![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/vu-wordpress-0\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2020\/03\/19123110\/TFD1.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Of all the steps I have taken, these remain with light, or white, that is, though at times a fierce green is permitted in my memory of where my childhood lawn died and the tall dry reeds crackled, all the way down to a creek. Now memory places that creek in black and white and I\u2019m under the country road bridge where fishermen filled buckets of crappie and sunfish and teens smoked menthols in the arch where the cement beams planked the rumbling road above; to be beneath, to sleek, to reel. Many times I followed the shores of the creek to where it either trickled into tinctures of a disappearance, or back the other way, to where it flowed wide into a lake and under a bridge again (a highway, always) to another slinking creek then through old marshes and we\u2019d pass the hissing geese and stop to tie our canoe up near the water and we walked past what we were told was an Indian burial ground to a slope and, at the top, where the state built a rest area, we\u2019d buy candy bars from the vending machine. Each action a part of the colonial residuum.<\/span><\/p>\n Other green things line up in my mind: the belly of a catfish, caked in algae before it grunts jaundice and is thwacked onto the bridge by boys grown bored in June. Then too the arms of the old snapping turtle, camouflaged until its neck is snagged by hooks and unpeeled for stew. So too the first puff of dope (a nug) in a joint rolled with notebook paper and coffee beans. Green glass of sparkling water and green glass of the attic window and green grass in a chance of blue July and green sludge behind the hidden fort and midnight green storms of August and when the creek had to be drained, how green our lost treasures became against the rust and the thousands of drowned fish sounding out their blurts like muffled tin cans, sinking, how green.<\/span><\/p>\n At first, I sunk my small legs in a swamp and years later I took the steps down to where I knew everybody loses their minds. Everything can be found in a dance. To go underground until you can round yourself out with strangers. To arise from that. This is grass. This is why cities can city. Can sit. I have seen grass grow out of the saddest room, five bodies bruised by nostalgia for the 1990\u2019s. When the bar closes down, the blades of grass whistle our throats home and heap us. To wake up near that fire escape, that siren, and get through a day\u2014much like a creek giving up right before it lakes.<\/span><\/p>\n He blades strangers, the underground of legs ***<\/span><\/p>\n When we pose to be taken in by a lens, what are we composed of? What must we dispose of in order to be ordered? I will always recall the first time I saw a child run to a camera to see how they had (or would be) seen. In our time, it was either the patience of development or just forgetfulness. To be captured and saved for later, gone still or negative. My first memory of light comes from snow opening itself through a gray hole of noon. And then the hole in the ice that I could not see while ice skating, the hole that consumed me the lengthiest smallness of time. Sometimes I wake up in the echo of that submergence. Other times I am carried in a layered halo toward an imperfect hour.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The moose swam right in front of our canoe with its calf on its back. When it arrived at the shore, it dropped off the calf, got back in the water, and swam toward us. My father told us to paddle faster and I looked back to where the moose stood tall, antlers jutting out and up, and I\u2019ve always wanted to be invited back to that emergence. Now our son is terrified of moose but he has only seen them in books. When I tell him that a moose will not be able to duck its head and get inside our house, he starts picturing moose bending and coming inside our home. I tell him they don\u2019t live in these parts. \u201cNo, daddy,\u201d he says, \u201cthe moose is here.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Lately, when our son wakes up from a nap, he is inconsolable. The dregs. Other times he wakes up in the middle of a question\u2014Where\u2019d green go? \u2014and I know I\u2019m not alone in living the best of my narratives in dreams. Today I ran with snowflakes in the woods. I followed what looked to be a trail made by man but soon found myself inside the deer-slip. With a hood on, I could not follow the wind but my calves felt part of the cold breeze. The trail thinned and I jumped over a felled tree. When the trail opened into a park, I ran toward a long dash of ice and slid across the edge of the barely frozen pond.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The sound of himself: ***<\/span><\/p>\n When you become close enough to your family to speak of the taut, befallen truths\u2014or when families only seem true because of the taut and befallen\u2014there is nothing richer than lineage. Suddenly the photograph of a grandfather\u2019s buttons or a grandmother\u2019s bob means you\u2019ve come from all the minutes of your dead. Of my progenitors, I am somewhere between their inherited guilt and their idiosyncratic Americanism. When I lift a book, for instance, I am often my grandmother\u2014a daughter of the American Revolution\u2014in the middle of a cigarette at the tail end of a romance novel near the door of our four-season porch. Other times I am my grandfather\u2019s laugh, itself a forgiveness for what was lost in growing up without the most essential truths.