repetition + silence

This is how it was, no detail omitted, nothing added for literary effect. It would be more efficient to tell the story as a fiction, where characters could be combined or compressed for individual constancy, acting as archetypes instead of the unknowable puzzles that even one's closest intimates fracture into when viewed at close range. In fairness to the story, though, there can be no wicked uncles or selfish stepmothers, no lunatics in the attic or absent patriarchs. That isn't how things were, though no doubt it would have been easier to live in a story, even a gothic melodrama, full of lightning bolts and scenes of anger and passion. This is not that story.

Here there was a field of endless wildflowers, the clover with its white blooms, the bluebells in spring, dandelions with their wishes in the heart of summer. The field was everything: the site of excavations for dinosaur bones and buried treasure, the savannah where lions and zebras were hunted with rifles made from fallen tree branches, the wide wide sea where the Spanish Armada was conquered and pirates walked the plank.

In the field were the usual assortment of natural residents, the shy brown rabbits fearful of the unexpected, darting away from one danger and into another before scurrying into bushes or burrens; the squirrels hovering around the perimeter, never too far from the safe canopy of the trees; frogs in the marshy corner where, we believed, the ghosts of the unhappy dead rose and walked on nights when fog obscured all but the outline of the moon. It is hard to place the appearance of the ghosts, if we knew instinctively that that was where spirits lurked or if it was an accidental discovery one winter evening, darkness descending before dinner-time in the nursery, the surprising discovery of something other than bullfrogs in the corner of the field.

There were the usual domestic animals in the field as well, for the fences had been strengthened and it was returned to pasture, full of lambs in early spring, then left relatively empty except for a few milk goats by the long days of August, when the mature sheep were rotated to pasture elsewhere. Rarely we encountered and avoided raccoons, skunks; and although we were warned against the bites of weasels, and so we searched earnestly for their nests, we never saw one. Instead we drowned in seas of butterflies, lady bugs, dragonflies who made the meadow their feasting ground.

It was late summer, the skies turning towards sunset far too early, yet the air still warm with the memory of heat, not yet blown away in the winds of autumn. We were playing tag by starlight, our shadows darting imperceptibly by the wavering light of the moon. Starlight tag is a game with its own rules and logic, as each childhood game is imbued with rigid regulations and penalties. There are two great secrets to tag in dusk: being able to become a shadow of a tree, all but invisible in a patch of darkness; and being able to camouflage sound, to move steadily and stealthily while throwing one's voice or echo in a completely different direction.

I found the shadows of trees to be too crowded, for it is after dark that the wood nymphs awaken, loosen from the anchoring roots of the tree, and they are prone to playing tricks and teasing human children. Perhaps they wished to join our game of tag, or were envious of our untethered existence, bound as we are by emotion and sentiment to home and hearth, but not physically locked into place. Those who understood the demands of the wood nymphs sought their company and protection under the tree limbs, but I perfected throwing sounds, sending the echo of my footfalls fifty feet to the left or right, to have by voice bound off a rock in a corner in the other direction. Undisturbed, I was free to dance in the shadows of the field, unseen by the light of the moon.

It had been summer for so long, a dry summer, that we had forgotten about the fog on nights when the air is dark and rain hovers over the horizon; we had not seen a ghost at all that year, or not since Midsummer's Eve, which is obligatory and so hardy counts. The gossip of the bullfrogs was hiding the squelch of the bog as my footsteps sank into the mud, and suddenly I was no longer alone in the dark. None of the ghosts had names; none of the ghosts had genders; we knew they were unhappy dead because the contented would be unlikely to live in a damp corner of a field and appear on foggy nights. The happy dead would be much more likely to haunt clearings in the woods by the light of a full moon. The logic of childhood permitted no other explanation; all was self-evident, just as it was obvious when I was no longer alone amongst the bullfrogs.

