Become Animal

My train didn't get in till midnight last night. As the car was in the town lot rather than the train lot, I had to walk a mile to the west with my bags. A good part of that was in darkness, strange at first, scarier than I want to admit. I don't even see well when it's daytime; contact lenses can only do so much to correct minus eight vision. But once I gave over to it, the other senses concentrated: the clop of my shoes against concrete, three deer thrashing through a fence, through trees. They half-circled, which had the slightest hint of menace about it, gangsterish, thrilling, as if they knew they were up to no good. And, as if I'd become animal too, I counted off the smells as the night shut down: part grassy, part fecal, seeds, sprays, spices, moisture on leaves, even a whiff of something like oranges.

*****

In the April 29, 2010 issue of the East Hampton Star. "Hearing Music in Sonic Scraps": An interview with yours truly by Joanne Pilgrim.

Above: First Presbyterian Church of Amagansett. That big white light is the moon.

Below: Bullfrog in the pond out back. Hello, Bullfrog.

Two Stories of Grief (Or: The Opposite of a Shadow)

After the last day of the term, after good book news, after forty-three days of running around, you're still for a while, and the wave is coming at you again, but it's not so big this time. You want to feel it, you want to remember, that cold slap against belly and chest.

from Anne Carson's Nox

1.2 Autopsy is a term historians use of the "eyewitnessing" of data or events by the historian himself, a mode of authorial power. To withhold this authorization is also powerful. Herodotos carefully does not allege to have seen a phoenix, which comes only once every five hundred years, although he mentions the same legends as Hekataios. Herodotos likes to introduce such information with a word like [---]: "it is said," as one might use on dit or dicitur. When my brother died his dog got angry, stayed angry, barking, growling, lashing, by day and night. He went to the door, he went to the window, he would not lie down. My brother's widow, it is said, took the dog to the church on the day of the funeral. Buster goes right up to the front of Sankt Johannes and raises himself on his paws on the edge of the coffin and as soon as he smells the fact, his anger stops. "To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?" asks a dog in a novel I read once (Virginia Woolf Flush 87). I wonder what the smell of nothing is. Smell of autopsy.

Bill Hayes's "Sleep: Loss" from the New York Times' Opinionator blog:

I used to think that the only thing worse than having insomnia is having insomnia next to someone who falls fast asleep and stays soundlessly so till morning....

Unbuilt Projects

Forthcoming from Four Way Books in Fall 2012.

I just found out last night.

This is the collection of short prose pieces: "The Boy and His Mother are Stuck!" "This is the Day" "Two Guys" "The Pillory" "The Didache" "What Might Life Be Like in the 21st Century" etc. etc. etc.

And you're among the first to know.

There Was a Deer

In preparation for my panel at the Welcome Table Press essay symposium this Saturday (see details above and below), I've been rereading Anne Carson, specifically "The Anthropology of Water" in Plainwater. I don't want to exclaim--Anne, with whom I once shared a long, sweet, funny cab ride from Aldebrough to Heathrow, probably would be happier if I didn't --but I do have to say that the passage below leaves me pretty dumb with wonder.

*****

from "Very Narrow: Introduction to Just for the Thrill" in The Anthropology of Water
Anne Carson
from Plainwater

Even now it is hard to admit how love knocked me over. I had lived a life protected from all surprise, now suddenly I was a wheel running downhill, a light thrown against a wall, paper blown flat in a ditch. I was outside my own language and customs. Why, the first time he came to my house he walked straight into the back room and came out and said, "You have a very narrow bed." Just like that! I had to laugh. I hardly knew him. I wanted to say, Where I come from, people don't talk about beds, except children's or sickbeds. But I didn't. Humans in love are terrible. You see them come hungering at one another like prehistoric wolves, you see something struggling for life in between them like a root or a soul and it flares for a moment, then they smash it. The difference between them smashes the bones out. So delicate the bones. "Yes, it is very narrow," I said. And just at the moment, I felt something running down the inside of my leg. I had not bled for thirteen years.

Love is a story that tells itself--fortunately. I don't like romance and have no talent for lyrical outpourings--yet I found myself during the days of my love affair filling many notebooks with data. There was something I had to explain to myself. I traveled into it like a foreign country, noted its behaviors, transcribed its idioms, prowled like an anthropologist for the rare and unwary use of a kinship term. But kinship itself jumped like a frog leg, then lay silent. I found the kinship between a man and a woman can be a steep, whole, excellent thing and full of languages. Yet it may have no speech. Does that make sense?

