ground cover in the rain

a little memory in frozen March

never mind that it's too late to move onto a farm
and in a dream isn't there alway somebody leaving
never mind the warnings the gas lines need replaced
never mind no one agrees what love is or even what the weather is or even a what  a song was
never mind the movies aren't worth the matinee price
never mind what used to be a memory worry seems now a dwindling peace of mind
never mind there was this swell idea and that idea is still like hearing birds in the morning
in that dream somebody's leaving a pile of stuff on an old brown car and they fidget as the sky turns mustard and what you see on the person is the faintest smile like a figure on a Mona Lisa print
never mind I don't believe I survived either the stone age nor the cold war
never mind I've forgotten the combination to the bicycle lock like someone fucked up on daytime tv
monday monday the bells are ringing and somebody calls for a dog with  honey voice
passing  strange wide awakenings kissings games
never mind thinking how DNA might save it all now
never mind who's asking or how the precious mettle is or what substance makes who's desire
put everything aside and listening to the recycling truck
never mind things like quantum or nostalgia or utopia or underwear and a technical screw up
never mind that set of misunderstandings
never mind pitch perfect necessities and how in the music they fell so good
never mind the window gets smaller while a target grows and fills the window
never mind the mourning doves and that who- who - who call that you always answer

Details equals details

There's something mysterious in the rain blown against a fence by an afternoon wind.

Mortgage payment was due. Insurance check arrives in the mail.

There's something mysterious about a broken branch dangling by a tread in a yard.

There's something mysterious thinking about low tide while sitting in a house in Vermont.

Any clock will hold the mysterious. Any doubt. Any laughing to oneself.

The way lines of geese are rips in the veil of the sky.

When the phone rings while you're watching a movie that's mysterious.

Taking about a closet and refurbishing it to find maybe lost money is mysterious moment of maybe.

Mysterious quiet. Kabuki dawn. The sky on a John Cage trip.

A slice of bread and the hunger that went before it and which cannot be remembered.

A runaway dream where you can't get away. The computer gear that keeps loading and loading and loading until you need to make a decision. Some woman playing with her tired curly dark curly hair and stretching into the back of a green wet car and smiling kindly in profile.

It's mysterious to know something and not find the origin from this information.

Mist gliding away in the trees is a mysterious contrivance that wants to be so rightly cinematic inside the eyes.

Blind Surfer

   Blowing like mad this morning. Leaves fly off and say goodbye to October in dusty yellow numbers flung across the yards on a harsh wind driven rain. Hundreds stripped away just like that. Naked trees left standing just like that. Seems the almost perfect time to hit the pause button and reflect on something as you stare out the windows.
   The honey in the tea cup seems just the right amount.
   Trying to keep your head spot on can seem difficult.
   Cleaning the baseboards not only loses dirt but rids looking at the dirt like some value added attachment gone weird.
   Just last week I went out for a walk on another beautiful afternoon that seemed chasing itself across a long string of fair weather days. A persistence -  a feeling maybe - seemed trailing me through those days - on a walk in the afternoon - that's the best thing - walking in the afternoon and forgetting - forgetting - words like quits - phrases like money kills the dream or other phrases like fear worry and doubt kill the dream - need the dream - need the money - when suddenly I was taken in my tracks - what a friendly environment where we live. The mystery of oxygen and all that remains in pictures…
   Trees bent and twisted by seasons grew along the water and geese flew south across a deep blue sky and rowboats in the harbor swung oars in an awkward fashion that pulled them back to someplace like home. Warm air shone on the lake. Ripples that were starlight bounced off the water and so in turn fled back to nowhere in the sky beyond the knocking on heaven's door at my feet standing in the little waves.
   Scarlet vines - crisps siennas - shapes and characters tangled in a wire fence beside the rail yard.
   Clean me out till there's nothing left - nothing left but some host of life grabbing a breath and pushing golds and shadows back out. Make it while you can. Brilliant orange. Purple runners.









