More rambles.


After a morning and early afternoon of reading and writing in bed, cup of coffee at my side, I finally emerged at midday to wash dishes and begin to make plans for the evening. Just when I thought I knew what I was going to be up to, my excellent friend showed up at the back door and invited me on a long walk. And so I went, and gathered more things, more shadows and shapes and shafts of light. My favorites all came from this one plant, early in the walk:


We were bedeviled by small children on smaller bikes; we gave the dog water from a squeezy sport bottle; we stopped for long breaks on the trestle bridge over the autumn-shallow river. We returned to Gambier in the near-dark. The dog collapsed on the floor. The night grew darker and cooler around the warm house where we all sat, together, catching the little breather our break has brought us.

Spots of dusk.


The afternoon hours were glorious and sun-mellowed for another day in a row. The landscape's palette deepens day by day--though, I'm so happy to say, we are not yet done with flowers. ("Aren't they beautiful?" the woman who got out of her car as I perched beside this flower said. "They're called mallow. I have them in my yard." In Gambier, people will offer you random thoughts like this.)


I continue to try to get pictures of our trees commensurate with their blazing. Partly for this purpose, and partly to see what I could see, I headed down the hill to the environmental center just before dusk.


The closer I got, the better the sights became. There were flying things (see the geese? at first they did not honk, and they were so far away):


I cast a shadow as long as the hill's highway is wide. By the time I hit the bottom of the valley, I had lengthened out my stride and fairly flew to the prairie space where I could wander along the path in the shoulder-high plants. And that's when the night grew interesting indeed.


Walking the four-foot cut through these stalks and stems, I realized I was dipping through pockets of radically different temperatures, warm as if still sun-warmed one moment, then chill with the coming night the next. Small birds took the air, startled at my approach. The night insects shrilled and whistled slowly; their sheer, continuing number surprised me. Occasionally, I would find myself about to walk face-first into a living constellation, a silent swarm. Without my having planned it this way, it became a walk for finding final flowers and silhouetted seeds, an irregular geometry of passage.


I am meditating on a lecture I'll deliver here next week, and meditating on the lecture is helping me think about how a walk like tonight's works as meditation for me. A camera in the palm of my hand fragments what I see into individual shots, certainly, but it also makes what's in those shots visible to me with a different range of patterns and meanings than when I apprehend it as something that will have continued existence only in my memory, or in my words. Having traced barns and flowers for so much of the spring and summer, I find myself collecting seeds and fruits now. Tonight, I think I was also collecting darknesses, trying them on for size, thinking about how the last ten weeks of our slide into the dark of the year will feel. As I walked back up the hill toward home, the eastern sky was its late-dusk deepening pastels, and the sun was well gone already, though it was only 7:15.

It is that moment in the autumn, then, when I feel fully that the darkness is coming; this moment comes every autumn, often right around the time the trees begin to reduplicate the sun at midday. Last year wasn't too bad. I'm hoping that this year won't be, either: so far, I seem to continue finding growth, and possibly even being growth itself, even as the temperatures lower and all that has been green shifts to every shade of brown and gold one might imagine. This year, I'm actually looking forward to watching the patterns around me keep changing into things I not only don't remember but also can't foresee.

The startle of color.

You have to see what we have been seeing today. Sometimes I get stuck under these crabapple trees, as you know. Compare April


to now



And also rejoice with me, please, that the burning bush has become brilliant once more. I have been trying to capture even modicum of this bush's recent splendor, and finally today I was there at the right moment.


This weekend, I suspect I will do some degree of searching for color. With some extra hours at my disposal, I am hoping for an extended prowl, the autumnal version of my walks through the spring.

More regular than clockwork.


In some things I am utterly predictable. Go back and look: nearly every month, you'll find me trying yet again to get a picture of the full or near-full moon for you. Nearly every month, I end up offering something that's been blurred about by some combination of my tiny tremor and my enormous heartbeat (even when I am holding my breath, as someone wise once suggested I should do...). Here's why I keep trying:

A sky with a moon is a larger thing than itself. Clouds interlacing a moon turn a lawn to a plain. A large sky moon gives the clearest light I know. Even students leaving a seminar, fatigued from their three hours of conversation, will pause to remark it. I tried to make a list of my favorite moon-sightings this evening, and it soon became a list of my favorite places to see the moon, and then started to become a list of all the times I can remember having seen the moon. And then I was stopped, because it was time for dinner and a reading. And by the time the reading had ended, there was another skyscene to add to my list: the moon high and small, the sky flung out broad as a sea. It was a moon for which I could not stop until I was walking alone again; I am still shy, sometimes, about breaking my long stride abruptly and taking pictures in the middle of a conversation. My brain does so many things at once now that I worry I may seem rude. I have become ever more the gatherer.

