The Thorn Trees of Pike's Peak

May 28, 2020

Yesterday while driving nowhere in particular, I realized that despite our fundamental disaffinity, I am become Hemingway.  Or, rather, I am Harry in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that wasted, obnoxious man full of things that he would never write.  To be sure, I have no gangrene and while the farm does have its carrion eaters, they do not circle me in particular.  I am not dying, nor yet am I drinking.  Still, I am episodically possessed by thoughts of things I once hoped I’d write and without the will or world to write them.  And I receive these visitations as Harry would, as signals from a future no longer mine, as things I meant to do and didn’t, while all along the world was swerving out, angling in a direction that would never include them, or the version of myself that could write them.  I am not convinced I want to be like Harry, but there are days I try.

Aware that he is dying, Harry assumes a posture meant to be indifference as he mentally rehearses what he meant to write and now would not.  His unwritten tales are told in fragments, in the fits and starts that will not finish, much less last.  The waste of days is in there too, all the regret for time he wasted, the way he engineered a life that had him ever in distraction. He’s not a man that I can like – who could? – but he is compelling in at least this:  He seems to know that when you’ve lost something, you need to find a posture toward its absence.  His is to simulate gruff apathy and acquiescence, to think a bit on stories never told, and then decisively consign them to the ash heap of energies burnt out in other ways – or at least to try this.  It is an attitude I can almost admire, for it seems at least to leave behind self-pity, to shrug where one could flail, to will stout resignation where mere sorrow could set in.  But I am unconvinced by Harry and so of myself as well. 

Sometimes saying “damn it all” in a bid to stop your caring works.  The pose of some indifference becomes a liberation, an attitude not assumed but felt.  But sometimes it’s naught but bluster – even resignation is a thing one can protest too much – an evasion of the griefs one lacks the inner heft to shoulder well.  That’s how I think it is with Harry.  He’s so busy posing “brave” that he becomes a coward.  He’ll die without the stories he would write but he also dies without the pain they ought to bring – before that horror he insists on flinching.  I think Hemingway himself did accidentally write that. 

I bought gas a few days ago at the ratty little gas station cum general store.  It’s a place where you might spend half an hour buying gas – because the pump broke down or the register won’t open or it’s lunchtime and there’s a crowd come in for the fried chicken and potato wedges that sit in a heated glass cabinet next to the credit card machine.  The men in line ahead of me were talking hay.   

           -You making hay?
           -Yeah, long day.

           -No other kind of days but long ones making hay. 
           -Last year, I got a crick in my neck running the mower in June what lasted all the way 
             through August.
           -I know that crick.  I done had that crick every year for  the last dozen.
           -That’s the one.

           -You ok otherwise
           -Cain’t cry… Well, I can.  But ain’t nobody gonna wanna listen. So I figger I may as 
             well not.

The men in line for chicken sound to me like Seneca - why weep over parts of life when all of it calls for tears? – but I think I like them better still, these accidental Ozark Stoics.  They have cultivated the finer art of meta-complaint, that way of registering life’s travails and paying them some verbal due before you make your move to shuffle them aside for some defiantly sardonic and shared fatalism.

                -Whatcha gonna do?

The answer, ever and always, is nothing.  The question gets asked, after all, when the only answer can be nothing, when there is nothing one can do to dodge Fortuna’s sword hand.  It’s a question posed to make a pose, to stiffen up the spine with the steel of a helplessness you recognize and own.  Or maybe it’s less that one will stand erect than that one can laugh a bit when hard days leave you bowed.  The cricks will come and some will really last, but maybe succor can be found in shrugging resignation for the fact.  That was what I used to think, before the billboards started to appear.

Not far from the gas station stands a billboard featuring an image of a farmer, his back turned to the camera, his eyes presumably directed outward toward fields that sit in softer focus in the distance.  Or maybe he is glassy eyed and staring vacantly at the horizon, his gaze turned inward on his woes while his eyes but set in simulacrum of sight upon his outer world.  We cannot tell where he is really looking when all we see is his broad back.  But this should be our worry.  What we can’t see could be a peril and that is just the billboard’s point.  It carries a phone number one should promptly call “if you think he’s thinking about suicide.”  The billboards are a gesture at what statistics about rural men lately show:  they have started killing themselves in ever escalating numbers.  Seen from the back, it’s hard to tell what afflictions might sit heavy on that man whose eyes we cannot see.  But then, I start wonder, aren’t all the men round here seen mostly from the back?  Isn’t that the pose they’re taught to take?      