Steady overnight rain fell like a drumbeat on the roof. Before you call it quits for the day - before you fall asleep - before you go off like a character dancing through landscapes of dreams   chase words and pictures that belong somewhere else -

city of attraction

   Too much to pass on with no clouds. Clear skies in the face. Hardly a wind and a warm Autumn sunlight: been a month since I was out on the water: like being a stranger without environment. When it comes down to it there are things you just can't miss. Like suddenly being inside an afternoon and having to blow off house projects and instead going out on the water for a paddle. Dozens of sailboats to the south like torn pieces of the sunlight itself reflected off the bay. Dark blue almost viscous colored water rippled underneath a small breeze. How to reflect on oneself seems nothing more but the quiet blade movements pulling water and pushing air and sending forty seven pounds of bright yellow fiberglass toward the rocky point at North Beach. The muscular skyline of town faced into the late heat falling from an an old precious star in space filled me with such a longing that one could not begin to possess it entirely and offered a wealth in place no one could ever steal. Burlington. My adoptive hometown. Set neatly in a biology edge from the lake to the west against what once were productive fields in Williston and the Green Mountain arch beyond Richmond to the east... one hope... among many that day I had... was whatever the developers and politicians do in the future and how the money turns out... what I hope for is - they don't fuck up the place. Might not have many more days like this. Paddle till the body turns sore. Then float. Be suggested. Look back at the shoreline where you belong. Bob like a cork from an empty bottle. Then move. Filled with sweet empty.

to bring neglected places and to find them

   Labor day.
   The conventional end of summer... tired garden flowers... ripe tomatoes... full cycle witness... each year comes back like reminders in days of small degrees of your own thinking to set things proper... you might flee.... you rally the marker... whatever case you make what I'm thinking is to celebrate millions... workers... have hope for more equitable standards of living for those coming after... and when all's said and done maybe then we've done more... more decent to have and to share the bounty of time ... more than just having a day and maybe setting ourselves up for a joke...
   Ah... the domestic self in a brutal economic world ... just as simply the cock-sure self in a funny throwaway world... either way when August goes into a calendar flip there's a chance to have proportion in your life.
    Okay - apart from having a couple of beers and watching the bike races each year downtown - not that it's a sacred tattoo of being - but it is a viewpoint - each labor day I feel lucky.      
   Hooked on it really.
   Consistent.
   States or wonder beautiful as evening clouds that describe the sky above.
   Fretful as a scrawl on a building's facade suggesting go away and be damned.
   Never enough really.
   Not DNA.
   Nor framework.  
   If I don't find out well that's enough for starters again...
 
 

obsessions are maybe like songs

   Can't get over it when I see all these people in the morning walking to work and in a sense I envy them how each day they're off and about. Not only are they walking without a limp (!) but they seem to have a place to go and something to do. ( I'm hurt and unemployed with no job to return to). And I know it's just my impressions guiding me, even these people might feel lost, but they're all off and after something. At the circling back point where a day layers upon the day before, don't we wish, don't we won't, the little pieces of physical evidence we have to start grabbing onto a void of sorts and contribute to something done with? At least for me it's that way. I hark to the object.  And to make a sentence out of one's life - to take living as language and to lose the appeals of authority for that life -  like to forget that frothy dictate I am who am -  that leaves a subject to dissolve in the making and a verb in the action word sense to make the thing presentable to see. Manufacture suits me. Something rather than nothing I guess and yea I add to all the layers of material stuff that overwhelm us. But I find it unsettling to do nothing. Give me a tool, a baking pan, a paintbrush...

