Denise Levertov gives me words again.

The story that I am writing right now is not beautiful. This pains me because beauty is why I want to write. It is a thick, ugly story, heavy with guilt. But it is a whole story that I have worked out in my mind, it needs to be told clearly and set free from a rush of too many words.

I think I have to write about this ugliness before I can write about beauty. I have to admit to the duplicity of self. I didn’t know what to do then and I don’t know what to do now. All I know is that it wasn’t right to do nothing.

So I have carried this image of things I didn’t do, sealed in a pocked in the pit of my stomach, since the day I walked out of the newspaper office in May; since the day I left my bent copper key on my editor’s desk and took away with me a burden of narrow reporters’ notebooks that contained the story of debt, drunkenness, murder, suffering. This was the town where I worked. But isn't it any town? These things happen everywhere. This is all part of the story.

And I burned those notebooks in the fire pit behind our first apartment. I burned them all on a night late in May. C and I sat by the fire poking it with sticks and drinking wine and we watched it smolder. Above us an orange harvest moon slid up the sky. In the morning the pages were all packed and furled like petals on black peonies. I went out and stood by the ashes with my coffee. And I carried the story here in my stomach—instead of in a forgotten notebook—because in my sleep I swallowed the smoke.

It has to come out. It has to be dealt with. But I don’t want to write about this. I want to write about my childhood, when beauty was everywhere. I want to write about wandering afternoons sitting for hours on mossy stones, feet in the river. I want to write about standing in the center of a birch wood listening to the leaves in the wind.

The conflict then was that of play—oh please let me up into the tree fort, into the hayloft. Let me go out into the field with the boys. And don’t tease me. Don’t put grass in my hair. Don’t tell me stories about wolves. Just let me play with you and share in these adventures as you run across the field and hide in the bushes. But to get back there, I have to unburden myself of this story.

Dear God, I want to write something beautiful. Please live in my imagination and show me the grace that I am missing, even here, as I struggle to confess.

(because I've started getting up early)

There are stories in my pocket. Some are old and crumpled, like grey receipts or shopping lists, pressed into little pills of paper that have been washed too many times. I am emptying these out and throwing them away. They have stayed in my pockets for the past three years, like stones of guilt, like worry. I don’t have to unroll them and try to read the words. I don’t have to bother with them. If I make room my pockets will fill up again.

They are already filling up. There are new stories gathering there. Most of them are too new to take out—but they are there, growing. The pocket is working again. It hasn’t for years. Every day is important. Write every day and make room to think about the same things over and over. Read things that make you ready to write. Keep a pen in your pocket. Never leave the house without paper. Listen hard. Watch the light. Put it in your pocket.

Christmas Dusk

Advent IV

You had a window on the bay, darling, and took walks even in the wind. You had poems tacked on your wall and your left elbow pointed to Jamestown. And I, up-shore and inland, spent the days driving from hazard to hazard with my camera strap looped around my wrist and a notepad in my pocket, my fingers poking through green unraveled gloves, listening to classical radio.

You took the 14 home; I drove in from the west. We lit candles in mason jars and mulled cider in silver pots. We ate our late dinner (squash and winter greens and pan-fried fish) listening for feet on the stairs.

Just before bed, our friends arrived, in coats and scarves, in thrift-store boots and hand-made hats, carrying wine and fruit. And we gave them slips of paper, with scripture verses written in pencil, and we sat in the dark and took turns reading out loud.

(Reading God With Us at Mawney Street, 2009)

Advent III

Some days I felt an urgent responsibility to each change of light outside the sunporch windows. Who would remember any of it, any of this our time, and the wind thrashing the buckeye limbs outside? Somebody had to do it, somebody had to hang on to the days with teeth and fists, or the whole show had been in vain. That it was impossible never entered my reckoning.

-Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

Advent II

We left the drawing room and drove to the coast at dusk. No one else came, just us two, leaving the yellow reading light, my sister’s blankets, my brothers’ company. Straight down her street, across another, into dusk, we drove silently.

Lights shone on the water at the park. Black-webbed volleyball nets hung against the sky. Red-lit smokestacks blinked, reflected and smeared like oil paint. We parked our car in the fire lane and walked across the lawn to stand above the sea.

We stood in the enormous silence of minor movements. The withdrawing tide secretly slipped over rounded stones that did not move. The sky fogged and spread down into the sea; the sea softened and crept up into the sky. Two ragged black rocks divided the expanse into top and bottom, but the horizon lay somewhere far beyond them, erased. The lighthouse spun snatches of gold out into the abyss.

