soba gone

We went to Nara during the New Year, which everyone told us not to do. It would be too crowded, they predicted, with people attending to the last rites of the dying year, and it was.

Which is not to say we were sorry we went.

Nara is a great Shinto center, and we fell directly in with the crowds as they worked their way up the mountain, passing shrines and countless lanterns, pushing through people who were pressing against others. Near the top we broke away and wandered the trails, pausing to peer at the faithful in their administrations before the colorful Kagami Mochi -- rice cake and tangerine treats offered up to the gods in exchange for divine favor.

The farther we pressed into the forest the thinner the crowds became until at last we were walking alone -- and feared we might we lost.

As we debated whether we should double back the trees thinned and the trail descended to a public road. There was nothing to the left or to the right, but directly before us there was a small restaurant, with a sign scratched out in English, for lost English speaking tourists like ourselves.

We stepped out of the January chill and into the warmth. I sat on a cushion before the low tea table and ordered cold soba, which I suspect I had had before and knew to be delicious, or else I wouldn’t have ordered cold food on a cold day after a long walk.



The buckwheat noodles were served on a bamboo matt suspended over a plate. The boiled soba had been shocked in a cold water bath just prior to serving, and the design was meant to allow the last of the water to drain off. I dunked the noodles bite by bite into the fish-rich sauce, and knew to wait once the soba was gone for the waitress to come with the cooking water, which she poured into the remnants of the sauce and expected me to drink.

I can’t recall if I did, but I do remember that chocolate cake and the coffee came next. Incongruous, all of it, and absolutely perfect.

serve warm

This will never be
the same simple pie

one gets
for about a thousand drachmas
in Kikitsa's little stone taverna
in Monodendri

up in the Zagohoria
the northwest reaches of Epirus

The flour is different;
the cheese, homemade,
certainly is different;

and the result here
is my humble attempt
to reproduce

perfection.

Diane Kochilas, prefacing her recipe for Tiganopitta Epirou, or Skillet Pie from Epirus, in her cookbook: The Food and Wine of Greece.

I had a pie like the one Kochilas describes, but it was on Crete, not in Epirus, in a little hard-scrabble mountain town called Kato Afrata, a short drive from Chania, which is where it had been recommended to me and my traveling companions.



Or rather: where She had been recommended to us. "She" was Roxani, and she was reputed to make the best cheese pies on the island of Crete.

They were delicious, and fresh, and hot from the skillet. There were spinach pies too, but the cheese were exemplary.

But what I remember about the stop in that little out of the way place where it surprised me anyone could make a living at all running a restaurant, was her Alexander, who ran the restaurant with her. The kindness that coursed between them as they conducted their business and welcomed these American travelers (the only guests just then) and fed them well and smiled to be recommended by their friend in Chania.

The way they endearingly and enduringly (in a way that made me ache) loved one another.



Here's Kochilas' recipe for that cheese pie:

1 cup sifted all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup warm water
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup grated feta cheese

1. In a medium-sized bowl, sift together flour and salt. Make a well in center and add warm water and 2 tablespoons olive oil. Mix until a dough forms and knead in bowl for 5 to 7 minutes, or slightly longer, until dough is smooth and silky to the touch.

2. Divide dough into several balls, and roll out each on a lightly floured surface to a 1/2-inch-thick circle a little smaller than the base of the skillet. Dot with feta, fold into a crescent, and flatten with rolling pin or fingertips to a circle about as large as the base of the skillet. Heat remaining 1/4 cup olive oil in a large heavy skillet. Fry until golden brown, flipping to cook on both sides. Repeat with remaining dough.

3. Serve warm.

speaking of lumbering apes

Film: Eadweard Muybridge
There’s a brief piece in Science this week about bouncy legs -- how the calculus predicts that locomotion on stiff legs is most efficient and yet all of us -- and small critters especially -- bounce about when we move.

A new computer model nails the reason why:

Integrative physiologist Monica Daley of the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) in Hatfield, U.K., had observed how adeptly the guinea fowl, an African bird known for its running skill, negotiated sudden drops and other obstacles. She wondered how the shape of an animal's body and the nature of the terrain -- details left out of earlier simulations because they're difficult to model -- would alter the models' predictions.

So she and RVC colleague James Usherwood devised a computer model that didn't sidestep the complexities of animal motion. Instead of attaching legs to an idealized point with a certain mass, the new model linked them to a bouncing body -- the seesawing guts and other tissue an animal carries as it moves -- and set them on an uneven course.

