Shhhh

Posted on January 17, 2012 by sputterpub

“You need to talk more quietly,” misspoke
her dad with elder mouth. He cupped her chin
for emphasis and curled a gentle stroke,
his index finger down her cheek. Within
she understood at once, at last, he meant
no hurt; he didn’t want to shut her down.
He tried to guide – paternally intent
to have her modulate each verb and noun.

He’s hard of hearing but too easy hears
her every argument, her any case.
He’s losing tones but finds her wrath too loud.
It makes no sense until exhaustion clears
her head and lets her feel upon her face
his loving touch, his gaze upon her bowed.

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Omission

Posted on January 13, 2012 by sputterpub

Oh I can pen advice I wouldn’t heed,
compose an argument that I’d ignore,
devise a dialogue I’d never read,
report a juicy item that would bore
me if I happened on it in a book,
and even leave me cold on film or stage.
This writer as a reader wouldn’t look
at phrases I’m creating for the page.

No, I read for the quality I lack,
and relish what I covet but have not.
I scan the characters while I ransack
the prose for what I lost or never got:
an aptitude for action and the knack
to fabricate the essence of a plot.

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Estranger Danger (Part 3 of 3)

Posted on January 12, 2012 by sputterpub

In the beginning, when Guy traveled away from her she worried. He never left her except on business and then, in her opinion, there was peril. He was a structural engineer. He wanted to design museum buildings but he made a living by working on roads. His business trips were to forsaken barren places, where cold winds blew all winter and the summers were brutally hot.

During those early times Nancy couldn’t help fretting about plane crashes, rental car accidents, on-the-job injuries. Guy called her every night and told her he missed her so much it actually hurt, and she’d respond with coos of tender concern.

But after 12 years her imaginings changed. They went from persistent worries to occasional crazy fantasies. Painless as an execution: swift and fatal. If it was a plane crash no passenger knew what hit him. If Guy died in the rental car, he was the only fatality and the truck driver was blameless. Her power plant fantasies were vaguer; she had him somehow shaken off his perch but not conscious of it.

Just news of his death. Friends and family rallying around her and the kids, arranging the funeral issues. A quiet time and then, gradually, a return to life. Comfortable. Not chaotic. And friends would probably introduce her to men: a widow was so much likelier that way than everyone’s spare divorcees.

Nancy is thankful that she is not psychic. She has so many worries that if they were prophetic her future would teem with trouble and her meditations could never be calm. But nothing necessarily bad happens to her after a nightmare. Earthquakes don’t occur after she gets that funny feeling on an unseasonably warm spring or fall day. She’s quite sure she didn’t really wish Guy dead.

It was quick and painless. He didn’t see it coming. He wasn’t on a tower. She never would have imagined it.

The plant he was inspecting produces blacktop. He was inside a huge conveyor when the operator ignored all standard precautions and started the machine. Two tons of hot asphalt hit him from behind. Death was immediate.

There was a month of amazing solace from their community. A trust fund was started for all five kids. Neighbors chipped in and covered the funeral. Insurance money let Nancy pay off the house and provided enough day-to-day income that she could drop work to part-time and finally go to college.

The biggest surprise about it all for Nancy is that she doesn’t miss Guy. At all. She keeps waiting for a sadness to creep into her but she thought it would have happened by now. It isn’t that she’s numb. It’s more that she used up all the good feelings about Guy already.

She thinks she ought to feel more for him. She wonders if she’s in trouble.

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Estranger Danger (Part 2 of 3)

Posted on January 11, 2012 by sputterpub

It didn’t help that Guy was alcoholic. Nancy should have been quick to spot that, what with her parents, but Guy threw her off by being functional. He could down four Jack Daniels at lunch and have a productive afternoon. He drove well. He’d never be the sort of father you’d find sleeping in the morning on the dewy front lawn. True, it was unattractive the way the shade came down in his eyes every evening, signaling a likeliness to be stupid and sentimental. That’s when he’d start repeating his reminiscences or ambitions, moist-eyed at least every third night. But after a few months of living together Nancy developed the skill of being somewhere else in the house when Guy got like that, or not responding if she didn’t get away. No: what led her to realize he was a lush was the progression that started with arguments they had some mornings after, when Guy too readily offered to give up booze entirely, followed by her accidental discoveries of hidden bottles, leading to his ceremonial pourings into the kitchen drain, triggering those horrible memories for her, ringing in her skull with the obnoxious familiarity of a car alarm sequence.