notre jardin

      An odd little rainstorm shows up from nowhere and these sudden clouds rack up overhead and as such derail my plans. Only rains for twenty minutes or so and then the sun comes back out. Only it's like being in the middle of something etc. and now that middle is gone and it's somewhere else to be found and so gets lost in space. What to do? Start something else? Settle for tomorrow?
   But I wish not to hurry off to nowhere, especially in particular, (!) and so just sit here on the back porch - the back porch mountain of solitude hanging out in a small town of influences - and take in the air as it happens.
    A truck out on Route 7 is using it's engine brakes against the neighborhood streets and it sounds like someone stuttering. A rapid vocabulary of sounds, brokenness and hesitation, the more you apply the sounds the more there is a hope maybe...
   Everybody lives faraway... and it's only a phone call... and it's not like they are required at the moment or anything... but they just live faraway...
   Try and concentrate on what you were doing -  but instead look up at those clouds with their frosty white peaks like mountain tops riding atop the packs of twisted and layered gray mass that spin into a kind of wool that seems classic and penumbral and stupid and gathers shadows from the wind and has a storm packaged within - and you think you're never too old to engage in doubt, never too far removed to have a portal onto a problem...
   Get soaked in the process...
   Ah the first aster has bloomed...
   Today without fail I still can't ever imagine heaven...
   Hell is for suckers mom used to say...
   Everyday there's a need for something like a tissue in nature that runs way below deep and so rips out your heart and then hands it back over to you to begin again...
   And tomatoes keep rising from the garden like the fruits of paradise turned over and made into salsa and canned later for soups when the dregs of winter hit ...
   Last evening at the ice cream stand... the tourists took so long to either make up their minds or get their money out and get out of the way that the sun went down as though no one might notice the full difference between an ordinary breath and a small silent bravo. Fathers called out for gleeful mindless children climbing across tables and jabbing one another with cones. Mothers lost in phone calls called out to fathers to harness the children as dollars worth of chocolate went down to the fate of gravity. A silly thing really but utterly worth it. To have one's own chocolate and watch the sights off a summer evening... sitting on the stairs that lead down closer to sea level... as though practically invisible... gleeful mindless people walked over me to get closer to the lake like American meatball heros appropriated from a source of endless life like vacation idleness and the un-lived terror of their failings and split into a simple human mask that grinned and spilled cold soda on my shoulders in the process...  Gold blue light settled on the water. The ferry boat pulled into the harbor like some character from a picture book. A brilliant blue sky flared out into the sweet blanket of night and exposed those first few stars that grid the light in space like fireflies. Seagulls in teams went mad over a discarded sundae that lay on the grass all wasted rose and lemon and stripped mined sugar from those pleasant creeme machines.
   Get rid of the anxieties in life and what's left? Leisure? The screws of disappointment?
   It's that time of year when the garden goes unruly and you feel a little scared about it and the plants flop in whatever direction they take. Grasses take over like wands casting myths. After a long season you need to let go - but wasn't I the manager of this dirt just like three months ago and so was cheering on the natural order of things?  So you take a look one day. And the whole organism is on its own without you. There doesn't appear to be an I within this equation that you do anything about.
   Some years I take the time... I tidy it up.... stake the tall late flowers like the asters and wage a kind of mesmerizing air against the weeds that want so much against my own desires...
   This year I guess I'm inclined to let it all go and watch. It's all quite beautiful. And I really don't know why.

soft vanilla

      Aint it like mad crazy, an eternal kind of set up, a kind of mad crazy happiness to boot... oh it's mid-August ... and crazy with it. Like the way the air of life possesses smells that bend you... tomatoes on a platter with cheese and oil and basil... corn in a pan steamed for six minutes and then spread with butter until the mouth understands what the brain keeps talking about...  the low feel of lake water on your skin after you dry off from floating at the park and forgetting about what made the day heavy... didn't all this happen just last year?
   It's mid-August and suddenly there's need to have that knocks you about like a few steps after a few cold beers and suddenly you need to fall in love.  
   Plenty of sunlight and no humidity to speak of. Beautiful afternoon even if the forecast said iffy weather. Walked over to Park Street to a reading because it was way too attractive a day to drive in the truck. Some poems. Some food. Lots of chatter. Flowers in the ground and also perfumed out of glass jars and books to inspect and a large bowl of popcorn for everyone's hands. An airplane did barrel-rolls overhead like a noisy ridiculous insect. Motorcycles roared on the street like some big balled confusion. Lawnmowers from across neighbor's fences  crashing through personal backyards. All folded into the din of a lively Sunday afternoon. Some poems. Some food. Some beer.
   Walked back home and on the way bought an ice cream cone and watched the sunset on the lake drop down behind the old rise of the Adirondack range to the familiar west. One could do worse and I guess it's hard to go wrong walking along and watching colors in the sky and eating ice cream in the evening heat. Like all the years we spend bring us new innards. What crashed into what over those years - fingerprints on the eyelids from what we know -  easy to settle upon the paper mask mystifications we invent for ourselves as a personality that sees death as anything at all but a clarity - as the years strip us down to a thin gauze from a horror movie you're afraid to peel off -  and I thought never post handsome photos on facebook...!
   Meanwhile back at the ice cream stand!  The mandatory turbulence of two kids holding onto one another, of adolescent introspection at a take out window, each wanting something they say, but maybe different for each other they say, the way they hold hands together while deciding what to order, what do you want their whole body seems to say like a question singing out for an answer, holding hands, looking at each other, confused, so solid, settling for sprinkles, one on a cone and the other on a dish...
   Got home. Has to be the best.
                             
