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Monday, November 30, 2009

Victory dance

We pour from the stadium and from our homes, into the streets and bars of the city, tumultuous as heated atoms, for we've won the game. Triumph crackles underfoot, in puffs of air and smoke, in the hearts of men, vicarious triumph through the sweat and bruises of younger men from the university gained from young men from a farther university. In the Stone's Throw the splash of a clumsily handled and overfilled mug precipitates a trip, a shove, a shout, a countershout, an elbow. Cheery and anonymous, the brawl expands and men fall into it joyfully, bloody good, bloody—good! This is the abandon that others feel in lovemaking, in speeding or in death; no longer self-preserving and single-bodied, we rattle and shout, blur all edges, and become a larger pulse.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Lodge

The deserted mill was long ago reduced to heaps of rubble and broken rebar. Cracked grasses obscure abandoned construction tools. There is a path alongside, hint of the development that will overthrow and then landscape these acres as soon as the Economy turns around and men resume their habit of expanding. There is only a little faroff morning traffic, and the air is motionless—but for a bit of steam rising. Two unobtrusive mounds, each the width of a truck and the length of two, are tarped in green plastic, weighted with stones. Between the seams, still the steam is rising. These two could be mistaken for smoldering piles of leaves, but for a passage of cut plywood, like the door to an igloo, and for a smell riding on the steam, unnameable but suggestive of southern states, of dampness, of childhood hideouts. The dog walkers do not notice, though the dogs do: this desert has a fruit, and a flower. This desert has a purpose; this wasteland is home.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

The Dalai Lama laughs

It is September 11, 2002. The National Cathedral in Washington, DC, United States is packed to capacity with Sisters of Charity in white and blue stripe, Buddhist monks in saffron robes, Catholic priests, and hordes of laypeople on folding chairs. Fans oscillate weakly across the audience, and programs are flapped in vain at sweating necks and faces. Outside, additional hordes bake on the lawn while squinting at giant video screens relaying indoor goings-on. There has been some singing, some praying, some talk of interfaith dialogue and tolerance, some mention of the tragedy one year before. It is all Important. The Dalai Lama is the featured speaker and so speaks, in English but mostly in Tibetan with his translator. After he has concluded his remarks, a fat bishop approaches with something red in his hands. He informs the Dalai Lama that he, as a representative of his diocese and of the Catholic faith in general, is presenting his Holiness with a small gift. And here is the ground zero of this August gathering, the moment from which all others spring forward and back. The Dalai Lama looks at the bishop as his translator echoes the words. And he laughs. He laughs the purest laugh this generation will hear. It is not joy at receiving the gift; it is joy that such a thing exists, that it has surprised him. The laugh flies at the speed of sound, free of the weight of mockery, bitterness or greed, from a soul fallible yet somehow perfect. It ripples from his throat, tickling first the rows of dignitaries and clergy, then on back to sisters, monks, general seating and lawn squatters. It cuts like a gamma ray through humidity, moods, dinner plans, note taking, and cathedral walls. The entire congregation laughs with the Dalai Lama, delighted and surprised at their involuntary but purifying laughter. In a few seconds it has faded and the ceremony and the sweating recommence until dispersal. Perhaps only a few notice that their lives have been bisected by this languageless round performed en masse, or that a mushroom cloud of joy rising from the nation's capitol has left an invisible pinprick of light at its epicenter.

Friday, November 27, 2009

Pink

A lot of paper money has lately been observed to be stained pink. It's green and white, and girl-toy pink. The reason is unknown, but the theory exists that perhaps we are turning into a game of Monopoly. Next, other bills will turn blue and yellow, and miracles will begin: favorable bank errors, a new railroad boom, equal opportunity jail time. The day we awaken as metal shoes, top hats, and thimbles, our daily dance of commuting, working, shopping and meeting will be forever transformed, especially near magnets... Of course, the theory also exists that someone overturned their juice while robbing a bank, but experts agree that would be a rather extreme explanation.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Ozomatli