One gathering this week: yet another translation (David Ferry's) of The Georgics, which mean something entirely different to me now than they did even four months ago, when I read them last. Now, as I read them, I cannot stop reading everything to do with farming as a version of everything to do with the vicissitudes and vagaries of the heart:

Not till the earth has been twice plowed, so twice
Exposed to sun and twice to coolness will
It yield what the farmer prays for; then will the barn
Be full to bursting with the gathered grain.
And yet, if the field's unknown and new to us,
Before our plow breaks open the soil at all,
It's necessary to study the ways of the winds
And the changing ways of the skies, and also to know
The history of the planting in that ground,
What crops will prosper there and what will not.
In one place grain grows best, in another, vines;
Another's good for the cultivation of trees;
In still another the grain turns green unbidden. (Georgic I)
And the fall makes its own appearance in Virgil's verse:
How shall I tell of autumn and its changes
And its changing constellations as the days
Grow shorter than they were, and summer's heat
Grows less than it had been? How shall I tell
Of all the things the farmers must watch out for? (Georgic I)
No one can tell of all the things to be watched out for. That's the trick and the truth of the matter. And so I watch out for what I can watch out for, and what finds me is that expansive sky with its cool wise moon.

I was reading fortunes by the moonlight.


Not so long ago, I offered you a line from an early-summer notebook in which I called myself a thing of ceaseless hoping. Tonight I have been a thing of ceaseless impatience. I keep a much-magnified fortune cookie fortune on my office door. "You are filled up with a sense of urgency," it says. "Be patient or you may end up confused." I leave it on the door because I pass through that door so many times each day that I figure eventually the lesson may sink in.

Tonight, working in the officehouse, I heard a light tap on the window. I looked over and saw a taupey moth, its wings flickering like an early film. The moth hovered just beyond the surface of the windowglass, facing into the office, suspending itself tightly in the air. It never landed on the glass, just kept treading the atmosphere just beyond my office. A second moth joined the first, their wings working together in stop-time motion. I watched, trying to make sense--to make a narrative--out of their hovering. The romance plot is a strong one, and so I tried to imagine that one moth was attempting to woo the other. Only I couldn't see which was which. And rather than simply near one another--as if that process could be simple--they would occasionally just collide outright, almost making a little click sound as they hit the window. I watched, rapt, until one finally escaped the seductions of light. And then they were both gone, and I still didn't know why they'd come, or what my office looked like to them, winking their wings just beyond the window, in the no-safety of night.

This afternoon the weather was lovely enough that I ditched my office and worked on the officehouse's front porch. Sometime around 1:30, a stick walked onto the table before me. At first, I thought it was a praying mantis, but it was far too stickish. When it started walking along, I dashed to my camera. I came back just in time to see the insect prospecting my computer


on its way to some other place. I hope he found it and that it turned out to be grand.

Tonight the sunset across the valley was worth my prospecting for.

First sighting, first sighing.

Nothing foretold that tonight's walk home would feel something like sanctified.

I am clearing out the last of the major writing projects I have to complete this week, and so I was out late for my walk home to where I am now still up, late. I have been listening to Deb Talan today and was tempted to slip my earphones back on for my walk through the night, but I have enough nightfear left in me to have decided to forego her for a few minutes. And lucky I did: otherwise, how would I know the slowing and slurring of the crickets still singing in the cold? In August, the insects struck at our ears all day and night with their shrilling. Tonight, I realized how much their sounds have softened, how tender they're getting, how mournfully sweet.

