Shadows

Do you ever have one of those days when you're going to a fake wake and a Wallace Stevens poem gets stuck in your head because of that, and then your roommate starts rolling a piece of newspaper and you think, "So you've had that poem stuck in your head too?"

Then you realize, probably not. But the fact that he made a flower out of rolled newspaper... Maybe.

I think winter has less to do with temperature than it does with longing. Or reaching. The same could be said of Summer, but less accurately, I think.

It's great to be a robot!

651 170 5131770 007012.

Grass and flowers, revisited

I

Yo-yos were in for a while.
I was in eighth grade. I learned
some tricks, I was pretty good.
My daydreams involved wooing
the cute girl from my earth science
class in a yo-yo showdown – old
west meets geek meets fad
meets a melted heart. I wanted
a 3-in-1 yo-yo, all-wood, forty
dollars from the company web-
site. It was the perfect yo-yo for
me, I thought. Forty dollars said
otherwise. I never bought the yo-yo,
I never wooed the girl, and I went
on to mostly forget. Perfection is
a rare thing to find, and even rare
to imagine.

II

Alcohol on a cut or scrape has
been hell to me. Fear of the
sting cuts so deeply.

III

On Memorial Day, 2005,
I went with my family to
the cemetery, looking for
stones with names I hadn’t
known before, but names
that I was told belonged
to me. We found a young
magpie, injured or sick on
the ground near a tree. It
was very cold, and my dad
caught the bird and we
took it home in a box. We
hoped to nurse it back to
health, and then to free
it. I secretly wished to
keep it as a pet. It didn’t
recover in the cage where
we kept it. We buried it
without tears showing.

Grad School Dedication

For Leslie Lynch King, Sr.,
Jimmy Cracker, and
Strawberry Clean,
with all my love.

Grass and flowers

My Praktica MTL5B Camera
is a prized, if seldom used,
possession. Perhaps I love how
constant it is. Kodak prints

remain Kodak prints, and though
my perspective may change,
the purple flower, and not the
white one, will remain in focus.

No revisionist history will bring
a kestrel's head out of its box,
no wishing can hide that a paint
can once held honey-roasted peanuts.

East German, one battery, all
manual. Even smudges on the lens
can be blamed only on me. And
regrets are dated and catalogued,

Every 3 by 5 in every album
eternal in its message: I
do not take back what I have
felt, I do not withdraw my statements.

I do load a new roll of film.

(Gordon Rees, personal communication 2009)

So Tuesday afternoon I'm working on calculations for a soil physics lab. Then I stop thinking about it all together because I've got this monster paper due Thursday by midnight, right? So, it's not exactly on my mind, if you catch my meaning.

At least, that's what I thought. Turns out: no. It was on my mind. As evidenced by the following:

Wednesday night I went to bed earlier than I maybe should have. I hadn't made a lot of progress that day on the paper I was supposed to be writing for my Pedology class. At least, I'd made very little progress in the actual writing part. That is, I still hadn't concluded the research portion of the paper, let alone started writing it. The good news from Wednesday, however, was that, after a long early-afternoon nap, I woke up to the conclusion that I'd picked the wrong topic for my paper, and that's why it wasn't coming together mentally or emotionally for me. I changed the topic a little after three that afternoon from gleization, shrink-swell, and ferrolysis to clay synthesis, shrink-swell, and ferrolysis. This was a huge comfort to me, and I became, almost instantly, a much more pleasant person. Unfortunately, there was no one else there to enjoy this dramatic change.

At some point, while I was in bed (and I honestly can't tell you when - maybe just when I'd gone to bed before I'd actually fallen asleep, maybe when I had a brief textersation at about 1 am, maybe waking up randomly during the night, maybe after my alarm had sounded in the morning but before I'd really awakened... Maybe in a dream) the thought came to me: Wait, we did all those calculations using the Q value as if it were our q value. We have to divide by the surface area of the column. That's why our saturated hydraulic conductivity (K) values didn't come close to matching what we'd calculated earlier.

It wasn't until a little later that I realized how bizarre this was. The K value disparity hadn't really bothered me at all. I hadn't been thinking about it at all. And suddenly, in a state of partial consciousness, not only did this lab randomly come to mind, but an error in my calculations that I hadn't been looking to find.

