Tuesday, February 24, 2009
I'm Not Ready
This season is throwing me. I'm not ready for this warmth. I'm not ready to lose my winter muse, she, with La Luna, playing in the frozen strawberry daiquiri sky and dancing across the creamy snow out my windows. Those two, they called me to my home floating like a houseboat near the edge of the Rio Grande Gorge. I'm not ready for the social explosion of spring when my butt does not want to stay in a chair. I'm not ready for the gears to roll the soil and pop the buds on the tips of the branches. No. I'm still romancing the hulking, sharp-branched cottonwoods, gnarled fingers jiggling an accusation, the boughs yawning against the wind with sideways snow glued into their creases. I'm not ready to push the clocks ahead. For now, I come home after a back country ramble and the light drops; blueberries and pixilated cranberries and, sometimes, electric salmon snakes waver over the dark covered nipples and humps, pursed lips and haughty buffalo flanks of the caldera. I'm not ready to give up the mourning for the people I know who have not slept all winter. The vigil, in my bedroom, on the satin blue zafu, looking southeast, the light already poured into the building navy of night. Looking at the foothills and the snow-streaked rounds above treeline leading to the pinnacle of a circus tent that is Truchas Peak. Sometimes the stars shine like a Bunsen burner blue gleaming razor blade and allow me to see shadows against the snow, silver clouds from the west lit from behind by the moon. And you can feel somewhere in the bowels and down through the legs the echoes of an exodus that happened a long time ago, and gets played out through shadows on snow over and over throughout the winter; the dying of something large, the leaving behind of the story, the bending of time. I'm not ready for that story to end. I'm not ready for the caress of solitude to be driven from me by my tensing muscles, the thrust coming up from my feet and feeding my thighs. But it's coming, the end of this and the beginning of that. It is too early. I see as I hike Devisidero in the mid afternoon, the warm wind blow-drying the mud and decimating the snow. The Taos lowlands are back to burlap, that patchwork I wrote about in November, those last days I followed my green velvet fiddler up the trail. I heard her again in late January when the roads first turned to mud after a wet pacific storm ate away the bottom of the snowpack. Back then, we were all in our houses playing fiddles, guitars, mandolins, banjos, listening to the snow drip through our roofs into pots and tin cups. It was then that the rabbit man told me she was dancing in the mud, playing, barefoot, heading for the canyon. I knew this and felt her pull me, she was wearing green silk this time, and I was pressed to my window feeling the cold against my nose and lips. I heard all their prayers kneeling in front of fires, playing for her, playing for their own ears so they could know how mired they were. And the fiddler, my fiddler, skirted the kissy lips mountain they call Two Peaks and went off with the purple tendrils of cloud lurking over the desert, looking for something to cling to, anything. I'm not ready to give up the mire, the depth, the slog. It is too early to be sprightly, to be bright. That time is coming, and I will be with it, I will dance to that song. But still I want to mourn and I want to lay down in deep snow, die properly, peacefully, the wind kicking through the trees teasing me. I came home this winter, to die with my eyes open. I came to be buried in that snow and I am not ready to be revealed.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
The End of the Ceremony
Rumors among the tribe, being seeded by Tayo's old friend, turned enemy, Emo, that Tayo is living in a cave in the hills (which he is, in harmony with his medicine woman, Ts'eh, and looking after the resilient cattle he and his uncle had purchased the year before and he had tracked down as part of his journey/ceremony), and thinks he is a Japanese soldier, has the army people, the tribe (even some of the elders), and the BIA government people, searching for him to put him back in the hospital (or kill him if they have to). Emo, along with some of his other old friends, Harley and Leroy, are getting close. Tayo is holed up at the mouth of a closed uranium mine.
"He had been so close to it, caught up in it for so long that it's simplicity struck him deep inside his chest: Trinity Site, where they exploded the first atomic bomb, was only three hundred miles to the southeast, at White Sands. And the top-secret laboratories where the bomb had been created were deep in the Jemez Mountains, on land the Government took from Cochiti Pueblo: Los Alamos, only a hundred miles northeast of him now, still surrounded by high electric fences and the ponderosa pine and tawny sandrock of the Jemez mountain canyon where the shrine to the twin mountain lions had always been. There was no end to it; it knew no boundaries; and he had arrived at the point of convergence where the fate of all living things, and even the earth, had been laid. From the jungles of his dreaming he recognized why the Japanese voices had merged with Laguna voices, with Josiah's voice and Rocky's voice; the lines of cultures and worlds were drawn in flat dark lines on fine light sand, converging in the middle of witchery's final ceremonial sand painting. From that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never known these mesas, who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter.
He walked to the mine shaft slowly, and the feeling became overwhelming; the pattern of the ceremony was completed there. He knelt and found an ore rock. The gray stone was streaked with powdery yellow uranium, bright and alive as pollen; veins of sooty black formed lines wit the yellow making mountain ranges and rivers across the stone. But they had taken these beautiful rocks from deep within earth and they had laid them in a monstrous design, realizing destruction on a scale only they could have dreamed.
He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together - the old stories, the war stories, their stories - to become a story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time.
He turned. The moon was rising above the last mesa crossed from the east. A transition was about to be completed: the sun was crossing the zenith to a winter place in the sky, a place where prayers of long winter nights would call out the long summer days of new growth. Tonight the old priests would be praying for the force to continue the relentless motion of the stars. But there were others who would be working this night, casting loose countermotions to suck in a great spiral, swallowing the universe endlessly into the black mouth, their diagrams in black ash on cave walls outlining the end in motionless dead stars. But he saw the constellation in the north sky, and the fourth star was directly above him; the pattern of the ceremony was in the stars, and the constellation formed a map of the mountains in the directions he had gone for the ceremony. For each star there was a night and a place; this was the last night and the last place, when the darkness of night and the light of day were balanced. His protection was there in the sky, in the position of the sun, in the pattern of the stars. He had only to complete this night, to keep the story out of the reach of the destroyers for a few more hours, and their witchery would turn, upon itself, upon them.
