photo credit: StayRAW

I was fighting it all the way, wearing knickers, me, twelve going on thirty it felt some days, dreams about Ginnie Wilmot practically every night now, the morning dew being the vague remnants my father spoke about with a smile on his face, new hairs in my crotch, my mother wanting her boy to look neat, my father looking at the horizon almost saying this too will pass. It was his one-shoulder shrug that carried verb and noun in its arsenal. I had early discovered that he did not need a lot of words.

My mother was looking at her choice of two hats, checking them out in the mirror on her bureau. A dried flower was creased in cellophane in one corner of the mirror; I’d heard some reference about it but had declined interest. My father’s picture, him in a Marine uniform, was framed in a second corner, my sisters and me in another, in our Sunday best a year earlier. A palm frond from Palm Sunday twisted itself across the top of the mirror. I think the hats were as old as I was. I knew she would pick the purple one. Her eyes announced the decision prematurely; again, an article of speech. Much of the time we were a family of silence, where looks or shrugs or hand gestures or finger pointing said all that was needed. My cousin Phyllenda had given the hat to her. “You’ll look great in this one.” I could never tell my mother Phyllenda’s boyfriend had swiped it from a booth in Dougherty’s Pub in Malden Square where he’d go of an evening or two. I’d seen them talking an evening on the porch, Dermott’s hand up under Phyllenda’s dress and it not yet dark.

A May Sunday was a bit snappy this early with the sunrise. “There will be hundreds of people at Nahant Beach today.” Both the radio in the bedroom and the kitchen were on; her music almost mute in the background. She looked out the window across Cliftondale Square, across the green of the traffic circle and the new green of elms already leaping at full growth against the sky. On the third floor we lived, yet not as high as some of the elms. Gently a nod was spoken, an affirmation. “They are waiting for summer at the beach,” she added. “They go walking on the beach looking for it. It’s over the horizon a few weeks yet. We will go right from church. You will wear your new green suit.” At length it had become her trip-hammer approach, the hard music. In that voice I felt the agencies of iron and slag at a mix. “You don’t know how proud I am of you in your new suit. And two pair of pants, at that.” For sure, iron and slag in her words, the new and the dross. At her lighting up about the new suit, I cringed. Two pair of pants seemed eternal, would carry me into high school, into football, the mold of the locker room, pal-talk growing the way my older brother would nod, owning up to all I had heard. Hell, there’d be knickers, for God’s sake, for girls, lots of them prettier than Ginnie Wilmot who once sat across a log flashing her white underpants at me so that something happened in my throat, something so dark and dry and dreadful that I can taste it yet.

Simon Goldman it was who sprung the suit on my mother, little shrunken Simon with the poppy eyes and the red face, on Saturday morning collecting his due of pennies she yet owed on a parlor set. “It’s green herringbone tweed, my Helen,” he said, in that possessive delivery he must have developed early in his game. “It has two pair of pants. For you yet cheaper than anyone. Resplendent he will be in it. Resplendent. No boy in this whole town has a suit like it. And the famous golfers wear knickers, I’ve seen them in newsreels at the theater. Hogan and O’Brien and Downey, McDevitt and Fitzpatrick, McHenry and that Shaun whoever from Swampscott.” He was inventive, you had to admit. I’d have said a liar as well as a schemer. “Two pair of pants. Green. Herringbone. Think of the message.”

His eyes almost fell out of his head, dropping Ireland almost at his feet, dropping it at her feet. I almost pushed him down the stairs, he was at it again, selling her, saying it was a bargain, saying you people are climbing the social ladder on my advice and merchandise. Truth is, she cautioned me once, only once, on how I should remember Simon. “I found him,” she had said, “he didn’t find me.”

The worst part of it all, putting on the suit, the knickers with knee length socks, was having to take off my sneakers. I thought they were welded to me. I thought I’d wear them forever. I belonged in sneakers, foul or fair, “But not in your new suit.” It was as if her whole foot had come down on the subject. My father lifted his chin, flicked his head aside, gave off a mere suggestion of a nod, shrugged his shoulders. This too shall pass. With a knife he could not have carved it deeper.

In my new greenery we headed for Nahant Beach, me in my green knickers, four sisters all dolled up in the back seat of the old Graham, the titters and snickers behind their hands, my unsworn vow becoming animate at the back of my mind, a prowler on the outskirts of a campground.

Up front, in her purple hat, a purple dress with a big collar, a black pocketbook with an over-scored but lustrous patina, my mother looked straight ahead, playing now and then with the knob on the radio, trying to catch La Scala or New York out for a morning stroll.