-Whatcha gonna do?

The old familiar language people here still speak, the diction of despair shuffled off, might just be evolving.  What once worked to scorn what troubles one can’t solve may encourage a surrender to them.  Stoicism has always struck me as dangerous relief.  A quick pull from the bottle can bring relief or even courage, but drink it dry too often and the liver goes.  But of course it isn’t the language of this place that’s killing its men, it’s how that language sits inside a world no longer made for them, a world that has their language turn on them.

I thought that someday I would write an elegy for what gas station chicken conversations did once mean, and for the broad, ambiguous backs of tired men.  But I will not write that now.

  

May 29, 2020

In Hemingway’s story, Harry can do naught but lay there wounded and waiting, for his rescue or for death.  My time lately does not pass at all like this.  There has been waiting, to be sure, but it is all mental and set inside activity too often frenetic, the stuff one has to do when other crises come inside the looming threat brought by pandemic.  Maybe it isn’t unlike Harry, after all.  It does often feel like something should be coming, and I suppose I cannot know it yet for rescue or for doom.

The month of March was consumed by troubles that seem distant now.  My father was then ill, with a hematoma surrounding and compressing his kidney.  It finally sent him to the hospital and so I went there as well.  His pain drove us to seek help we’d hoped he would not need.  Because of the pandemic, we kept him home longer than we ought, so it was in some trepidation of what our delay might cost us that I approached the ER intake desk.  I did the necessary paperwork beside a man unable to do likewise.  “I’ve been doing meth all week,” he jittered to the nurse, “and I am seeing things that I don’t like.  I need some help with that.”  My father looked ashen as he stood and waited, and I wrote faster as I idly wished we all could find relief for seeing what we cannot like.

The days my father spent in the hospital transpired in a slow accumulation of alarm.  The hospital here is usually a place frenetic, stormcast by waves of doctors made too active because they are too few and swells of visitors who come in crowds to set with their ill and injured.  But as the days wore on, the place grew ever stiller, like a ship becalmed and stranded far from land.  Elective surgeries and any care at all that could be put off had ceased.  Visitors first thinned, then vanished altogether.  The several outer doors were locked and barricaded save the one they wanted all to use, the better to check for temperatures or for travel from away.  I often walked the maze of hallways to my father’s room without seeing any other person.  It felt like we were the last and only in that place.  Covid had not yet come but all had hunkered down to brace for it. 

My father and I took to talking late with his night nurse, a man moved here from the city because the land is cheap and deer to hunt abundant.  He regaled us with recitations of the local numbers and what they might portend should Covid soon arrive.  The hospital has one isolation room, designed to cordon off the one inside it from all else.  It has one device designed to decontaminate a space, a machine that can helpfully be moved here or there as needed.  The ICU beds number eighteen and the ventilators sit at twelve.  It might not be enough, my father’s nurse would worry.  The hospital serves eight counties, mostly rural.  No one knows just how to count the number of people this might be since most in those counties are betwixt and between – an hour to a hospital if you drive south or just over an hour should you go north instead, and which way you choose to go a mystery till you make the choice.  The nurse’s hope for my father, and ours as well, was to get my father sound enough that we could make for the shore of home and tend him there before any Covid came like a corrupting wind.  And that is how it happened in the end.  We made it out before the first case came.  

I wonder if that nurse is still working.  A few weeks following my father’s release, the hospital laid off more than one hundred of its staff.  Without the treatments now deemed optional and the money that these bring, it had no funds to pay its workers.        

Hospitals cannot but be a place for sorrow, for anxious, aching worry.  Yet still I think ours something else as well.  It always seems a place of great travail gone dreamy – a purgatorial place, caught in some usually hidden interstice of time, a place where scientific progress of a sort joins up with old awareness that all are, ever and always, but in the hands of an indifferent, cruelly playful Fate.