Arrowboy got up after she left.
He followed her into the hills
up where the caves were.
The others were waiting.
They held the hoop
and danced around the fire
four times.
The witchman stepped through the hoop
he called out that he would be a wolf.
His head and upper body became hairy like a wolf
But his lower body was still human.
"Something is wrong," he said.
"Ck'o'yo magic won't work
if someone is watching us."
"He had been so close to it, caught up in it for so long that it's simplicity struck him deep inside his chest: Trinity Site, where they exploded the first atomic bomb, was only three hundred miles to the southeast, at White Sands. And the top-secret laboratories where the bomb had been created were deep in the Jemez Mountains, on land the Government took from Cochiti Pueblo: Los Alamos, only a hundred miles northeast of him now, still surrounded by high electric fences and the ponderosa pine and tawny sandrock of the Jemez mountain canyon where the shrine to the twin mountain lions had always been. There was no end to it; it knew no boundaries; and he had arrived at the point of convergence where the fate of all living things, and even the earth, had been laid. From the jungles of his dreaming he recognized why the Japanese voices had merged with Laguna voices, with Josiah's voice and Rocky's voice; the lines of cultures and worlds were drawn in flat dark lines on fine light sand, converging in the middle of witchery's final ceremonial sand painting. From that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never known these mesas, who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter.
He walked to the mine shaft slowly, and the feeling became overwhelming; the pattern of the ceremony was completed there. He knelt and found an ore rock. The gray stone was streaked with powdery yellow uranium, bright and alive as pollen; veins of sooty black formed lines wit the yellow making mountain ranges and rivers across the stone. But they had taken these beautiful rocks from deep within earth and they had laid them in a monstrous design, realizing destruction on a scale only they could have dreamed.
He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together - the old stories, the war stories, their stories - to become a story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time.
He turned. The moon was rising above the last mesa crossed from the east. A transition was about to be completed: the sun was crossing the zenith to a winter place in the sky, a place where prayers of long winter nights would call out the long summer days of new growth. Tonight the old priests would be praying for the force to continue the relentless motion of the stars. But there were others who would be working this night, casting loose countermotions to suck in a great spiral, swallowing the universe endlessly into the black mouth, their diagrams in black ash on cave walls outlining the end in motionless dead stars. But he saw the constellation in the north sky, and the fourth star was directly above him; the pattern of the ceremony was in the stars, and the constellation formed a map of the mountains in the directions he had gone for the ceremony. For each star there was a night and a place; this was the last night and the last place, when the darkness of night and the light of day were balanced. His protection was there in the sky, in the position of the sun, in the pattern of the stars. He had only to complete this night, to keep the story out of the reach of the destroyers for a few more hours, and their witchery would turn, upon itself, upon them.
Arrowboy got up after she left.
He followed her into the hills
up where the caves were.
The others were waiting.
They held the hoop
and danced around the fire
four times.
The witchman stepped through the hoop
he called out that he would be a wolf.
His head and upper body became hairy like a wolf
But his lower body was still human.
"Something is wrong," he said.
"Ck'o'yo magic won't work
if someone is watching us."
Richard Hugo on Work and Luck
From "The Triggering Town" on writing by Richard Hugo (p. 17):
"Once a spectator said, after Jack Nicklaus had chipped a shot in from a sand trap, "That's pretty lucky." Nicklaus is supposed to have replied, "Right. But I notice the more I practice, the luckier I get." If you write often, perhaps every day, you will stay in shape and will be better able to receive those good poems, which are finally a matter of luck, and get them down. Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don't work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work."
Darn it! Genius or no, it takes work.
"Once a spectator said, after Jack Nicklaus had chipped a shot in from a sand trap, "That's pretty lucky." Nicklaus is supposed to have replied, "Right. But I notice the more I practice, the luckier I get." If you write often, perhaps every day, you will stay in shape and will be better able to receive those good poems, which are finally a matter of luck, and get them down. Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don't work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work."
Darn it! Genius or no, it takes work.
Monday, February 16, 2009
The Lie - An Excerpt from Ceremony
An excerpt from "Ceremony" by Leslie Marmon Silko. This is deep into the book about Tayo, a half Laguna half Mexican, as he is tracking a herd of lost cattle owned by his dear deceased uncle in the central mountains of New Mexico. It is soon after he has visited a half Navajo half Mexican medicine man in the sandstone hills above Gallup, NM to cure his post-war "sickness." During this healing "ceremony", Betonie, the old medicine man, explains to Tayo that the destroyers who practice witchery are out to destroy the people, the world as it has been known, maybe the world itself. But it does not have to happen. The new world requires an evolved healing ceremony, different from what the people have known. The stakes are higher, the weapons more destructive, the agents of witchery more deceptive. But if you step through the five hoops, representing the 5 worlds, you will see again and the worlds will come back to you, and you will be able to continue. In this case, the white man is the agent of witchery unleashed by one of the destroyer gods, and is living, in most cases, the Lie that perpetuates the destruction of the other peoples, animals, the earth mother herself. But, Betonie, makes sure that Tayo understands that you cannot judge the entire race for the deception of the Lie, as they are deceived too and under the influence of the witchery. It is in the waking up and being present with the Mother, whether it be Indian or white or any other race or creed or mixture thereof, that unmasks the witchery and prevents the destruction (of everything). Although at once harsh and beautiful, and certainly an indictment of the history of the white race on this continent, it is also hopeful, in the sense that there is the possibility of waking up.
