My cousin died today. Only 51, only 10 weeks since the first suspicion of the cancer. She lived in Arkansas, and I haven’t been in Arkansas since the year Carter ran his big grin for president. I don’t know her favorite color, or what she may have seen in the clouds that hang over the river, where it escapes Oklahoma and falls away to waste itself in the Mississippi. I rarely feel so small, confessing what I do not know, and having no defense.
It’s hard to say, but let’s imagine blue. Sometime maybe I’ll find out if I’m right. And animals – let’s believe in dogs, evaporated from the lakes I have lost in thirty years of sedimentary forgetting. That explains everything, except why it seems to be so cold tonight.
Well, she’s met up with good company, there beyond the fields. But it’s not for us tonight. Somebody get the gate, and let’s go in.
Category Archives: stories
how do you do
the blog that stops at nothing will let this speak for itself, lest we forget…
No no, we should have this to caption it:
It was a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among the western democracies. When those who warned about a coming crisis — the rise of fascism and Nazism — were ridiculed and ignored.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Address at the 88th Annual American Legion National Convention, Salt Lake City, Utah, Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Truer words were never spoken.
uh oh, we’ve lost it
Says here the US has lost control in Iraq. Holy crap.
Wait, I never knew the US had control in Iraq. Did I miss a memo?
seeded, sleeping
Last month, I posted a paragraph which was giving me a struggle – couldn’t find the inspiration for it. A few of you encouraged me to stay the course. I thought you might be interested in where it’s going so far. This is a second draft.
The Dark Room (working title)
And I find it kind of funnyI find it kind of sadThe dreams in which I’m dyingAre the best I’ve ever had.[1]The room is full of winter dark, but his mind is full of the feeling of summer. It’s a longing, a kind of love of the way it stays warm all night, so that he can sleep with the fan on; love of that moment when he parks the car in the shade and wants nothing so much as to lay across the seats and sleep in the close air through the afternoon. What does it take, he wonders, to hold on to moments like that? How is it possible for a man to fend off the winter that’s always seeded, sleeping, in his heart?He has a ritual for finding sleep. At midnight, he goes out on the balcony, no matter the weather, and stands there cross-armed. He looks down at the dull glow of the city, the inky void where the river runs, and the outline of the hills in the distance. Those he can see like the edge of a saw if the moon is out. He thinks of nothing but how terrible the day was; long and stinging like a biting fly. Frequently painful but vital, like the lancing and drainage of some torn, infected thing. His life is resistant to
medication.What am I doing out here, in the world, with its hard smells and bad water? Oil and water do not mix. I should be in bed. It’s late, isn’t it? It feels like it must be midnight; I’m getting that ache between my shoulder blades and my eyes are tired. I should rest, pull the covers over my head and breathe slowly in the dark.
Back inside, he goes around to check the locks and put out the lights, and takes a long pull on the bottle of whatever juice is chilling in the fridge.As a child, he would lie awake a while, on his back, and pull the covers over his head. He would die there just a little, in the darkness of his room, arms across his chest. He could hear his parents’ television droning down the hall, and then their laughter. Imagine his pure little face incorrupt in a beautiful casket of rosewood, where he could see himself mourned by classmates and teachers awakened, finally, to the obvious truth of his greatness. They had missed his special gifts, and now they paid the price in pure loss. No hope, no remedy, but now at least they were sorry, and sprinkled his corpse with their tears.
Now at 45, these vestiges of that waking dream persist: He lays on his side and pulls up the sheet, over his head, smelling the essential nearly dead scent of self. He drifts off disillusioned, having seen life stop but then go on, too many times. No lessons learned, no abject repentance; just a few days of cold cuts and hot dish, packaged napkins, and finally the lawn to mow. Someone has to pay the bills, divide the loot. There must be a thousand snapshots in those boxes there, and why would he keep all these receipts?
Sometimes sleep won’t come at first, so he reaches out and feels for the phone beside the bed, keeping his eyes closed, and listens to the dial tone. He lets it moan into his ear, getting louder and louder in the abject silence of his room. This is what he needs to hear, the perfect voice of everyone on Earth. The humming even of the dead.So when the voices come, through the blanket, from the bland wallpaper or the clock that hangs there, they come as just a breath. The voice of his mother sometimes, gathered like the echo of wind in a shell. Or someone else; he never knows. But there is always a voice in his head as he waits for sleep, and he considers it a kind of art. As if he set up a canvas by the muddy river, and watched as the river painted itself.[1] Tears For Fears, “Mad World.”
