a quiet glory

The snow sublimated slowly into the late afternoon, shrouding the fields of cut hay and cornstalk stubble in a pervasive fog. That not even the sun could dissuade. There was a black and yellow sheriff's car in the middle of the intersection, blue and red lights made eerie in the pressing haze. He stood in the road and waved us around, a circuitous detour when I just wanted to get home, directly. She told me who was there, just beyond the fence, and what they were doing. Parsing metal and wire from flesh and bone, blood mingling with mud and snow and gravel, a job to be done.

And later, what he said, how he described it. There was a look that passed over his face, and I traveled back in my mind to the death that I had seen, our cross to bear. The way he described feeling their souls watching, just above and over the shoulder, and all that you can do is offer up a prayer and hope that your hands can do what they are tasked with. The way it is almost embarrassing, as if you have trespassed on a very private moment in someone's life, but you have to be there. The body is still but the will shakes.

And as he described it I could not help myself but to say a greedy and jaded thanks, that there are those of us who heard the call, and answered it. That he was out there praying over the dead as he zipped the bag shut, that she runs like a tornado when her pager goes off with a working fire, that I will go in and put on my body armor without thinking about it. To the blessed few who know what it's like to feel faithful departed watching over your shoulder, to those who are called.

Fight or Flight

She had eyes like pieces of agate, that the sun makes dimensional so that you could stare at it for so long and never, not ever get to the end of it, the dark place where the soul coalesced. We set up in two long lines with me at the front and her facing, and me throwing out a preemptive joke, unable to retire my sense of irony, or deprecation, even while staring down such stoicism. I tucked my chin, like her, and iced my glaze and steeled my flesh, like her. She held the bags and swung wide and hard and fast my arm came up to counter and my weight sunk low and fluid into my knees and hips and quads, all the while our pupils locked in a kind of unspeakable balance for power. Control. For understanding.

At the end of it she talked about what was new and being offered and again, our gaze locked and there was a whole lifetime of conversation that passed between us, unspoken yet understood, and I knew, I knew. What makes a warrior, where is the place inside that decides that all begins and ends with the self, with the power of the soul, and the determination to never, ever be second best? How is it that such a vague and unquantifiable quality can be sensed, scented, recognized in the rare and isolated brethren? And then when he questioned her and my ears went red and hot and I could not help myself but open my mouth and yell across the blank expanse of our empty warehouse, and the held glance after.

Then, later. My forearm ached and when he told me I had a strong right hook I remembered how it happened. And later than that, even, a picture on a wall, after a hesitant longing, a calculated pause before an explosive embrace and me there, alone for a moment and looking, scanning, assessing, trying to take every small piece in for the larger picture in my mind which is, as yet, incomplete. And wondering how I got there, and with what luck it was that I could remain.

And the quiet open spaces of the road at night and driving home, and the darkness and the isolation which I covet more than any other possession. Later, in the early morning by then, and her telling me that she could never hurt anyone that she knew, and the incredulity of it, my utter disbelief. The wolf snarled and bared her teeth as I spat out that you should have a plan to kill everyone, with no disclaimers. That I tried but could not wrap my brain around the idea of living so passively. I dismissed it, easily, tallied her up as a fool, and walked on.

You are your own best investment, always.

To the hunters, may we always choose the former instinct over the latter.

Daybreak

I tried, but I couldn't. I didn't give it enough of me. Maybe. I stirred, and she found me, and I knew that she would not let me go again, not now, and I lay there with it sinking in as the new day crested, the dark of it. The light in my room, a pinpoint of resistance.

My mind wandered back to that early western morning and me waking up to him sitting upright and looking out. Looking at nothing, looking at a place two thousand miles away, the anxiety of it veiling his face in lines and veins and thickness. My breath expired with everything else in my waking, and the next surge of air was to an emptiness, a resignation. Sometimes we take on more than we can manage just to see how far we carry such a load. And then comes the moment of clarity when you remember yourself and you put it down, without thinking, you walk away, and on, and on.

She looks at me lately and there is something in her eyes, a memory floating like ghosts, something that passed between us though I can't remember when nor what it was. Flailing around in my recollection and I look away before admitting that it won't come back. That some things are just unknowable.

We are too early a thing yet for me to let go, completely. Though my body wills it so. But brain remains too stubborn to obey. The pieces moving around on a board as if I had enough left to see more than two moves ahead. The anxiety of change wells up in veins, and is passed off again into lungs to be released, and forgotten. I had a dream that we were in a hotel room and I looked at him, knowing what was coming, and told him I am going to need for you to trust me, and him looking back with those big eyes that one could get lost in, were it not for the dark. And him just replying, yes, of course, but without the need for words, without saying it. How perfect an understanding, I thought just before waking.

I tried, but yet I am still awake. With the clock ticking its thick tocks as I slowly slip toward daybreak, toward movement. I will learn by being led, later, but for now the world is still dark, and quiet. Familiar.

Spare change

All I ever really needed to know I learned from MacIntyre. Well, that's not true, really. But, maybe. He has affected my thinking in a way that nothing before or since has been able to match. Or even whisper by. So where does one turn, after virtue?

I threw my hands up, I think, to a certain extent. I listened to them debating, and my mind turned down its well-worn path; how can we be arrogant enough to think that values can be measured, or prioritized, or charted even, as if there were some scale that we could refer back to when the arguments become grey and murky and obfuscated. Freedom or safety, they ask. It is ridiculous to think that such a question could even be posed. The words jumped from the page and etched themselves in my mind like the reversed images of a camera obscura. For always. You win the day by being more articulate, turning a better phrase, beating your fists upon your chest and not stopping for air. You don't know what the words mean, but you like the way they sound when they roll off your tongue. You beseech your listener to remember her forebears, and with what spirit they endowed her, and the smoke and the mirrors on cue as you wave your arms and look back with conviction.

