The Truth about Grownups

What you suspect of us grownups is true,

at least of some of us—we

just want you to do exactly

what we say, because we sort of

hate you for being young

and feel the balance should be 

struck by your obedience.

We want you to think what

we think—because you allowing

us to convince you makes us feel

wise and smart and like we have something

to show for all that youth we wasted.

We’re jailors and slave-drivers,

self-righteous power-trippers,

bent on punishing you for the

disappointment and mediocrity

of our lame-ass grownup lives, seeking

in our control over you some semblance of

vindication or salvation.

And, oh yes, your first thought

should be resist, escape,

recriminate—doubt and question.

Why should you follow our

instruction, respect our

decisions, follow our example—

unless you want to end up

like us?

Old and boring and bossy.

No, you’re not condemned to

be like us, not quite,

but the generations shift

with no one’s consent,

dumping you in a place

bearing no mark of your own design,

and looking around in

the vast indifference, the struggle

lost without your ever really

sensing you’d adequately

taken it up—there is

something like concern,

something like worry,

something like a genuine

wish to pass on whatever

you can of

preparedness.

All your discoveries

will seem worthy of

handing down - 

even the ones that get

thrown back in your face.

What we think of you kids

is right too, at least some of you:

you’re oblivious to

your own inconsequence—

have no sense of what

anything’s worth, can’t

imagine losing

sight of a promise

that vanishes in the distance

or recedes like a mirage

on the horizon.

Also read:
GRACIE - INVISIBLE FENCES

Secret Dancers

IN HONOR OF CHARLES DICKENS ON THE 200TH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH

THE TREE CLIMBER: A STORY INSPIRED BY W.S. MERWIN

The Tree Climber: A Story Inspired by W.S. Merwin

Image created by Canva’s Magic Media

Everyone in Maplewood knew Clare as the little girl who was always climbing trees. But she was so dainty and graceful and reserved that at first it surprised them all to see how deftly, even artfully, she could make her way up even the most formidable ones. It wasn’t just the trees in her family’s yard either. She climbed everywhere. “Oh, that’s just Clare Glendale,” people would say. “She’s got tree-climbing craziness.” 

            A lot of stories circulated about how Clare first came to love going up and down the trees of the neighborhood and the woods surrounding it. Some said her mother told her stories about how fairies lived up in the canopies, so she was constantly going up to visit them. Some said she once escaped bullies at school by climbing a tree on the playground, so now she feels secure hidden high in the foliage. And some say it began one day when she espied a lost treasure—a toy or an heirloom—from her high perch and now re-experiences that feeling of relief and reconnection whenever she’s up in the highest branches.

            Even when she was still just a little girl, though, what kept her climbing was much more complicated than any of these neighborly conjecturings could comprehend. Every child eventually climbs a tree. Clare did it the first time because she’d seen some girls on her way home from school dangling from a low branch and thought it looked appealing in its manageable absurdity. The girls were squealing and kicking their earth-freed feet.

            Approaching the big sycamore in her own yard just minutes later, she struggled to figure out how to make it up through the lowermost layer of branches. That the sequence of grips and reaches and toeholds she would have to traverse wasn’t clear from the outset yet gradually revealed itself through her concentrated, strenuous, grasping efforts, like a tactile puzzle she needed her whole body to solve—that was what she remembered as the earliest source of pleasure in climbing. There was also a feeling of overabundant energetic joy in the physical exertion, difficult but surmountable, of hoisting herself with her hands and arms, swinging and pushing herself with her toes braced against the bark. When she made it up near the highest tapering branches, too tiny to hold her scanty weight, she felt she’d succeeded in overcoming earthly constraints she’d never even been aware of up till then. As she rested at last, the breeze blew against her light wash of sweat, setting her skin aglow with the dissipating pulsing heat, like soundless music emanating from her blood into the air, even as she felt her strained limbs shimmer with life, discovered anew through the dancing ache. She breathed in the cascading sighs of the dry undulating sun-sparkled leaves, millions of tiny mirages, and thought about how they reminded her of ocean tides she’d only ever seen on TV. She would dream that night of dancing alone by a high-built bonfire on a moonlit beach.