"The lie. He cut into the wire as if cutting away at the lie inside himself. The liars had fooled everyone, white people and Indians alike; as long as people believed in lies, they would never be able to see what had been done to them or what they were doing to each other. He wiped the sweat off his face onto the sleeve of his jacket. He stood back and looked at the gaping cut in the wire. If the white people never looked beyond the lie to see that theirs was a nation built on stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had been used by the witchery; they would never know that they were still being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients together: white thievery and injustice boiling up the anger and hatred that would finally destroy the world: the starving against the fat, the colored against the white. The destroyers had only to set it in motion, and sit back to count the casualties. But it was more than a body count; the lies devoured the white hearts, and for more than two hundred years white people had worked to fill their emptiness; they tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great technology and the wealth it brought. And always they had been fooling themselves, and they knew it."
"The lie. He cut into the wire as if cutting away at the lie inside himself. The liars had fooled everyone, white people and Indians alike; as long as people believed in lies, they would never be able to see what had been done to them or what they were doing to each other. He wiped the sweat off his face onto the sleeve of his jacket. He stood back and looked at the gaping cut in the wire. If the white people never looked beyond the lie to see that theirs was a nation built on stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had been used by the witchery; they would never know that they were still being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients together: white thievery and injustice boiling up the anger and hatred that would finally destroy the world: the starving against the fat, the colored against the white. The destroyers had only to set it in motion, and sit back to count the casualties. But it was more than a body count; the lies devoured the white hearts, and for more than two hundred years white people had worked to fill their emptiness; they tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great technology and the wealth it brought. And always they had been fooling themselves, and they knew it."
Music Memory
"Things are different now, things are different now” – strains of Robert Mirabal run through my head, and I pick up the bongos. When I listen to Indian music my internal landscape changes and I see a coyote leaping a low fence and crossing a dusty road under a full moon in the sage and boulder wash spilling out from the blue-bearded mountains. And when I open my eyes that actual landscape is there, but it’s not the same as when I daze out my car window on a weary trip back from Santa Fe, parallel worlds apart, white and sweater clad, shoes too tight, coffee too strong, talk radio keeping me company until droning static tells me I’m all alone along the Rio Grande. Then I turn on the Mirabal CD, at first resistant of the change I know will occur. But then the flutes that rise along the canyon walls and float like smoke through the branches of the bosque trees and out into the faltering blue above the red escarpments, take me back to a place where I must have been because it hurts too much not to be true, and it is this land that is that place. And what I know when I write this is that I have been buried here, in the soft sand along the river, at the foot of a mountain next to a boulder, many times buried and birthed. Then the guitars kick in and Mirabal chants in a witch doctor’s wail, a medicine man’s entry into the wound, and I am with him. The pain, I realize, is in stretching myself across these parallel walls in an unconscious state incapable of sewing up the space, collapsing the worlds, remembering they are one. And then I remember, and it doesn’t take much; 20 seconds of a song, and I soar with the bald eagles through the album, chanting along, banging on my steering wheel, looking out to the west as I crest the horseshoe to see the cut in the earth on the caldera, my ass feeling a horse beneath me, my eyes setting with the sun through a lone, leaning tree on the edge of the mesa sea. And I understand how hard it is to reach back through the killing times, the unfathomable loss of recognition and understanding, to the times when the sun just circled the sky. But, I know as I’m listening and looking that I have to reach back to be here, and not just once, but every day. And then the CD ends and I see the sign for the golf course. I’m 7 miles from home. I forget again.
Burn
Blackened earth on the side of the highway in northern New Mexico. I get out of the car and breathe deep - sage and pinion and the sun on wood chips. Blanca Peak rises like rock candy to the north dominating the San Luis Valley. It is here when I knew I was home. It is here where I dropped to my knees and put my nose to the dry, prickly ground and brought the dust of the high desert into my body. It is here, looking to the dry, broken west - all the way out to the San Juans 100 miles away - where I came into my body for the briefest moment; where I inhabited myself for the first time since birth. It was 1995 - June. The wind blew from the west and clouds massed over the endless crest of the Sangre de Cristos. It was here when I knew I was alive. Life smelled like burning ground and distant cottonwood trees in an ancient streambed. And it tasted like antelope and buffalo long gone into that ground. The sky to the west was unrelenting in its blue - the crystallized New Mexico blue. How does the sky know what state it's in? Go With God - "Vaya Con Dios", the sign read. It was here when I knew I was a writer. And I knew also that I wasn't a writer. It was here where my eyes burned from tears and I almost turned around and went back to sleep in Boulder. It was hard to stand in that forever valley. It contained everything. I had vertigo. There was nothing to hold on to - no hooks in the sky, no trees to climb - only sage: sturdy, sweet sage fanning to the horizon beyond the burned hump of mountain in Sunshine Valley.
A Bargain at any Price
A barker at a carnival talking out of the side of his big mouth over a set of Ginsu knives that the knife thrower will throw into the hollows under the arms of the long-legged, red-headed, roped-to -the- wall siren.
