morning lines #127
cacophony of crows not phoning it in, they’re murdering or marauding, from a comfortable distance, wire hanger wingspans, with nothing to wear morning lines #126 black-backed and stunning, murky motor oil or grounded plum, amid the charcoal-dead hush of tree after dead and dying snag, set ablaze by whatever means, pecking, drumming, tattooing, at bark, existing borehole, and my dead and dying eyes so that I might see, woodpecker morning lines #125 Animals and insects, spirit messengers of later adulthood, and none more than the honeybee. Avoid getting stung at all costs says the kid in me. But now: Eat its honey, watch its brethren buzz-bomb at the precipice of extinction, and you takes your chances. An affable arthropod, it’s the singular species of bee to sting at its peril. With a nonretractable stinger, it leaves behind needle-sharp dagger, abdomen, and digestive tract, along with stray bits of muscle and nerve. Avoid at all costs causing this kind of ruination in another creature says the aging adult in me. morning lines #124 it’s never too late for naming the western trees, never too wrong for a slip and slap in the weeds, never too late for height and wisdom and wonder, never too wrong for besting or beetles or blunder, never too late for lesson-learning the knave, and never too wrong for love, a sigh, and a wave morning lines #123 there’s a chair in the corner of this lair, gathering in layers the light of all the gunmetal gray mornings until it’s grayed out and begins to stink, no, sink, in the mire of tomorrow, yesterday, and all the days cum grano salis morning lines #122 The birds have nothing to say today, here in the dawn’s half-yawn, a raspy near-light, that fingers throat feathers across the lawns and up into the maples, maidenhairs, oaks, sycamores, and more, and yet not a peep or shriek, just the silence of trees holding tight to their leaves. How can it be the birds have nothing to say today? morning lines #121 hiking up the steep slope of a narrow trail, the weather perfect as the summer day is long, leaping over lupine, foxtail, and timothy, the sun shining, a bright chill—the rarest comfort to a body in motion; in the distance, San Francisco and Marin, a simultaneous shoulder shrug, to the layers-thick blanket of fog still weighing them down; a foggy color no one has ever seen before—bruised, disagreeable gray morning lines #120 Before me sits the wide white box of anxious construction, a box made of wind-whipped desert sand, fluttering moths, eggshells smashed under foot, broken bird bones, and clouds bereft of air and water. It’s easy to pretend the box isn’t there because it blends nicely into the wall. It’s easy to pretend the box is the representation of all that’s calm and clean and bright—the incandescent angel in our midst. I find the edges at the top of the box, unfolding its whisper-white flaps, allowing all the white-hot days of my life to emerge, shyly at first, but then with a blinding force that destroys everything outside the box while pulling me safely within. I mix among the chalky remains of shell, sand, and bone. Eventually, I find my way outside the box, where it’s easy to pretend the box isn’t there because it blends nicely into the wall. morning lines #119
the peck and peel of love in conflict is the image of crow and rind, a dark specter, the smell of burnt hair, meat, and loam, casts an aubergine gloom, and there’s sour-sweet acid against the skin; the pierce and singe is heightened when understanding and trust evaporate in the heat of the day, the crow flying off alone with a curl of zest in her exquisite beak morning lines #118 Voices in the morning fog drag heavily upward on air made for thirsty slugs and walks in the Lake District. The clipped conversation could be coming from the west, two yards over. A door shuts with a stiff squawk, caught at the edges on too-old weather stripping or a bloated doorjamb. It’s all about what the water does, whether it moistens, drowns, or taunts. morning lines #117 I want to believe it. That ghosts walk among us—under the ancient and aching bristlecones, the sky sighing—draped in sheets the color of milk. Their sightless black eyeholes seeing absolutely everything. I want to believe it. morning lines #116 “rag & bone new york,” she told me, conjuring dressed-down wordplay and trowel-like hands that dig deeply into clay and dirt, not to mention the early-1900 rag-and-bone men, bone-grubbers (today’s can collectors), carrying their greasy bags and scavenging rags on top of bones, the gray-white remnants used for making knife handles, toys, glue “rag & bone,” she said, and i think for the umpteenth time, what a world we live in morning lines #115 writing with a pencil gives writing a sense of the turnip’s blood yielding but more slowly than a drip, the turnip’s roots the capillaries that paint the field red, moistening what was once as colorless and dry as the first scale of skin morning lines #114 the drugs drag you under, not unlike the drowning man’s lethal derring-do, not so much straight ahead of a plumb bob but across the zigzag path only a moth has the schematics for everything i don’t know or understand
