Beckett's Martyr

2010-01-16T22:34:00.000-08:00

UP : RODNEY'S

The stairs lead up. I stand in the light shining down through the sky light, looking up, for so long the man behind the desk behind me clears his throat. Can I help you? I don't turn around, and raise my camera, leaning further back, to frame the well, to adjust the light meter, to aim my focus so that it reaches all the way up, capturing details of the rails and stairs along the way. A bag of postcards hangs off my wrist. It's why I'm here. The postcards. Each one with a specific destination. Each one with a specific set of directions. A way to reach out to the world. A way for the world to reach back. One postcard is for you.

A quick click of the shutter and the photo is mine. I cap the lens, the image trapped inside for later. My footfall echoes down the last staircase. The door is heavy. The street outside is loud. Cars, people, busses pass each other before me, merging then pulling apart. Storefronts fill and empty. Everything is destination. We are destinations.

2009-11-20T21:25:00.000-08:00

HAPPINESS

We wandered here from Harvard Square, where we had ice cream from J.P Licks and paused at the "question wheel." The man who curated the wheel was standing by, announcing to anyone who stopped to ask, that he answered all the questions, and there had been over 12,000 questions posted so far. There were questions about love and love lost, about death and about lost hope. Some questions were about dreams, how to achieve them when the path to them was overgrown. I took his photo. He was standing in front of the descending sun, the light seeping around his raised arms as he beckoned people to come nearer, to ask him anything they wanted. "You can ask me anything. What do you want to know?" his voice was full, deep. It filled our chests when he spoke. I set my camera down and wrote down a question. I didn't want an answer. Not really. Just asking was enough. It was the first cool day of fall. Cool enough for a hat and scarf. Cool enough to capture the breath of the man yelling out to anyone who would hear, his words clouding up and lifting slowly into the air above our heads. We walked away in silence. Hands jammed into our coat pockets, cameras slung around our necks, eyes watering in the wind. Store fronts reflected the street perfectly, as if we were inside looking out. Until the alleyway, and we stepped in.

2007-01-14T20:46:00.000-08:00

JFK DREAMT OF SATOMI DOGWOOD

That is all it takes is one shot.
And all that crimson spills out,
staining each leafy green brocade.

Forensics can tell us the velocity
of a lacerating blow to the flesh
by the size, the shape of blood marks.

Trajectory is measured with strings, pulled like webs,
that span the distance, the angle the blood has traveled
to mark its place upon any wall or blade of grass in any field--even this one.

A bullet through the back of your head
will spray the blood, each droplet spreading out
into thin wires, into tiny telegraphs of how you died.

Maybe, you were running across an open field just then.
It does not matter. Your blood will say it all. It will cry out after you cannot
saying listen, listen, let me tell you what I know.

2006-08-05T09:41:00.000-07:00

PREMONITIONS OF AN EARLY RETIREMENT

It came while the syrup was thickening,
all the water evaporating from the heat of the fire
inching its way into the pan from below.

Resisting the urge to dip a finger
to test its readiness, wanting its sweetness,
its purest dilution and too thick to be absorbed by any breakfast fair,
I stirred slowly, making sure it would not burn around the edges
so that everything would taste the way I was promised
as I paid for my bottle of "pure heaven" across that small table
filled with tiny bottles just like mine, glistening in the sun,
all of them dark and thick like his voice,
the man whose work was now mine, his skin ridged and rough
as tree bark, or so I imagined it to be
because how else would he know
because how else would I know
if all this waiting was not in vain.

2006-06-28T17:50:00.000-07:00

THE PROPOSAL

Imagine it
this way:

The sun was at its heaviest,
plumbing the horizon.

Flowers bloomed
where it landed.

Pan's name for that time of day?
"The perfect lover's hour."

To her surprise
I used the hour well.

From now on
her name for it is

"toward God."
Numinous.

That morning
rain fell here, right here--

my knee grew damp
from kneeling beside

our perfect reflection
cast into this shallow body of water.

My memory of it was
lagging behind the hour even then

as our eyes turned
upward finally.

Her voice was strong,
her answer demanding

that I
listen to it still.

2006-01-21T10:18:00.000-08:00

IN PASSING
(for J, wherever she may be)

The east-west track spreads its wings before me, too heavy to fly,
as he rocks heel to toe, his hands tucked deep into his sleeves.

Stale urine confronts me, even under the weight
of the January chill I shrug from my neck.

“You know,” his voice straddles me
from behind his coffee-black beard,

“dust mites and spiders freeze like precipitation
in the crowns of cumulo nimbus clouds and are carried over oceans . . .”