"A bahgin at any price! Lad, step up to the table. See these knives? See the blood stain on the stainless steel of the dagger? Ahhhhh, yesssssss. You're right. This knife was used in the Perfect Tommy's Massacre on 84th and Amsterdam in good Ole NYC back in 1989. Hmmmm, REAL Amercican killing steel...that's right. 4 dead with the same 4 inch dagger. But it was the last victim, John Amici, 24 years old. Lived around the corner. It was Amici who was stabbed in the heart - right in the center of the aorta. Aortic blood, the deepest, darkest of its kind. Stains stainless steel....see it right here? For you....$100....that's it. Right now. Tomorrow, I'll sell that thing in Chicago for a grand. That's right kid, one of its kind"
The kid walks away; not really a kid is he, about 24 himself. Deep hollows of yellowed purple under his eyes. A Kool in his hand dangling. A Kool? Who the fuck smokes Kools anymore? He's bored. He's walking, dragging his PF Flyers in the clotted dirt, clotted from cola and candy and maybe some of that aortic blood. He looks up at the top of the ferris wheel. It rocks back and forth stuck for the moment. 2 people at the apex banging on their
cage. He's thinking that they should just relax and look out over the water. The water looks endless from up there, stretching out into the night, calm, dependable, calling, but not too loud like his girlfriend. Well, was his girlfriend until last night. He heads over to the gambling tent where he won $50 playing blackjack with the firemen and Knights of Columbus. He spits and rubs the wad into the dirt with the rest of the effluvia. His head is down. He's sick of the jouncy carnival music cast out over the speakers hung on the tops of telephone poles. He smells the water...low tide.
"A bahgin at any price! Lad, step up to the table. See these knives? See the blood stain on the stainless steel of the dagger? Ahhhhh, yesssssss. You're right. This knife was used in the Perfect Tommy's Massacre on 84th and Amsterdam in good Ole NYC back in 1989. Hmmmm, REAL Amercican killing steel...that's right. 4 dead with the same 4 inch dagger. But it was the last victim, John Amici, 24 years old. Lived around the corner. It was Amici who was stabbed in the heart - right in the center of the aorta. Aortic blood, the deepest, darkest of its kind. Stains stainless steel....see it right here? For you....$100....that's it. Right now. Tomorrow, I'll sell that thing in Chicago for a grand. That's right kid, one of its kind"
The kid walks away; not really a kid is he, about 24 himself. Deep hollows of yellowed purple under his eyes. A Kool in his hand dangling. A Kool? Who the fuck smokes Kools anymore? He's bored. He's walking, dragging his PF Flyers in the clotted dirt, clotted from cola and candy and maybe some of that aortic blood. He looks up at the top of the ferris wheel. It rocks back and forth stuck for the moment. 2 people at the apex banging on their
cage. He's thinking that they should just relax and look out over the water. The water looks endless from up there, stretching out into the night, calm, dependable, calling, but not too loud like his girlfriend. Well, was his girlfriend until last night. He heads over to the gambling tent where he won $50 playing blackjack with the firemen and Knights of Columbus. He spits and rubs the wad into the dirt with the rest of the effluvia. His head is down. He's sick of the jouncy carnival music cast out over the speakers hung on the tops of telephone poles. He smells the water...low tide.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Taking it to the Hole
Tonight, being watched by a bloated, blousy-faced moon, I went to the gym to play basketball for the first time since September. I was ready. I ate well, had protein working in me, felt awake, was hydrated and the ankle was giving off fizzes of excitement to run, cut, backpedal, leap, sidestep, and just explode. Digging in the back of the CRV, I found my ankle brace and put it on over low athletic socks and pulled it tight. The hoop sneakers that felt too tight a few weeks ago, felt perfect, snug yet giving. Instead of athletic shorts, I put on my loose green "working" shorts, the ones with the creosote stains all over them from when I was hammering rebar into railroad ties last summer for the Taos Rock Garden Amphitheater. So ready. I stretched and then rotated the ankle, which was giving me more go-get'em feedback. Sweatshirt over gray tanktop, mushroom cap, navy blue sweats and I was ready to roll. Backing out of the driveway I slid out of the good ruts and ended up crunching into a rock hard snowbank, but Montez took it in stride and powered on. Onward, straining into a window of dried mud spray, Montez bounced and slid in and out of the tracks on Tune Dr., rocking me back and forth. It felt good, and like a driving game. In fact, the past couple of weeks have been a driving game out here. It's starting to crack me up, belly laughs, and hoots, like I'm bustin a bronc. Out to Hwy. 64, the stumbling moon with the double chin making it's way across the valley toward the river, tossed stainless blue light at the Taos Range pulsating in fresh white sheets laid down and stretched tight by yesterday's 10" dump. Moving at 65, sometimes near 70 (Montez is not a speed car), I hit the blinking light and made the ralph toward town. At First Community Bank the digital thermometer read 21, and the time 7:43. I was focused, not thinking of much else but basketball and stretching my muscles, even in the car as I drove. And they all felt good. It's not like I've been sitting idle for 5 months. Nope, I've been hauling up, down and around Divisadero 4 or 5 days a week, and usually on down the canyon to the river on the other days. So, my lungs are good, and muscles are fairly supple. I've been stretching my trunk every morning, hitting the heavy bag, doing a ton of pushups and situps. It's just been that the ankle has felt tinny, hollow, crunchy, and tight...until the past two weeks. So, here it is, the Guadalupe Gym, next to the Lady of Guadalupe Church. There's a bunch of cars pulling in, moving out. Seems like a good sign. Almost too many cars. Maybe the game is packed and it'll be hard to get in a game? Out of Montez, I go in and see that the Los Tigres boxers, the youth boxing club of Taos, are finishing up. They all depart en masse, and I'm left alone in the gym stretching. A guy comes out of the equipment room, 40s with long, dark hair in a ponytail and a thick fu manchu, wearing a Los Tigres windbreaker. He strides across the basketball court floor and looks at me. "Where are your cohorts, bro?"
