reconsiderations and recollections

This is the story of the house in the woods with a tree growing straight through the roof. It was once a proper house, with windows and a china cupboard and a daily visit from the postman. There was a kitchen garden and a rose garden and a perennial border and a maple tree and a row of bushes placed just so for playing hide and seek. There was a small chicken coop and a single apple tree and a stretch of clothesline from which clean sheets and trousers would snap in the wind.

The postman brought the news of those who had been left behind and those who had moved on; the dog littered with six healthy puppies; the fire smoked a bit but not too much; the third step down from the top creaked, even if one was very gentle and very careful and tried to step at the edge just by the wall and not on the center. The rag rugs lay braided in faded vibrant colors, the chairs had once contemplated matching and then thought better of it; the water was always and only from-the-ground-cold, or at least until it was boiled; eventually the icebox became a Frigidaire. On cool summer nights the foundation moaned, but not too loudly; on cold winter nights, the rattling of the windows would wake the entire household.

It was not a particularly cheerful household: no one sang while washing the dishes or sweeping; guffaws of laughter could not be overheard escaping from the living room to the path below; the children were not remarked upon for their unflagging good spirits. But neither was it a dour household: strictures of behavior were gently enforced; infants heard lullabies; tag was played in the garden; the pipe smelled neither angry nor critical. It was simply a household that was; that accepted fleeting emotion and then returned to regular activity, free from both the highs and lows expected in much of the contemporary melodrama.

A family lived in the house; a family with a fluidity of membership, infants growing departing, replaced by friends, older relatives, grandchildren, neighbors. The barn cat wasn't interested in the living room fire, nor were the puppies interested in the chickens. Trips to town supplied outside material essentials, but these were few, through habit if not compulsion. The china in the cupboard was used for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter; the silver was polished on Tuesdays; Monday was reserved for laundry and ironing.

The horse was supplanted by a series of cars, reliable if not glamorous; to the apple tree was added one of peaches and one of cherries; lilacs grew amongst the rose bushes. Time passed, and then the end.

It may have been a heart attack or a stroke or a slow-growing untreated cancer or an accident involving an axe or a ladder or an intentional decision using a garden hose and the family car. It was preceded by or followed the other death, a death of carelessness, intent, or inadvertent, a death who may have simply knocked on the door and gently explained that Life was up, and now was the departure onward.

Discussions were held. The china cupboard went to live in a remodeled kitchen in the suburbs; the various remaining animals were distributed amongst neighbors; the furniture was mostly left in place, with the view to keeping the house for a few years, using it during long summer holidays, though the roads were too unreliable for Christmas or New Year's.

And so it stayed in a state of purgatory, visited on the occasional Labor Day or Fourth of July at first, then gradually forgotten: a touchstone referred to in conversation but with neither location nor architecture to mark it out as a destination.

Teenagers discovered the privacy it offered for testing the waters of adulthood; squirrels raised families in the cubbies created in the hollows of the walls; eventually they thought to turn off the electricity and gas, just to be sure to not cause a fire in the absence of regular attention. The post office stopped holding mail for pick up, and once the new postmaster arrived the forwarding address was lost, letters returned to sender.

One of the descendants of the barn cats founded a nest of kittens in the old woodshed; the kitchen garden disappeared to the encroaching grass and then the seedlings of trees, early growth shrubbery. Leaks went unnoticed and drainpipes uncleared; ice dams formed at their own convenience; the old games in the broom closet disintegrated into paste residue and dust.

Eventually even the teenagers found the setting too unkempt, too abandoned to pursue experimentations; a man stopped in for a spell under the guise of disappearing from some legal trouble, left an empty bottle of bourbon, then moved on.

In the early days of spring there remained the disconcerting pervasive memory of lilacs, but the roses had reverted to wild, and volunteer seedlings grew scattered about the apple tree. During the ice storm that decimated the forests, the roof finally admitted defeat against a force greater than itself, and without its protective umbrella the remaining furniture and floors began reconsidering their material nature.

