On the Significance of Ash

Most people who “read me” (really, I laugh at the arrogance of that notion) know that I grew up on a farm, and that I lived and worked there until I was thirty-one years of age, when, to preserve our health, my wife and kids and I moved to Oregon. They also know, if they aren’t completely bored and are paying any attention at all, that I do not have what is in common parlance called “a college education.” Truth be told, I was at a university just long enough to get drunk and married, neither of which I regret, and which are, in fact, two of the best things I’ve ever done. While the drunkenness has taken on other comically exaggerated forms, the marriage, now in its thirty-seventh year, continues to blossom, thrive, and grow. Soon after our wedding, my father’s mother wisely referred to us as “two children playing.” She’d be glad, I’m sure, to know that her description is still apropos.

A few months before, although he would never have put it in those terms, my father was delighted at the prospect of our future life together. When my grandparents were married, his father was twenty-one. When my parents were married, my father was twenty. When my wife and I were married, I was nineteen. But the fact is, I was married from the time I was fifteen or so — life just hadn’t led me to the right girl yet. I offer this revelatory tidbit as one who has elsewhere entertained the possibility that his writing life began at birth, or even before. Of who I can be sure; how, and where, and when, remain a mystery.

It hurt my father to see us go. Bodily, by doing too much of the work he loved, he had been crumbling for years. He understood the logic of our departure, which was first and foremost for the benefit of his grandchildren. But without my hands and help there was no longer purpose to his farm, and without that purpose, and having to endure a steadily increasing amount of physical pain, purpose quietly eroded within himself.

I can’t count the times he has appeared to me in dreams, or that I’ve wondered if our continued presence would have helped him stay alive. And I still dream of the farm, with its big and small jobs needing to be done. Sometimes I find I’m late and have fallen far behind: how will I prune twenty acres of vines now that spring has arrived? There’s water in the ditch; polliwogs and crawdads teem along the edge. A buzzard drifts; a bullfrog calls.

The other day, I shared a dream in which I’d found him spreading ashes in the vineyard. With infinite patience, he was placing a shovelful at the base of each vine. Ash. Why ash? In my book, Winter Poems, there’s a page-long poem called “A Thimbleful of Ash” that I wrote more than six years ago on Christmas Eve. It ends thus:

The vineyards are asleep.

The neighbors have gone to bed.

In the far distance, a baby cries.

I still remember what he said:

Long lives, a thimbleful of ash.

And so, again, I say I don’t know how, or where, or when. But of who I can be sure. He is a child. He is a man. He is everyone who is, and who has ever been. And I must sleep if I am to remember him.

Between the Lines

This blog’s moody background image only hints at the importance of books in my life. The room has changed a lot since the photograph was taken. Each week, another volume or two is added, and often as many as three or four, almost all of them old, some many decades, others a century or two. I derive great pleasure from handling and perusing them, otherwise I wouldn’t bring them home.

All too often, those of us who call ourselves writers speak of the books we read as if their very mention were an indication of our learning, depth, and worth. I speak about them because I love them, knowing full well that even after they are read, I will be at a loss to explain the profound or mean effect they have had on me, my understanding, and my thinking.

I drift with the current. Some facts cling to to me like moss. Most, though, glide off and are lost. What I retain, most of all, is a sense of the times and of human thought and behavior. One day, I’m loaded into a cart and hauled through the streets leading to the guillotine; another, I live in Montaigne’s tower, or write Petrarch’s poems to Laura. Never, though, do I kill anyone in a duel. I see that as a good sign.

What’s to be gained by keeping my nose in the 1892 Peale edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica or in Boswell’s Tour to the Hebrides? Why, nothing — nothing at all. If I’m to limit myself to terms of loss and gain, then I’ll be obliged to believe a great many foolish things — even, perhaps, that the past is the past, and the present is mine to control.

I am well

Quiet, that’s all. Reading, mostly, and deep in thought.

