The Ordinary Weather (Part V)

I’ll be periodically posting pieces of the following, of which this is the last. If you haven’t picked up a copy of David Brazil’s The Ordinary, it’s available here.

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11/10-11/19

Dear DB—

Whether one has soul or no (reading soul in the sense of ‘man that cat’s got soul’—or maybe reading the former as breadcrumb if I’m on the latter’s case), the junk washes up regardless.

Something’s got the best of me & I guess I’m trailing—even before signing—off. But let me leave some junk w/you first:

It’s not quite a silver spoon… Maybe there’s a junk joke in this one—it was a gift from my uncle to my dad, on my getting born, who were already estranged and just got even more distant: I only met him once as a kid & not again until all these years later, at the hospital after my dad’s death. He’s the older brother, always had much more money-junk (flew his own plane to the funeral, etc.). They didn’t get along much. Put his hand on my shoulder at the hospital & said, “I’m sorry about your old man, kid.” Seemed broken, kind even. Awkward. Full of regret.

So now I inherit the junk joke & some other junk:

My brother found this key at the debris site, picked it up & handed it over at the hospital. I carried it in my pocket for about a month afterwards. One of hundreds of keys my dad never threw away. Would have opened a trailer at a rig site, I think. Dad was a rough-neck, sometimes a driller (so never quite management, always busting his hump), so this would be the key to a sleeper or something, a break room.

As soon as I had it in hand I pocketed it & thought of Genet’s matchbox coffin in Funeral Rites:

& after a summer of sifting, sorting, trashing (repeat, repeat—& more to come), I reread your poems in light of all this junk & think about value—about the kinds of value I’m unwilling to discard—& I keep reaching for this: these little acts of salvage as touch, as what value’s to be had or held in that daily sift, funereal or not—

Signing off, w/a little kairos in my pocket…

Your friend,

CJ

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Read Part I of this piece here.

Read Part II of this piece here.

Read Part III of this piece here.

Read Part IV of this piece here.