Things You Carry Over

At the end of every year, I've found there is often one or two things that sum up those twelve months in retrospect. Sometimes the event is a little beyond my present state, giving me a glimpse into what is on the way. This past year was no different. In 2008 it wasn't my fun ride employment saga or my parent's health or even the reconnection with people I haven't seen for decades. No, for me it was an exhale long overdue, a recognition of something I have overlooked for decades, on purpose.

It was laid out before me like a tattered, black and white photograph, the sections unfolding with the chapters of a novel, Provinces of Night, by William Gay from Hohenwald, TN. The setting was not that unlike the rural south I left behind in 1995. In Gay's words I heard the melting drawl of a vernacular left behind, felt the wind on wild nights of my own that might have changed everything. It was all right there like a bloodline I was trying to deny. It was right there, making me admit my makeup, and it was in a written in a town considered hick even by hick standards. A moving novel from a place I had all but written off as, well, illiterate. Point made, south. Point made.

Page 248 and the young Fleming Bloodworth was still being offered the bottle by the weathered and dying, to make some tiny ammends to the fragile, or - almost forgiven - to get a rope around a bit of beauty and pull it down with them. A rabbit's foot for crossing over.

Page 248, that's about the time I caught myself starting to sink back into some relaxed, southern earth I figured left me a long time ago. Lord knows I did my best to strangle it. By all rights such a return ought to have happened after some survivable tragedy--a lost love, real destitution, busted locks or lips on the way back from some night out amongst 'em. I'm sure it happens that way to others, but when you're as sensitive as I am, it doesn't take that much. The Lord God whoever knows this and has seen fit to dole out my epiphanies in right and proper proportion.

So what is it that has come back? In short, the South. The southern earth welling up inside. It's a language, a tempo, a way of moving through the days very different from the way it happens up here in the north. I've discounted it all my life. But there's something there for me, for everyone I'd guess. It's a perspective that rests in valleys content to cradle the wind and rain, not brave it for old Scottish ballads and shitty landscape paintings over bad living room sofas. It's a language that can drink like my father did for a time, like I've heard his dad did before him, breaking jawbones just by looking at them. It's the sound of attics and spider basements, a crackle of energy that never seemed to wane, crack we can no longer afford. It's also a quiet desperation, like pulling a butt from the fire time and time again for one last taste of what's been bought and paid for.

On a summer night in 2008 this old piece of me tracked me down through the pages of a book and asked to come in. We started talking. We understood one another. I dare say we reached an agreement.

So at the start of this new year stop and think about what the last one has given you and what it has taken. Me? I found a little peace with my past.And I'm bringing it with me.

from something in the works...

"The Lao woman in the large round sunglasses laughed too hard for the crew in the courtyard. They didn’t need any of that on a Friday afternoon. The week had given them hell enough. The heat was enough noise for them and if there needed to be more noise, they would be the ones to make it.

For these that’s what’s left, a writer might say. Truth is some just do better work out of sight of the rays of summer. A little something in a room, nobody looking. What’s wrong with a little help between the calls you have to make? Between whoops and howdoyadoos to the roving security guards a lot of okay okay don’t get excited. We work something out. We work it out. Like Mexico mañana, mano. We work it out.

The skinniest woman at the table grabbed the lighter with authority and sucked hard. Five beers in, performing Bic CPR is an act of necessity. Marlene, or whatever, stood up quickly, cell phone already to her face. A car horn behind and she’s around the corner in a dramatic exit worthy of Shakespeare. You’ve seen the move before, and not in movies (the film industry hasn’t quite caught up to some parts of real life). It’s a move that seems entirely practiced. It’s a statement of freedom, the proof that should that ship come in, you’re packed and ready to go. To her long-time drinking buddies it always means the same thing. Importance. The call is more important than they are. It is a chance to escape, and she jumps at every one. Every time that Nelly ringtone disrupts the universe, they swallow their pride, left behind again for whatever good might come. The first look is horror, then sadness, then a glance around for their own stroke of luck or at least to pretend it doesn’t hurt so bad to be abandoned so easily. In public a loose hold on dignity becomes a used condom stepped over in a hurry..."

from Twin City, a work in progress

Latest Doings...

Recent Publication
New poem, "River Lesson", published over at the cool thought blog (THOG)
This Side of Paradise: http://geoffschutt.blogspot.com/2008/11/river-lesson-michael-k-gause.html

Would love to know what you think of it. Comments are enabled at the site.

Facebook
In other news, I am now an Official over at Facebook's Poets and Writers Registry. Will be posting ideas, poems, thoughts and such over there regularly. If you are on Facebook, drop me a line there.