A tribe of gypsies or hippies or graduate school drop-outs stumbled upon the house, read its energy, and moved on: too much decay, too much lost memory, too much festering growth. The fecundity of nature continued, unabated and unquestioned, reigning supreme as it had five hundred years previously, and it was in this state that she discovered it.

She was leaving a religious sect, a too-demanding professional program, a torrid affair, an overwhelming job, a sense of the futility of existence, an abusive marriage, the tedium of the suburbs. She may or may not have been pregnant. She may or may not have had a financial parachute in a bank in the city. She may have driven a Volvo or a bicycle or taken a Greyhound bus to anywhere or specifically to here. She may have been a descendant of the original family or she may have unintentionally stumbled upon the outgrowth of a house.

Regardless, she stayed. She scythed a path through the overgrown shrubs and grasses, found the old hand water pump that had never actually been removed, set up camp in what had once been the living room, now lacking a roof, a campfire in the fireplace. Somehow she created a vegetable garden or knew how to forage for edibles; somehow she found a stray chicken or two to incorporate into the yard.

People suspected her arrival, not through actual visits but through supposition and local intuition; the house had already developed a reputation, and she could only be at least slightly mad, at best. So they left her alone, except during full moons or at Halloween, took alternate paths rather than the shortcut to the river; and there she lived.

She may still remain so, tending a half-wild garden and washing with chilly water, a woman become one with the house.

---

reading more the the amazing Atwood
and On the Way to the River / Laurence

weather the final ending of a too-melodramatic June

a missed deadline

Obviously, deadlines as conceptual constructs are nothing new; I'm now a week past one deadline and 5 weeks past another, and hereby enlist the assistance of the general readership for the former.

Please let me know your 2-3 favorite pieces from the past year. There's no need to actually try to reprocess or reread the available text, just a note mentioning whatever happens to remain in the brain, such as "ooo, I liked the Lego one", or "Dear Ms Aubergine, your methods of declining proposals are truly revolutionary for the consideration of the end times of future relationships."

Opinions may be sent to the author by whatever form of communication you prefer. If you aren't sure how to contact the author, perhaps you shouldn't (although the bio page has an email link). She prefers telegrams (although not singing telegrams); Morse Code; skywriting with aeroplanes; and messages in code presented using a surveying map, compass, and dodgy characters in back alleyways.

Please send correspondence by Thursday a fortnight ago.

poets in cars

The end is a grassy hillside near the shore, blue skies punctuated with impossibly perfect clouds, wind rustling the grasses.

The ashes are scattered or the grave is dug or the goodbye handshake has been clasped or the legal documents have been signed or the mortgage has been foreclosed or the jail sentence has ended or the evil doer has been captured and brought to justice or the lost child has been reunited with the family or the gavel has dropped at auction or the ceremony has concluded or the sale has closed or the investigation has been acquitted or the dog has returned home.

In any or all of these situations, the same hillside, the same late afternoon early September sunlight, the same ocean, the same breeze, the same clouds. The same sense of an insufficient conclusion, too many loopholes, too many loose ends, too many unanswered questions, not-credible witnesses, unknown motivations, shadowy figures in dark alleyways unaccounted for, an unexplained extra thousand miles on the odometer, a partially recalled memory, an inexact déjà vu, a telling ache in the left elbow, a portentous dream, an overheard snippet of conversation, a missing proof of identity, an unfinished dialogue, a mistranslated passage, an unconfirmed bullet, a found wallet, a dog-eared page in a paperback novel, a crumpled brown paper bag, a man's single brown loafer, a missing argyle sock, a broken glass, an empty wine bottle.