The man holds a thumb and two fingers midair, motionless, aiming toward the crowd. There is a voice unlike the sound you would expect from such a man, and it is coming from him. The spell knits from his fingertips, mouth, from his skin, organs, from the heat of his body. There are other musicians, other instruments, the sea of crowd, the late hour, the lights, all feeding the sorcery, but here and now he holds the reins, is the prism through which the harnessed power sets the people and the atoms to dancing.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Cosmos and dog

It’s been a long supermarket night of many How Are Yous, Thank Yous, Have a Good Ones, much bagging, scanning, smiling, joking, cleaning, counting money. Thus the hours have gone, and it’s cold, black, nearly bedtime, and I am out collecting abandoned shopping carts from far corners of the parking lot. I lean into metal, crash them together, drag them along under floodlights. Things are moving, making noise, par and normal until I happen to look to the sky: The universe unfolds straight up and outward forever. It swallows earth and all its shoppers, putting our blue marble in its rightful place floating in a backwater intestine. Suddenly the cashier is gone and I am a microbe swimming in Why am I here? What is this? and How did these carts get into creation? My chain of metal keeps rolling toward the warm, glowing store, pure inertia, and I’ll soon be swallowed back into the mundane— but not before the eye of a doleful yellow retriever catches mine. He sits politely in the backseat of an idling hatchback, tilts his head. His eye blinks placidly and says: I know, huh.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Wherein the bearded lady gives thanks and makes a wish

Coins.
Curtains.
Hydrogen peroxide.
Hot roasted chestnuts from Benji at the gates.
Thirteen years of normal girl memory; a before.
Ramojah's tiger eye, open even as he dozes.
Novels and other tunnels.
Candles that smell of home.
The payphone ringing home.
Home:
A hearth, a shedding cat, a boyfaced man, and a cupboard full of brushes.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Outrunning sunset

The sun sets suddenly here. It slips behind a mountain ridge long before it sinks below the true horizon with a watercolor parade of dissolution. If a lone jogger on the old railroad line, squinting westward in the late afternoon, turns back at this moment, she will see the sunlit eastern hills before her, and a line of shadow racing toward them. In the act of turning she'll have missed the shadow passing over her head. And should she try to chase it, propel herself back into day, she'll find it’s not possible. As she sprints, lungs full of the air of gladly dying leaves, the shadow races up the hills like a kite catching wind. By the time she's given up, catching only her breath, colors speak only gray and she needs electricity to find the way in. Nightfall here is not the slow darkening of tea into hot water; it’s instant coffee. There is no outrunning sunset, only a furious sprint into dark.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

The rules of lying

When you gotta lie it’s better to lie for real. Like use the truth, you know? She makes an o with pink lips and pops pink gum out between two fingers, smooshes it between two magazine pages. Her eyebrows are bolts of concentration, but her eyes are casual and distant as napping cats. So, if someone asks questions, the answers are right there and I don’t have to make up stories and look guilty. I’m Lucy Trujillo and I’m looking for stuff for my little sister’s birthday. I just found out I’m pregnant. I have money from a car crash that I want to spend. It’s true, but it’s true for someone else, and if they ask I’ll tell them someone else’s life, not mine. It’s like I become everything I know about other people, I’m anything anyone’s ever said to me. I’m the history of the whole world or something, lying, but really I’m inside it, getting whatever I want and going wherever anybody else could go. She shrugs, stands, tosses the magazine back onto the rack. The two cats awaken, hungry.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Incognito

He was forty, and sat in the deli with a spider plant he'd picked up in Floral. Several things were apparent from his posture: that he had borne a Kansas childhood with no mother, and a father and stepmother out of a Roald Dahl book. That as a schoolboy he was neither tormented as a nerd nor celebrated as anything; he was simply not seen. He asked no one to prom, took his clarinet instead. Dinner beforehand and everything. She got her own chair, her own salad. That people just like his former classmates would admire his films and wish they knew the kind of guy who could dream up that kind of stuff. That the noise of his musician companions would fill the ears of their teenagers. He was successful and still invisible, currently disguised by foliage. Now he traveled. He had twelve years left to live, and figured as much. He fancied the plant, but left her on the table when he was finished sitting. He thought better of trying to keep her warm in his car as the states flew under the wheels.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

