Our Insomnia

Something new. Still in a state of flux. Nothing great, but, you know, something.... A little vague, but briefly: A poem about 2 people who are not together but who share an interest in words.

 
Our Insomnia  

We are, the both of us, awake--Shakespeare's "soft nurse"
of sleep tempted away by the waning moon you have yet to see.
I dim the light on the table beside me. Upright, I settle
into a wingback chair and trace my fingers across our shared
words of kings, of strangers, of husbands and wives--
words that are secrets in the gravity of the moon.
 

Since We're Sharing...

...here's another one. A bit mushy and mundane, but what the hell.

Bank-Fishing

For my grandfather

We are fishing before dawn.

My grandfather’s remaining lung

works for breath even as we sit

and watch the bright tips of plastic bobbers.

“What are your plans,” he asks

as the bobbers drift,

the spaces between his words

patient ellipses of inhalations.

But I am ten—basic and elemental,

and I cannot answer him any more

than I can understand what happens

beneath the water’s soft surface.

I know that I have not planned anything,

that I understand little more

than expectation and guilt.

Our bobbers are together in the shallow

pool between large rocks.

Waiting, my grandfather looks at me.

I want the sun to rise.

I want to step between the rocks,

then kneel there, then reach into the water

to find him an answer.

So...

Yes, it has been a long time. So what? Things have changed. But that's not why I'm here--to tell you that. Everything changes for everyone. What I want to say is this: I found some poems! Or, they found me, maybe. There are only 2 new ones, but here they are. Each is dedicated to a specific person. One of them is dead, so he'll never know. The other person is still alive, and he already knows.

Hummingbirds

            for Mark

I dream that the wife who divorced you

sits beside me on the patio. It is mid-January, but

the sun is warm. She has brought with her the harp

she plays at weddings, and she draws thin fingers

across the strings.

She asks me to tell her one thing that I know.

I regard the sun. Hummingbirds crowd

the feeder above the redwood planter box.

I turn to her and say that you told me

of dressing for dinner one night before she left,

that you had bought a new ring and said to her how

you would always love her, that she should stay.

She nods. She dampens the harp’s strings with the palm

of her hand, and the commotion of hummingbirds

ceases. She turns to me, then, and stands to leave.

She points to the two sequoias, noticing that they are

browning from the top down.

She rests her hand on my shoulder and presses her fingers

into my skin in a way that makes me see how any man

could love her. Lifting the harp, she frowns and turns

to leave. The hummingbirds are gone. She

raises the corner of her mouth, smiles, and whispers

that you are still dead, and that each waking day

I must know this.

Evolving

for Shawn

What fish feel,
birds feel, I don't know--
the year ending.

-       Basho

In the winter of my sixtieth year I remain

ignorant of how the heron knows to fly south,

how the salmon knows to find better water.

I have risen hours before sunrise to sit beside

a small lamp to alternate between

Birds of North America and The Total Fishing Manual,

hoping to find this morning’s answers.

This habit of leaving the bed so early is new.

I want to ask someone—my sister’s therapist,

perhaps—if the change is typical, if I should

be sleeping more. And my eyes do grow tired

so quickly now, another change, and I have started

writing down questions to ask my young physician

who nods so well.

“Are these still my eyes?” I have written twice.

Soon I switch the lamp off and press deep into the chair.

How does this make you feel? my sister’s therapist might ask

while ignoring my eyes, and I would answer with arms

that were once wings, lungs that were once gills.

Home: Part 45

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Expect nothing, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for a while.

July 1958

The tent was pitched at the fringe of a soybean field that was an agricultural barrier between Mitchell's house and mine. The tent was canvas. A single wooden pole--two halves that screwed together--held raised the top-center of the tent high enough for even adults to sit up. The tent had no windows, just a single doorway. Mitchell's father drove moving trucks, and he'd given us each a packing quilt that we could use as improvised sleeping bags.