My boots are loud if I'm not careful, so I started thinking out my steps just a bit, trying to keep from crunching and cracking the whole way home. The near-quiet settled me down and back into a conversation I've been trying to have for weeks. In this conversation, there are only two moves: the question "now what?" and the answer "what will be." I have it with myself and with what is not-myself, and somehow it proves calming every time. It was while I was cycling through the conversation, and while I was realizing that the night had grown cool enough to chatter my jaw in the dark, that I heard the first insects trilling and burbling, saw the last light on in a student room, sensed the nearest thing to frost I've felt yet this fall.

And then, just beyond the dormitories at the side of the road, off my right shoulder, there he was: Orion, lying long and low across my eastern sky, walking me home for the first time this year. For this greeting alone, I am grateful to have been up this late. He filled the whole night-blue space between buildings, and then some.

Partway down the block from my house, I realized that a deer had stopped stock-still on the lamplit lawn across from my yard. I stopped, too, and we watched each other for a moment, and then I started forward again, walking even more carefully and quietly than before. I murmured to the deer as I murmured to Orion as I murmured to myself as I murmur to you now: good morning, and don't worry: the last thing I would do is get in your way. I only want to whisper good morning and welcome back, night sky and night self. I've missed you so. I'm so happy you're here.

source for tonight's image of the Orion Nebula: NASA.

Adventures in vehicular travel.


To get to Cleveland from Gambier, one generally travels along OH-13 north for about 25 miles, then makes a left turn onto the entrance ramp for the northbound I-71. Yesterday at 3:15 p.m., as I flicked on my left turn signal and started braking for that turn to the interstate, the back left side of my car started making a dramatic clattering and rattling sound.

I may not have mentioned my car much to you before. It's a good, solid, old car: it turned 14 this year, and I've been driving it for 10 of its years of service (though only for 67000 of its 236000 miles). It does everything I could want a car to do, except air condition me in the summer, and I feel pretty much fine about that, given that I don't live in the south.

But I drive my car with the tiniest quiet worry that eventually it will just decide not to run anymore, since cars get tired after all these many miles. And I know the car pretty well, so I have an ear out for things going wrong when I'm driving it.

Which is why, when the rattling started, I thought, "Oh no!" And then, suddenly, "Oh, right." And so I said to my excellent friend, "I'm losing my left rear hubcap." And sure enough, just then, having rolled along the length of the left side of the car, it rolled out in front of us and, with perfect inanimate grace, carried itself straight into the median. "Do you want me to get out?" my friend asked, while I laughed and laughed both at the neatness of what had just happened and at my own relative unconcern about the loss. We were not in anything like a safe place to pull over or cross to the median, and so I said, "No, no, don't worry. It's fine. That hubcap's been getting ready to fall off for ages."

But what I was also formulating, even as I laughed us onto the northbound interstate, was a plan to retrieve the hubcap from its medianal sojourn on the way home today. And so noon today found me up to my knees in median weeds, hiking along in my boots and jeans until I found a hubcap--that wasn't mine! Leaving the Buick's hubcap behind, I proceeded until I found my own, sitting right where we'd seen it come to a stop yesterday afternoon. And within seconds, I having returned to the car with hubcap held triumphantly over my head, we were safely on our way, making jokes about reprimanding the hubcap: "That's what happens when you decide just to run away. You remember this!"

Meanwhile, the car was that extra bit easier to find during our stay in Cleveland, given that, among all its other distinguishing characteristics, it temporarily had its back wheel exposed. In fact, I felt as though this detail made it fit in more fully with the neighborhood that houses last night's concert venue, which was fairly divey but an excellent setting, so that the show was much smaller and much more crowded (sonically and personally) than the June show in Bloomington. Once again, though, I was all a-grin at the band's obvious dedication to their music and one another. The surprise of the night was finding out that Sally Ellyson is eight months pregnant (and lovely), which means that she was already well into her pregnancy when I met her in June. And one thing this means, dear readers, is that if you're inclined to see Hem play in the near future, you might want to do so relatively soon...

The other amusing thing that happened: just before Hem came on to play, the woman behind me tapped my shoulder and said, "Excuse me, but is your necklace a Superhero Designs piece?" Because it was, I replied in the affirmative. We Hem people must be running in the same online circles.