And as I follow his gaze up into the nearly all blue sky
his voice, large and heavy, fades beneath the horn of slowing train

like chalk flowers in a warm summer rain or
my memory of you on days less perfect for travel.

I reach absently for the browned hourglass core
of the last apple we shared, traded bite for bite from your hand,

then step up, pause half-way in the door of empty train.
With a quick glance over my shoulder, I realize now I will be traveling alone.

As we pull apart, I wonder if he will remember me
when the rain reaches to him, embraces his skin,

or when this east-west reaches out to any place other than here
then reaches back again, just as I have tried so many times for you.

My breath, touching the cool window beside me, gathers him up
in a single cloud, then fades, into the nakedness of everything.

2006-01-03T21:15:00.000-08:00

OUR TIME IN EDEN

H-eaven and eden are lost.
your inventory of the earth
given away.

"Eat of this fruit," she said. "Break into its flesh with all your heart.
Feel it give way beneath the weight of endless appetite,
of everything you rest your hands on."

and yes, this means her too. this means
the rock skipping now across the lake, your hand
still poised where the two were parted.

this means the flowers you picked,
already browning in the vase
by the window, in the sun.

this mean also your hands themselves
while you stand rubbing them, warding off the cold.
look out before you, this is home to you now,

this unharvested rock is what you have left.
but be glad. it will not perish. never the fuel.
never itself the fir-e.

Sh-ould heaven make a sound, it would be this . . .
or, whispering, for example.

did you not stop to listen just now? were you not
convinced for just that moment you might hear something?

even now you catch yourself just about to lean toward it,
eyes looking up, where you have always known heaven to be.

it is an infinite task squandering love, letting it spill from your heart
into the things you lean on most: your good looks. your hands. your

undying faith each will be returned unharmed.
name once when this has happened?

before i brought you here, you were looking at the clouds, counting them,
believing they could hold the lives you gave them: sheep, birds, the the fire in your heart.

and now, your whispering soul, the one whose lips press against the back of your throat
urging you to speak though you resist, is growing faint.

it too will drift into nothing, another cloud lost across the horizon,
another lost opportunity to cup your ear and lean your head toward your deepest desir-e.

2005-12-28T11:56:00.000-08:00

DEATH BECOMES US

The class shifted. Their weight moved from the backs of their seats. They weren't yet to the front, but they definitely had slipped forward, aware . . .

Ralph looked out across the room. Each student looked at him waiting for the words. He held on to them just a little longer . . . counting in his head one, two, three . . .

They had been working all morning on defining voice, and style, and tone, both in their work and in the work of others, and how these things helped them, as readers, to articulate the things they were thinking themselves through the words of another. Each student had worked on the same thing. They each read and analyzed a piece of fiction, Snow, by Julia Alverez. They only had to compose a one page response as to what the snow analogy meant and what they thought to be Alverez's larger theme, all the while figuring out how to show this by using the text from the story to support their ideas. Each one of them, as he suspected, drew entirely different references and made remarks that were close, but not quite right. IT happened this way every time with this assignment. It was why he did it. To illustrate this very point.
They were in the midst of doing research for the final research papers for the quarter. He wanted them to spend time thinking about how they were choosing their sources. What better way than to have them read each student piece and then have them decide which ones, anonymously of course, were the ones they felt were best, or most accurate. After each round, after they narrowed the papers down the to the final two, he could see in their faces the depth of critical analysis they had begun to engage in. Was the piece they had chosen the best? How did they know? What made their decision similar or different than their peers? What made their decisions the right decisions? How would they know?

"Are you ready . . .?" he asked, smile settling over his face, his lips curving, against his will, into the very corners of his mouth. He was amused, always at this point, by what he figured to be obvious, though it never was to them . . .

The assignment asked them to think about what the snow meant in the piece, and most students could formulate an opinion. Most of the students thought about the traditional images of snow, that snow was unique, that no two flakes were the same, that snow was innocence and beautiful, therefore we too must be these things. Surely this is what Alverez meant. Usually, as was the case today, at least one, sometimes two students looked beyond the obvious imagery and looked to the other details in the story to draw a more significant conclusion. They looked at the war, the images of isolation the girl, Yolanda, was subject to both by her teacher in the classroom, and by her ethnicity and her being an immigrant in the U.S. They looked at these things and put them all together with the idea that snow was also winter, and death, and cold, and the earth was buried beneath it for a long time. Snow was death. We were not unique, but indeed made equal in death. This was beauty. This lack of arbitrary boundaries was beautiful.