She stared at nothing she might wish to have. Beside her, between her and my father in a car borrowed from my uncle, was the second pair of green herringbone knickers. Not knowing why they were there, I nevertheless felt my father’s hand in it. I wondered if there had been an argument’s movement along with the package, or behind it. Arguments I had heard, about dozens of things, then quiet discussions. Once it had been about the radio one could hardly hear. “Music has shaped me,” my mother once said, “from the very first touch to the very first clench of fist..” That’s when I knew she loved the brass of a band or an orchestra, not just the oompa of it, but the cold clear energy of horns clearing their throats with melodies one could only dream of.

“Toot the horn,” my mother said. “Now there’s Dolly Donovan.” Her wave was thorough and friendly. No message hung on its signal. “She’ll be at the beach. Maurice will bring her.” I did not deflect a message in that pronouncement: it came anyway. Maurice bid and Maurice done. Some laws, it seemed to say, were carved in stone. It could have said Life is more than being made to wear green knickers, but I wouldn’t let it.

In the rearview mirror I caught my father’s eye. “We might as well see what Forty Steps looks like today, and then come back to the beach.” The gears downshifted as he swung the corner down Boston Street in Lynn. We had come over the bridge spanning the Saugus River. In my nose the salt was alive, and pictures came with it. The gulls, by the hundreds, whipped a frenzy. Waves dashed on the rocks of Nahant, especially where Forty Steps climbed upward from the froth of water. The lobster boats, working yet, bobbed out on the Atlantic. Under sunlight majestic white sails of sloops and schooners and sailboats from Elysium, Islands of the Blessed and Marblehead darted like skaters before the wind. On that same wind brigantines and caravels and corsairs leaped from my reading, taking me away from green knickers and Nahant all the way back to Elysium and Ginnie Wilmot, the salt spray clean and sprightly and the dry vulture of taste yet in my throat from one glimpse of white underpants. Would that mystery, that sight, never go away?

The Graham, brush-painted green, lumpy for the tour of Nahant where Cabots and Rockerfellers and Lowells and Longfellow himself once sat their thrones, cruised along the Nahant Causeway. In the slight breeze you could feel the sun bleaching stones, sand, the inner harbor’s glistening rocks throwing off plates of light like the backs of hippopotami caught in a satin lacquer. People dressed for church and late dinners and nights on the town walked along the beach, their best clothes akin to badges of some sort.

“My, look at that white hat with the huge brim,” my mother said, pointing out a woman holding a man’s arm, three children at their heels. The girls were still giggling behind their hands, restrained while my father was driving, on their best behavior. Once on the beach they would become themselves. And I would set about de-suiting myself.

When we strolled over to the Forty Steps, the waves talking to us, the crowd of people on all approaches, I saw other boys in knickers, but no herringbone green tweed. No iron mother holding her whip and her pride in one hand. A few giggles and harrumps I heard, the way my grandfather could talk, making a point or two on his own. No question in my mind they were directed at my pants more than the whole suit. These people could also nod, shrug, gesture, make sense without words. I wondered what made me want to read in the first place, seeking all the adventure of new words, in this wide world of the body’s semaphore, so expressive, so legitimate.

I knew it wouldn’t take long, not at Nahant, not at the edge of the great ocean itself, not here where the Norsemen and Vikings and Irish sailors were flung to across the seas with Europe behind shoving them relentlessly. My parents, arm in arm, walked on pavement, the girls broke free with yells, I fled down to the rocks at the ocean’s edge. With an odd gesture, my mother lifted a hand to her face, as if surprise dwelt there to be touched, to be awakened, to be lifted for use. That’s when I knew she was the smartest person in the whole world. She had seen it all coming, had practically choreographed the whole thing, and my father thinking he was in control all that time. At last she had measured me against all other boys in knickers. And found something wanting.

Green is as green does, I could almost hear myself say as I slipped on the rocks heavy with seaweed still with salt, still with water, still with an unbecoming dye residing pimple-like, blister-like, pod-like, in its hairy masses. It was more like sitting down in puddled ink, that intentional trip, trying to be a loving son, finding it so difficult in green knickers, obeying more primal urges.

“What a mess you’ve made of yourself,” she said when she saw me, that hand still in surprise at her face. “Go up to the car and change your pants. I brought the other pair along,” so you could get rid of them also she seemed to say. My father had found the horizon to his liking, the thin line of boyhood and manhood merging out there on the edge of the world; no shrug of the shoulder, no sleight of hand, but a look outward that was as well a look backward. I saw it all.