I once read a book about ancient Roman burial practices and discovered that the road to Rome was laid with graves.  The dead were kept outside the city and their graves lined the pathway in.  Because of this, dying old Romans liked to style their tombstones in a way to catch a later eye.  They’d have their stones writ with what would draw attention and make a busy traveler pause – though they would be dead, they would thus not be always lonely.  Their stones could say all sorts of things, but the one that ever has stayed with me was the sage advice one fellow left to warn the living off the doctors.  I cannot now recall the full testimony of his stone, but it cautioned against doctors, claimed they were the ones what killed him, and if you did not heed what he would say, you would end up there beside him.  

That old Roman would have fit right in among the patients standing on the street corner outside our hospital, gone there be-gowned to smoke.  Our hospital is called Ozark Medical Center – OMC, for short – but many on the corner call it Order My Coffin.  They talk like people expecting to be killed.  They work a kind of alchemy on me.  Since I only ever go to the hospital in some condition of distress, they seem to me to be the sentries of the place, uniformed in threadbare gowns and some equipped with IV poles that could, in the imaginative frame of tired mind, register as spears.  They keep the gates, or at least the crosswalk, and if your arms are full, they’ll even push the button for you.  To pass through them and the haze that attends their talk of coffins is to know you’re headed somewhere strange.  

One too early morning in hospital, awaiting treatment for my grandfather, we wiled away the time in his shared room eavesdropping on an exorcism.  The patient next to him, his roommate for a time, was apparently in charge.  His kin had come to visit and with them was a cranky child.  After suffering too long to have their conversation interrupted by the tears and commotion of the child, the family reasoned out that here must be some demon, for what else might ail that could so refuse the ordinary gestures both of comfort and of scolding?  So the elderly patient presided over the necessary business from his bed, leading the rest in calls to Jesus to liberate the child, to set it free from any and all the malignant forces that so plainly did beset it.  “Do you have all of your organs?” the nurse asks my grandfather.  “I do,” my grandfather answers, adding as an afterthought, “but I did give up my cataracts to the doctors.”  The nurse has come to take my grandfather’s health history, and because he is old, the history is long.  His fellow patient has, I hear, invoked the biblical demon that claimed for itself the name of Legion – I take this as sign that progress over there is likewise slow, for surely this indicates that the demon is now judged to be not one, but many.  Before I can complete the thought, the nurse has turned to talk of tuberculosis and my grandfather is confessing that yes indeed, he has been exposed.  In abruptly concentrated attention, she asks how long ago that was.  My grandfather mulls the years and then allows it must have been 1927, but it could also have been 1928 – there was “that boy” at school what had it, but the year is not exact in memory.  “That’s ok then,” the nurse sighs – TB some eight decades old surely cannot hazard any now – and goes on to ask him about broken bones.  When she at last has finished, I register that the exorcism too has ended.  Someone over on that other side has turned the t.v. on instead.  The screen is full of fighting pitbulls covered over in old scars and fresh wounds.  A football player has lately been arrested for raising these dogs to make them fight.  That, too, seems demonic but our neighbor’s prayers are apparently exhausted. 

I’ve only just the once been privy to an exorcism at the hospital, but one sufficed to make me prone to errors.  When my father was there ill some years ago, he complained of a cousin coming with a friend to declaim loud prayers over his prone form.  I thought this conduct odd, not the sort of thing to which my cousin would be given, but I also surmised that perhaps the place had worked in him some uncharacteristic impulse he could not deny.  The hospital seems a place that just well might turn ordinary speech to booming incantation or well-wishing visit to desperate pleas for God’s attention – my cousin may have been turned verbal snake handler by the general atmosphere, or so I reasoned then.  In fact my cousin had not been by at all.  My father was then sliding into septic shock and hallucinating, but it wasn’t until the next day, when he complained of the guinea hens flocking thickly in his room, that we discerned it clearly.   

