On the Varied Uses of String

String cheese.  String instruments.  The String Cheese Incident.  Shoestring potato chips.  Shoestring budget.  Tin cans & string.  String me right along.

Few people know it, but a tiny piece of string is instrumental to not only accurately installing a crown over a broken or otherwise damaged tooth, but also to steadily piloting a helicopter.

The former requires a dentist to cinch a pre-looped-&-knotted piece of string around the base of what's left of the newly shaved tooth before the temporary plastic crown is installed.  She does this, one, to ensure that the soft tissue of the gums doesn't relax around the reshaped tooth, & two, to prevent infection of any kind.  Common colors include black.

The latter involves a two- to three-inch piece of string secured to the exterior of the helicopter's bowed windshield along the central seal just about at eye level.  The pilot uses this string as a guide, lining it up lengthwise along the windshield's seal to ensure a steady, & safe, flight pattern.  Common colors include yellow.

It's not often that professions -- hobbies? -- so dissimilar as dentistry & helicopter piloting line up so neatly.  Thank you, small, but mighty, pieces of woven cotton.  Thank you.

Things I Didn't Think Would Happen during My Lifetime

Anniversary by Kris Sanford

(in no particular order)

1. Dippin' Dots
2. Accepting the five Buddhist precepts during a ceremony in which I chanted in Korean even though I had no idea what I was saying

3. Deadwood getting canceled

4. Barack Obama being elected president

5. Barack Obama being elected president for a second term

6. Facing my fear of the ocean, twice in one week
7. Twitter
8. The repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell
9. Skinny jeans, twice in one decade
10. The very real possibility of same-sex marriage being legalized in my home state of Illinois

Drawing the Circle

This is the first fire I ever built entirely on my own.  She'd told me patience & lint.  Dry grass or leaves first, then tiny sticks over it, leaving an opening for the lint.  She'd told me a bundle of wood lashed together with twine wouldn't be enough, & she was right.  She'd told me yes.  Later that evening, over lukewarm beer slugged from sweaty necks, we scanned the dark for a flash of glowing eyes, & listened to how loud late summer silence can be.  When I tossed the twine into the flames, we watched it turn to heat lightning & then, just as quickly, disappear completely.

Watching Me Watch You Watching Me

Lately, I see them in my driveway.  In my front yard.  In parking lots.  In the middle of the street.  In my dreams.

I wish I were talking about birthday cakes or twenty dollar bills, but I'm talking about stray cats.  Lately, they find me like omens I have yet to decode.  And I like to think they know more than I do.  Because, if not, if they don't, then the bell rings hollow.  Then each one is just another lost animal on its way home that'll probably, let's be honest, never get there.

Reason tells me they're not everywhere, that my subconscious mind has drawn a prominent pattern out of an otherwise thin array of incidents.  But muscle memory & my keen sense of hearing tell me otherwise: ears two eager semaphores.  Sometimes, I even hear them mewl at wide but rhythmic intervals through my apartment's single-paned windows when the sun goes down.  Sometimes, I mistake them for infants or young wolves whose voices have yet to rasp & howl.

Just last week, I managed to save a pair of stray cats huddled in tandem beneath the bushes lining my home.  It was a particularly cold day, so much of the ground not covered in snow was covered in a solid, not always visible, layer of ice.  It was evening, the sky drained of all color, & I'd heard some strange, distant crying, as if muffled, but insistent, almost pleading.  To be sure, I'm no bend-over-backward-vegan-red paint-PETA-activist, & yes, these are cats, hardly people, but I figured they must be aching from the cold, &, though I haven't quite been able to make sense of it yet, something instinctual in me responded to their cries.

So I walked downstairs & that's when I saw the two of them curled into one another for warmth, a black & white round-faced younger cat & a gray long-haired older cat, not unlike my own cat, Fen, above.  Noticing me, one or the other of them hissed, & both ran off, the one with the broken leg managing an awkward & labored, obviously pained, gallop reminiscent of Saturday morning cartoons.  While its companion had hidden away, the injured cat scrambled on ice to make her escape.

That's the last I saw of the cat with the broken leg, save the next night, when I gave it some cat food & water after finding it tucked between the shed & the basement window, no doubt making good of the dryer vent for any warmth that might provide.  I trust a police officer found it the next day as they said they would, because I've caught no sight of it since.  At least that's what I choose to believe.

I'd spotted the other cat later that night when I first saw it, &, after a spell of trying to coax it my direction from behind a fence & beneath a neighbor's car, success.  We'd stand outside & sit in my stairwell for a good four hours before a policemen picked her up & took her to a shelter.  Luckily, I managed to avoid any scarring on my lip from where the cat, startled, had scratched & drawn blood.  But I do have a small ghost of a scar on my left hand.  She did manage to leave that.

And tonight, walking down the library's stone steps with a load of books in my arms, I watched as a full-bodied black & white cat pranced across the street & into an alley.  I followed him for a bit, but no amount of calls or soothing words brought him to me.

