"The Edge of the World"

by Jack Gilbert




I light the lamp and look at my watch.
Four-thirty. Tap out my shoes
because of the scorpions, and go out
into the field. Such a sweet night.
No moon, but urgent stars. Go back inside
and make hot chocolate on my butane burner.
I search around with the radio through
the skirl of the Levant. "Tea for Two"
in German. Finally, Cleveland playing
the Rams in the rain. It makes me feel
acutely here and everybody somewhere else.

The Work of Snow

Maybe it's the snow. Maybe it is because the snow, more than any recollection, reminds me of the solitude of my childhood. When school and home were too overwhelming for my delicate sensibilities, I would retreat into the woods behind our house, and I would sit on a hill beside the stream. I imagined myself a monk, I suppose, communing with nature. It was calming to be in the presence of something that did not want. As if this cloister were not peaceful enough, there was winter. The snow did there what it does up here. It mutes the insect buzz of the world. It forces you not to listen, but to watch. Watch the water flow beneath the ice ten feet below. Watch the bird alight on a branch, shaking free a puff of snow. Once you get seeing down, only then can you start to listen. Align yourself with the stillness and you will hear what is not to be heard. That secret water sounds like whispering. That snow likes to mimic the wind through hollow oak. All of this built in me a foundation of stillness that helped me through it all. It sharpened the senses we don't think much about. However, sensitivity has its cons. I haven't harmonized with that environment for over twenty five years, and yet I still often find myself overwhelmed by even the most simple of urban life. It is unsettling to think I trained myself out of being functional in the world.

So the snow is here, and there's more on the way. It knows its work. It stands for an elusive stillness. It recalls troubled times. It is the nagging reminder that I have always felt ill-prepared for what I entered the day I left it all behind.

Fortune

We have everything we need, she says
in a voice that verges on truth.

But I know Angels
are not meant to live so low

So I kiss her long, for this we do not ration,
and swear to make her an honest woman

And as I close the door behind me
I can hear her soft singing, searching the cupboards,
dividing even the dust by two

The Knowledge of Bombs

Once in a while creators of art, those who attempt to bring the thoughts and images to the light of day, stop. They look at themselves and their processes. They see the whole of it like an exploded diagram of the atomic bomb. They can see the arming mechanism, the casing, Fig. 3: the vital pin. If they are truly fortunate, they are able to see, as well, the context in which it all tries to exist. The culture. The composition of the air through which said bomb will plummet toward its target. Sometimes this knowledge stops the creator in her tracks. Sometimes it lights a fuse otherwise never seen.

For me, it has taken me years to realize the value of two important things:

1. trusting myself
2. caring less

These two notions have only recently shown themselves, their evil twins having postponed many a bomb waiting to create life.

Next up: The Nature of the Bomb and How Let It Go

New Writing Contest on Facebook Keeps Michael Writing!

Paper Darts Magazine is featuring a monthly micro flash fiction contest on Facebook. Up to 1000 characters on a given prompt, entrants can win around 100 bucks if they get enough votes (in the form of "likes"). It is brillian marketing really. If a Facebook group wants a high member count, you host a contest where all entrants (and voters!) must become members of the group, then you can rest assured that your entrants will be recruiting new members just to vote for them. Brilliant.

Anyway, the latest contest ended at midnight last night, and I was fortunate enough to receive 13 votes. I liked the piece myself and had fun writing it. My thanks to Flannery O'Connor for her wonderful prose which inspired the dark foliage of my submission. "The Dark Foliage of My Submission." The title of an imaginary book by George Bataille and Gary Snyder.

I'll be entering this contest monthly as writing practice. If you are on Facebook, I invite you to "friend" me and check out my submissions to the contest. If you like them, leave a like, won't you?

Best as winter comes,
m.

2 Polaroids of the South, 2009

The sun hunches itself elderly over a line of oak trees behind the old storefront, while a man watches shadows grow sleepy and yawn themselves into the dirt. Neon stutters, abetting the twilight. Bats, like the dead of summer, dart above cricket drones from the darkening wild wood.

He stares at the Coke machine, at the cloud of insects around the bulb overhead. Not even they, in their heated electron swarm, can make movement on an evening like this. Resolute in its stillness, the air is a statue in the park, parting words you can't take back.

But in his head there are explosions in the sky, soundless and unseen and worlds beyond it with no idea what they have coming.

The Double Complaint (Laforgue Remix)

I.

"What comes, when all else fails?"

I thought it would be me you would come for. Instead, you tempted. Sure, Death. Ahead of your grainy caravan you sent your damaged angels in reconaissance. But you never asked them what they wanted. Seems they had grown tired of brittle hues, longed to embrace the defiance they sold. They found me waiting. I, so full of wet life. Of course they stayed.

In truth I never knew
Death needed needed so many.

So now you arrive, but you've wasted your time.
Your data is corrupt. I'm not fit.
Keep banging.
Hammer out your first complaint.

II.

"The dead are discreet. They sleep in a cool a place."

You had too much to do. I understand. Sure, Life. Before the heated angels' mutiny, I was also too cold. Perhaps I was too still for you to notice. I must have been nesting. Huddled beneath the racing level of the world, digging a little deeper for gold, I found sharp stone. I bled myself into a divine recepticle.

Sure, Life
I hated.
Unnamed objects and sections of time
reached for me. I felt my first friendship
with the nothing that lies beneath the lie
of the world.
We played elaborate games.
We both lost.

But that's old news.
One learns.
I heat it up.
I wrestle the sweaty bodies you abandoned, which now
abandon death. Now this is no cool place.
You are present only in the refraction of laughter.

Death has come for me.
Everyone here laughs,
moves closer. I tell him I'm coming
and we depart.

He complains I've no right to do this.
We just laugh louder as we sneak out the back.

We, his Angels, never told him.

The dead?
They travel.

*

P.S. Pic by Kristel Schneider (http://kristelschneiderphotographyblog.blogspot.com)