Katie and Tomasz.

She slides a tight triangle of paper into his massive hand. His other is on a half-full beer and he's looking diagonally away from her, at the band, at the bassist whose left hand is up and down the fingerboard. He made some awkward weather talk when they first sat down with the others, but the music started and he'd turned away. For such a big man he sure seems shy and self- conscious, she thought. She had been passing him here and there around town since she arrived, two weeks ago, and learned here and there in bits and pieces that he'd been with several town women but hadn't settled on one. When she was getting ready, washing, putting on perfume, dressing a bit but not too much, getting her good jeans out and brushing her boots, one of the girls from the restaurant had dropped in and they'd had a bottle of wine so she is pretty well pre-loaded and now she's drinking a beer and feeling the heat coming off his arm, which is why she passed the note. All that plus the encouragement she's received from her new girlfriends at the restaurant, who say he's sweet and who already have their own men. She wrote: can I take you to Pines this weekend? and folded it junior-high-style in a tight triangle and on the outside wrote: open later! because right before handing it to him she felt shy through the alcohol. Now he's looking at her over his shoulder and looking at the triangle, and then holding it out a ways to read it, which makes her think: maybe he is older than he looks because he reads with his arm almost straight unlike a young man. He smiles a bit and looks unsure what to do and the music is going up and then he just leans so he can put it in his jeans pocket and smiles again and goes back to looking away, studying the band, watching the bassist. What she promises herself to remember is the way his shirt is ironed and the way it stretches across his back and the way the red late sunlight under the poplars runs up his neck.

Jim and Terry

Jim and Terry met at a dance the day before he was drafted, in 1968. They wrote letters almost every day the whole time he was in basic and then when he went overseas. They got to know each other letter by letter over the first few months he was away, asking and answering questions, like a stop-motion conversation. A year in, he was assigned Apache gunner which he did for 40 missions before the Viet Cong shot off his right hand. In the hospital, he taught himself to write with his left, and those letters are noteworthy not only because his handwriting was suddenly like a child's but because he was on large doses of morphine that played hell with his attention span and allowed him to say more than you'd expect from a usually tight-lipped boy from the U.P. Till the day she died these letters made her blush, even when dementia left her unable to remember if they were from Jim or from Jim Junior, what with the childish handwriting and all. After the war, they got married in Ann Arbor, where he worked 40 years at inside sales in the tool and die industry. Terry raised 4 boys. When the youngest left home, she went to school and got a biology degree and worked in a lab into her 70s. They are known for their spring bulbs, maybe the nicest display of daffodils and tulips in Ann Arbor.

Chingadera: a Proposed Etymology

Something to be used up, or of little consequence. The word that stands for the word you momentarily forgot for the thing you're pointing at. A pile of split firewood, as in: "una chingadera de len[y]as". An example of the kind of rubbish I think about late at night. Archaically: noun cognate of the verb "chingar", to split lengthwise. "Chingar" now means to harshly disrespect, to treat like trash, sometimes to rape. One must never call a Mexican man "hijo de la chingada". This is sometimes referred to as committing "suicide by dishonoring".

Silence is Complicity! A Fascist Parable.

She wore a veil made of the stretched skin of pelicans' throats and a kind of sombrero of white feathers, but he could tell she'd be beautiful. He was hounded by moths and was always swatting and flinching and scratching but she could tell he'd even out in time. She was at home above, on, and below the water as long as she didn't spend too long in any one place. He wore heavy wool all year and smelled of lanolin, but whenever he got snagged, on a branch or nail or fence, he was quite good at getting everything re-ravelled so his sweater never entirely reverted to sheep. She had a steady job, and he liked the way she threw her head back to swallow. He avoided eye-contact and obligations and certainty like the plague, and dogs. They spent a year together and then got married. It was a small ceremony on a grassy hillside overlooking the ocean, and everybody was there. One photograph shows the two backlit, the sun bright white through her hat and his woolly suit and shining on a roundish white cloud so you see three indistinct haloed whitenesses, without definite edges. They had a child who, as of this writing, fifty-five years later, has still not spoken.

Kolob, Utah

To give you an idea, one came saying, without irony, that she'd come to find her voice. I can think of only one other year-rounder who would, I imagine, find this funny. For some, this rationale [or declared mission or quest] is entirely unembarrassing. A few may even think she's on a truly sacred pilgrimage. For the rest, the majority, the old Mormon ranchers, the hangers-on after the drying-up of the old Mormon ranches, the aging remnants of the pioneer culture that still lives by gardening and slaughter and canning and sharing in a pinch, she is a silly child of modern times, a risible but possibly dangerous invader from the city, from America, from the credulous, sissified, misinformed, arrogant but contemptible liberal elite.