One night--it was the first winter my father began to have trouble with his mind--I was sitting at the kitchen table wrapping Christmas presents. I saw him coming down the stairs very slowly, holding his hands in front of him. In his hands were language and speech, decoupled, and when he started to talk, they dropped and ran all over the floor like a bag of bell clappers. "What happened to you to I who to? There was a deer. That's not what I. How many were? No. How? What did you do with the things you dripped no not dripped how? You had an account and one flew off. That's not. No? I. No. How? How?" He sat down all of a sudden on the bottom step and turned his eyes on me, clearly having no idea in the world who I was, or how he came to be there with me, or what should happen next. I never saw a human being so naked. His face the face of a fledgling bird, in what fringe of infant evening leaves, in what untouched terror lapped.

Sometimes you come to an edge that just breaks off.

*****

More details about the Welcome Table Press essay symposium.

Across the street from the house in Springs:

Bigfoot Dreams

I wish had a more developed sense of why the amusement park shows up so much in newer fiction. It's certainly the perfect stage set for queasiness, all the psychic overload we associate with modernity. It's also a good vehicle to think about control. If we can't control disaster from within (illness), or disaster from outside us (volcanic clouds, terrorism, financial ruin, the deaths of our friends), the amusement park makes us feel like we have at least some charge over our terrors. The last two stories I've taught this semester have used the old school roadside attraction, or an updated variant of it, to think about these things. The first was Karen Russell's "Ava Wrestles the Alligator." The second? Here's a short section from Laura van den Berg's loopy and sad "Where We Must Be," which is in part set at the Bigfoot Reaction Park, an attraction where people pay to have an "encounter" with Bigfoot himself.

*****

from "Where We Must Be"
Laura van den Berg
from the collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

The fat man says my client wants to kill Bigfoot. The customer is a man from Wisconsin, who came equipped with his own paint ball gun. He tells me not to ambush, but let the man sneak up on me and then moan and collapse after he fires.

"I didn't know killing Bigfoot was a part of the deal," I tell him.

The fatman is sitting behind his desk. He leans back in his chair and picks something out of his teeth with the corner of a matchbook. "It's a recreation park," he says. "They get to do whatever they want."

When I first started at the park, my costume had to be specifically sized, with lifts in the feet and extra padding sewn into the body. As the fat man took my measurement in the trailer, I asked how people found this place, and he told me about taking out ads in magazines for Bigfoot enthusiasts and about the sightings that had happened in this part of California. Just last fall, his cousin had seen Bigfoot in the woods behind his house, pawing through an abandoned garbage can.

I open the closet and take out my costume. My initials are written on the tag in black marker. "So this guy is going to shoot me with paint balls?"

"To be honest, you might feel a little sting," he says. "but I've banned any other kind of weapon after after an old Bigfoot got shot in the face with a pellet gun."

"Ouch."

"It was at close range too. He was covered in welts for days." He runs a hand over his head. "If the weapon doesn't look like a paint ball gun, then shout your safe word."

I step into the costume. "I have a safe word?"

"I don't like to tell people when they first start the job, in case they scare easily."

"I don't." I seal myself inside the rubber skin. "What's my safe word?"

" Jesus," he says. "It's really more for the customers, but this is a different kind of situation."

"How'd you come up with Jesus?"

"You'd be surprised at how religious some people are," he says. "I always thought screaming Jesus would get their attention."

I lower the Bigfoot mask onto my head and inhale the sweet scent of the rubber. Through the eyeholes, I can only see the fat man and his desk.

"And what if this guy doesn't believe in God?"

"Then you've still got the element of surprise."

*****

Here's Laura van den Berg's website.

Naked to the Waist

Maybe it's just the marine air out there (raw again, the familiar churring of the heater downstairs), but I've been wanting to be someplace with palms. Maybe my senses were rewired after all that time in Florida. Which was why the title story to my friend Alice Elliott Dark's Naked to the Waist was such a welcome read last night. I don't think I've read a better take on Key West and its cultural collisions. Bike rides, falling stars, lying out on piers, drugs and drink, scary bars. Elegance, too. Leaves so dense they keep the sunlight out of the rooms. That sense of grand purposeless in the atmosphere, seductive at first, then enervating, then frustrating. And Lucy, the central character, who's torn between her love for Nick, a gay man, and Dennis, who isn't Nick. It's as animated and loose as anything I've read in a long time. I think I even dreamt myself into it.

