"Window Shopping for Mirrors"

My yoga instructor may be the only person in the world who can turn a playlist from Loenard Cohen and Victor Jara to Sade and Enya in twelve hours flat. A Friday night alone with my week’s exhaustion opens to a morning hour of performing the gestures mountains and cats, horses, frogs, and even a moment in which I unabashedly imitate a star. Amid breaths and turns and the density of weightless asanas, I recall in that hour a few positive associations: a tea slope in Shimizu, the kitchen of a beloved aunt, and the opening notes to In a Silent Way, track 2, hush.

1

A slim gold is pouring westward down the boat canal, lighting the bolted scaffolding of bridges, illuminating masts and sails, bringing crystal life back to the small wind’s waves and a water it is discouraged to swim. 

2 

It is brightening the rust of Gas Work tanks and awakening thin empty beaches, rolling softly in search of the final West where the value of its coin would at last be appraised. 

3 

Morning here is when light passes waterfalls and ridges and begins to peek around for the Pacific. Its general movement is toward the Sea. But every place it reaches, it explores with no other wisdom than that of a curious child who will one day study science. 

4 

No matter what happens, there will be a morning like an untroubled eye, a bay whose sounds are as tired as every birth, a pathway where runners look for the soul of breathing, and I will drive on until there is no more rumor of night…  

To begin, I live at the suburban edge of the metropolis, on a hill of strip malls, 600-dollar apartments and flat yards. A graveyard and a trailer home, both remembering Jimi Hendrix. And further, separated by gullies, valleys, ravines, more tameless hills lead eastward into the west. Their smoothly curved slopes are thick with evergreens.

This used to be the land of cougars; as things are, a bunny can be seen now and then. Since I no longer live in the city, and generally don’t use a car, I like to take my feet and get myself even further away from it, escaping the ever-more repetitive exploits of civilization, and daring what is left of the pristine. While others drive to far-away locations, park, and set out to walk or jog, I wake up, put on my Brooks Addictions, and slowly gather speed and sense.

Yesterday’s run along the May Creek Valley could have made good photography. Descending through upper class neighborhoods, past large houses of people with a hell of a commute, I found, in a dead end, a brief cement alley declining to a well-trimmed street.

Going on downward, I reached the valley, crossed a creek bridge, verged right and followed a string of long farms winding for miles between the two slopes. Tall trees stood half-way up the broad grassy incline, horses grazing in October air recently cleared of fog.

The horses: earth, sienna, copper, brown and rust. I was above them by the space of a large gutter times two. Within the fences, a calm land, tufts of gorged grass, and piles of the healthiest crap I’ve seen in months. You could smell it, too. It was the smell of unrestrictedness, of air unfolded, breath opening from all ends of the body

A few drab sheds of unpainted wood, rusted farm equipment, long fields surrounded by short barbed-wire fences. The road followed the farmyards, the creek, Squak Mountain rising directly at my side, its trees leaning in and dusting the roadside with yellow leaves. So the road wound in the way of creeks and mountain flanks. At the sound of an engine I’d look back, or skip to the opposite curb, since there was little room for either of us.

Further on there were sidewalks, a streetlight, a one-room café with lamps over dreary, happy faces. A gas station sat over a gully, and in its lot a tall pink coffee cart with Christmas lights, hung with a pitch-black board saying Rosie’s Beans. I crossed a bridge over that imperceptible creek which the poor road was named after, a pedestrian pathway covered with staling moss. It is always comforting to reach these brief intersections that flash in and out of the mind, leaving images of small things you almost wish to be a part of.

In the outskirts of the metropolis, in small towns, it’s more trite, but more touching; in the city I would run past bistro after bistro in which I had never eaten: North 65th Street, say, before the recession, bustling with lovers dressed smoothly in almond, in cobalt, lovely amaranth or immaculate black, feeding each other wine and mozzarella. I never went out to such venues in my early twenties, and there was sadness–and a thrill–in never being a part of that life directly, but moving by it with well-earned adrenaline and peace.

Now, through with intrigue, I was tiring. The knee which cured itself last year was asking me to remember, and the tight sinews rising from them were stiffening with wear, warning of Monday. I was coming back into unfamiliar roads which I knew led to familiar streets, and the novelties began to decrease as I approached a bend.

A faint suspicion of Fall went back and forth through the wind, and I turned back westward, four miles from home.

–Sunday, October 3, 2010

By a series of small leaps, I manage to make it five miles tonight, through moonlit neighborhoods of hill country where I am saved several times from Death by Dog, often by only a single chain link

Keep in mind, this area is a chaos of foxhounds and terriers so lonely they would eat your feet if you let them. The moon burns a hole in a passing cloud. The sky, 7 at night, is still a blue that baby boys would recognize.

In another place I am threatened by a thin wood cow fastened to a mailbox, which nearly takes my ear. Is this a dangerous neighborhood? They say that goats live in the fields.

I remember running once in a foreign country at night, and suddenly hearing a menagerie of animal sounds around me. Only when I got home did I see on the map that I’d been running the parkway through a zoo.

