Timework

A full rotation is no small magic. Of late I find years begin to blur, the space between breaths attenuated. When I hear a snippet of a song trailing out of one of the radios from a passing automobile, or sometimes from one of the wiring mechanisms that accidentally picks up a signal and starts to sing (itself more than worthy of note, I think), it cues memory. That is, if I know it, and I rarely do, then I try to place that song in narrative. When was it the soundtrack to my life?

You speak of the hush of white and silence so loud that it becomes a whine, rising, aspiring to thunder and lightshow in the snowburst. I know it too. I have never been good at apprenticing myself to silence. It does not seem to be in me.

Are we us, Willard? Are we still who we were? Do we contain those selves? If those old skins heard song X and were induced to electrical state Y and we felt, what, aroused? weightless? explosive? somehow more alive, harboring such potential energy, do those selves still exist? Or are they retired, decomposed in the compost heap or in the cemetery or in the backlist of our brains?

Have I ever told you about the phenomenon of paradoxical undressing? That a body gets confused in blizzard conditions or when chilled sufficiently, that it starts to feel hot, that it strips layers off and discards them in the snow, that bodies are found on some mornings, especially those following the big snow storms, naked and frozen and buried, maybe a foot still sticking out, the ice crust on a face like a rite? That police are often fooled into thinking murder, molestation, at least at first?

The brain is so easily misdirected that it's hard to believe in I, in anything, in who we were or who we are. But then you step out in one of those moments that you describe and all those thoughts erase. It's so obvious, then, who you are, who you couldn't help but be.

Perhaps you already know it well.

Yesterday I looked around me, at the snow, and smiled

Almost an entire rotation since I wrote last. We are entering a new decade, Bentley. Did you know that? Of course you did, aware of time in the same way that I am. Aware of snow, too, even there, in a different kind of desert. Back when snow was a novelty, I used to wait all year for the possibility--a probability, I don't know when it didn't snow at least once per winter, but rare enough to wonder--and when the snowflakes finally arrived, a look up, eyes wide, I'd listen to all the noise of the world being blanketed, and it was the sound I loved most. Not silent, but quiet. Have you heard it, Bentley? And even when I wasn't alone, when there were friends speaking to me, I heard that quietness as the snowflakes landed. But then I discovered loss and I forgot about that sound or could no longer hear it, and it was bad, Bentley. No rest for the weary, as they say. The constant buzzing, the year-round noise, not even muffled in winter. Until yesterday. I ventured out into the snow, drove on the dangerous roads, did what needed to be done, and by the time I returned, stepped out of my car, and looked up, looked around me, I saw that snow once again and smiled, and it wasn't what I saw but what I heard. It was a moment, Bentley.

But I don't know why I even bring this up because it isn't the happy ending I was hoping for.

Near a year

since my last entry here. What has transpired in the since, Willard: it is hard to say. Time passes. We play with our mechanical creations. We have loved, lost some, lost weight. Got thin. We are barely there, and to be clear, we are not there at all: we are here. I am here. This space is not a place, but it is a meeting point. It feels like my brain is still as it was then, that it contains the then. Maybe it has been frozen out. The weather on my windows feels weird. I was in a car that crashed. I thought about children. I ran a distance. Climbed a mountain. Made new enemies before I knew it. Then they became anemonies, stinging my skin gently as I moved through them.

There is them and me. There is world and self. There is self and self, and I am not so sure they are the same moment to moment. Electrically I am different now. Electrically I am different now. Electrically, chemically, I am different now. I am in a different state. I am in a state that is not North, that has not, or little, snow, unless you go looking for it. I am not exactly lonely. I am lonely, but not exactly. Think of me here and this: a tesseract is a four-dimensional version of the cube, also sometimes called a hypercube. Which is to say it connects with, maps to what we think of as ourselves. But it--us--is also larger than us, outside of our own understanding. I think about this only when alone.

Things to Do:

Use less Es in your sentences from this moment forth. Aim for Is and Os, mouth a vertical cut in snow, a hollow thing. It has you halting as you strut and think about tomorrow, or a tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. It has a word for it. Not Tim (a tag) or Timbuktu (a location) but an anything than it. A rock with tiny scars apparitions in your window. Magic? Vanishing? Night. Oulipo if you want it badly, badly. Talk slowly. I had always thought I told you. I am losing hair. It falls out in chunks in morning. It is disturbing. I dial a doctor. A doctor picks up. I ask this doctor what is up. Doc purrs, unmoors my thought. In front of both of us it apparitions: 0 and a 1. Dot. Again. Again. Again. What should occur? I cannot say. Again. Again. Again.