The Dishevel'd Salon
My monthly happy hour gathering of writers and poets here in the Cities, has gotten an needed tune up and will be going strong until the end of time, at which time it may be reduced to quarterly. If you are a writer or poet in the Twin Cities, shoot me an email, so I can add you to the mailing list. Would love to meet you.

Misc.
Just returned from a Thanksgiving visit to the backwoods of TN. Long walks and observation. I continued taking notes for a work I am writing on that region. Childhood memories mixed with present-day observations with the running theme of the myth of moonshine. May be a chapbook, may be developed into a larger work. Time will tell.

Make Up

Sometimes they remember
That they’re widows passing

The fine young men
On the square

A laughing strength
Counting out the years

Gone by
But sometimes you can see it

Floating
To a now ancient surface

A tender habit
Of dignity

Recalled slowly
And red

Across the lips

Little Pink Houses

Be it a result of the political air about us these months, or merely the constant and natural reaction of the streets crossing just outside the door; I notive the clear tones of words like 'action' and 'connection.' Those sounds made with the inflection of the righteous and the pride of the chosen matryr. Their employ is never strained and never complex. Grassroots, they seem to imply, are simple structures one does not dissect, but accept, nurture, wrap inside ideas of community, home, hearth.

Middle-aged women, having finally allowed their bodies to evolve beyond roles of mother and wife, are now soldiers of puporse, the bloodless battle for the future of their souls, their district lines as they intersect with notions of dignity.

They age further and become the ancient women I watched today at lunch. I saw them first through the window before I even entered. Two tables long and dotted with their male counterparts, their faces and hair already on the slow march toward a unified whole. They were almost indistinguishable from one another in stature and gaze.

Each looked around her as others spoke, as if confused by the sound, as if they should understand but could not. Like so many names, birthdays, faces, and broken smiles, they had lost the facility to connect with the living, gained the uneasy gait of the dying. And, somewhere in the eyes, a hint of sadness. The only thing more unbearable than the clueless fall into suffering or death is is to glimpse that spark of recognition in the victim, the whispered sign that reaches out to us, begging without shame, for saving.

It was the men who were sentient. Fitted with pointed caps pinned with mementos and shining proof of valor. Chronic bills and countless pain garnered in the name of freedom. A lone, plastic American flag is taped to the back of a wheelchair. The flag is made in China, but not Japan. For the group sharing their strange memories, that is the important thing.

A memorial gathering a Taco Bell. Veterans of a foreign war. Men and women who put aside the immensity of their lives to serve a cause bigger than the universe itself, a foe straight from the radio serials of their childhood. Sitting together over chalupas in a place they themselves fought for.

Responsibility

There comes a point when you must
record that which you have to forget.

Video by Nelson
@ Bottom Union http://www.bottomunion.com

Perchance to Dream

When it comes, it isn't. Call dreaming a riddle.
Water doesn't feel wet when you're in it,
and dreaming is dead real when it begins.

No images this time
words again

Thoughts printed and careened until they
were forced back on themselves for nourishment
in a kinetic recoil. They bounced, fought and merged.
Each moment a sentence or two scrolling across my vision,
Yielding a slew of urgent questions clamoring for the floor.

“Were you to repeat this, would you use first person or third?”

“Which one of you is experiencing this? How do you determine?
How important is it to be right?”

“Do you see how every context already saw you coming, laid
traps?”

There is a pendulum here, a three-dimensional shadow of the one poised above the heart of the city. It sways in multiple directions at once and at different speeds. The lie is that one can reach, within it, some kind of détente. You pen your best lines, deliver them with passion and perfect timing. You state the case of your life to tacit response. You walk away with a smile, believing this time the deal with the Devil has been figured out. This time, you win. However, the deal has been perfected on the other end to lead you to this false confidence. There are always advantages to allowing the enemy to believe he has won.

Photo by Paula Campbell (http://pcampbellphoto.com/index.html)

You return to the act of creation to find that you have, indeed, come out ahead, as long as you do not dig too deeply, study the boundaries with too much scrutiny. Best to pick a medium and a closed universe and ride the blind wave to an ephemeral satisfaction. Walk beyond the taped off areas and you see that your world is a room within a room within a room of people that don’t stop laughing.”

The questions begin to fractal and assume the stance of a lecture meant half to warn, half to entice. The responses I generate naturally half-asleep load and fire just as easily as the questions arrive, pounding holes in the exterior of inquisition and exposition alike. But it’s old hat for the other side, and whatever damage you think inflict is compensated for immediately, replacement axioms, paradigm shifts are born to fill the holes. Your attempts to gain control over the shifting parameters of form, function, perception, and acceptance yield little – all your might just to tread water.

Like trying to punch holes in the flow of a fountain.