We were sitting outside. It was past midnight, and the sky was clear; the Milky Way seemed to stretch toward what Mitchell liked to refer to as infinity, a term that I was less sure of than he apparently was. At the far end of the field, the terrain sloped gently downward toward the highway that ran through town. The other sides of the field were bordered by dense wooded areas in which we had spent much of our free time exploring and improvising small forts in which we occasionally slept. 

The air was warm for so deep into the night: close, humid. Mitchell had pilfered one of his mother's Winston cigarettes, and we passed it between us, each drawing a small breath of filtered smoke. Months earlier we had tried a Lucky Strike from a pack that Mitchell had stolen from the Woolworth's. The Winston seemed less harsh to me.

"Another car," Mitchell said, gesturing toward the highway. "I wonder where people go so late at night."

"Work, maybe," I said. "Or home from work. Doesn't your dad drive a lot of late nights?" I handed the Winston back to Mitchell.

"Sometimes. Things are quieter then, he says. Easier to drive." He held the cigarette toward me.

"Nah," I said. "Hurts my throat."

He took another puff, looked the cigarette, then ground the butt into the dirt between his feet. "I don't think I could do this all the time," he said. "The smoke makes me a little dizzy."

I lay on my back and stretched out. We'd trampled some of the soybean plants, and they formed a comfortable cushion. Mitchell stretched out, too, and we both stared up into the sky. There was no wind. If it weren't for the occasional car on the highway, there would have been no sound. We lay still. Mitchell coughed and spat the phlegm off to one side. Directly above us, then, something that burned fell through the sky. It was gone so quickly, I wasn't sure of what I'd seen--or if I'd seen anything at all.

"Jesus Christ," Mitchell whispered.

I coughed and blinked. The first breeze of the night pushed through the bushes, carrying the scent of soybeans across my face. When I woke up at sunrise, I saw that neither Mitchell nor I had moved from where we settled.

Home: Part 44

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Expect nothing, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for a while.

June 1968 

"My parents think you're crazy," I told Mitchell. We were sitting in McDonald's.

"I probably am," he said. "My dad didn't really say anything, just kind of looked at me. My cried."

"You're their only kid. If I went away, at least my parents would have Cindy. Why didn't you just wait to see if you got drafted?"

Mitchell shrugged and chewed a piece of his hamburger. "I thought of that. But I was lying in bed one night and I thought that I'd like to be in charge of my own fate, you know? When the war's over and I get home, I can join the American Legion and the VFW."

"Everyone needs goals, I guess," I said.

"I just couldn't see staying here," he said.

I understood what he meant. The town we lived in was small, and there was little to do for those who were done with high school. I was taking my one-and-a-half-legged-self to college, though the campus was just a few miles from home so I really wasn't going anywhere. "You'll be a local hero," I said. "We'll have parades."

Mitchell laughed. "Yeah. Parades."

Home: Part 43

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Expect nothing, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for a while.

April 1958 

Terry had two brothers. Mark, the oldest of the three, lived in Albuquerque where he owned a small restaurant. He had a wife and two children, and from what I gathered from Cindy was the family outcast who had turned his back on the farm and everything involved with it. "He doesn't even write letters home or send Christmas cards," Cindy told me. "Terry says the two of them were close, but then Mark changed and moved away." Tony was the youngest of the three boys. He was a couple of years younger than I was, and he was what Cindy called "special." She chose her words carefully. "Not retarded, just slow." I'd seen Tony at school, and he had seemed normal enough to me.  

A couple of days after my experience with Terry in the barn, Cindy knocked on my bedroom door. Inside my room, she sat on the chair at my small desk and looked at me. "Terry's not sure about you," she said.

I didn't know how to take that. "What does that mean?" I asked. 

She pursed her lips. "He just says he's not sure he can trust you. That's all."

"Trust me with what?"

"With things he says or does."

"That's what he says?"