I used to think I’d like to think a bit about all of this, about how the stuff of hard empirical realities and of hallucination can happen all together in one benighted place, and the place so odd the difference can’t be obvious.  But our hospital has changed.  The sentries on the corner have stood down and I can’t be sure of how things go in there now that there are none, real or imagined, gone there to pray away all that is malevolent.  So I will not write that either.

May 30, 2020

Once my father was secure at home, the days briefly found routine, albeit one of largely lonely drudgery.  When I wasn’t doing chores my parents couldn’t, I retreated to an empty house across the dirt lane to record online lectures for my classes, sorry episodic talks I’d make while pacing.

In Hemingway’s story, there is a hyena that paces the outskirts of the camp where Harry lays and suffers, a creature of foreboding, a portent foul and unlovely.  I have no such creature stalking me, but when I recorded my lectures, they were often attended by a ratty dog, a creature never yet alarming but, all the same, unsettling.  He would lurk outside the window staring in, the closest thing I then had to an ear to listen as I paraded out things learned long ago to send into the ether where they might someday find my students.  The dog would stare balefully and blank, or curious and alert, and I began to adjust my lectures to his reactions.  Should he look away, I would shift my cadence to become more lively or offer up a rousing example that might animate philosophy’s abstractions.  I am competing for attention with the squirrels, I would think.  Perhaps it was ever thus.

That dog – called aptly Dog – has a status that’s uncertain.  He was dumped two years ago at the homeplace of a neighbor some few hundred yards away.  Because the neighbor neither ran him off nor shot him, Dog counts in the calculus round here as belonging to that man.  Dog accedes to this some days and patrols the yard around the neighbor’s trailer, but he is more usually just a rambling presence, a creature mysterious in his ways and unaccountable to any.  Some days no one sees him, some days he never leaves our porch.  Most days, he likes some petting, but some days, not – he once showed up carrying a slice a pizza and kept his distance lest I try to steal it.  One day he cornered an armadillo only to sniff it with disdain and walk away.  On another he tortured a groundhog, mortally wounding it but declining to finish what he started.  I then went for my rifle and did the work he wouldn’t.  Every night they’re near and howling, he answers the coyotes with his voice – in this at least, Dog is reliable.  I suspect he is unsure if he wants to count himself as feral or as tamed.  He is, in short, about what someone might expect from a dog that has learned Zhuangzi. 

The weeks I passed in making lectures are preoccupied in memory with this dog.  He stalks me, too, when I have tried to write.  He is here now, resting under the shade of walnut tree while I sit in the sun.  As Harry is with his hyena, so I am with Dog, my portent undetermined and so far mute for sense.  I can’t decide if he is a distraction or the point and purpose. 

How are you coming along by this time we are all right only Sisser and I have colds but are better well it looks like Spring is here everything is pushing out although I am still feeding have one more feld of silage am figering on turning on the wheat this week we had an awful rain the creek go out of its banks but did not do any harm I have started plowing across the road it plows all right but is to wet at present oats are looking good we got some fertilizer from the Goverment to put on the basen I have got all the Sespo sewed now we went over to the Ark. Place and sewed the Sespo in the wheat and put the Hay in the ditches every thing was allright am going over again this week and see about the Pasture am thinking of puting some stock over maybe my hogs that I am feeding are getting fat think I will sell them next Monday they are pretty good price now cattle are awful high we have 10 calfs now just now got on the radio the hogs jumped up a $400 top I hope the will hold up till I get to sell we got your check all right it was more than I espected I guess you fellows are getting exercise now I sure am well will close hoping this finds you O.K. Your Dad.

My great-grandfather Will had trouble writing.  No one told me this but it is plain in letters left behind, his short notes written in dull pencil and tentative hand to my grandfather.  My grandfather Lynn was then in service – it was World War II – and I expect that only a separation as dramatic and worrisome as this could motivate Will to write.  Will did not use punctuation, save for a single period at the very end.  And I imagine him laying that dot down as some release, the sign and signal that the lettering was over and he could then revert to occupations more pleasant.  I read the final periods of his letters – always capping off the words “Your Dad” – not as a stop but as a hearty sigh taken in relief.  I wonder if his writing would be better were it written in the German.