The sex dwindled to marital maintenance, the conversations faded, the plans stalled. But Nancy could no more give concrete reasons for falling out of love with Guy than she’d had for falling into it. She didn’t mark the moment any better than one can pinpoint the second when a headache disappears. It must have been weeks, months maybe, before she noticed that she didn’t want to return home after work. She had no place else to go but she just didn’t want to make that last left down her street and into her house. Where at best it would be boring.

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Estranger Danger (Part 1 of 3)

Posted on January 10, 2012 by sputterpub

Nancy knew she was in trouble when she started to imagine Guy’s death.

They’d been married 12 years. They’d survived the early marital challenges and at first she didn’t understand her morbid fantasies.

In the beginning, when she was madly in love with Guy, she was very creative about worry. Whenever they were apart she’d play the awful “little did they know when they kissed goodbye that morning…” script and imagine a freak car accident, a plunging elevator, construction pieces dropping from the sky. These were different. Nothing specific and not out of worry. Not as regular, but recurring enough to be noticed.

These fantasies didn’t include pain for Guy. Death was immediate, clean.

Everything was drastic and simple. It didn’t take long for Nancy to understand. She didn’t want to be married to Guy any more, and his death would be the most convenient way to end the marriage. Then there’d be no money hassles. No public shame.

Whoa, she thought then. Wouldn’t she miss him at all? Did she hate him?

The short answer was yes. Not enough to kill him herself – far from that. But it became clear that Nancy really felt she and the kids would be better off with Guy gone.

They weren’t his kids anyway.

Nancy had gotten herself knocked up in high school. She thought she’d have an abortion, but four parents argued too persuasively, so she and Gary got married. Miranda was born when Nancy was 18, and she and Gary managed to stay together long enough to also produce the twins. They split up after four years and she didn’t marry Guy for another (hard) five, so she thought she’d done all her growing by then. She thought she knew herself and what she wanted.

Guy was older (by nine years). He was a professional (engineer) and seemed happy (not). Nancy had thought he was strong, but she came to reconsider that later. After it was over she tended to view the whole marriage, for Guy, as a symptom of an early mid-life crisis (other men bought sports cars). But in the beginning his passion for her and his drive to marry her felt like it swept her, if not off her feet, at least sufficiently along, in his slipstream.

The sex was very good at first. Intense and varied. The life plans (sex, travel, sex, business, sex, dining, sex) were exciting. But reality paled.

Guy had two sons by his first wife, and he was a diligent daddy. The five kids swamped Guy and Nancy. And Miranda, nine years old when Guy moved in and precociously already adolescent, charmed, boggled, tested, and frustrated him. He’d never had a sister. He didn’t abuse her or anything, but he didn’t get her either. They argued often. Home life became unremittingly tense.

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Re-uppance

Posted on January 9, 2012 by sputterpub

If I continue living, I will fail
by increments – I fear the hearing’s next.
The years fling inflammation and assail
the circulation and I’m undersexed
already, bent to burp with gas attacks,
reducing height and vigor every year,
obtaining bumps and building cataracts …
But how can I depart while you’re still here?

I’d miss a week from Wednesday afternoon.
I couldn’t watch you learn to dance or write.
Perhaps I shouldn’t shuffle off this soon;
if I postpone, the future’s out of sight.
On balance, after contemplation, I
decide to live some more before I die.

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Sleep Study

Posted on January 6, 2012 by sputterpub

Asleep my fellows wander through a maze
without a clue of strategy or thread.
Somnambulating heavy are their days
as dense as night, as if they’re walking dead
who cannot even note what path they took.
They live oblivious in financed ease
and only rise to half-awareness shook
awake by earthquake-sized catastrophes.

It’s not as if they fell asleep somewhen
along their span; existence is a knot
for them, they never thought to pry apart.
They’re no more weary than they’ve ever been.
Each trial glimpse at God someone forgot,
propelled to motion by a dreaming heart.