I’m so shit lucky, I said to myself, loving them forever, and then some.

photo credit: liquidnight

Cavernous this room of culled eggshells,
edge to tidy edge, such clean shores
of solitude – cold, white chamber of birth
or death, I traverse in middle September.

Straighten a bath mat, end a dripping tap,
ghost-echo of footsteps and breath. Behind
the shower a whole-wall mirror – cool, clear
slab, hidden doorway in childhood to a world
of infinite song and summer. Transformed
now to looking-glass. Slow, patient reflector
of my graceless undressing; spooled
clothing, the eventual amazing lightness of air

on skin. I touch this bark scathed by familiar
longing, lined by the persistent wrench of hours,
pulled to open earth, and marked by secret
network of scars. Beyond the window,
past raw, pecan plumbing, the world is in autumn
and trees turn russet-yellow. I turn quietly like a leaf.

photo credit: Blyzz

Walking through the mall
On an ordinary Saturday,
I am awakened by the fragrance
Of an old man walking by.
Old Spice!
I would know it anywhere.
Fresh citrus, vanilla, cinnamon,
Like eating an orange and a gingerbread cookie
In one mouthful.

In a moment I am transported
To the kitchen of my youth
Watching Dad
Place chipped cereal bowls,
Cornflakes, and Cheerios
On the Formica table.
Dad, freshly shaven, ready for work,
Chipper and talkative in the morning,
So many years ago,
Yet as fresh as today.

Dad, were you wearing Old Spice
The day you pulled off the 605
And into the crowded parking lot
Of the nearby strip mall?
Were you wearing Old Spice
Sitting in your car
Alone
On the day your heart stopped?

I wish I could have been there.
To hold you,
To breathe you in.
More, I wish I knew whose mornings
Your presence is brightening now.

photo credit: tkamenick

I see you in the scrubbing bubbles
of toilet cleanser ads,
all the high hopes of a clean bathroom
and all the false advertising of the idea
of change.

photo credit: alertxitsxaimee

I saw this girl. It’s like she has no protection around her thin
face. Her face flies so low and frail beneath all our steps and in the
indifference of day’s transfer to night. It’s like she’s
enclosed in cold. It’s like she’s the inmate of an unknown and
starless equation. I should be like a bird or God and put my arms
through her blue halos and embrace them.

Equators imprison migrant birds like men. Padded melodies in the air
come flying out to the birds, to rescue them and shuttle them half way
to infinity…

God has little toilers, deformed by right, that lunge into the
horizon, where the world’s tall fellows fall fast through the earth
like trees

photo credit: lindztrom

I want to come back as a plant. A life above and a life below. No thinking, just finding. Water, food, light.

Maybe not a redwood; that’s a long, long life. A sunflower might be fun. One sturdy stalk zooming skyward, pushing fuzzy heart-shaped leaves, and then the grand finale: a giant yellow flower brimming with seeds. The ending an offering, a promise kept. Half a year on earth and not a single wasted moment.

My brother doesn’t drive anymore. When he rides with me I find myself driving more cautiously: hands on the wheel at ten and two, eyes scanning left and right. Every block or so he glances up, then jerks his head back down. His hands, jammed in his lap, rub against each other constantly. He is trying. A few months ago he couldn’t get into a car. Couldn’t even say the word.

An accident, that’s what most people think. No. Nothing happened―at least nothing we’re likely to understand. There he was driving to work, normal as you and me, when somewhere in his brain a pair of neurons fired and doubt was born. Had he hit someone?

He checked the mirrors, turned around, circled several times. Nothing in the road, but he couldn’t be sure. He may never be sure again.

Locomotion. That’s our problem. If we stayed in one place we could grow unerringly, drinking the rain, absorbing the sun, pulling in food with our feet.

With a brain you get options, illusions, second guesses, mistakes. One trifling incident slips into that gray jelly and just like that you’re hardwired for trouble. Everything is a matter of association and interpretation; the margin of error is incalculable. The fact that we can’t see the forest for the trees doesn’t make much sense, considering what we have to work with: The human brain is so disproportionately large that as infants we can’t hold our heads up.

The reason we need a brain that big? Language. Our crowning achievement. We are word wizards. Not only can we learn any number of words, we know how to string them together so that we may comfort or seduce, cajole or deride, inspire or coerce, inform or inflame.

Double talk. Slander. Fine print. Filibuster. Language may be getting the better of us.