Because I was driving and someone else was in the car, I did not take pictures on this trip. Not taking pictures yesterday was no loss, but today dawned sunny and clear and autumnally beautiful. But even I have my limits. And what that means is that you have to extrapolate from yet another picture of Gambier leaves and imagine the golds and reds that are falling in all around us here in mid-Ohio. I'll proffer some more examples tomorrow; another walk to the cornfield across the highway might be in order, later on (though "later on" is having to become earlier and earlier, I've suddenly realized, as we start losing our light more and more swiftly, with this slip into October).

Not just because I'm off to see Hem later.


Today is the day: after I complete three writing tasks (because everything happy in my life these days seems to require at least two or three writing tasks), I leave for Cleveland and the Hem concert happening there--which will mean that twice this week I'll have gotten to hear performances of art I know and love well, which means (as if I didn't already know) that I'm blessed, and how. If you have not yet developed your own fondness for Hem, you may wish to do so now, here; some of the songs on the new album are mightily lovely (though others, alas, leave me a bit cold). I have high hopes of returning to Gambier with at least a t-shirt and another poster. I have become such a groupie, with Hem and others.

My ardent soul leaps up: I feel little embarrassment about saying so. The weather is rainy and blechhy (today's picture of these hallucinatorily lovely leaves, close and not-close, red and not-red, is 24 hours old as I post it), and my old, limp-along furnace made a wrong smell when I turned it on for the first time this season last night, leading me to think that it would be better off for now. Thus I am curled in my bednest, in my paisley pajamas, with my tweedy green cardigan on, feeling glad for the invention of polyester super-warmth. And yet, and yet, I will give you the ending of my early fall poem that really is my heart's singing right now. I continue keeping this one mostly to myself. But I'm giving you a taste, because if you're reading you're probably someone I know in some way or another, and you may be happy to hear what's flowering under my fatigue: an at-core content and happiness that's undergirding the various surface things I'm making happen all around me. Know that these lines come just after (surprise, no surprise) lines about birds. Know also that I'm deliberately exaggerative in my similes and my mixed metaphors here; in the working title for this one, I acknowledge myself as an amateur, in an attempt to suggest that I actually do know what I'm doing, to the extent that any of us can:

My laughter is floating like those feathered wings’ riffles;
my joy purrs more plenty than this long path has stones.
And I wave in my waiting like a tree on a shore,
like a slow-budding branch in a sweet swelling storm.
I will whirl giddy beauty like a top on a string.
I will sing to myself until you come with your song.
When I shared this one (in its entirety) with my beloved Brooklynite, she said, "I love that you've written a waltz." Yes I said yes I did yes.

Plethoric and myriadic.


You all should know that one of you reading today will be visitor number 7000 to this ongoing project. Which reminds me of what I forgot to tell you during Sunday's brief celebration of that other numeric milestone: thank you, as always, for being here.

Falling asleep last night, I knew, even from under my layers of blankets, how cold the night was getting: somewhere behind and above my head scritched the scratch of a mouse searching for warmth in my walls. Or perhaps it was a raccoon--which is a story for another day. For now, extricating myself from a warm bed, covered with blankets and books, handily wins the title of project least likely to enthuse, this sun-chilled autumn morning.

Echoes and distances.


Tonight, the mystery of acoustics: how a sound so clearly coming from an airplane above can have no apparent relationship with the space of sky from which it seems to fall. How the eye will try to follow where the ear has already gone, how the eye will seek the one star that's not a star, that instead is moving steadily northward, blinking red and green and shining steadily white in between. How a truck driving down a highway moments later will have red and green running board lights, suggesting the prevalence of patterns that might mean nothing but that you keep seeking out anyhow. How you will rue the sense that six months ago, in your hands those red and green lights would have become something much more than themselves, before your attention started to diffuse and fall away. How you reassure yourself that you will be able to make that turn in your thoughts, beyond your thoughts, again--to follow an echo with the eye until it becomes a light that becomes a truck that becomes, say, a latter-day silver fish of thought--though perhaps not for a spell, not just yet, not until you can grapple past the things around you (undergrowths, overgrowths, chokers all) that could care less whether that distant roaring ever catches your ear, much less whether you meet its eye.

Focus. Refocus. Focus.

The rain set in late tonight. Before it broke its clarifying over us, I treated myself to a walk home for dinner, through the warm air, with my camera. And I collected some things for you.