<\/span><\/p>\n Of the things that surprise us, so few of them are internal or local. We come home with news and gossip as suddenness and infancy, but rarely are we turned over by what is not, at least in what we know is. I carry so many cartridges of myself that I feel even my wife does not see or know just who I am. Just who I am. Do these thus disappear, get expelled elsewhere, die in the sweat of a run? It is not that I keep sides of myself away, only that in flashes of who I am, I know too that I am not. Like being in a crowd and suddenly a microphone sneaks into your hand and you are asked by the grandstand to answer the question, what\u2019s your story?<\/span><\/p>\n Sometimes we see ourselves being seen\u2014in windows, mirrors, puddles\u2014and there is no otherness to save us. We remain diffidently ourselves, too much us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n One of the joys of living near water is that you can often feel yourself being taken away, even if briefly, from all the stillness. Or taken, swiftly, into away.<\/span><\/p>\n When there is snow in the morning and you have not expected it, it is less a trick, more of an offering. All this loose death, this blanketing brevity. I want to get so lost in it that all I will be able to do is be found, then split back up, directly into green, and be.<\/span><\/p>\n I have spent the day with our son. I take him to a gingerbread gallery at the Eerie Canal Museum and then we stand inside a model ship. He says hello to the mannequin woman and man in the front hull, mock-ups of travelers in sleeping quarters. Afterwards, we walk to a giant Christmas tree and he says, \u201cHey, there\u2019s baby Jeeze,\u201d while pointing at the nativity scene. We stop to get a plain bagel with cream cheese. Then onto a vitamin store to get some DHEA. Now I see how quickly our son is slung through history, holiday, hearth, and hope. As we build a barn fence with magnet tiles by the fire, I can tell he has unknown questions festering. He smiles at me before launching a block at the woodstove.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Before the fence, ***<\/span><\/p>\n The fire is popping and splattering. We have gone through so many doors but rarely have we stood within them and kept check on all the exits and entrances of time. This is why city streets remain so fashionable. They are full of leavings, erased by goings and comings. So too the holding forth of oneself in the wind, that it will actually care enough to allow us a way out of it.<\/span><\/p>\n How do we measure the size of what we need? Mostly, and as need dots an absence, we are content with portions small enough to swallow. Mouth and eye. I dispense with such slant. I abused words for so long because my body was small. As my body grew, definitions changed.<\/span><\/p>\n Look at the end of us when the streets change access. I put more logs on, put our son to bed, and wake up in another year. I promise not to pretend anything that isn\u2019t okay is. I will not announce the pain and frailty either, no, but I will not deny words if summoned by inquiry. We are meant to mean much more than meaning.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n He means to announce ***<\/p>\n Mirrors must face themselves. The year has turned and the list of things I have done today leads me to believe to believe. I take the bulbs down from the fence and watch frost peel the wooden slats into a darker trance of guarding. The wind draws its dress up and throws its bones out. My wife sees it as 2018 holding on, or 2020 starting strong\u2014so many reasons to see the signs in things, the sense in hinge. Branches are all over the street.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n All that the chairs are doing to hold our weight. That we\u2019ve sat in so many that they could be remanufactured as history. I look at another photograph with no people in it and yet that is all that I can sense, that someone has been here, even if they\u2019re never coming back.<\/span><\/p>\n He prepares two ***<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m watching a video of the late poets James Wright and Louis Simpson read and discuss their poems with James Dickey, the moderator. I am blown away with how soul-scraped and weighty their work is. It seems they wrote with a sincerity that has been sucked out by purity. However, I also recognize that, and in speaking about America, they too were thinking of the days between themselves and Walt Whitman. We must renew ourselves on the daily.<\/span><\/p>\n ***<\/span><\/p>\n I dream about not getting up early, as I\u2019ve planned to do. Silent repercussions, like dark clouds, scuttle. I couldn\u2019t seem to clarify what meant more to me\u2014getting up and writing and running, or sleeping longer. The dreams woke me so many times that I arose in the dark to do as planned.<\/span><\/p>\n There are two anagrams I have forever found myself scrambling back to: 1) listen=silent; 2) routine=in route. Something about the silence of listening means that listening has to happen in silence in order for it to fully succeed. But whose silence?