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Hey, I said, I’m not the dead, not a shade passing. I’m flesh and blood here.
Did it matter the ritual was in word only? Did it matter my oxen were carved in bone?
It occurred to me, as the heavy curtains were opened and the morning light flooded the small dining area, that without a doubt we sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality.
Personally, I’m not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can’t things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down “Desolation Row.” I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.
What the pathologist calls blood is also a substance of release. A pathologist examines it in a scientific way, but what of the writer, the visualization detective, who sees not only blood but the spattering of words? Oh, the activity in that blood, and the observations lost to God.
Writers and their process. Writers and their books. I cannot assume the reader will be familiar with them all, but in the end is the reader familiar with me? Does the reader wish to be so? I can only hope, as I offer my world on a platter filled with allusions.
This is how I live, I am thinking.
You have misplaced joy, he said without hesitation. Without joy, we are as dead. —How do I find it again? —Find those who have it and bathe in their perfection.
why do we dream about anything?
Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.
Not all dreams need to be realized. That was what Fred used to say. We accomplished things that no one would ever know.
Looking back, long after his death, our way of living seems a miracle, one that could only be achieved by the silent synchronization of the jewels and gears of a common mind.
How could I have nothing to read? Perhaps it wasn’t a lack of a book but a lack of obsession.
How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they’re gone?
Oh, to be reborn within the pages of a book.
In the weeks to come I would sit at my corner table reading nothing but Murakami.
Patti, nooooo
We are guided by roses, the scent of a page.
All doors are open to the believer.
These things happen, that’s all, the undeniable domino effect of being alive.
Love is the most precious jewel of all, she whispers, unclasping the pearls that drop from her throat, scales of sorrow that soar and diminish.
But I knew it was to be a long winter of waiting, the destruction was so vast.
spent the balance of my birthday watching Elvis Presley in Flaming Star, reflecting on the premature end of certain men. Fred. Pollock. Coltrane. Todd. I have lived well past them. I wondered if one day they would seem like boys.
But what of God himself? What is his language? What is his pleasure?
The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.
The warm drone of a Law & Order marathon was exactly what I needed.
Same
In time we often become one with those we once failed to understand.
—How is it that we stray away from one another, then always come back? —Do we really come back to one another, I answered, or just come here and lazily collide? He didn’t answer. —There’s nothing lonelier than the land, he said.
We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother’s voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow.
Images have their way of dissolving and then abruptly returning, pulling along the joy and pain attached to them like tin cans rattling from the back of an old-fashioned wedding vehicle.
One afternoon while crossing the street I noticed I was crying. But I could not identify the source of my tears. I felt a heat containing the colors of autumn. The dark stone in my heart pulsed quietly, igniting like a coal in a hearth. Who is in my heart? I wondered.
It’s the loneliest thing in the world, waiting to be found, she says.
Why is it that we lose the things we love, and things cavalier cling to us and will be the measure of our worth after we’re gone?
We seek to stay present, even as the ghosts attempt to draw us away.
believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose.
That is death. A disappearing act.
How does one make one’s work a living thing? How can a writer place a living thing in the hands of the reader?
Perhaps it’s not where we are going but just that we go.