            But whenever she thought about that day over the ensuing years she was never really sure the memory was really of the first time she climbed a tree. She went back to it for an explanation because not having an explanation, a clear motive, some way to justify herself in depth of detail should anyone show a willingness, or even an eagerness, to hear her out—it bothered her, making her feel her youthful isolation as a lifelong sentence, hopeless.

            When high school first started for Clare, she stopped climbing trees because it was too odd a habit, too conspicuous. But then one day she climbed again, after several months, and things seemed right with the world in a way that forced her to realize things weren’t at all right with the world all those months she hadn’t been climbing. She thought, “Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to let them think I’m weird.”

            Maplewood was a good school in a nice neighborhood. Clare’s classmates talked among themselves about how she climbed trees all the time—as something like a hobby. They knew she sometimes took her digital camera with her. They also knew she sometimes did drawings of parts of the neighborhood or the city beyond from the tops of the trees. They knew she brought little notebooks up there sometimes too and wrote what they assumed was poetry. Sometimes, her classmates even tried to talk to Clare about her tree climbing, asking her questions, saying they’d like to see her photographs or drawings, read her poems. No one was ever cruel, not even the boys. She heard herself described as “artistic” in a way that made her inwardly cringe because it sounded dismissive, impatient—artistic even though she’d never shared any art with any of them because she sensed they were just being polite when they said they’d like to see or read it.

            But Clare was glad to have circulating all the stories explaining away her climbing, even though they were all wrong and her not being given to correcting them felt a little like dishonesty, because if someone had simply asked her, “Why do you climb trees all the time?” she wouldn’t have been able to answer. Not that she minded thinking about it. She wouldn’t have minded talking about it either except that it was impossible to discuss, honestly, without being extravagant, self-important, braggy, snobby—all the most horrible things a high school kid could be. She knew for sure she didn’t climb because she wanted to be seen as interesting. More and more she didn’t want to be seen at all.

            Sometimes, though, she imagined whole conversations. “Well, I’d say I climb trees because I like the feeling. But I don’t always. Sometimes my hands hurt, or I get up really high and I’m afraid I’ll fall, or it’s just really hot, or really cold. I get scraped up a lot. The view is often nice, but not always. Sometimes I go into these really peaceful trances, like dreaming while I’m awake. But that’s only rarely. Really, most of the times I go up it’s not pleasant at all. But when I don’t do it for a while I feel strange—like, my soul is stuck in a tight, awful sweater—you know, all itchy.” She imagines herself doing a dance to convey the feeling, all slithering arms and squirming fingers.

            Every time she thinks about her itchy soul she laughs, thinking, “Probably aren’t too many people out there who’d understand that.”

            It was when Clare was fifteen, months away from getting her license, that she overheard an older boy at school, one who wasn’t part of the main group, but sort of cute, sort of interesting, compare her tree climbing to something awful, something that made her face go hot in a way that had her ducking away so no one would see how brightly it burned.  It was an offhand joke for the benefit of his friend. She couldn’t really be mad about it. He didn’t mean it to be hurtful. He didn’t even know she would hear him.

            She went to the woods after school, hesitated before a monster of a tree she knew well but had always been too intimidated by to attempt, gave it a look of unyielding intensity, and then reached out and pulled herself away from the ground. The grips were just out of reach at every step, making her have to grope beyond the span of her arms, strain, and even lunge. But the tree was massive, promising to take her deeper into the bottomless sky than she’d ever yet plunged.

            She paused only long enough at each interval to decide on the best trajectory. In place of fear was a fury of embarrassment and self-loathing. She couldn’t fall, it seemed to her, because there would be a sense of relief if she did, and she just didn’t have any relief coming to her. Somehow she wasn’t deserving, or worthy, of relief. She reached, she lunged, she grasped, she pulled. The ache in her hands and arms enflamed her pathetic fury. And up she flew, gritting her teeth as she pulled down the sky.