Wendy Mack, my nearest neighbor on this lake, has given up the spoken word. No one around here has heard her speak since the day her daughter died, two years ago this June, of a rampant staph infection. She lost her mind, people said, snapped like a twig.

Aside from Wendy’s silence, she seems normal enough to me. Sometimes she brings me cuttings from her garden, sometimes a basket of tomatoes. I just nod and smile and take them from her, figuring that if she’s not talking, she’s not keen on listening either, at least not to words. Every so often I walk across the tall grass that separates our houses, and we sit in the wicker chairs on her porch and watch the setting sun turn the lake to copper, and listen to the crickets and leopard frogs, the occasional jumping trout, the buzz of a dragonfly. Lift away language and you hear all kinds of things.

Kris, my daughter, has no patience for Wendy. “What is she trying to prove?” she asked me last week. “What’s the point? It’s like she’s trying to punish someone.”

“Who knows?” I said. “Maybe she’s punishing God by not using the gifts she was given.” You’ll not believe this but Wendy used to be a motivational speaker. She lectured all over the country and wrote four books—two of them bestsellers―on how to rouse yourself. I have an autographed copy of her first book, YES YOU CAN!

Oddly enough, on the opposite shore of this lake, in a yellow house directly across from mine, lives a man who speaks volumes. His name is John Dalrymple and he used to teach Chaucer and Shakespeare at Northeastern University. I’ve always been impressed with his prodigious vocabulary, which he still happily exercises, though his sentences are now indecipherable. Several months ago John fell out of his hayloft and smacked the side of his head on a horse stall. When you ask him how his wife is doing, he is likely to say something along these lines: “Oh yes, the more the better. One day soon. Biscuits with blackberry jam.” I have no idea if he understands the words that flow out of him, but he seems remarkably at peace.

Plants communicate with exquisite subtlety. If a tree on the African plain is being ravaged by antelopes, it will send a chemical signal to its neighboring relatives. Instantaneously these other trees will begin manufacturing more tannins, just enough to render them toxic to the herbivores, who, in their own canny way, will seek an alternate food source.

In response to beetle attacks, a conifer will release wads of resin, embalming the marauders. If ground ivy loses its shade, it quickly gets to work toughening and thickening its leaves.

Whatever happens—floods, droughts, bugs, beasts―plants are always making corrections, becoming the best they can be.

“Why do you think you hit someone?” I asked my brother.

“I saw a shadow.”

“Maybe it was a road sign, or a passing bird.”

Eric shook his head firmly. “I felt a bump under the tires.”

“Probably just a pot hole or a frost-heave.”

“No. It didn’t feel like that. It was more than that.”

“But you went back and nothing was there, right?”

He didn’t answer, just glared at the floor, his mouth set in a grim line. I had no idea at that point just how often we would have this exchange, or how much time he would start to spend on these frenzied searches. That Eric never saw any bodies in the road did little to reassure him. Maybe, he reasoned, the victim had crawled away. Maybe another motorist had stopped and picked him up. Maybe an ambulance had already come. Was that a siren in the distance?

Dysperceptions are what they are called: sights and sounds the brain creates to confirm its greatest fears.

Field dodder cannot afford doubt. A leafless, thread-like vine, unable to make its own food, it snakes through garden beds, ambushing the innocent. With no energy to spare, dodder must be swift in finding a proximate host in adequate health. The wrong choice, a moment’s lag, and the vine perishes.

And yet dodder is next to impossible to kill. “Devil’s Hair,” gardeners call it. Yank out the thin yellow strands and the smallest remnants persist. And forget about saving the strangled host—a prize dahlia, say; the poor thing is already gone.

In college I had a roommate who was afraid of wind. Breezy days would turn her wide-eyed and quiet. Gusty days she took Valium and stayed indoors. Gale force winds would chase her under the covers, where she hugged her knees and moaned and cried. Naturally, I couldn’t use the fan I had brought from home and had to keep it out of sight.

There is a word for the fear of wind. Ancraophobia. In fact there are names for nearly any phobia you can think of: otters, garlic, knees. There is a fear of beautiful women. There is even a fear of sunshine.

What a comfort for the afflicted, to see their illness respected with a name. I’m glad that someone is keeping up the list.

Orchids! Over 25,000 species in the wild and each one fabulous simply because it manages to exist.

The quickest route to extinction is cross-pollination; to avoid this threat, each orchid variety seduces a particular insect, bird or butterfly, offering up whatever scents or shapes or colors the creature craves. An orchid pollinated by a hummingbird is likely to have red tubular flowers filled with nectar, while an orchid fertilized by carrion beetles comes in shades of brown and smells like rotting meat.

