Things We Didn't Say Yesterday #11

It's like happiness

But there were good memories, too.

He was driving toward the park--a neutral location--where they'd decided to meet to exchange rings yet again: his to her, hers to him. A simple reversal. They could then do whatever they wished with the rings. Final dusk was just minutes away, and the western horizon was clear so that long lengths of sunlight could enter through the passenger-side window and illuminate the dashboard. The moon roof was open all the way, and the cool air washed across his face and forehead. As he passed the high school, the cadence of a marching band became loud, then faded. He wasn't sure of how to feel as the high school dropped behind him, but he didn't feel anger. It was more of that post-coital feeling of blended contentment and melancholy. It was an odd feeling that soon enough was gone.

Now, driving, he remembered their first meeting, how a mutual but now-dead friend had thought it would be a good idea if they met at a local artist's showing of nature photography. And it was a good idea. Roxie, the friend who also owned the studio, had left them alone for a few minutes not long after the introduction. "Talk about something," she said.

Chris didn't remember what they'd talked about, but he remembered the first time he saw her. She was almost as tall as he was, and blond in a good way. One corner of her mouth turned a bit upward when she smiled, and he'd always found that attractive. Roxie returned soon enough, and she told them both that she hoped they hadn't talked about sports or the weather.

He'd often wondered at how easily the good memories had become subservient to bad experiences. Or, maybe they were simply subsumed.

He saw her as soon as he turned into the park. For most of the day he'd hoped that this exchange would be more difficult than he now realized it would be. She was sitting on top of a picnic table. Across the park a group of young men played soccer. She watched him walk from his car to the table, and he knew her smile was false because the corners of her mouth stayed at the same level.

"Hi," she said. She opened her palm to reveal her silver wedding ring and its single diamond.

"Hi."

"You ready to do this?"

"Yeah, I am. It doesn't seem as bad as signing all the papers, does it?"

She shook her head. "No, it doesn't."

He removed his wedding band from his finger. He looked at it and the indentation that it left behind.

"You never took it off?" she asked.

"A few times. It just seemed easier to keep the thing on my finger, you know? So it didn't get lost."

"A good idea." She stretched her arm and her open palm to him. "Here."

When he pinched the ring between his fingers, he felt the familiar softness of her hand. He dropped his ring into the same palm, and she closed her fingers tightly and withdrew her hand.

"A piece of cake," she said.

"I want to tell you something, Cindy."

"Are you going to yell?"

"No."

"Okay. What?"

"Your smile. I always liked it. It's what attracted me to you."

"You never told me that, did you."

"I don't know. I think I did. If not, I should have. It's like happiness."

She seemed confused. "It's like happiness? A smile is happiness, isn't it?"

"Maybe I didn't think it through, but it's what I was thinking nonetheless."

"That's a strange note to end all of this on, isn't it?

"How can the ending of 'all this' be any stranger than it started?"

She looked across the park to the soccer game. "I've got to go." She got down from the table, looked at the ring in her hand, then pocketed it and strode off.

Things We Didn't Say Yesterday #10

Bop, Bop, Bop

He remembered when they were in North Beach. The next day would be the first day of winter, but the night was warm enough that neither of them needed much more than a light sweatshirt. After dinner they'd wandered into the Tosca Cafe, having a couple of the specials--Ghiradelli Chocolate, steamed milk, brandy--served in small glasses. After a couple of drinks he'd gone to the men's restroom where he'd stood in front of several colorful posters of Marilyn Monroe. It was the only time in his life that he didn't want to leave the smell of urinal cakes behind. From there they'd gone to Vesuvio where they tried to channel Jack Kerouac, but the noise and the crowd became too much after a single drink. Standing on the sidewalk outside, he'd pulled her arm and told her they next had to go to the Condor.

"That's sick," she'd said.

"How do you know?"

"It just is, Chris. Would you want your kids to know you went to a place like that?'

He shook his head. "I don't have kids. And if I did, I don't think I'd be obliged to tell them."

"Pick someplace else."

"Larry Flynt's? The Hungri i?"

"Chris."

"Let's go back to Tosca, then. We can listen to opera."