"I don't know. It's my first night of the year. They're still playing on Wednesdays, right?"
"Most of the time, bro. But, eee, it doesn't look so good tonight."
"Guess I'll wait a bit."
"Enjoy, bro."
Nobody is showing up. I start running around the court, stopping short, changing directions, changing speeds, sprinting full out and tapping the backboard on each side. I backpedal (one of my strong suits...I can run backwards faster than most people and almost as fast as people going forwards). There isn't a ball to be found so I start making believe I'm dribbling. I move to the top of the key, throw a head fake, crossover my dribble and drive to the hole. I finish the layup by tapping the backboard. The ankle is feeling secure in the brace and giving me no trouble. I KNOW I'm ready to play. My air feels good, I have some quickness and my body is just jones'n for action. Still nobody shows. Just me, alone on the basketball court my sneakers squeaking and my footfalls echoing off the walls. I do a couple of suicide drills, 3x to foul line, half court, the other foul line, and the other end line, and then the same on the return trip. Good breathing. No sweat because it's probably 55 in there (it's always cold in that gym). I feign taking some shots from 3 point land. It all feels right. As I sit here and type, it's 9:32 and usually, I am wiped out. I didn't sleep well last night, but here I am with xray eyes, and my legs buzzing and twitching. They want to run, like a thoroughbred needs to be let loose to go through her paces. This boy needs to run! And jump! And hit a few shots, teardrops and jumpers, and running one-handers, even a hook.
But it wasn't to be tonight. Turns out the hoop posse was at the Taos Adult League championship game at a little school just around the corner. I hopped in there for a few minutes, but if I wasn't going to be playing, I had little interest in watching or talking to the people in the stands. So I snuck out and headed Montez back home.
All that not playing has made me ravenously hungry.
"I don't know. It's my first night of the year. They're still playing on Wednesdays, right?"
"Most of the time, bro. But, eee, it doesn't look so good tonight."
"Guess I'll wait a bit."
"Enjoy, bro."
Nobody is showing up. I start running around the court, stopping short, changing directions, changing speeds, sprinting full out and tapping the backboard on each side. I backpedal (one of my strong suits...I can run backwards faster than most people and almost as fast as people going forwards). There isn't a ball to be found so I start making believe I'm dribbling. I move to the top of the key, throw a head fake, crossover my dribble and drive to the hole. I finish the layup by tapping the backboard. The ankle is feeling secure in the brace and giving me no trouble. I KNOW I'm ready to play. My air feels good, I have some quickness and my body is just jones'n for action. Still nobody shows. Just me, alone on the basketball court my sneakers squeaking and my footfalls echoing off the walls. I do a couple of suicide drills, 3x to foul line, half court, the other foul line, and the other end line, and then the same on the return trip. Good breathing. No sweat because it's probably 55 in there (it's always cold in that gym). I feign taking some shots from 3 point land. It all feels right. As I sit here and type, it's 9:32 and usually, I am wiped out. I didn't sleep well last night, but here I am with xray eyes, and my legs buzzing and twitching. They want to run, like a thoroughbred needs to be let loose to go through her paces. This boy needs to run! And jump! And hit a few shots, teardrops and jumpers, and running one-handers, even a hook.
But it wasn't to be tonight. Turns out the hoop posse was at the Taos Adult League championship game at a little school just around the corner. I hopped in there for a few minutes, but if I wasn't going to be playing, I had little interest in watching or talking to the people in the stands. So I snuck out and headed Montez back home.
All that not playing has made me ravenously hungry.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Spell Interrupted
"He breathed the air outside the doors and it smelled like trains, diesel oil, and creosote ties under the steel track. He leaned against the depot wall then; he was sweating, and sounds were becoming outlines again, vague and hollow in his ears, and he knew he was going to become invisible right there. It was too late to ask for help, and he waited to die the way smoke dies, drifting in currents of air, twisting in thin swirls, fading until it exists no more."
- The narrator in Leslie Marmon Silko's novel, Ceremony, about her half-breed protagonist, Tayo, who was just returning from the South Pacific theater after WWII.
"It took a great deal of energy to be a human being, and the more the wind blew and the sun moved southwest, the less energy Tayo had."
"Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves."
Snow blew in from the west today, slanted, copious, chaotic. I was reading Leslie Marmon Silko in the window of a Taos cafe and walking landscapes of baked red clay and dust storms. The sun in the story made me squint and the nausea of Tayo, a survivor of the Bataan Death March, became my nausea. I couldn't finish my chicken pot pie. It was dark in the cafe, 3pm feeling like dusk. Although crowded with people, there was a sense of isolation, of hollow halls, of purposeless beings. The music was too loud, stomping on my ride on a reluctant, felt gray, skinbones burro down and up arroyo after arroyo on the way to a bar on Route 66 to meet other vets from the pueblos. But it was elegiac, melancholy, the vocals in echoing circles, like starving buzzards left with only the company of other buzzards. Emptiness with cold, metal walls. Automatons moving errantly, programmed for crisscrossing and leg shaking. Lost on the planet and in the time of this book. Smelling it's beauty, burning flesh, sentences so true you have to dig trenches with them. I did not want to lift up my head. I did not want to see the motion in the room, or break the 4th wall and talk to the characters rooting around me. Tayo choked on grief, stuffed from the forced meal of it, and my eyes bulged and watered. I tilted my head left, two ladies in red playing scrabble on the big corner table, and I wondered if they saw the glistening in my eyes. Not a page went by when Silko did not spin out a line of gristle, and smooth muscle sheath. "Yes, yes," I'm thinking. But it's not a yes of goodness or pleasantness or satisfaction from reading, but of yes, I know this and there is no answer for it. Yes, I know this, and it makes me want to disappear like Tayo's smoke. And then Dave the CPA walks right through the wall and thrusts out his hand. "What, you don't say hello to your old friends?"