I shivered and you wrapped your coat around my shoulders. Oh sweet sanity: salt and wind, bird cries and sailboats, damp air to settle all the dust in our minds. Minutes passed. We did not move.

When we walked back from the sea wall three people stood smoking by the car parked in front of ours. The men wore suits, the woman grey tights and black boots up to her knees. Our headlights lit her up. “—have you ever been down here?” I overheard one man ask the other two. I didn’t hear the response; my door was shut; we were driving away. The coast receded behind us and the crescent moon mounted, pivoting on a single star.

Advent I

All the leaves are gone. Our secret house feels revealed, in plain view. The neighborhood has grown. There are swathes of wasteland between some houses, valleys of brush and crumbling leaves. Now we can see a dozen windows out of our own. We have to shut the shades at night. We must be visible, slipping out of the house for walks after dark. We leave our house and cross the street, past the music studio and drycleaner, up the hill. From the top we can see our neighbors’ Christmas lights outlining the place where we live. Then we turn away from the ridge and delve further, into unlit neighborhoods, down a narrow path between two boundary fences that opens into a field. We stand beneath the stars, wrapped in scarves. “I like December,” I say, forgetting that it’s not yet.

Miles

An hour before midnight we stole through Rhode Island, south to north, beneath the first snow. Unknown and unannounced, neither coming nor going, we had no purpose here. We did not stop last night.

It could be any night last year. Shouldn’t we take this exit then, and go home, and sleep in our own bed in the room with blue walls? Shouldn’t we wake up to sun in our yellow kitchen, to tall ceilings and windows that nearly reach the floor, to our second-storey living? Put the teapot on in the morning darling and turn up the heat. And you will walk to First and Main and I will run down to the harbor. We will catch the snow on our neighbor’s lawn and will breathe this bright air together.

Yes, this is the way, but that is not where we are going.

We did not stop last night—not to say goodnight to my family, not to drink wine with your mother, not for coffee on the east side, not to look out over the water. How grey, even by headlights, the highway looks now. How narrow and fissured. How crumpled these guardrails are. Were they always so rusted? Spaces spread wide with familiarity shrink back to first impressions. I do not believe I ever lived here. The windshield glass keeps out the night. Snow falls and we sweep it away. All of this is slipping past. I watch the edges of the road and you stare straight ahead.

Lyman Estate

Inside the hothouse I can count the years by looking at the bricks, webbed white with old paint or veins of mold. The glass is fogged. Vast pipes run along the floor, leaking steam into the air. Patient orchids bud and bloom in the white light of almost-rain. Muscat grapes hang from the roof. Green lemons and oranges bulge at the tips of citrus branches. I should at least have had a pencil to write all of this down.

Because the light always changes I should have had a camera or paints. It hangs, low and diffuse above the orange maples that crown the lane outside the hothouse, lighting the yellow leaves from behind. Men are raising a tent behind the mansion.

I walk the crushed stone path with words rising under my breath. If I was alone I would be singing. If I was alone I would linger longer under the beech tree that stands beside the brick wall. Its trunk is too thick to reach around, the branches spread over my path and nearly touch the ground, leaves still glossy. I pause slightly, finger the scarred bark self-consciously and fish in my bag for a pen.

Slowly I wander back. Words are gathering in me like the leaves that overflow from the hothouse gutters. The car smells like bread, just baked. I go home to my notebook.

Thursdays this October

I could watch the light for hours: catching in the leaves, flickering up and down the maple trunks, scattering on the ground like the shards of some brightly-colored vase, falling in squares across my lap as I sit inside.

Today I left the house before breakfast, investigating the immediate geography. You can walk from woodland to woodland without touching a road in this area, someone told me. I tried but was put off by swamps and fences. I walked home in the bright air, along the road, against the wind.

It is the afternoon. I am seated at my desk. I am watching the light. I am trying to understand why I must write. Whenever I am still, it is the first thing that I want to do.

Strong clean wind is sweeping through the house, through the windows and doors that I opened after my walk. Now I can hear crows calling across the yard, squirrels rattling the power-lines, branches tossing, and the neighbor’s wind chimes ringing. The chimes are clearest when I stand by the bathroom window. The wind moves the white shower curtain, it lifts my hair, and it carries the notes of the chimes down the hill and underground to where I live.

I write to anchor myself here, where I am content and attuned to the light and the wind. This stillness is the threshold of creation. I will wander away from it, so I write directions for my return.

I write to secure what is free and ephemeral; to preserve the light moving across the yard, which will fade at the end of day; to remember the notes of my neighbor’s wind chimes long in the future when we have moved away.

