Could it be possible?
First things first. The great San Francisco snowstorm of 2011 never happened… bastard bought a ticket, told everybody in town & then never stepped off the train. Hell, it hardly even rained. I was having a delicious sandwich in the park during “the worst” of it, & I couldn’t remember a nicer lunch. The sun was strong & the air, somewhere south of 50 degrees, felt deeply refreshing. Selah.
Now I’m home listening to Van Zandt’s gorgeous take on Cocaine Blues & the church bells are ringing & the sailboats are out again on the saltwater. Earlier I returned a biography of E.Hopper to the Chinatown library & then stopped in at the Fairmont for coffee on the way back up. This is where the incident took place.
As I was leaving the hotel, a small crowd waiting for the taxi queue blocked the main exit so I tried to pass through the valet line & ran squarely into a clusterfuck of three bodies spread evenly across the path - a man, a woman & a dog. I was high as a satellite on coffee & didn’t mind the inconvenience. But eventually the woman noticed me & realized her husband was blocking my path. I didn’t want to be rude (she was about to pull the classic shoulder tug on the poor fellow), so I cleared my throat & said “excuse me.” When the man turned his head to hiss at me & my stupid smile, I couldn’t help but recognize the face from album covers, from Bridge School 1999, from Seattle 2004. Suddenly only half aware, I pushed between him & the dog & didn’t look back until I was across Huntington Park & couldn’t possibly see a thing.
“Quand on a pas d’imagination, mourir c’est peu de chose, quand on en a, mourir c’est trop” - Céline in Voyage au bout de la Nuit
Instinct vs. Instance
Back on a cold evening in October, I was kicking down Market Street toward the Embarcadero w/Mills & Abby, on our way up the piers to Fisherman’s Wharf because I wanted them to experience the wonderful Musée Mécanique. We hadn’t committed to the plan for long when I saw the ugly facade of the Hyatt Regency across the street & decided we must first sneak in & see the unexpectedly spectacular interior - the reversed pyramid open heart of a concrete bunker w/streamers the size of soccer fields hanging like Spanish moss & exposed elevator shafts lifting & dropping glass pods, & this interesting little fountain spilling over its edges just enough to create a thin film of falling water that sort of resembles a fabric from across the floor. Ever since I’d walked into the hotel on a whim long ago, I’d felt compelled to stop in again every time I walk by, which is often. So we went inside, Abby & I first while Mills watched over their bikes, & then vice versa. The short diversion was soon over, nice & worthwhile but not a thing you dwell on. Afterward we went on to a memorable run through the antique arcade on the wharf &, ultimately, off into our own lives like before.
Last week, an 18-month-old boy went inside the same hotel with his mother, twin sister & nanny. They were not guests of the hotel. Like us, they went inside to see the interior. Like me, that little boy must have been moved by the vastness of the room & the strange little fountain. He crawled off, unnoticed, to the trough, where the water falls like fabric. Only a few minutes later he was found unconscious in the water, already halfway back to wherever you arrive from on that first morning. He died in the hospital.
I’ve thought about that little boy every day since… see, his instincts were right on: curiosity is a measure of life… of the fire in your chest & the dynamite of mind. He was young, he was helpless, but he was not wrong. I’ve replayed all the times I’ve stood there in his place staring up in childlike wonder at all the stupid decorations & that dumb little fountain, & then stumbled off toward evenings w/good people like Mills & Abby or even just a nap on the couch w/a view of the sky. & I’m caught up & destroyed that these two worlds can both exist in the same place at the same time.
Trying To Fill A Full Cup W/Tea
Writing is fighting the rising tide… our inability to tell anyone anything of what it was like to be us in that moment, to be there, then. The fumbling early attempts at communication in the kitchen w/a mother who loves you, but doesn’t understand. The frustrations of wanting to get away forever.
Now some of us live in a place where the antique streetlights never go out because the skyscrapers overhead block the daylight. We think more of a dropped cherry Slurpee bleeding out painlessly on the sidewalk, or the lovely Christmas lights in the one tree we pass on the walk home.
&, of course, some of us still till the earth w/our feet & our lives. We should talk soon. Wine country blues.
ps. recent strange dream about a mirror: i study my reflection in the glass, twisting a hundred different ways. ‘isn’t it weird to be a thing & exist in a physical world?’ suddenly a car approaches at a terrible speed. ‘am i on the highway?’ somehow i jump clear of the path. in the mirror, though, i see my reflection is hit & carried away. for the first time, i peer into a mirror & do not see myself staring back.
For My Grandfather (a good man who died this afternoon)
Your step back brings you forward, though I cannot be sure I am sure.
Just as your return to the shadow, dark as the cure, quiet as the dew, brings you light.
& while your only hands made gifts out of holy clay, I concede they were the clay too.
Once reborn. Once renewed.
Your bold voice now receding, gives your words a weight, grants them wings.
No longer caught up like a water drop on the tongue of a saint. You are more.
As if pain were a record, pressed & played. Smiled upon. Blessed, & kept away.
- all my love & respect, always, Oct. 28, 2010
A few more weeks down the line I turn from twenty-nine to thirty years time in this world. I believe most things are in their right place… married to the loveliest, lucky to have good friends & family, & a pillow to place my head on each night in a top-floor apartment atop a tall hill in the center of a top-shelf city on the ocean. Other things are coming along… writing, writing, writing. Let me write until I die, until I understand.