Still the unsatisfactory ending, still the hillside, still the blue of the sky, still the clouds, still the grass, still the sea, still the wind. In the distance internal unsettled questions are answered with the bark of a dog, the whirr of a speedboat, the drone of a plane, a man whistling, children petitioning for ice cream, an argument about lunch, a car backfiring, birds swooping and calling on their path among the tailwinds, a lawn mover revving, the bells tolling, a radio singing just out of range, a turtle progressing across the path, a tree dropping leaves, the clouds repositioning, and somewhere the echo of a fife and drums, the jingle of bells, the call of a cat beside itself with indecision.

The questions continue unanswered, silently condemning the cracks in conviction, the shades of gray, the mutability of memory, the quote gone askew, the inaccurate assertion, the unverified footnote. Certainty remains improbable, untouchable, though this is the end, this hillside reposing just so, perched at the junction where the land disappears and only questions and fish remain.

Trawlers, coast guard vessels, tug boats, row boats, house boats, yachts, barges, steamships, sunken galleons, lost submarines, carcasses of expeditions unsuccessful, outlines where sailors succumbed to sirens, skeletons of lighthouses, unfinished bridges, canals, ferry docks, piers destroyed by the fight against impossibility all offer a passage beyond this point, if any method seems more reliable or less certain of instant annihilation.

Here is an oar, there is a life vest, a barometer, a flask of rum, an oilskin coat, a compass, a Penguin paperback Guide to Sea Navigation by Constellations, a two way radio, a ship in need of a figurehead, a length of rope, a message in a bottle, the threat of scurvy, the possibility of syphilis, of drowning, of aboriginal tattoos in strange ports, of cannibals, of sea monsters, of crashing and being dashed against the rocks, the appearance of pirates, constant seasickness, a surgeon who is also the barber, briny drinking water, a hammock for a bunk, evening waltzes with mysterious strangers, the loss of identity, the disappearance from an uncertain, inconclusive ending into an existential nonexisting continuation, the replacement of the unidentified fingerprint and the partial scent of a perfume and the sound of nails clicking along a polished floor and the almost grasped certainty of what can not quite be described, these near recollections thrown back at the land in exchange for swimming across the Channel, deep sea diving, propelling onward as one of the fish, leaving the ending at the hillside, the clouds, grass, wind behind on shore.

Something catches at the back of the mind; anchors the ending as the present, inescapable by a sea route, not a raft to be seen. A troop of brothers carrying identical backpacks, the same pattern of freckles across the nose, the same scurrying, swinging gait cross the pass, absently nodding hello as they continue their trek along the coastline, intent on arriving at the hostel, the car, the train station, the campground.

This is the end, on the hillside, questions destined to remain obscured, deflected, the sky darkening towards sunset, the approach of a seagull. Champagne is poured, streamers loosened, a final great whistle definitively separating the sketchy then from the uncomposed soon, the exchange of identity, and embarkment. A life of petty crimes, an ill-considered murder, a plagiarism charge, a lost library book, an unpaid parking ticket, a fraudulent election, planted evidence, a bribed judge, a stolen kiss, a lost suitcase, a torn map, an appropriated car, a coat abandoned at the dry cleaners, an aspidistra left unwatered, a garden not weeded, a conversation abandoned, all left behind unanswered for this moment on the hillside where the sea begins and the sun sets and the moment is declared the future, the blurry outlines of everything prior beginning to fade.

The sun finishes descending, fireflies come out, a chill falls as the breeze shifts towards the ocean, the red light from the lighthouse across the bay glows towards the distance, warning of the dangers of returning home, the undertow of reality and the treacherous rocks of duty. Stay at sea, the fog horn bellows, stay in the shadow lands of international waters, shifting time zones, lines of latitude and geography unmarked except on charts drawn up by homesick explorers tipsy from strong spirits disoriented by storm clouds and uncharted currents.

This is the end, this peninsula rising up from the sea, and the end offers only questions which remain unanswered, the ship, the sea, the unknown the only certainty.