Don't Suffer More,

Suffer better. Beat a surfer if you see one. Seat a burping baby, and she will stop. These are things I've learned since being away from snow. The thing is it's no less cold, my heart no less tiny and starlike in the center of my body. It is disturbing. My doctor thought it would expand when the average temperature went above 45 degrees Fahrenheit. But no. It just beats slow, Willard. The doctor held the mechanism up to it and we both could see it on the screen. You know I hate doctors, hate their manners and adopted mannerisms designed to make you comfortable, make you less likely to resist the many ways they penetrate your sanctum. But we could see it on the screen. The heart. A blip. Another blip. Then another. And soon my inside was out onscreen like a baby. I don't know what it was called. The mechanism, the baby, the surfer.

I looked it up. I checked some sources. I was suffering then. But not suffering well. Suffering better, beater? Neither. We are apart. It is a suffering. It is a lovely suffering. If we were together we could weather anything but nothing would be produced. When two magnets nestle back to back there is no energy between them. When they are pulled apart you can see the squiggly little lines like in physics textbooks that can make electricity move. We need those lines. Sometimes I feel that's all that keeps this microscopic heart alive.

In an attempt to be more like Jesus

I may try snowshoeing. This morning I contemplated buying a pair, priced them, figured my size (they said it was okay to lie about my weight for my driver's license but not to find the right size of snowshoes--the snow, apparently, keeps us all honest). Sitting in my apartment, putting lotion on chapped hands, knowing a chill was crossing the country, made me think of miracles. Could I walk across snow and dream it’s water. I'd like to walk on water. I suppose I have in the winter. Freezing temperatures, Bentley, makes us all messiahs, miracle makers. I'm in need of miracle, the word. Some days I want to leave this place, follow your path through the snow. You left me here, brotherless, nose bleeding from the cold. But I’m dealing. My new year's resolution was to suffer more. I’m determined to succeed at something.

And maybe I already have. I’m still in love, surviving the summer, when I can’t seem to feel a thing—a reverse thawing. And, yes, I fall in love each morning—but it’s easier to love in the morning of winter, before the sun comes up. So many possibilities in darkness.

I didn't know, Bentley, if I'd return here, but the wind chill, the refusal to leave the apartment, and who else do I think of but you. There is so much. To tell. I need you when the snow comes.

Willard, I have long admired

your openness to love. I know we both reach out when the days of sun are short and we want for brightness. You fall in love each morning with something new. That's you. That's always been. You are a set of repeating zeroes, each one a mouth, lips, with abstraction behind. You give those kisses out like gifts to the small things in the world: the electric kettle. The numeral 5. The sound of bass coming up from just up the street and scattering against your windowpanes. One reason why I've always loved you. But you asked: what does it mean to love only under winter? It means I am closed when the sun is long. My attention is too promiscuous: a fault, I know, I've known, a noun, but something more. To fall in love with everything is to fall in love with nothing. We cannot mate with weather. We can pair up with the digital voice of the alarm clock for a minute each morning but then it's gone. To fall in love with it is easy. Its everything is so apparent, or seems to be. I can only wish I had alarms. I sleep through everything except the sound of guns.

They pop at night from a couple miles away, or more. I listen closely. They might be fireworks is what I think at first, but then that's not right. They don't have the afterbirth of fireworks. They have the emptiness of weapons. An action and then effect. I wait for them to move closer. I fear them moving closer. A posse! is what I thought when they first appeared. It could be a band of anyone splitting a door from a doorframe and doing anything to the X and Y inside. I feared for myself so I wished my doom on them. My doom was then forestalled. They did not come closer. I fell in love with them, their perishing on my behalf. This is a terrible admission. But only because they had perished was it possible—nothing could return. You are such an optimist when you have no options. But when human interaction is possible again you submarine and disappear. Or am I speaking about myself, speaking to myself. I forget. This glass and crystal: you can see through all of it. At times I catch sight of my own sign and think I have some company.

That Ken doll that I had when I was eight: that was love, too. I admired its smooth facade. I would keep it under water for days before letting it back up. Was that practice for the winter? I tortured it with burning sticks. I torture everything with burning sticks. It remitted nothing in response to my many queries. Whether it was it or it was he, for instance. What his relationship was with the other, with the water heater, with his mother. I filled that zero in and tore him limb from limb, tied him in glistening bits of string and hung the string from twigs in the yard so the birds would take him. I never saw a sign of him again.

