Words

July 2009

Day One: Minneapolis to Billings

In the beginning there were cornfields, wheat fields, turkey factories, and words. Minnesota sprawled northward before me in waves of farmland and commercialism. Miles of billboards lining both sides of the highway heralded every little colony of prefab houses and fast food: Buy an RV, Ride the Superslide at Wolf Creek Lodge, Don’t Abort Your Fetus. Images bigger than your car. Letters taller than you.

I was almost to Montana when I finally found myself alone with the earth. Here were bare rock, wild grass, gunmetal rivers. Red dirt showed on the paths cut through the sagebrush. I turned off the radio. My own mind fell silent, and I drove on.

Day 2: Billings to Mesquite

I may need to live in the desert. Not that I belong there. This land rejects humanity with scalding rock and sand and spiny brush. This is not a home-place to which one belongs but a stage on which one is stranded agape, the bare plain bounded by mountains like an amphitheatre. Here is an arena for bold endeavors. Let me stand in the glare of that naked sun, and words will come in time. They will clatter from me like stones on dry stones, hard and true, hot as though newborn from fire.

Day 4: Mesquite to Cambria by way of Las Vegas

In the midst of the desert’s stillness breaks a sudden chaos of color, sound, and the human image, like a perpetually exploding bomb. An ersatz Roman palace stands across the street from an ersatz French estate, down the street from the candy-colored Victorian townhouses, the oversized Arabian bordello, and the undersized Eiffel Tower. The city is as senseless in its evocation of human civilization as the surrounding wilderness in its rejection of it. Vegas testifies in sound and fury, and the rest is silence.

Some hours’ driving farther, out in the wastes, there are other, smaller outposts. The towns raise glowing marquees like standards against the dark mountains: CHEVRON, CONOCO, MCDONALDS, BEST WESTERN: War camps mustered on the floor of the plain, awaiting battle with what implacable force they know not. Perhaps they fight it every day, with light and speech, with habit.

In smaller camps, the signs refer not to companies but to necessities of life: GAS, FOOD, MOTEL, CASINO. Black letters painted on white-washed wood. A rusted trailer stove in and listing to one side behind a splintered shack.

August, 2009

The Farm

A pig barks, a rooster shrieks, “What I do is me. For that I came.” What grace enacts itself in curve of neck, in stance, in wing, or rhythm of hands coiling a rubber hose is native to its materials and its lease not paid with an exquisite sacrifice but claimed only and irrefutably by blood rushing through arteries and veins.

The Sun Worshippers

We watched the path of the sun. We stood on the back porch and turned right in the morning. We turned left in the evening. The birth of each day was set on the hills to the east and its departing on the hills to the west so that the house was bounded and held in place by banks of dusty, rose-colored and saffron sky.

The mornings were without dew, as though the world had not slept but only waited quietly for the return of the sun. As the sun climbed, windows were shut, shades were lowered first on the eastern sides of the barns and houses, then on the other sides. Fans were switched on. At noon the swamp coolers were turned on it the pig barn.

We made our rounds four times a day, counted every pig, sheep, duck, goose, chicken, turkey, rabbit, cow, steer, donkey, and goat. We raked straw. We filled buckets with water and scrubbed the automated water troughs. Our faces were black with dirt, our hands with dirt and the oils of animals’ skins. Our mouths were full of straw dust. The sun burned white in a sky the faded blue of old photographs and baked our skin brown and dried instantly the small cuts torn in our hands and arms.

As the sun descended, the residents were herded back indoors. Fans were shut off, blinds raised, shutters opened. Every animal was counted once again.

The cat followed us up the dirt road back to the house that was held in place by dawn and dusk, in which one who had returned early from work was baking bread in the cool of the air-conditioned kitchen. We stood on the porch to watch the sun sink. A house stood across from us on the top of a hill, and a wind turbine spun next to it. By these the light of the ebbing day was measured until both were lost in darkness.