There wasn't wailing or crying, there wasn't really even a voice, just the echoing whisper of the sounds of the night, the songs of the moon, shortened and elongated for emphasis and meaning where before there was the steady refrain of the nightly symphony. The air was thicker, shadows took on forms of their own, separate from the primary entity that cast them. That was the first night my shadow detached itself from me, and in the twin outlines of the evening I saw myself and the ghosts.  There were many ghosts out that night, they were consoling one another or sharing misery, it was unclear precisely how they engaged, but my shadow was drawn deeply into the rising and falling murmur of the spirits.

I was not unwilling to be one of their number, although I worried about being caught unawares in the ongoing game of starlight tag and therefore caught out by the finder; but over the summer my age had begun to catch up with me, and the voices of the spirits were both more clear and less comprehensible. In the past it was quite clear when they appeared, what they requested, how to fulfill their requests, but never before had there been so many, had the cacophony of their voices obscured the meaning of the words.

The commotion of the ghosts must have acted as a magnet for the others, drawing them away from the jealous intentions of the tree nymphs and pausing the olly olly oxen free cries as children dashed to the safety of home base behind the eyes of the finder, the truce of a time out prevailed as we gathered between the calls of the bullfrogs and the sounds of the spirits. The shadows of the other children joined my shadow among the ghosts, and we all listened intently to the murmuring ghost songs. They were not trying to claim us, they were not asking favors of us, but none of us were quite certain what to do next.

We took hands and began to snake chains through the marsh, then broke into teams and darted across and through the opposite chain of children, following the directions of the ghosts. Their song took on definite harmonies, vocalizations, as our movements formed new patterns, and we began using our spinning and skipping to influence the notes of the music, creating a song out of the incomprehensible singing. We spiraled, hands clasped, into a tighter and tighter circle, then broke open and spooled off in a chain, a thread of children running madly through the field. As we spooled out of the marsh and onto the drier lands of the meadow, our shadows followed, cartwheeling and somersaulting behind us. The ghosts, whose songs had grown entwined with our movements, followed up into the heart of the field, and when the wind picked up and blew the fog off the moon, there we were, fully exposed in the field: our shadows detached, the ghosts illuminated in the full face of the moon, the night alive as it never had been before.

We did not sleep that night, as no child can sleep after gazing directly into the face of a spirit, and something changed, forever, in the field that night. Our homes became empty; we spent more time straying into the world, looking for the corners where shadows hid spirits hovering just out of sight. Our game of starlight tag expanded to incorporate everyone else, everywhere, and our shadows took on a purpose of their own, sometimes parallel with our own person and sometimes incalculably distant. As I aged the songs of the ghosts continued to become both louder and less understandable, but we had learned the secret symphony of the night world, and we became its conductors.

reading
the completion of 30 Poems in 30 Days!

weather
so long November!

memory of

Thanksgiving: all of that, and then much more.

This week is an memoriam to a mentor: the gifts of compassion and calm beauty; the smoke of Hu-Kwa Tea; the perfect soufflé.


Soufflé

melt 6 T butter, whisk in 6 T flour
cook until thickened (~10 seconds)

whisk in 2 c milk, salt & pepper
stir until thickened (~2 minutes)
remove from heat, let cool


beat well 5 whole eggs (unseparated)
add to eggs 2.5 c (6 oz) grated Swiss cheese, chives


bake at 400 F for 30-40 minutes in a buttered 6 c gratin dish

the little dog laughed

Watch, watch closely and carefully, and I will show you magic. Not a magic trick, those cheap flashes of smoke and mirrors propagated by the men who prey on society's gullibility and desire to be deceived. No, this is real, the coercion of matter into substance of a radically different type, the bending of the laws of physics into new shapes and dimensions. This is not alchemy, it is neither chemistry nor biology, those fields beloved by technicians in pristine lab coats with official clipboards for tabulations and recordings of precision and hypothesis. Nor is this the gypsy trickery, the carnival games of fortunes, crystals, messages from the dead. You have grown cynical and disbelieving after watching the dazzle and color of the Houdini's of the world, but the magic I produce and promise is richer, deeper, than any of these sleights of hand.