[now there

are two opened out to the world, like ears, like bells, like halves of balloons. I am okay with piling these notes up against the door. Today was a long way from summer. I could see snowcaps on the mountains, the candy made fact. Actual experience turns my head around. You know a thing because of description or depiction or metaphor but having never seen it you don't know it in the same way. Sort of the way a bracket works: you throw one in and it opens up a space, a thinking space in which to diverge, to pace, to make peace with whatever trembling idea is working in the mind and won't let you continue until you work it out, give it room to run and extend itself. These things open. They are invitations to the world, or what is left of it. Sometimes I wonder if there is any there there at all under the snow or behind the fog, underneath the hem of dark. Individual experience is tough to transcend. I mean, Willard, like, fuck. Sometimes you just want to tear a piece of yourself off and attach it to the world, pop it in a socket or a freezer hole like a popsicle or to have your gaze fasten on something tiny. Maybe like an atom if we could see atoms. Or maybe something simple, the head of my broken leopard statue.

The head is all that's left. I shuffled the rest offstage in a combination of dustpan and trash. It was there—just a day ago—and then a body nudges it and it is on the floor in pieces. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. But I keep the head. When I see the head, when I really see it, when I open up the eye and let it just stew and look at it and when it reveals whatever it is going to reveal... when I see it, I can see the whole. It is a representation. An asterisk standing in for a star. A colon and a comma standing in for a face, emotion, our brains flooding out the rest.

But I digress. I digress a lot—

More here

A year. I fear. It cannot take me there or away from there or anywhere but there. These songs on the radio. These calls from another climate, another weather color, they take me there, whenever they come through the window or the electric wires that enter under the window and transform themselves into bloom. A year. I'm aware of it. That gap, that yawn, that open bracket. I heard today from a love from a decade ago or more. I'm unsure of what to do about it, whether to claim this ear as mine. Is this ear mine? When I hear those songs I am the same, I am the one I was before. I am myself a decade later and I am that other body, that set of chemical collisions, hormone and yawn and yearn and earning power and evermore. You can see I am conflicted. I am tied up in it. O. I make too much of myself, as always. I will recede. It's fair to say I see that far and more. I am (you are) a set of nested parentheses inside another nest of them, a thorn and gash of them, of the, of iteration, ball inside of ever larger ball until we are the world and then etc. We all recede when we are the world. It is an impossibility. An unlikelihood at the very least.

Do you hear that sound? It is just a tone, a flat unaltered tone, a pitch. The computer's speaker, maybe, emitting it, reproducing it. That's magic, isn't it, reproduction, even if the brain is reconfigured and so comprehends it differently. If all we are is processing power then what, I wonder. If all we are is loop after lopped-off loop of wire connection, then can we claim to have proceeded, to have preceded any of our thousand stupid decisions?

It's late. I can feel it. I can feel the walls telling me this every time I strike a key on that old typewriter you had delivered to me, what, it must have been six years ago. It still holds that same desk place. I can operate it even as the computer keyboard is quicker. But it doesn't make that same sound, the strike of work, what strife is worth, each accumulating letter somehow containing more, being more permanent, an artifact bursting or at least persisting in the world. If there is a world at all. If there is a word at all. If there is an all at all. An awl in the toolbox out beyond the woodshed I can see the light breaking just across the yard from here. I see you everywhere, myself everywhere, a dozen shadows of myself, and they are multiplying, opening, multiplying and opening, unfolding like a forest.

[

A long life away, Willard

is what it seems from there to here. A year to the day, or near to that. I hear no snowhush through the trees. Snow is what loneliness is for. Snow is everything I ask of it. It rarely disappoints. A year. A dash between one calendar and a new one, a new set of thoughts of presents deposited in the mail for disposal or dispersal to other countries and acquaintances.

From what I hear you are away from it, considering the beach a respite, a white night of everything in the north. I understand. I am a heartbeat at least on an analog line from listening to it. But I think of it. Each night when I contemplate this new surrounding, particular quiet. I don't blame this space for the white lack. But I wonder: what would this place be like if it was blanketed. Quieter, maybe, slushy, petrifying, electric.

