I.
For a while it was showing me cattle dogs and that was nice. Cattle dogs posing against a prairie backdrop of dotted blue cloud, fat cattle dog puppies with their stub of tongue hung sleepily out, dozing in litter piles like guinea pigs. Videos of cattle dogs herding sheep, close-up videos of cattle dogs barking and smiling, panting, that I watched on mute. I gravitated toward the black and white ones and I guess it knew that, because those are the ones it showed me most often.
The animals never took it over completely, only peppered in the gaps between other things that might catch my attention, or had, and did. Someone splitting a thick sandwich in half to show me its layered contents. Flyers for contemporary book fairs and readings from several months prior. Wide interior shots of devastatingly expensive homes built in forests to look like communes. Lay-flats of quilted vests that (crucially) looked easy enough to sew myself.
Sometimes it took a downturn, or I did, and suddenly the images reflected something darker. Women standing half-naked in front of their phones, stepping back from some gym mirror, adjusting their sports bras shyly, rotating to show the sides and then the back. Compilation videos of a woman’s body in exercise clothes, supercuts from a period of several months, time and weight stamps flashing in white text on-screen to map her progress. She lifts her arms over and over to show us, smiling at the end.
I indulged these videos; of course I did. An intense compulsion of the fingers and eyeballs to see the changes take place, the force of will so evident, and then the despair (mine) of all this: of my baby eyeballs, baby mind, pure pale blue baby jelly of no-thought, which—somewhere—maybe I craved? I did my best not to linger too long on the things I didn’t want to become. I went searching for the cattle dogs, tapped open the stills and videos and liked and saved, trying to get back to where I was. But it knew what I wanted then, or thought it did, or knew I had no idea. Knew I had only the faintest memory of arriving there in the first place.
II.
I was gliding along the main road
in my dream—hard spring buds and pebbles
littered the weeds but no trash (dreaming)
No forceful compulsion to push an object
onto crust of earth / stunning / (that absence)
Aware (dreaming) my vapor had exited
though not of when / Probably years ago
Now dry greenhouse ideas / Absence
of wet streaks / I’ve made peace
with my desire for smooth administration
Witnessing miracles of administration
daily / Eggs replaced, plants drunk / Sure
there are these bright green sub-dreams
of bottoming out / selling it all / or more
specifically piercing something with rose
gold / Gambling and winning
(historically speaking)
I do dream about the truth of that.
Jay wraps the dog’s paw tenderly
in gauze, only sometimes asks for help
in curling an arm around his waist
or holding his back legs steady
Mostly I look on
as they slip out the clattery back gate
on their own / going for a jog / Dog boot
administered / Truly a miracle
I make a website for editing books
and a website for selling ceramics
and a website for making websites
and dream of a big warm wind gusting
all the loose pieces of me away.
III.
How is the eclipse blowing up your life? This is what Suzanne wants to know. We’re early into a new ritual of exiting our caves just one afternoon a week to drink Americanos together, letting the caffeine balloon us upward into the fritzing mental ether, into the churn, as this is where we like to be.
We meet at the coffee shop near her house and take our paper cups due south, walking parallel to the long field at the jock high school where kids (you could see) might normally play lacrosse, field hockey or soccer—on a sprawling complex of multiple competitive fields, several acres of manicured grass.
There’s no great way to begin. The big things are too sad to talk about, increasingly too big to hold: the housing market, the genocide, the impending election of a senile man. The same gray backdrop I’m experimenting, in little bursts, with ignoring completely; upon which I’ve painted elaborate scenes of resilient bodies sculpting, resting, thinking their thoughts.
I begin with a description of my preoccupations: the easiest way to churn me up. The truth is I don’t know what I like, where I’m bent toward, what’s disintegrating until I say it out loud. I do my preamble, run through my task list: making work for x, hoping for y, wouldn’t it be so nice to go write in a room for two months and have someone bring food and clean the windows? I’m not ready to talk about the paid training session I completed in which I tell the computer whether it’s hallucinating or not. A spring characterized by doing things in response to the feeling I get, when I’m exhausted, that I’ll die poor and alone—a refrain I try my best to turn into a little joke.
Between the jock field and our bodies is a busy road. I tuck my elbows into my side as trucks rumble by, keep glancing back to make sure Suzanne’s dog is close behind us. To our left there’s a grid of calm-looking residential blocks, landscaped and lined with trees, the odd old person out gardening in a floppy hat, and I want to be in there. Looks like I’d have nice thoughts in there. I’m taking us to a secret wildlife sanctuary, Suzanne says, perhaps sensing this. We have, she promises, a destination.