This comes down through a line, generations of masters who could massage the perception of reality to take another shape, another form, until it could be created or destroyed at their touch. Years of careful preparation, a calm hand, taught and distilled, father to son, grandmother to granddaughter. It was never cheapened by stage performances, never watered down to be served to a public spending their beer money at the show; it was never coerced into governmental service, to battle foes real or imagined. There were moments, small glitches in history, when the protection of the magic was not enough to avoid prosecution, but even in the dark, unending nights of the Inquisition, we survived, and it survived, unharmed, unweakened by boiling or rending of body or spirit. There is no age, no gender, that is more or less gifted, as with all attributes some show more promise or more interest, but, like arithmetic and grammar, all are taught to manage and balance the talent. So watch, watch closely and carefully, and I will show you magic.

On the night of the thinnest crescent moon, the smallest white sliver in the sky, focus on the point where the sharp horn of the moon pierces the night sky. It is a small rend, so small telescopes cannot focus their mighty mirrors upon it, but through this piercing every month is birthed the moon, emerging full, glorious, and white into the sky. And as the moon escapes from her confines behind the curtain of the heavens, watch, watch and see what else is drawn out from that tear.

There are all the goblins of history, the elves, the trolls, the fairies, each slipping through the break in the sky to make their way to their adopted lands, islands and forests in the darkness of the night sky. Some, more reticent, keep to the shadows, can only be seen as reflections on the surfaces of lakes or glimpsed in peripheral vision through fog, but among them are all the spirits of the other worlds. There are no demarcations between good and bad, kind and cruel; these are human values, assigned by the superstitious who fear or desire the presence of the otherworldly.

As the moon waxes large more and more of the spirits gather, joining their celestial brethren under the illumination of the night sky. Not always, not often, but when the moon is full and ringed with fog as the seasons shift and turn against each other, on the nights when the air is perfectly still but the ghost of the wind moves the clouds, on these nights all the creatures from behind the curtain gather together, in our lands, and tell stories, sing, dance, as the night grows long. Humans, lost in the woods or on quests or with broken souls or vulnerable hearts can hear the songs, feel the rhythm of the dances, and those who hear the stories of the heavens become marked with the tattoo of the night world, a star upon their forehead that glows with a steady invisible light, drawing towards them others who have ventured into the world that is both ours and theirs.

Watch, watch carefully as the moon begins her retreat behind the night sky and, like children, the spirits slowly make their way home, across vast differences to other lands, with other stories and other songs. There are some, a very few, who do not heed the hurry up please it's time of the waning moon, who hide in the hollows of oak trees and the shallows of tidal ponds so as to remain behind in the unchaperoned darkness of the new moon.

These, the mischief makers, sneak, tease, twist reality when all lies still in the darkness of the empty night sky; they hide reading glasses in the empty cavities of bookcases, empty bottles of reserve Burgundy, misdeliver love letters, nibble holes in the hearts of sweaters. They wear the masks of men into the world to tell stories which are, in their world, true and sincere stories, but in the darkness of the new moon are confidence tricks of easily won affections and misplaced faith. They intend no harm, but their world, where all these lies are truths, is more real to them than their adopted lands, where hearts are broken and fortunes squandered in pursuit of the promised rewards.

As easily as they evade the policing of the moon as the opening in the sky closes the gate between here and there, so, too, are there those eager to latch on to the horn of the moon and slip away. Usually it is those already marked with the sign of the heavens upon their forehead, but there is an affinity amongst the very young, awake past their bedtime rituals of Ovaltine and a picture book and now I lay me down to sleep.

Standing up in bed, they grip the windowsill, reach through the glass towards the rattle shaped handle of the moon. The very young know instinctively that glass is both a solid and a liquid, that the human heart and body can pass through it as easily as wading through the sandy lake shore on a summer afternoon, and their hand is exactly the right size, exactly the right shape, to grip and clasp the waning crescent moon. When they are just at the tipping point of infancy and childhood, their buoyancy lifts them up, up into the cradle of the moon, and not often, but sometimes, they reach their fingers into the closing gap of the sky, and hold tight to the heavens as to a security blanket.

