Monday Journal 5.5
Lucifer, McMansions, Transcendentalism, Nevada Falls
3.21 My wife and I drag ourselves from bed, sky like lungs drowned in phlegm from flu, last day before the break named for spring begins. Will warmth break now, on this our joyless week at storm season’s tail end, sun still sluggish in our creaturely ways? Next new moon we’ll look back and see a great meaning. Today we see a bitter cup. 3.24 Subsisting on simple fare we work and pray as fish swim, aplomb in sea. After awhile our bodies grow lithe, united with life on land, mediated by sun and rain. The sky speaks— we understand, and light seems to point all directions, til everywhere is up. The forecast is always good. Even cold nights squeeze bones toward praise, and morning warmth swells the earth with joy. 3.26 Micah, you brittle boy of Transcendentalism, broken-winged and shut inside dark halls, do you know I feel guilty by my father’s building a thousand McMansions in Florida on packed-down dunes, scraped, hosed, pinned with toothpicks, mile upon mile cratering the economy, ready to blow over in the first category four? Ugliness at such scale breaks the heart. I counter with mysticism, injecting it as fast I can into youth, sowing seeds of dreams we can eat, forging foundations to build on. I see your deflated eyes, ticker-taped to death, and I beg you—come out and taste sun! Your buttoned shirt can stay buttoned if you want, your tail tucked or untucked as you like. We’ll circle the city, pointing out the gnarliest trees. 3.27 I suck down coffee, five miles of sidewalk under my feet, happy to have braved March drizzle. Corvallis has a groove to it—leopards have slept here for forty years, a pantless sleep, and I’ve been visiting for twenty. Eight years ago I moved to this vale, and now there’s everywhere plants, square yards of pothos and succulents galore, and in mere hours I’ll turn on the season’s first game. You know it’s good when baseball’s on! I’ll read a dozen books and send this little letter to you, kissing it, then kissing my hands, sand on the shore shifting again, grain grinding upon hapless grain. To the Evil One O great clueless Enemy of the world, you missed it! It’s paradise here most days, but you keep falling so far you’ll never come back, and the more we laugh the more you fall. I wonder, do you wish this time to join us, broken at long last by our sweet, cunning love? Cherry blossoms crash late March by thousands, surfing the highs of fifty, smiling at wives on wispy strolls, their tactile hands revived for joy. It’s Thursday of Spring Break and I'm bursting! The ceilings have become floors, the sky has become sea. The sparrows pause, dim with memory. The sun takes my wings and presses them in the hot and cool air to form a tiny spell. 3.28 Morning after supernova I look out— blossoms pink and white, and three more kinds of green. How gentle mornings are on my street. My goddaughter sends a photo of a bristle-cone pine atop Nevada Falls, says it looks like me, toughing it out amid shale and stone, sipping clouds, sage bent and lonely, praying for home.