"You shaved off your goatee. I'm lost in this book, man. Haven't looked up in a while. Can't break from it."
"Alright, Mr. literature, I won't interrupt. But I want to talk to you about a lady on Santa Clara Pueblo who needs to sue an oil company for sucking out the oil under her property from outside the boundary line by hooking the drill horizontally right under her. She already won $1.8 million settlement from the other oil company that was doing that."
"I do only small business law and bankruptcy."
"Right. Come talk to me."
"OK, in a bit."
Now I had to look around, stretch, make all of those moves you make when you think people are looking at you, when you're back in the world of contact and movement, of social acknowledgment. I looked out the window and saw my formerly muddy car turned into a box of furry whiteness. Fat flakes being driven south to north by a slamming wind. It took my eyes, and I realized everybody else was looking out the window. Snapped out of the story trance, my skeletal connection to the race grew some meat, and I joined in the weather-made delight. Taos is a place where people love the weather, the drama of it, the sweeping in of the cold front that augurs a return to active winter, to swirling fists of storms lined up from the Gulf of Alaska down to Southern California promising heavy snows to our Sangre de Cristos to augment the stagnant snowpack. Although we've had a flurry or two, the past month has been mild and sunny, only the early morning cold and retreating shield of snow to remind one of the ferocity and heavy chill of late November through early January. I had been thinking before falling into Silko that Taos, in the lower elevations and on out on the desert, was starting to look like the victim of a wreck who shows you her healing wounds too soon after the accident. Spoiled and mishapen shrubs, torn up mud, cloudy amber pools of melt, matted, stained hay grasses, and children's toys, broken and upended, emerging in front yards for the first time since November 28. Scarred with irrigation ditches, the fields flanking town looked like they'd gone under an unsteady knife. The snow had pulled back to the edges, in the trees, in the yards of houses along the outlines. It looked like a battle had taken place where the horses leaned down to search for magic shoots or old, dried grass with a speck of green left in it. That old end-of-autumn sadness hung out there, where the land is still soft but will soon be paralyzed and hardened and left on its own. The creamy, cold depths of winter, the early nights, the acceptance of dormancy, the dream of stillness in the covering of the landscape, the rounding of its features, all of this rolled back too soon and creating a no man's land, a desire to give up on the season and ask for the glories of the next, yet knowing that river cannot be forded, not today.
Silko and Tayo are with me, now in my house with huge windows slapped full of snow now frozen in a design that looks like dancing tulips and daisies. Once the spell was broken in the Cafe, I could not get it back. I gave up and went outside to revel. With the sticky, apple-smelling snow attaching to my eyelashes and goatee, I cleared my windows, and smelled again the winter I'd been missing these weeks. I got in and drove into the storm, windshield wipers on high. People in the other cars, when I could see them, had broad smiles and red-cheeked glows going. Out of the automaton world, and the knowing of emptiness, I propelled myself into the giant cookie of Taos being filled rapidly with sugar cream. I drove north into a funnel of snow and became the only car on the road as I curved southwest on the Mesa. Sliding down and up through the undulations of Tune Dr., near my house, I lost the car to the left, corrected in the direction of the slide, but still ended up in a full 360 that landed me in the mouth of a side road. No ditches or fences this time. Feeling my angels, I let out a whoop, backed a few feet into the road, and got back on Tune Dr. for another 100 yards and home.
From Divisadero yesterday evening. Shangri-la.
- The narrator in Leslie Marmon Silko's novel, Ceremony, about her half-breed protagonist, Tayo, who was just returning from the South Pacific theater after WWII.
"It took a great deal of energy to be a human being, and the more the wind blew and the sun moved southwest, the less energy Tayo had."
"Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves."
Snow blew in from the west today, slanted, copious, chaotic. I was reading Leslie Marmon Silko in the window of a Taos cafe and walking landscapes of baked red clay and dust storms. The sun in the story made me squint and the nausea of Tayo, a survivor of the Bataan Death March, became my nausea. I couldn't finish my chicken pot pie. It was dark in the cafe, 3pm feeling like dusk. Although crowded with people, there was a sense of isolation, of hollow halls, of purposeless beings. The music was too loud, stomping on my ride on a reluctant, felt gray, skinbones burro down and up arroyo after arroyo on the way to a bar on Route 66 to meet other vets from the pueblos. But it was elegiac, melancholy, the vocals in echoing circles, like starving buzzards left with only the company of other buzzards. Emptiness with cold, metal walls. Automatons moving errantly, programmed for crisscrossing and leg shaking. Lost on the planet and in the time of this book. Smelling it's beauty, burning flesh, sentences so true you have to dig trenches with them. I did not want to lift up my head. I did not want to see the motion in the room, or break the 4th wall and talk to the characters rooting around me. Tayo choked on grief, stuffed from the forced meal of it, and my eyes bulged and watered. I tilted my head left, two ladies in red playing scrabble on the big corner table, and I wondered if they saw the glistening in my eyes. Not a page went by when Silko did not spin out a line of gristle, and smooth muscle sheath. "Yes, yes," I'm thinking. But it's not a yes of goodness or pleasantness or satisfaction from reading, but of yes, I know this and there is no answer for it. Yes, I know this, and it makes me want to disappear like Tayo's smoke. And then Dave the CPA walks right through the wall and thrusts out his hand. "What, you don't say hello to your old friends?"