"Yes."

"I don't know what that means."

"He says you were acting strangely in the barn the other day when we were at his house."

"I wasn't."

"He says that. He wants you to be friendly with Mark when we're all together, but he's not sure he can trust you."

"Trust me to do what?" I'd never even spoken to Mark, so I didn't know what Terry could be talking  about, or thinking. I did not remember seeing Mark the few times I'd accompanied my sister to Terry's house.

"Just remember that Terry is my boyfriend, okay? He's important to me." She seemed genuinely concerned, but I was not sure of why or for whom.

"I don't want to be doing your church stuff," I said. 

"You're not old enough to know what you really want, or what you need," she said. "Everything Terry and I do is good for you. Not just for god."

"Dad says I don't have to go to church if I don't want to. Not anymore."

She let that sink in as if weighing whether I was bluffing. "I'll talk to him." She got up to leave. "I might go to Terry's next week, too. You'll come with me."

 

 

Home: Part 42

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Expect nothing, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for a while.

June 1968 

Mitchell enlisted in the army the day after we graduated from high school. He said he needed some adventure and wanted to get out of our small town as soon as he could. The day he signed the papers, we went into the recruiter's office together. "You can still change your mind," I said as we walked up the concrete steps and into the building. The sky was gray. The light rain showers we'd had the previous night had left the concrete wet and slick, and I had to walk slowly. "Or, you could join the navy, go to sea."

He hesitated before opening the door. "No," he said, shaking his head. "I think this is the right choice to make."

That evening at the supper table, I told my family what Mitchell had done. My parents both seemed petrified. I'd known Mitchell since Kindergarten. His father was a mechanic who owned his own shop, and his mother was a cook in the high school cafeteria. "Not a good choice," my father said. "Why in the world did he go and do that? Not a good choice at all."

"He said he wanted adventure."

"His parents must be furious," my mother said.

"Why didn't you talk him out of it?" my father said. "You're his friend. You could have done that."

"I tried," I said, thinking back to my feeble attempt earlier that day. But I knew Mitchell well, and I was sure that I could have pleaded for hours and not succeeded.

Cindy, though, thought that Mitchell had done the right thing. "We have to fight Communism," she said. "It's the Domino Theory. We have to stop them."

"Maybe you should go fight," I said.

"Don't be stupid," Cindy said. "I'm a woman. I can't got fight. I'm doing god's work here, instead. If I serve got, then he will fight."

"Onward Christian soldiers," my father muttered.

"We are soldiers, Dad," Cindy said. "We're fighting for the entire world."

My father seemed as though he wanted to say more, but instead he let the matter drop. 

But Cindy wasn't finished, and she turned her attention to me. "You should be fighting with us," she said. "Since you can't go to Vietnam, you should do what you can from here."

"Why doesn't Terry go?" I said. "He seems healthy enough."

"He can barely see out of his right eye."

"He can shoot a gun just fine," I said. "At least, he likes to shoot pigeons flying around his barn. You can go to church and do whatever you want to do, but don't drag me into this. Besides, I've got other plans."

Cindy snorted. "Plans? What plans could you possibly have?"

"Anything but church," I said. "Anything that doesn't involve that boyfriend of yours."

"Some plan."

My mother exhaled loudly. "Not at the supper table. Let's just eat in peace, okay?"

Home: Part 41

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Expect nothing, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for a while.

February 1958 

"You should show him around the farm," Cindy said to Terry.

"It's dark," Terry said.

Cindy pointed to the window. "Not yet, it isn't. Just take him around. Show him a tractor, or something."

We were sitting in the kitchen of Terry's house on a Saturday evening. For most of the day Cindy and Terry had been preparing certificates and small bibles to hand out in the next day's Sunday school sessions. Some of the children were moving up to the next grade, and Cindy thought it was important that those children be rewarded and recognized. Cindy had once again succeeded in dragging me along with her as she and Terry fulfilled their churchly obligations. I had wanted to stay home, to wander through fresh snow that had fallen the previous day. The two of them had finished typing and signing the certificates, attaching each to a certificate rolled into a small scroll.

