Prose on A Well-Lit-Path

El Masnou

Sat, 02 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Catalina’s mother was able to travel and be with us for a number of weeks, shortly after the birth of her grandson, our son. On one of the Saturdays of her visit, the two decided to, finally, “Do the Tourist Thing”, and ride one of the big red double-decker buses around the hills and beaches of Barcelona. I was invited, but declined; they had a great mother-daughter-grandson outing, and I took my bicycle and headed north.

Catch

Wed, 03 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

– It’s pulling hard!

– Yes, it’s a big one. Don’t jerk the line, just keep…. wow, yes, just keep hold and bring it in slowly…

The line in the boy’s hands bucking and tugging, this way, that way, desperate to escape the fingers. His expression more determined than seven years of puzzles, seven winters, seven pairs of shoes, seven circles around the sun. A case for karma, the man thought, watching.

The fact of a fox

Mon, 15 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

– There! Did you see it? – I don’t… think… over by the water? – No no no, down there (look where I’m pointing). OH! It moved again! – I can barely see your hand.

By now the children had returned from the shore and, having been hushed to quiet, came on exaggerated tip-toes to stand behind their parents. What is it? What is it?

– I think it’s a fox or a mink. – A fox! (stage whisper) – What’s a mink? (the fewer the years, the louder the “whisper”) – Quiet, quiet. There’s a little light between those two trees… it must be coming off the water? And every once in a – there!

Crows

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Between the hills and the channel, the crows flew into cornfields as they had two hundred years before; the crows were chased from the nests of sparrows and starlings as they had been a thousand years before; the crows made their raucous calls as they had as long as earth could remember.

"Crows" by chrissymllr @ DeviantArt.com

On the shore, the channel waves pushed and pulled grains of sand as they had under the same sun, time forgotten. The salty water, warmed by the same rays, made little lives from its brine, time undefined. The breeze rose from one direction and flew to another, mixing sun and sea, making fog and rain, until no one and nothing remembered when it began, until the habit of creation was no longer noticed.

We Don't Run

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“What was that!”

They were on the river trail, a few minutes’ walk from the town center: far enough out that traffic noise was hushed and self-absorbed, yet near enough in that the bank of the waterway was tended like a garden, perennials were in bloom, annuals in bud, the grass clipped neat and paths swept clean. Comfortable benches had been placed every so often, that couples might rest in public privacy, leaning together, their words becoming soft and intimate, their breath merging as their thoughts merged.

fireside stories

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

- 1 -

Look at that moon! And over there, Venus is a diamond. While this campfire warms my feet, the breeze nods itself to sleep, and the river (whose unceasing flow is an unremarked inspiration) hushes along on its gentle, downhill slide…

There is much to be said of city life — but the less said, the better.

We can make smaller circles in the trees, just out of sight of those agitated centers. Here where embraces are slower and quieter, where we do more to nourish ourselves and our neighbors, and less to stoke a Machine whose engines carry others to others’ destinations.

They walk I follow

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Some art is as trivial and ephemeral as our youth: its willful innocence soon outgrown, and without resentment, but with a kind and condescending turn of heart, to be dismissed as a passing, as a light distraction.

Other pieces are soon discovered: those that remain with us are an artist’s masterwork, which once open our youthful eyes, a door to something larger than we know, larger than we are; and as we age into their beauty and their wisdom they make their way into our hearts along the lines of fracture and remorse we earn through our hard living.

my reflection in the photograph

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Several years ago I was “improving” my photo collection, which had become a wobbling tower of Kodachrome, balanced precariously and in no particular order in a hidden corner of my closet. Every time I saw it, I felt a vague intolerance; and each time I saw it, I felt that intolerance grow, until finally the intolerance was itself intolerable, and I furiously shoveled the concealing junk out of the way, and hooked those boxes and stacks out into the middle of my bedroom floor.

Windows - 4

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

At the sliding glass door she stood, looking at the night. Through her own reflection she could see, in order of diminishing certainty, the branches of a pine, the outline of flowers along the walk (in shades of gray), lawn that faded into the darkness of what she knew to be a road. When she breathed in there was a faint whistling through her nostrils; when she breathed out, her breath fogged the glass in an oval that grew outward, then shrunk on itself, as though its shape were being drawn back into her lungs. The hall tiles were cold. She looked down at her feet.

Windows - 3

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Lonny was the product of big energy and tiny town, where the limitations imposed by three square blocks of homes – an Alcatraz adrift on an ocean of unswimmable wheat – fueled the kind of incendiary pressure that could only come out wrong. Even back then, when I was eight and Lonny was nine, his combustion resulted in trouble; so years later, when I heard that he was in the pen for grand theft auto and some litany of other offenses, it was disappointingly no surprise: the wide world never succeeded in changing Lonny’s first impressions, nor would he be able to see it as anything but an endless, confining small town. A twitch in his heart was too large for his skin, a cruel itch, an irritation for which he found no balm. Maybe he didn’t look hard enough. Maybe he took off in the wrong direction, followed the wrong leader, and never got righted.

His truth; her truth

Sat, 11 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

-- The wind swept north and as the weather lifted, my spirit lifted, as though cloud held the weight of me, and sun held the lightness. Is it that easy? A wind? I wanted to believe it was heartache, it was joy brewing in my heart; but maybe heartache and joy are related to weather in the same way the setting of fruit or wheat’s harvest or a flower opening or wilting are related. The sky calls, the heart answers, whether the heart of a man or of an apple or of a grain or of the stamen.

curve

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

“The curve of the river is where the breeze comes freshest. You can hear the leaves find voice before each gust arrives, like an invisible wave reaching upstream, downstream. On this bank is the small shore, because the arm of water hooks around us here, an embrace. The far bank is the long shore: from here you can see it’s slow progress.