"You shaved off your goatee. I'm lost in this book, man. Haven't looked up in a while. Can't break from it."
"Alright, Mr. literature, I won't interrupt. But I want to talk to you about a lady on Santa Clara Pueblo who needs to sue an oil company for sucking out the oil under her property from outside the boundary line by hooking the drill horizontally right under her. She already won $1.8 million settlement from the other oil company that was doing that."
"I do only small business law and bankruptcy."
"Right. Come talk to me."
"OK, in a bit."
Now I had to look around, stretch, make all of those moves you make when you think people are looking at you, when you're back in the world of contact and movement, of social acknowledgment. I looked out the window and saw my formerly muddy car turned into a box of furry whiteness. Fat flakes being driven south to north by a slamming wind. It took my eyes, and I realized everybody else was looking out the window. Snapped out of the story trance, my skeletal connection to the race grew some meat, and I joined in the weather-made delight. Taos is a place where people love the weather, the drama of it, the sweeping in of the cold front that augurs a return to active winter, to swirling fists of storms lined up from the Gulf of Alaska down to Southern California promising heavy snows to our Sangre de Cristos to augment the stagnant snowpack. Although we've had a flurry or two, the past month has been mild and sunny, only the early morning cold and retreating shield of snow to remind one of the ferocity and heavy chill of late November through early January. I had been thinking before falling into Silko that Taos, in the lower elevations and on out on the desert, was starting to look like the victim of a wreck who shows you her healing wounds too soon after the accident. Spoiled and mishapen shrubs, torn up mud, cloudy amber pools of melt, matted, stained hay grasses, and children's toys, broken and upended, emerging in front yards for the first time since November 28. Scarred with irrigation ditches, the fields flanking town looked like they'd gone under an unsteady knife. The snow had pulled back to the edges, in the trees, in the yards of houses along the outlines. It looked like a battle had taken place where the horses leaned down to search for magic shoots or old, dried grass with a speck of green left in it. That old end-of-autumn sadness hung out there, where the land is still soft but will soon be paralyzed and hardened and left on its own. The creamy, cold depths of winter, the early nights, the acceptance of dormancy, the dream of stillness in the covering of the landscape, the rounding of its features, all of this rolled back too soon and creating a no man's land, a desire to give up on the season and ask for the glories of the next, yet knowing that river cannot be forded, not today.
Silko and Tayo are with me, now in my house with huge windows slapped full of snow now frozen in a design that looks like dancing tulips and daisies. Once the spell was broken in the Cafe, I could not get it back. I gave up and went outside to revel. With the sticky, apple-smelling snow attaching to my eyelashes and goatee, I cleared my windows, and smelled again the winter I'd been missing these weeks. I got in and drove into the storm, windshield wipers on high. People in the other cars, when I could see them, had broad smiles and red-cheeked glows going. Out of the automaton world, and the knowing of emptiness, I propelled myself into the giant cookie of Taos being filled rapidly with sugar cream. I drove north into a funnel of snow and became the only car on the road as I curved southwest on the Mesa. Sliding down and up through the undulations of Tune Dr., near my house, I lost the car to the left, corrected in the direction of the slide, but still ended up in a full 360 that landed me in the mouth of a side road. No ditches or fences this time. Feeling my angels, I let out a whoop, backed a few feet into the road, and got back on Tune Dr. for another 100 yards and home.
From Divisadero yesterday evening. Shangri-la.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
I Know Nothing
Walking west on the caliche road, it was soft and somber, the half man half woman that is winter dropped her smooth belly on the valley as she has for most of the past month. Strange and out-of-body, I ran, then walked, trotted backward, weaved back and forth. La luna was up there high, bathed in blues. There was an entire family of blue to the east and north, sad but steady, calm and quiet. Alarms rang in my right ear, the only sound on the vast desert. It is a moment that leaves you alone, able to walk into the curtain of air, not a stir, as if on the glass surface of a leaden lake, no oars to rip the skin, no body to plow the depths. And I have no expectations. Things are good in some ways, trying in others. I'm never sure when I'm walking this road, and surety tends to the ridiculous underneath the baby sky of crisscrossing pastels to the west. The river is just over that hill and down that far wall of cliff, but tonight there is no destination or goal. I'm torn and deadened, hopeful and weary. Confused. Swimming in the cold water rises to me as something that would unmask me, unwind me, unravel the knot that disappears when I am in motion, and returns when the door to the civilized world reopens and I step back in. Calls to make, letters to write, psyches to juggle, spirits to caress, magic serum to deliver, work for money, work for hire, work for legitimacy, and spinning up and up we go; I gotta sufi myself the fuck out of here. You know what I mean? And breathing, a bubble inside of the chrome tube of time, sliding, looking for the end of the line where I'll be dumped out into the lake like a pearly waste product. Waste products floating on an unexpected lake, below mountains, near sharp nipples of desert bumps, afraid to touch anything or be popped back out into the hum. Human elements, darting around inside their amber lit houses, trying to reform, recollecting in a bathtub, listening to the sizzle and seethe of other elements in heat, wanting to reach out and find the floating device and slither under the door and out over things, stretched out, vast, unhinged, buttons popped, clothes slid off, swathed in today's newsprint as a time capsule bomb to be dropped when you land. I must admit that I know nothing. I am listening and I am empty, can't tell right from left, right from wrong, right from form. When I hit the point of the road where I knew I must turn back, I ran again, ran hard, harder and faster than I have since September 7th when I mangled my ankle sliding into first