So they'd gone back and found a booth away from the bar. This was supposed to be an attempt to get some spark back, but Cindy didn't seem eager to be anywhere, and she hadn't even seen that he wasn't serious about the Condor. Dinner at the Cafe' Zoetrope had been good, if quiet. He'd had the Linguine alle Vongole, while she had picked at the Penne all’ Arrabbiata. They'd shared a bottle of Coppola's Pinot Noir.

Chris knew that neither of them really could find that spark, just as he knew they seemed to have lost any sense of humor with each other, that everything had become literal. That's why she couldn't see that his suggestion of the Condor was a joke.

"Stop that," she finally said.

"Stop what?"

"That--that tapping on the table. It's opera--you don't tap your fingers to the beat."

"I didn't know I was doing it."

"I'm tired. I need to get to sleep."

"It's not even ten."

She looked at him, watched an elderly couple get up from their barstools and walk out the door, then looked back to him. "I'm sorry. I'm irritated, that's all."

"I know. We're both irritated. At everything."

"This isn't doing what we'd hoped for, is it."

"It's early. Maybe if we stay out awhile, something will come to us." He looked beyond her to the door to the men's restroom, and he thought maybe he should go see Marilyn Monroe for awhile. He wondered what Cindy would think if he told her about that.

"Chris! You're doing it again. Stop!"

"They're just fingers."

"It's not just fingers, Chris. It's you. It's this bop bop bop and it's driving me crazy. Every day it's like this, one thing after another. Bop bop bop. And if it's not you, it's me. We do these things to drive the other person crazy."

"Do you every wonder why?" he asked. "Why is it? I've been tapping my fingers to music since I was a kid. You used to find it endearing. Why does it bother you now?"

"I never did. I just let it go."

"You shouldn't have."

"Oh, I know. I know. Look, let's just go back to the hotel, okay? I'm tired. I don't want to end the night like this."

But they had let it end that way, he remembered. They ended the night when she returned alone to the hotel, and he stayed and listened to opera--music he neither enjoyed nor understood. Looking back, he should've told her that. But the next morning, as they were driving home, he kept the radio tuned to any music he could find, griping the steering wheel with both hands and not once letting his fingers keep time.

Practice

Writing poetry and being alone not only require practice, they also require that certain willing suspension of disbelief: Fictions have to be accepted for what they are. Writers of all ilks struggle with both--writing poetry requires such precision that it is easily abandoned, while solitude requires confrontations with demons and angels alike.

Being alone is the easier of the two when one gets beyond the initial realization that nobody's around to help. Writing poetry? One of the hardest things to do well. I have known many very good poets, and I continue to admire how they can be so precise, how their works can be multi-level structures built in just the right way.

And I am always looking for new poets, though this task is not easy. Visiting City Lights and Green Apple Books in San Francisco can be of great use, but I think I am now a greater fan of Powell's Books in Portland, where stacks and stacks of new and old collections of poetry are waiting for good homes. On my recent trip to the bookstore I selected two books: Ted Kooser's collected poems Flying at Night, and W.S Merwin's The Shadow of Sirius. Both have remained in the darkness of my knapsack for a few days. Merwin is less direct and often challenging; Kooser uses language accessible to anyone. Reading from Merwin's book, I am reminded of reading Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and Morrison's Beloved--books that require a suspension of disbelief and a particular relaxation of the mind to be enjoyed.

Here's one from Merwin:

Rain Light

All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning

And one from Kooser:

Advice

We go out of our way to get home,
getting lost in a rack of old clothing,
fainting in stairwells,
our pulses fluttering like moths.
We will always be
leaving our loves like old stoves
in abandoned apartments. Early in life
there are signals of how it will be--
we throw up the window one spring
and the window weights break from their ropes
and fall deep in the wall.

Of course, I'm no literary critic, and I don't know enough about poetry to discuss either of these intelligently (Shawn at These Rivers is one to follow, however). It's just nice to once again find poetry that I think is "good."

Navigation

For a full week now I've been residing in the Pacific Northwest, not too far from Portland. It's a wonderful place, Oregon--greener than most of California this time of year. I'm really doing little more than working my regular job in a different place for just over 2 weeks, with my commute lasting all of 10 seconds, a full minute if I go downstairs to brew tea before sitting at the computer. I have a dog and a cat to keep me company. The dog is friendly enough but misses its owners and knows that I am a mere interloper. When I leave the house, the dog greets me and then stares through the window to see if its owners are there. I take the dog for a walk each morning before work, before sunrise, and it seems happy enough. I allow it to spend much of the day on the bed I occupy at night, but we have agreed that it will sleep elsewhere at night. Dogs belong on the floor.