The Stars

I woke in the night and walked outside to lie beneath the galaxies and was at high tide, the mind washed full into the body, flooding ears and nose and mouth and eyes. The mind pressed against the shores of this world as though in love with it – as though it could breach the demarcation wrought of this flesh and sink into the spaces left for it between the stars, and seep into the rocky soil, there to lie with tree roots and the bones of the earth.

Drought

6-1-09

When I returned to Minneapolis, the first bloom had not yet begun to wane from the lilacs and crabapple trees, nor had the sere leaves fallen in September yet crumbled completely to dust at their feet. Spring was young and thirsty, stirring petals in the dry creek bed. There was a groaning of frogs, a perpetual rustling of leaves: of the sea an inland echo that, tempered by the revisiting death of winter, uttered not any sublime, inhuman polyphony but only “hush, hush.”

There was a deep peace on the avenues, risen from the ground like fog where no fog was, and the shadows held still on Summit beside the rustic mansions of limestone and dark wood. The bells rang from the cathedral and from the Basilica for spring weddings. The forecast called for no rain and still no rain as the city began the third summer of its drought.

The last tide to wash over this place was made of glaciers, the detritus of whose wake lies since and ever beached, and these ten thousand lakes are drying tide pools.

Gods

May 13, 2009 (San Francisco to Phoenix): Earth

Past San Bernardino lies a scrubland whose naked hills are the color of flesh, not sensuous but thrilling and obscene.

The sun has burnt the grass to red and golden straw. Every rusted tractor standing alone on the desert floor looks like a shipwreck and whole towns of battered, metal ranch houses like the abandoned base camps of a vain human adventure that wasted itself upon the plain and left no survivors nor even any dry bones.

Even the decadent fields of green that intermittently set themselves against the pale dust of their surroundings, and that are made of vine-draped arbors or rows of trees, appear not as any testimony of human presence but as the armor, soon to be shed, of one chthonic power at war with another.



May 14, 2009 (Phoenix to Las Cruces): Bones

I walked in the mountains north of the city, where were heat and thirst. Gnarled, spined, desiccated brush clung to rocks that were black as iron and could scald your hand. This was a landscape drawn completely out of the numinous mists and burnt to a perfect clarity: a place definite and finished.

I had come to these desert paths to court loneliness, having after all been a student of poetry once. But I had brought too little to drink, and what I felt instead was an almost religious yearning for water. My heart swelled painfully. I believed I had loved nothing and no one better.

At 9:00 AM the air was already 95 degrees Fahrenheit. As I breathed, it dried my gums and the roof of my mouth as though to stone. I could feel the shape of my skull.

The awe I had for what surrounded me was of the primal sort: made of fear and egoless hatred. This dust and rock did not impress my soul with some sublime and horrible insinuation (about scale, meaning, identity) but threatened the life of my body like a jealous god.



May 15, 2009 (White Sands National Monument): Flesh

I drive north and east of Las Cruces. The scrub cover grows thicker over the dust and tawny sand. The land undulates slowly. Then suddenly before me is a desert of white dunes, like the immaculate body of God asleep east of the San Andreas Mountains, east of the earth’s scored and dusky bones.

I leave my car and enter the alkali flats stumbling and almost blind. There I find a dark object on the sands: a small bat with its wings pleated about it and its toes curled, dried light as paper. A dark body, a stranger, utterly alone save for the moment I sit beside it. I am a dark body, sun burnt, frayed at the fingertips. I am red and veined, engorged with blood.



May 16, 2009 (Fort Stockton, TX, to Austin): Rain

Again a garden. First nothing but sand-colored rock sparsely stubbled with low, dull-green brush. You could see the weather coming five miles away. By noon, the dark ceiling of the sky had closed over the plains. A smell of wet rock rose from the ground. Then the rain poured down, and lightening tore the midday dusk asunder. There rose taller trees standing in wet, green grass and fields all wind-sown with yellow wildflowers. I turned onto US-290, a country road that winds through orchards and old frontier towns whose slow decay is clothed and ornamented by moss-covered trees – a ruination less naked, less monumental than that of the farmhouses kneeling with broken spines in the desert. Here will grow peaches, tomatoes, and lavender. Here is a smell of wet leaves. A raw but gentle air.