The belligerent composter

Every few days, a small plastic baggie filled with kitchen scraps appears perched on the topmost morsel in our back-alley compost pile. The scraps are appreciated, but the baggie, tied neatly shut each time, is a minor and thought-provoking nuisance. A good deed packaged in an insult. Our polite cardboard sign specifying only biodegradable materials-- hint: no plastic-- was overturned and another baggie set in its place. Who is this, anyway? A lazy, germophobic environmentalist? A passive-aggressive neighbor avenging our noisy coffee-grinding habits? A hippie-hater enjoying the jam I'm put in: empty the organic mess into the bin and discard the bag, or toss the whole business, earth be damned, and reveal my true colors under duress? Shall I examine the scraps, then smell the breath of passerby to connect the dinner with the compost? Give the bin an impenetrable metal makeover, with password given to only the most trusted? Accept this as my lot for as many years, days, baggies as I live here? Stumped.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Morning

An hour more of dark before dawn. Asleep. But now the alarm, the toilet, cold water splashed on my face, somehow into pants and shirt, gathering ingredients of the day--bag, lunch, key-- okay-- and I'm down. Wedged in the couch warm in the sweater, the pet rat's tiny heart pulses with contentment, nested by my big slow heart. Can't stay here, we can't stay like this for long-- but not yet, not yet to go and be human. It's two minutes free of any presence of mind, just me and the other animal, tired and awake and breathing here now. And in the marrow of my bones, I thank God for stupor.

Monday, November 16, 2009

4153 of my eye

The grocer's convention of assigning numeric codes to fruit and vegetables may seem unnatural, reductionist. I admit, when a lush bunch of radishes arises, that my first thought is no longer their color nor their salad potential, but: 94089. Yet a remarkable number of numbers actually seem to edify their edible equivalents. 4689 is a yellow bell pepper, round and golden as an eight or nine. 94409 is a Bartlett pear, crisp and heavier on one end, fourlike. With popcorn in bulk, diminuitive ones burst repeatedly into puffed threes: 1313. The mango's 94959 is a tropical rhythm on the keypad. And adjacent codes are friendly, as in 93127 (the pomegranate) and 93128 (the purple potato). Surely it is right and good that such colorful, surprising beings as these two, though from disparate soils, would be digital bedfellows, and that even numbers, underestimated and scorned, could be poets of produce.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Sunday morning

They're singing and speaking all the same words and outside trains pass, sound like cannons, thunderclaps, giants clanking armor. They're blessing a little girl, pouring warm water over her ears and smearing oil over her brow and through the window bums do a Sunday morning stumble as sunshine burns off the last alcohol. They're biting at the bread of life and sipping together their spiritual drink in the old white building unremarkable off Toole Street, unrecognizable as churchly, dedicated, even inhabited. The trains and the prayers disperse, as afterwards do the people, mingling with the sun and the bums, in the middle of it, smiling and trying and fallible and real.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Burn on

A walk-taker in a woolen Scottish cap greets me not with a chin tilt and a blink, but with a full-armed wave and a noisy hello. An old lady appreciates the mid-afternoon sunset and flecks of gold and flamingo pink dance in her eyes. People buy wasabi, cayenne, and fractals of ginger; they sweat at their kitchen tables. Dogs, predictably, leap at the abundance of dead things to smell and dig. Artists putter in their garages at night, warmed by concentration. So we know that the advancing winter doesn't shadow northern spirits-- no, we take it as a dare to burn on. And in the small window of a house that the south-clinging sun barely touches, a net of Christmas lights glows, all hours, despite rising electricity bills: a galaxy more luminous with each darkening hour.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Rite