I’ve thought a lot lately about how all the things we take for solid, ever-present forms are, in fact, crumbling or absolutely changing. The overriding sense I get is that we ought to slow down, slow down. No one is going to survive forever, but we’re all going to make it through. Get that? There was a kid I knew as a child who died unexpectedly on the bus one day like all the other days. We were in elementary school. I remember trying to reconcile his disappearance from this planet w/some innate sense of fairness, & failing. But, looking back now, I see he made it through. He made it through the same way I’m going to make it through, my grandfather’s going to make it through & all of our triumphant & tragic stories will make it through. So slow down. None survive, but we all make it through.
Change is the only constant in the long run. The tides that run over the Earth from shore to shore exchange energy w/the moon, slowing the planet’s rotation enough to measure & pushing the moon further into space. Dinosaurs had a shorter day by fifteen minutes. The moon is already five feet further from us than when American astronauts landed on its pockmarked & silent surface in 1969. Order is not solid, but temporary. A mossy forest of pine & fern once thrived on the Antarctic land mass. White was green for a spell, the proof of which now rests beneath a mile of ice… an entire mile of ice, in a part of the planet w/less precipitation than many deserts.
I’m getting on a plane in a few hours, too, which always makes me wistful. If you read this while I’m off being someone else, please dig through the archives for my past lives.
This is contemporary life.
You piss in a pot under blacklight in the back restroom of a great restaurant in Southeast Portland. Late afternoon. The sunlight outside is pure gold, & the sky is quiet & easy in its summer. Only a few hours pass & the night rises up from the shadows in the grass & behind buildings & under mountains. You see the transition from the windows of a half-empty airplane, some 30,000 feet above the coast, above the clouds. Soon the only light is a small planet pinprick above the wingtip, then the unholy glow of San Francisco in the fog. Near midnight the elevated platform outside the airport in Oakland is full of preachers & thugs & people like us. A train appears, apparently from the seventies, & takes you home, through a tunnel resting on the floor of the bay more than 100 feet below the surface of the saltwater.
Frisco is lit up like a disco on Market Street, but the hustlers are slow tonight & the cabs seem eager. You see the towering antique hotels of your neighborhood standing on the hill - it’s like taking a sleeping pill. Your shoulders slump as you enter the taxi.
These Things Of Equal Value
The immediate problem is that you cannot be in more than one place at a time. The larger problem is that it takes a long time to build an honest home.
TENET FOR BASIC LIVING
There are two people living our lives: Who We Are & Who We Want To Be.
Others can only see the first & we tend toward the second. This is the problem.
Bring these two together & lose all the stupid, subtle tensions they evoke.
In Somnie
A wall of green blooms serenely near the river. Près de la Parc du Champs de Mars
I am there, eyes wide, mouth sharp, in another year, long from now, far far from here
& old Paris seems so complete, so completely covered in concrete & meaning
I’m only bone-tired & ready to be swallowed up again by the din of Europe’s evening
Reborn as a Basque tour guide, or a pigeon on a park bench facing the seaside
… never leaving. My Mediterranean mothers & the gentle nudging of Italian weather.
Impressed by ordinary men less than humbled by the overwhelming obesity of time
Who go on, set apart from location, station to station, & fashion some sort of home
In love like long rambling walks w/no destination, safe from deadly games & favorites
Teach me the language, let us live in fantastic vacancies, explosive pleasantries
Run out my weakness on the roads of history stretched out to infinity & still arriving…
A thriving marriage of humanity & patience. I am there, Paris, unthinking.
Until the sober cathedral bells shake me & reclaim me from my dumbstruck stupor
Here are the paved sand dunes of my poor California, America’s bold boutique future
Here are four hard years of tracks, from hill to bay & back, & one dull wall of plants
These nights lit like fires in the center of stars die out entirely. Morning in ruins, running
Two tickets to Istanbul & then the Serbian countryside & then… nothing.
& finally, that life can still be like this.
- San Francisco, 2010
[ last page from love letters to saint francis, a collection of poetry i’m writing ]
![I was in Palm Springs, amazed at the rage of a freak rain that filled those streets with water, flooding for lack of drains & having absolutely no place else to go… except back up into the sky once the sun came out to dry it. & it did. Meanwhile, we drank date shakes in the desert. We drove around in sprawling squares listening to Gram Parsons & real country radio. We bought watercolors after dark & painted on the hotel bed while the television set played commercial ads broken now & then by brief stints of programming. I opened beer bottles on the coat rack, floated across a warm pool on my back staring at the mountains.
Then I was in San Francisco for awhile, long enough to wrestle a traveling flu to the floor. You do this by sleeping each time the exhaustian finds you & drinking more tea than you want to, moving less than think you ought to. I wore a Halloween costume Matea made: The Oil Spill, all green felt fishes w/little Xed out eyes & blue clothes head-to-toe marred in black ink. Then gone again.
& I was drinking a terrible coffee in a beautiful cafe on the banks of the St. Croix River, near a public library the size of a greeting card aisle & trees w/no leaves & lakes half-frozen over & trembling in a wind that sees only the autumn states outside California in preparations for winter. There was a memorial in the morning, & that was sad… because we are unfortunate animals who understand goodbyes. But we said them anyway & stuffed memories in our pockets, & together went off toward some kind of tomorrow. Just before my birthday, I was back on an airplane. The world I saw outside my window never seemed so lovely or uncontained.
[photo note: a friend kindly sent me his collection of short stories, which i read in an appropriate setting]](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbjd1eYMTs1qz7avgo1_500.jpg)
