EnginesThe hammer of summer has fallen again: it is hot. The mornings are misty, the early sun promising a pouring of light as it fights upwards to take station. The afternoons are the calm scurry from shade to shade. Twilight is close, languid, and the evening is the long drawn wait for the breezes to cut the air down again. It is making me slow. The tomatoes are nearly shaking with joy.
This morning on the way to the Library, I stopped a bit to watch time trials. We have something of a race here, vintage cars singing their teeth into a twisting course of closed road that climbs around the local park. I sat on the small hill overlooking the fast turn at the end of the bridge, comfortable against the slope and grateful for the shade. People came to watch; there were photographers, unhappy in that the could not shoot images from the end of the bridge (a dangerous place for them), young men and women on bicycles, wondering how to reroute their day, old men with faces lit bright as something growled by.
They have voices, these cars. They clatter and howl, some of them, a brass of fast explosions. Others are smooth even after all these years, take to the business of pushing through corners with strong strides. From the hill, they would announce their presence first on the far side of the park, growling dreamlike in the distance. In short order they came around the turn, weight shifted outside, sound and sight snapping into focus for a brief moment before they were off again, gone again, out of sight and lost in the trees while we waited for the next one.
After the Library but before the markets, I managed to get tangled in an ethnic festival completely by accident; another road closure, but this time done by bright blue tents from sidewalk to pavement. Long tables, music, food: sausages, pierogi, cabbages, good things to drink. The route remapped, to market then, and this time into the jaws of another festival, set up on a small piece of cross street that serves as home to the notion that putting fries in a sandwich isn't such a bad notion after all.
Getting home was something of a trick. I can't talk about it, of course; apologies.
A friend of mine turned to me, and said: "so, how does the air get into green peppers?" I know the answer to that one. A different friend on a different occasion in these recent days also turned to me, and said: "y'know what's good? Baklava, but with hazelnuts. That's pretty good." And so it is that I have phyllo in the freezer, honey in the cupboard, and a sack worth of filberts on the kitchen table. I do not know the answer to that one yet, though. It is hot.
Lead RingLast night, the circus of kittens took up station on various stoops on the street and sang a choir for unknown reasons. I stepped out onto the porch to investigate and found two of them, as cute as possible, nonchalant and quiet. They looked at me as disdainful artists might look upon critics, those from the tribe that can only offer reaction instead of creation. I do not think that a fair assessment of the art of criticism, but I got the distinct impression that the cats would not hold much care over such sentiments. All of the singing stopped, though: the night returned to silence perhaps due to audience, more likely for other grounds.
The kittens are feral, living as a family with their parents under a nearby Japanese maple. The mother has been seen worrying, stalking. The father is a vast bulk, a trophy cat, a giant heap of gravity plopped atop pathways with a swishing tail, taking to shade in these hot days. The light falls relentless out there, warm and bright. The kittens do not care, and romp in the yard.
I do not mow the lawn as much as I perhaps should. It is good to let it grow a little long, particularly in the heat; the grasses shade themselves as they know how to do, the thick carpet keeps water in the soil. There is also the pleasant sight of the winds rippling the blades, movements of air visible, patterns flowing through the yard and on to places elsewhere, once again unseen. I take great joy in watching it, except as a signal that I should really mow the grass. The kittens had much fun in the long stuff, too: jumping, rooting, chasing bugs and tumbling together, splashes of color in the gently waving green. I mowed the lawn the other day, robbing them of their little savanna.
I could plant cat mint for them, but I do not know if it would be kind.
The cicadas sing mechanical, hidden in the leaves of the trees. They mask the distant rumblings of cars and planes with stuttering starts, arcs of trembling rattle, the slow stalling before they ready themselves to begin again. There is still a trickle of raspberries, and a bowl of gooseberries sits on the counter. I am on the porch with a cold drink from Andalusia and a bright cheese from just east of there, each from a tradition as old as the other. The evening heat is a soft press on the shoulders, the temples, the small of the back.
