Sirius

Texas Beach

~

Night Run

I got stuck on the motorcycle in Carytown traffic Saturday night around six, which resulted in a wild hair that put me on Route 5 headed toward Williamsburg. I have wound circles around this city lately and I'm tired of it. The problem with Route 5 was a spring bloom of some kind of flying insect, I was forced to stop frequently to clean the guts off my visor. I got out of Williamsburg around ten, figured it wasn't enough, reached 64 and decided to go east. Somewhere outside of Hampton I got the idea to visit my parent's old house on Lynnhaven inlet in Virginia Beach. This is where Mary and I got married sometime late in the summer of 98. The last time we were there must have been Christmas of 2000 when we discovered she was pregnant with Henry. She felt nauseas in the hot-tub one night. There was snow on the sand dunes across the creek. The next night I was sent out for pickles and cottage cheese. I came back with a pregnancy test.

I must have made the Inlet sometime around 11:30 because I have a receipt for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, which is where I went next, that puts me on it at eleven fifty-eight, last night, June seventh, 2008. I think the idea came from watching Cast Away the night before, and the scene where Tom Hanks is unconscious on his raft, just before being rescued by an ocean freighter so huge it almost seems to be passing overhead. My desire was to be out over the water. It was cold, I ran it fast and alone. It felt like soaring, which is exactly what I needed it to feel like.

The Dirt Smelled Like Dirt

There are things that cannot be made okay. There was no insulation in the crawlspace under our house, hundreds of feet of exposed black pipe leading to the convectors. I lined each of them with foam, wrapping each linear foot with all-weather duct-tape. A main trunk down the center took all of one cold Saturday in February. I re-acquainted myself with the spider crickets. Deep in one corner they sounded like rain falling onto the plastic vapor barrier covering the dirt. The dirt smelled like dirt.

Henry helped. In camo-coveralls, he crowded me, minded the flashlight, examined the spider carcasses hanging by their webs from the joists, he said he wasn't scared. He worried about the crickets. For two whole days I had him with me, in the dark belly of our home.




~

Poem

Every morning I forget how it is.
I watch the smoke mount
In great strides above the city,
I belong to no one.

Then I remember my shoes,
How I have to put them on,
How bending over to tie them up
I will look into the earth.

--Charles Simic

The Fire In Our Throats Will Summon the Thaw

End

3.

~

In a Tree House

Light
Will someday split you open
Even if your life is now a cage,
For a divine seed, the crown of destiny,
Is hidden and sown on an ancient, fertile plain
You hold the title to.

Love will surely bust you wide open
Into an unfettered, blooming new galaxy

Even if your mind is now
A spoiled mule.

A life-giving radiance will come,
The Friend's gratuity will come --

O look again within yourself,
For I know you were once the elegant host
To all the marvels in creation.

From a sacred crevice in your body
A bow rises each night
And shoots your soul into God.

Behold the Beautiful Drunk Singing One
From the lunar vantage point of love.

He is conducting the affairs
Of the whole universe

While throwing wild parties
In a tree house - on a limb
In your heart.


~ Hafiz

Eight Miles High

There is a seam in my skull that marches northward from the inside of my left eyebrow across the expanse of my forehead and dies just into my hairline. I suppose it congealed there in my mother's womb some thirty seven years ago, like tectonic plates forming a rift where they agree to junction. I forget that I have it, that I have always had it, until occasionally, I find my fingers tracing the length of the crack. Like how I rediscover the ridge-backed line of callouses across my palms, my tongue yearly wearing my chipped teeth, or the individual story associated with each unnumbered scar. Part of the song my body carries with it is an anthem to these traumas.

I have no idea what possessed Husker Du to cover Eight Miles High, but they forever transformed it. I tried unsuccessfully one ragged winter at a conference to drag a group of academics across the length of Athens, Georgia to the punk jukebox I had found it in. My intent was to expose the old hippy professor from Maine to it and note his response. About two-thirds of the way through the song the thing deteriorates into merely the chord progression and the drums, Bob Mould stops growling the lyrics and begins to scream, his voice a howl, it is the sound of a body being subjected to incredible pain. It is precisely there that the song is transfigured, it is there it ascends. It is there the body of the song is broken and thusly remade.

Akhilles

Given to the Rising