There, all the fairies, ghosts, trolls, spirits, tricksters, and gnomes become visible int their true form, and speak the babbling language of infancy; or, the infant's babblings become focused and directed into form, taking the shape of the effervescent beings of the sky. Some of the goddesses, sentimental for their own long lost children, the heroes of myth and folktale, teach the infants the secrets of the gods, sending them back to their cribs with access to the mind and power of Olympus and the oracles.

Some of the creatures, the unicorns and flying zebras and fish with fur instead of scales and birds that are balls of perpetual flame, some of these creatures bring the children into their meadows and nests, and feed them with the charged cosmic honey which their own young are weaned upon. These children return with a touch for the language of all animals, become the guiding spirits for gerbils, cockatiels, Guinea pigs, and golden retrievers, as well as the greater and lesser beasts, the plankton, moths, and grizzly bears.

There are infants who find themselves among the spirits of the wood nymphs, the haunted elms, the bodies of heavenly trees whose roots extend deep into the constellations of the sky. They swing easily from limb to limb, wrestling with the grandfather maples and the great great aunt pines and are coddled by the snow white arms of the young birches, rocked-a-bye in the treetops until gently lowered into their own cradles.

When the older visitors behind the curtain of the night cross over, they are not greeted with the coddling warmth of the infants, but are instead handed steaming mugs of starry mead, mulled cosmic cider, and accepted into the circle of storytellers around the crackling fire of the sun, spirits amongst their kin, slipping between the gap in the night to the land in the shadow of the moon. Watch, watch closely and carefully, and feel the shape of the night sky stretch and tear at the tip of the moon, the momentary magic of worlds changing places and telling stories.

reading
The sense of an ending / Julian Barnes

weather
this rain rain rain could be snow snow snow: tires in place! shovel in place! ice scraper in places!

one potato, two potato

We were to go to the fair that day, as we went to the fair every autumn, the corn as big as watermelon, the pumpkins orange and just coming in for harvest. The previous year -- last year -- I had been too short for the midway rides, not allowed on the roller coaster with a loop de loop or on the giant spider machine with little airborne cars that spun and swooped. I wasn't allowed on the Ferris wheel, the biggest in the nation, or the merry-go-round, with its fancy tigers chasing beautiful horses and sparkling zebras to ride, even though I'm sure that I wasn't too little for a trip on the Ferris wheel so high that the moon is bigger than the earth or to sit upon the gorgeous rearing black stallion under the calliope organ pipes.

The reason was just that I was too little, and instead of the bouncy castle or the fun house with the scary twisty mirrors that make little kids twist and turn into funny shaped grown-ups, instead of the arcade games and bumper cars that were almost just like driving real cars, only with floppy wheels that don't go straight, instead of any of the fun and a little bit scary stuff, we just looked at the grown up things.

We watched the big kids from high school walk their pet cows in a circle, and some of them got ribbons and some of them didn't. We looked at super-furry bunny rabbits with long hair and floppy ears, and some of them had ribbons, but not the one that I liked best, that was all black with one white ear. Then we looked at all the fruits and vegetables, but even if I like eating corn with lots of butter and maybe a tiny little bit of salt it was boring to just look at all those vegetables sitting in a big barn. There were flies starting to make homes on the vegetables, so they were getting smelly and gross, and then we went to see the baking competition.

They were still judging the baking, lots of old people wearing glasses taking tiny bites of pie and writing something down on a clipboard, then taking a tiny bite of another piece of pie and writing on the clipboard again. All that pie, I thought we would at least get a piece, since the judges weren't having any fun eating it, but apparently they don't let people eat the pies, just look at them. Looking at pies is a lot less nice than eating them, and I don't mean those tiny bites like the old people took.

The best part was after we left the pie barn and went into a big ring, where people were racing horse drawn carriages around and around, then they just used one horse and ran circles around barrels. It was like being at a wild west rodeo, but without the bucking broncos. Then we went on a hay ride, pulled by a tractor, not a horse, which was the only ride I was allowed to go on.