Oh, CelesteLet us walk out into the night; let us wander through the evening, under streetlights just waking up to the notion of twilight, the stops lights gaining strength against the indigo sky. Let us dodge the children using us carefully as screens in their game of hidden and sought. Let us go see bands.
So there, at the little festival, there was a pretty good time. I only managed to make it there for the very end of Ms. Hatfield's set, but she seems in quite fine form, and I am sorry I missed it. I got to spend a fair bit of the Wilson Twins' set in good conversation with Mr. Tinerant, but the sisters made good music, and that cover they do was lovely. Then, with the light draining out of the sky, the Old 97's came to play, carrying their weight in yowl, blister, thump and snare.
And there in the crowd, I found a story. Some ways in front of me, each seated: a young woman, a young man, his foot tapping too fast to be part of any music. The music has her, and she stands to dance, dances around him, next to him, dancing playfully into him to get him to feet, to join her, there on the lawn. Her efforts are for naught, but she dances on anyway. After some time, she sits back down, arm over the back of his chair, letting her fingers dance on the small of his back. He reaches his own hand behind, and I prepare not to notice a secret comfort of fingers, a small private tenderness. He knocks her hand away. I could have written her a note with a truth on it, then, left it with her before leaving, even as it would have been misunderstood.
I didn't do that, of course. That would have been rude, and the night had little use for rude. I moved up and in, into the knots of people dancing by the front of the stage. The pistons were firing up there, these four men together in music, the lyrics pouring right out of the top of Mr. Miller's head. We cheered and clapped against the great swallowing sky; they gave us more, we did it again.
I hope we did them well.
8:24One of the great fears with words and long projects is that the engine that makes them will change so much from the start to the finish that those first timid lines will seem incomprehensible strange to those that pile on for the finale. This has already happened a number of times on the long projects. From one view, what seems to be happening is that the vast sense and senses that pour in from everywhere do their good work: to bolster, to illuminate, to tear down to bring up, infinitely. So, too, does the engine change with age. I have so little control over it. It's frustrating.
"Did you mean that, what you said about singing," she asked. "Is that a line? Something you tell all the girls?" I do not know if it mattered what the answer was, even though the answer was no.
The process will always be laced with change, though: it is in some ways nearly a sad thing to pin the words down to paper, fix them there, keep them still even as they ring in their own way. It is, after all, what they ask for. So: keep going.
Hey, Chris: There's Probably A Poem In Here, If You DigConsider dumpsters. More often than not, when encountered in the wild, they are already somewhat full of whatever it is they are there to carry, nearly always fulfilling purpose. They, too, are more often than not filled with the debris of construction in reverse, laded up with the trappings of things previously built, cleared out and cut up and tossed with little ceremony into a big box to become memory. We do this to make room for new things; some day, too, all that we do today will take the place of the things that they took the place of. Note, too, the amount of it all: it says many things when one has need of so large a refuse bin. A lot can be seen in the nature of a trash can.
Consider...dumpsters. The things themselves. They are massive, stout, built to take tremendous punishment, and often carry the tells of such suffered. The lines of them should be arrow straight, but they are not: with care, place an eye on the lip of one and look along, to see the warp and wave where things large and heavy once crashed down in moments of bad aim. With care, run fingertips over the dents and dings that make a landscape of the panels of cold steel, with more care in the spots where something has managed to punch through, introducing new topology, letting in light. I think it would be strange to see a new one, shiny and perfect and straight. They are brave things, dumpsters, with long shoulders weary from their time. A lot can be seen in the nature of a trash can.