Imagine being that sure of yourself: Sweet or stinking, you claim the right to be here.

We spook too easily, a throwback to the time we were prey. Nowadays this hair-trigger alarm is more trouble than benefit, but there it still is anyway, lodged deep within the brain, steeped in ancestral memories.

The truth is, our noggins are still evolving. We can’t help it that we see a stick and think: snake! 3000 years ago the brain’s hemispheres were not even integrated: one side “spoke” and the other side listened. Which goes a long way toward explaining all those oracles and talking gods.

My brother began calling hospitals to ask if any accident victims had been admitted. When he started phoning the highway patrol, several times a day, he wound up in a rehab center outside of Boston where he stayed three months in a sage green room, eating nutritious meals and learning ways to calm himself. Because his fears began behind the wheel, that’s where they launched his lessons. “Car,” he wrote, over and over, filling pages of a legal pad; then he had to say the word; then he had to look at pictures of cars; then he had to carry the pictures in his pocket, and so on. Believe me, it’s been a long journey to the passenger seat; I couldn’t be more proud of him.

Bull’s Horn Acacia is a tree in South America that sports giant hollow curving thorns. Attracted to these formidable thorns are stinging ants who drill their way inside and take up residence. If a branch is disturbed—typically by destructive leaf-cutter ants―the stinging ants will race out of the thorns and sting the attackers to death. In return for this service, the tree provides its defenders with shelter, nectar and, as if not forgetting anything, tiny protoplasm-rich nodules that ensure complete nutrition.

If we ever saw the big picture; if our minds could accommodate, even for a split second, the terrible balance of life on this planet, we would surely be frightened out of our wits.

No way are we ready for custodianship.

So, plants. No brain, no fear. Just the urge to grow. The right to be here. I’d love to come back as a lilac, but a stinking orchid would be okay too.

“Survival Skills” first appeared in The Foundling Review in June 2010 and Cezanne’s Carrot in September 2010.

photo credit: isthisREALLYmylife?

In the Deep South,
dwindling rural congregations
no longer have regular worship services,
but mourners still gather for funerals.
They come to pay their last respects,
to say goodbye to relative or friend.
After the burial,
they visit under ancients oaks,
speaking in muted voices,
whispering like the leaves above.
They hug, shake hands, pat each other,
clinging, reluctant to take their leave.
Letting go is no easy doing.

photo credit: daveeza 

There is something deep

embedded within the earth’s bass

aligned in the distance of time.

Drenched within the raise of the sun.

trumpeted within the roar of thunderous clouds.

I hear its voice at the dinner table of a family who just lost their mother, their father who just lost his job and still has 5 mouths to feed.

See it’s dance, in the outstretched hands of a street beggar, saving up for his next bottle, “HAPPY NEW YEAR, MERRY CHRISTMAS, HAPPY THANKSGIVING, HAPPY BIRTHDAY to me, he sings in drunken song, as his own family doesn’t even know he exists anymore.

I feel it in the FREENESS of the addict, who was found yesterday in an alley- dead from an overdose. No one will ever know her last words…but I can guess her last thought to be  ”I just wanna be loved.”

I understand it through the glowing faces of first graders, now humbugs of medicine, law, politics and religion, standing on top of the San Francisco bridge, flying to a death of “What have I become?”

Life, Up or down, over or beneath…tangled or unraveled, Life is what an illusion could never be- REAL.

photo credit: cristine crapanzano

Trust me if I say
the sun never sets
the earth merely turns away.

There is no argument
between the sun and the earth.
The earth simply turns away
as a dark woman turns her head,
her hair drawing a shadow across her face,
her face in shadow as she turns away.

Trust me, while I write these lines
have turned, the earth has turned,
you have turned.
Turn back to me.

photo credit: Jim Nix / Nomadic Pursuits

Harmonious morning, you’re trying too hard. Your soft lights are so persistent. Your budding children fall right into place. You have my time, but I’ll withdraw my mind just before noon hits.

Harmonious morning, I’m here for the words. I ask that you block all other influences; I ask that you keep the train in motion. I’ll unload with alacrity, a smile on my face. Only the receipt worries me. Ink is a terrible lure.

Harmonious morning, not the first of your kind, I see you looking at others. Go to them if you wish. I’d rather die than keep you in shackles. I want you here of your own free will.

Harmonious morning, you aren’t irreplaceable, though you may feel otherwise. I know your family, and I love the midnight. You’ll be mourning soon. Darkness was always more loyal.