As Daley expected, the less-idealized runners fared better on compliant legs. The spring in their step offset the bounce of their bodies, resulting in a smaller energy cost. "That's interesting and quite novel," says biomechanist Manoj Srinivasan of OhioStateUniversity in Columbus, who was not involved with the research. [1]

This is a lovely nod to the impact of terrain on our evolutionary development and only adds fuel to my long simmering theory that we are born and made and shaped by place; that each of us carries our own terroir and inherits some from those who came before us.

That, like wine, we are seasoned by our soil.

It also reminds me of a conversation I had with my dad when I was small and we were navigating the precarious paths of Mesa Verde. I was terrified. “Walk like an Indian,” he told me. “Bounce a little bit.”

I don’t know where he received this intelligence (it well could have been while he was rambling through the desert with Native American friends in search of peyote buds; it may have come to him after they were consumed; it was probably from the pages of a book) but it turns out it works. I deployed it at Mesa Verde -- with success -- and I've found whenever I’m uncertain about my footing on rough trails that exaggerating the spring in my step gets me through the worst of it (with some adjustments in the presence of scree).

Works on mountain bikes, too.

It’s counter intuitive, because when fear settles in while walking the cliff’s edge the instinct is to go rigid and inch your way along in terror. But it's also old news, isn't it: like the drunk who emerges unscathed from the crash with the upright toppled and dying around him, or the reed that bends in the wind.

It's the pliable who survive.


[1] Gisela Telis, Why Bouncy Legs Work Better, Science 23 March 2010

p.s. the apes are still lumbering for a little while longer yet »

a clean well-lighted place

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

William Shakespeare, As You Like It
Act II, Scene VII, lines 163-166

Once my grandmother knew she was dying (once we all did) she wanted pictures. She pantomimed holding a camera to her face and releasing the shutter. She gestured for those of us in the room to draw near -- there were many in the room, often, coming for a visit, knowing it was goodbye -- to stand close and pose.

I held up my holga and pretended to click. My aunts were better at it -- they really took the photos. I should have but couldn’t. I couldn’t bear to see her there, dying. She looked other worldly, and nothing like herself, and yet: she was entirely there. And wholly her own.

It was hot in Seattle this last July, almost unbearably so, and we spent much effort trying to keep her cool with washcloths and fans because the facility where she was staying wasn’t air conditioned. Few older buildings are, in Seattle. There really isn’t a need. We pulled the drapes against the bright sun so that it wouldn’t bake the room to a fever. Compounding the problem was her own internal combustion; the body heats up as it makes its final passage, like a rocket ship exiting the atmosphere.

For many hours I sat beside her as she slept. Tried to work. Tried to read. Found I couldn’t. Mostly I gazed at her, my thoughts inarticulate, my emotions as high as the heat.

There was one moment in all those afternoons (I can't remember which one) in which the light was just right and she rested quietly, having just had a bath. I worked up the courage to take a few photographs in that well lit place, feeling awkward and strange, but knowing I had her consent. Knowing I would never photograph her again. Knowing this would be the final roll.

road rat

road rat
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

In my memory our VW camper was vast and magical. It smelled of vinyl and metal window screens and orange juice in a carton that my mother pulled from the small fridge behind the front seats. The yellow plaid curtains lifted on the hot breezes of summer and I longed to sleep in the popup bunk that my sister claimed by right of primogeniture.

I can’t recall if I ever actually sat on the thin foam of her little cubbyhole that rose over the roof of the bus like a crow’s nest peering out over strange seas; I remember only that she meted out peeks to me as I stood on my tiptoes, all curiosity and tense tendons, before she decided that was enough I had to go now, to play elsewhere with my Barbie in the strange wilderness where we had dropped anchor, to load her long hair and legs and her fashion sunglasses into her red convertible and dream of racing along the open road.

lakeview

When I was at Lakeview Cemetery in Seattle over the summer, collecting the rough temporary markers that have long marked my family’s graves, I took out my holga and wandered a bit. As I’ve mentioned I used to walk here a lot when I lived a short distance away. These aren’t all of my favorites, but they’re a few.



Grandfather cedar. Easily the most magnificent tree in Lakeview, a cemetery that is littered with magnificent trees. Old growth. Sits on the crest of the second hill.



The Rhodes. This small charnel house (can I fairly call it that?) matches the department store that the Rhodes built in downtown Seattle. That department store later became Frederick & Nelson and is now Nordstrom. The Rhodes also built a Greek revival home along 10th Avenue, just down the street from here. All three structures match.