                                    things to do in August after cold beer

a closed spherical spacetime of zero radius
small round stones in pools of willow shade
mark shelly quotes
tomatoes in hand
why be astonished at all
treat every light as a yield    
watch an inning of baseball on television
don't even think about igloos
imagine there's a marilyn monroe apt for your phone
entertain bit player thoughts
keep in mind the word vesper and what pertains to the evening
have drunk dial questions at the ready in case someone answers
why does the world exist
should there be synchronized floating as an olympic sport
what's the unintended side effects if our memories are no larger than google
 

Soundings

The two kite surfers the other evening - skimming on the ocean like a pair of mechanical toys chased through the waves - where were they were riding on - the water or the wind?

   Wide hot sunlight let lose and catching a stifling 90 degree mark. Bikini season in full bloom. High school graduates just off the block and what seem to be a kind of dance on the the crazy whims of happiness were hauling coolers and plastic footballs along the shore and yelling out each other's names as though if they did not make this effort then they might forget who they were. Coppertone smells on a small air moving inland... makes me think backwards... back to hanging out on beaches in Jersey when I was a kid... where mom was somewhere near an old blacktop access road to the beach and chain reading mystery novels and buried into a wide brim hat and sunglasses so as to be so little noticed like a blade of grass you might pass in the dunes... Tim was out in the surf fishing for blues and I remember him casting and reeling and casting and reeling... and just where  in this sweet world am I?
   And so am left standing, knee deep in the calm surf at Watch Hill. Staring across the water at the lighthouse. I guess there's a tonic here for the nerves. Falling beneath the sway of the summer air around your shoulders and the cooling brace of the ocean around your legs. You know for sure that if you blink in the looking nothing ever gets resolved.
   I keep looking out at the sea, past the lighthouse, and thinking there goes my family. Everything I've ever known as family - the blood links - the biology like connective tissues on earth - the names given to us at birth that keep us separate from the other groups we encounter - was now over. But not gone. Right? Because now that family was a part of the ocean. Can't go wrong there. Right? It's like a cosmic homecoming. But still gone right?
   Sadness makes me feel stupid. And I don't even know if that's just a guess.
   There is  a picture in my head... one that I hope I will never forget. What we have we need. And what we need we have all the way through and that way through us all and how that becomes a circle that we look to complete... first we dumped Tim's ashes overboard... then we did the rest of mom... they sank just out of reach... beneath the easy roll of the  parchment green water... the Rhode Island Atlantic they both loved... and stayed visible... swirling about... as though hovering in a place before taking off for somewhere else... like a powder from magic tricks.. like two ghosts kicking around a house... magnetic as we watched.. spreading out into the waves which meant they were lessening from what I knew about them ... but still recognizable from what I've known of them...
   Emma tossed flowers overboard. Yellow for Tim. White for mom. Al circled the boat to keep the lighthouse in view. Pete said goodbye my friend.
   The yellow flowers stayed over Tim. The white flowers stayed over mom. And it remained that way for several minutes. Ash pools rising and falling in the swells. Flowers marking the rise and fall and not leaving those pools. Like nothing was separate... like everything was separate... we stared in near narcotic silence... having a conversation without words... maybe afraid that this was so final and nothing more could be done... maybe we'd seen something... the other worldly tour guide who came around for the dead... and following those several minutes the ashes then began mingling in the waves... Tim and mom... turning into part of the Atlantic...
   I see those milky translucent clouds turning below the surface of the water... just released out of a cardboard box and a plastic bag from the funeral home... and perhaps were now living again in a strange way... like they swimming for the first time... finding peripherals... turning over to a different world... the ashes  becoming water... the flowers like our hands waving on top... like the flowers belonged to our world on land... and now the ashes were in the water and belonged to the water and were on their way... opened onto a great system... tidal and deep... something we only fetch at until it reaches us and we die... and back on the boat we try and fathom it but we really can't since we're not down there in the water... so we sigh because that's the consequence for the living and watch it all drift away... then we all started to laugh... I guess we recognized what we saw... we the living had our boat... in ways left to the imagination... Tim and mom had theirs...  
          