Terry looked at me. "Can you walk around okay?"

"Don't be like that, Terry," Cindy said. "Just take him outside for a while."

Terry rolled his eyes. "Like a dog?"

"Put on your coat," Cindy said as Terry led the way out the back door.

The sky was winter-gray. The crisp air smelled fresh and new, not stuffy like was in the house. Terry stopped, looked around, and gestured toward the barn. "This way." He started walking again without looking back to see where I was. The inside of the barn smelled old and musty; scents of manure and hay overwhelmed me at first, and I had to stop to catch my breath. "You ever been inside a barn?" He still hadn't looked at me.

"I don't remember being in one," I said.

"Well, this is it. Can you climb a ladder?"

"Yes."

"Follow me." He started up some heavy boards nailed into a wall. "We'll go up into the hayloft."

I followed slowly. I generally did okay on level ground, but I sometimes had trouble with anything vertical. The loft was nearly empty but for some bales of hay and a few lengths of rope that were coiled into a corner, like snakes.

"Come on," Terry said. He had moved to the edge of the loft. "Let's see if you can do this." He had climbed onto a large crossbeam that spanned the barn. He stretched his arms out like wings, and he started walking across to the other side. "Follow me." He stopped walking and, finally, turned to look at me. The light was poor, but from what I saw of his face he seemed to be smiling.

"No,"  I said.

"Yes." His face seemed sterner now.

"I'm going down," I said, and I started toward the ladder.

"You really are a pussy, aren't you?"

The concrete floor seemed far below me as I cautiously turned and slid a foot over the side of the loft. At first I could not feel the ladder, and panic filled me as I thought that I would have to call Cindy for help. When my foot found a step, I grabbed the top rung tightly and then worked my way all the way down. I reached the bottom and stared up. Terry was now half-way to the other side. I wanted him to fall. On the other end of beam, he stopped to stare down where I stood.

"You're so precious. I've been walking across this beam since I was a kid. You need to grow up." He had worked his way to another ladder. He laughed as he climbed down. At the bottom, he turned toward me, brushed dust and bits of hay from his clothes, and walked over to me. "We'll tell Cindy that we saw some stuff, and you'll be happy about it." He lifted his hand toward the side of my head and tugged my ear. "Maybe next time you won't be such a pussy and you'll walk across that beam."

Home: Part 40

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Expect nothing, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for a while.

March 1976

Marilynn, Shannon's mother, was as polite as Howard, Shannon's father, was gruff. I often tried to compare her to my own mother, but Marilynn seemed more assured in some ways. My mother usually acquiesced to my father's moods and whims when she was pressured, but Marilynn seemingly acquiesced to nothing. When Howard bellowed and cursed,  Marilyn either simply stared him into submission or left the room. I always had the impression that she had dealt with bullies throughout her life, and she knew that bullies are given power more than they earn it.

To a fault, though, Marilynn also refused to acquiesce to growing old. For her mother's fiftieth birthday on the last day of winter, Shannon had arranged a surprise party that, Shannon told me, was more expected than a true surprise. "It's how my family works," Shannon said. "We pretend to not care about these celebrations, but we feel slighted for a long time if there are no celebrations." The party was held in the back room of the Breaker's, Marilynn's favorite restaurant. The gathering was small. Howard arrived late from a plumbing job, and Marilynn held court in the center of the room as her sisters, brother, and assorted relatives drifted in and enjoyed the catered dinner. When Howard finally entered the room, he was dressed dirty work clothes. His name was stitched onto his shirt above the left-hand pocket. From my seat in the corner of the room, I watched as he walked toward his wife before stopping short when he saw the look on her face. When he turned and found a seat across the room from me, Shannon patted her mother's shoulder, and then she sat down next to me.