I suppose that's the lesson, then.  I certainly don't like it, but, try as we might, there's a limit to our ability to control another being's reality.  We can only do so much.  So we better make sure that what we do really counts.

Forgive Me,

but this NASA satellite image is beautiful.  More here.

Rapture of the Deep

I have never felt so alone as when I swam the milky blue depths of the Atlantic.  Each breath was labored, intentional, each movement calculated but entirely guided by instinct.  It was as if I were made for this heavy, otherworldly lilting, as if the water held inside my body was relieved to finally be reunited with its earthly counterpart.  My wetsuit weighed 2 pounds, & the weights lashed snug around my middle added another 10, making me a more substantial version of myself in a land shy of solid ground.  What I remember is coral, so much coral, my mother swimming beyond arms' reach like I'd never seen her move before, the pink translucence of jelly fish & how they float, effortlessly, like tissue paper riding the back of the wind. The angels that circle the deep circled elsewhere that day. What remained was the thrill of doing something I'd been too afraid to do for as long as I can remember.   That, & the tremendous, crushing, euphoric silence of, finally, letting go.

Ekphrasis (n.)

Exhausted Globe by Robert ParkeHarrison

Is the globe exhausted, or the man?  And, where is the globe, why is it rusted & haphazard?  Who holds on to whom with both hands?  Or, is the man sleeping, lashed in tight by carefully tied knots of cloth?  And, if so, who tied him there?  Did he go willingly, or was there a struggle?  Did he cry out?  Is he dreaming?  What would happen if the globe began to roll?  Is the man holding it up, or is it holding him up?  Is he tired, do his muscles ache?  Is he really quivering with fatigue?  Can a globe really be exhausted?  Isn't the man the one who's exhausted?  Is exhaustion always such a bad thing?  Doesn't sweat mean something has just happened?  What do you have to hold onto?

Anthropomorphization (n.)

Nocturne in Blue and Gold--Southampton

by James Abbott McNeill Whistler

I know prose poems are born into this world and walk around on their own legs.  I know this.  And I'm ever grateful.

But some books of non-poetry make it awfully difficult to resist the urge to reach down deep into the narrative & extract something resembling a prose poem, both hands gleaming when held up to the light.

I'm thinking of Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, J.P. Rosenthanl's Elena of the Stars, Tove Jansson's The Summer Book, Adam Rapp's Nocturne, David Guterson's East of the Mountains, Dorothy Allison's Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, even Thomas Lynch's The Undertaking: Studies from the Dismal Trade.

I'm thinking genre, limitation, a rusted wire fence strung up around a field overgrown with wildflowers & prairie grass.  I'm thinking borderland.

Exhibit A:

"The piano doesn't sing.  It sobs.  It aches without release.  Like a word that can't wrench itself from the throat.  Like an alkaline trapped in the liver.  Even one note.  A C-sharp.  The death of a small bird.  An F.  A stranded car's horn bleating for help on the highways.  The piano has permanence.  A factual permanence.  You walk into a room and there it is, in all its stoic grandeur.  It has omnipotence.  It waits for you without pursuit.  The hulking, coffinlike stillness.  The way it comes to know your touch.  Like a lover's private indulgence.  A kind of glacial intimacy.  A cold, sexless knowing." -- Adam Rapp, Nocturne

How Do You Apologize?

Morning Dove by Trish Carney

It's a very good question.

Sometimes the world gives us everything at once: suffering, beauty, wonder, joy, discomfort, pleasure, sorrow, anger, fear, longing, insight.  But often, when this happens, we can't bear to sustain our gaze, at least not for very long.  We feel both whiplash & release, & are left balancing, wanting to be alone to make sense of things before telling a friend about it, if we tell anyone at all.

These are the experiences -- the encounters, really -- that take us right up against who we are.  The encounters that send us into our most insistent silences, & our most profound moments of expression.  These are the encounters that liven us.

Trish Carney's series of photographs How Do You Apologize?, featured in the November/December 2006 issue of Orion, is kind of like that.

Cairns (n.)

We climbed until the August sun fell behind the rock that looked like a burial mound, the whole valley cast in a gauzy, twilight shadow. It wasn't enough that we'd climbed from sage brush to high desert air on only a fistful of crackers & a liter of water each, stopping to snap photos of each other posed as strongarms high on the rock; that we'd weaved through agave & stone on low gear & high speed, the mountain bike's suspension a pleasure all its own; or that the air out there was spiked with piñon & juniper & mesquite. What we craved was sunburn & muscle ache, the weight of our packs on our back, a little fine red dust permanently staining our shoes. Even now, at 27 and 30, I still call you little brother, & you were beside me that day, wide-eyed & sweat-stained, a pair of desert pilgrims we two, straying from the trails just long enough to prove we could. As you climbed to heights I'll never see on the other side of this outcropping, I gathered large flat stones the way I gather dreams -- full throttle, without question, damn lucky to remember them the following morning.