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The firewood separates into hundreds of charred blocks when it burns, so that even as the log is leaning, its old form crackling into white squares, it is reversing something, showing us that it comes from its parts. I think of high-rise buildings twinkling with distress, and that they all shade the same entrance. Bodies just leave in their own cursive pain.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The timing of ***<\/span><\/p>\n The photograph. We can follow it back at times, where our hands need to go. The reliability of the relatable. If I begin to speak about my son, for instance, and how he builds a castle again, then I have in my audience sons and fathers and mothers and daughters. If I tell you how he copied me when I got home from work by kissing my wife and then me and saying, \u201chi bears,\u201d then I have in my audience bears, embracers, and love.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We see ourselves passed up by the past. As in, where is the mention of what we come from? What I enjoy the most about the film is twofold: 1) the main character simply lives (not lives simply, of course). She shows no signs of working any place forward or backward. She lives. 2) I was not ready to cry but could not help doing so when everyone embraces on the beach.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Upstairs, our son is screaming, fighting off his nap. I throw the Christmas tree on the street. I know he will ask me what I\u2019ve done with it. As a parent, it is easier to put in more care in one month for your child than you have placed into your whole life for yourself. Having run early every morning this year, my back aches and research says this means my core or glutes are weak. I watch our son work hard to climb the stairs. I rest my hand on his lower back and he bounds ahead.<\/span><\/p>\n The pine needles from the tree are everywhere. In our hair and books and socks. The Norwegian Maple tree outside has streaks of thick moss embossed on it like decals. I see the young pastor out walking again. He looks forlorn, almost thrown into the forlorn. I often wish to speak with him but I fear the conversation will always end up being about faith, and I\u2019ll feel as though I\u2019m making up for something invisible.<\/span><\/p>\n Away is a kind of ***<\/span><\/p>\n The sun, pink in its rise out of morning, pinking. Now it is blown orange before retreating behind clouds. Somewhere, the last clink of night allows this day to begin and I think of where light is stored when I wake in the darker hours, fighting my steps. In winter, the beaches and lakes are mostly left alone. Even the ocean seems on hiatus. We can oversee the silence from docks and piers but perhaps the best assumption is that a quieting occurs. Sometimes a body finds a floral pattern to sit and stand inside and goes all day without having to feel like a body making sense inside scenes, aside the seen. Clothing as capsule. Not disguise, but the container vessel of and for surviving what breathing makes of us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I walk The Trail. It is cheek-flush cold. It is an old railway path that cuts alongside a creek. Yellow poplars and tall grey trees. I launch a large branch toward the ice. It punctures then sticks and remains standing, my part-time flag. The rocks gurgle and beep atop the surface of water, marsh, and stream. I hold a chestnut. The drumlins and small country barns sprawl out like knuckles and cartilage.<\/span><\/p>\n The knuckled surface ***<\/span><\/p>\n I return from work, put ski goggles on, and run in the darkness around a pond. There is one other runner whom I pass\u2014we are going in opposite directions\u2014twice, this double looping. Snow has just fallen and so there is very little sound at my feet. Each step is like a quiet pat on the back. I feel alive and released, but also parceled out into a quickly lit frame of time, slotted into the mileage\u2014 sent, part by part.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I put our son to bed and I can hear him constructing a narrative about farm animals and daycare. He made me sing a song before I put his blankets on\u2014 \u201cour song, Daddy,\u201d\u2014and then he told me to keep the door open. Now he is taking turns spitting and singing. \u201cYou have to be quiet,\u201d he says, \u201cno I can talk,\u201d he responds to himself, \u201cI can talk.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I have seen this picture before, the one in my mind or is it the woman in front of me? The fire keeps on with the teapot above the stove, groveling for clarity. Snow falls\u2014perhaps a foot since last night\u2014like decisions from the end of a day. I\u2019ve been reading a lecture by Donald Hall and he\u2019s talking about the difference between size and scale in poetry. Now I get it; I\u2019ve said very little, but I know the wind in the chimney is more than a small day dying.<\/span><\/p>\n My wife and I have been trying to conceive a second child and we are failing. Fail is not the right word. Some element, some aspect of what is so naturally easy for others, is not working for us right now. I am not frustrated but I am pressed up against something. My fates. I have trouble seeing that just because science has evolved, we have to try things that, years ago, would not have been possible. There is size and scale.