"You think you're safe in the back of the room?" Shannon asked.

"I've been ignored, so I guess that's the same thing."

"Did you see my dad? Good god."

"I saw how your mom looked at him."

"He'll pay for it," Shannon said. "One way or another."

"He's here, though," I said, finding myself in the strange position of defending a man who didn't seem to like me. 

"That's not enough," Shannon said. "But look at her. She's loving this--this attention."

"She should enjoy it. She looks happy."

"She is. At least, she's happy with the party. She's not happy about being the big five-oh."

But Marilynn wore her age well, and her dress formed in such a way to advertise how slim her hips and waist were, how they curved into each other. Shannon said that her mother's hair was naturally brown, but she had recently begun dying it a dark blonde to, according to Shannon, "hide the grayest roots a woman could possibly have." In the months I had known her, Marilynn seemed to have worked hard at changing her appearance so that she looked more and more like her daughter. 

Shannon learned into my shoulder. "She cut her hair to look more like mine. She asked me this morning if I mind that she's started wearing some of the dresses I left at home. That's my dress that she's wearing."

"Maybe she admires your looks," I said.

"Yeah, maybe. I think she had some surgery on her eyelids, or something, but I can't be sure."

I hadn't known Marilynn long enough to have noticed if her eyes had changed, but she did seem to be dressing as though she were twenty years younger. "Your mom's attractive," I said. "There's nothing wrong with her trying to look good."

Shannon nodded. "Then why can't she just be an attractive person who's growing older? Christ, look at my dad. I don't even know when he last combed his hair."

"So, you're unhappy with your mother because she's trying to look younger than she is, and you're unhappy with your father because he's not trying to do anything like that?"

Shannon looked at me the same way her mother had looked at Howard when he'd come into the room. "I'm going to go help my mom open her gifts."

Home: Part 39

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Expect nothing, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for a while.

January 1958

My parents, starting at some point in their marriage and our lives, went for long stretches of time without speaking. They would barely acknowledge each other, though how they dealt with Cindy and me did not seem to change. My father would leave for work in the morning and say goodbye only to me and my sister, and our evening conversations at the supper table involved us all, but never the two of them directly. 

Home again after my first visit to Cindy's church, my mother walked into my bedroom and asked me about my experience. I told her it had been fine, and that I had neither sung the hymns nor closed my eyes during the prayers. "Do you want to go back?" my mother asked.

"I'm not sure why I would," I told her. "Do you think I'm a bad person and need to go to church?"

She smiled. "No, I don't think you are a bad person. But it wouldn't hurt you to keep going. You'll learn about god, about doing good things in your life."

"That's what Cindy says, too. And she wants me to go to Sunday school."

"You might like that more than church since you'd be around people your own age."

"It's just more school," I said.

She didn't say anything else about it. Later that day, though, my father asked me similar questions, and I gave him similar answers. We were in the garage sorting through his tools. He kept them clean, regularly wiping them with a rag. I enjoyed sitting with him and smelling the oil and dust emanating from the workbench he had built. 

He handed me a Crescent wrench to clean. "There are things worse than going to Sunday school."

I wondered why my mother hadn't already covered all of this with him, why I had to relive the same conversation. "Mom already told me all of this," I said. I handed the cleaned wrench back to him.

"She did?"

"When I got home. We talked about all of this."

He nodded. "Oh."

For an hour we cleaned tools and sorted out the bins of nuts and bolts that crowded the workbench. That night, Cindy stopped me in the hallway that ran through the middle of our house. "How about Sunday school next week?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said. "I already told Mom and Dad that I don't think I want to go."

"I'll talk to them," she said. "I'll tell them why it's a good idea." She walked away, leaving me in the hallway to consider my choices.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Grief (Part 2)

This is it, all you get, the final piece. Maybe you deserve more; I don't know. But you wouldn't want more, so we'll just choose to finish things off.