Place a young child in the front yard, looking up at the long horizon line of the dumpster, hulking in the driveway, forcing the family car ignominiously into the street to part under the elm that grows between the sidewalk and the pavement. The dumpster is there to receive the detritus of the remodel. The child cannot see in, for they are not so tall, but somethings heave up into view, piled on other things. The child can see half of the sink, tipped up into view, the sink where they brushed teeth and washed hands before sleep. The child can only wonder at this new place for this familiar fixture, perhaps not knowing that it would soon be gone, too. The parents are happy to finally get rid of the lime green enamel.
The fireflies surprised me tonight, in the back yard: a small storm of soft green light.
Water Is Greedy For DownI have known people that do not know how to tell time by an analog clock. I do not think this tragic, merely strange - the graceful arms of analog clocks are an engineering solution no longer needed in this country, passing gently into anachronism and fashion. There are, after all, plenty of digital clocks around. They are both their own cause and cure.
It has been days of stormy evenings. I have made a point to set a tuner on the shortwave to point to an empty band. In most times, the radio only reports a gentle hiss. When lightning strikes, the radio wakes, singing a crackle in perfect time with the light outside the window. The radio can find lightning farther away that I can see it. It is impressive and in some small way beautiful to hear lightning sing so. I mentioned this mechanism to a younger acquaintance, and that any AM radio would neatly do this trick, and his reply was this: "who has a radio these days?". He had a point, if not a lamentable one.
There are many rooms in the house with two doors; the kitchen is one. She left me to tend to the onions in the skillet on the stove, disappearing though a doorway into the dim hallways, eager to explore. Some minutes later I looked up to see her peeking around the frame of the other one, watching me: half of a smile, soft and shy, one pale eye, bright with light, half of a face, filled with fitness.
A peek beneath the spreading leaves of the raspberry bush this morning showed a surprising number of little fruits, still shrunk and green, tiny baubles of promise. There was, too, one singular fruit, a gentle and tempting red. It fell away with a touch into my fingers, warm. I ate it standing in the yard, with summery sun, remembering that this was what they are supposed to be.
The Promenade CallsOne of the nifty things about this place is that it is being cleaned up a bit. For years and years, the earth underneath has supported industry here, and although they were not the cleanest it must be said that they were, in their time, frightfully important. Through draw and whim, all of that is largely gone now, even as the memories linger on. There is much talk and service these days in the world around toward the manner of how we are custodians of the places we live; here, I think, it is a little different. The people here have a good memory of just how bad it was, importance aside, so as the waters run cleaner and the soils are scrubbed, there lurks a consensus that the job should be done well, and it should bloody stay that way.
There are benefits to this. Slowly, the watersides are coming back as a place to work, play, and travel. There are many examples of this, but a recent favorite is a small eatery on a small island, where one can sit outside in the evening air over the water, taking in the lights, the boats, the sounds of the band playing over in the grotto. Being on a trail, there are happy collisions: dancers in pretty summer dresses moving for each other on the patio, rubbing shoulders and exchanging pardons with tired cyclists, dressed reflective. This little corner of the island teems with light and sound, while the rest is strangely quiet at night, the calm primness of the heavy weight of an HOA agreement, stoic and stern against all the forces of nature that must batter them so in the winters.
We do not live like that up here on the hill. This evening I pulled a hundred plants from in amongst the strawberries: feverfew, the stuff that isn't lamb's quarters, one lone locust seeding, other things. Down there were treasures: more strawberries. It was quick work to pull another quart, each ripe, some with red too deep to be true. Some of these I washed and tucked away; the others I washed and put in a box, the bring them up the street and up the stairs to a neighbor, sitting on her porch in the breezes. With gift given, we got to chat a bit: trade histories, tell stories. I am glad to live in a place with porches like that.
It is cool on my own porch, now; sleepy fireflies yawn and glow in the twilight.
All content under copyright by the author. Dancing is permitted. The strange deltic glyphs in the sand under tidal flow are a pleasure to watch in their deepening. Offer not valid in Kansas. We put it down and then we lost it. It all happens in the corner of the eye. Mail accepted for the bears in the basement. We have a dog, but we do not own it. Thank you.