I'm not sure that makes any sense to anyone else, but I can't get over that. A day and a half later. Bam. I have to divide by surface area. Bam. When was my mind thinking about that enough to process all my calculations and come to that realization?

I haven't ever really had a fried pie. Maybe I can remedy that. Maybe not...

There's your trouble

I was going to spend most of the day working on the 10ish page paper due on Thursday that constitutes a third of my grade in one of my classes. I was going to spend most of yesterday evening on that too. Now I'm thinking maybe that's what tomorrow is for. Obviously I'm in a bad way - I dangled that preposition and I don't care.

On the bright side, I'm almost done with that paper: at least in terms of time: I'm only a couple days away from finished.

Circle of Life

I'm full of myself.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if someone else came in and wrote a blog post as me. What would they say? Would they project my own ideals and opinions or would they type what they perceive of me? And if I were to hack into someone Else's blog... what would I write?

Goodnight, dear void.

What's the point of forgetting if it's followed by dying?

I really am trying. I swear.

I once started filming a movie (with some friends) about a person who would start crossword puzzles but never finish them. Actually, I'm not sure he even started, he might have just thought about starting. I think that's how it was. But he was always certain that he could finish if he wanted to. The sequel to that movie might involve him actually trying to finish a crossword puzzle and failing. It would be devastating to him, but at the same time, it would only confirm all of his unspoken suspicions.

Also, keep your eyes open for Newsies 2: Life in Santa Fe. *Spoiler alert* It's actually about a teenage girl who becomes so obsessed with the movie Newsies that she believes that she must live out the rest of Jack's life by traveling to Santa Fe and fulfilling his dream. (Is that his name? Jack? I'll have to check that before I write/direct/produce the sequel.) But don't worry, I won't tell you here whether or not she succeeds. You'll have to wait 'til it hits the dollar theaters to find out. Or maybe it'll go straight to VHS.

Poems on death

I wrote this one year ago today. That's why I'm posting it now. I mention it here. I do plan on reading that talk again tomorrow. I think it'll be appropriate once again.

I

I want to talk about my dog -

In June, she was dying from cancer
and I went out to say goodbye to her
before I left on a trip.

We had carried her down the steps to the grass where she could lie in the shade
and we had covered her with a faded brown towel to keep the flies off –
we had tried to pick off the maggots that had already hatched from the eggs they were laying.

As I laid my hands gently on her
this is what I said to her:

How’re you doing, dog?
Are you alright?
I wish I could do something for you.

Dog, do you remember
how when I first got you,
when I called you puppy,
that you spent the night
in a brown cardboard box
and we would take you out
to hold you?

Do you remember that
when you grew a little
I would take you out
to the front yard and
play with you on the grass?

Do you remember that you
didn’t run away then?
Do you remember, dog,
that later we had to keep
you fenced in the back yard
but that you only jumped
that fence one time?

Do you remember how high
you would jump next to that
fence without pulling yourself
over?

Did you choose not to make
that leap out of love, or out
of fear, dog?

Do you remember winters and snow and you would jump, rabbit-like, through it while we watched from inside the house and laughed?

Do you remember thunder, dog?
Or have you chosen to forget
how it tormented you?

Do you remember the nights
when I sat with you and held
you to comfort you until
the storm had passed?
Do you remember how I would
talk to you in those early morning hours
and tell you secrets that I never
told anyone else?

Have you kept those secrets, dog?

Do you remember the nights when
you would jump and whine out
of fear of the thunder, and I would
close my door downstairs and
pretend that I couldn’t hear you?

Can you forgive me, Dog?

Then I spoke to her in Spanish,
telling her all the secrets that
I have never told to anyone.

I looked at my faded brown dog,
and watched her slow breath
and felt her shiver
and I said a prayer:

Let her die, God.
Let her die.


II


A month after my dog died,
I met you.

I told you about her,
and how she never
jumped over the fence
in our back yard.

I didn’t tell you that
one time, she did
make it over.

You said that maybe
God sees us jumping like
I saw my dog
and wishes we would
pull ourselves over.

I didn’t tell you that
I had been terrified that
my dog would clear that fence.


III


It’s been more than a year since
my grandmother died of cancer.

I was alone with her when a nurse
came with forms for her to fill out.

What should we do if your heart stops?
she asked.