floats in on a molecule of dust--dirty and unseen-- like the mites and dog under the comforter with me, breathing as if muddled, muffled, or mute, when the dog’s nostril sends out a chord in e minor, and an ambulance squeals in the distance, and everything i don’t know or understand exits on the same molecule out the rear window and over the neighbor’s weathered and weathering fence morning lines #109
the dog jumped from the couch toward the bed, a shortcut he’s been trying recently, missing the mark by a miserable mile, falling against the sharp corner of the side table to the hard floor; his life flashing, from dog shelter to what’s coming, in the choked and choking rise of my voice; he got up, shook himself off, and walked over to the light-green water dish for a drink expression is the thing with fur;
it’s the thing we keep warm until we shear it, when, raw in the light, rolled into a ball, shivering with a hairy eye on the door, the mother-naked thing speaks, not genius, rarely genius; but in the language of fish eggs, clay, Silly Putty pass-the-time manipulations, flow generators, mere distractions from the piss and weave, whiff and leave, thing-in-itself morning lines #101
the delicate, almost careful, flowers you picked for me are shutting down, giving way, the so-soft eggplant petals drop, a shush at a time, in painterly scatters we take out the trash, the dog dies, and the gray-ivory pebbles disappear, one by one, from the path leading to the house morning lines #100 I think a lot of the deep black diamond mind of forgetting, seeing a sparkling arise as if “the gem sands” was a thing, minute points of light near enough to touch with a fitful index finger, if not grasp like a gasp, with a fist. I yell into the dark as if someone will hear, and sometimes they almost do, sometimes a pinprick of star-shatter becomes a way to perceive, if not remember, a means of making all of this almost okay. morning lines #99 The variegated moth won’t make it, won’t be lifting off the floorboard runway, won’t be striking the lamplight, big eyes on closed wings, looking back, not ahead, antennae not sensing what’s coming, only what’s been morning lines #98 Caring for a slowly failing Gigi in 2017, means paying penance for running a rat laboratory, at the University of Maine in 1978, the year of Body Snatchers. Skinner guiding my hand, I used those astonishingly white rodent bodies, sweet dispositions turned to despair, with not much on my mind but the next boyfriend, and a degree in behavioral science. morning Lines #32 I stood waiting for her to be loaded into the para-transit van, the lift grinding, raising her up into the air, like one of the goats or mules or sheep kept on her family farm in Neponset, Illinois. She stared into the middle distance, a breeze tickling her ticklish shale-gray hair, a Botticelli (or Rockwell?) waiting to be painted, or so I was about to learn. “She’s beautiful,” said a very tall/slender and handsome young blue-black man watching us from under the awning of the building’s side exit. He beamed, further commenting, in his slow, meditative way, that Mary Ann and I must be related. I said no but we got that a lot. He recently lost his grandmother. His cellphone came out. She was a grand-looking African mother, indeed, her madly colorful prints and headdress and his unflinching friendliness giving them away. She died at 115, stopped walking at 112. I got my own goat-lift while facing into the van, joking with Mark, the driver, about the precious livestock he was hauling across town, and feeling touched by the angel of immortality, as we pulled away from the department of motor vehicles. morning Lines #31 I read The Velveteen Rabbit for the first time. And just afterward, Theo, asleep under the covers, wriggles to the surface, nudges my hand away from the keyboard, and demands my attention. I ask out loud whether he dreamed of my tossing him into a bag of scarlet fever–kissed toys and walking away forever. I clasp him to my chest. It’s a maneuver he rarely suffers for more than two seconds. This time, I gently hold him there, his cheek on mine, my left nostril blowing, rearranging his whiskers. He falls asleep in my arms for 20 minutes. I go to heaven and back. morning Lines #30 Jack-Rabbit, Silver Service, Storm’s Coming, Steel Me, Hot Stone, Alley Cat, Flannel Pajamas, Black Flame, Free Reign, Knight’s Armor, Up in Smoke, and Downpour are the best PPG-brand paint colors to describe the San Francisco Bay sky as I climb to Grizzly Peak on an early-February Sunday. morning Lines #29 “Pseudobulbar” was the term the nursing home doctor used. I looked it up. “Emotional incontinence”: a kind of involuntary outcry of laughter or upset that expresses the opposite of what you feel. MA yells for help. She is unhappy and anxious and never laughs about it. She says she wants out. She feels every pinch and gnarl of her miserable state. And I’m helpless to help her. evening lines, after Paterson i come home to love you because you’re all i have. but when i open the door, you run outside like a beast from the depths, wailing at the fence and garden stones. you’re on the scent of a night animal. you settle, piss, and come in the house. you throw yourself on the sofa cushions and wait to love me. because I’m all you have. morning lines #1 good sleep opens the door, slide through to the green and bright, where the heart settles, the mind skips a beat |