My grama pointed this out to me on one of our many visits to Lakeview together.



Bruce and Brandon Lee, unquestionably the most popular denizens of Lakeview Cemetery in Seattle.

They’re rarely without a visitor or two, and their graves are covered in coins and flowers and notes.



A pioneer. Nestled near Henry Yesler and Princess Angelina. Otherwise unmarked.



Chief Sealth’s (aka Seattle) daughter Princess Angelina is buried under a rough stone near “her good friend Henry Yesler” as her marker reads. When I was a kid we lived along Angelina Avenue in Suquamish, just off Agate Pass.



The poet Denise Levertov's grave. I've written of this stone before »

agate passage

I lived here once.

In this small pocket of place
capped by our rental shack
at the crest
buttressed by the boathouse
at the bottom

gapped by a steep incline
where the tips of the tall grasses
heaved with spit bugs
in the Summer

large white wet loogies
that smeared and burst
against my leg as

like a capsule called to splashdown
I catapulted to the sea

here I am again. now.
the tide is high
the Sound has pulled in her skirts
and the rocky shore remains
maybe a yard wide for walking
a thin path of passage
that after half a mile (I guess)
dissolves to sand, grows wide

I was small then and knew the distance
as Suzie’s house first (the trampoline!)
and then the wide open stretch that
became the path to Richie’s place

Sealth knew it too, this place
where now the massive cedar
rest like errant detritus

soft from the saltwater
limbless from the efforts
of lumberjacks

the Longhouse was here
warmed by towering fires
the congress of commerce
consanguineous and carnal
heated conferences. confidences.

I wasn’t going to Richie’s place today.

The tide was high, just shy
of the soft silver wood of the
deck and I lay my belly
against the boards

to listen to the water drum
in that small space between it and me

the barnacled legs of the dock
(encrusted like armature, impenetrable)
wake to the waves, and then
(I came to expect it, I came to see it)
they roll back their lids
like observatories to the night sky

and then, unearthly, they
extend their tendril tongues
to lap and feed

a soft undulation
that looks all the world
like Armstrong taking his first
uncertain steps
on the Moon




p.s. The place I mean »

herein to pass without delay or hindrance

The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection.

This is my second passport, ordered in in 2000 to replace one issued in the early 90s and then stolen just as we were crossing into the new decade. I was the kind of skinny then that you get when you’re in the middle of a divorce that you didn’t see coming.

But should have seen coming.

You can't see the knot in my stomach but it was there, and stayed with me for a good couple of years. Maybe three. I’m fatter and happier now. (And no: you can’t see my new passport pic. It’s miserable.)



This one is heavy on Central America -- Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador -- and light on other International destinations, although Dublin’s in there along with Osaka and a brief week in Paris (with an overnight in London).

The one that was stolen was littered with backpacking trips and otherwise to Greece, Norway, Paris, Thailand, Singapore and London.

It’s been too long since I’ve spent any real time in London.



Which is why I’m shipping this one off today, seeing how it expires in March and I plan to be in London just after that.

Wanted a snapshot before it goes. I hear the new design is hideous, and I don’t want to forget what American passports looked like before they went mental.




updated: just penciled in a couple forgotten -- but how could I forget Thailand? and Singapore? oh. right: finally trips in the final days of a dying marriage.

on remembering

In 2001, while conducting ethnographic research in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, I spoke with the son of a local traditionalist priest regarding his ancestors who had founded certain ritual prayers and practices performed during Day of the Dead observances in the community.

During our discussion, I showed him a photograph of the principal elders of the town taken by Alfred P. Maudslay in the nineteenth century. He told me that these men were well known to him, although they had died long ago: “We all know them. They still visit us in dreams and in person. We know their faces, they are still very powerful -- the soul of our town. These people live because I live, I carry their blood. I remember. They are not forgotten.”

In highland Maya languages, the word na’ (to remember) also means “to feel,” or “to touch.” To remember someone who has died is to make them tangible and present to those who carry their blood.

Allen J. Christenson, Dancing in the Footsteps of the Ancestors

temporary markers

This is where Corinne is buried. She was my grandmother’s older sister, a marvel on the violin, who attended the Cornish School of Arts (just down the road from where she lays now) on scholarship (her family was not the sort that was able to afford tuition).

She died when she was 8 years old of meningitis. Her family buried her in the Spring rain of 1925. My grandmother was 7 when she stood beside her sister’s grave.