            It was a loose flank of bark coming away from the trunk with a curt, agonized cough that left her dangling from one arm, supported only by a couple of cramped and exhausted fingers. Seeing her feet reach out for the trunk, rubbing against it like the paws of a rain-drenched dog scratching the door of an empty house, and feeling each attempt at getting purchase only weaken her lame grip, she began to envisage the impending meeting of her body with the ground. Resignation just barely managed to nudge panic aside.

            But Clare never fully gave up. As reconciled as she was with the fall that felt like justice for the sake of some invisible sacred order she’d blunderingly violated, she nevertheless made one last desperate maneuver, which was to push herself away from the tree with as much force as she could muster with her one leg. What came next was brutal, senseless, lashing, violent, vindictive chaos. The air itself seemed bent on ripping her to shreds. Her tiny voice was again and again blasted out of her in jarring horrific whimpers, each one a portion of her trapped life escaping its vessel. She thought she’d see the razor green streaking crimson so sudden and excruciating were the lacerating clawings of the branches.

            And then it stopped. She stopped. She felt herself breathing. Her legs were hovering powerless, but they were some distance still from the ground, which was obscured by the swaying mass of leaves still separating her from the just end she had been so sure of. Weak and battered, she twisted in the hard, abrasive net that had partly caught her and partly allowed her to catch herself, without her even knowing she was capable of putting forth the effort to catch herself, and saw that she was bouncing some ways out from the trunk of the other tree she’d had the last ditch hope of leaping into. Looking back to the one she’d fallen from, she saw she hadn’t even fallen that far—maybe twenty feet she guessed. She hurried toward the sturdier parts of the branches holding her aloft and then made her way down.

            Both feet on the ground, Clare turned back to retrace the course of her fall with her eyes, almost too afraid to breathe because breathing might reveal the mortal injury she still couldn’t believe she hadn’t sustained. After standing there until the momentousness of the occurrence dissolved into the hush of the forest, silent but for the insects’ evening calls and the millions upon millions of leaves sent atremble by the wayward wind, both of which seemed only to dimensionalize the silence, she began to walk, hesitantly at first but then with a determination borne of an unnamed passion.

            She lay awake all night, upstart thoughts and feelings surging, rolling over each other, crashing into shores of newly imagined possibility. The pain from her several less than severe injuries provoked inner crises and conflicts, setting her mind on a razor’s edge of rushing urgency. She had created a tear in the fabric of commonplace living—the insistent niceness she’d been struggling all her life to fold herself into. When the gray of dawn peeked into her room, she heard herself let loose the first half of a demented laugh before cutting off the second, lest her parents hear and start asking her questions of the sort now more than ever she would be hard-pressed to answer.

            Clare now knew that all her life she had been accustoming herself to a feeling of inevitability, of fatedness, of gradual absorption with growing maturity into the normal flow of life she saw emblems of in every last one of the really nice houses she passed on the way to school. But this morning they all looked different, like so many strained denials of the only true inevitability, a veil protecting everyone from what they assumed could only be some hellish nightmare.

            When after school that day Clare approached Dean Morris, the older boy who’d made the crude joke about her climbing, she managed to startle him with the wild intensity in her unaccustomedly direct glare. “You have to come with me,” she said. “I have something to show you.”

            And that’s how Dean became a crazy tree climber too. At least, that’s what everyone assumed happened to him. He disappeared with Clare that day and kept on disappearing with her almost every day thereafter for the next two years. It was only two weeks after their first climb together that he showed up at home injured for the first time. He told his parents he’d broken his arm in a motorcycle crash, but he refused to name the friend who had allowed him to ride, insisting that he didn’t want to get anyone into trouble and that it was his own fault.

            One or both of them was always showing up at school or the weekend jobs they each had with mysterious welts on their arms or faces. Their parents must have been in an agony of constant exasperated worry those last two years as, despite their best efforts to put an end to the excursions into the woods and the injurious goings on therein, they continued having to deal not only with their children’s defiance but with the looming danger it exposed them to. But everyone at school saw something to admire in the way Clare and Dean so uncompromisingly settled on the existence they would have be theirs. The girls remarked on Dean’s consuming and unselfconscious devotion to Clare and were envious. He always seemed naturally gravitating to a post standing guard close by her, intensely, passionately protective. What would it be like to see your first love nearly fall to her death again and again?