May 17, 2009 (Austin to Oklahoma City to Emporia, KS): Grass, Shit

The stockyards of Oklahoma City are paved with brick, and the brick is covered with an inch or two of cattle shit. The shiny black cattle have been delivered here from open rangeland, as I can tell from their branded flanks. They look not sick nor afraid, only hot. This is a place of waiting, and they abide. What else? Some low and low to each other or anyone who might hear, but most lie curled in the dung, rocked gently by their own panting.

A worker calls up to me from an aisle between the pens as I stand on the catwalk. Among the stoic, middle-aged, white cowboys roving or lazing about the yards, he is the lone Mexican, speeding around in a muddy ATV in coveralls, sunglasses, and a jaunty checkered cap. The others are possessed of that hardscrabble country disposition that greets a smile and a friendly wave from a stranger with a look to the effect of, “Yup, well, you’re here,” but this guy likes visitors. They get people from all over, he says, white, black, Chinese, trying to take pictures. Sometimes they want to take pictures of him. His name is Francisco. The work is hard work, dirty work. No one is clean here. Guys get kicked, sometimes so hard that they limp away to the hospital. Men come looking for work and leave in a week, a month, because the cows are crazy and the whole place floods when it rains. But Francisco has worked here a long, long time. Too long. He never calls in sick when it rains. After all, the boss hands him a check every week. He used to work in restaurants as a chef. Maybe he’ll go back to that, but it’s all cheap labor. Money is money, he says, money is money. Money is money, I repeat, shrugging my shoulders. Francisco tells me to stop by and say hello next time I pass through Oklahoma City. I will. San Francisco, Stockyards Francisco. The map is shit-spattered with points that are places insisting on a return.

I stomp the manure out of my boot treads, get back in the car, and drive north through Oklahoma and Kansas along I-35, on whose shoulders lie shredded tires and belly-up armadillos with their faces smashed to pulp. The Flint Hills of Kansas are the last stretch of original American prairie. Like armadas of clouds across the sky, herds of cattle drift over this enormous lawn, growing fat on the bluestem, soon to be driven into trucks headed south. Green fields spread to the horizon uninterrupted, like a pasture tamed through some enormous labor, but the creek beds are made of mud as red as though it were dyed with the earth’s blood or with the blood of the multitudes long since dead and compounded below – silent but not harmless spirits.



May 18, 2009 (Emporia to Minneapolis): Dirt

Beside the highway, tractors raise dust on black fields still strewn with the waste of crops I saw in their ripeness as I drove west eight months ago. Cattle browse the deep grass ditches. Rusty well-pumps bow like perpetual penitents.

I return. I return to roadwork, mowers on the median, suburban commercial sprawl. I return to brown, slow rivers sunk in the flatlands, to marshes, to bright red barns, to modern farmhouses flanked by silos and stands of cottonwood that shelter them incompletely on the naked fields. I will not drive in silence even for five minutes here. I could not endure to pass with bare senses through such expanse of tamed land. In two months, the corn will be high as an elephant’s eye. Corn and soybeans all around and all over, as far as human eye can see.