I turned it off. I put my layers on and meandered out into the cold blanket of white, again, and crouched down low to tell if it was fox or coyote track laid fresh. The deer are easy, and they are many. High above and far away a familiar bird song, that sounds like spring, and you wonder if he is confused, or just hopeful. Always knowing that the thaw awaits, even if we closer to the earth forget that everything changes, always.

So what do I do, Alasdair? I haven't read your other books thinking that I'd be able to come up with the answer on my own. Under a street light somewhere, gritty dark and cold, like He would find me in any one of the random encounters. There is no way to win the debate on virtue without first having a teleology. We are so foolish. So there is the spartan winter, and the beauty, at least, of being heard by someone more intelligent.

A quiet doxology

The woods were dark and lovely and lonesome and deep, snow crunching dry and light under each footfall, I turned every now and again to see my tracks laid deeply in the twilight of it. The wind swept winter's diamonds from tree branches, to the air, and down to the forest floor to be carried off again later, after my passing. Impressions along the path revealed that deer and rabbit and dog and ski had gone before, and I followed the animal path through the trees, into the plain, along the river and over trees that bridged the space between. I could not help but smile, could not help but feel my kid-heart overcome with the pressing beauty of it. Just knowing that you exist helps me to remember that I am never alone. I paused in my meandering to take the spartan cold into the very marrow of my bones, to keep the vision of it in my soul for the hot days filled with people, and places, and obligations. To not forget the perfect simplicity.

I wound my way back west and found myself saying an improvised and gritty prayer out loud, offering whatever I might have had for the remembrance of the evening. Passed my grandfather's bench, the ones their names are etched upon, passed sandstone crucifixes in stark contrast to the white of the world surrounding them. I thought about the path that had led me to that exact moment in space and time and continued on in my amateur benediction. God how lovely is the world, sometimes.

The call came and he opened with a joke to set my worried heart at ease and then told me day shift, and I soaked the news in, unsure of how to answer. Of course, yes, of course, how can one say anything other to such a man? The conversation ended and I lay in my bed, thinking. She tells me that it's overrated and I, of course, agree. My mind wandered to the darkness of night, and the figure-eights I had grown so accustomed to, and the people, the places, the unnatural somnambulism that I had taken as ordinary. That I had acclimated myself to. And now daylight, and people, and responsibility, and the semblance of normal life and a normal schedule. I had prepared myself for a long and lonely winter.

Well, perhaps not lonely...

I cut a wide and random path through the golf course on my way back home, as the idea of it settled in upon me. The sun had set and all was blue, the way the snow is at night. Beautiful. The rolling hills were undisturbed and I lost my depth perception and laughed when my legs navigated hills that my mind had not anticipated. I thought, how can a hunter be at the same time a poet, a mystic, a philosopher, a soul in need of a telos, a home? How can the two purposes not be mutually exclusive? I thought of my forebears, and their legacies, and the span of geography that binds us to each other and realized that, well, there must be a way, there is an answer that they had already discovered. And now, me.

And then, and then. How funny it is to feel longing. A stirring prurience. How strange and crazy and unexpected to feel so familiar so fast and for the brain to be so consumed despite the posturing of the will. I am vulnerable, and I had to laugh when I thought it, because, doesn't that make things so much more meaningful?

Blessed Father, guide me.

The new year's eve.

My eyes had not yet adjusted to the cold twilight outside from leaving the warm and glowing inside. The door slid shut, frost scraping gently in the track, and I fumbled my way in the dark. Alone, the world quiet. When I opened the lid a large breath of steam billowed out and I watched as it chased itself up above the treetops, into the frozen air. Climbing in, the body resolves itself, slowly, into the heat, like the letting go of a climax when tense muscles are overpowered, and useless. My eyes closed and I sank to the bottom.

I could hear the wind rustle dry, broken leaves down the valley. Hear them break free of their lofty heights and fall, icy, to the floor, the ravine. I heard the twig-snaps of predators, making their first rounds of the night -- one more hunt in a long and unyielding succession of their eking out. The flipping of a calendar page obscured by obligation, by survival.

And an owl. Far off in the distance, singing some song unknown to me, but more beautiful for its strangeness. My eyes had long made their adjustments, rods and cones in delicate balance, and the sky was a deep, dark blue beyond the near trees, and beyond the crest of a far hill.

I sunk lower into the hot water, to dissolve the frost from my cheeks, my hair, and at once became strangely aware of the warmth surrounding me, not a body alone in a spa but a globe of warmth in the center of a cold and snowy wood, the night spinning and slipping by. I opened my hand to reveal the one pebble I had held onto for the greater part of this year, and offered it up to the darkness of the sky, the cold. She told me, in her judicious and merciful harshness, that I had better cast it down into the ravine, and not take it with me down the path of this next year. That all I would need I contained, and there was no need to carry any thing. And with the pressing hush of the forest I let the stone loose and listened as it careened down sandstone bluff and ice-slick, and into the trickling water far below. I smiled.

Back inside and climbing into the shower a quick glance in the mirror and I was shocked to see that my entire head -- face, hair, cheeks, lips -- was covered in a fragile and delicate frost. But I hadn't felt the cold. I laughed. Maybe the casting off could endow a person with an unknowable impermeability? Maybe I was just a fool. But I was happy.

The night subsided into itself, and I lay awake in the dark, thinking, for a long part of it, but it didn't frustrate me as it normally does. My mind wandered, and was slow, and my body was grateful. When I fell down into the warmth of sleep it was to a new, but surprisingly familiar embrace, and to the unlimited loveliness of potential.

