Thirty-Nine Less than Forty

I took a street where houses on my right
were small and neat. To my left, a fence, and then
the avenue, further off. The cars streaked by
and whistled, radials whining on the tarmac.
I gave no thought to people inside them, hands
casually at the wheels equipped with covers
because of the heat. But it was early morning
and still cool. Earlier I lay shivering,
a few miles short of town, under a bush,
curled up, on my side, my hat and coat
pulled tight to cover me. I had steered the car
to the side of the road, parked, and clumsily stepped
over the guardrail. It was early, and still dark.
Up north the desert bit with cold at night,
and I was glad that I had brought a coat.

I'd planned it: Put the coat and hat in the trunk,
but forgot the gloves. I lay there until daybreak,
trying to sleep, but drunk and drugged awake,
conscious and interested. As light began
to take hold in the sky I looked before me
and had a sideways view of what looked like
a forest in miniature. Not any forest,
but one that elves and halflings might inhabit.
Dead in the middle I'd made out a door,
or what might be a hatch, or magic portal
to some new world. That was the drug at work.

I felt at ease, at rest. But some time later
the cold had bitten deeper into me;
my thoughts had cleared a little; so I rose
and turned around to take note of the car
just up the embankment. In my clouded state
I had left the trunk wide open. I climbed up
and found the key still stuck in the ignition.
Christ or an angel had kept old Sofie safe.

I closed the trunk and drove on into town,
spending the last drops in the tank. I parked
at the visitor's center. In the back of the trunk
I had stashed my runaway bag. It held two books:
a novel, and an anthology of poems.
From the glovebox I took a pair of sunglasses,
pulled the woolen hat over my ears,
and walked away. Kingman was strange to me,
an old town lying along Route 66.

I took no notice of the names of streets,
but wandered aimlessly. Soon enough
a deepening thirst, the product of hangover,
gave me an aim. I found a restaurant
and went inside, noticing only then
that I had run out dressed in my pyjamas,
shod in light shoes scarcely more than slippers.
At least I looked the part that I was playing.
I asked for a bottle of water: a dollar-fifty.
I had plenty of quarters in my coat pocket,
enough that it was heavy against my side.

Scantly unburdened, I wandered off again.
Along my right a sad and empty park
lay narrow, between two streets. I went uphill,
and came to an overpass. Leaving the road,
I clambered down the embankment, crackling brush,
and sought the shadows of the underpass.

I sat on a concrete shelf and gravely took in
my new surroundings. Several blankets, shoes,
empty bottles and cans, were strewn about,
some flyers, a magazine, a circle of stones
where someone had made camp. I felt for those
who had taken shelter here, from desert heat
and desert cold, which strike in the same day,
from rain and wind, from sharp and wary eyes.

I put my bag of books down on the shelf
beside me, drank some water, and took note
of the flimsy plastic bottle, narrow, crinkling
inward as I drank, as if to warn me
not to take too much. A dollar fifty,
when water sprang from fountains everywhere.
Stupid mistake. But then, I needed the vessel.
I looked around and saw the other vessels
scattered pell-mell, a bounty of empty vessels.

The Lord provides. I knew with certainty
that that was true, but also knew its contrary,
That He taketh away. Not being privy to
His counsel, I stood toe to toe with nature,
which looked capricious from my ignorance.
I walked and shuffled among the litter, toed
a leaflet here, an empty matchbook there.
I stooped to grab a bottle from the dirt
and held it up, its former contents drained,
its cap still twisted tight. A bigger bottle.
I poured the water from the smaller bottle
into the bigger, then discarded the smaller.

Back at the shelf I took my runaway bag,
removed the books, and threw the bag away.
I cracked the big book open at Robert Bridges.
How fitting, being that I was under a bridge.
But poetry didn't speak to me just then.
My eyes just skipped and darted over the words
like a flashlight in a rundown movie theater,
not finding much of interest, only lines
and curves of black ink on the aging paper.
I closed the book and put the thing back down,
then put the novel up on top of it.
When I left later on, the books remained,
a gift for some lost reader down on his luck.

Time passed, and nothing happened. I remembered
the pills I'd put in one of my coat pockets.
Not wanting to waste water, I chewed some up.
At first they tasted sweet, then turned bitter.
I didn't waste the water. I ate more pills,
I ate and ate until there were no more.
I thought that that foul taste had better stay
in my mouth, to remind me of what I was looking for:
an ache in the mouth and in the gut, an absence
in the body, but fulfillment in the heart.

My mind went haywire once the pills kicked in,
but that was later. Let me take you back
to where we were at the start of this: a street
with houses on the right; to my left a fence
and further off, the avenue. By now
the drug was coming up. It threw the webs
of hangover assunder, its wedge of light
a sharp straight line that cut across the mind,
parting the clutter there, the flotsam and jetsam
of liquor's sloppy and obnoxious rioting.
I thought that at some point the fence would break
or stop, and I'd be able to skirt across
to the avenue, but the fence ran on and on.