thewreckhunter

           Back to R. I. for another truck load of stuff from my brother's apartment. A work bench that I can use. Odds and ends of kitchen things - there weren't many - how many pots does a person need to heat up a can of soup? That doesn't even seem like a question to me as much as a blank and satisfying statement. A small television used for sunday football games with take out pizza and a couple beers. And paper back books. A quick estimate in the stupid heat of a humid afternoon hauling them down a flight of stairs was around 800. Mostly political thrillers and the star wars books.
    And oh there was a house plant that I now remembered from two weeks ago. I watered it then before I left. My thoughts were someone had to have given it to Tim. Maybe after mom died. I can't see Tim as someone who bought a houseplant. Not that he wouldn't care for it. But I don't think he'd go out of his way to have a plant. Maybe I'm wrong. I said to the plant you look like you need a ride. Had to be the hottest day to haul shit away...
   On my way down the stairs one trip, a neighbor in the complex held the door for me and asked, are you still at it? Yea I thought. It's just a call that's been placed in my hands. Naturally, just as I rolled into town and was driving north on School Street a truck passed me and I said man that guy looks like Al. Five minutes later Al pulls up. Goes like that. The way it goes. You leave a phone message for someone and the next day they appear to help out... like magic, like technology, like love...
   So cleaned out two file cabinets and a closet. So weird. To pack away the flotsam and jetsam of another person's life into a truck with out of state plates and then haul it away - to recycling to the dump to storage to perpetuity. And what of that brings the responsible one, namely me, nearly bone close to the present? Don't know. And that thought was a little troubling. Had to leave mom behind though. The photograph. And why bring those ashes all the way inland to my home in Burlington when in three weeks time I'd just turn around and bring those ashes back to the sea? That's how I explained it to the plant. It was tired and withered looking. I gave it some water and fussed over it.        
    Anyway I said to the plant you're coming with me.
    I guess it was another phase complete. Truck packed. Sweating like mad on the summer earth and feeling crappy over the loss of the dead -  I grabbed cold beers and drove out to Watch Hill. With a peace lily riding shotgun. The guy at the beer store said you look like you could use these! So with two hours free parking to be had - it's a moneyed area and enforced as such or else - I went out walking on the beach. Threw a jacket over the plant against the windshield as a sun screen and the best shade I might offer. I think the plant understood. Better probably than I did.
   When I walked far enough I stopped and flopped in the waves.  And the weather in the surf was different. A sweet breeze. Less humidity. Ah. Salt water. What's about it that grabs you like a call and won't let go until you dive in? Perhaps it's nothing more than getting away from the heat... Anyway I've had this walk many times before. Out to Napatree and back...  with my dog Mckinley and mom's dog back in the day. Back when everyone was alive as I later said to the plant...
   It feels so strange to wake up one day and be the last one standing. Like suddenly you've got extra  gravity dumped on your feet.
  Checked into the motel for the night. A much needed shower. Another glass of water for the plant.
  And it was too creepy - like where's Norman Bates - and too boring - like who can I drunk dial -  to be in some motel room around six in the evening on a beautiful night with nothing else to do but watch the news and weather from Providence and wait around for pizza delivery and then watch a few innings of the Red Sox/Tigers game on television before crashing out. Creepy and boring are enough I said to the plant. So we went back out driving some more.
  Back to the ocean where all this began. Back at the parking lot at Sam's Snack Bar. Often the heavens are viewed as the ocean of space, so, adjacently speaking, why not the ocean as the space of heaven ...  Just looking out into the sea, the Atlantic, and I guess the end place where my family will ultimately be.
    What I was doing I guess was trying to gather some sense of Tim in the abstract and tried to bring it home to the evening where I was. He lived fishing. He literally died fishing. I guess I was looking for a blessing. But it's a fools errand to expect something back from your own gaze. Waves in. Waves out. The waves coming in had a slap crash muffle sound to them. The waves going back out there was almost a sound of crystal tinkling as they land and were pulled away and then got lost back into the big water in the pull of the tides. Maybe that's all there is. But I want to believe there's so much more.
   Sun going down back over my shoulder if I cared to look back over that shoulder toward Weekapaug and the salt pond where he died. I simultaneous felt like jumping off the world and falling in love with accents both on that one long sigh that gives us pause and has another breath for us for another day in the world...
   A good sadness will do that to you I said to the plant.