May we never stop at all.

Where soul meets body

All of his sixteen years were fidgety, nervous energy, clothes hanging off loosely and sloppy, belying the athlete underneath, the animal, the prey. I remember becoming aware of his telegraphs, the lizard brain's Morse code, and trying to engage E in eye contact, but he too focused on his task to notice. I thought he is going to run a second before he did, and when his pupils dilated, the adrenalin dumped itself into his vessels, and flight instinct took over the brain stem, I pushed him. He righted himself, steadied, and floated over the hedgerows, into the dark of backyards and fence. My feet churned up the yards, wet with dew almost frozen, and I heard the other two say what the hell is going on to no one.

Later, after he was in handcuffs and being put into the back of the car I asked him what his name was, and he told me G-- and then looked with the big kid eyes, into my irises, grey-blue and irritated, sleepy, bothered. I remembered him, then. The takedowns blotted his face out making it just shadow and darkness, but I knew he was smiling when he saw the connections form in my head. As if we were old friends, met at night. He ran from me before, I thought. Five months ago. He laughed when all I could think to say was his last name and then well that sucks, your mom is going to be really pissed this time. And a little place in my heart moved, as if from sleep, when I thought of Jon and that these two had so much in common.

In the jail he laughed and enjoyed his roll in the game, and we talked, casually, until I realized that I did not want to be called to his house in five years to assist the medics with an overdosing man-child with no future, and no options. I stood close to him as I said it, and it came out profane and ugly and honest and he sat there and said nothing. And then his mom came, with the tired look, and then he was gone.

Then later, the long and monotonous anonymity of the drive home, and pulling off all of the dark blue, and showering, and laying my head down, at last. Sleep came fitfully in stops and starts and then crashed over me all at once and deeply, as if to make up for lost time. When he released me the house was dark, and empty, and I roused myself from bed to street to running in a long and liquid movement.

The night air outside was cold but carried the smallest warmth in the center of it, as if spring could lay pregnant in the deepest recesses of winter's chill, germinating there through the freezing and frost, so that it would be ready when called, months from now. How much anticipation my body felt for that warmth, buried in the cold. The road clipped by in rhythmic footfalls, and when I got to the track I practiced sprints and tempos and stride-length until the bells downtown reminded me that I had better get back home, to see to my obligations, my rituals.

The streetlights, the empty neighborhoods, the wetness of the asphalt, the sound of my breathing. Remember what your goals are, where you want to be. I felt lucky, in that moment, to be running, unencumbered. It smelled like a year ago, winter turning to spring, and how much has changed since then, how the road has leveled out and grown wider. The fog slowly lifted, and I moved, again, finally, for myself.

First snowfall

I have this memory that I keep in the dark recesses of my heart, and I told her about it once, or maybe twice, but most of the time it is guarded, entombed, and I only visit that place where I keep it on slow, sleepy days where the world outside is wet with rain, grey and immutable. We were perhaps two. In that room we shared in our first city, a few football fields from the churning of the lake's faux tide, she slept and I, I lay idly by. I recall my eyes opening to not a thing at all, pregnant afternoon sun seeping in through the drawn shades, my mother, perhaps, taking a much needed repose from our boisterous and incessant stirrings. Through the plywood pegs of crib I turned on my side and watched her, sleeping, downy tufts of blonde hair askew all over face and neck and quilt and mattress. Another look to the ceiling and with my two year old sinewy body I stood, tiny fingers gripping safety slats, and looked out upon my kingdom, our room.

A thought. I remembered that there was something that I was supposed to remember. Grasping at it the way one might cling to the sandy and slipping surface of a cliff, as you watch yourself tumble down into the surf, into the world that awaits. It was fleeting, and I knew it was fleeting, and nothing I could do to bring it back.

Why are you here? She asked herself. Why are you here, remember. Just try to remember. There is some thing to accomplish, some mission that you tasked yourself before taking that deep breath and jumping out into the wide, cold, open space of the world. I recall thinking to my toddler flesh and bones that there was a purpose to this life, and that I was mad I had already forgotten it. I lay back on my gummy spine and hips, all cartilage of it, and gnashed my teeth as I looked up into the swirling miasma of the afterlife, still so close and prescient and influential, as the realization hit me, in stages, that I would not be able to bring that memory back. That it was gone, and that it was a shame.

I offered up an early prayer for the forgetting, rolled to my side to watch my doppelganger in her slumber, and I, fell, asleep. My earliest memory, and it left my wanting.

I think of that sometimes, most recently when I read my grandfather's journal and stumbled across an entry that he scribed regarding me. He said I was a talkative kid, he joked about how incessantly I went on about the things around us, and me, then, maybe all of five or six. A devilish smile played itself upon my lips when I read it, for, as much as I would like to think of myself as calm, rational, detached, the truth of his words belied the child within.

What was that purpose that swirled away into the ether?

And now, and now. The scent of him plays languidly on my neck, my wrists, my pillows and when I stir the memory of it comes back in waves and wends its way from fingertip to toe and all of the tiny, greedy places in between. Like a grape that you play with on your tongue, and suck the skin off and let the juicy pulp sate itself fatly against your cheeks, your lips. How come to this? Sometimes, night, she surprises me with her generosity, her giving.

It has been nearly thirteen years for the one, and just over one year for the other. In an interview, once, I told the man that it was important to know where you came from, because, without that, how could you ever know where you were headed? He nodded, and he said Amen, thickly.

