Is sentiment a bad thing in writing? To be avoided, like incomplete sentences or beginning a sentence with an article? And shunned? Well. I don’t know, but I was watching a movie earlier, in which a writer is asking someone what they think of his new novel, and refers to sentimentality as if it were bad. I think maybe we like to be sentimental. We like to go into the dark, warm places where the purblind puppies of memory are sleeping.

Pictures Of My Forgetting

Since I am being forgotten by time,
I offer these pictures of time I am losing.

I tell you I am aging relentlessly, blindly,
Open to the ocean air, like a sash window
framed by peeling paint. That’s how it is.
But I have been held close, held up,
into sunlight and moon wind, into branches
of old trees, held so tenderly and helped
to lean out over water rushing into death.

You and I are still alive. Don’t be afraid.

You know that life is hiding from us, though
we caught a glimpse this morning, where
it fell as light on the carpet by the door.
It rose and flew like a moth down the long
hall and disappeared. As a child I saw it rest
that way. It would lie by the window while
morning arrived and my grandmother
was singing in another room. It fluttered
by and rested a while on my hand. It spread
its wings and loved me, whispering a psalm.

The house is gone but not that room, not yet.

Look at this candle on the desk. Its tiny flame
is all we know of fire, no less than a sun. And all of
time is moving in this single clock. I wind it
twice a week and see behind the glass the marks
where Papa’s fingers brushed its face. We do not
die, his garden goes on forever. So we can see
him planting tomatoes in a day of late spring,
with Easter arisen, swaying in green
and yellow light. A breeze parts Grandma’s
linens drying on the line.

That day will live as long as we want it to.

From a distance he appears soft and kind
and now he is visible only at the focal length
of years. Seated on the sofa in an umber light
he sets his watch. Half past eternity. He looks
up at us as if to speak, but so much silence falls
between. Did he remember, as the evening
softened and grew dim, the cry of the dogs
through the tangled woods?

Did they know how much they were loved?

I look around and see that I am home.
But from where? I must have been
somewhere, and returned bearing something.
I ache, I am tired from the weight of it.

The mind is vast and powerful.
It is an empire of its own.
It has a harbor full of ships
and armies raised for civil war.

I send out ambassadors into the darkness
dripping from the trees about my house.

Did you see me pass by yesterday
or any time this afternoon?
I would have been wearing this shirt,
this shade of old wine with blue stripes.

I might have looked this full of sin,
this lost. I would have been walking
alone, carrying everything.

Kyle Kimberlin
August 27, 2007

… Then the sea,
which is blue steel, winter cold
and hungry, in need of sleep.
Boats, oil rigs, islands, sea birds
lost and homeless, sick to death
of fish, and then the setting sky.
Ruby, saffron, tangerine, shouldering
cobalt and lapis lazuli….

from The View From Here
c.2006 Kyle Kimberlin

There is a light

beyond the window

and leaves beyond the light

and the clock pretending life

along the wall

and I in the midst of it

wishing for you

c.2007 Kyle Kimberlin

I am more human in darkness.
At night I hear things, soft things
in the wind. And I move slowly,
carefully through the house
alone. Sometimes in halfsleep,
I hear my mothers’ voice calling
my name, just once, just that.
And I remember the smiles of dogs.

There is not so much left of me
as you might imagine from my size,
but I am a man when the sun is gone.
Let’s go out, in the dew
and the soft snore of the freeway,
and I will conjure you owls.

We can hear him coming, shoes crunching
on the hardpack and sparse gravel. And just
above the push and pull of his breathing,
the thin and urgent whisper of a prayer.
Something about mercy, but nothing
to explain his coming through the juniper
green and pale gray chaparral.
Just out for a walk, to clear his mind.

He will not stop to talk, but looks
at the stones ahead of him, at the sky
gone to dishwater in the afternoon,
then away at the boats where they move
to their moorings for another night
with no rain or wind. For a moment,
everything is quiet here and quickly fading.
A great blue heron sails for home.
A woman walks a massive dog.

Our man can’t be worried for Rottweilers,
or fear the train that rises up and lunges,
bleating, from the darkening grove of cypress,
and pounds away behind a hill.
He has his own concerns.
Some people, even in his love for them,
seem bent on pain. He tries to warn them,
but they just won’t hear.
So he has a worried mind for life itself,
for all the cracking crystal bones of it.

He is alone, except for you and me
and the trees, and the last of the sun.
A sliver of hot coal, fused to the sky
beyond the islands and the sea.
Do you see what he’s doing?
Holding on to all of this, time and place,
to even the rose and saffron dying
in the highest clouds, and all the trees
that fade to charcoal gray.
He holds it all together with his prayers.

At home, he climbs the stairs and listens
to his breathing, step by step. The last cry
of the train has faded now, and everything
is turning toward its end.
The daily round come round again,
and nothing to be done for it but hope.
It leaves him spent and drained, as though
he needed emptying for night to come.
He locks the door behind him, kicks off
his shoes against the baseboard by the rug,
and goes from room to room to light the lights.

Why does it always have to end this way?
He counts his footsteps up and down the hall,
and puts a pot of water on for tea.
He has a hundred books he ought to read,
and concertos for the violin.
If you asked the number of his clocks,
he’d simply shrug and look away.

He does not believe in ghosts, but he
believes in memory. Grandpa comes in
leaning on crutches, after the news
has all been read, to check the locks
and dim the lights. Grandma layers blankets
on the beds. In every room a dog
is keeping watch. They do not speak
or make a sound, though some nights
he thinks he hears an old dog sigh.
His memory has a gift for mimicking the wind.

Lying awake, he thinks of their house
in the long valley, and Christmas, and the fog
that would come before morning.
By dawn the trees would be submerged,
and all the neighbors’ homes were sunken,
gone to God. He loved those mornings,
lost at sea, with scrambled eggs
and Papa with his newspapers.
By noon the sea would melt, give up her dead.

Now he just keeps still and tries to sleep,
and listens to the gently settling house.

The birds wake up at six o’clock;
they’re cheeping in the myrtle hedge.
It’s warm enough this time of year
to make them glad. He sleeps
a little more, and dreams of organizing shadows
into words, then chasing them in panic
through a book. At eight o’clock he eats
two eggs, then shaves and drives to town.

He always signals turns, as if nothing
changes course without a plan. Nothing
veers away and winds up lost, not
if he holds so tightly to the wheel.
And watches how the light comes
smoothly through the glass, not broken
into facets as in a world of quartz.
Such great responsibility, holding on
to everything with tired hands.
Lord have mercy, it is all so much
and gone so fast. He whispers
this prayer for more time,
another chance, and a firm grip
so that all of this will live.

(c) Kyle Kimberlin
July 5, 2007