. . ."one, two . . ." Ralph counted off, eyeing each student and the ease and new found excitement with this part of the assignment growing in them.

And when these ideas were exposed, he watched the faces turn with wonder, first on their own ideas of snow, then on themselves, and then, without them realizing, to the sky, as if to wait for it to fall. All around the room we slipped outside ourselves, forgetting self for just an instant. We were beautiful this way. Together.

" . . . three!!!!" The students, most of them laughing now, tossed the scraps of their shredded essays into the air. The paper filled the space above them and fluttered down slowly over their heads, the desks, and on to the floor. Some students ducked, some students stared up into the fluttering scraps and held out their hands, each of them trapped in their fondest memory of winter, in the memory that felt like home.

Later, when the class had slipped away, chatting about the paper, about everything they had been asked to do, Ralph began to clean up the room, sweeping paper off the desks and chairs into the trash. He reached down and picked two pieces from the ground. On them were single words: yolanda and death. He smiled and tucked the pieces in his pocket, aware that it would never happend just this way again, no matter how many more times, and the days slipped off him like clouds across a summer sky until he was home, hands reached out above him, his tongue catching the very first flake of that very first time.

2005-09-05T00:45:00.000-07:00

ESTUARIES/TRIBUTARIES/GULFS

(a triptych)

Prologue:

Ralph looked out from his car window at the Mississippi rising high above its banks. It looked to be breathing, swelling. The river was filled with nightmares he was yet to have. He was four.

The river licked parts of the highway. The tires sloshed through the water, which arced away from the car, brown and tired.

The current was strong. It roared beneath them as they crossed the bridge, slipping between buildings vacant on the banks, then drifted out of sight.

It carried entire trees on its back, the branches stripped of their leaves and waving in the air as if asking to be pulled from the water.

He closed his eyes as they crossed, learning to fear . . .

2005-09-04T22:09:00.000-07:00

ESTUARIES/TRIBUTARIES/GULFS

(a triptych)

Part One:

The first time Ralph stood toe to toe with a body of water that stretched further than he could see, he was seven: Aberconwy Bay, Llanfairfechan, Wales. Aberconwy Bay opened up into the Irish Sea. By comparison, the Irish Sea was a small sea. At seven, small sea was contradictory. Ralph, at seven, was very much at an age where he was still the standard unit of measure of things in the world. At seven, the Irish Sea was immense.

His father was teaching summer session at Oxford University. It was the first time the family had been overseas. The entire time they were there, they kept turning around on their own axis: a low flying solar system, Ralph's father always standing in the middle, always the source of gravity they returned to.

The Irish Sea's a nook in between the west coast of England and the east coast of Ireland. Wales, and The Myrtlewood Hotel where his family was staying during his dad's "holiday" from teaching, both stood right on the coast.

At low tide, the sea would retreat so far from the beach that he could not see it. It vanished behind Puffin Island, which stood a mile off the shore. He had heard of high and low tide but he had never witnessed either. He looked up into the sky for the moon and lifted his arms. "Take me, too," he whispered.

At high tide, the water covered the beach, crossed the boardwalk, and came right up to and sloshed against the low wall on the side of the road. From the window of his room in the hotel, he watched the waves lean their shoulders into the wall until the sun went down. He fell alseep at the window, listening to the water rocking back and forth, wondering if he too would be dragged off to sea.

The next day, they all went for a walk along the beach. There were jelly fish everywhere. He wanted to touch them, to step on them, to poke his finger through them. He ran from fish to fish, looking down through the clear flesh, his father's voice nestled deeply in his ear. "Don't touch them, son. Don't ever touch them."

Early the next day, Ralph crossed the road and ran to the beach. The fish were gone. He walked out into the wet sand and stopped just at the rim of the water. He looked out over the sea. They were out there now. All of them were out there.

2005-09-02T15:55:00.000-07:00

ESTUARIES/TRIBUTARIES/GULFS

(a triptych)

Part Two:

The summer when he was ten, Ralph and his friends would shag balls from the river between the public golf course and the country club. They dredged the river slowly, jeans rolled just above the knees, lifting their feet straight up and setting them down lightly. Any sudden movement swirled the mud and sludge and left the river unnavigable, solid. The entire river turned cloudy. It wouldn't settle for hours.

They would carry the balls in their shirts that they fastened into satchels and hung over their shoulders. When they found all they could, they would climb the steep banks onto the golf courses to sell the balls back to the golfers. The balls didn't sell as high on the public course. The golfers always wanted to make a deal. Six for the price of five. At the country club, balls would go for a buck a piece. A near mint condition Titlest or Ping could fetch two bucks if they landed the right guy. Some guys would even pull twenties out of their pockets, buy what they had and let them keep the change. However, since the club was private porperty, they always ran the risk of being run off the course without making a single sell. Either way, the only way home was back up the river against the current.

