Sunday morning melancholy: awake too early with Homer and Plato and Aristotle and Sappho, and now I'm getting that old the-past-is-too-much-with-me feeling again.

Accident Report

Dawn Potter

You know how it is:

tires devouring the coiled road,

one hand on the wheel, bending left,

bending right, slick as a seal; one of those

dawns when grains of fog spatter your windshield

like handfuls of sand, when a monstrous owl drifts

from the invisible forest with a rat writhing in his claws;

when a half-grown buck, leaf-drunk, vaults across the sopping

tarmac like a prince under enchantment; and “Whoso list to hunt,

I know where is an hind!” you cry, but silently, of course, because . . .

because you’re ashamed to mouth a greater poet’s borrowed trappings;

you, with no rights in the matter, mere remote control in fog, ambivalent,

wishful, and cold as well; for all the heat’s in words you were afraid to sing

in earshot of these phantoms—Wyatt, Milton—floating in the vinyl shade,

ready to taunt your match-struck quavering flame. You, not man enough

to warble to an empty car; they, so long dead, still young: still flashing

their brash “So help me, God, an immortality of fame.” They played

their necessary cards: not only intellect and drudgery and grief,

wordy sleight-of-hand and rage and loving, probing curiosity,

but plain obnoxious gall. A poem, a stiletto in the back.

And you, alone and lonely, in your blundering car,

afraid of some fool prince with the temerity

to leap into your high-beam’s timid dark.

As if that murky light could be his star.

[first appeared in Locuspoint (2011); forthcoming in Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2013)].

Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son is a sad and beautiful book. That was my reaction when I first read it a decade ago, and still it makes me weep. Reading these stories on a bouncing school bus, when slightly motion sick and entirely noise-overloaded, is probably ideal. All the drug-hazed plot switches make perfect sense, and each sentence is as tearstained as a sentimental drunk. I wanted to cry along with them, but I had to behave like a chaperon who cared which kid was kicking which other kid's seat. Meanwhile, this is what Johnson was saying to me:

The last time I'd been in the Savoy, it had been in Omaha. I hadn't been anywhere near it in over a year, but I was just getting sicker. When I coughed I saw fireflies.

Everything down there but the curtain was red. It was like a movie of something that was actually happening. Black pimps in fur coats. The women were blank, shining areas with photographs of sad girls floating in them. "I'll just take your money and go upstairs," somebody said to me.

Yes, I'd rather be reading Plato's Republic today. No, I would rather not be going on a field trip to a transportation museum with 40 middle school students. Guess which one I'll be doing.

Tom is still one-eyed, the dog is still scratching, and the rain is still falling. Plato is still dissing the poets, and the boys are still pretending they don't have to get out of bed this morning. The dishwasher is still making that strange sound, as if it would like to crunch up spoons but is refraining--for the moment.

What is the best reading material for a long school bus ride? Not Plato, clearly.

Update: I've chosen Denis Johnson's story collection Jesus' Son. Rationale: It's thin enough to carry around a transportation museum and appropriately pie-eyed for a road trip with crazy people.

Sorry I'm so late with this post. I spent the morning in the emergency room with poor Tom, who roughed up his eye at work yesterday. It's just a scratched cornea and will heal, but for the moment he is miserable and incapacitated. At least now he has the eye properly patched and is asleep downstairs on the couch rather than wandering through Dover-Foxcroft like a pathetic yet wild-eyed (singular) landlocked pirate who has been forced to walk the plank with his wife's scarf and a wad of tissue wrapped around his head.

I've been thinking about the Woolf remark that I copied out for you yesterday: "I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museum the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh." In other words, Woolf claims that her need to describe is not like passion but like a desire for passion. For some reason I can't stop thinking about this statement, and I can't decide whether it simply makes me sad or whether it proves to me that she was a canny and ironic observer of art's revisionist powers. There is something terrible in this sentence's detachment from the roots of desire, yet its focus and commitment is nonetheless obsessive and alluring. However I read it, the comment disturbs me--which is not bad, which is probably good, which is undoubtedly tonic--yet I found it by accident yesterday. I didn't mean to read it. I wasn't even waiting for it.

Another holiday weekend has passed away, and once again I am home alone. A volume of Virginia Woolf's letters sits on my desk, watching me. I have much to do and nothing to do.

The trees glow in the mist--reds, yellows, oranges, flashes of green. Outside my window a fir tree sways beneath its burden of cones--tiny, fragile, no larger than Christmas lights but demure, darkened. They withhold; they refuse the sun.

The words I am writing pour out easily but are hard to recognize when they reach the air. A scab is not simply a memory of blood. It also hardens and thwarts.

I open Virginia's volume of letters. She tells Roger Fry, "I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museum the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh." The year was 1918. She was 36 years old. Across the sea, in the Allegheny foothills, my grandfather was an infant lying across his mother's knees. After his death his daughter discovered that he had kept his eighth-grade penmanship certificate as a treasured relic. That was his last year of school. He was the age that my second son is now. But Virginia never went to school.

All of these incidents are bound together in me, but they mean nothing to any of the players. Neither Virginia nor my grandfather ever imagined the existence of the other. My son has heard their names but has no vision of either. The penmanship certificate is hidden away among my mother's papers, and someday I will find it and forget that I have written about it here. Or perhaps I will never find it.

Very early this morning, just before light, I heard an owl cry--so close to my window that it might have been perched on the roof above me. Three times it cried, and then it was silent, as streaks of day began sifting down among the maple branches like tiny birds do, with their brief drops and flutters.

Tom asked yesterday, in a comment, what my Tom ended up making me for birthday dinner. The answer is ravioli filled with picked crab and sorrel, topped with lemon butter. They were lovely. And we were even so fortunate as to have leftover crab, which last night I mixed with homemade mayonnaise and served with a composed salad of red and yellow beets, sliced potato, orzo and garlic, spinach and arugula, topped with cilantro. Tonight's menu: chili spiced with many, many tiny hot peppers harvested before the frost.

Today I plan to look at the new book I've acquired: Patch/Work Voices: The Culture and Lore of a Mining People, a compilation of the recollections of southwestern Pennsylvania miners and their families. Already I can see that the book will be both instructive and clumsily nostalgiac, as such things generally are, and that it will be at odds with the other book I'm reading, Compton-Burnett's A House and Its Heritage, which is stylish and brutal and not at all heartwarming. I hope the clash will be enlightening and not just confusing. Now that I am involved in two research projects simultaneously--my Chestnut Ridge poetry collection and my Poets' Sourcebook anthology--such clashes are bound to keep arising. Yet Compton-Burnett has nothing to do with either project. She's just looming there, like a Macbethian witch. Either she's making trouble or predicting it.