Traveling with Crows

Revisions on a Sunny Morning

A murder of crows assaults the pecan tree.

Steady, they deliberate, attack the nuts,

replace the space an ordinary nut

falls through to muddy ground, treat

the delicious interior pulp as gold

mined from the highest branches laced with frost.

Crows fall through my windowpane at angles,

springing up later as marionettes;

dance down, and then again rise up, accost

the still point furrowing my quadrangle,

black curliques in a paragraph vignette

riding the blackness of the deep frost.

Cold chair, light from the window, wish for wings.

The pace of crows is exactly what it is.

Office Windows

Cold Sunday in the office, snow piling up outside, the vision of tiny hands touching the flakes for the first time, nostalgia.  I call my son.  He says it's not snowing there.  All day, I drift into the window pane between tedious computer work.  The fight to stay alive in the human realm.  Feeding the soul requires a little dip and snuff -- I peruse the bluegrass postings on youtube, listen to songs in between posting grades.  My feet never warm.

Sundays too, I get up early.  The dog at my bedside, the reminders of the way into the wilderness.  For a Sunday or two, I have to check back, lean into the blinking cursor and find the snowflakes' envy, the warmth of a rapt attention to detail.  Time skips toward darkness.  I drive to Raley's to buy some chicken for dinner.  Baking it with garlic and rosemary, walking the dog in evening snowfall, the crunch underfoot, sensing the pierce of stars around the billowing gray curves of clouds, I find the slight inclination of spirit.  This is all there is.  I could walk until midnight if there was somewhere to go.

The chicken won't wait; the oven is on.  I have to press on past the lighted alleys and decorated homes in midwinter glamour to find the flavor full and sweet inside.

Writing Gonzo

I should say that I teach writing.  That disclaimer allows me to admit I haven't read anything interesting lately.  Although the writing I read is summarily more proficient than any of it was, say, ten years ago, the overall proficiency pronounces apathy in slow tones and predictable syntaxes.  The subjects stray sometimes into the range of mighty pit bullian struggles in suburban backyards.  Just yesterday, within the city limits, a grandfather shot a neighbor's pit bull at the fenceline.  Each member of the pit bull's family claimed she was something other than a pit bull -- a rat terrier, a lab mix, part boxer.  That fact alone, though not highlighted by the ever-correct journalist who merely reported the details, reveals the truth, that the dog was mighty vicious, and we're all better off now that she's dead.  Simply put, each family member proclaimed her "not vicious," but since they each had a different story about her breeding, the tendency to exaggerate the truth cannot go unnoticed.  But the sentences and the scene were drawn with the bland perfection of a paragraph with a topic sentence.  I read the story over coffee, recovering from my dreams.  Before I went to bed, I watched Hunter S. Thompson in the documentary, Gonzo.

Wouldn't it be something, to watch someone tense at a typewriter?  For real?  Just that, the mere act of awaiting genius, tossing out wild hours of television viewing to seek some fine verbiage, would pepper my landscape with semiautomatic thrills.  I guess I have to move in with Jimmy Buffet and order steady margaritas and cocaine.  Hunter S. Thompson was a bit more complicated than drugs and alcohol, according to the movie.  He was all about the story.  And some of him missed the best of stories -- he seemed to be a man in pieces by the end of the documentary. 

I thought how so like me, he must have been out of step with contemporary life.  People I know would be hard-pressed to comprehend his motives for filming a gangbang by Hell's Angels, let alone writing sentences about the men behind the curtain.  I get the sense that he wasn't happy about those bikers and their drift and paunch, their tongues.  Yet he wrote them down.  Deviance interested him.  He made an art of it. 

I used to teach his essay, "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved."  Some who read it loved it.  The main impact of the essay, however, became some fascination with the woman who assigned it as reading in a college course.  Gonzo journalism doesn't have meaning in the current web of pop culture iconography.  Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan are not deviants.  They embrace common culture.  Irony is almost completely beyond their comprehension.  They take off their underpants and get out of limos because someone has a camera, not because they are making a statement about inhibition; and they are uninhibited because they are uncouth, not because they are wise.  Hunter S. Thompson, crazy wisdom, you are missed.