*****

from Naked to the Waist
Alice Elliott Dark

That night Lucy walked through the half-dark, fragrant streets to the Little Theater, where Dennis was selling refreshments. He made a living by supplying and operating the concession stand at local theaters, a profession she thought enterprising. He got her in free to see the show, but she couldn't concentrate on the drama. She thought the lead actress looked sad, and that the old velvet curtains that hung at the edges of the stage smelled musty. At intermission she left through the back and smoked a cigarette behind someone's refurbished antique car; from there she spied on Dennis. He was wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a look that reminded her of boys she'd known in college, who had all copied Neil Young; in her experience, that kind of association led to big trouble.

A bell rang and the crowd went back inside. She'd been curious to see what he would do when he was alone, yet with everyone else gone, she suddenly felt that she was the one alone. Dennis seemed to be surrounded by decent companions in the form of boxes of homemade brownies and jars of lemonade. She stepped into the driveway, grinding her cigarette under her toe.

"Come here, Lucy," he said without looking up.

She walked up to the stand. "I was spying on you," she confessed.

"Likewise." He snapped a large plastic lid on top of a tub of brownies.

"I'm not going to watch the rest of the play."

There was a pause.

"Should we go get a drink, or something?" she asked.

Dennis leaned across the refreshments table and laid his hands gently on her shoulders.

"Lucy, I have someone," he said. "I'm not really free."

Although technically nothing had happened, hearing him explain why nothing would made her feel as though something had, and she was automatically embarrassed for both of them.

"I wasn't suggesting anything but a drink." She forced herself to smile. "There's nothing wrong with a drink, is there? Between friends?"

****

Some cellphone shots of our Key West trip in 2008...
Sweet elderly pit bull on Duval Street:

Hulga's Stolen Crutch (or someone saved?):

Seagrape Valentine:

Bougainvillea on wall:

Pets on porch:

Seal Haulout (Or: Blow! Blow! Blow! / Blow Up Sea-Winds along Paumanok’s Shore)

After a full twenty-four hours of adding, subtracting, dividing, consulting tables, and writing two checks for heartrending totals, I decided to reward myself with a drive to Montauk. I've been wanting to go to the Seal Haulout Trail for months, but if it wasn't blizzarding, it was windy, or raining, or flooding. Finally, it was none of those things. Today, a high bright sun, light breeze, sounds of bees buzzing. Earlier, I'd seen a yellow-banded snake, the first snake of the season, slide into the daffodils and hide as I stopped to take a look.

A walk to the Seal Haulout requires stubbornness and faith. You often don't know where to go right or left. You walk over the thickest roots, you walk over rocks. Your feet hurt. Up hills, down hills. Muck, branches thrown over streams, more muck, a pleasantly fetid scent, and creeping through catbriar to avoid a foot-deep lake of ale-colored water.

And then you're out on the treeless bluff. Sure enough they're out there in the Sound, drowsing in the sun, sometimes three or four to a rock. From a distance they resemble marbled gray yams with bird tails and flippers and curious beagle faces.

I must have been out there a minute before I noticed the young seal down on the beach, all of fifty feet away, right in front of me. He rolled on his side, closing his eyes, opening them. Every few minutes he'd rub his mouth and face with his flipper. Then yawn so wide I could see the clean bright pink of the roof of his mouth. I'd wondered if seals respond to pollen--certainly dogs do. I do. But by and large he seemed as if he didn't want to be anywhere else, even after I started telling him he was a fine seal. This caused him to lift up his head and go back to sleep.

To my right the sea was turning a deeper blue, almost a navy blue. The deeper blue seemed to be advancing toward the west and south--or was the sun just doing something to my eyes? But sure enough, it was the sea version of an advancing cloud, and with the deeper blue came a cold astringent wind, even though the sky was still clear. Waves, scouring waves, and an alarming sound in the atmosphere like something frying. I didn't have my jacket. It was as if the elements all said at once, Go. That's exactly what I did.

