Downpour

When I probably should have been cooling down my hot brain, I took Ned for a ride. We went two hours south to Long Beach Island, specifically to that fine stretch from North Beach through Barnegat Light with its lagoons and Japanese black pines. I suppose I needed to be in motion after a week of sitting in hard chairs. As soon as we reached the causeway, though, the clouds swelled up. The rain wouldn't let up, even after we tried to wait it out at the inlet with the engine off. Ah, motion: so much for it. Fogged windshield, smell of wet dog--already the sensation that our day was going to be better in memory than in the experience itself. The experience itself was air conditioning vs. muggy air, fleas in the weeds, one black fly biting my ankle over and over again in the closed-up car. But it's something else inside these frames. This landscape's always been my ideal vision of seashore: trees beside water, red channel markers, gravel, style, a little wildness.

My Week at Juniper 2011

1) Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst

2) Charles D'Ambrosio

3) Eileen Myles

4) Jenny Offill

5) Buy those Books!

6) Noy Holland

7) Mark

8) Heather Christle and Mark

9) Thomas Sayers Ellis

10) Dara Weir

11) Joy Williams

12) Joy's hand on Autumn (Autumn was actually one of two landscaping goats at the party for faculty and staff at Dara's house. Let the goat loose and it takes right to brush.)

13) Dan the Goat

14) Autumn and Dan

15) Me caught in a funny moment (via Justin Dowd)

16) Mallards outside the Art Building, where I taught my workshop

17) A rainbow is pretty hard to resist

Sink and Float (Or: Pillar of Stillness)

Maybe it would have been different if I'd grown up on a mountain. When summer comes around, I not only want to be around the sea, but in it. So when I have to go many miles inland, even if it's for something I like to do, really really want to do, in this case a week of teaching at the Juniper Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts, I get logy when it's time to leave. That feeling's lifted considerably now that I'm here, writing from a coffee place in town, looking out at trees and people walking by, but earlier today, just when I was packing up, I came across this excellent Dean Rader poem, which I liked so much I copied it out by hand after I'd already packed up the laptop. The poem is of course not about the ocean, even if the ocean is the occasion of the poem. Maybe it will sink in and float me for the week.

Ocean Beach at Twilight: 14
from Works & Days
by Dean Rader

Who's to say the stars understand
their heavy labor, or the moon its
grunt work across the hard curve of absence?
Who's to say the gulls taut on their tiny strings

believe the air? Everything seems surprised
by the fat slab of pink strung up against the blue:
the dogs dark in night's watch, the fishermen
buoyed to the beach's pillar of stillness

Even the teenage boy playing in the spoor
of foam and backflow pauses longer
than expected, his father's voice dissolved

in the din-drop of surf and sea hush. Night
is no curtain. When he stares out across
the wave of waves, who's to say he looks inward?

Two T-Shirts (Or: A Weekend in Provincetown)

Never pack during an excessive heat warning, especially if you're headed north, to the coast. That's my note to self, note to you. On Friday afternoon, I arrived in Provincetown with two T-shirts, two pairs of shorts, two short sleeve shirts--you know where this is going. By Saturday night, I could have used a wool coat, wool hat, rain boots, etc. Still, a full, sweet weekend, in spite of clouds, off and on rain, marrow-chilling damp. Three highlights: Staying up late with my old friend Polly Burnell; teaching a short prose workshop to a group of great writers; trying out some brand néw pieces ("Little Kingdom," "In the Time of Great Building," "Winston and the Ocean," "Sally and the Nursery," "Prehistoric," "Tungsten") Saturday night, when I shared the podium with the excellent Elizabeth Bradfield and Mark Adams.

A Half Hour at the Beach

It certainly looked like the low-key Brighton Beach I knew: same Russian restaurants along the boardwalk, same jut of Breezy Point across the channel. I don't think I'd ever been there when it was pushing on 100, though. I had to prep for my Fine Arts Work Center class, and the thought of all that reading at home, in the dry blast of air conditioning, just sounded like work.

So--the beach. Reading at the beach seemed like a better idea. But once I got to the Brighton Beach station, I was so confused by the pour of teenagers coming out the subway car, onto the platform, down the stairs, that I went up a side street, in the wrong direction, away from the ocean. Maybe the heat was doing something to my compass points. Or it was the roar of voices coming up from the sand, from two blocks away. When I turned myself around, and walked up on the boardwalk, I felt: no. I couldn't even put words to it. Not crowds, not heat. I don't think it was even the footballs flung, or the moving sandstorm the soccer players were kicking up on the beach. An animal sense, even though people were laughing, were having a good time, a great time. I heard a gunshot--or something that resembled a gunshot; heads turned toward the sound; maybe it was just a balloon popping--and I headed back to the brain-freeze of the subway car to read Lydia Davis.

Less than an hour later, someone shot eight shots into the crowd, at the very spot on the boardwalk where I'd parked myself on a bench. Who knew about turf wars, or gangs, or the long history of trouble in the neighborhood on Brooklyn-Queens day? I'm just trying to get my head around the fact that I might have talked myself into staying had I relied on reason alone, whereas the animal in me said go.