Will’s mother only spoke the German, she and her husband having immigrated here in the 1880s and her never learning well the new tongue.  Will naturally spoke it too, but not with his own children; because he would not use it, they would never learn it.  The history of the Germans in this region is a little vexed.  The earliest Germans here favored the Union in the Civil War, a posture that put them in bad odor in this county. While the region saw no formal fighting, the informal was in some ways worse.  The county where our farm sits was counted no man’s land, not fit for any but the fiercest and the wild, those willing to stick around where your stores of food and livestock could be violently confiscated by bushwhackers or your place entire burned out.  Many were killed in just this way, while more fled the county in search of greater safety.  By the end of the war, few farms at all remained intact.  My kin arrived when the dust from this had settled, when something closer to “civilization” was returning to the Ozarks. But soon another war was in the offing, this one abroad and against Germans.  Will’s children were all born here in the years just after World War I, so I expect his refusal to pass on his family’s native tongue reflected necessary caution against local history, both the old and fresh.  He wouldn’t want his children set apart, though this would happen anyway.  When his daughter started courting a boy from a farm just up the road, his family styled her “that little German girl.”   

I expect Will’s trouble with the writing was more than just the language.  German, after all, includes some punctuation.  His letters wake in me uneasy thoughts of formal education, both what it does and how it works.  He’d not have had much, this is plain.  I often think I have too much.  This might be a thing to mark a distance great between us, but instead I find in it a kinship.  The things I write register with me as more like Will’s than like those well-formed letters other of my kin have left – our scribblings, Will’s and mine, are a labor to write and more labor yet to read.  But more than this, I think that Will and I might have a shame in common, or a confusion about how to be.  We are set apart together in not wanting to be set apart amid the rest, him losing language once his and me suppressing what I acquired away from here.  That’s one hypothesis at least.  Another, more persuasive thought might be that I can only farm the way he writes, the way that one will do work when the learning requisite to skill is just too little come too late.  If you could put us both together, we might make a decently skilled single person.  That’s a tempting thought, and one I’d like to linger on, but it’s one I have no heart or time to pursue.  I won’t write about that either.

June 1, 2020

I meant to make this my account of days inside of the pandemic, to chronologically recite just what the weeks now drawing into months have been.  I would mirror Hemingway’s benighted Harry, as he slides, graceless, toward his fate – the serpentine spread of gangrene up his leg, the accumulation of circling vultures, and the frustration and impatience most of all.  I would relate my own crawl of days that tend to worsen, not improve, and also my frustration and impatience most of all.  If I could here rehearse some well-ordered calendar of time just past, at the end I might locate a silence that would feel like rest.  I have also been hoping for some boredom to set in.  Harry grows weary of dull dying and perhaps I could do the same with this, my plight, whatever it might be or how I could describe it.  But that orderly descent through time, I find, is not the way this now will go.  There is no order to enforce on this, the way the days keep coming on to do their worst.

Yesterday, my husband fractured his spine.  He was doing what he ought not, trying to shift the heavy oak plank floor of a demolished calf barn onto my burn pile.  Unable to lift it outright, Garret raised it on one end, his body bracing the top with the thought of heaving it into a flip and onto the smoldering pile.  His knees bent in a way that looked like preface to the great push that would send the whole thing over, but then his knees kept going, folding, and then him falling, with the massive floor to land atop him.  He looked crushed as he lay pinned beneath it.  It was all that I could do, even in the onrush of adrenaline, to raise it just enough that he managed to slide out, there to lay white faced on the hot concrete.  He muttered that he thought he might need to go home to bed.  We went to the hospital instead.

Garret and I had taken to saying over the last many weeks that come what else might, we would need to stay healthy and be careful.  Too much else and too many others rely on what we do.  I cannot now explain what Garret and I thought we were about yesterday, trying to shift and then to burn that heavy oaken floor.  I expect sometimes it’s just hard to keep your mind inside a crisis, to remember that the world is set awry and wrong.  This is especially true on a fine spring day when there is work to hand and you have a cheerful, eager will to do it.  We just forgot our situation and ourselves.  It is the situation that has returned in force to plague me now.  We have the keeping of others and now less of ourselves to keep them.