I turned around and walked back down the street
I'd just walked up. No matter, we had time
to waste, I and my winter coat and hat,
my pocket full of Washington in profile.
But there was Someone else. Not Delmore's bear,
not Harvey, but much bigger than both of them.
He always went with me, wherever I went.
I always knew His presence, and spoke to Him,
From childhood on. I don't need secrets now,
so I'll let this slip out: I felt the hand
of God one day, right on the top of my head,
without so much force as a baby's breath,
yet bearing behind it an unspeakable power.

That's all I'll say, and if you feel the need
we can part ways right here; or you can stay
and listen, understanding that I speak
to Him that touched me, bold and unashamed,
not fearing, but loving His hand. And if I shake
it's not in terror, but reverence, and awe.

So I continued down the street, and now
the small houses were on the left. They seemed
perfect and stately; some had tiny lawns
of neat cut grass, inside of low white fences,
and in the desert they looked out of sorts,
but quaint and homey; warm and sentimental.

At this point I was missing home, and felt
a stranger in a strange land, unwelcome
and untrusted, a man without a purpose,
which meant it didn't matter where I walked
whether it be north or south, or east or west;       
a drifter, lacking a long black duster, my eyes
hidden and thereby shifty, maybe squinting
if I should of a sudden feel romantic.

After a while I found myself far off
from the visitors center, farther out of town.
I took a side road where I watched a pick-up
growl fast along the tarmac, up a hill
and over, vanishing from eye and earshot.             
When I surmounted the hill and leveled out
I scanned a brush-cluttered ravine to my left
that wound along and below a railroad track.

By now the drug played havoc with my balance:
I nearly fell when I stepped over the guardrail
and made my way down the rocky embankment.
It may as well have been the wilderness
for all I knew, once I had gotten into
the heavy brush. I stomped, crackled, and trampled
as one not too familiar with such things,
as one whose hands were used to pressing keys
and making words appear before his eyes.

I wanted to lay down and have no reason
to rise again, in a shaded, hidden place
where only God would see me. I stomped on,
pushing through brush that looked to me as if
it had been pushed before by force of water,
all of it leaning in the same direction.
                             
Beyond this concentrated wilderness
I found a private place. In front of me
the brush was scant, the ravine grew broader,
then leveled out. Right before it widened
I made camp. To my right, the tracks continued
and then bore left, but where I sat they loomed
a good ten feet above me: I couldn't see
the rails. Behind, a sagebrush had my back.

I sat, legs stretched, took out my water bottle,
but didn't drink. The drug had given me nerve.
By this time it had taken such hold that time
slowed down: my last ten feet of movement seemed
a mile, the last few minutes, hours. The world
had shrunken to the dirt and rocks around me.

I think I lay for some time on my side,
then sat back up and went to the other side
of the trench, my back against the rocky slope
that went up to the tracks. After a while
I leaned to my right, taking a deep interest
in a small arrangement of rocks and dirt beside me.
Also I noted a host of butterflies.

Some of the rocks had shapes that made me think
of creatures, this one a fish, and this a mouse.
Then I saw that all the rocks had faces.
The mouse I still have with me. I gave him an eye
on either side, etched with a sharper rock,
and called him Fiep, the name of a stuffed mouse
I received as a boy of twelve, from my grandfather's
sister, a nun visiting from Germany.

She gave me the toy, and a toy to my brother and sister,
from her natural kindness, and I cherished it
like no other gift that I had ever been given.
To this day I cannot say, if I am honest,
and so I am, under the eye of God,
exactly why I cherished that toy mouse so.
However it be, my Fiep has never left me,
and never will, unless the Lord will take him.
I know, I know. There comes a time when a man
must put away childish things, but I confess
I never will, God deal with me as He may.
                         
The more I leaned over the better I fixed
my vision on that little arrangement of rocks
and dirt, so that before long I was on
my side again, my right this time, so that
my left hand had its freedom, my strong hand.

I always held it just that God had made me
go at the world from the left instead of the right,
to see things from a minor point of view,
affix perspective at the peripheral
and sympathize with nature's also-rans,
the blurred out players on the limelight's fringe
who spoke a line or two and then returned
to unengaging silence. As I stared
at those tiny rocks and clumps of earth it seemed
as if I looked on a house without a roof.

With a small stick held in my left hand
I shifted the furniture about, a fleck
or two of dry green verdure gave the place
a holy aspect. In my inebriation
the flecks of green were palm-leaves, and I thought
of Mary Magdalen, and thought she slept
there in that microscopic roofless house
on the outskirts of Kingman, Arizona.

I hoped I had not disturbed the lady's chamber
with my obtruding twig, nor desecrated
her place of rest, nor her sacred memory.
In childhood I had wantonly destroyed,
and as an adult, in anger, I've wreaked havoc
on God's material objects, disassembled
items that had cohered, by His design
or aping human invention: broken them
is the easiest way to say it. I take comfort
betimes to think of Moses in his anger,
also in the desert, raising high
those tablets whereon God Himself had written,
and dashing them against the ground, breaking
the sacred work, because of his stiffnecked people.