“I come to think. Sometimes I come here not to think. The place seems not to mind the face I put on, at any rate whatever face I brought is put away soon enough. So long as you’re quiet, the small sounds work their way into you and fill you up, so the burden you decided to drag along with you that day is rained-on, then water-logged, then sinks into the slowness of the current.

Soliloquoys

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I. Our Daily Dance

The waning moon has this hour turned above the crowns of trees, and spilled its liquid light into the yard. So this evening is accompanied by a shadow of sun’s heat. The same moon that years and years ago was torn from earth’s belly, born from her and borne away on some celestial tide: once blazing with the fire that gave us life, now its patient ashes spy upon our daily dance, at times shy and out of sight, at times winking at our plight, or otherwise full-faced and offering its white-washed world for these our fine somnambulisms.
With no one’s arms to hold you from these sights, the dimensions fall one into another, you join the ranks of every color-blinded creature as it flies or crawls or navigates the night, employing sharper, duller vision. A leaf-rattle makes the paw pause mid-step, a stick snap shakes the courage of the smallest, while above the sudden flush of air or nearly-silent slant of wing makes cowering the act of statues, whose hearts race from one moment alive to the next, still alive, alive yet still, praying to not be prey, hoping for no tooth nor talon’s spike to rake the nerves.

Some of us are larger: suffer less.

But suffer even so, adventure when better ventures aren’t reached by opening fingers, opened hearts. A footstep starts the body where the spirit would prefer to stop. Still. A stick snap stops the world around the boots of men: who goes there? What would a man be wanting of the night, if not a hunt of one sort or another?

The moon will not stand still; her mother moves below her, always at arms-distance, always departing. The child spins as if to turn away; the weight of their connection means she’s always falling toward her elder. A pure, white face: smiling as she rises her hello, sad as she departs. A desert of desire, whose fires went out so long ago, depends on stars’ impressions to light her further face.
Who wouldn’t see a spark up there? Some ember that was better than its gray surround, some flickered flash of life that kindled past to second sunrise, companion star, golden guide to keep us honest and awake and in each other’s arms, to banish sleep in favor of a man or woman’s favored sleep companion.

II. Gift of Sight and of Delight

One can speak more plainly. An apple, for example: there was nothing woman ever gave a man that would be his unmaking. Genesis requires rethinking, since its metaphor is cactus-garden, is painful to embrace. If (for example) Eve opened Adam’s eyes, it was to preciousness of life. I suppose that might be blinding, but hardly expulsion from the Divine; invitation, rather.

There is some bland assumption by the readers of those ancient runes: a paradise was lost, to be regained at last when body’s been betrayed as temporary residence, reminiscent of a slum-lord’s tenement, reminiscent of a child who’s given no delight or - more likely - never found its gratitude.

I do not sign that lease.

Paradise is every moment, but skill in seeing clouded by emotions or events. The paradise of creation is in company of men and of women, building walls or raking them down, raising pillars of life or whirling in the great river of each other’s dancing, scratching at the earth or forging teams to push back need, or needing the sweet waters of ourselves to wash upon that labor, to loose the earth of us and make us one.

No, an apple, or a pomegranate, maybe have been a gift of fruit, of sustenance, of sight or of delight. The days that followed, simply striving to maintain that paradise. If missed, at times, or if (at times) we fail to be delighted, still there’s no mistaking it exists.

The lens of a book

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I received a book as a gift.

It measured 8 1/2 by 6 1/2 inches, and contained 256 printed pages (including index), with another five in introduction and eight more in bookplate, title, copyright, dedication, contents, and trailer pages, in all about an inch and a half of paper between the hard covers. The covers themselves were a silvery-gray matte, embossed with a marble texture that allowed patches of sheen to show through washes of barely-felted cloth; the slipcover provided decoration: a smiling Brother Victor-Antoine d’Avila-Latourrette seated before the gate inside his garden, holding a hand-turned wooden bowl of ripe peaches, surrounded by his season’s harvest. Sweet peppers and mallows and basil and greens, dark beets and eggplant, mid-season red potatoes and green beans and the ripest red tomatoes.

tangle

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Tangle - Mark Schultz

If you could sing the wind, your voice should wear a sighing sound, as if from distant sources you had flown, and half-way through your flight your wings were weary but not yet done. Or a whistling of time through the sieve: divided into strands that strain then stream in parallel until they tangle, intertwine, and fuse together once again. What else would it seem? Is it winter round the windows moaning ancient love’s lament, a loss remembered making sadness modern, soon to be spent? Is it wind that carries moonlight lightly on its back, depositing in drops of dew the dawn that trees and flowers rush to drink?

plucked

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

“No; no, please; no more.” Art stretches on the canvas, the sun fallen half-way round the sky, having sweated its way to zenith, now drying and diminishing toward the end of its day, the end.

“But why? I thought the work was just beginning? I thought: a little more color, how it changes from morning to noon (when the light is really too terribly flattening, don’t you agree?), and now again from noon to night, when it picks up a… poignancy… that almost causes fruit to ripen…”

Sniffing out a virtual trail...

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Here I am, pondering the bits and pieces of technology that I am trying to band-aid together before our very real travel begins, trying to reach out of the past as I have known it – I am pre-moonwalk, after all – and into this strange and tenuous digital future, where words are sent out like puffs of breath in a pre-dawn sky, received by a few listening ears (maybe), then dissipate as quickly as they have arrived.