            For those two years, they formed their own region apart from the life of the school and the neighborhood. No trace of teenage self-consciousness or awkwardness remained. They seemed as though they were in the midst of actuating some grand design, some world-saving project only they could be relied on to handle and no one else was even allowed to know about. They knew themselves. They loved each other. And they together exuded an air of contented self-sufficiency that made all the other students somehow more hopeful.

            A lot of people said when it was over that Clare must have run away and started a new life in some far-away place. The truth is no one knows what happened to her. I used to think about those two all the time. When I came back to Maplewood years later, it was just on an odd whim. My parents had moved away soon after I’d left for college. I wasn’t in touch with any friends who still lived there. For some reason, I just up and decided to spend a day driving, get a hotel for the night, and maybe make a weekend of visiting my old home town. The first place I went was the woods where Clare and Dean spent their last moments together.

            Everyone knew the story no one professed to believe. Beyond that, there were quite a few versions of an official account. Some held that an animal, or maybe a few coyotes, had dragged Clare’s body away. Others insisted that she was still alive and that seeing what had just happened to Dean she panicked and fled and never came back. Maybe she was afraid they’d blame her. Maybe she blamed herself and couldn’t bear to face his parents. There was something desperate about this version of the story. The fact seemed plain that Clare had died that day too. I always imagined Dean standing high up in the tree, seeing what happened to Clare, and yet never for a moment hesitating to follow her no matter where it took him.

            I found myself thinking surprisingly little about what had happened on their last trip to the woods together as I drove around town, stopping by the school to see if anyone was still around to let me inside to indulge my nostalgia. What occupied my mind was rather the way those two were together, locked in to each other, suddenly mature. They seemed—what’s the word? Knowing. They both knew something the rest of us, even our teachers and parents, simply didn’t know—or couldn’t know. What that something might be is a question I put to myself with some frequency to this day.

            It was late on a Friday night when I tried the door at the school. It was locked. I ended up wandering around the town in dreamy reverie without running into anyone I recognized and could invite to sit with me somewhere to reminisce. That was fine by me though.

            By Sunday afternoon, I was beginning to question my decision to come. I didn’t exactly have all the time in the world to amble around my old stomping grounds in a feckless daze. Impatient to get back on the road, I responded with mild annoyance to being recognized and addressed at the gas station. When I saw it was Bret Krause, though, the boy Dean had told that crude joke to about Clare’s climbing, his best friend right up until Clare pulled him away into that separate world of theirs, my curiosity got the best of me. I was amused when he pulled out his phone to call his wife and let her know he would be stopping by a bar to have a drink with an old friend from school. Bret hadn’t exactly been a lady’s man back in our glory days, but the picture he showed me was of a striking but kind-eyed beauty. It’s funny how things like that seem to work themselves out.

            I enjoyed hearing all about Bret’s life since high school. We’d never been close friends, but we’d had classes together and knew each other well enough for casual exchanges of greetings and pleasant small talk. I do have to confess, though, I was glad when he spontaneously began to talk about Dean. Anything I knew about the story had come to me in rumors thrice removed, and as curious as I’d been after they found Dean’s body in the woods that day it seemed to me untactful to barrage anyone with questions—though plenty of others apparently hadn’t felt the same scruple.

            Bret had gone away to college and returned to Maplewood to teach Algebra, of all things. He brought back with him the girlfriend he would marry soon afterward. They planned on having a couple kids but weren’t ready just yet. After letting us into the school, he took us directly to the spot where Clare had walked up to Dean and told him to come with her because she had something to show him.

            “I was a little worried coming back here,” he said. “I thought it might be too painful to be reminded of him constantly. At the same time, though—I know it’s a weird thing to say—it was sort of like his memory was one of the things that drew me back.”

            “I know what you mean.”

            “For a long time, I really thought any day we were going to hear that Clare had just shown up somewhere. It’s just such a strange thing in this day and age.”