When in Rome

While driving through the southwest, I turned on the radio and attempted to acquire an appreciation for country music. Within ten minutes, two songs had obligingly provided summaries of the subject matter I would be encountering. Country, I gathered, celebrates all things really American, which include:

• High school proms
• Springsteen songs
• Rides in Chevrolets
• A man on the moon
• Fireflies in June
• Kids selling lemonade
• Cities and farms
• Open arms
• One nation under God
• A kid with a chance
• A rock-and-roll band
• A farmer cutting hay
• A big flag flyin’ in the summer wind over a hero’s grave
• The front pew of a wooden white church
• Courthouse clocks that still don’t work
• Slant rhymes


The music to which I am accustomed, loosely categorized as alt-rock, tends to pace around its subjects, striving to reveal the truth about some idea or experience by complicating it almost beyond recognition. From what I heard in Arizona through Kansas, however, country music don’t complicate nothing. It’s nailed together with concrete images and simple metaphors, and its material is narratives.

Love stories dominate. During one stretch of driving, I heard the tales of five men who married their high school sweethearts, one whose daddy married his high school sweetheart, one who married his third-grade sweetheart, one married a woman with whom he slow-danced in a bar, and one who was proud to be a “stand by your woman man.” These twang-voiced fellows get down on one knee to propose. They fantasize about their wives having a baby on the way, their wives growing gray-haired. They are often the same men, or at least too similar to them for me to distinguish, who sing paeans to soldiers and righteous war, but their wars are all overseas against an unseen enemy (who, though the subject is never breached, almost certainly did not take state back in ’63 or woo a homecoming queen). The homeland is a bastion of peace, where men of integrity safely inherit and perform a cycle of domestic rites.

Fidelity is exalted, and marriage is as much a forgone conclusion in these songs as in a Shakespearean comedy, though the version of the songs is much sweeter and considerably less troubled, less sexy.

I heard also, however, specimens of a randier strain of country music. This subgenre presents a worldview kindred to one prevalent in contemporary hip hop. The piece “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk,” for instance, addresses many of the same themes explored by Juvenile’s “Back that Ass Up.” Along with nation, family, small town values, and true love, therefore, the country man can be said also to love the sight of a woman with a rear-end so round, he can’t imagine how she even got them britches on.

Relenting

Three weeks ago, I stumbled upon some flaw in my left knee. I can no longer run.

I subside. With relief I subside. I turn back from the extremity. I return.

I had thought to escape, run wild into space to be cold-hearted and lost forever. But gravity has me, and I go back – not to stay, beached, but to visit that shoal again, again. I am the tide washing in again. I am the orbiter swung back around.

Possessions

March 21, 2009

Though I have been inside few of San Francisco’s hidden places, its dim rooms pounding with music or warm, cluttered rooms whose windows glow in the night, though I have not wormed my way into the city nor stumbled in a drunken rapture through its doors, I feel I know the place.

This morning I took my tea to the rocky outcrop at the end of the street and stood there naming what lay below me: There was Stern Grove, the Stonestown Galleria, Lake Merced, Fort Funston. To the east the Bay. To the north Davis Hill. To the west the Pacific. I have not seen the city’s secrets, but I have seen the pattern they form in aggregate, their skeletal reef, like a map spread at my feet. I have stood over it and looked down, turning in a circle: the bay, the hills, the ocean, the hills. I have been reminded that I am living on the surface of the earth.

Therefore, much to my surprise, San Francisco is more intelligible than Minneapolis, which must be navigated from the inside. One has no map there but a dim constellation of feelings, like a constellation of black holes, its objects detectable only by the effects of their gravity. Somewhere to the north there is downtown, a river, train yards. There are neighborhoods too dangerous to enter, though one cannot say for certain where their borders lie; one’s path is bent away from them like light bent around a great, dense mass in space. There is a lake somewhere nearby. There is a park. One cannot see one’s way. One feels one’s way, running hands over railings and walls, stumbling upon new places, perpetually surprised. Minneapolis is small and full of secrets, like an attic where sun slanting through a dirty window illuminates columns of swirling dust and leaves the corners in shadow. It bears its history as an attic does, letting it grow worn and dusty but also cherishing it, holding it safe to be discovered by the grandchildren on some rainy day.


