so how do you live except by not thinking about it too much, if at all, he doesn't say, he does not say to anyone in particular unless he counts. could i be more specific? i look up and see a young woman trotting across the street, her breasts jiggling behind a black blouse, her eyes masked by huge gold rimmed sunglasses, fabulously incognito, hiding in baroque sight. like statues in a courtyard or dancers performing deceptively spontaneous street theater, every single woman on the sidewalk suddenly stops to check their phone. i walked around the block before i arrived, to let my mind taste this morning sky. my legs are tight from walking to & from work all week. it is only slightly cool while the very blue sky promises later warmth. summer has only just begun and i already miss the rain. as i circle back toward the cafe it occurs to me that i cannot remember the last time i spent an entire day outside, outdoors, the so-called natural world, the wild. everything i see here is tamed except the weeds & the raspberry bushes. strange to define what is essentially doorless as outside our doors. a door allows you to both emerge & withhold. open it and you are granted vista, scape of sky & land. could you be out of doors as if you had spent them all like cash? shutless, neither keeping out nor in, and now you have nothing to walk through, nothing to frame your flight from home. you would have no choice but to be always home, entertained by & entertaining creation. a door is also a womb, of course, through which you are born into the world, each time, which makes me wonder if our birth is so traumatic we have to reenact it, again & again, as if we couldn't believe that the world itself was a womb that keeps us warm & fed while we spin through space. for most of my life home was place i could only return to if i was exhausted or driven inside by the elements or by need. this past year i have learned how to be at home after spending most of my adult life rehearsing my childhood escape from its shell of constant crying. an experiment, in a way, in learning how to be with, in learning how to stay, which isn't really something you learn but rather pay attention to, feel the drifting away and in that brief instant, relax the contraction, soften, soften. i always wonder what it is we use to pay, what exactly is attention? and what if you have contracted in a certain way for so long that you don't even realize you are doing it, so seemlessly integrated into the style of your living, even anatomically. last night i watched a movie about a man trying to start a new life, with some assistance, after being released from prison and the connection he makes with his mentor, who was also starting over with a new job in an unfamiliar city after getting divorced. i was struck by how spare their living spaces were, how unhomelike in their strict cleanliness, bereft of sentiment & memory, and how, in the absence of community, we are merely parts fulfilling some function in some larger but not greater machine, rewarded with the slight privilege of consuming in exchange for our toil in the great extraction. there was no meaning. they needed each other to keep themselves from haunting the landscape. on the highway outside the motel there was a long tail studded with red eyes, bleeding beside rows of gas tanks arranged alongside like gigantic rows of aspirin for a land that aches from our too heavy presence.
inside & beside me, a man i do not know is moaning, has been moaning for awhile now, not continuously, but in staccato bursts, punctuating the music & the din of the cafe with his own morse code of pain, a sort of monologue of moan, as if the only thing he could share was his ache which was too great for words. and just outside the open door sits a little dog that everyone wants to pet, without invitation, as it sits there, patiently rehearsing its devotion toward its owner, a young woman who arrives wearing brilliant white headphones & brutally red lips, whose clean white sneakers glow like pure puffs of stormless clouds, sweatered in bold stripes of maroon, white & navy blue, who pauses for a moment just outside the door, as her dog continues to wait, its devotion perfect, a tattoo crawling like a rose bush up her slender tanned leg as she thumbs a device for a tune.
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