Saturday, September 19, 2009

New Hampshire Dreaming (prose poem)

New Hampshire Dreaming, 3 AM

I was walking with a friend at night in high coniferous
woods. We looked up in very little light to see occasional
large butterflies whose colors revealed themselves only
at a particular angle and only when they rested briefly,
perhaps twenty feet up, on the trunks of very tall but
slender pines. One in silhouette seemed somehow
shaped like a broad corkscrew; then, as my own position
shifted, it glowed a deep gold like a monarch in sunlight,
just for a second before it flew off. Another was a deep
blue, almost cobalt, its rich color improbably distinct
in the semi-darkness.
As we walked further, calling each other's attention
to unusual plants or to mysterious glimmering on
the trees' bark, two jets, fighters, flew over at a couple of
hundred feet, slow as canoes resting in a moderate current.
We wondered whether they were looking for us, but after
a few moments they accelerated to a boomless supersonic
speed and raced almost vertically into the sky.
Somewhere in this dream was a thought of my
strict grandmother, now dead for more than forty years, the
grandmother who called me out in childhood for general
laziness one hot morning when I malingered in the upstairs
bathroom to avoid my assigned weeding in her garden. In
the dream her death felt recent, and we wondered who would
live in her room at the farm now that she was gone.
The woods we walked in were a mere strip, a hundred feet
wide, flanked by indistinct open land that might have been
clearcut; and then there were the planes, and our having
reached this path not on a long hike but in a Volvo station
wagon, parked nearby, its power and comfort a badge
of our complicity.

Dream #3: an invitation from my mother

I encountered my mother and an equally elderly but much heavier friend on a town street. My mother smiled with her usual radiance and said, "Do you want to play golf with us? We're going to play golf on the moon." I saw no clubs, no cart. My mother had never hit a shot. But she had a way of stating ideas both decisively and with ambiguous commitment. Was she delusional, or kidding?

What is this one about? My sense of her opaqueness to me? Though I derived my sense of life and my primary values more from her than from any other source, still in some ways I hardly knew her. Did her life make sense to her? At the core did she feel gratitude, or futility? Am I myself playing golf on the moon?

Friday, September 18, 2009

Dream #2: The Whipping

In a dream I found myself in conflict with my maternal grandfather, a stoic, kind, consistent, and entirely responsible person for the twenty-five years I knew him. On this anomalous occasion he had spilled his morning cereal all over the kitchen floor and decided it was my fault. He took me down to the basement and ordered me to drop my pants and bend over, so that he could exact the retribution of corporal punishment, something that he never did, approached doing, or, as far as I know, even imagined during his actual lifetime. He used a broad belt and inflicted twenty-four lashes. He also required my dream-friend Luke (unknown to me outside the dream; like me in the dream, apparently about eighteen) to remain present as a witness, despite Luke's embarrassment and constraint. After the whipping I told my mother that I would never voluntarily speak with Grandad again. Soon after that but at least twenty years older, I was in conversation with a colleague, stating emphatically that writing was very difficult. I was trying to identify the elements of the poem that I wanted to extract from this strange experience. Luke, my grandfather, and my mother had all disappeared.
Almost as soon as I awoke I found myself thinking of Robert Hayden's poem, "Winter Sundays," which suggests that I understood the dream's unfairness as soon as I was released from it. I'm sure it was about me, not about my grandfather: I miss my mother and wanted to talk with her while she was still in her fifties; I fear my own aging and wanted to separate myself from it, from my mother's long, gradual decline, and from my grandfather's imagined loss of rationality, of being himself. The lashes were not painful, but since my mother, now four years dead, is unavailable, and since aging comes on no matter one's abhorrence of it, I think it's fair to call this a nightmare.

The Ego as Wide Receiver

The Ego as Wide Receiver

In an intramural touch football game forty-five years ago I caught a pass for a touchdown. The ball was well away from my body and below my knees; I took it from the air with hands that until that moment had helped me mostly to run cross-country without losing my balance. I was slender and bookish, on the edge of being a nerd, and I drank in my teammates' applause like nourishment, like a tonic.

A play in an informal pick-up game, no matter how agile, carries zero currency, none, in the way of adult bragging rights. And yet this moment changed my relationship with my body and contributed to the formation of a more enterprising public self. However improbably and absurdly, it helped me feel less inadequate, feel as manly as classmates who were physically stronger, more confidently virile. In this way it reduced my need to make jokes at the expense of better athletes, my need to see varsity football players, say, as intellectually undernourished. It peeled a layer from the self-protective lens through which I viewed the world. Others remained.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Columbia River gorge (journal entry)

On Wednesday [July 15] Eleanor Ritter and I drove ninety miles along the Columbia River, through a densely forested gorge and then on into high desert, where the basaltic rock formations and the upland vineyards, orchards, and ranches replace the dark forests that seem both eternal and fertile. From the top of Horsethief Butte you can see miles of the river in both directions and also Mt. Hood, which rises thousands of feet above the treeline into glacier and snow and which reminded me of the spiritual promise of a Mt. Fujiyama or Kilimanjaro.

In the desert as elsewhere in the northwest one sees astonishingly varied plants and flowers, many with tiny blossoms of white or pink. This plant life is sparser here than in the side gorges of the varied and dramatic waterfalls downstream but in a way seems more precious, a bolder assertion of 'the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world' (Thoreau) in places that seem, in their dryness and absence of topsoil, designed to stymie the impulse toward growth and organic diversity. Even the rocks themselves do not seem barren, partly because they stand so near the lifegiving river and partly because the height and mass of the rock formations suggests a mysterious presence both watchful and detached--not unfeeling, exactly, but an embodiment of a very long and comprehensive perspective.

This idea (that spirit is immanent in the rock formations) is in me, not provably in the rocks, but standing in their shadows and gazing up at their massive but subtly textured fronts, one gets some idea of the experience of native peoples for whom such places were sacred in the way of cathedrals or, rather, Olympus. The variations of shape and form suggest a plurality of spirits rather than a single one--are these presences all of the same mind? But they share a common remoteness and transcendence.