This year, though, I knew I had grown big enough to ride on all of the fair rides, and I had saved my allowance to buy a ticket for the fun house and maybe some cotton candy after the roller coaster and before the Ferris wheel, and so I wouldn't have to spend the day watching old men eat pie while I could hear the organ for the carousel. We packed our picnic lunch and all loaded into the car, and were assigned fair buddies to not get lost. There was a new baby sister that Mother would be showing the bunnies and cows and goats and vegetables, so my fair buddy was big brother, and he loved roller coasters and fast go karts and haunted houses, even. I didn't like haunted houses, but as long as I didn't have to go in alone, it would be okay.

When we arrived at the fair, big brother asked if I was tall enough for all the rides I wanted to go on, so I said yes; and if I knew where to meet Mother when they played the loud whistle at lunchtime, by the big statue of the Indian wearing a feather headdress, and I said yes; and then his best friend from school met us by the haunted house and he asked me if I wanted to ride the Ferris wheel while they went into the haunted house, and I said yes to that, too. After all, haunted houses are scary and loud and its easy to get lost and they sometimes kidnap little kids although I don't know why, but the Ferris wheel is like flying, higher and higher, above the church and the town hall, even higher than skyscrapers.

The man putting people in their cars for the Ferris wheel didn't see anything weird about a kid riding it alone, and up, up, up we went, if it had been dark I could have winked at the man in the moon. Around and around, up and down, we went, and it was like being in a tree house higher than any tree house in the world. When my turn was over, I didn't see big brother, but knew to meet Mother at the statue of the Indian chief when the whistle blew, and went to ride the merry go round, where there was a unicorn with a blue saddle, and then the twisting twirling spider ride where our cars went up and around and down and around and upside down, and one boy threw up he was so dizzy.

After that I didn't want to go on the loop de loop roller coaster, but I still had my money in my pocket for a ticket to the fun house. I didn't know where big brother was, but it wasn't hard to find where I wanted to go. When there were too many people in front of me I looked up to see where the tall space needle was, then for the Ferris wheel, and then looked at the tops of the rides for the ones that were the most twisty and turny.

On my way to the fun house I bought cotton candy, blue and pink swirled together on one stick, and it stuck to my nose and to my fingers and turned from fluff to nothing but sparkle as I ate it. When I finished I was still a little hungry, but Mother had brought a picnic lunch for us and it would be lunchtime when the whistle told us so, tuna fish sandwiches and peanut butter crackers and crispy apples and maybe some of the toffee candy that we were allowed a piece of on special occasions. Going to the fair was definitely a special occasion.

Before I reached the fun house there was a puppet show, the type where the puppets all have strings and you can see the people up above twisting the strings to make the puppets move. They might have been playing Robin Hood, but it might have been something different, it wasn't very funny so I got up from my seat and left. There were clowns riding around on motorcycles, with curly wigs and big red noses and floppy shoes, but they all had shiny police badges, too, so I wondered if they were clowns pretending to be police or police pretending to be clowns. I didn't ask, because then they would have thrown me into jail, even if they were just pretend policemen, and even jail at a fair isn't a fun place to go. Then people would laugh at me and I wouldn't get to eat lunch.

There was a place where there was supposed to be a ride or a game, but there was a padlock on the entrance, and no one at the front. I wondered what it was supposed to be, if it would open later or if I would have to come back next year to find out. When I went up closer to look more carefully, there were all sorts of funny animals painted on the sides, horses with wings, lions with human heads, dragons with shiny purple scales, and lots of other things, that weren't scary monsters and weren't zoo animals. There were lots of words written in a curly alphabet, but I hadn't learned cursive and it may not have been cursive, it may have been a special language spoken from where those animals came from.