I checked on the bowl-shaped web, only to find it gone and a strange, bunched, thick strand of spiderweb--and a large, multicolored spider--in its place. And it was difficult to photograph, I'll tell you, but eventually that spider and its web came into focus.

Then, it was nearing sundown when I crossed the state highway, heading from the officehouse to my home.


Hawks circled and swooped, catching the sun on their wings' undersides; I thought of Hopkins's "Windhover," my heart (in hiding) stirring for a bird.


And then, the dragon, who has been clamoring for my attention for a long time, wanting to tell you that it's fall:


And then, as I walked back to the officehouse, my belly full of pasta and my ears full of Hem (only three more days until I see them again!), jets overhead, brightly:

Threading water.


If the rain would just fall, the seasons change, the light shine steadily just a little longer, it would be easier to see where threads are being thrown. They are so delicately done, dropping and dripping their way into all the interstices of these days. Not even doubt daunts them. I start to imagine other things being thrown: graces, glances, gauntlets. Gloves, if we still did that kind of thing. Whoever we are. What nets me reliably, night after night, is a tiredness born of too much to do and more tasks joining the queue at each turn. It's not quite blinding, but it is a track-stopping tiredness. It's knocking on the door right now. I think I can hear rain falling behind the leaves that are falling just beyond the cold windows, even though the rain isn't due to start for another day. There's only one thing to say: hello, and welcome, and where have you been, and why are you here. One thing, which translates to: when you see a sunset out of the corner of your eye (because it has tipped the tops of the eastward buildings in red) as you hurry from place to place, do you stop? or do you keep going? Do you at least slow your steps? Do you smile a greeting at that improbable shade of light? Is there space for another thread to catch hold?

Testing, testing, 1...2...300.

There is this challenge:

I have eighteen minutes before I have to be somewhere, and thus an hour and eighteen minutes before I have to start writing a major piece of autobiographical prose that I must finish this week for professional reasons. Which means that, as is too often the case, even a milestone post is going to get squeezed. But here's how it's going to get squeezed: I decided earlier that I would write something tonight about dreams and hopes, in keeping with the revelatory effect this practice of daily writing has had on my life. Lately, I've been listening semi-obsessively to Erin McKeown's song "Air," among whose strangest lyrics are the lines "Hope / it's the one thing science will prove / what you don't have hope for you lose / evolution is what you choose." Now, I know that that's a scientifically bankrupt set of lines. Evolution is absolutely not what we choose; that's the point of evolution. But putting the bad science aside, I think she has a point about not-hoping and losing. So I wanted to write you thirty words each about ten of my hopes. And this truck in the Kroger parking lot this evening encouraged me in my plan:


However, now (especially since I'm wasting all this time telling you what I'm going to do, instead of doing it) I don't have the requisite time to count my words and make sure that there are 300 when I'm all done. So instead, I'm just going to give you ten high-level hopes I'm holding for myself. I'm not wishing for these things. I'm just expressing them in the hopes that having said them aloud will help some of them come to fruition. Some of these are for the next year or so; some are longer-term. I should also note that lots of things in my life are such rock-solid baselines that I have not mentioned them here: I always want to spend more time with my family. I always want to be a better, more reliable friend. These are constants.

One. I want to publish something creative. I have a maelstrom of a book in me; it's coming out in ekes and starts, little by little; I want so much for it to be something attractive to other people once I've crafted it. I want other people to read it and then just want to keep on reading whatever they can get to next.

Two. I want to fall in love with someone excellent who will love me. No more one-sided, unrequited crap; I've had enough of that for a lifetime, I think. I want someone who wants to be in a mutual admiration society with me. I want something ferociously wonderful.

Three. I want to start taking piano lessons again. I quit when I was 13. It was my teenage rebellion. I regret it.

Four. I want to finish my critical book. About this I have little else to say.

Five. I want to start cooking on a regular basis again. I made a start tonight with a huge vat of pasta for the week.

Six. I want to spend some good, long time beside an ocean. Preferably in a building with a sea-facing window and a window-facing desk.

Seven. I want to see a glacier and some mountains. (I am in need of a sublimity recharge.)

Eight. I want to become a homeowner. (This one is a longer-term goal, though not if my neighbor has anything to say about it: he's started pushing Knox County real estate on me this week.)