---

reading
Arrest Docket [Poems] by Christine McNair:






weather
gin and tonics and strawberries and chocolate cake and lingering evenings and all that June was designed for

grandfather paradox

Can you tell me how to get there?

I followed the directions of the gas station attendant,

turned left at the road just past the third house after the second stoplight,

turned right at the tree struck by lightening in the freak July hailstorm of ’83,

right again at what must have been the old Cooperston family farm, or I assumed it was once a farm due to the presence of chicken wire and I presumed it was the old farm because the roof had collapsed over part of the barn and the house was boarded up and a not-quite-vintage tractor was quietly rusting behind what may have once been a woodshed,

then I took the left turn by the water tower and followed the road past the railroad tracks towards the old swimming hole in what used to be an abandoned mine shaft,

took a sharp right when a branch of the road passed the 1953 Buick parked in front of the old school teacher’s residence,

followed the road past the Grange and the Congregational Church which is now the deconsecrated home of a town selectman and his family of incontrollable boys, one of whom is rumored to have left a cow on top of the general store,

kept to the left of the road around the hillside hugging the meadowland that is said to be for sale to a soda bottling facility, threatening to drain the local wells and pollute the rivers,

turned at the second right after the post office but before reaching the home of the brother of the wife of the cousin of the gas station attendant,

continued straight for a few ups and downs of hills,

crossed the river,

turned after the recycling yard on the left onto the path on the right, opened the fence, drove onto an unpaved track with Jersey cows grazing indifferently under the shade of a tree, their eyelashes hiding mischievous intentions,

drove over the stream and continued through the field past Old Mr. Hastings farmhouse, even though he hasn’t lived there in years and it’s been taken over as a weekend hobby by a lawyer or such in from the city, and they don’t know a damn thing about how to run a farm or to respect the countryside, although Old Mr. Hastings probably should have had electricity and plumbing put in rather than living like a hermit for all those years, begrudging a dime to anyone else in the area,

and after passing the house turned left onto a country lane whose intended destination lay towards the old county seat, before the counties were merged to solve budgetary redundancy issues in the region, and so even though the new county seat is really only accessible to a fraction of the population, everyone else must drive miles out of their way to conduct any local business at all, and taxes still keep going up, so it can’t be saving that much money anyway,
but following the lane around the forest will lead to a sharp right where the best farm stand in the market area operates during the first two and last three weeks of the growing season, with strawberries people drive hours to purchase and sweet corn whose flavor induces tears in even the sturdiest of farmers,

followed by another right at the statue of Billy St. Anton, the local man who went to the statehouse to argue for civic autonomy and was descended upon by a mythical pack of ghosts of murdered convicted witches and trussed and left hanging by his left ankle in a tree, to slowly die because it was full summer and no one passed close enough to hear his calls, only to be discovered in October when his presence was revealed at the leaves’ absence, and memorialized because his sacrifice not only enshrouded the supremacy of town charter over state law but also because the sacrifice of his life quieted the blood thirsty ghosts of the witches, who no longer trouble the area,

then left at the old watering hole which was reported to run with beer during full moons, a theory since discredited and traced to Prohibition, when the local distillery would take advantage of the night skies to send barrels downstream to his customers,

then left again at the red brick house constructed by the town’s first surveyor, a man who came over from England with instruments no one had heard of and a heavy, rugged oak chest that was kept locked, and everyone assumed he was either a vampire or a werewolf because he roamed the countryside with his instruments late at night, moonless, clear nights, gazing at the stars, and he built a house that was reputed to be as impenetrable as a fortress, with a secret lab and a rooftop observatory, and it was rumored that he had a wife and child, although these were never seen by the townspeople, and after he died it was as if the house had been built but never inhabited, no furniture, no chest, no instruments, no clothing were found when it was searched,

then the second right after the working dairy farm, which really only produces the second best milk in the region, and flavorless butter and cream, since they don’t take care of their cows the way the other farm does, where it is rumored that classical piano is played at milking time, to draw down the milk, and show tunes during the calving season, to keep the heifer’s spirits up, and even though no one really approves of these methods, the milk there really is the best in the region,