Zavod

The way the different jurisdictions sound, when the radio is keyed. There was that heavy and pregnant scratching, and I knew it was my Sergeant, and I readied myself, pen poised in the glow of map-light, for the address and scenario. I was two blocks away when it came out, too close for lights to play against houses, too near for the sirens to render useful in the empty and ice-slick streets of a midnight weekday neighborhood. I rolled up, I parked, I saw them standing in kitchen, watching, waiting, and all of the words of my previous colleagues, the cautions and sidle-steps and calling out with "standing by" went up into the air with so many chimney fires and I keyed the mic, locked my car up, and approached, crunching through the snow.

Got to the door and he was there, waiting for me. We talked, and me, incredulous (I love how that word rolls off of her tongue) not believing his whining, I went inside to get the other side of the story once my backup, finally, arrived. She spoke to me, and I watched her as her hands produced vials of medication, sequestered away inside zip-loc bags for the journey that awaited. In my mind I wended back to Patrick, and the last months, and the things that I broke, and my dad coming to pick me up in the safety of his Ford Ranger, and the gun shows that we attended, together. A kind of fail-safe that one cannot account for, nor articulate the importance of. He told me then, you can't allow another person's happiness to be beholden upon your own. And I knew, instantly, that it was true, and how to get there.

The scene was a mess, and all skulked about, pupils farther dilated than is normal, and I fastened the cuffs around four wrists, brought them both in for fingerprints and photographs, as if casting a wide net would somehow makeup for the recent and staggering lack of empathy. He joked with me as I rolled his fingerprints, sweating in the far too hot jail, and I wondered, is he flirting? Circumstances as they were, I would have liked to drop him, drug him impotent back to his cell, and never had another moment with the guy. But I continued in my task, heard his familiar tale of wedded bliss gone bad, gave him his orange suit and finally, found my hidy-hole and nearly finished the story of Suttree, and his perils. And God, how I do not want to let him go.

Later, a house we were called to, an older man fallen out of bed his wife unable to lift him back into same. We arrived to the stink of it, he had lost his bowels and lay there on the floor, helpless. I arrived last and there were jokes about the young blonde who had arrived to assist, and I could not help but feel an empty feeling in the pit of my heart when I looked at him. Back into bed, wife more like nurse-maid looking on, I left in haste and tried to stop it from my mind. Tried to think of happier things when the sushi flattened out thick on my tongue, hot, sweet, sultry with the ripeness of it. Lord, let me have a viking funeral, let the people that I love bear witness and push me out to sea, to lake.

They called me back at 3pm, when I woke, and I prepared myself in a psychotic swirl of duty, and things that one has to accomplish before life can trod along its well-worn path. Done, done, I made my way home to her, to them, to my family, my friends. We drank in the darkness of the bar and toasted a kindred spirit that had passed too long ago. And I thought, what would I give to share a drink with him, now, as an adult, to hear his stories and what he had to say.

The nightmare

It was the big overgrown man-child and we were in his house this time, him out of control and drunk and petulant and his flaccid father having given up years ago, sat idly by in an adjacent living room, watching tv. The man-child looked at me with those wild-fire eyes like we knew each other before and I had left his friendship owing, him coming to claim his debt now, through the miasma of purgatory's holding pattern. He wanted flesh and bone, soul if he could have it.

Ed stood in the corner of the room as the focus winnowed down on me, and he started his pensive dance forward. I pulled my gun and he laughed. Ed continued with the talking as if he was ghost image, engaged in another call entirely. I put the cold steel and polymer away and pulled my Taser. He laughed at this as well because when he clumsily lurched onto me the plastic and unspent electricity was more burden than tool. We fought and rolled and he ripped the cross off my neck and I beat his face with my fists, my training long abandoned in favor of the lizard brain and its ugly but effective strategy. Finally, Ed. We were able to subdue the boy, father still watching tv in next room, and as we struggled to lock the cuffs around his over-sized wrists I thought that he reminded me of all the rich catholic boys I had ever known. And how they shared the same insecurities.

A hole in the story and I can't remember why we were unable to properly get the cuffs on him but there he sat, edge of bed, Ed on phone in corner making arrangements that made no sense, and me, licking wound by door, watching. Waiting for it to start. He lunged and I punched him and we fell to the ground and my arms were tied up around his head and we both saw this at the same instant and he went for the leather and steel and cleared it with one movement, so fluid like he had been practicing for this climax since that cold night in November. Ed not noticing, still on phone. In that hoarse scream of late-night terror I tried yelling he has my gun he has my gun but nothing came out and we wrestled for ownership all over that bedroom floor. With a grapevine and some wiry scrapping I rolled on top and with all four of our hands we shot him in the chest, his hands yielding, at last, for the fate that he wanted. His eyes were greedy as I realized what he had done, what all of the dance had meant, and I fell off, screaming, angry, used. Finally, again, Ed. People came, pictures were taken, measurements made and they whisked him away. The whole time I lay on the floor, sobbing. E arrived at that house on the corner and rubbed my back as I shook there. Would you think that I was a monster? Would you say that I did the right thing but would the eye contact change? A diminutive black man in a very official looking suit came and gave me a few flyers articulating the whys and hows that made my actions just. I remember leaving them on the coffee table for the father before I woke up.

north wind

I ran. The tone of the emergency phone ringing all over the station that freezes you, at first, and then pumps blood rich and fast and furiously, flipping that internal switch, the one that sends its flesh-and-bones machinery into a practiced and subconscious checklist. AF passed me in the hallway and tossed me his keys and I could not hide the smile as I met the cold air with his go get 'em trailing behind. Car in drive, lights playing tag against the already blackened houses, sirens preparing every single light for my approach. And passing. I gave thanks for the recent training as I used the skid and scuttle of the loose rear tires to navigate the turns faster than, probably, I should have. First to arrive some habits do not quit and I told them to step it up, step it up.

