"Corpse" and "Smoke"

Two new pieces, "Corpse" and "Smoke," went live on New World Writing today. Although they were written weeks apart, early last winter when I was living in Philadelphia, they weren't originally intended to be a duo, and maybe that is a good thing, or else the connections between the two might have been a little willed. I like the fact that pieces knew more than I did, at least when it came to the contrasts and parallels. That's not to suggest I wasn't aware of pitting highs against lows, lights against nights, etc. In control of, controlled by: though I've never surfed, I imagine it must be a little like looking for the right wave, standing up on the board, flexing the legs, turning the trunk, holding out the arms, taking it as far in to the shore as you can until the depths run out.

Cinema

I went to the theater on a school night, not so much because I felt like seeing a movie, but because it was cold out, insanely cold, and I thought it would be an adventure to sit in a theater, in a beach town, almost three months after Sandy, in multiple layers of clothes. I bought my ticket. I trudged down the aisle. Sweet smells in the air: seashore carpet, stale popcorn butter, panelling? Music--not the ads and/or canned music you'd hear in a multiplex, but the music of another era, the 1960s, "Anyone Who Had a Heart," for instance, or "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence," in orchestral versions that felt grand, outlandish, determinedly ceremonial, as if something big were on the way. Seats kept filling up before me, behind me. Chatter, mostly seniors. Candy wrapper noise. Clearly my idea of an adventure was not so terribly original. Then the theater darkened, a pipe organ recording filled the room--more ceremony, with carnival horror stirred in--and a big red B in script on the screen. The sound was scratchy. The upholstery was cold, the metal beneath the upholstery cold too. And the tilt of the seat and the width of the seat between the armrests--were peoples' bodies that different back then? Or: what did we used to settle for? I couldn't make myself comfortable, though I finally stopped shifting my butt and lower back around. The movie started. Silver Linings Playbook, which felt part John Cassavetes, part HBO drama, part 1940s romantic comedy, part Rocky. I sat through to the closing credits. I was the last person to walk out into the cold. My life was getting back on track, though that was more hunch than fact.

That Silly Retriever

Today's featured poem on Poetry Daily is "The Physics of the Known World" from Unbuilt Projects.

Still

I once knew a woman who couldn't sit still. She was never in one place for a day or two, running off to the airport with underpacked bags or overpacked bags, driving off in her car with animals in the backseat. She'd lost her husband, unexpectedly, a year or so before. It was clear that all this running around was as bad for her as it was good for her. She always seemed to be on the verge of panic. I remember thinking about with her concern, a little pity. She is avoiding pain, I thought. She is avoiding feeling, avoiding the fact that she doesn't have a home anymore.

That was years ago, and when I think of the person I was, the person who thought he had it figured out, I can't help but think about him with a strange mixture of feelings. In part I feel protective of him (I want to say, oh, just you wait) and in part I feel a tad superior--okay, more humble? I'm talking about the allure of certainty. You can be caught in the thick of that, and not even know you're stuck. And who could actually blame anyone for deciding what they think? We spend years and years not knowing anything, and it can be a relief to take on any narrative, a vocabulary of belief part our own, part something out there.

This is a long way of saying: I'm running around a lot, I'm realizing that. And though a part of me still wonders whether I'm running from something, I also don't think anyone is necessarily gets clearer to himself by staying put, sitting in one place, in one's room. The sentences started coming to me as I was driving south on Thursday morning. And here I am in Cape May--away again after only two days home. A whipped-up sea out the window of my hotel room, the surface all disturbed, like hair combed against its expected direction. Then goes where it's supposed to go.

World War II Observation Tower, Cape May Point

Ferry heading out into Delaware Bay, pre-snowstorm

Marine Debris Timeline, Sunset Beach, Cape May Point

My hotel room in Congress Hall

For warmer times. Chairs facing the ocean, Congress Hall

Patrick, whom you might recognize from a recent cover of AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW

Congress Hall by day

Congress Hall by night

From the beach. Congress Hall as floating palace.

Father Jed's Head was Stuck in Lent

My story "Lent" went live on Four Way Review a couple of days ago. The text comes with a voice recording of the piece which you can find on Soundcloud. The recording was made under funny/challenging circumstances at 5:00 PM or so on the seventh day of my Sierra Nevada residency. The heater blowing through the vent was too loud so I shut the bathroom door. The little dorm refrigerator in the little dorm was making a sluicing sound, so I unplugged that. Finally when the room quieted down I started speaking the story into my iPhone. One take, two. Two-thirds of the way through the third take, a dog started barking in the hall. I kept on reading. It was a small-dog bark, racheted up with alarm--I don't think he was supposed to be in the building-- but as his warning came in at a slightly heightened moment of the story, I decided to leave it in. I'm curious as to whether you hear it. From the here on out, the story will always be, for me, in part about the single-digit temperatures pushing against the other side of the glass, the fluorescent coil on the ceiling with its missing dome, the bare walls, a packaged sanitary napkin in the drawer. In other words, a dorm vacated by its usual inhabitants over winter break.

Real Time, Residency Time

I'm just coming back to real time after nine days in residency time. That's another way of saying my relationship to the clock is still in flux. In residency time a day seems to mean a week--that much is packed into a 14-hour day. And when you're done, and when you count up the hours of classroom time spent with your students, you realize: 21 hours, that was half a semester. It's a little dizzying when you think of it. That it manages to be good time as well is also another kind of miracle. Well, good is a little lax. We'll just call it serious, awake, but down-to-earth, if it is at all possible to be down-to-earth at 6200 feet. I'm talking about the winter MFA residency at Sierra Nevada College, in Incline Village, just a few hundred feet from Lake Tahoe. I imagine it will be a different experience when we get together again, in August, when the air is hot, jet skis and power boats must be tearing across the surface of the cold, cold lake. This time it snowed and snowed, temps went down to minus -15 one night. I spent a lot of time looking for bears, looking at the snowpack for tracks, but I never saw one. Probably I was trying too hard. There are 400 or so living around the shores of the lake, and they are much beloved by the locals, well, at least some of the locals, who believe the human/bear coexistence is a happy thing.

It's sunny. It's snowing.

Out the window of the dorm.

A fed bear is a dead bear. Alas.

Alexi Zentner, me, Brian Turner. Against hallucinatory wallpaper.

The Prim Library, where I taught my workshop.

Bikes in snow.

Sunny, a local bear, who came to a sad ending. But that is another story.

Present

At a certain point this week I was running my thumb over photos on my phone. Terrible year, I'd been thinking, terrible. Terrible! And yet there were vivid trees, lightstruck shots of the sea, and faces (friends, strangers, me) that looked, well, awake, present--and dare I say, happy?  Happy in our dailiness. So this is why we make representations. This is why we put a frame around things. How else could we see otherwise?

Happy New Year to all.