then over the footbridge where the gas station attendant took a nasty dive when he was out fishing and his little sister’s best friend pushed him over the railing on a dare, and he almost drowned, seeing as he can’t swim, but wouldn’t you know he married her five years later, and now they have two strapping boys,

then a left at the old oak tree where the earliest settlers signed a treaty with the Indians, giving the Indians all the hilltops and the settlers all the valleys, an agreement that was honored up to the time when the settlers decided they wanted the hilltops, also, so they burned down the old oak tree and set up farms on top of the hills, and there were a few ambushes and skirmishes, but now everything is pretty peaceful and they’re thinking of putting up a casino on top of one of the hillsides the was Indians do on their reclaimed land nowadays,

and left again at the cottage that is barely visible under the overhanging branches of the trees, with an overgrown front yard and a few desultory chickens pecking about for insects,

staying straight on the road past the old gypsy encampment by the bend in the river, although it is probably an old hobo encampment, since there weren’t ever really any gypsies here, and the freight lines used to parallel the river, this being a spur that led through to Cleveland and eventually Chicago, but everyone says that area is cursed and to stay away on account of some human bones found at the site a few years ago,

then follow the railroad bridge over the river and towards the valley further onward, taking care on this stretch of road which isn’t well maintained,

then staying to the right when the road splits, taking the lower route by the cornfields towards the pub, where the ale is home brewed but the food is trucked-in frozen stuff, so if anyone is tempted to stop order a pint but wait until reaching the village center to get a sandwich at the little café next to the refectory, where they make sure to always have at least two types of pie, one of which is usually apple,

and after the pub take the third left onto the main road, that leads straight towards the train station, that heads directly where I’m going.

I followed these directions exactly: the second light, the lightening struck tree, the old farm, the water tower, the swimming hole, the schoolteacher’s Buick, the Grange, the selectman’s house, the meadow, the post office, the recycling yard, the Jersey cows, the forest, the farm stand, the statue of Billy St. Anton, the watering hole, the brick house, the second best dairy farm, the footbridge, the burnt oak, the overgrown cottage, the hobo camp, the railroad bridge, the cornfields, the pub, the main road, and the train station, and now here I am, and I don’t know where I’m going.

Can you tell me how to get there?

---

reading
Margaret Atwood, the exquisite Good Bones
weather
this is June?

fatigue is a mysterious thing

When did a wad of cash not solve the problem? Perhaps it merely becomes a calculation of the size of the wad of cash in question. A fist-sized ball of crumpled single dollar notes may seem unnecessary and meaningless when compared to a briefcase filled with neatly stacked bills of varying small denominations, but either presentation will inevitably solve the problem, defined either as how to pay for lunch or how to pay for brain surgery.

Even when sailing the wide blue seas far from a prying civilization wads of cash will continue to solve the majority of external problems, be they unscheduled visits from off-shore pirates or a bit of mechanical failure near a collection of remote south sea islands. In the deepest darkest hallways of corporate life, a well disposed of wad of cash purchases either the suit or the certificate necessary for promotion; a wad of cash departed with at a local house of worship will help slide the petitioner into a well upholstered afterlife.

The slums of third world cities could receive schools and sanitation with a wad of cash passed through the appropriate governing pockets; diseases become diminished when wads of cash are tossed in their general direction. Regardless of the trope that money can't buy happiness, a wad of cash can secure a warm meal, a decent champagne, a new wool sweater, a less lumpy pillow, a housecleaning service, a new haircut; and if these details do not push the recipient gently along a path signposted as "happiness," then it is because the recipient has determined to experience intentional misery, not because the wad of cash has failed.