Nine. I want to read everything. I'll settle for Romola and Proust for next semester, though. Well, no, I won't. But I'll start there and see where else I can get.

Ten. I want to go dancing. This desire is tied up with my second one.

Lo and behold, I've got 300 words after all, according to my word processor. So: that's our somewhat attenuated celebration.

And I'm only five minutes late.

On the eve of 300...


There is this milestone. It is tomorrow, which will yield my 300th writing. I have not made up my mind about how to celebrate. But I will, and you'll be invited. In the meantime, I have my bedtime mug of milk--with honey and nutmeg tonight, because I'm needing a little sweetness--and I'm off to rest up for the occasion.

Another variation on this theme.


There is this woman. She has been waiting in this spot, she thinks, on this ribbon of ground, beside this sweep of water, for longer than she can recall. The sun passes. Her shadow shifts. If she leaves now, refuses to look back, she might be lost for good. She remembers her breathlessness on the tram, coming down to this place, the way her body swayed with the bodies beside her, the bodies she disregarded because of the one waiting for her at that spot, on that ribbon of ground, beside that sweep of water. Now the only body here is hers. Her heart is pounding still. She begins to plan. She needs no god, no myth for this one: she can feel herself changing already, can feel the white veil piled and pinned atop her favorite hat feathering to a plume, can feel what is massing at her shoulders and down her spine, there where her back is strongest from all the living she's done so well these many years. She will become what no one has imagined. She will leave behind this open road, this killing rail, the cold suggestions of this empty boat, these wintersick trees and abandoned shelters. She will transfix. She tips back her head, seeks an image of her longing there in the open sky. She can feel her throat opening, her breast swelling for this swift new song she is coming to be. When she arrives, she thinks, another who has wanted will be waiting. There, her singing will unfurl faster than her finest hope. She dances a quickstep in her leaving, loving the turn of the waltz in her flight.

source for tonight's image: The George Eastman House.

Another way things might be.


There is this man. He has walked to the sea. There is nowhere to sit, and so he stands, here under the wind-bared trees, stands with his arms akimbo (the very word sends his mind roaming on a laugh), stands and watches the line where water meets beach, where water meets water, where water meets sky. He is surrounded by a world of meeting water. When he has met all the meetings before him, he tips back his head, learns the tracery of branch crossing branch below the white sky. Cathedral rib, he whispers. Rood screen. Iconostasis. Somewhere near are rocks, the shore's minor mountains. This place is not that other place: he will tell it by its stars, when they show. For now, the buttresses do not stop flying. Before him space lightens, largens, would become a pale abyss in which he could be lost were it not for that darkness of matter, that branching carving and cradling of openness over the shining ground behind him. The tree to his left and the tree to his right have arched into indistinguishability. He twitches each elbow's arch, remembers how being lost is no unequivocal thing, keeps his feet planted, watches. Above him a knock, the whirring gurgle of a bird he has heard before. He looks, catches the clip of red as the woodpecker--no shorebird, fellow transplant--leaves these shadows to him alone. He stands where he has stood, here where he has walked, here where he sings, sole, and slow.

source for tonight's image: The New York Times.

A way things might be.


There is this bench. It has perhaps been sitting empty for some time now. It is perhaps a place where one might sit alone, might have been sitting alone until the sitting alone grew too stilling and a walking away (also alone) was required. Now there might be a returning to circle a place where one might be considering sitting again. But is still in the process of returning, still eyeing, still circling and considering. It is perhaps a place where one does not know who should sit down first, because it is a place where sitting first and last (or, worse, third) has become one rendition of the unpalatable. And the bench might need to be moved, might need not to face that long line of regular trees (brinked at losses as they are)--might need instead to front extravagant silences, swift quiet fogs, slivers of moon sublimely fragile. It might need to seem so close to the edge of something daringly, delicately lovely that the very ground might no longer seem to be beneath the feet of those who sit there. Instead: simply open darkness, not an abyss but a covering, covering not of fallen red leaves but of impossible stars and sanctified stone and unending space, spooling out and around and over like snareless silk, like the slippingest of song, like serenity, simplicity, the supplest of solemnities. Like some strange singing in a key the ear did not even know it could hear, silking there under and over and beyond the little raspings the leaves make as they fall through space to one another, one by one by starry one.