Are you the same as you were last year? Am I? Another heart, another life, another tower. Another tour of duty. It feels like much the same. Except I am no longer there, or here really. Well, I am here, but this is not the same as that. It is not a hat I can put on at night to protect me from the wind. It is not a winding road up to the highest peak for ten hours or more. It is emptiness, like other emptinesses, a grid like other grids. Little color. Little grain. Almost nothing.

Snow to Rain, Washed

I don't know where I have been or can't say, the summer swallowing me whole, the fall tolerating me, but now the snow is back, the reflection of light, though I don't think to write until today, when the rain returns, takes what snow has covered the dying ground and washes it away, no reflection but gray, and where are you my friend? Heading toward or away. Some snowstorm in the distance. A scarf around my eyes--I can hardly see, Bentley, in my homemade darkness, my hand, open, waiting for the temperature to drop, for the snow to accumulate in my palm, amongst my life line, other nameless lines, waiting for whatever light can come in winter. And I'm in love, again, Bentley--the only way, really, to prepare for dusk in the afternoon, for ice on skin, for the whiteout, coming. Yes?

Snowbell: a mouth

This space. A hush. Windsound outside, Willard. Do you hear it? I know you must. Darkness everywhere but I saw some today. It has been another quarter-year almost. The weather's turned and turned again. I have been gone from here. Moved further north with the snowline into Canada. I've been tracking it. I know I had said that when the last bit melted off that was it for me, that I would find a way out of place, this space. It was partly fear. Of being. Of being without and away from it. As if my body would melt in the warmth. As if my bare skin would be torn away by sun, turned to ash, a tuning fork underneath the radiation. It has been a dozen weeks at least.

And then came hail. Tiny pellets. The usual bombardment. We get prediction then we get weather. In Marquette they expect a foot or more this week. It will be upon them in that remote place, in the dark heart of Michigan, and they will be knee-deep in it.

You knew it wouldn't last, though, didn't you? I am in love, surrounded by darkness, returned to this lonely moment. Temperature will drop and all of this will come again.

Not a sign of it

that white, this is the opposite of winter now. This morning came and I thought of you, things chilly on the ground—a sudden something, reminder, maybe, that all of this warm will end and end, and we will dream of it again when curled up in all that crystal.

The Spring, The Snow

It has been two months since I last wrote and one would assume a change in season has arrived. But all that has arrived is April, that month so synonymous with spring yet so unpredictable. In the Midwest, in the Northeast, in the Northwest, a snowbell blooming, a snowstorm descending. This year where the months mean nothing. Several days ago it was the mid 70’s, today the mid 20’s and snowing. The other night, driving home, I nearly slid into winter, into sirens, into the unexpectedness of return. How could none of us expect it? Not even snow but ice. And no one was ready. Not the roads nor the brakes, nor the SUV in front of me who danced right to left to right until the guardrail decided to join in.

It is April and the same outside as January. The same inside. How was it that I kept driving on, past the police lights, the smashed in windshields. How is it that I’m exactly where I was. Or how is it that I’m in love. I don’t know how else to survive, perhaps, the temperature as I write 22 degrees outside, a light snow falling, a future so blank it’s difficult, really, to wake up in the mornings. Except. She exists. And I keep waking up, and I know even the weather is unsure of what will come next. Winter will end when it’s ready. The flowers who had already bloomed, who are hanging, heads down, at the edge of the house, will return. She will be here when she's ready, and I will walk outside and hear each snowflake as it melts, each flower as it blooms. Her pulse, quickening.

A Lull, An Icicle

Here’s my question, Bentley: what does it mean to love only in the winter, when all is either asleep or dead, when the ground divides, the asphalt disappears in spheres, in black holes. The same as. What I can’t explain. This genderlessness of winter. The wool, the thick coats, the hats. Who doesn’t become invisible. Who isn’t suddenly approachable. A wallet left alone in the snow. A girl. A boy. One and the same. I love everyone, the rest of me so numb there’s nothing else to feel. The empty streets, the wallet that had fallen out of my pocket, waiting on my return. I love each thief, stuck inside, beside a radiator, a space heater, a cup of cocoa.

I love a friend here, a friend there, trying to get out of bed in the mornings, to see as much daylight as possible, to forget about their uncertain futures. I love that I’m not the only one. And I love the digital voice I wake up to in the mornings, fall asleep to at night, love the person it belongs to. I can admit it. But it’s only possible when I can’t over think it, when there’s nothing else to think about but the layers of clothing needed, the glove covering the hand, a scarf protecting the lungs. When it snows horizontally and everything in the world disappears and equalizes and I can’t step outside for days. When the streets shimmer and windows turn to ice. When the malls and the theaters and the universities shut down and the temperatures drop below zero and everyone is like me: desensitized. This heart opens. It’s easier in the winter, Bentley.

