Joshua Corey's Blog, page 5

100 Words: Life shifts into the streets

Life shifts into the streets with no more public interiors—kids cluster on corners listening to hip-hop, folks pull down their masks to yell to each other along blocks, and a whiff of anarchy scents the otherwise mild bourgeois airs of Evanston on a holiday weekend. People bump into each other with six or two or no feet of air between them and spin away again like pinballs. The young inherit the empty center and leave the leafy expensive fringes to us, the ones who are supposed to know better. A stiff breeze pushes a forlorn wild mask down the street.

100 Words: Does water break

Does water break its own surface
absent the intervention of hull or gull
or rock? Doubtful Lake Michigan simmers
like a pan on the stove 

or like the pan of a miner
on his heels by a creek
probing with filthy fingers
flashing gold mica and quartz. 

The surface heaves and ripples.
Heat sinks into water and spreads its molecules
whores out the waves that fall in painted strokes
of the axe upon our shoreline. 

It is a human thing
to regret but not enough to change.
My face bears its lines like these waters
swallowing every single cast stone.

100 Words: Depths of green

Depths of green invade the shallows of spring, clinging as if wistfully to what may be one of the last days of cool air and brilliant sunshine before things heat up, and the spring that was somehow never there is eclipsed entirely by one of the awkward new summers of our age. From where I sit it’s getting harder to ignore the stink of cat pee where he’s been missing his litterbox out of laziness or spite. People move gently in the streets, greeting each other at a respectful distance, as though the world were a church service. The age.

100 Words: “Bucolic interludes”

“Bucolic interludes laced with light anxiety”; thus Parul Sehgal in the Times on the relationship of writers to time in these times. She’s not wrong. I have exchanged the bucolics of campus life for life in my semi-abandoned college town, which can include trips like this to the beach in Wilmette where a woman walks her dog and a man stares out over the water and a handsome young couple with a Seventies vibe saunters by, he with a thin mustache and she in a shiny jacket, all of us unmasked. We play at normality, but the normal escapes us.

100 Words: Step into late light

Step into late light a few minutes before sunset with Beethoven’s piano sonata #5 in my ears, played with deliberative fury by Igor Levit, one of the beacons of humanity in this black time, with his impassioned solo concerts broadcast via social media—one per day until he took a recent break. I walk the same old circuit to and from the lakefront, but the red scabs of light falling off of rooftops and treetops do their best to light my way. Steam billows in misty gusts from a depopulated building engulfing me as I pass; I almost leave a trace.

100 Words: The lake’s gone feral

The lake’s gone feral, its fur slicked in hackles as it slams against the shore, eating the beaches, finding faults in concrete. The water is rising. And the sky’s gray lid seems to shudder against it, like the lid of a pot on the boil. People in brown studies pose against the dark baize of the grass; two girls perch on the rocks serenaded by anonymous pop from a tinny speaker. University cops pace in their sinister SUVs along paths intended for pedestrians. Trees hold their breath. The lake cries out, I wish I were a sea. And it is.

100 Words: The figure in the carpet

The figure in the carpet eludes my eyes, trained and dulled by the daily routine. My upper back and shoulders are tight from too much heavy bag work, or maybe not enough. The day suspended in mists. I’m glad to be summer teaching, glad to feel minimally useful, though in the present parlance far from essential. Poetry is non-essential too: I read Joseph Brodsky for his sensuous genius in the face of the life-denying extremes of our once and future austerity. The beloved waits: “What matters is not what life has, / but just one's faith in what should be there.”

100 Words: Rain on the skylight

Rain on the skylight all day, up and down with the laundry, down and up with groceries, and the line of storms keeps threading the needle of our town until tonight when the backyard floods to six inches and the building kids come out to frolic in the changed climate of their inheritance, voices ringing; are they ignorant of its meaning or wiser than we, the true realists, the abstracted brief chroniclers of our strange times, the only times, as Billy Joel sang, they’ll ever know? A time for meditation in cathedrals of our own. The rain, falling like walls.

100 Words: Despair is ordinary

Despair is ordinary as joy; ordinary as in ordered, regular, customary, usual; ordinary as flowers, ordinary as eggs for breakfast, ordinary as an afternoon nap, a plummet into unmotivated exhaustion, a swoon. My therapist reminds me that everyone is under continuous stress, becoming habituated to it, stress a thin sheet of ice to plunge through at the least provocation. Tears are always close, and so is numbness in the face. But the spring comes on, and nature, though mutilated, is undeterred. And something in me answers that nature, that mutilation, that flower seemingly oblivious on its stem, on my shelf.

100 Words: Buy the rumor

Buy the rumor and sell the fact. There’s a floor on despair and a ceiling on hope, and less and less distance between. Rain again this morning, then the sun came out and the earth breathed with it until the afternoon became luscious, gravid with light. In the evening the warmth fled the stones—late light glimmered and witched in the stand of trees between buildings as the sun dropped into its narrow channel. Fire, wet with fire. The sky pressed down indifferently as if we hadn’t supercharged it with our own indifference. I live always underneath, wishing I didn’t care.