He was the first to find me, and in his wild-eyed delirium could not make words into sentences. His two small children trailed dreamily behind, and I scooped them up and put them in the back, in the warmth, safe, sequestered. Is there anyone else inside I asked as I watched the black smoke ebb and billow and suck lazily out and away. A soft and gentle and wicked orange glow from within the structure. Next she came and was the most frantic and idiotic thing I have, as yet, experienced. Screaming, wailing, like those banshees they described in the old parts of the bible. Her eyes looked through me, into whatever dark and horrible past she had dredged up in that obfuscated file folder, which held nothing, no scrap of paper even from which one could start anew. She just kept screaming for her dogs, which were roaming freely the neighborhood, and would not let go the idea that I was going to dive into the heat and stink of it, and rise out again, one in each arm. They ran past us again and she hallucinated them into invisibility. I told her that she needed to be strong for her children and she did not hear me and took up her broken lamentations for the lives of her dogs and a stream of consciousness about I just survived cancer goddammit and I wanted a new garage but not like this, not like this, what am I going to do oh God I am sorry that I asked for a new garage. I put my grown up voice down, useless as it was, and, just, walked away. Tasked the neighbors with her deliverance back into the night, reality.

The fire department arrived, finally, and I watched, incredulous, as they walked into the structure with no air, no water, no masks. Just hubris and some kind of sense of inevitability. The air was heavy with things that would kill you, or plant the seed of some poison deep within the fatty tissue, to sprout and give fruit much later when all one could ask was why, and that was from where I stood twenty yards upwind. I thought of E, and what she would say to me, were she standing by my side to bear witness. The things that complacency engenders. And I prayed that there would always remain some part of me that was afraid, and took the necessary precautions.

Later a fight broke out and I was thankful for a task that I could understand, a role I knew and performed well. People are so much easier than disaster. And then later than that, even, another call down the block and around a few corners, and I was the first one there again and found the tender flame licking brick and beam as I hugged the ground on hands and knees, following smoke. Later when she told me that the brick can explode I regretted having stood so close to watch their fumbling and hesitations. Next time I will know. And then the warmth inside the car, and the lateness of it, and no purpose but to keep people out, I fell asleep to Mewithoutyou and my favorite fairy-tale. The complacency of it. Waking, the irony of it all was not lost on me.

With my jaded kid-heart I put the car in drive and said a loud fuck this to absolutely no one at all, and pointed the push-bumpers in the direction of their home. Cold, tired. The trip home was long and it folded out foot by foot in front of my car's hood. And after the phone calls and brotherly harassment and sympathetic disbelief, I lay my head down and pulled sleep over me, disappearing in the dark of it.

How thin is the line some days.

Is better than

The way the clock moves in the quiet hours of pregnant anticipation when the only task is to just, wait. Every other stroke of the second hand falling fatly, to be outpaced by the short staccato that follows. I lay awake, listening. Hanging on each thick tock, the room clung to me darkly as body and mind, both, resigned themselves into the slow slide of sleep. At last. Warm, happy, exhausted.

We met them at the station, and the diminutive figure that was to be my charge was dressed in all of her holiday finery, red wool coat buttoned with circles of ebony to make her look like she had just stepped from a movie. She hid her face in her mother's leg when I told her how beautiful she was, and I remembered being that age, and how easy it was for the kindness of a stranger to reduce me to tears. We climbed up into the hulking mass of the Excursion and her eyes were big as saucers when I explained the lights and switches and static. We wound our way to where he said to stage, sun cutting through the cold of the morning, lulling us into a kind of warmth there, in the cab. The throng of blue uniforms and black and white cars was crushing when we finally alighted, and I was not at all prepared for the welcome that waited. So used to the sleepy anonymity of being alone in the car at night. I found an outpost and planted myself there, and let the tide of people jostle around me. Watching. When we left again it was to snake through city streets in a two-mile procession of lights and sirens and noise and smiles and waving and disbelief. It was unreal, almost. Men in parking lots put hands over hearts, people looked on, mouths open, and old women plugged their ears for how loud we were. We, in the middle, towered above the sedans, and she laughed and screamed as her tiny fingers made the siren sing different songs, and never tired of it. The hours to follow passed in a kind of delirium, and when it was over the sting of tears turned to acid each time my eyes blinked kept me awake until I, finally, made my way home.

And there was that moment in the hall when four or five of them stood in a gaggle and the eye contact that passed was too telling to wave away. The ignorance I feign sometimes, unable to turn that part of the self off even when it is unnecessary, or painful. And I remembered that the heart will betray the mind in even the most disciplined of people, and was instantly glad that those encumbrances are all gone now. That now, the heart could do what it wanted, and the mind could step back and just be grateful.

Then later a smile, and laughter, and how easy it is, sometimes, to fill a moment with someone else. And how lucky I must be, to have that knowing. A long and slow parting, and I found myself again, listening to the clock tick each second thickly by in the blackness under covers. And as sleep came it was something else that he pulled me into, the memory of a feeling, a whisper, a sigh, and the warmth of his touch still playing on my skin.

with love and admiration

From Robert Creeley...

What was resistance.
How come to this.
Wasn't body's package
obvious limit,

could I fly,
could I settle,
could I even
be I...

And for what want,
watching man die
on tv in Holland, wife
sitting by.

She said, "He's
going off alone
for the first time
in our lives,"

He told her,
"to the stars, to the
Milky Way,"
relaxed, and was gone.