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Our house sits close to the street we live off. On nights like this, where I sit inside by the window and fire, the night walkers slip along our fence, not twenty yards away, like ghostly anthems.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n A yard is where ***<\/span><\/p>\n Today is my father\u2019s birthday. He turned 71, the same age his father (my grandfather) was when he had his second stroke and died. My grandfather is ancient in my mind, and seems to have been older than I ever thought he was. I remember his stack of <\/span>National Geographic<\/span><\/i>, riding on the back of his four-wheeler, and collecting golf balls with him in the woods. One summer I wore a t-shirt from the clothing company, <\/span>Gotcha<\/span><\/i>. My grandfather would reach out and grab me and say, gotcha! Sometimes I dream of him pulling me into death. <\/span>Gotcha.<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n At the grocery store, I run into the recently ordained Lutheran chaplain. I wish to tell him I contain faiths. Our son yells the butcher\u2019s name when he sees him, tells him about his Christmas kitchen. For five straight aisles, our son stays atop my shoulders, snug in his heavy poncho, which cloaks me for much of the shopping. I feel taller without having to be, and in knowing my son\u2019s eyes are above mine, seeing out the things I cannot, restores in me the thanks I have for my own father, and for whenever he carried me before I even knew what it meant.<\/span><\/p>\n Even the father ***<\/span><\/p>\n I drink a beer in the shower while our son plays on the shower floor with his toys. He fills a boat and tells me he is making me cinnamon kombucha. I take my time, hoping that my wife could use the space to read one of her books on myth and Celtic history. Maybe, in this time, she can divine enough to keep us all at bay.<\/span><\/p>\n I take our son to the Museum of Science and Technology. I climb a jungle fortress with him and he is terrified when a vacuous toy tube launches air out, mocking something interstellar. When he cries, I hold him atop a rolling cushion slide made of primary colors. We leave by flying down the spectrum, just below the spiraling galaxy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Sometimes a face will wear a look that something that just happened should matter more; other times, less. I\u2019ve been trying my face at the place where things matter just as they\u2019ve been received, and then keeping it on. All the cranes have quit sulking for the day and hang over the emptied air.<\/span><\/p>\n ***<\/span><\/p>\n Reflections everywhere. Peripheral impulse. As I close in on doors in winter light, and when I feel my image trammeled by passing cars, I know right away that we are equally taken in and away by day. I walk through the door and the building holds me, long after I leave it.<\/span><\/p>\n In the middle of ruminating about a war we do not know about, the writer brings us into our thoughts so that we are processing them alongside her. Then we can never catch up and the sentences win us over. Death becomes the life of not caring what\u2019s next.<\/span><\/p>\n He\u2019s beginning to ***<\/span><\/p>\n There are too many strangers I feel I know better than I know my friends. Myself. I blame photographs for this.<\/span><\/p>\n ***<\/span><\/p>\n Today all the <\/span>studium<\/span><\/i> is going <\/span>punctum<\/span><\/i>. My wife has minor surgery at the exact moment I sit in front of fifteen students discussing the relevance of <\/span>punctum<\/span><\/i> in their writing: That a wound\u2014even in just a detail\u2014will save the whole order of the seeming and see for it style, carve the feeling back to cores. It is happenstance, to get down to the surgery room having just espoused Roland Barthes. The class speaks about Philip Lopate\u2019s distinction between technique and psychology, that quite often what is in our way is not the unsharpened tools of a craft, but a reluctance to be exposed. I want students to see how their own quirks align them with higher registers of being. I ask them to write about where they are from (physically, yes, but philosophically, too), in one sentence; then how many siblings they have; then one word for a mother and father figure; then to finish the sentence, \u201cone strange thing my family might tell you about me is that __________\u201d and I walk right out of the room and down to the hospital.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n ***<\/span><\/p>\n In the planetarium, our son sits on my lap asking where the lights have gone. When the stars come, he asks where the man went, the man running the stars. I tell him about Orion, and then Orion as a butterfly, via the Navajo. He sits still for the whole show, amazed that the lion in the sky is named Leo. When we leave he says, \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong with Orion\u2019s belly?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span>stand, muffled in nightly green. Who knows
\n<\/span>the first hook bores the mind? The private
\n<\/span>vending slope passes a creek to disappear
\n<\/span>above cement. The road circles green with light.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span>pond opening ice. The cold
\n<\/span>slips him, middles the waking.