Seven years later they buried Ingebor, my grandmother’s grandmother, at the far opposite edge of Lakeview Cemetery. (Only the rich have the luxury of family plots.) There as here the ground is thick with paupers under pauper’s stones, all of them invisible. Rough cinder blocks with the names and dates of death roughly stamped in them. The birth is not noted, and if you want to see the stone at all you need a plot map and a trowel or you ask the nice man at the office to bring out a shovel. This is because the headstones of the poor are not maintained on the regular maintenance rounds and the sod soon reclaims them.

I can verify that there are dozen stones that run below those two large slabs from here all the way to the fence that edges the property close by. I can verify this because I dug them all up one wet Spring day with my trowel. My grandmother sat nearby offering color commentary, darkly wicked and witty, words I thought I could never possibly forget; words I wish I had written down because, of course, I’ve forgotten them all.

But not how she made me laugh, and how she sat there watching me work, a far away sadness in her eyes beneath the laughter; a faint hope that we would find what we were looking for; a set jaw that was prepared for disappointment.

I wish I could describe the light on her face when we finally found the stone.

This is where I asked them to lay the new stone this Summer, as Grama lay dying across town. The man at the office (his last name was very Guys and Dolls -- something like Detroit) was a bit baffled by the request as he ran the calculations; frustrated that the plots were far distant from one another (they wouldn’t be able to share a stone); graciously offering to run the numbers for children’s headstones (they’re smaller, less expensive); pointing me to the standard issue granite.

Still, as he punched the numbers into his 10-key and gave me the result he said: “There it is. I mean: that’s a trip.”

He didn’t mean a groovy trip. He meant: you could take that money and go to Hawaii.

The stones were installed within a month’s time, and I stopped by to see them when I was in Seattle over this last weekend. They’re simple: I asked that they be carved verbatim to their temporary markers. I requested no ornament.

I simply wanted them to be seen.




p.s. The original markers? I had them shipped home. They’re in my backyard, under the big bluestem grasses.


Update: I posted an annotated map identifying Ingebor and Corinne's plots, along with a few others »

poppies

a found poem

Other wars have happened since.

Only when they passed 100
under gentle nudging
did they break their silence

The words tumbled out then

Mr. Allingham misstepped
into the vile hole
where he could feel
against his groping hands
the floating carcasses
of rats and parts
of human bodies

Mr. Patch in his nursing home
saw the linen cupboard light
flash on

and cried out

He thought it was the shell
that killed three of his mates
leaving nothing to find
and had sent into his abdomen
a jagged chunk of shrapnel

cut out
without anaesthetic
four men holding him down

Both men remembered the mud

sticky gluey mud
mud crusted with blood

in which men and horses drowned

In old age he visited the battlefield
now tided and grassed over
staring out from his wheelchair
he murmured

Mud. Mud. Mud.

Found in From Memory to History in the 17 December 2009 issue of the Economist, concerning the deaths of the last two surviving veterans of WWI.

in search of memory

Please come to a theater near me.

Please.

btw: Eric Kandel's book, In Search of Memory? Brilliant and a pleasure to read.

daddy walked in darkness

Photo: Me & my daddy on a family camping trip in Vermont. I was probably three.

The mother of my high school boyfriend was the first person to call me a nomad. J told me about it later, saying she remarked it was a wonder I was so normal, seeing how I lead such a nomadic life. I was a high school senior then, and I had attended twelve different schools, only a small fraction of which were in the same school district.

We were the renters on the block; the kids who were always a little unkempt. I learned in awkward and sometimes embarrassing ways that we were different from the kids who rooted long and hard in a single place and all knew each other from Kindergarten; learned in bright hot flashes that we were the transient ones.

But being the new kid in many lonely lunchrooms gained me the skill of knowing always how to be anywhere, easily. How to make friends; how to be the first to say hello. I suspect it’s also the root cause of my persistent solitude and my wandering. Never having a place to settle and be easy in your skin means it’s best to keep moving.

I know now that our curious habits were my father's doing. At the time I assumed no agency -- that was just how things were. Always. Predictably. Now that I’m grown I have a heart full of theories about why we were on the move so much, but this post isn’t about what was missing, or about what gnawed through the electrical lines in the dark; this post is about what made it all okay somehow.

I suspect the music had something to do with it; somehow managed to anchor it all, somehow produced in all four of us kids a solid center to start from and make our way in the world with some kind of certainty that what we were doing was all right.