© 2006 by Kyle Kimberlin
all rights reserved
guess that’s us
Muzio Clementi, who had seen (the Razumovsky Quartets) in manuscript, remarked to Beethoven “Surely you don’t consider these works to be music!” To which Beethoven replied: “Oh, they are not for you, but for a later age.”
rascals
The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.-Thomas Paine, philosopher and writer (1737-1809)
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world’s general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing.
We’ve been expecting this, haven’t we? I think we’re already seeing the last throes of many smaller daily papers. And it makes me sorry, because I’ve always liked newspapers. Since junior high school, when I started reading the paper during the Watergate scandal and the fall of Nixon.
In my mind, a good newspaper — any good news source — is like a large rock in a river, in the flow of events both important and trivial. So my question is this: As journalism dies and gives way to cyber-information, how do we trust the river itself, without its rocks?
morley’s doorway
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
-Christopher Morley, writer (1890-1957)
Oh yes. I’m presently working on a short piece that’s entirely about what a man does in the moments before he falls asleep each night. That little ritual of fresh darkness, you know. Do you have one? Maybe you start out on your back, think about work a while, roll onto your left side and pray — or think about sex — maybe watch TV and let the set turn itself off. Maybe you’re working your way through The Brothers Karamazov, and your wake up at 2am, with the damned massive thing smashing your nose.
I listen to CDs of mountain streams or ocean surf. Maybe I think about toy trains. No no, that’s not it. Maybe I get fetal and imagine ten red-eyed coyotes padding through the orchard, past the playground and the swimming pool, ignoring the mailbox like I do, and resting on their haunches at the bottom of the stairs. Maybe they doze toward dawn, and dream of me, descending with a great bowl of Starbucks frappucino and ten stout straws.
My point is that all the times and places of transition between consciousness and unconsciousness, wake and sleeping, living and dying, sin and redemption, sane and coocoo for cocopuffs, are target rich environments for us mad poets.
I spend a lot of time crouching there in Morley’s doorway, wishing he’d thought to deck the transom with mistletoe.
headlines – apply directly to forehead
OK, it’s time for a little levity on this blog. I just got this from my Mom. You’ve seen it before, no doubt, but it sure handed me a few chuckles. Enjoy.
THE YEAR’S BEST [actual] HEADLINES OF 2005:
Something Went Wrong In Jet Crash, Expert Says
Police Begin Campaign To Run Down Jaywalkers
Is There A Ring Of Debris Around Uranus?
Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over
Miners Refuse To Work After Death
Juvenile Court To Try Shooting Defendant
War Dims Hope For Peace
If Strike Isn’t Settled Quickly, It May Last Awhile
Cold Wave Linked To Temperatures
Enfield (London) Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide
Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges !
Man Struck By Lightning: Faces Battery Charge
New Study Of Obesity Looks For Larger Test Group
Astronaut Takes Blame For Gas In Spacecraft
Kids Make Nutritious Snacks
Local High School Dropouts Cut In Half
Hospitals Are Sued By 7 Foot Doctors
Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead
kill ’em all!
Scientists have developed a way of ‘executing’ cancer cells.
Healthy cells have a built-in process which means they commit suicide if something is wrong, a process which fails in cancer cells.
The University of Illinois team created a synthetic molecule which caused cancer cells to self-destruct.
Cancer experts said the study, in Nature Chemical Biology, offered ‘exciting possibilities’ for new ways of treating the disease.
yip yip
Do yo ever sit there in your house on a afternoon like this, listening as I am to the drone of the fan as it sweeps side to side, sifting cool air through the room, and wonder what seeds were planted in your childhood, to bring your garden to it’s present state of general disarray?
Well, I know a lot of people do, but not me. I once heard a wise person say something like this:
If you’re walking down the road, and a big old rottweiler comes running up and bites you on the backside and won’t let go, you don’t stop and look down and ask him if he had a challenging puppyhood. Whether he had to push and shove and struggle to finally get weaned, because the bitch was indifferent and it was a rough litter anyway. Whether maybe his inner puppy needs a cookie. You get the dog off your ass and move on.
Anyhoo, here’s a poem.
The Wind, One Brilliant Day
The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.“In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I’d like all the odor of your roses.”“I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead.”“Well then, I’ll take the withered petals
and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain.”the wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:
“What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?”Antonio Machado
Translated by Robert Bly
sex
Now that I have your attention, I’m wondering about this, from the text of the proclamation announcing the 19th Amendment, which gave woment the right to vote:
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
I can’t help wondering if Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, whose proclamation it was, didn’t intend to say gender instead. I mean, if you’re having sex in the room while I’m trying to vote, I’m going to abridge your rights, with a folding chair upside your head.
I’m just sayin …
Metaphor 