I made the trip just as we'd discussed. The bus to Green Apple Books where I finally picked up a volume of Vollman, someone we'd often discussed but never committed to buy. I figure I owed him--and you--a chance. I walked among the stacks of books and brushed my fingers through the dust and across the dust jackets, thinking of how we'd often forget what we already owned and what we needed. And I thought of the literary conversations that carried us through the books and the dust. After Green Apple it was a beer and fries at The Bitter End, a bar that knows it's a bar and where the bartender was tall and plump and honest.

Then, the walk back toward the financial district, a long walk that started out as a short wait at the bus stop before I got restless and opted for the urban hike, something we'd done so many times in San Francisco and Chicago. Five miles later I checked into the hotel, cleaned up, rested, sat on the balcony and tried to come to grips with what seems to avoid being gripped. Later, dinner at Cafe' Zoetrope. Same meal as usual, top-shelf pinot noir, good bread. Then, on to City Lights, another great bookstore where years ago we'd glance Ferlinghetti sitting in the office, his Beat-era aura a little dull to us but nevertheless significant. Upstairs I found a volume of Jim Harrison's poetry, and I sat in the Poet's Chair for a bit as I read. Both of our bookshelves are full of Harrison's stuff, and you barely blinked the time I told you that his book Dalva is, I think, one of the better American novels ever written.

Next, a latte' at Caffe Puccini. I sat at a table on the sidewalk and watched and listened to the tourists. Traditionally, this was the final stop each night, so I stayed true to that tradition and strolled through the streets of North Beach before heading back to the hotel where I bought a glass of wine at the bar and returned to my room's balcony. I realized the evening's beer, wine, and food didn't seem to measure up to my expectations. It's the end of some things, I guess.

Maybe it's the beginning of things, too. Re-reading your stuff, for one, stuff that seldom made sense to me but now is starting to. And I came up with the official title to my novel at some point, and I owe that to you.

But this is the last piece of this nature. In the end, everything has been said.

Home: Part 38

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Expect nothing, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for a while.

January 1958

I stood alone at the top of the steps that led to two large wooden doors. The doors were opened, and inside an old man with a patch over one eye smiled and beckoned me forward. "Welcome!" he said. "Are your parents already inside?"

"Yes," I said. "And my sister," I added.

He reached out to shake my hand. "Welcome!" he said again. He let my hand go and rested a gray, wrinkled hand on my shoulder, guiding me inside and out of the snow. "Come on inside and get out of the cold. 

"Thank-you," I said. I followed the people ahead of me. The pews were nearly full, and I could see neither Cindy nor Terry in the crowd. I found a seat in the back, pulling one of the hymnals from the back of the pew in front of me. I leafed through the pages and hoped that nobody would talk to me. My parents had taught me so little about god and church that I did not know what to do or what to expect. I knew that my wool coat was too warm and my dress shoes were too tight, and for a moment I considered retracing my steps and simply waiting outside until my sister and her boyfriend found me.  Soon enough, though, Cindy tapped my shoulder from behind. 

"Why are you in the back?" my sister asked. 

"I see better from here," I said.

"Sure, you do. Terry and I are up front. Come sit with us."

I shook my head. "I'm comfortable here."

She sighed and looked annoyed. "This is good for you, you know. I'm going to talk to Mom and Dad about making you go to Sunday school, too."

"I don't want to go to Sunday school," I said.

Her face softened. "You'll like it. You'll learn about things you never imagined. Come on. Sit with me and Terry."

Acquiescing, I emitted my own sigh, struggled to stand, and followed her to the front of the sanctuary. She made me sit between her and Terry, who looked at me in a way that let me know my being there was not his choice. "Just do what everyone else does," he said. "Stand when we stand, sit when we stand."

"He's not stupid," Cindy said to Terry. She turned to me. "You'll be fine." She seemed happy, and I sat and waited.