February 21, 2009

Driving up the coast, I saw clinging to the sea cliffs houses whose entire fronts were banks of windows. I wondered in what ways I would have to reshape my life to possess a perpetual window onto such gorgeousness.

It is better that I never do. I would have to become voracious. I would have to indenture myself to some bland undertaking and set the house with the wall of windows as my exceeding great reward – labor dimly for the promise of a long view into the west. And for what, in the end? To live every day on the continent’s extremity, with the ocean crashing at my feet, and make no headway against that confounding beauty? My elation would be overthrown by familiarity or made dumb by the overwhelming insistence of the scene. It would be to have the window, not the beauty: to have what I desire always before me, outside of me. Better to live inland, in exile from it, but hold it in my mind like a fountain of language and like a cherished beacon casting illumination over some humbler landscape.

Away

February 21, 2009

(Elma, WA, by way of Hwy 101)

So up the coast I went, from dawn until midnight, hurtling along the coastal highway with my mouth hanging open. I stared so hard at everything around that I was in constant peril of smashing into the side of a cliff or plunging into the sea. The land itself looked to have some such inclination, always leaning like a wedge into the ocean, with a trail of small, rocky islands scattered before it as though it had flung itself at the horizon, broken, and fallen.

I hurtled through the little coastal towns of souvenir shops, gas stations, and rickety houses – by day like some curious flotsam that had washed up these fifty years past, by night like shoals of multicolored light in a sea of darkness.

In Oregon, the evergreen forest grows right down to the water, and the trees stand with their feet in the white sand. I think such sights are almost too beautiful, confluences of Paradise and Eden – nature decadent, nature unspoiled.



February 23, 2009

(Seattle)

While M was at work, I took a walk through Beacon Hill and along the bank of Lake Washington. Seattle in February feels autumnal, sedate. The trees are bare-armed and thick with moss, standing on lawns of sparse, dull grass and fallen leaves. They are trees of modest proportions and unostentatious postures. No towering cypress, no palm, no rigid desert trees standing sentinel. There were some pale, yellow crocuses gathered about the foot of a sapling on a boulevard. There was something of Minneapolis, something of Bennington, Vermont. Ambling by the water, I felt like a convalescent, my senses muted, my restlessness palliated. The naked trees cast a mottled shadow on the mind, threatening peace. The sky dims at the horizon, even at midday, and the edges of the mind dim.



April 4

(back in San Francisco)

A long walk to Pacifica reminded me again how different this city is from the one where I was born. There is such a difference in the way the genius of the place makes itself felt.

The beauty of Minneapolis is an old ghost with creaky joints. It walks slowly beside you, laying a hand on your shoulder as you cross the Hennepin Ave. Bridge, as you stand beneath the mill ruins. It rumbles in the throat with the engines of buses that struggle awake in the morning cold.

The beauty of San Francisco smacks you right in the face. It smacks you silly, and the April wind lashes your clothes about you, spins you around, and drives you downhill with your mouth agape.

One beauty is a titan with a crumbling face, with rust stains running from the mouth. The other, though as old, approaches you always as a young god at the height of its powers. It flexes its muscles; it beats its chest, with the wind rushing in from the ocean and waves smashing against the rocks. Strong and amorous, it bares its best treasures at once and demands you fall in love. I was of course swept off my feet. But I have been here some months now. I have woke of a morning and, looking out over the hills covered in dingy, pastel squares of houses, thought it an ugly city. Sometimes the sun shines too brightly for one raised further north, and inland, and beneath the shade of elms.

I begin to miss the green corridors of the avenues. Ivy-covered houses. Hastas. Grim skies promising snow. Promising thunderstorms. Yellow skies before hail. The faceless, handless statue of Longfellow standing alone in that forgotten field. Shade trees. Shade trees. That dappled, relenting light. It casts a shadow on the soul. It whispers in the throat of history, age, and a great river eating away the banks, carrying them away south toward an end, and leaving every year, proud and diminished, the remains – like some original place.