This morning, shortly after one o’clock, I awakened from a dream. By the south road, I’d returned on foot to my childhood home. I found my father spreading ashes in the vineyard, one shovelful at a time. He looked at me and smiled. It was his work now, and his alone.

Thank you for your notes.

So I Hear

A photo from the library of Bent Sørensen,

friend and blogger extraordinaire.

Visitors

The front door of my childhood home — someone has left it standing open. Two cats, the small reclusive calico that lives with us now and a soft-white stranger with brownish face and paws, are inside playing. When they see me, they dash out. I follow them and close the door. To the east beyond the yard, a morning view of the High Sierra. I think of a painter in love with blue, long since buried in the snow. I remember what a lover knows and is so eager to begin — the taste of one bright apple, and footprints where no one else has been.

Darwin

While reading early this morning, a small leaf fell from between Pages 222 and 223 of my old book into my lap. It was very dry, but not brittle, without the slightest tear anywhere in its delicate map of veins, or damage to the several dozen points by which its edges were defined. After I’d finished those pages, which were about Charles Darwin, I returned the leaf to its place, not knowing who had put it there, or in what state of mind, and having no idea as to its future. And then, before I continued on, there came upon me a memory of graves I’ve seen of pioneers, their names and dates a lichen stain or mossy smudge, as if the elements in their persistent art had replaced one kind of writing with another. To which I answer now with the miracle that is my hand.

Testament

In the eyes of the law, I own so very little that my will, if it were written, could fit on the blank side of a business card and still leave room for a drawing. In truth, I own nothing, nothing at all. What “belongs” to me is only temporarily in my care. Love, like a fledgling poised for freedom in my hands, is all I have, and all I really have to give.

Canvas 285

“Canvas 285”

January 26, 2012

[for the best view, right-click and open in new tab or window]

You Are Here†

The geography of reason,

related in a dream:

You are here,

wherever here might be,

And what you seem

is what I mean.

† an impromptu response to Robert Willson’s inspiring renewal theory

On French Pronunciation

Being unable to correctly read and pronounce all but a few French words has bothered me only little until now. Now I not only want to learn to read comfortably in that language, I feel it’s an absolute necessity, and an embarrassment that I’ve put it off for so long. Luckily, my copy of Heath’s French and English Dictionary (1903) has a guide to pronunciation. That will be a good place to begin, as well as Chapter 13 of George Moore’s Avowals†, which is a lecture of his presented in French. As I told my son this morning in a brief email exchange, how can I skip that chapter and still say I’ve read the book? Next and simultaneously on my list: Latin.

† a book mentioned here yesterday

Reading

Think of me not as hungry,

or eager to possess,

but as a statue

in your path,

blessed

by silent snowfall.

Spring is how I turn the page.

What I know

is the moss that grows

where you stand, and where we meet.

Currently Reading†

Avowals

Little Journeys

Ulysses (Armenian translation)

A Tour to the Hebrides

† among others

Rain

We could abandon buildings for streets and fields,

look up, open our palms, and let our minds be cleansed;

but that’s too simple, and so we wage war instead.

Snowflakes

Think of them, for a moment,

as fingertips of all the world’s dead,

seeking love in faces, hands,

and tongues.

Softly as their peace is borne,

we are among them.

In the interim

While I chimed like a grandfather clock, my grandson† watched the movement of my tongue as if it were a pendulum. To his rapt attention, hour upon hour I tolled, until I became a horse’s hooves on cobblestone, and the mist arose, and Dickens was at the door. “I’m here!” the dear scribe cried, as if he’d joined us many times before. And, as he eyed us with a pleasure I clearly understood, the movers came and carted me away. “He was a good old clock,” their foreman said, “back in his day. I wonder what we’ll get for him?” The truck roared off. My grandson, a grown man in the interim, looked after us and waved. Or so I imagined in the cold and in the dark.

† our second, nine months old

Blessing

Fifty-six come May

and still a child’s throw

of the perfect stone

into an icy

river.