The music was always there, and the music was always home. It was there when friends gathered late around the table, or when my dad let us come with him to the studio. It was there when he picked up his guitar, whether an emotional storm had just blown through the house and throats ached from the yelling, or we were just floating collectively on a the sweet tide of Sunday morning.

I still feel it every time my daddy picks up his guitar and plays. Felt it when he strummed just a few fragments over Christmas; felt it when he played for the first time after his coma, after he came back from the dead, when he was home at last and I handed him a rental six-string on the doctor’s prescription, who said it would help the neurons destroyed in the accident wire back up again.

There is something inarticulate in a tune, when it's shared and when it's authentic, that says: it’s okay to search this thing out, to figure out for your own self what it all means. When the music's playing there's an unspoken invitation to ride it, it’s yours; and there's an unspoken understanding that the ones playing with you will keep you company, ride right alongside, and find their own measure.

Where everything is all right.

A note about the clip: My dad recorded this a long time back when he was recording and promoting and producing for Jerden Records in Seattle. It's shown up on a couple of compilation CDs in recent years, but it's impossible to find a shareable clip online, so I patched together this brief video with Apple's iMovie program. I'm still a newbie at the app -- I prefer Adobe Premiere but my PC hard drive combusted and there's no getting at my installation -- so regrettably, until I can figure out how to override the time constraints, all I can offer you is a one minute clip of a three minute track. Of my daddy. Walking in darkness. (It's an old blues cover -- I'll see if I can hit him up for more info about the song's history and the recording itself.)

p.s. My grama, my father's mother, hated this song -- in a what-will-the-neighbors-think kind of way.

me & my bompa

Getting baptized.
And loved.

I've never seen this shot before -- my little brother (right. too old to be little. but he's still my little brother.) just posted it to Facebook.

See that grin on my Bompa's face? That's how you know you're with family.

Happy Birthday to me.

something I regret

there's a lot of orange juice in greece
Originally uploaded by lisachan81

On my last day during a trip to Greece a long time ago, following my illegal activities on Kos, I wandered around the Plaka in Athens before catching my flight home.

I passed a Greek Priest in street vestments. He had a kind face and we exchanged smiles. I turned into a music store and exited a short while later to find him waiting for me. He asked me, in Greek, if I would buy him an orange juice.

I understood him perfectly (I had been studying modern Greek) but I pretended I did not, mostly because I didn't understand why a kind Greek priest would ask me to buy him an orange juice. And it frightened me.

I shook my head and continued on. He looked sad and mystified.

His memory will sometimes materialize for no good reason; a regret that nags at me like his unslaked thirst.

and to think I saw it on mulberry street

I took this shot from my hotel room in Manhattan three blocks away and one day before that plane touched down in the Hudson River.

I was presenting in the same hotel the afternoon that it did, just before the news came in and the room started to buzz, and then later that evening I got the job of closing the bar bill, so I never got to step outside to hear the sirens in the street and see folks walking quick to the river bank, craning their necks to get a look at the miracle of a planeload of people standing in the cold water on the wings of the craft. I never got to see what I could see.

Maybe if my head hadn’t been pounding after everyone else went home and I retired to my room to order room service and work on a slide deck for the next day’s meeting, maybe I would have stepped out into the street to hear the quiet city silence that settles in after the wondering, after the what do you know about that, after the parade has passed, the lion tamer has gone, and the dustman sweeps the street.

twinning

Meet my wet dream (every girl should have one): Twin poets from Portland. One “hard edged and tough,” “something of the pugilist”; the other “lush”, “Nureyev--each movement articulated”.

Matthew and Michael Dickman, profiled by Rebecca Mead in Couplet: A tale of twin poets in the 6 April 2009 issue of the New Yorker.

I’ve dated a twin and I’ve dated poets, but never all at once.

My twin was the taller of the two, the muscled one, as much as muscle shows itself in the second grade. We were “going steady” which meant at that raw age a few shy glances, a note passed between friends (“check ‘yes’.” I did.), and then nothing.

Did we hold hands? I can’t recall. Eat lunch together? Unlikely. Sit together in class? Impossible.

But his stamp was on me and I was his -- the whole class knew it. My parents did not. Second grade is not an age for going steady. Steve, I think his name was.

There must have been some fond exchange of affection however, because what I remember most was its absence. After a long summer of nothing to do with one another I expected we would pick up where we left off.

We didn’t.

Of our whole history I remember only the way he looked at me when I asked him why, and the disdain in his eyes when he explained: “You used to wear dresses.”