The stain is yellow and subtle now, on the concrete between the hotel dumpster and the dirt path. At the time, two young guys, university students maybe, had stopped there. The first held his bicycle upright by the seat. The other's bicycle lay, pedal aloft like a claw, on the ground where he knelt. They were softly talking but looked up as I passed by, registering me at the moment I registered the spatter of fresh blood between them. “Oh damn, are you OK?” I could see no wounds, and their bodies were at ease. They smiled; they'd forgotten how bad this must look. “Yeah,” said the lower one. “Just bit my lip.” It was an accidental reenactment of a minor sacred act, routine as these acts have been for centuries, one giving, the other supporting, a pittance of blood the best they could think to offer. He spat another tablespoon into the small puddle, which, however accidental, glowed with intention.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

The art wall

In the neighborhood, unadvertised, is a humble but high fence of painted brown wood. When I first passed it, two painted ceramic tablets hung there, shining in sunlight filtered through the trees, and a small sign declared: TO AVOID NEGATIVE KARMA, REPLACE ANYTHING YOU TAKE WITH AN OBJECT OF EQUAL OR GREATER AESTHETIC VALUE. Soon one tablet disappeared, then the other, and other orphans appeared in their place. Watercolors, oils, coloring book pages, some framed and some bared, melting in the rain, curling in the wind. One afternoon I offered a black-and-white horse from my pen, and looked to take in exchange. It was then that I realized that any piece there is, to me, of greater value than any I could offer: such art is not only art, but also a mystery, and mystery is a treasure beyond value, aesthetic or otherwise. Still, I took one, unsigned and aqueous, blue and green, a mystery in markers on laminated paper. I will take my chances with the karma.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

In the woods

The man on TV knelt by the tree stump and reached inside. He scooped forth a handful of glowing red loam, heartwood going back to earth, and smelled it deeply. The house the girl lived in with the television and her family was in the big city, but upon watching the man inhale in the forest, she had a powerful urge to smell and know for herself. Years later she did this, and also felt the decaying earth bounce gently as she walked over it, a souffle of elements. The man on TV was probably dead by now. It was easier for her to fathom the regenerative power of death in a tree than in a life more similar to hers, but she figured the results would be the same.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Revolver

I handed coins and bills to a woman buying groceries tonight and noticed that her zipper pull was an inch-long plastic revolver, brown and tan at the neck of her blue windbreaker. She thanked me and left the store, the tiny handgun bobbing as she nodded. Perhaps it gave her a feeling of security. Maybe it was a political statement. A whimsical gift. Or just what happened to be there when she bought the coat. I didn't ask. But when I unfolded the newspaper tomorrow there was a short column relating the startling shooting of a local woman, 54. She was in a hurry to get out the door with the dog, was trying to zip up with mittens on. The dog whined and jumped at her knees. And a minuscule but persuasive seed fired into her shoulder as she triggered the power dangling at her throat.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Snow Gods

To a flatlander, snowing is a verb. If it is snowing, you are engulfed by flakes, flurries, sharp blizzard flecks, or gobs of wet white if it is warmer. Your vision consists wholly of motion. It can be snowing nowhere except everywhere; you're in the globe, and it's shaking. But this afternoon, from the valley, I saw four great white columns spanning from the clouds down into Mount Jumbo. Translucent but imposing, they slowly turned the slopes white, but they did not move. They were positively Old Testament. And it was positively snowing—for to a mountain-and-valley dweller, snowing is also a noun. A four-dimensional event, and you are omniscient. You see not only here, but there; not only now, but what's to come, or has past. So I suppose that somewhere, an observer with more senses than we, or at least with an even more contrasting landscape, watches six or seven dimensions stretch out on all sides.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Howdy, Pardner

There are tumbleweeds in the streets of this city. One was lodged forcefully by the wind under the front fender of a parked car on 3rd Street. I swerved to avoid another while cycling to work. Near collisions, in this case between metro and Wild West, are pleasurable: no harm done, but you still get to imagine the bicycle speeding onward with a starchy, spherical, fiercely rasping spoke ornament.