base, hung over, breathing heavy, stamping the loose dirt. 5 months. It is starting to feel supple. There is regret lodged on the inside, and that still feels hollow, the bone speaks to me in broken tones like a pen on spinning spokes. And it may always speak to me. But, still, it is almost ready, as am I, to explode, to launch as if I was wrapped in a thousand rubber bands and somebody slashed them from head-to-toe with long knife and I was slingshot. Dogs call from the distance, and the smell of crumbled and sloughing earth mixed with pooled water climbs my body to my nose and I want to crawl in there among the sage. Hmmmm, bury the head in the clay mud and let it be a sheath over all of me. Moon, should I? I don't. Instead, I continue down the road and the western sky doesn't give a shit that I know nothing, not one shit. It goes gaga and leaves me swallowing hard with feathers and swirls, waves and curls of first cranberry, then hot raspberry, then that occasional-if-you've-been-very-nice-I'll-thrill-you electric salmon (thanks Ivy). Clueless, I dig in my back pocket for my cell camera, and stagger into the mud ditch and up into the crunching snowdebris, looking for the everything shot. I take here, take there, pushing the button, capturing what you can't capture, breathing a little heavy, excited, threatened. It's all unexpected, but what the fuck did I expect. I'm not really happy, but neither am I sad, or disappointed or anything. The sky does not give up. 45 minutes has elapsed since I left my house. I wonder if I'm still in the bubble. I don't think so. My mind flashes to posters on the window of the World Cup. An Apache medicine man is doing a sweat lodge ceremony and giving spiritual guidance somewhere, soon. Bands with friends of mine in them are playing everywhere at the same time all weekend. A full lunar eclipse approaches and there will be a gong ceremony. Roses are being sold for Valentine's Day by an acting troupe of developmentally disabled magicians. A woman promises to help blocked artists flow once more. I want to do, and buy, and be everything. And I am nothing. I want to see movies, but first I want to learn to speak telepathically. Blogging is not nearly enough; neither is email or IMing or facebooking, or talking on the phone. None of these things can be done in the bubble. I want to get up way before dawn tomorrow and know something. The clouds of red make the sage stalks black, shaking silhouettes, and that is something. A bomb waits inside to lay waste to what has been me, and the aftermath is a man exhaling.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Monday, February 2, 2009
19th Nervous Breakdown
A late afternoon coffee, an iced one, leaves me completely lost and befuddled this evening. I mean fucking daft, disconnected, rolled over, strung out, jittery, unfocused, lazy, apathetic, and swimming for safety. I had some inspiring conversation today with my buddy and biz partner, Dan, a musician, about the moments out here when you notice, even if it's for 30 seconds, that everything stops, caves in and stretches out, rises and collapses, is pulled tight like a drum, but remains silent, no birds, no dogs, nothing stirring but the sky and the dark peaks take on dynamism, and move hunchbacked as if on water, stealthy, maybe rumbling from some underneath, the skin of it all broken apart, dots in your eyes, and you forget yourself, your awareness covers you like a shroud so that there is nothing left to perceive, nothing...at...all. And you are left standing there, alone and nothing, and forgetting and leaving, drifting, unburdened, weightless, green, unaware, needing water to sprout. And then your heartbeat, slow and relentless drums you awake, in the ears, in the eyes, yes, the backs of the eyes, it tickles, but you have vision you did not know you had, able to scale the black anthills and reflect the dirty copper sun, and gain in strength, the kind that makes you flare your nostrils in an understanding of invincibility, immortality, endless capacity, and you know you are in the superhero realm and can picture breaking bricks with your forehead, 10 wooden planks with your chopping hand, you can throw a ball of water in a whirlpool of sonar and awaken the fish to your cause, and then you see a woman in tight black leather, head to freakn toe, red lips softly pursed, and that's the moment you know, you know, know, know, you'll have to wake up, for real, or start laughing out loud because c'mon, this can't be real, can it?
So, I'm super frazzled, and I come across this picture of Mick Jagger, long-haired and contemplative, blown out. It's in the New York Times online in a box where there is a link to a story about a man who bought a Scottish castle after the sellers rejected Mick. Rejected Mick! And, man, he looks rejected in this picture, but it cannot be recent. He is soft-skinned and lightly lined, not craggy with deep creases that can hold whole tears. His eyes, though, are heavy, weighted, bagged, dull coal inside. He's wayward, staring out into the middle distance, woken up in the winter afternoon with one hour left of sunlight. He is old before his time (which is when?), frustrated, whipped by the journey, beleaguered, forlorn, he's lost some measure of love, he may have a song to write, but first he'll have to drop his head, and he's not quite done it. Almost, almost. Too much, he thinks. Keep it simple. Break me down. I'm black before dark. She is gone and I don't remember her. I've been doing this for too long. When will the wheels stop turning? When will I know?
So, I'm super frazzled, and I come across this picture of Mick Jagger, long-haired and contemplative, blown out. It's in the New York Times online in a box where there is a link to a story about a man who bought a Scottish castle after the sellers rejected Mick. Rejected Mick! And, man, he looks rejected in this picture, but it cannot be recent. He is soft-skinned and lightly lined, not craggy with deep creases that can hold whole tears. His eyes, though, are heavy, weighted, bagged, dull coal inside. He's wayward, staring out into the middle distance, woken up in the winter afternoon with one hour left of sunlight. He is old before his time (which is when?), frustrated, whipped by the journey, beleaguered, forlorn, he's lost some measure of love, he may have a song to write, but first he'll have to drop his head, and he's not quite done it. Almost, almost. Too much, he thinks. Keep it simple. Break me down. I'm black before dark. She is gone and I don't remember her. I've been doing this for too long. When will the wheels stop turning? When will I know?
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