Another arrived by way of Cedulosa [where she'd hawked handmade jewelry and post-card-sized watercolors (abstract meditations, she called them) of the redrock desert and worked on and off at the Right Eating to put gas in the car], looking for work at the restaurant. She said she'd do anything and was affable enough to be believable, but they let her go within the week for smoking grass, which here can get you put in jail for a very long time, so everyone is strict about it in public. Now she is taking care of The Mysterious Joseph Mary's horses while he is gone doing what we can only suppose and gossip about since we have never met him except K who works stuffing P. O. boxes and claims to have handed him heavy piles of reloading catalogs and IRS notices every few months when he comes through. This one is still in town maybe sleeping in her car and maybe with one of the guides from The Unwashed, the survival school.

This place sometimes we say it has an invisible fence, more like a series of filters that get finer and finer as you get near town, around it that keeps the tourists away, or at least from stopping for long, and that admits only the desperate, the impressively-lazy, and a few that don't have the real-life skills to match their idealism, which means the town is basically two-in-one: the ranchers who are all skill and no idea, unless you count conspiracy theories as ideas, and the recent arrivals who are mostly good at only useless things, like making stone arrow points or hand-carved guitars, but have many very big ideas indeed. All of us are in the same spread-out place mostly agreeing to disagree and going to sometimes-elaborate lengths to avoid each other. Picture, if you will, two of our citizens: one, "Radar" Lyman, is the Troutfield County Sheriff's Deputy in Kolob, and the Mormon Bishop. He is state and church here. He is the youngest son of one of the old Mormon families, and he owns maybe half the valley. He is tall and boyish and clean-cut and nobody has ever seen him smile. Two is Firefly Pems, who came from Flag looking for organic farmwork that doesn't involve weeding, because the plants were calling out to her in pain and who are we to judge which ones stay and which ones go, but she couldn't find anyone looking for that kind of help so now she is living on a hillside waiting for the mothership. When you talk to them and keep it shallow and friendly, these two seem fairly normal, well within the fat belly of the American bell-curve, but they are never sitting down to talk politics, I believe it's safe to assume. Even if Radar maintained his most stoical gentlemanly reserve, Firefly has told all of us that the energy field of his gun gives her labor pains if he even comes near, and he's never withouit his gun [except when it was stolen] so there will be no conversation.

Haiku

Young men wrestle ang-
els. Middle-aged men wrestle
habits. Old men rest.

An Oath I Swear on the Anniversary of D.F.W.'s Infinitely Sad Death

Dear readers,

By the shade of D.F.W., I will attempt my best to sell you nothing, or to not sell you anything. I will try my hardest to avoid irony, parody, and ridicule, because he was his characters' God and he loved them. I will also do my levelest to be honest about my experience, which is probably more honestly spelled experiences. He made me love being an American, and I'll keep at it until I'm an honor to my country.

Thank you, D.

Signed: V.

Drinking With My Notebook, Part 1: July 4, 2010

11:00 PM
Venus is in the west, low and hot.
Juniper and pine play their perfect fifth.
The stream is running, our guests are stumbling
in groping pairs through the dog-yard gate.
The wine was perfectly adequate.

12:00
I am writing this by blankest moonlight,
by what could not warm the moon,
by what its cauterized dust could not absorb.
This wrecks me because I am drunk.

1:00
Better to get up and help you
shut in the chickens, wash a few glasses,
brush my teeth. Better to set aside
this notebook and drop my clothes
and dive down to our bathyspheric house
at the bottom of the night.

2:40
This valley is full of black. The coral looks like
juniper and pine. Barracudas draped in dog-skins
hunt in packs. Schools of moths
recite Goethe's last words. We will surface
at sunrise and have to inhale.

Brief Lectures on Knowing: Part 1

I have to say this; that's the first thing.
(Wllm.) Blake says, and maybe I'm misremembering this
but I've already said it this way maybe a dozen times, that
everything that can be thought is an image of truth.
So for starters, a distinction: there is a difference
between my self-serving schemes, altered as the occasion unfolds,
and the thoughts that arrive like light-and-geometry at the eye.

And are held there tenuously by an art that no one can teach you.
We can certainly argue about an idea but we are not arguing
with each other, exactly. And if we are we aren't attending to the idea.

And if an idea-object does arrive sometimes you are helpless not say it.
Maybe because it has not fully arrived until it is taken into the mind.
The words that you find for it are not to be confused with the idea-object itself
but they are an important point of ritual, a kind of listening that is at best
collaborative, revised in the space around you, occupies the senses like good bread.

Un lloro, un grito, y el crujir de dientes