As if the words could somehow make a painting of this great, frozen, and wide open Midwestern landscape. The cold licks the edges of my flushed skin (internal fire buttressed but yet painfully ephemeral) and as the ice-packed grass crunches beneath our boots she asks, aren't you cold? A self-conscious glance (despite myself) at my white and chapped and numb fingers and a loose smile plays across my lips as I pretend to forget the question. The playful cry of two coyotes off in the distance and our eyes meet, the answer traveling quickly across the wind-chilled night air, the way sound does in winter. Taillights, mirror images, we point our terrestrial skiffs back out into the crush of early morning frost, the world around preparing for its annual thinning, all things subsiding back into themselves.

rain turning to snow

Nights this time of year when the sky lets loose its heavy wetness, the roads are slick, and black and loud with my passing. The ground, as if it were so greedy for every last bit of light that it condensed down upon itself with a gravity too strong for any small sliver of luminosity to escape, and be reflected back. Dark. Impossible to see the lines in the pavement, the path I cut was wide, and sloppy.

I parked under a fluorescent outpost, so that I could keep the interior of my faithful partner obscured to the world without, to keep the wolves away. Rain playing a staccato melody on the roof, and windows, and the thick tactility of the pages under my fingers released a ghost of old office buildings, cigarette smoke, and coffee. The smells of my trade, no matter where it might be plied. My eyelids tried their best to fight as I sat, nostalgically, and fell asleep.

Open with a panic, heart racing, look at the clock, was that a minute? more? look around, is everything still here, am I still here?

Car in drive, I swore off the lack of movement for the rest of the bible-black morning. I finished half of my first infinity circle when the sporadic brake lights ahead and late and improper turn summoned me. Blue and white lights made the rain look like falling sapphires, exploding into a strobing river in the road. He looked so young, was so young, and smelled of very old smoke, and dirty clothes that had been piled on the floor. And he told me the same story, recycled over and over by others who came before him. Of a mistake being made, of him taking care of it, of just not having the right paperwork, of there needing to be an exception made.

I looked at him in the rear view mirror as we made our way back to my home base, and he looked so small, resigned. A wayward country mouse. His pupils were so constricted from whatever he had done to himself that it seemed he only had iris. And they both looked back into the mirror, and they hated me. He would not speak to me, after saying yes to the admissions I phrased like questions, and after he had changed, and the door had closed, he sat on the concrete catatonic, like a little Buddha, and I wondered what the drugs were doing in there, past the iris and pupil and brain stem.

But more than that I wondered when it was I'd understand the why part. And if I could, if it presented itself to me. Or if perhaps I was starting to surpass my ability to empathize, with such a line of thought. And the last hour I set out back into the rain, in a sort of aloof isolation, as if I had let someone down. As if I could have made it right somehow, but didn't.

And when I got home, Marcus Aurelius said Nothing happens to anyone that he can't endure. Things have no hold on the soul.

inlet

Awake, again, at least with eyes open and blinking as the early morning grapple for bearing consumes me, lucid, slowly. I wake to sleep and take my waking slow. The eyelids are surprising and cruel, shunting acid from top to bottom and top to bottom over iris and sclera and cornea and into the vitreous humor itself, making the task of seeing seem unnecessarily difficult, and, perhaps, optional. Defiant in my defeat, but too delirious to mount an offensive of any consequence. And night, she laughs as I watch her leave.

The soft, empty hollow of sleep. The feeling when he comes for you, and how he starts darkly behind the eyes and, slowly, heavily, carries the body into himself until you are too consumed to remember to trace the touch. Ferried. But night, she is so jealous of her brother, sleep. And the war between them rages.

I turned the key and the engine hummed to life, the feeling of its heartbeat passing through my fingertips like old friends, embracing. Benjamin Gibbard a moment later, singing to me about Transatlanticism, and the images were of Olympia, and the beach trail, and the ripe way it smelled when the woods cleared and you neared the ocean. I turned the dial until it said "10" and was, for a greedy moment, grateful to not be worried about damaging the hearing of my passenger, nonexistent as he was. The headlights united at some miraculous point in the distance, and cut a swath through the early morning blackness to wherever we carried ourselves, car and driver. I learn by going where I have to go.

Lights on houses peppering the darkness with greens and reds and whites and the blue that disappears when you look at it directly. Always a test for the rods, lest the cones think themselves superior. The brilliance of it all reminded me to order the Christmas Blend from B&B, and the thoughts came like rapid fire, like a box full of treasure you had put up on the shelf for safekeeping and forgotten, the easy joy when you once again, remembered. The kuchen fresh from the oven on that morning, the smell of the coffee mixed with pine mixed with woodsmoke, the entire family assembled around dad's early fire, and how he will look tired, and laughing, in his Sponge Bob pajama pants. And how important every detail is, and how fragile. The rods press in while the cones look away, and the image remains, gently.

The car wound its way back, headlights making a miracle of brightness always edging just ahead. We rounded the corner, I and the deus ex machina as Richard Adams would have it, and the neighborhood looked pointedly dark, as the world sometimes does just before the dawn, when the sky borrows all of the available light and takes it to some unknown place to motivate the sun to once again set the eastern horizon ablaze. Our two windows punctuated the stillness, and the inside glowed warmly, like the glassed door to our wood stove. She was inside, tucked away, languishing in that deep and hollow place of sleep. The wind was bitter as I pulled my key from its slot and opened the door and wondered, well, what next. And if not the hollow place of dreaming, then, at least, the gloaming, and that I can keep watch. At least that, and with a smile on my lips I know that it is so much more than enough...

out of the ashes

I set out to sleep like normal people, as I imagine they do while I slowly snake my way around neighborhoods in the pitch blackness of night - tucked under covers that smell of lavender and salt, with the edges pulled in tightly so that the warmth from bodies entwined does not escape out into the room but presses back down, a thermal mirror of lover's embrace. Their houses darkened, and in my vignette there is a soft and gentle glow from the fireplace's embers, resolving into themselves as they slowly burn to nothing. A vision from my childhood. This is what I set out for as I lay my head down at a reasonable hour. But she found me, night, peered in at me as I slumbered and, disapproving, roused me from the lavender and the glowing, and would not be satisfied until, after a half-hearted fight, I accepted my somnambulance. She left, victorious as always, and I wended my way down past the dark hearth, into the early morning. With no one else to witness.