            Bret turned the key to let us into the classroom where he taught his students quadratic equations, the same classroom where I’d learned pretty much the same lessons all those years ago, with Clare and Dean sitting four rows behind me in the back corner by the windows.

            “What do think happened to her?” I couldn’t help asking.

            Bret laughed good-humoredly. “Everyone knows what happened to her,” he said. “Haven’t you heard the story?” 

******

Inspired (partly) by:

Recognitions

Stories come to us like new senses

a wave and an ash tree were sisters

they had been separated since they were children

but they went on believing in each other

though each was sure that the other must be lost

they cherished traits of themselves that they thought of

as family resemblances features they held in common

the sheen of the wave fluttered in remembrance

of the undersides of the leaves of the ash tree

in summer air and the limbs of the ash tree

recalled the wave as the breeze lifted it

and they wrote to each other every day

without knowing where to send the letters

some of which have come to light only now

revealing in their old but familiar language

a view of the world we could not have guessed at

but that we always wanted to believe

         -from W.S. Merwin's The Shadow of Sirius

Also read:

Those Most Apt to Crash: A Halloween Story

And:

CANNONBALL: A HALLOWEEN STORY

And:

Bedtime Ghost Story for Adults

A Lyrical Refutation of Thomas Kinkade

FIRELIGHT ON A SNOWY NIGHT: A Lyrical Refutation

I was eager to get out when I saw the storm, the swarm of small shadowed blurs descending

in swerves to create

a limn of white, out into the soft glowing sky of a winter night, peering through the

dark as those blurs

become streaking dabs as they pass through spheres of yellow lamplight, countless, endlessly

falling, engulfing

those sad, drooping, fiery lenses depending on their stoic posts.

I think of those Thomas Kinkade pictures my mom loves so much—everybody’s mom

loves so much—

and I have to admit they almost manage to signal it, that feeling, that mood.

Cold, brutal, uncaring wind, and a blanketing blankness of white struggled through

by the yellow and orange

warm vibrant doings of unseen humans, those quaint stone bridges over unimaginably

frigid, deathly chilling water,

somehow in their quaintness, in their suggestion of, insistence on, human ingenuity,

human doggedness, those scenes

hold out the promise of an end to the coldness, an end to the white nothing that fails,

year after year, to blot out world.

Those pictures are lies though—in almost conveying the feeling, the mood, they

do it an injustice.

In willfully ignoring the barren, venous, upward clawing, fleshed branches that rake

the eerily luminescent wind-crowned sky,

and failing to find a symbol to adequately suggest the paradoxical pace of the flakes

falling, endlessly falling

through those yellow, orange spheres of light—hurried but hypnotically slow, frantic

but easily, gracefully falling,

adjusting their cant to invisible, unforeseen and unforeseeable forces.

The story of human warmth defying the frigid, impersonal harshness of a colorless,

lifeless cosmos—

in trying desperately to please, just to please, those pictures offend—that’s

only half the story.

The woman who lit the fire sending out its light through the windows, she’s aging—

every covering of snow

is another year in the ceaseless procession, and the man, who worked so doggedly

at building a scaffold

and laying the stones for that charming bridge, he’s beyond reach of the snow, two or three

generations gone since his generous feat.

The absence of heat is its own type of energy. The wet-lashing night air is charged with it,

like the pause after a breath

awaiting the inevitable inhale—but it holds off, and holds off. Inevitable? Meanwhile,

those charged particles

of shocking white, tiny, but with visible weight—they’d kiss your cheek if you

opened your coat

and you’d know you’d been kissed by someone not alive. The ceaseless falling

and steady accumulation,

hours and days and years—humans create watches and clocks to defy time, but

this relentless rolling over

of green to white, warm to cold, thrilling, rejuvenating spring to contemplative, resigned

autumn, this we watch helplessly,

hopefully, hurtling toward those homes so far beneath the snow.

The air is charged, every flake a tiny ghost—no tinier, though, than any of us merits—

haunting the slippery medium

of night we might glide through so slow, so effortless, so sealed up to keep in our warmth,

turned inward on ourselves.

The hush, the silent yawn, is haunted with humanity’s piled up heap of here and gone,

and haunted too with

our own homeless, friendless, impossibly frightening future.