A wad of cash, outgoing, accompanies the receipt of a diploma, the acquisition of a car, a night at the movies, a new pair of socks. A wad of cash secures a mortgage, a farm membership, a holstein cow, an adopted child in a mysterious country, a newspaper subscription, a public radio program, a fledgeling or established political campaign, a start-up newspaper, an expanding family business. A wad of cash encourages local authorities to smile politely if said family business falls into the grey areas of the law, if permits may be in disarray, if contracts need to be renegotiated on more favorable terms.

In many instances, the proper deployment of a wad of cash is a lesson better learned young rather than late: paying kidnapping ransoms, greasing speeding tickets and dubious environmental disposal notices; the tipping of porters to the tipping of the mayor opens many windows of opportunity.

Receiving wads of cash funds nursing home stays, cancer treatments, school tuition, cocktail parties, private jets. The wad of cash secures farmland in trust for perpetuity, subsidizes low income housing, builds urban medical clinics, sponsors research into energy generation, changes political dialogue, permits travel to foreign countries, establishes museums, provides scholarships, feeds the hungry, puts on a play, landscapes a park, sponsors a highway.

The wad of cash supplies allergy medicine, malaria pills, viral vaccines, chicken soup, radiation treatment, antibiotics, ambulance rides, hospice care. The wad of cash can be exchanged for hair color, hair plugs, fitness training, psychiatric assistance, hypnotherapy, a phone call home, a past life regression, a palm reading.

Properly deployed, a wad of cash greases the wheels of civilization; improperly deployed, a wad of cash provides an economic stimulus, local jobs, a good party, new shoes. Indifferently applied, the same wad of cash lost to the mundanities of human existence and daily life supports the network of relationships dependent on grocery shopping, coffee drinking, utility bill paying, lawn maintaining, gas guzzling, bird feeding modern life. The loss of the wad of cash leaves milk unpurchased, caffeine unconsumed, electricity unsecured, lawns unkempt, commutes unconsummated, birds unfed.

Without the wad of cash, the casual exchanges of quarters and dimes disappear, rough hewn log cabins on cleared government subsidized land a no longer valid variable. Even the commune is founded from the seed of a wad of cash, land purchased, yurts sourced, hoes sharpened, shovels at the ready, seeds started, Mason jars sterilized, goats grazed on fallow lots.

The wad of cash upgrades the rusted out sputtering jalopy with the inconspicuous sedan, moves the passenger from Greyhound to Delta, extricates the ghetto into the suburbs, changes plastic recorders for shiny trumpets, cleans lead out of soil and asbestos out of walls.

The wad of cash founds the subsidized day care center, the training program, the food bank; the wad of cash imports the entertainment, gilds the lily, extracts the tooth, buys new books, upgrades the plumbing, preserves the forest, buys the memorial, distributes the film, starts the bakery, climbs the mountain, buys the canvas, sharpens the pencils, planes the wood, balances the budget.

The wad of cash appears at the root of the stream of subway cars leaving the station, the fountains in the park, the trees in the park, the bridge over the river, the plaque on the building, the outdoor concert, the parade, the downtown clock chiming the hour, the church bells tolling the call for mass, the fresco on the wall, the sculpture at the gallery.

With the wad of cash, calm the enemies, secure alliances, watch the sun set from a riverboat, free a hostage, clear the land of mines, clean a river, make a film, hire a roofer, replaces fishing nets with dolphin friendly models, send a man to the moon, invent petrochemical variations for modern applications, plant lettuce, mitigate drought, pay off politicians, build a safer factory, redesign the internal combustion engine, sponsor dark matter research, publish an underground newspaper, produce a radio program, establish a trust, protect a turtle, rebuild a fire station, commission a statue, restore a mural, protect local microclimates, provide vocational training for criminals, enforce local regulations, clean up an oil spill, plant a tree, hire a babysitter.

All of this, from a wad of cash.

---

reading
that entire printed-word-on-paper-bound-into-a-book concept hasn't really been happening recently

weather
glorious, mostly