Clean Air

It had to happen. Between Denver, an overnight trip to Baltimore to hear Mark read, taxes, teaching, taxes, packets, midterm evaluations, more taxes, the inner life has burnt out like an old motor. I'm in awe of anyone who has the cognitive machinery to narrate the steamy engine known as AWP (here, for instance, is a nice set of reports from Matthew Hittinger) but I'll just say I had an unexpectedly fun time, the best since, well, New Orleans in 2003. I must have helped that the convention center's common areas were enormous, giving us plenty of physical and psychic clean air (though I heard more than a few complaints about dehydration and mountain altitude). There were many highlights, of course, but the big, big, big one? Joy Williams, whom I got to talk to before she gave a stellar reading from her upcoming novel, which features a young writer named Brittany. (Or Britney?) And her exasperating mother, who always manages to say the wrong thing. And is so complacent and/or morally horrible that she's funny. I knew there was a reason why I came.

****
From our trip to Baltimore on 4/11-4/12:

Poet walks into the light

Mark on stage

The Baltimore Lisickys: Sandy, Jordan, Michael

Signs of Denver--& Some People I Talked to at AWP 2010

Thursday, April 8:
Jean Valentine Kathy Graber Deborah Lott Kimiko Hahn Patricia Smith Aaron Smith Sam Amadon Brian Kiteley Laura McCullough Chip Livingston Joan Larkin Anne Marie Macari Toi Derricotte Maureen Seaton Robin Becker Angelo Nikolopoulos Alex Dimitrov Philip Brady Bob Mooney Jesse Lee Kercheval Erica Lash Williams James May Chelsea Rathburn Yusef Komunyakaa Sven Birkerts Tony Hoagland Dara Wier Guy Pettit Deborah Landau Robert Polito Alison Granucci J.C. Hallman Patrick Ryan Tree Swenson Zach Roesch Melissa Stein Sharon Dolin Rigoberto Gonzalez Ada Limon Chris Caruso Matthew Hittinger Colin Cheney Anna Journey Amanda Murphy J.D. Schraffenberger Elizabeth Winston Richard Matthews Mark Bibbins Catherine Barnett Kate Schmitt Jennifer Chapis Eloise Klein Healy Sean Hill Addie Tsai Edan Lepucki Josh MacIvor-Andersen Nickole Brown Eric Wasserman Joy Castro Ron Block Jennifer Lauck Deb Henry Barrie Jean Borich John Rowell Nancy Boutin Gail Donohue Storey Teresa Carmody Vanessa Place Corinne Manning Christopher Bakken and I know I'm forgetting many others

Friday, April 9:
Joy Williams David Trinidad Ru Freeman Stephen Motika Monica Youn Geoff Becker Michael Fauver Lia Purpura Cathy Park Hong Honor Moore Sheri Joseph Megan Sexton Jericho Brown James Allen Hall Miguel Murphy Jerome Murphy Martha Rhodes Bryan Rice Charles Flowers Tom Healy Manuel Munoz Gary Short Carolyn Forche Michael Montlack Robert Philen Christopher Hennessy Gabrielle Calvocoressi Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon Peter Kline Brittany Perham

*****

Toi Derricotte at the Prairie Schooner Reading

Harvey (H.L.) Hix at the University of Wyoming Reading

Joy (!) Williams at the University of Wyoming Reading

A Blue, Thirty-Foot Bear Peers in the Convention Center and Says, WTF?

A Manatee?

I'm trying to get the gumption to pack for Denver, for AWP, later today. It goes way back with me, but I always have a hard time leaving the coast for rocky, dry, high, brushy places. It resists explanation, my only assumption is that it's something primal, written into my circuits. Maybe I was a manatee in a different life.

So to delay the packing a little longer, I decided to take a walk on the High Line, which is just down the street from our apartment. I don't understand why I don't go to the High Line more, given its evident attractiveness and its proximity to us. Trees, flowers, leaves, interesting people to look at, interesting views--somehow the Statue of Liberty looks poignant framed between two buildings, and the view of London Terrace from the north end... Was there ever a more spectacular apartment building? I sat on a bench; I cooked in the sun. Highs in the uppers 80s today, warmer than Orlando, warmer than Miami. I began thinking about how every voice I heard was German, French, or Italian, and I had the realization that Manhattan's transmutation into a tourist and entertainment center--and no longer a place to live--was complete. I felt disturbed by that, until I'd realized I'd been a tourist in every place I'd been--with the exception of three or so days at home--for the last three weeks. Then I had a realization that, as alluring as the High Line is, the real life of New York is not rarified or set off, but down on the streets with the faces: hungry, panicked, clueless, lusting faces. I turned around to look at the Hudson River Park, and thought of the waves slapping against the piers, fresh water mixing with salt just as it spilled into New York Harbor, and beyond. And up from where Florent, the diner, used to be, a smell of warmed food transformed the High Line into a boardwalk.