The homes of neighbors friendly donning matching caps, alike in our mutual blanketing, our

mutual muting.

Those paintings of cozy lit houses in the winter harshness remind me of the juxtaposition

of fright and absence of true threat,

those opposites we feel when young, the trick, the gift of some masterful ghost story,

properly told in such a scene,

and this night, snow creaking underfoot like those ill-hinged doors opening all on

their own, raising chills,

this night is haunted too, but less with presence than with utter absence, here and gone,

all those troubled souls,

their existence of no more consequence than the intricacy suddenly annihilated as it

collides with the flesh

just beneath my eye, collides and instantly transforms into something more medium

than message and

no sooner lands than begins to evaporate.

Also read:

THE TREE CLIMBER: A STORY INSPIRED BY W.S. MERWIN

THE TRUTH ABOUT GROWNUPS

IN HONOR OF CHARLES DICKENS ON THE 200TH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH

GRACIE - INVISIBLE FENCES

ECRET DANCERS

In Honor of Charles Dickens on the 200th Anniversary of His Birth

DISTRACTION

He wakes up every day and reads

most days only for a few minutes

before he has to work the fields.

He always plans to read more

before he goes to sleep but

the candlelight and exhaustion

put the plan neatly away.

He hates the reading,

wonders if he should find

something other than Great Expectations.

But he doesn’t have

any other books,

and he thinks of reading

like he thinks of church.

And one Sunday after sleeping

through the sermon,

he comes home and picks up

his one book.

He finds his place

planning to read just

those few minutes

but goes on and on.

The line that gets him

is about how “our worst

weaknesses and meanness”

are “for the sake of” those

“we most despise.”

He reads it over and over

and then goes on intent

on making sense of the words

and finding that they make their own.

After a while he stops to consider

beginning the entire book again

feeling he’s missed too much

but he goes back to where he left off.

The next day in the field he puts

everything he sees into silent words

and that night he reads for the first time

before falling asleep.

The next day in the field he describes

to himself his feelings about his work

and later holds things in their places

with words as he moves around in time.

The words are the only constant,

as even their objects can shift

through his life, childhood,

senility, and through the life of the land.

He wants to write down his days on paper

because he believes if he does then he can

go anywhere, do anything, and yet still

there he’ll be.

It’s not that Dickens was right that got him,

but that he was wrong—

even Pip must’ve known his worst

wasn’t for anyone but Estella,

nor his best.

One day could stretch to a whole

book of bound pages like the one

in his hands, or it could start and finish

on just one.

He imagines writing right over

the grand typeset words of Dickens'

on page one, “Hard to believe,

I woke up, excited to read.

I wished I could keep reading all day.”

Sunday, June 22, 2008, 11:43 am.

Also read:

Secret Dancers

And:

Gracie - Invisible Fences

Gracie - Invisible Fences

Invisible Fences

I hated Tony’s parents even more than I had before when I heard about the “invisible fence” for Gracie.

They were altogether too strict, overly vigilant, intrusive in their son’s, my friend’s, life, and so unjustifiedly.

He and I were the shy ones, the bookish, artistic, sensitive ones—really both of us were conscientious to a fault.

What we needed was encouragement, always some sort of bolstering, but what Tony got was questioned and stifled.

And here was Gracie, a German shorthair, damn good dog, spirited, set to be broken by similarly unjustified treatment.

As dumb kids we of course had to sample the “mild shock” Gracie would receive should she venture too near the property line.

It seemed not so mild to me, a teenager, with big dreams, held back, I felt, by myriad unnecessary qualities of myself—

qualities I must master, vanquish—and yet here were Tony’s parents, putting up still more arbitrary boundaries.

I could barely stand to hear about Gracie’s march of shameful submission, conditioning to a high-pitched warning.

She started whimpering and shaking, and looking up with plangent eyes at her merciless or misguided master—

this by the second lap along the border of the yard, so she’d learn never to get shocked—it was all “for her own good.”

The line infuriated me more than any lie I’d ever heard, as there was no question whose convenience was really being served.