Surf Rat

   Must be like fifty surfers out in the water this morning, maybe looking for something to call their own in dark rubber suits. Big windy clouds race through the sky like shreds from yesterday's storm. Spray rises from the waves and catches the sunlight in the air and the effects from each wave and the sunlight behind them and the air all around are like the fine needling of lace from old window curtains. So much depends on a take out coffee. So much is silence. So much like some guy parked next to me says - I don't know, I'm from out of town - when I ask him a question.
   But I do know what I'm looking at. Staring into the rear view mirror of my truck. Weekapaug. A salt pond where my brother drowned ten days ago. Out fishing. Tim was forever out fishing. And that's how he died. But that's also how he lived. I can only imagine how cool he was with that. Not dying. But living. Sometimes it's easy to confuse the two. And it's not my job to either blur the lines nor clarify the lines. I'm sitting in a parking lot at Misquamicut at Sam's Snack bar with a fuzzy head but a razor outlook. What did Tim want? The sand from all the rain was soft and rich, almost a thrill to walk upon, almost like your footprints slipped after each step and then with each step further you forgot about them.
   Tim was maybe twelve or thirteen. We took the bus out to the Schuylkill River. Tim with all his gear causing looks from other passengers and riding along in his quiet and taking notes on a flip over spiral pad. Tim was fishing for carp. I didn't really care that much so while Tim was out fishing I wandered along the banks hanging out with stray dogs and avoiding the toughs in the neighborhood. We both had a baloney sandwich on white bread with yellow mustard and a black cherry soda for lunch that mom put together. And I don't know what Tim valued more. That I remember this. Or that mom made lunch, because whatever mom did, Tim in turn revered. When I got back later in the afternoon, near the bus stop, Tim wasn't there. A kind of panic flooded over me. How do I explain this to mom? That I lost my brother? Plus he had the bus money!
   Then I saw him. Down off this retaining wall knee deep in the water. Fishing rod in his right hand above his head and in his left hand was a soda bottle that he was smacking the top of the river with. Like I said Tim was a quiet guy. But he wouldn't let that carp go. He knocked the shit out of that fish with a soda bottle. But that fish was his. And that moment, I think for us both, was enlightenment. I believe it at least because I saw it. He looked up and saw me and grinned and held up some gnarly looking beast that he pulled from the stank brown and heavy polluted waters of the Schuylkill.
   And watching all this was a reporter from the Evening Bulletin. He wrote a story a few days later in the sport's pages about what he'd seen. He also took a photograph of Tim holding up the carp. Tim smiling and tired with his head cocked and holding up a fish by the gills.
  Over the years Tim sent me photos. Here's a shark. Here's a tuna. Here's a tarpon. Nothing more than a little note with each photograph. But I know that inside each of those photos was the picture of a carp. That's where it began. What they show me is the same kid, head cocked, tired from the fight, smiling, with a fish that he caught for the world to see. And that's how it ends. Tim was out fishing. God speed.