Let me die was my
grandma’s answer.

If you stop breathing?
Let me die.

If you enter a coma?
If you lose consciousness?
If you can’t swallow your food?

Do not resuscitate.
Let me die.


IV


If I don’t dream of you at night,
it’s not because I’m not trying.

Wind in dry corn is an autumnal silence

That's the kind of line you write in your mind after your first few minutes biking into the wind on a gravel road when you're trying to avoid thinking about other things. And when you have to stop to take a picture of that dry corn.

Every solitary child rules the universe

So I can now add pear cheese pie to this list.

This is why I should have just skipped everything else and gone to Thomas Pynchon from the start

From Vineland:

Question was, would it be this time, or one of the next few times? Should he wait for another spin? It was like being on "Wheel of Fortune," only here there were no genial vibes from any Pat Sajak to find comfort in, no tanned and beautiful Vanna White at the corner of his vision to cheer on the Wheel, to wish him well, to flip over one by one letters of a message he knew he didn't want to read anyway.

As per your request

I want to know the trees

Powerpoint slides – a novelty
in my high school – taught me the
trees. Fifty of them: Common name,
Scientific name, Principal identifying
characteristics. Populus tremuloides, Little-
leaf Linden, Weeping White birch,
Acer negundo. Amateur pronunciations

of Latin drew snickers at times: Salix
matsudana, Catalpa bignoides. I’ve
forgotten most of what I learned. Now

I want to start again, but this
time not just fifty, this time all of
them. Starting with the leaves, and
moving down. From the trunk down,
without looking up: I know you.
Eventually, just from the roots. The

reaching I recognize, the suction I
feel unmistakably: I know you.

Then from trees to birds: Harrier,
Cooper’s hawk, blackbirds. A chasing
game? Or life and death? Mimus
polyglottis: So you know him also?

A feather, this flutter: I know you.
And from there: roads, books, oceans,
fields, Cracks, waves, flashes: I know you.

I want to sense your footstep,
hear your feeling: I know you.

July and November

So if the luckiest guy in the world ended up not being quite as lucky as he had originally thought, he might incorrectly think that he wasn't really the luckiest guy in the world, or that he was no longer the luckiest guy in the world. And it might take a few months before he again realized that his luck never really changed.

Alone and solitary only look alike in a photo.

These are the plums, revisited. I was going to do cherry sap from the same roll, but that picture has never been digitized. In some ways, that's very comforting.

Some colors I wouldn't dare put in a rainbow.

So it's been more than a month since I last sang, and this was starting to bother me. I've really been wanting to sing, but my current living arrangements don't allow it. I've got neighbors. I live in a duplex. And when I go to school, there are other people studying. And there's really nowhere where I can be alone. Some of you may think that I'm being far too self-conscious or ridiculous or something to feel that I can't sing just because I have neighbors. Others of you have heard me sing. I mean, actually sing. I'm just sayin'. So, today, I decided to ride my bike west until I got to the middle of nowhere where I would feel like I could sing. I eventually found a spot - near the hawk (pictured) - but it took longer than expected, so I only sang while on my bike. That's also where I was when I took the majority of these photos. Digital images.

Migratory

There are birds that fly over, which feels significant. The sky at twilight isn't poisoned the way the word is, but instead is yellow, orange, yellow-orange, vespering.

See, birds flying over gives this place a feeling of openness, of belonging. Not belonging, but not alone either. The horizon seems to suggest that there's a place from which birds might come, a place that they might go. I came through here on a train, once. I knew I would return. I didn't know that reflecting ponds of water in a recently graded construction sight would lead me to spontaneously salute the not-yet-yellow sky.

Supporting documents

Rain...


Tortillas.

Not everything, maybe

So the bruises, the little red spots, are gone from the tips of my fingers, the ones I hit over and over again while roofing the shop out behind my family's home. That's good, because I was sometimes reminded of Isaiah 49. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't doing any comparisons, it's just that those verses would come to mind, and that probably wasn't for the best. Anyway, sometimes forgetting is good, in a way.

The nails were very short, see, too short to hold normally, so I had to hold them with my hand palm up between the first two fingers:
This led to me hitting my fingers. Also, if anyone would care to read my palm, all those lines are absolutely accurate. I know, incredible life line, right?