That first day after Gracie had been trained as directed, Tony and I were walking away from his house,

and I looked back, stopping, to see her longingly looking, desperately watching us leave her, leaving me sighing.

I shook my head, frowned, subtly slumped, which maybe she saw, because just then a change came over her.

She fell silent, her ears fell flat to her brown, bullet-shaped head, her body tensed as she lifted herself from her haunches.

And then she shot forth her willowy, maculated body in long, determined strides, but keeping low all the while,

as if somehow intuiting that the impending pain was simply a manifestation of her master’s hand to be ducked under.

My mouth fell open in thrilled astonishment, and as she neared the buried line, I shouted, “Yeah Gracie! Come on!”

Tony likewise thrilled to the feat his old friend was about to perform, shouting alongside me, “Come on girl! You can make it!”

About the time Gracie would have been heedlessly hearing the warning beep, my excitement turned darker.

Simultaneous with the shock I barked, “Go Gracie! Fuck ‘em!” with a maniacal, demoniacal, spitting abandon.

Without the slightest whimper Gracie broke through the boundary, ducked under the blow, defying her master’s dictates.

“Yeah! Fuck ‘em!” I enjoined again, my head jolting, thrashing out the words, erupting with all the force of self-loathing.

If Tony had any apprehensions about hearing his parents so cursed he never voiced them—was I really cursing them?

Gracie approached atremble, all frenzy from her jolting accomplishment and now met by our wild acclaim and eager praise,

or not praise so much as gratitude, as she anxiously darted between and around us as if disoriented, reeling, overwhelmed.

But Tony and I knew exactly what we had just witnessed, the toppling of guilt’s tyranny, a spirit’s willful, gasping escape.

Our deliverance lasted hours, while we idly ambled about and between neighborhoods, casting spiteful glances

along the endless demarcations of land, owned, separated, displayed, individual kingdoms, badges of well-lived,

well-governed lives—I wanted to tromp through all those manicured front lawns, my every step spreading pestilence

to the too-green grass we weren’t supposed to walk on lest it wear a trail, ruining the pristine quality of ownership.

Our march of euphoric defiance inspired by Gracie’s coup de grace could only go on for so long, though—

we were newly free, but free to do what?—before we’d have to return home for a meal, shelter, electronic entertainment.

As the sun sank, I began to have the sense of squandered opportunity, dreading the end of my reprieve from invisible impediments.

Back toward Tony’s house we hesitantly made our way, but all the while I kept the image of Gracie’s escape fresh in mind.

My friend and I took up conversing as we neared the stretch of road by his house, ranging widely and irreverently—

our discourses having served as our sole escape up to then—in the tone and spirit of seeing right through everything.

We were both halfway up Tony’s driveway before we noticed that Gracie was no longer keeping pace with us.

…She was turning tight circles in the street, whimpering, anxious, and seeing her, Tony and I exchanged a look I’ll never forget.

Even after removing the device from Gracie’s neck, we still had to lift her, squirming desperately, over the line to get her home.

Also read:
IN HONOR OF CHARLES DICKENS ON THE 200TH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH

And:

Secret Dancers

Secret Dancers

For about 3 years, I was a bit obsessed with C.K. Williams's poems. They usually tell stories, and rather than worrying over whether his words impose some burden of meaning on his subjects, Williams uses words to discover the meanings that exist independent of them. The result is a stripping away of tired, habituated ways of seeing to make way for new revelation.

This poem was also inspired by Ian McEwan's novel Saturday, which focuses on a day in the life of a neurosurgeon. Anyway, I really love how this poem turned out, but it's so derivative I feel I have to cite my inspirations.

Secret Dancers

The woman on the right side of the booth as I approach—“Can I get you something to drink?”—I noticed had something wrong with her,

the way she walked, the way she moved, when I led her with her friend, much older,

her mother perhaps, from the door—“Hello, will it be just the two of you today?”—to where they sit, in my section, scanning the menu for that one item.

“I’d just like water with lemon,” the one on the left says, the older one, the mother.