View to the West

   Arthur Rimbaud said, "always arriving, you will go everywhere."
   Seong-jun said, in the voice over, a fictional character in the movie - The Day He Arrives by Hong Sang- soo, "I have nowhere to go."
   They say aging is a spiritual practice. The boxed set of the years so to speak. And I imagine we'll all find out how that works!
   But in the meantime life is on the move. With or without us. Always recharging like weeds in the ground after a springtime rain. It seems practical and dumb enough to say it without feeling you having any smarts about it. And even though I'm a rather domesticated being, with regards to what my daily habits are in the world - yea - you could almost set your watch by me - it's a sentimental notion to try and occupy a fixed position. I remember a few years ago filling out a credit application to buy a bicycle. Questions like: how long have you been employed? How long have you lived at your place of residence?  I've worked at the same job since 1978.  I've lived in the same house since 1987. Whoa. What does that amount to? A good credit rating?  Walking away from a store with the bicycle that you want?  Good thing - bad thing - indifferent thing.    
   I remember driving to Florida from Philadelphia and sleeping in the trunk of a Chevrolet Caprice circa 1972 in Key West next to a circus because that was the furthest point on land and that's all we had to do.
   I remember after a weeks' hike in the White Mountains saying fuck getting back and hopping in the van and driving overnight to Acadia and sleeping there against the rules and watching the sun come up from the parking lot on Cadillac Mountain with instant coffee and a bong.
  I remember a bus station in Savannah and an elderly woman stealing my book while I went to get food out of a vending machine and my having to ask her to please give it up once I got back to my seat.
  I am afraid to let go of the days. I want to let go of those days so bad I don't know how.
  So in the interests of standing someplace forever, the pursuit of happiness and knowing something eternal in the bones, I painted the front room over the weekend. The room was a little beat up and dingy looking. It's funny. First you buy a house and that's like having this step into some established order. You feel cool to be there etc. Then you fix up the house which is like having a tag for others to see as they pass by your labors and ideas and designs. Over the years you maintain the house, which as the house gets along in years well, so do you.
  Did I imagine in that last third of life I'd be cutting in ceilings and rolling out walls? (!)
  But when it's done the room looks good and feels clean - the way blue sky in the morning makes you   want to fly out an open window and loop around the trees.
  There's always something next to do. It's worthwhile to look at things in their opposite and float around in the moves and strangeness and beauty of one's peculiar space. A crack in a wall needs to be repaired, and you begin to notice, the cracks elsewhere, and how they appear to be wherever you look...    
 

Free Mints

    Maybe it's a regret. Maybe a celebration. Or a combination of both. Or a combination that we don't yet know about? But when I read in the paper that Levon Helm died well that was a bit of a page stopper. So I played some Band c.d.'s later that afternoon in the studio. Everything goes away. Despite a life, and a career that I followed in his music, and the sing-along with respect that happens afterwards. That's the real time leftover from the object lesson when things change. And running corollary to the sad news on the obit pages were the first tulips blooming outside in the garden as a kind of welcome news. And there was a song bird perched on a rose bush. A little bird passing through the yards that I did not recognize and who flew off too soon for me to grab the field guide and glasses and try to identify.  Ain't that the way we compile the world? Or at least for me. What we see we forget. And what we forget we look up as information about a world already having been there for the viewing in the first place. It's like trying to catch up to the past, playing with  the future, in the hopes that you establish a present?
   Sure it might have all been different. But how? More importantly, to realize, it wasn't different. And the weird thing was to take someone else's obituary and then start to think about your own life. That seemed fucked up but I did it regardless. Like some kind of advice.
   And fitting in I guess was the weather. The day was alternating sun and clouds, cold pockets to scare you, warm light on the skin. It was like all these earthly adventures I never had, and having a queer feeling of nostalgia for places I've never been. But if you've never had those experiences, how is it possible to long for them? Don't you need to have something already in hand before you lose it?
   Perhaps I should make a list. It's an odd brainstorm indeed to imagine yourself as being attached to regret. The blow to memory and all that. A kick in the pants as the body wears down. However, as a open link, beyond the permitters, where we die how we live, it was his music and listening to it and having my take upon it that seemed to say foremost get out of the way and stay tuned.