My parents continue a little frail. My father has both his hematoma and mobility issues that have him somedays come up lame and every day in pain.  My mother is beset by not one, but two autoimmune disorders that need her kept cosseted from risk of Covid and resting when the debilitating aches will inevitably come.  These were the concerns with which we started the pandemic, but more then came.  

Our daughter was abroad, off in far Russia, but she is here on the farm now too, a circumstance quick to describe in summary but laborious in the making.  It is not easy to get a child out of Moscow when the flights are shutting down, nor was it simple to quarantine her once arrived.  

Then Garret’s mother fell and cracked a rib at her home in Austin.  He hastened there, and there remained for weeks – her rib was slow to heal, pneumonia was a worry.  She, too, is immunosuppressed, but even worse with it.  Eventually, Garret moved her to our home in Oklahoma, into the house we live in during schooltime and where she could get the specialized care unavailable near our farm.  He would then spend summer, so we planned, driving back and forth between.  

Just last week, my brother brought his girls to us.  His circumstance isn’t mine to explain, but he needed us to keep them for a time and so we will.  With us at least, they have space to roam, and sunshine too.  

I have lately been inclined to archaic ways of thinking.  Garret and I have responsibilities for others, and I want to count them in the old way, not as persons but as souls.  In early March, there were two souls upon this place and to keep safe, my parents.  When my daughter arrived, two souls became three.  Garret’s mother brought us up to four and introduced a complicating distance, and then my nieces brought the number up to six.  We have six souls in our keeping, but here my counting stalls and stutters.  Now that Garret has a fractured spine, we cannot be two souls keeping six, I think.  I am become one keeping seven. 

When my grandmother died, I wanted to carry her couch to the rooftop of her house. There I would wave it about and then at last hurl it to the ground.  This fantastical wish was born most basically in the mental incoherence that the fresh arrival of grief will summon, that species of confusion that can suspend all practical considerations – where, after all, would the strength to wave around a couch originate?  Yet the wish was also inflected toward the aching good sense of ancient Chinese death ritual.  In ancient China, when someone died, one of the bereaved would be delegated to carry her clothes to the rooftop.  From that high vantage, the clothes would be waved in the air while the bereaved would ritually incant pleas for the soul of the dead to return:  Please, come back!  Please, come back!  Once these pleas had failed, as fail they must, the clothes would be dropped from the roof, to flutter in the airy agony their emptiness would signal, to the ground below.  The ritual was a way to act on profound longings, to make longing take a definite shape and give it over into action.  And then to mark in yet more action that these, the hardest of our longings, are longings without answer.

My desire to substitute my grandmother’s couch for her clothes, however impossible to achieve, was also not without its logic.  For her soul might well find in this a far more provocative temptation to return.  My grandmother’s couch, you see, was white and thus acutely totemic, a thing that iconically remarked her in a way mere clothing never could.  She had owned the couch, the white couch, for decades and had maintained it pristine and unblemished amidst all the dirt and grime that living on a farm entails.  In the first of grief’s many defeats, I thought with utter clarity: None of us still living will be equal to this couch.  Best take it to the roof where her soul might see this plainly, where my deliberate abuse of it might inspire her fierce will to exercise itself back to us.  “Please, come back,” but with a touch of menace better pitched to summon up an answer:  Just look what I am doing without you.  You better get back here right now.

Even in my incoherence I knew it would not work, but still it would do something like a bit of work for grief.   For when her soul declined return and I cast the couch from the roof, to send it not fluttering but plummeting to earth, it would then, at long and belated last, be truly soiled and we could thus commence in earnest with the fate now forced upon us.  We would then begin the us-without-her, an us most fittingly remarked as a world in which white couches on dirty farms do not remain unblemished.  As it was, the couch instead stayed firmly where it always sat, in the formal living room.  Our loss was then marked carelessly rather than in ritual.  Two days after her death, I noticed two long streaks of dirt across the low skirting of the couch, dirt likely come off someone’s boot thoughtlessly rubbed against the cloth.  The symbolism of this worked, I guess, in its own shambolic way.  