There were several poets, including one who failed in his promise to “teach the wind” my name, but it was only the first who transcended sentiment and burrowed into the hard nut of contention that bound us in perpetual heat. Arguing hours of philosophy and resolving argument in a rough tumble of perfect compatibility (I remember kisses of unique sympathy and thought maybe I imagined it until years -- years -- after we split and he mentioned the same, like mentioning a map lost and with it a whole continent).

We were ultimately undone by his Catholic conscience.

He immortalized the heat and argument into pitch perfect verse, delivered poems to me on carefully copied pages, and then took confession.

An act that wiped him clean, he told me, of our delicious immorality. I remained soiled; still damp from our coupling.

Too soon the burden of my sin got to be too much for him, and it undid us -- along with a larger assortment of complicated conditions.

Years later there would be a sudden brief clumsy moment in the dark when he pulled me close after much waiting and I pulled away from the shock of it. When I said nothing more and left the room. He stayed awhile, until it was entirely clear I wasn’t coming back, and then let himself out silently, closing the door behind him.

(Here is where I feel regret like a slow swelling Tsunami.)

If he wrote a poem about that moment, about the loss that accompanied it, the history that preceded it, the future that never followed; if he wrote a poem I have yet to read it.


Some poems by Matthew Dickman »
Some more by his brother Michael »

the wait

It's not the waiting I mind: it's the wondering if they'll ever come. It's almost certainly residue from a rough patch of my childhood when the grownups were trying to corral the chaos of their lives like water overrunning the tub and they forgot to come for us. After the buses were gone and the other parents had ushered their brood home to warm nests and dinner, I would shrink myself down to invisible in the early evening chill where lonely thoughts ricocheted off the far dome of heaven.

And wait.

pressing

The word specimen doesn't adequately convey the feel of these gorgeous plates by photographer Stephen J. Joseph. Each is elegantly rearranged on the page, caught in its moment of life, and a powerful connective zap moves from Muir to us through these photos of the plants he encountered, described, and collected.

Judith Larner Lowry writing in Orion Magazine about a new collection of the photographs of John Muir's plant specimens: Nature's Beloved Son: Rediscovering John Muir's Botanical Legacy, by Bonnie J. Gisel with images by Stephen J. Joseph; Foreword by David Rains Wallace.

We weren’t church goers when I was a kid, but we knew enough to revere Jesus and John Muir.

Which is almost certainly my father’s fault.

My dad wore thick wool socks that he called his John Muir socks. He taught us early that the woods and the mountains and the rocky shore that limned the Puget Sound were where the action was; that anything else (this house? these four walls?) was artificial; a compromise.

My father’s love of books is why I love books; is why the acoustics of every room in my home are impacted by the soft muffling of pages arrayed against the wall. My father’s love of books gave me always a soft place to fall, a universe that welcomed me, a place where I could sort through the crazies and understand what was sane. I read Mark Twain and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jack London and big stacks of National Geographic just because they were there.

And John Muir.

When my father fell fast into a coma for reasons none of us understood while hiking through Utah’s red rock canyon country, my brothers and my sister and I took turns by his bedside, where we read John Muir to him through the tubes that snaked through every orifice, through the lids that danced from his dreams, through the edema that bloated his body beyond recall.

We read of mountain sides and rock slides and ravines. Of snowstorms and earthquakes and the cooling shade of conifer trees.

Scripture. Story. Salve.

Until he woke, we read.

my brothers

My Brothers.

Delayed in Detroit just now
I called you

First Denver, then Philly.

We shared details
Made plans
Deferred others

And I thought how I wanted
to capture this
full feeling I have
in my heart
when I hear your smiles

How I worry through your stress
your projects
your children
how I beam presumptuously
when it all goes well

Thought maybe I could
trace out the memories
that make us kin

Football tackles
and Fisher Price little people

Dying to the count of ten
(one thousand one, one thousand two)
in neighborhood battles of war

Big wheels and bikes

Your slight frames riding my knees
as I revved and roared speedway sounds
and leaned into the turns
your tiny hands grinding my balled fist
like a stick shift
your feet on my shoulders
(the gas and the brake)

The electric proximity of play

Thought maybe there would
be a way to sketch out
those years when everything
went to hell and we fled the house
each as we could
to find firm earth
to forage for comfort like we’d known
once
when that house was home

But there’s no way, my brothers,
to ink out the ache that remains
when I cut the line and end the call

The fractured terror of missing you always
The rich round way I love you

There’s no way to explain what I mean
when I call you My Brothers.