There are times I feel, and have admitted, that my friend is reading my thoughts; times I feel she is peering into my actual brain. This feeling occurs usually just before she laughs off some self-deprecating comment about how crazy she is—because she can see that I am?
Suzanne tells me about her twin flame theory, which I agree with. We pass a parked boat from 1986 named Mirage. There really is no map for this thick middle of life, only jokes about Ferraris, sitcoms where the barbs have a laugh track. Reiki works, even from a distance, and she knows this because her practitioner found holy archetypes in her energy field. I think: everyone has holy archetypes in their energy field but me.
We reach the secret sanctuary—a pocket of marshy land maybe two blocks wide at the base of the South Hills—and finally turn our bodies inland, into it. The ground is spongy and mossy, a dirt path winding around brackish ponds with gliding ducks and geese, feathers everywhere, cattails swaying across water. I’ve concluded that my life is not blowing up, though I concede it might—maybe even soon. A good student answer. We amble through the park in the mellow sun, drifting into the residential chunk I’ve longed for. The dog rolls in goose shit and we absorb this—I’m impressed with how easily we absorb—and sip our coffees, and walk on.
IV.
I was gliding along the main road
in my dream / missing something usually
at hand / usually pocketed / Felt the familiar
urge to cleave off this political canopy
Fruitless urges / Made an elaborate series
of handled jugs instead
And thought of the decadence
just before fear of people, the aimless motion
before disgust at the self / Drinking coffee
on the creaking back porch steps
in the morning and not thinking
of how you’d arrange things if you owned it
Thinking instead of the people who planted
one single cluster of tulips against the studio
and maintained the lilacs on the west face
so spring distributed itself early and evenly
The way we saw it that first year
Scrolled through the photos to remember
or to jog my memory / No difference
Thumbnails of sweatshirts I wanted to sell
Could be my dad in the mirror
fixated on his numbers / trailed off…
And again arrived to this
rounded cave door / Internal Mode
Where I might be swaddled and carried
along fixed time / into my lineage
Or crouch here with my found river
rocks / knives / ceremonial bargain
textiles / and await instruction
V.
The parking lot isn’t as full as I thought it’d be, though it is cloudy—the chance we’ll see a sliver of partiality through thin cloud so thin. We walk the skinny trail bisecting the big outer loop, toward the place at its top that overlooks the city, the mysterious flat mesa that no one can get to (says a message board) because it’s private property. The vista we call The Beach.
Feels like totality was really rammed down our throats this year, I say. Too windy for it to land. A kind of thought, anyway, I wish I didn’t have so often. Maybe spectacle is the only thing we all share.
It’s cloudy enough that we left the house without sunglasses, and we laugh about this. Position our cameras at the dulled eye, guess where the sun might be. My eyes are still a little puffy from the weekend, our brief trip down to the pit of things, combing over the whole narrative: what are we going to do? Snow came down sideways which we couldn’t laugh at then, though now, I concede: it’s funny.
A sturdy couple passes us in tall hiking boots, trekking poles, three dogs. They’re headed south. See anything? It’s funny because we can’t. Another guy passes the other direction, asks us if we were here for the last one, but we can’t keep the volley going. We were naked on Mount Shasta. He walks on.
Later we joke: why don’t they talk about Egyptians on the news? what Egyptians did during eclipses? We should have asked that guy what he knew about Egyptians, he seemed cool.
We never mean to fall into the pit. Specifically not after a visit to the new photo book gallery of Contemporary Western Art, not after the curated vintage basement, or affogatos at the fancy brunch place, crispy shallots and eggs in yogurt—these little luxuries we’d planned, in advance, to take pleasure in. But something about the sweet curator’s wind-blown ease of showing up new in town, his new eyes seeing all the little gaps to fill here, all the potential, and the frank discussion of money—it landed sideways and down we went.
Later on, in the pool, flanked by a textualist Christian third date and a pipefitter (?) describing his method of fishing the broken pieces out of the main channel, the resulting numbness all down his right leg, I saw things as they really were, and gave permission for whatever big sadness to slide out of me, and think it worked. We split a smuggled can of coconut water in the warm purple tank, gentle tentative gestures, then returned to the van to sleep.
The chunk of blue sky we’ve been tracking is drifting closer, now: fissures in the clouds approaching the dull eye of sun at a windless pace. You affix the correct lens for direct sunlight and hit record. A film you’ll no doubt set to music.
Something broke loose, you admitted, when we banned screens from the bedroom. You moved the jade plant closer to the window, hung up the big purple-gray painting on the blank wall, the one that looks like a molten star; the sound of grunge.
You think it’s called Totality. Something we hope to one day, together, travel to see.
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