\n<\/span>Geography rooms a house,
\n<\/span>ducks into emergency stance.
\n<\/span>Water, right in front of time,
\n<\/span>echoing through itself. The
\n<\/span>negative develops order
\n<\/span>then disposes it.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span>history stores
\n<\/span>the scenes in sleep.
\n<\/span>A model gallery,
\n<\/span>death, this
\n<\/span>morning of
\n<\/span>remaining at
\n<\/span>windows.<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/vu-wordpress-0\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2020\/03\/19123108\/TFD3.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n<\/span>another change. The body
\n<\/span>is enough absence to walk
\n<\/span>in new wind and leave behind
\n<\/span>time. So many laughs to return.
\n<\/span>Belief within the
\n<\/span>breaking secrets.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span>potatoes, toast,
\n<\/span>and an apple.
\n<\/span>Someone historicizes
\n<\/span>the weight of
\n<\/span>the telling. That
\n<\/span>theory signifies
\n<\/span>nearness to
\n<\/span>preparation. Ahead
\n<\/span>feels miles away.
\n<\/span>The street holds
\n<\/span>guard, wood
\n<\/span>right in its face.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span>sunrise is entrance.
\n<\/span>Buildings lean
\n<\/span>quietly at being.
\n<\/span>He gets silent:
\n<\/span>listen. He finds
\n<\/span>himself\u2014sleeping
\n<\/span>repercussion,
\n<\/span>hereditary dip
\n<\/span>of the worn tongue.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span>faith. Streaks of need,
\n<\/span>stairs aching all year
\n<\/span>for care. He\u2019s done
\n<\/span>the tree struggle,
\n<\/span>the jag of embrace.
\n<\/span>No signs enjoy the past.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/vu-wordpress-0\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2020\/03\/19123108\/TFD4.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
\n<\/span>ices over. The launch
\n<\/span>is path being hour is
\n<\/span>returning. Breathing,
\n<\/span>he\u2019s inside an
\n<\/span>assumed alone.
\n<\/span>Stored to allow
\n<\/span>the before some
\n<\/span>coming after.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/vu-wordpress-0\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2020\/03\/19123108\/TFD15.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
\n<\/span>science releases
\n<\/span>family. Possibility
\n<\/span>is pressed naturally
\n<\/span>into failure. The
\n<\/span>chimney scales
\n<\/span>the night, clears
\n<\/span>outside the picture.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span>cannot know
\n<\/span>the son\u2019s heavy
\n<\/span>stay on seeing
\n<\/span>into being. Animals
\n<\/span>castle the heart,
\n<\/span>reason staves off
\n<\/span>death. He
\n<\/span>accompanies the woods
\n<\/span>into a stack
\n<\/span>where the mind
\n<\/span>turns the sameness
\n<\/span>back and stars anew.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/vu-wordpress-0\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2020\/03\/19123108\/TFD8.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
\n<\/span>dance, to hear
\n<\/span>where knowing
\n<\/span>wins over thought.
\n<\/span>About war, the
\n<\/span>door passes
\n<\/span>on impulse, aims
\n<\/span>to close with fact.
\n<\/span>The omission
\n<\/span>is known to
\n<\/span>sense something.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n