I have wanted long to think on my grandmother Ruby and her home.  She had so much more than just the couch.  There was a room with white furniture painted all round with golden trim and set on carpet with the reddest roses every splayed across soft flooring.  The lighting of the room was red as well, owing to the red glass shade that domed across the lamp, bedecked with jewel-like teardrops all around.  When I was a child, this room entire made me think of France – France being the place where everything was fancy and gold paint normal.  King Louis the Something could have slept happy there, I expected.  My grandmother’s other rooms were duller and more used but all had flourishes of finery – the Avon perfume bottles styled to look like antique ladies stood erect across her gold filigree vanity tray, the strange print of a French masquerade ball hung on her bedroom wall, the tiny, ornate lady shoe that was her pincushion.  All these things, I know, had things to say and I would like to puzzle out their message.  

But my thoughts of Ruby now track a path too primitive and rough for any flourish.  I want whatever it was that she had:  the indomitable confidence and competence that keeps a farmhouse couch white, the will to announce plainly what I cannot like, maybe even the stuff to scare the children.  “I’m going to slap you to sleep and then slap you for sleeping,” she would promise, with a voice that made the promise break: You just did whatever she said and slaps were never needed for it.  I’d like to turn that kind of voice on Fate itself.  Ruby has become a distillation, a concentrated essence upon my memory and nothing left of what was fancy.  I won’t write about her and her fine house either.

June 2, 2020

In the end, Hemingway’s Harry gets salvation of a sort.  He hallucinates in his last efforts turned toward dying, imagining a rescue plane has come, the pilot, Compton, carrying him above the white, snow laden peaks of Kilimanjaro.  I have no blood-poisoned dream for my release, no fevered hallucination to serve as ending now for what I write.  

In some altogether too obvious sense, all endings are the same.  Compton, or something like, does and will arrive, not for rescue but for that last exit we all must sometime make.  But the state that comes before, that reflective, aching consideration of all that has not happened, will not happen, and abides undone – that just meanwhile sticks around.  

I write this sitting in the bed of my truck on the farm’s highest point, a place my great-grandparents, for reasons now lost, named Pike’s Peak.  It is where I have come to evade for a time my attention’s rivals, those other souls I keep.  There is no snow here, nor height from which I can get a truly better view.  But the Peak is cluttered rich with downed timber, dead trees felled by natural rot and many more we have sawn down.  There are cut thorn trees and cedar too – the stuff you cull when you want good, stout hardwood coming in.  In the cab of my truck I have a lighter, and a pocket bellows too.  I think this is where I’m going next.  Hemingway ends his in snow, but I will end mine in wood made ash.

June 3, 2020

“It’s very fractured,” he says.  “I’m not sure I see how it all hangs together.”

“You have to read the Hemingway,” I tell Garret, now he’s read all of the above.  “See:  I’m Harry, or I was supposed to be.  I’m the dying bastard experiencing the end – that’s the stuff in regular font – and the rest, the italics, that’s like Harry’s stories never told.  It’s the stuff I’ll never write really, never write to any finish.  It’s all a mental recitation of the lost, except I had to type it, not just think it.” 

“I remember the Hemingway.  I think I do.  It’s an unsettling story.  Painful to read.”

“Yeah.  It’s all horrible and Harry is horrible.  But he gets to do what I want to do, to take leave of the things that won’t be written.”

“It just doesn’t seem like you somehow.  You seem like an elegy writer.  Your best stuff always seems to turn into elegy.”

“I think maybe this is my elegy for all of the elegies though.  When you need too many elegies, you can’t finish any.  You can start them, but you can’t finish any before some more commanding loss shows up.  So if it’s going to be total, it has to a broken thing of shards and fragments.”

“Well, I think at least it needs more clarity.  Your prose is sometimes running away with you, as if it has become the thing and meaning is just secondary or swamped.”

Garret is trapped inside a back brace, unable to do much at all, but he can read.  Still, I regret showing him these pages.  He agrees that I might make more sense if he re-reads the Hemingway, but now I have doubts.  I expect that Garret’s likely right about the prose.  I am all sound bereft of meaning, the way maybe a mourning wail should be.