Not that this precedent gives me excuse,
No, no. I'm guilty of my infantile wrecking,
and many an evil, as is any creature.
Now look there, take note: as is any creature.
See how the creature wants to lose himself
like a grain of soil in boiling tar, dissolve
and hide his blackness in a deeper blackness.
Perhaps he thinks that God will look him over,
forgive him for his selfish impurities
with a shrug of mammoth shoulders and a forgetting,
forgetting that God does not forget nor fail
to pay attention to any particle.
                         
Remember I said before it is not fear
I feel toward God, but reverence and awe?
We need to say that over, and admit
to a rational fear: a fear necessitated
by God's immensity and grandeur, His
immeasurable magnitude and power.
It were unwise to go about the world
in fearless pleasure, not to mind His presence,
in moral abandon, unaligned to reason.

It were an affront to Nature, and to those
who came before us, by whose industry
and stamina we have a safer world,
and break less sweat upon our wider brows,
whose names we carry down, and proudly wear
as emblems, honoring their lives and work.

Of course we owe our relative ease to science
and to the men of inventive mind, on this
there is no argument; but still I remind
all those who scan the skies with telescopes
and name, like modern Adams, sundry stars,
galaxies, beating pulsars, nebulas,
comets, planets, various cosmic bodies,
if they can find no God, no shred of Heaven
or wings of angels, that it is the same
for myriads of microbes in their bodies,
the living mass that make of them a home
and can not see a being in their host
but mere material, a habitat.

When asked if he believed in God, Einstein
answered, I believe in the God of Spinoza.
Go to Spinoza, open up his works.
This is the age when we will see the marriage
of reason and religion, the chaff sifted,
the wheat turned gold; when the heart and mind
can join at last in sweetest alchemy
envisioned by our ancestors, a genuine
consummation of love and intellect.

When I grew tired of moving furniture
in that small house without a roof, I moved
back across the ravine. Under the sagebrush
I lay on my side again, and tried to sleep.
The other thoughts occurred, of course: a snake
could come and take me unawares and make
my dying easy. I did not think of the pain
of dying, only the dying, the fading away
to black and deeper blackness; but the sun
was high enough that all I saw was red,
a vivid, candid red divorced from blackness,
and far from death. Come take me now, my Lord,
I uttered, while I heard the wings of flies
and bees beating close to my head, my hat
pulled farther over my ears. Come take me now.
I want to see you, Lord. My heart triphammered,
part drug, part dehydration, part pure hope.
But God said no. My heartbeat would go on.
I asked to die. God said, you will continue.

Sleep would not come, perhaps kept off by bees
and flies, perhaps by thoughts of scorpions
I could not see, those stealthy little dragons;
more likely stemmed by that vivacious red
I saw in my eyelids. Indeed, the day grew hot
as the sun crawled slowly, brightly, up the sky.

I said, alright then, Bill, we have a mother
and father that love us, and our two young sons,
a brother, sister, nephews, whom we love
as life itself, and more than life. Get up.
Let's go. And so I gathered all my strength
and got to my feet. I stood for quite some time,
and held on to the top of that sagebrush
as if my knees had given up the ghost
when I could not. It was the drug full bore,
which meant that walking would be difficult.

But I walked. I got out of the ravine,
my hat and coat now rolled under my arm,
and tended leftward, along the railroad tracks,
then headed back to where I had parked my car.
In the distance I could see the visitor center.
A train came by, and by its sound and force
I stood stock still. It was going the other way.

My hand to God I saw a dollar bill
flutter out of the front car. A gentle soul
had seen me, standing still, in mid-step,
and threw to me a value which, perhaps,
she needed for herself, or perhaps not.
I looked for it, my eyes scanning the rock
and sagebrush covered ground, but it was lost.

I hope that someone else will find it. I'm
happy I didn't find it. Another soul
will come across it, sure enough. The Lord
provides. I kept a slow but steady pace
and placed my feet upon the boards that went
outside and under the rails. For a moment
I wallowed in self pity, and said aloud
I wish someone would call my name: Hey Bill,
Bill! they would cry, waving from the road
that I saw off to my left, a loved one who
had come to rescue me. I heard Pop's voice,
saw his arm waving, the cap on his sacred head;
I saw my precious mother, waving her hand
at one of her 'cubs'; my sister, my 'gift'; and Kurt,
my older brother, my hero who had come
to save his brother, come Hell or high-water.

And then I saw my sons, my two young men,
grown tall and strong. I knew I had no time
or means for self-pity then. I raised my head,
thanked God for my sons, their mother, all the love
that had been given to me all through my life,
and said, Keep going. I have no time to die.
I only have enough time left to live.


6.22 - 6.29. 2013