I caught flashes of myself in reflection from the cell window across the hall as I rolled her fingerprints. She was crying and hysterical and her tears mixed with snot and makeup as they dripped onto the card stock and ink, onto my hands. When she went stiff I watched the reflection as I yelled at her and in the distance the thought was that I looked older, more than I had expected. The lines around the mouth, the darkness under the eyes, tired. She hurled out bitch, slowly and thickly and the stink of the alcohol and the snot and the tears and the ink now on her face became immediately worse than obnoxious and I watched as I lifted her into the cell and shut the door. And told her to think about it as if I was some kind of mother to the drunk and pathetic. I washed the filth from my fingers, letting the hot water seep into my bones, and noticed that the weeks of being nocturnal had turned my skin pale and my eyes grey.

And all of the alone-ness and isolation. The hours of figure-eights where I talk to myself to keep my voice from atrophy, the detachment of my perception during wakefulness, and the deep, empty hollow of sleep. It had been a rough few months.

And so as kinsmen met at night... Rostropovich filled the world with sound, my phone ringing. And that is how things can change, in less time even than the quiet space between exhaling and taking the next breath in. The rivets in the steeled exterior began to rust, and loosen their hold, and let go, and it was as if they had been waiting for quite some time to give up their posts, with how efficiently they retired. And I will never get used to it, but it is astonishing with what ferocity things can burn when they are meant to be.

May the flame ever flicker.

the way time moves

A year. It hits me as I'm back out on the street, trying to make out lane markings on the rain-slick bible-black leaf-covered asphalt. The car skitters and all four tires loosen over the low spots, now full of water. I catch a reflection under a passing street light and expected to see someone much older, harsher around the edges.

Then the slow syncopation of that familiar beat breaks into my orbit -- a rapidly shrinking strong hold at that hour and for the amount of quiet rage transmitted from white knuckle, to steering wheel, to road. After the protracted intro his voice washes over in spoken word and I have enough this night, finally, to be able to listen and keep up the constant flow of my figure-eights around town. Instead of just parking somewhere, anywhere, and being overwhelmed. Instead of closing my eyes and indulging myself. The way his prose blends into the hook makes my heart race. At three in the morning the song is about as close to perfection as, it seems, any human could hope for. And I wonder if we would have anything in common. If I ever met him, what we would talk about.

And what I would want to say. What I do want to say. I fucked it all up, and I know that's not shocking but I think sometimes that it is, to me. As if I could somehow really have been a stoic if I had played my cards right. Been better about the strategy. That angel-vision that the poet talked about changed, and I had to alter the sculpture but it was too late. Parts of it were already too carved out in rock and dust and flesh and bone. And I know, and I know, and it's okay because I guess it makes me more like the half-boy that way. Like she wore the scarlet to remember. But still I catch myself, not always, looking down when I pass a mirror like I could just rely on the image I have locked away in my head.

At night, I am alone, and I hunt, and I am becoming pretty good at it. And it's when I feel the closest to being that finished vision; marble and dust only half-lit by the moon. For no one to see, and for that making it all the more important.

The lone wolf, again.

I shut my eyes and watched the light play back and forth in the ethereal blackness behind closed eyelids. The way it flickered and danced and chased itself over and over as I squinted into the corners of that un-sighted vision, watching it move until it vanished. His face appeared in the spiral of rods and cones, fragile as dew. I relaxed the sockets and pressed my vision into the image, only to watch as it dissolved back into itself. So familiar. I wondered where I had seen him before.

Driving around in loops (indulge me) a feeling settled down upon my shoulders, a sense of things, forever, being just a shade off. Like papers out of order, or finding a pen in the wrong place, but maybe only one slot over. Nothing of any consequence, just different. The radio queued up one of those songs and his voice told me about how hard life could be, how you had to be a fighter, and once you made it, well, you had made it. Spoken word with such reverberation that I had to park my car and close my eyes. And back into my old habit of chasing the lights, watching them flicker.

His face again, but I circled around it this time for fear that it would fly away before I even got the scent of it. I saw him standing in a shabby apartment, grey Ohio snow covered the span of strip-mall and shopping plaza just outside. The cold of it, the dampness, the bleakness so raw and endearing that you could spend your whole life on a shelf there, trying to protect that vulnerability from the harshness outside. I watched a lifetime unfold between we two strangers. The the bridge came on over car speakers, and the woman's voice bringing me back, reminding me how hard it was.

Car in drive, static obscuring thick beats, endless loops, isolation, loneliness. Summoned later to a house in utter distress, and I watched myself walk through the front door, order commands to the people in chaos inside, walk up stairs and into his room and beat on his chest for him to come back. Stay with us, you SOB, I know you can hear me. The medics came with their God juice, and meted out life in judicious and spartan doses. He died, and I was there to watch the resurrection.

And then later, alone again in the car, the feeling of the inside of that apartment heavy on my chest. In my mind I opened the door, walked out into the snow and on, and on. The lone wolf having laid claim to most of my soul. The lioness put up a small fight at first, but stuttered and stammered as she went, and in the end was just too tired. The wolf knew all along that victory is in the waiting. In the strategy of the hunt.

The night expired into the red and orange spectacle of sunrise, and I pointed the truck's nose westward, home. I thought about all of the doors I had happened upon, all of the lives I had bumped into, the ways I had, for better or worse, affected things simply by just being there. She will shake her head at me and repeat the words back mockingly, but so much of it is just being out on the road.

