Joshua Corey's Blog, page 2

100 Words: Rain in the afternoon

Rain in the afternoon, then a break toward evening for my walk through spattering drops, and then steady ones, and then the feeling of pushing through velvet, through curtains of heavy water, slicking away vision, soaking weight into my shirt, while all the time the Piano Sonata in E-Flat Major (“The Hunt”) flares manically in my earbuds and beats time with my splashing steps. Warmer air holds more moisture; every year we bring heaven closer, and every angel is terrifying. Living the loop between home and away, each of them dissolving into the other. The lake in flight, heavy air.

100 Words: Father’s Day

Father’s Day brunch in the backyard, an easy 5K with a friend, hot in the sun and cool in the shade—meanwhile the Arctic broils and Siberia burns. I am a creature of shreds and patches on my attention, pulled perpetually, centripetally and centrifugally, in flight from my ordinary life into the rarefied, terrifying superstructure of unordinary times. My own father gone two years this summer, leaving me in the blind spot of fathering, caring for a child I can’t possibly protect, afflicted with unforeknowing. The present tense insisted I remain with the day, breezes in leaves, the night to come.

100 Words: Heavy solstice

Heavy solstice warmth, air too close to the skin, parading residential streets, pausing in front of a mysterious American-flag bedecked house, the flag monochrome to a degree that almost overwhelmed the actual colors of the scene. A kind of distress signal, a mark of colors that have run. Downtown people sit leadenly at tables outside restaurants that have decided a strip of sidewalk can be a patio. Interiors are inaccessible, secret, nondescript and indescribable—we live in private or nakedly but the public as we’ve known it has disappeared. Robins and squirrels in the backyard trade places, exchanging verticals, perspectives, cries.

100 Words: Peeking

Peeking up from the edge of a hammock on the lakefill, someone’s reading Between the World and Me. The graduates flock in their purple robes, some masked, most barefaced. Warm and humid. The lake shades from blue to lead as I follow the usual path on my usual stroll, trying to clear my mind of all the cobwebs and rags that piled up through a day that started with a strangely convincing dream of a barefoot woman in a white dress and long curly hair—a woman I knew was me or had been me, pre-Raphaelite vision of the self ephebed.

100 Words: The sign

The sign by the lagoon was written in the voice of the ducks, as though the ducks had written it, or spoken words in English that were then transcribed, or words in their own language that were then translated and transcribed. “Please don’t feed us bread,” the sign said, and went on to describe the deleterious effects bread-feeding might have upon the ducks’ digestion, upon the pond on which the ducks swam, upon algae and upon fish. The sign asked us to reconsider our interventions into a system not easily grasped as ducks swam, wordlessly, under the sun’s nothing new.

100 Words: A soft rain of pollen

A soft rain of pollen drops in our courtyard—sun lights patches of patio and of grass—a green insect like an aphid walls up the notebook page, over the landscape of these words and over the page’s edge and into an unknown and unfathomable outside where words like these can never go. Someone’s AC unit rattles irrelevantly from a second-story window. Some orchids purpling in a big blue pot. This is a spot outside public space with no interior to call its own. A bird whistles down the breeze as evening wings its way toward us; evening, the earth’s self-swallowing shadow. 

100 Words: Neither stately nor plump

Neither stately nor plump on my daily procession to the water, head almost empty, answering the pressure of reality with air. This morning mild morning air everywhere; this evening a blue light in a blue shade on the lakefill thronged with young people looking out at the water but mostly at each other, very few of them masked, the immortals. The pathways tagged with earnest chalk; coming up the hill an array of brown and Black children on their bikes, none older than eight, all masked, in cheerful defiance of their adults’ trailing gloom, rolling right over the hashtags. Bloom.

100 Words: Evening walk

Evening walk to the water for the nth repeatable time, Beethoven in my earbuds, descending the slant of mid-June light into the stand of aspen—they look like aspen—quivering at the bend in the path to the Northwestern lakefill, a shimmering ephemeral barrier between me and the lake taking out its nightly shade of slate blue. The water is high—the shoreline recedes like the gums on a middle-aged man. A lone duck rides the waves, contemplative—sun elongates the bodies of buoys marking the invisible line between water and waters. We career blindly up—or is it down?—Emerson’s stair. We find—ourselves. 

100 Words: The Weekend

The weekend is self-devouring, its own species of unmarked time, a step away from them as Frank O’Hara has it. Spent most of the day in front of the computer grading student poems and stories, radiant with earnestness and the occasional startling note of grace; in the afternoon an hour in the rose garden with a circle of masked friends sketching the fountain carved with pelicans. This is the flânerie of which I’m capable, biking through Evanston in rich sunshine while the news simmers and the cops burn down. My heart isn’t in my pocket, friends—I left it at home.

100 Words: Saturday

Saturday for the purposes of these words was today. So what was Saturday? Deliciously and unseasonably chilly—blue dome clamped down highlighting each nick and shadow in the overhead leaves. And another black man was killed by the police. Bicycling free from house to house, the little palaces adorned with light, friend to socially distanced friend. Another black man was killed by the police. In the evening in our building a hair’s breadth from normalcy as people gather in the back yard to grill. The stars, I’m told, will come out eventually. Another black man was murdered by the police.