M Train

by Patti Smith

Without noticing, I slip into a light yet lingering malaise. Not a depression, more like a fascination for melancholia, which I turn in my hand as if it were a small planet, streaked in shadow, impossibly blue.

am certain I didn’t quite meet their criteria, but I suspect that after some deliberation they welcomed me due to my abundance of romantic enthusiasm.

Alfred Wegener

After Nature

Blossoms covering the dead where they lie, like a line from an old murder ballad.

Fred once found a small portable record player in the closet of a cabin we’d rented in northern Michigan. When he opened it up there was a single of “Radar Love” on the turntable. A telepathic love song by Golden Earring that seemed to speak of our long-distance courtship and the electric thread that drew us together. It was the only record there and we turned it up and played it over and over.

Such things that disappear in time that we find ourselves longing to see again. We search for them in close-up, as we search for our hands in a dream.

If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time?

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.

when I found I was pregnant we headed back home to Detroit, trading one set of dreams for another.

Fred finally achieved his pilot’s license but couldn’t afford to fly a plane. I wrote incessantly but published nothing. Through it all we held fast to the concept of the clock with no hands.

There are two kinds of masterpieces. There are the classic works monstrous and divine like Moby-Dick or Wuthering Heights or Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus. And then there is the type wherein the writer seems to infuse living energy into words as the reader is spun, wrung, and hung out to dry. Devastating books. Like 2666 or The Master and Margarita. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is such a book.

The Scarlet Letter.

Pastoral Symphony, following the great composer on an epic walk into the countryside listening to the songs of the birds in the Vienna Woods.

A young woman brushed past me with an armful of flowers. A dizzying perfume lingered, then dispelled, replaced by a vertiginous refrain. I felt conscious of everything: a beating heart, the scent of a song wafting in a conflict of breezes, and the human current heading home. Three dollars short, richer longer love.

As always, I quietly thanked my parents for my life, then went down and fed the cats.

I thought, what the hell. I could feel my chronology mounting, snow approaching. I could feel the moon, but I could not see it. The sky was veiled with a heavy mist illuminated by the perpetual city lights. When I was a girl the night sky was a great map of constellations, a cornucopia spilling the crystalline dust of the Milky Way across its ebony expanse, layers of stars that I would deftly unfold in my mind.

I noticed the threads on my dungarees straining across my protruding knees. I’m still the same person, I thought, with all my flaws intact, same old bony knees, thanks be to God.

A sudden gust of wind shakes the branches of trees scattering a swirl of leaves that shimmer eerily in the bright filtered light. Leaves as vowels, whispers of words like a breath of net. Leaves are vowels. I sweep them up hoping to find the combinations I am looking for. The language of the lesser gods. But what of God himself? What is his language?

I loved my coat and the café and my morning routine. It was the clearest and simplest expression of my solitary identity.

A young man was tramping through the snow with a great bundle of branches tied to his back with a measure of vine. He was bent over from the weight yet I could hear him whistling. Occasionally a branch would slip from the bundle and I would pick it up. The branches were completely transparent, so I filled in their color and texture and added a few thorns. After a time I noticed there were no tracks in the snow. There was no sense of backwards or forwards, only blankness sprinkled here and there with minuscule red droplets.

On my last visit to Japan we visited the grave of Yukio Mishima. We swept away dead leaves and ash, filled wooden water buckets and washed the headstone, placed fresh flowers and burned incense. Afterwards we stood in silence. I envisioned the pond that surrounds the golden temple in Kyoto. A large red carp darting beneath the surface joined with another that looked as if it was cloaked in a uniform of clay. Two elderly women in traditional dress approached carrying buckets and brooms. They seemed pleasantly surprised at the state of things, said a few words to Ace, bowed, and went their way.

When I was young I had the notion to think and write simultaneously, but I could never keep up with myself. I gave up the pursuit and I wrote in my head as I sat with my dog by a secret stream incandescent with rainbows, a mix of sun and petrol, skimming the water like weightless Merbabies with iridescent wings.

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.

I tossed the crumpled napkins into the flame, and each closed like a fist, slowly reopening like petals of small cabbage roses.

Fascinated, I watched as they fused and formed one enormous rose. It ascended and hovered above the tent of the sleeping scientist. Its great thorns pierced the canvas, and its heavy fragrance rushed within, enveloping his sleep, becoming one with his breath, and penetrated the chambers of his exploding heart. I was blessed with a vision of his last moments, rising from the smoke of cherished mementos of the Continental Drift Club.

These are modern times, I told myself. But we are not trapped in them. We can go where we like, communing with angels, to reprise a time in human his...

We seek to stay present, even as the ghosts attempt to draw us away. Our father manning the loom of eternal return. Our mother wandering toward paradise, releasing the thread. In my way of thinking, anything is possible. Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all. We imagine a house, a rectangle of hope. A room with a single bed with a pale coverlet, a few precious books, a stamp album. Walls papered in faded floral fall away and burst as a newborn meadow speckled with sun and a stream emptying into a greater stream where a small boat awaits with two glowing oars and one blue sail.