It is quite odd, this living alone even temporarily. Unlike travels or backpacking, I have no destination, no itinerary, no agenda. Not knowing my way around too well keeps me fairly close to "home," though I did figure out the mass transit system well enough to get me into downtown Portland and back again, and each day I pedal or walk ever-widening circles, and on a bike after work this afternoon I discovered great bushes of wonderfully ripe and sweet blackberries. I have also learned both the compass points and the sounds of local traffic patterns. Just knowing east and west allowed me to ride to places on a bike that I would feel lost in if I were driving a car. We often miss so much while driving--the sounds of things, how to tell east from west by the feel and sight of the sun.

Even walking around downtown Portland left me disoriented since I had no familiar reference points to work with. I knew a river was somewhere, and I knew that some streets divided the region into quadrants, but just as I was in Brussels a couple years ago, I was more lost with my map than I was this afternoon on a bike with only a sense of direction to guide me. And when I stopped for lunch at a brewpub in Portland, I considered such things: the feeling of being lost amid commotion, the lack of a true sense of direction. (It's not supposed to be a metaphor, though it perhaps could be.) I stared out the window of that brewpub and admired the locals' ability to turn down just the right street that would lead them where they wanted to go. Me? I needed a good hour to figure out how to find where I should catch the bus for my return trip.

Things We Didn't Say Yesterday #9

Everything's almost over, isn't it?

Light from the half-moon was bright enough to fill the yard. Movement through the leaves in the trees alongside the house must have been birds because whatever breeze there had been earlier was now gone. The chair she'd dragged from the shed to the patio was less comfortable than she'd remembered, but she had neither reason nor inclination to go back into the house.

She hated insomnia, how after so many nights of fitful sleep every small problem became large, how what seemed to be months' worth of events and conversations replayed and repeated in whichever part of the brain was processing things. Chris had left hours earlier after retrieving a few more boxes, but she still felt something of him nearby. For the most part she had let him work alone. Sequestered in the small room that had once been their shared office, she had watched through the partially opened louvers of the door as he and Phil did what they'd come to do. When the rented truck was finally loaded, Phil had driven away in his own car, leaving Chris to get a few small items. Cindy had watched for a minute as Chris looked around the room, his hands on his hips, and then she'd opened the door and made her way to the sofa that Chris was leaving behind.

"You done?" She had asked.

"I think so. I'm meeting Phil at the apartment. We've got to return the truck by five."

"The house seems so empty now."

"What'd you expect?"

"Don't be snide."

"Kind of late for that, isn't it?"

"And don't be an ass."

"What, exactly, should I be?"

"You could be civil. I wasn't trying to start anything."

"No, I'm sure you weren't."

She hadn't liked the tone in his voice. "Just stop, okay? Just let it go. At least for now."

"Let it go? What the hell does that mean?"

"Don't."

He'd turned to face her directly then, his hands still on his hips but his face full of the type of anger she hadn't seen in a long time. Even when she'd asked for the divorce he hadn't looked like this. "You play these goddamned games as though you know what's going on, that you always know how to win. You started all of this. You handed out the rules you wanted me to follow, and for the most part I've done just what you asked. We're almost at the end of things, aren't we? Everything's almost over. You think the house seems empty now, right? But you know what, it has been empty for a long time. I'm only now starting to realize it. And maybe I'm starting to see how empty you felt before this started. I keep thinking if I'd known, I might've been able to fix things. But I'm angry, too. So when you tell me you're not trying to start something, or when you tell me 'don't,' how do you think I'll react--just shut up and walk away?"

She'd stared at him, but she'd not been able to say anything for several moments. She thought about an earlier argument when she'd suggested the feelings they had for each other had been gone for a long time. This seemed like the same argument all over again. "Are you through?" she'd finally managed.

He'd looked around the house, finally dropped his hands from his hips, and nodded. "I'm through. You can have whatever's left. All of this emptiness is yours." She saw his face relax then, as though all of his anger was gone.

Now, on the patio, she listened again to the leaves moving. The moonlight seemed brighter. She leaned back in the chair, shut her eyes, and for some reason thought of the differences between "empty" and "emptiness."