The sycamores out front.

Under my tires the street sounded wet, and every few hundred feet fallen leaves would loose themselves from the slick asphalt, kicked up by my passing like clumps of clay, into the soft, dewy median that stood as a stoic divide between east and west, despite the season. With my windows cracked, and the thump of anticipation pulsing from speaker to fingertip, the wind ushered in scents of musk, and decay, and peppercorn, and autumn. And I gave a silent thanks to Whomever was looking out, for the early and sudden departure our northern landscape had taken, into itself.

My heart stirred with restlessness, and the old fairytale song the radio selected of fox and crow and baker made me convulse to my core. I caught a glimpse of myself, reflected from streetlight onto window glass, and the vision it cast on my mind was the wiry frame of the girl in the Cheerios t-shirt. Wind-swept and sunned, with always the one wild lock curling away from the rest. The next passing streetlight betrayed a much older, slicked-down version of the feral soul. And the fox went on in his subtle persuasions....

I got a letter in the mail from someone whom I helped. When it happened it was no big deal, in my retelling of the events. A call came out, I was a few blocks away, Grace made it so that I was there in seconds to watch myself climb out of the car, yelling at the bad guy to put the bat down. He did, and as always, when I dig into my bag of tricks for the grown up voice, I am amazed that it works. It was just something that happened, a solitary event in a string of calls for service. Like my sister, it was just one switch that I managed to flip in a night where it was mostly dark. The letter was all broken English, to the point of being painfully ironic. I always knew that Lenny wasn't supposed to survive in this world. There are some things that are just too fragile, to naive, and when you encounter them they make your bones weak. And if you nod your head in understanding then you have been there. And if not...

He described what he felt, being trapped, and what he thought his only recourse would have been, flawed as maybe his perspective was. He pictured himself crawling to the floor of his van, head underneath the backseat to protect the most important of his ephemeral organs, while the bat swung up and down like a pendulum from a nightmare. Where time slows down and you see everything unfold in perfect detail, but are powerless to prevent a second of it.

And finishing the letter I stood still for a moment. Rain pitter-pattered off of the metal roof overhead, and the hiss of radio static next to my left ear punctuated the heaviness of the world that was pressing in on my back, my shoulders. I realized something I had not before. As I drive in, there is a stretch of highway which is some kind of catalyst in my mind. As soon as I cross over it I begin a measured out number of Our Fathers and Hail Marys until I feel sated and begin pleading my case. Mostly it is that if something tragic has to occur let it at least be understood, and always there is the moment when I plead for just a second to come and tell her that everything is okay, and that there is a reason, even if it is impossible to understand.

Love is more thicker than forget, more thinner than recall, more seldom than a wave is wet, more frequent than to fail.

And in the end the fox gets his share of the goods and I find myself again in the early morning blackness, navigating streetlights from end, to end. How we walk the line, and do not even consider its existence.

I ramble, but permit me, as I have had far too little sleep and perhaps too much waking for rumination and self-deprecation. There is regret, surely there is. I wear it like a brand across my chest. But we have to get up and dust ourselves off anyway. You do not have to be good, remember. You are, at least, unencumbered.

Invisible to the eye.

Windy, dark, silent, prowling, the beat dropped and his voice scratched in and I surprised myself, even, at how quickly the melody transported me to another place. Another time. It was snowing out, cold, and the wind shuddered against panes of glass -- the weakest point in our fortress against the outside world. A scent, me laughing, and the always pressing forward, always crushing momentum of the clock. My descent down the rabbit hole this time was sharp and sudden, and painful when I thought it couldn't hurt me anymore. My heart beat at all the wrong speeds, and my fingertips went cold, then numb. I wavered on the border between wanting to be sucked back down to languish in the regret, and feeling around in my pockets for a match and some accelerant to just be done with it all. But there were no answers at the crossing.

The wind kicked up and as I drove my figure eights, the melody still pressing down, I looked up and watched the largest size of balance ball one can purchase roll calmly down the main intersection of town. I reached up, turned off the radio, and the memories, set alight every blue and white flashing strobe that I could finger, and parked my car. In the darkness of the pre-dawn I beat the hell out of the balance ball until I felt that, were someone watching, they had probably gone from thinking that perhaps they should ask if I was okay, into shutting the blinds and sequestering the children away into the basement until the danger had passed.

And I wondered, if it was Grandpa Z or J who put that giant, ungainly turquoise piece of inflated rubber in the street. Or maybe it took both of their cunning to come up with such an effective way of putting me back in my place.

I corralled the ball, a sort of suburban tumbleweed, in the corner of an empty bus stop shelter. I climbed back into the driver's seat and switched off all of the dancing lights, pedal to floor, resuming my figure eights. The streets led me down the hill and to the lake and I turned off the car and all of its noise, and sat at the edge of the water so that the bottoms of my boots stood on top of the whitecaps when they broke. Strong wind, big waves. A freighter clung to the edge of the world, with Orion keeping a steady watch lest it slip off into oblivion.

I sat there until the freighter had slipped away and the bottoms of my pant legs were soaked. I thought about the fox, and his lesson that you are responsible for what you have tamed, and how we so carelessly try to tame whatever enters our gravity. With no plan, or empathy, or love even. We cast big nets, and discard whatever was caught by happenstance. I wondered, in my self-deprecating way, if the rose had survived his absence, and I hoped in my childish heart that she had. I watched the lake froth and churn, and I vowed to myself that I would be careful about what I tried to tame, and that I, myself, would stay wild from now on.

And it was a lonely decision. But, I have found, the good ones usually are.