Later that summer, near the Fourth of July, the river flooded. Every day after, they would walk down to the river to see if it had receded and to watch it push over the banks, submerging everything in its path. A week later, when the water had gone done just enough that a person could get to the bridge, they found two boys sitting on the railing of the foot bridge wearing just their shorts. They were daring each other to jump in to the swirling, raving water that was rushing by with tremendous speed. One boy lost his grip pretending to push his friend, and fell. The water swallowed him whole. His arms poked through the surface once then slid back into the murk. He never came back up. He was found two miles up river, snagged on a fallen tree.

They played baseball for the rest of the summer. They used a tennis ball, a wooden bat that had been split in half length wise, and tee-shirts for bases. They played in the school lot up behind the houses on the corner of the block. The houses both had chain-link fences. The place where the yards and fences met was the middle of center field. They set home plate in close and swung for the fences each at bat.

No score was kept. They just kept track of outs to know when to let the other guys hit. Each boy would look out into the outfield, over the heads of the other players, to the fence line.

Everyone swung big one handed home run swings like his new heroes, Dave Kingman, Mike Schmidt, Dave Parker and Reggie Jackson. They were constantly hopping the fences to retrieve the ball.

It didn't matter who hit one. Every time the ball sailed up into the air, sailed over their heads and sailed as far away from home as they could hit it, each of them raised their fists into the air and yelled.

2005-09-01T08:19:00.000-07:00

ESTUARIES/TRIBUTARIES/GULFS

(a triptych)

Part Three:

He received a letter and a postcard in the mail from his mother. Both were sent from Seward, Alaska. The town of Seward sits at the bottom of Mt. Marathon next to Resurrection Bay on the Kenai Peninsula. The view was spectacular. Two mountains rose up behind and dwarfed the town. The sky was clear and blue. Evergreens forested the first quarter of the mountains. Beyond that, the rock was covered almost entirely with snow.

The postcard itself was blank. The letter was intimate:

Dear Ralph,

Last night I dreamt I was the river. I pushed my way down across the Minnesota-Wisconsin border from Lake Itasca, down along the entire length of Illinois from Galena to Cairo, where the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers meet, down through New Madrid and Osceola to Memphis. As I pushed my way along, I took back everything I ever had taken from me: uprooted trees, every stone left carelessly along the shore, your father's hands, and my very own heart, which I grabbed off the banks at Memphis where it had been buried in the ground. My burden of love now lighter, I wound my way through Arkansas and Louisiana down in

to the bay. I closed my eyes and let go of everything I held in my arms. Some of it sank, some of it floated off into the ocean. The land pulled itself together and the bay closed up behind me, Memphis, now gone to me for good.

Everything here is beautiful. I am amazed at the things we have seen: a whale, sea lions, the mountains, sunshine nearly all day. It is all so exciting. So new. Wish you could see it all, too.

The letter came to him after he had just returned from Duluth. The trip was very much still with him: the brick roads through downtown; the steep hills the side streets had to climb up every day to get to the top; the sense of things staying the same just behind every door he walked through in every store; and the smell and feel of the lake in the air every direction he turned.

He spent an entire day along the lakefront. The sun was warm. The breeze off the lake was cool. He skipped stones, read, wrote, and sat and watched the lake push up against the shore and retreat to gather up its strength, again and again.

Late in the afternoon, when the sun had begun its descent over the edge of the horizon, casting long dark shadows behind everything and away from shore, Ralph stopped to watch some boys playing in the water. They were swimming out to a structure about twenty yards off the shore. It was the remains of a loading bin that was destroyed during a brutal winter storm around the turn of the century. The structure was left there as a reminder of the power of the lake that rested so calmly on days like this, when the only waves that scarred the surface were made by people in their boats.

The boys were climbing on the inside to the top of the bin that stood a good twenty feet above the water. From the top, they were jumping out into the air and disappearing into the lake. Each time a boy jumped, they all let out a whoop like a battle cry.

There was sudden silence among the boys when he climbed up from the inside of the bin and stood up against the breeze. The light around them was a pale pink. The lake could be heard below, lapping the iron sides. Ralph looked into each of their faces and they parted before him, the wide expanse of the water all he could see.

Their battle cries echoed off the hills. Their fists pushed up into the sky. The air was empty and the lake wrapped its arms around him.