There was music coming from inside, even though the ride was all closed up and padlocked. It wasn't the fun music of the merry go round or the fast dance music of the spider ride, it was more like grown up's music, it was kind of quiet and just played by one instrument, maybe a flute. When I was right by the locked entrance I saw the guard's entry booth, all striped in green and pink, but it wasn't closed up and locked like the rest of the ride. There was a little girl in it, littler than I had been last year or the year before, and she was wearing a frilly dress with lots of bows. She asked if I wanted to go in, and when I nodded, she pointed to the back of the guard's booth, where there was a special door.

It was impossible to see through the door, there was a lot of smoke, the cold magic type, not the type from fires, and the music was louder. I wanted to see if it was more like a fun house or a carousel before going inside, but the girl took my arm and dragged me into the mist. It was like nothing I had ever seen before, people on trapezes and dancing on barrels, and lots of little animals, not dogs and cats, but the ones painted on the outside of the ride, with wings and horns and special shapes. It was amazing, and I knew I would never want to leave, I would stay until I was a grown-up, or maybe even longer.

reading
Transgressions : stories / Sallie Bingham

weather
late-summer-sneaks-into-November

knights of malta

The forecast was for rain, rains so torrential and unceasing that the autumn harvest would be lost to mold and rot, rains that filled basements and began to creep up staircases, rains that, it was foretold, would float parked city buses out of their stations and into entirely new towns. Given the forecast, repeated with such solemnity by every reporter and news anchor, it seemed only right and proper to make preparations; or, barring actually making preparations, to at least carry an umbrella.

The stores had taken advantage of the prognostications for flooding and unceasing precipitation to raise the prices of standard issue black umbrellas to luxury item status: only those of means would be protected from the elements, others forced to make do with jury-rigged contraptions of trash bags and old newspapers. In the recesses of the hall closet I found an old umbrella, which must have been a parasol in its day, of rumpled pink silk with an ivory handle and a tassel hanging down for very little purpose. The parasol had not aged well over the years; it smelled of mothballs and Sunday school picnics and rat poison, and the silk had weakened over the skeleton of the frame. The entire idea of carrying a pink parasol into the heart of a storm was ludicrous; but it was what I had. Not being a person of means, it was impossible to waste money on something so unnecessary as a black umbrella, when there was a serviceable pink one to hand.

Next to the umbrella in the hall closet was a leather ammunition case, that seemed to have seen active duty during the First World War, guessing from the language phrase cards and emergency aid kit that was stuffed in a side pocket. There was also a compass and a somewhat tarnished pocket knife, and with these in hand there seemed no reason to delay the journey. The storms had not arrived, they were due to begin today or tomorrow or yesterday or sometime next week, depending on the forecaster, and the more headway I could make before the rain, the better.

This expedition was different from the others: there was no back-up in place, no communication with the home office, no one else in the field to whom I could turn. Whether a successful completion would allow contact with any of my colleagues ever again was even in some question. If I survived, success; but if I survived and was never heard from again, that was to be expected. The remit didn't say so in quite as many words, it was full of references to a reconnaissance mission and contact with person or groups unknown and bold explorations of future possibilities, but after a lifetime in the service, I knew what the terse memo meant between the stock phrases of patriotism and duty.

Technically I wasn't even employed by the Department any more. Technically the Department no longer existed. A lifetime of habit is hard to step away from, though, and when the recognizable blue envelope was delivered by courier, there was no question about accepting or declining. To serve in whatever form requested had been standard operating procedure, and the semantics of military coups and heads of state changing over meant very little as far as duty and responsibility to the call.

The first day was spent getting beyond the city center, a scramble between bus lines and trains whose routes and schedules had been altered by the new regime and no longer followed any published maps or timetables. There were rumors of where buses could be caught, of when trains might appear, but the rumors were only as accurate as the intentions of the speaker. The system could change from day to day, depending on the particular favorites chosen by the transport operators. By dusk on the first day, I was approximately three miles from where I had begun, having taken a series of increasingly contorted buses and trams down streets which had previously been little more than unmarked alleyways.