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Basics

Posted on January 5, 2012 by sputterpub

It’s just about time to go back to school. Or at least to learning, even if the lesson is something already learned (but not fully accepted) about the futility of keeping a new year’s resolution in the darkest coldest season of the year. (I like salad for lunch in the winter, because I like salad and my hands are too cold when I get home to make one for dinner, and for the first 10 days of January the salad places, like the gyms, are crowded with the newly resolved; I have to wait for them to clear out, which never takes more than two weeks).

Back to school. Back to the memory I want to describe.

One of the best stories my father told about his college experience came from the late 1940s, from CCNY, from an engineering class. There’s a Basic Energy Equation that is at the bottom of every engineering problem. I don’t know what the equation is, and I’m resisting the Internet research that would quickly inform me, because the formula isn’t the point.

Dad said all the students groaned when they learned the assignment. All semester, no matter what they tackled, the class was required to start with the Basic Energy Equation and build from there. It would be like working a bunch of arithmetic without a calculator: drill after drill starting at one end and plodding to the end.

I’ll bet you can guess the result. The students who finished that class really learned their stuff. Ever after, each was confident about how to tackle any energy problem. Those students had the basics well-laid: neural pathways like rich irrigation canals in their elastic brains.

A lot of people scoff at repetitive tasks. Like we’re above them. Like they should be automated. Piffle. There’s no substitute for practice if you want to incorporate a skill.

So please, don’t ask a computer to do a task you don’t know how to do yourself. Run through problems off-line at first, as much as possible, until you comprehend them. Personally, I don’t even think speed-dialing is a beneficial idea.

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Greek to Me

Posted on January 4, 2012 by sputterpub

9.8.08
And it came to pass that I went to college. There were a few weeks that last high school year when I conjectured that I might not attend, that it might be better for me to proceed directly to the life experiences that would make me a writer, instead of spending more years in classrooms.

Dad talked me into it (if that was necessary – I think now that what I said then was a form of affectation), by explaining that even if I learned nothing in class, the university would provide professors who had read ahead of me, and who could steer me away from books that would waste my time.

So I crossed the bay from Marin to Cal, entered with Honors and finished my freshman year with an average average. No surprise: I spent those quarters taking breadth requirement courses and exploring drugs, sex, politics, rock and roll. It was a fine year.

I plunged into English courses as a sophomore, and thoroughly burned myself out. The work for an English class is never over – you can always add to that essay – and taking nothing but English was like constructing a circle in Hell and moving into it.

That’s when a few of us noticed the change in the course catalogue. Unlike spoken languages, which had classes every day, Greek and Latin were usually offered MWF for an hour and a half, or TuTh for two hours. That term (fall of 1969), there was a daily Greek class. I enrolled.

It was just what I needed. Elementary language homework is objective. You do the drills, you memorize the vocab, and you’re done.

But Greek provided more than that. It wasn’t like the ambient Spanish or even temple Hebrew. Classical Greek was exotic. The alphabet was mysterious. The literature was deep.

I acquired what Cal calls proficiency (or maybe “advanced knowledge”). Nowhere near fluency, but I learned enough to struggle with Homer and make sense of Sophocles. I got to experience what it was like, a little, to think like a Greek of their golden age.

For example, we all know how lifetime is presented in our language. We use words that suggest our past is behind us and our future (teeming with possibility or otherwise) is unrolling in front of us. I was taught that’s not how you think in Greek. In that language, it’s as if you’re walking backwards through your life: the past is always before you, present in mind and memory, but you’re moving ass-first into your unseen future.

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Auto-Doc

Posted on January 3, 2012 by sputterpub

I notice flaws in others as I move
around – I see my friends grow old and stout,
my relatives relapse. I would improve
the lots of most I love – I have no doubt
my cure is best; my remedy is fine.
I’ve spent a lifetime learning and I’ve found
the cause effective, and my own design
comprises truth in texture, light, and sound.

So I, a self-taught medic, state my case
as if I wrote the books upon my shelf,
as if I ran experiments to base
my theories on, took labor from an elf
who worked all night to holler in my face:
“O idiot physician, mend yourself.”

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