I wanted to be down there.

Transmutation (Or: Happy Easter)

We all know it's not supposed to be 70 degrees in early April, by the ocean, on Long Island.

We all know that June belongs in June.

At the same time, we couldn't not be a little in awe of our day yesterday. Late in the afternoon, we walked down the road--in T-shirts, no less--to the bay beach in our little neck of the woods. There was a man standing on a surfboard, rowing down the middle of the channel with perfect posture. There were two naked little girls sliding down the dune, squealing, romping ahead of their mother. There was our friend, Rebekah, who lent us a blue quilt with stars on it. We fell half asleep as the sun shut our eyes, the sand baking our backs through the padding. A dog retrieved a piece of black plastic, shaking off water as he dropped it again and again. Flies swirled deliriously above an empty crab shell. After a while, I was tempted to stick a finger into the Sound side, until I thought of these lines from Bishop's "At the Fishhouses":

If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire....

Swampy

I was afraid I was going to have swamp withdrawal after spending so much time in Florida, but I arrived in Springs last night only to find out that half of our neighborhood was underwater from recent rains. Not under feet of water, but certainly enough cedar-colored water to understand our part of the world differently. Though my needle palm had died over the winter (as brown as any of the coconut palms of St. Petersburg), the fish pond seemed as active as any canal you'd see along a limestone road. Already the fish are begging for food, already there are flies, already we have a bullfrog sunning the top of his head. And when it's night, the peepers sing so loudly, you swear an alligator, with little ceremony, might just pull himself up through the muck.

Hungry fishes in the pond out back:





And a few front yards just down our street:



And the peepers at twilight, at the intersection of Old Stone Highway, Neck Path, and Accobonac Road:

I Wanted to Molt

After I met a class at the University of Tampa this morning, I was left to my own devices for eight hours until my reading tonight. As I'm sans car on this leg of the trip, I decided to take a walk to the Davis Islands, on the recommendation of my brother Bobby. Across bridges, under overpasses, beside bays, canals, the hospital, dumpsters: there's something both ominous and compelling about walking for some distance in a city where no one walks, or where the only people who walk are homeless, or panhandling. You tick off the smells: saltwater, human pee, jasmine, cigarette, boat exhaust, Super Glue, bandage, liquor. You feel a little suspect as your lift your camera to take in what's left of the world that once was: an earnest Florida, pre-Disney, pre-Hooters, pre-spring training ballparks. You almost forget Bishop's line on the state: "...the poorest postcard of itself." You morph into Evan, the character you wrote fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years ago, who walked relentlessly all over a different part of Florida.

*****

from Lawnboy

I couldn’t sleep. I felt something simmering in my body, a slow cooking, spreading up through the stem of my torso, then prickling, exploding in my throat like salad oil. I wanted to molt, I wanted to cut away the baggage of my skin. I kicked the wet covers off the bed, threw on some clothes, and left the house. I was going to walk it off. I was walking through developments, through people’s backyards in the dark, over culverts, canals, retention basins. Hours had passed. I passed airport runways with their raucous blue lights, sanitation plants vast as cities, signs fizzing and sparking, arrows pointing in all directions. Two towns over, the boat factory was working overtime, and the junky hot smell of plastic lingered in the atmosphere. A storm threatened from the Everglades, then receded, pushing the humidity even higher. I took off my shirt and roped it around my waist. I decided to walk and walk, possibly to the Keys, possibly to the Card Sound Bridge, until I finally got rid of this feeling.

Hours later I was standing in William’s front yard. I expected the lawn to be overgrown, ruined, bits of scale and dollarweed eating at the turf. But no. It looked even better than before. Moist, lush. I knew it: William had found another Lawnboy. I had lost him for good. I fumbled for some broken shells and started tossing them, one after another, at the glass of the window: ping ping ping ping.

*****

from Davis Islands, with the exception of the first three photos, which were taken on or near the University of Tampa campus:













Read about D.P. Davis, the developer of Davis Islands, and the history of his projects.