It would have been faster and less exhausting to walk the three miles, but the public transportation served well a function otherwise inaccessible. With all forms of mass communication jammed with news only of the impending flooding and political upheaval, it was only on the streets that information gathering could occur with any accuracy. There were riders on the buses whose trade was accurate information; they didn't have any type of uniform or identifying badge, but it was always possible to make them out. One had a gold earring in the shape of a feather, another a feather tucked into tied shoelaces. On a train was a man playing harmonica, singing old songs from the player piano days, A Bicycle Built for Two, with a black boa wrapped around his neck. One woman wore a fringed suede jacket with long braids and a feather attached to just one braid, the others anchored by beads.

Find the feather, find the bird who will sing sweetly into your ear, for the price of gold or a favor. I didn't have much gold, and fewer favors, but for old times sake they were willing to share nuggets of information. Compiled over miles of bumpy bus rides, the smell of diesel fumes, the wheezing of trains running on unmaintained tracks, over the course of my travels to the outskirts a picture began to emerge, a map of my itinerary. East south east, avoid the lake, avoid the shore, the water is toxic, contaminated. At any crossroads, first go south, then at the next, go east, and the path would avoid the most dangerous zones. The rains, the floods, were imminent, would be full not only of water but of the same chemicals that had dyed the lake a deep deep red, and my silk parasol would be scanty protection indeed.

The final informant I spoke with, a lad of six or seven selling newspapers in a subway station, looked at me as if he knew me, recognized me, before blinking away his vision of someone else, and shoving a bundle in my hands. It was an old army blanket, and must have been serving as his bedroll for some months, but it had been treated in the War to withstand the toxicity of poison gas, and would help with the rains. I gave him my umbrella, my bedraggled pink parasol, and the emergency aid kit from the ammunition bag. He might not be able to use them, but he could sell them, even though they were far less valuable than the blanket. With this knowledge I left a token at the bus stop on the edge of town, before passing out of the city limits and beyond the help of my colleagues, or the reach of the government.

That night the fog grew thicker and thicker, gathering and condensing into a frozen dense mist at morning, and I came to the first crossroads at daybreak. South, then east I was supposed to travel, and pulled out the compass to confirm what information the shrouded sun could not supply. The compass spun, wildly, back and forth, caught in a magnetic zone of its own making, unable to settle at any point before swinging wildly and randomly in another direction. It was possible that in the years since learning how to use a compass my skills, a steady hand, a calm mind, had deteriorated. It was possible that sun spots or a geologic magnetic zone could be spinning the needle. It was possible a meteor had fallen nearby or the poles were switching. It was possible the compass had lost its calibration from unused years in the hall closet or from action in the war.

Regardless, I placed the compass back in the bag, closed my eyes, and turned right. Perhaps the route would be more dangerous or toxic, or perhaps the sun would appear and I could correct course, but for the morning I would continue walking into the slight and biting rain, looking for the pockets of safety hidden in the countryside.

reading
Mr Fox / Helen Oyeyemi

weather
how nice, how nice, to have light and heat after extended dark and cold

30 Poems in November

There's a benefit going on this month for the Center for New Americans, in Northampton, MA: write a poem a day. Get people to underwrite your poem a day. Donate to help literacy.

Poetry isn't something I write. Not even in the deepest darkest recesses of an unlit New England night by flashlight under the duvet. How does one know when a poem is done? A story finishes (even if others don't like the ending). But a poem . . . every comma matters. Every verb matters. Is that the definite article where the indefinite article would be more appropriate? How does one avoid the maudlin, the confessional? What's up with the line breaks?

How could I subject a reading public to a poem a day -- given its unfinished and maudlin appearance -- in the deep dark recesses of November? Even to benefit something so lovely as literacy? It's like exposing a marsupial mammal to the ravages of the environment when it should be warm and snug in a pouch.

Here's the compromise. I'll write a check to the Center. You can write a check to the Center. Mail it to them. I'll write poems, given the above caveats and disclaimers. They'll be compiled and uploaded here to a pdf or something at the end of the month. Maybe. Probably.