Even right now, at this moment: the neighbor’s elderly cat screaming at the door, the distance, the dreams, the dead, even myself. Right now, it’s true. And how much easier it is, Bentley, when it’s too cold to stand below the icicles and wait for one to fall to pierce the chest.

A moment of clarity

Die Ford Die

and take it with you, the whole parenthesis
of it, opening upwards, smile-like, slime-like,
to the world, containing everything and everything
that comes just after it. You will take my election signs
and the snow that's covered them just after your passing
through this world and into another, after one of many passing
plays broadcast on ESPN classic, you in maze,
in maize and blue. And as you go into it, the cool
blackafter, all afterburners and more than occasional
vitriol, take the clot of mourning with—
haul it all away, Xmas trees in the weeks
after the holiday, still clotted with lights. You were a light
of sorts, and sixty thousand in Grand Rapids
pressed their bodies together in a hundred plus lines
weaving back and forth in a warehouse, spilling like light
from lampposts weaving in the snowy haze
out into the street and freezing. We gathered
here, hearing aids and walking aids, and special
teacher's aides and all other kinds of aids, just
to watch the funeral procession crawl up I-196,
least venerated of Interstates, towards one of the outposts
on the trail to your final rest. Your name was
vapor trail on all our lips, even mine, these slipping things
that never had much to say for you, and if you were
a President, I barely knew it; you were past tense for me,
a memory of pardon, airport, and one
of this city's few claims on sweet hereafter.
But I stood there too in the wind and cold,
above the winding road, not above exactly,
as no one stood above your procession as it passed,
leaving the overpasses only half-filled out of ceremony,
but we were there. If you were there, then you can say
you were, and there we were together, hands clammed
together, humming, almost, with something like the galaxy
of excitement we reserve for celebrity approach.

There were some flags. And I can say, here
if not elsewhere, that I felt something,
strange as that may be, for you or your idea,
not you in fiction, devoured by wolves, as if
you could be anything other than fiction and if
we could know the body as we do the story, and
I was cold and I was there and there
we were together, triangulated, you and I
and more than sixty thousand who had a kind
of rabid love for you, their kin, their kine, and there
were almost contrails in the sky from fighter jets
who had come through hours ago in a dry run for their
maneuvers during the last of your many funerals,
and I wish they came together better, spelled something
out in the chemical remains of fire and refracted light,
but I could barely see them, and then I could barely see,
and there is very little left to say.

No snow still for the dead Gerald R. Ford

Sad day of sorts. Ford is gone and there will not be snow to await his body's return to Michigan, probably. Perhaps we will see some kind of spontaneous majesty from the skies, but the middling weather feels like it's here for a while.

When the ground is frozen much more is required to inter a body in the earth. One must warm the ground before digging, or else use special equipment, or else blast its frozen heart away with explosive charges and then dig, the last of these being problematic in cemeteries for obvious possible zombie reasons, for all-too-clear indian burial ground reasons, and certainly that would not be acceptable in the quiet heart of the city in very early January, upon a solemn occasion such as this.

I will be there in attendance, at the public viewing for Ford. I hope for snow. I turn my eyes up to the clouds and think of the physical remains of the former president, the only president never elected to the post of either Vice President or the Presidency itself. I hope it snows for you, Ford. I hope it covers the world again in white.

Well met, then, Willard

I am here, have been here in waiting. Waiting for weather—as you (probably) know, there is not a spot of it on the ground anymore. Has not been for weeks it seems. And close now to the holidays, just in sight of them, still the ground is bare, if wet and watched over by consistent wind. I wish for it, for winter, if this is what it is, what we can call it. We have passed the solstice just yesterday which means the days begin their game of lengthening again.

It is dark out in the world. There is no poetry in the darkness. There is no language in the heart of it, the occasional flick of light, the loneliness, the quietude. I could map your face onto it but where would that leave me—here, still, the sound of typewriter keys striking the faceplate as I write my way into it, whether the weather sees fit to grant legitimacy, a brief white blast, a taste of it at least, or if it does not.

Trapped under snow or rain or fog

Or wind: there goes a roof, a cow, any semblance of thought. My body landing miles no months away. But I'm back, Bentley, I'm back.