The worst that could happen, and the best, is getting lost. You build your lungs up that way. For ten minutes I lose myself in cul-de sacs, later realizing they surround a dense forest.

I finally make my way back and around them, then turn toward home, covering fine, fresh-laid gravel, moist, moss-filled grass, five-foot sidewalks fronting tall houses, and strips of dirt along the roadside trailing the edge of a long park.

My feet are happy. No matter how the ground changes. Looming above me, one iron tower stretches media wires to another, playing hopscotch with the wind. Or trying to. The wind laughs, rolls once around the wires, turns backward with a tired but knowing glance, and moves on.

–January 17, 2011

Consolidating my well-saved coins
like candy in one pocket,
I started toward the Store,
knowing well
that the thin-haired man,
owner of every chocolate
I knew of in the world,
but who had clearly never
eaten one himself,

would look at me
with the disdain
of a judge before
a lifetime thief,
the seriousness
of an undertaker
regarding a corpse,
the element and aspect
of a statue long betrayed.

Hands folded in, perched
on a stool, he would frown
audibly as I brought each piece
to my inadequate eyes,
stalling a decision
until I had seen each one.
Furled brows would follow me
with merciless suspicion
as I gathered my sugars

color by color.
He’d clear his throat of cobwebs
as I neared the chin-high counter
and placed my meager spoils there.
And finally, if so resigned,
he would accept my nickels
morbidly,
like confessions
arriving years too late.

Her children hate candy
and love chocolate.

At 8 o’clock on All Hallow’s Eve
they get back home,
throw their combined spoils on the floor
and weed out the Hershey’s© and Eightlets
from sticky, depraved things like

Smarties©, Grapeheads© and Jupiter
suckers. They donate this crap
to their toddling, fierce-toothed cousins
(who don’t yet know about
the vile manners of dentists)

and secure their load of sweet cacao
in an unassuming grocery bag 
stashed beneath a stair
that should, if the secret doesn’t leak,
last them all until December.

and remove it, empty its contents

If I could free
the organs from their cage
like so many incongruent birds
imprisoned together, and then
unlock each bone from the next,
clean them, polish them, and
return them to the sea,
I think I would feel alright.

And if on Sunday, meta-ambulating
as open breath
along the shore,
it had all washed in,
I suppose I would collect it
and wrap, click, fasten,
and suction myself back up
again, jog a good ten miles
on refreshed feet, eat,
then lay it all down
in cotton sheets ‘til Monday.

and second, that I was joyriding
at such a breakneck speed
that it warranted a 252-dollar ticket,
an experience which,
now that I am aware of it,
I have decided I do not regret.

I also found out that I have a Florida
driver’s licence, although it is pOSSibly
being revoked, a pretty
damn drastic measure considering
I commited the infraction
only 9 years ago.

“Please detach and return
this portion with payment
in envolope provided.”
I am hereby requesting
that anyone who knows my
address send small donations,
so I can put this poor
252-dollar owing
bastard of a namesake
back out of misery,
returning honor to our great
name, from sea to shining sea.

-Renton, Washington

There are, of course, workers here.

People with compliant and noncompliant mowers, tools rusted in hibernating sheds, and pliant fingers whose smallest grooves will carry red stains for a week. Workers who, without the dignity of minimum wage, a suited gentleman who nods as they clock in on time, or a guaranteed hour to abandon labor in favor of rushing off to television and love-making, nonetheless emerge commuteless into private yards, wearing obscenely practical shorts and sexless visors.

They adore the utter closeness of an outdoors they had barely remembered owning on the other side of their doors–without, of course, a single wall…color rosing and flexing not from an artist’s fingers, like Michelangelo’s hands of God and man tentatively touching,  but from the contact of a stem or branch blooming out of green and tan.

I have nothing to do with any of this, just stumbling by, a person without land stretching half-tired legs and lifting eyes from a week of logging in and out, reckless phone calls and mechanical appointments measured strangely in minutes. It’s rising past 80, a lot of people aren’t home, blackberry vines spill through short fences, I keep going despite a slight tendonitis, looking for what it is I might be looking for. 

Twenty-first and Yesler, a dental clinic, to 23rd & Jackson, an errand in a drug store, 23rd to Judkins, Judkins up east to Martin Luther King Junior Street and down over north to a park with pathways weaving between playgrounds and knolls of grass, tricyclists and pale-legged women reading novels in black bikinis.

King Junior Street down slowly back to South Washington, and South Washington, which is an entirely insignificant street on which it is therefore possible to reside, brings me to Main, then 23rd again, where there is, what else, a coffee shop decked with crazy blue and yellow jazz murals and newspapers fronted with citizens dancing.

For three dollars, I take a seat and take back a few old addictions, noticing how dark it is despite tall columns of well-intended windows, and how the smell of roast coffee compares poorly to that of completely uncooked grass, and how the air inside is completely even, balanced and lifeless without the June breeze, sporadic and soothing…