I nod, repeating, “water with lemon,” as I turn to the other, like I always turn from one to the next,

but this time with an added eagerness, with a curiosity I know may offend, and I see my diagnosis was correct,

for the woman cannot, does not, sit still, cannot be still, but jerks and sways, as if unable to establish equilibrium, find a balanced middle.

I’m glad, hurrying to the fountains, as I always do, the woman said, in essence, “For me too,”

because I’ve already lost her words in the deluge of the disturbance, the rarity, the tragedy of the sight

of her involuntary dance—chorea—which is, aside from the movement, nothing at all like a dance, more an antidance,

signaling things opposite to what real dancers do with their performances.

I watch my hands do by habit the filling of plastic cups with ice and water, reach for straws and lemons,

still seeing her, slipping though sitting, and doing my own semantic antidance in my mind:

“How could anyone go on believing… after seeing… dopamine… substantia nigra…

choreographed by nucleotides—no one ever said the vestibular structure, the loop under the ear

with the tiny floating bone that gives us, that is our sense of balance, was implicated… so important to see.”

In the kitchen, sorting dishes by shape on the stainless steal table on their way to being washed,

I call to the pretty young cook I sort of love, who sort of loves but sort of hates me

for the sorts of things I say (noticing and questioning), and say, “There’s a woman with Parkinson’s

at table three—you should come look,” and feel chastised by an invisible authority

(somewhere in my frontal lobe I suspect) before the suggestion can even be acknowledged.

Look? Are we to examine her, make her a specimen, or gawk, like at a freak? But it—she is so important to see,

I set to formulating a new category of looking.

I begin with the varieties of suffering so proudly and annoyingly on display: abuse, or “abuse”, survived,

poverty escaped, gangsta rappers shot or imprisoned to earn their street cred,

chains of slights and abandonments by ex-lovers, all heard so frequently, boasted of as markers of authenticity.

Is there a way, I wonder, to look that would serve as tribute to the woman’s much more literal,

much more real perseverance and courage, a registering and appreciation of identity,

that precious plumage that renders each of us findable in the endless welter and noise

of faces and the dubious stories of heroism attached to them?

Returning to the booth to take the women’s orders, so awkward, so wrong, the looking, I discover,

cannot be condoned under my new rubric because the sufferer’s antidance is leading her in the wrong direction.

Those stories of abuse, penury, assaults or arrests, and recurrent dealings with unfaithful lovers all go from bad,

the worse the better, to better but never too good. This story, like nearly all real and authentic stories, is about deterioration.

So I type their orders on the touch screen computer, defeated, chastened, as if curiosity—

noticing and questioning—leads irredeemably to taboo

(but how lucky to be born with this affliction instead of one more incapacitating!)

I’m left sulking a little, and thinking about dancing and movement that goes by the name

but isn’t. “Dance Champ!” they exhorted Ali from ringside in Zaire,

when he’d decided, strategically,

and it turned out successfully, not to. Ali, The Greatest, the star and subject of movies, King of Classic Sports on ESPN,

his not quite dancing featured so prominently, so inescapably—look all you want, look and be awed—but all in the past.

You forget the man is still alive. The secrecy makes me wonder: is it economic, is it political?

The visibility, the stark advertisement of achievers of the formerly impossible, the heroically,

the monstrously successful, coupled with the tabooed hiding away of the vastly more numerous unfortunate,

fallen, and afflicted—the lifeblood, the dangling American Dream, insufficient,

the market for better lives necessitates the beating heart of

belief, “You can do anything...,” be your heroes, be heroes for others, by working,

spending, studying, being industrious, acquisitive, but never, never questioning and only

curious to a degree, “…anything you put your” (antidancing) “mind to.”

As I carry the plates, one in the crook between palm and thumb in my left hand, the other

balanced over it on my wrist so I have a free hand to grab the ketchup

on my way to the booth, I recall uneasily watching Ali, his arm outstretched,

antidancing as he lit the Olympic Torch.

Also read:
GRACIE - INVISIBLE FENCES

IN HONOR OF CHARLES DICKENS ON THE 200TH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH

THE TREE CLIMBER: A STORY INSPIRED BY W.S. MERWIN