I write to keep myself from moving, because I know that if I stay still long enough I can create something good with words. I write so that I can write better, because that is what I have always wanted to do.

Listen. Pay attention.

Laura described things to her blind sister, Mary. Mom told me that's how she got so good. If you watch the world and practice describing it, you can be good too. You can be a writer too.

So I paid attention to the acrid scent of the printer shop and the hot-pressed air, to the little jars of pink and green paper clips above my head on the counter, where my mother stood at the paper cutter slicing proofs to just the right size.

And I listened to the moan of the copiers as they vibrated back and forth while I sat beneath a folding table with the box of paper scraps in strips or squares, sometimes whole sheets buzzing in yellow, fucia, french blue, or tangerine. Johnny and I would draw or fold them into airplanes while my mother made greeting card proofs. Sometimes the printer's daughter was in, and she would make paper chains with us, sitting under the table too.

My mom was a calligrapher and a watercolor artist and didn't write that often, except copying psalms and scripture verses onto her artwork. When we were kids she started reading out loud to us, to Johnny and I, who always wanted one more story. That reading of bedtime stories was the most she had read. Now she reads all the time.

Sometimes she would leave us in the car. She always took longer than she thought she would. I remember the rainy days, sitting in the station wagon--white with brown fake paneling down the sides--and she would bring sheets of paper out to us, where we drew. She would leave the radio playing, classical music, and Johnny and I would decide what kind of scene the music would illustrate. He always thought that each piece was a perfect battle soundtrack; I imagined myself riding horses through fields.

At night we would read those prairie stories, and whenever mom got to a description that she thought particularly good, she would stop and read it again--when Laura and Mary were riding on the train, and Laura described the countryside as it unfurled, colors and shapes and long shadows. "Look at that," my mother would say. "If you pay attention to everything that happens, if you practice, you can write."

and then you saw miracles.

Then autumn fell across the lawn in long shadows and swift evenings and the air stung when you ran hard. Night got longer which meant you could play flashlight tag earlier, and feel older and braver, outside in the dark, crawling from one hiding spot to another. There was the smoke of wood-stoves in the air as all the sounds became clearer, carried across the cold earth more directly.

One night you pushed all the way to the back of the yard, into the empty field beyond the stone wall, and you watched from behind a tree as your sister looked for you in the little ring of light around the back of the house—she was afraid to go farther—and the neighbors called your name, and you won the game; you won it, you won it, you won it.

The shifting of seasons cut suddenly along the edges of every image in your world, drawing out the details, and as all the colors sharpened you knew exactly where you were: in the dark and unafraid.

And then maybe one night you pushed too far, past everything you knew, and the whole world lurched beneath your feet; the ground buckled beneath you. You were horrified—watching each hold loosen, each rung break, feeling physically the sickening drop. There was no sense of direction, where the house lights didn't reach. There was no assurance, where no one called your name.

Don't become too afraid.

But, she said, one day you'll wake up and this doubt will have loosened its grip. One day the serpents will unknot and slip traceless from your stomach. One morning you'll feel as if a whole layer of self has evaporated, disappeared; but the parts that hurt won't exist anymore.

She said, you don't know, you don't, how the world will settle after it shifts or when it does what the contours of the road will be. You have to be generous to everyone and hold onto your faith. God's will, she said, is a lot more resilient than your whims or your ideas. Your volatile passions are likely to break upon him, but afterward, anything that remains will be better for the breaking.

Remember what it was like when you believed that God wanted to speak to you?--that he'd formed the hungry part of you to be appeased only by himself? Remember the fear and the ache of substitution, of rationalization, of turning away?--all the times you knew that he was calling to you and yet you lied to yourself and to others?

Remember when you believed?--there was a significance then to everything, to each blade of grass around the periphery of your path, to each barrier raised in the midst of it.

Remember when you realized that dreaming wasn't enough and you began to mime along with the motions of your dream?

And then you saw miracles.

---
I wrote this the autumn of 2006, just after graduation. I just found it on my computer today.

Turdus migratorius

I would like to take a class on North American birds and their calls. Or better, I would like to walk through the woods with someone who could tell me which call belongs to which bird.

Windows down, I am driving to work on the road I always take—the one that begins with sagging cream-colored colonial and a yard of lilacs and ends with an angular stone wall that bars legions of pine trees, erect and uncounted, from overtaking the road.

Straining my ears, I am dragging this car—this weighty noisy thing that attaches at my hips and keeps me from the fresh air and sunlight—and wishing that I was walking.

I have heard these birds my whole life, recognizing no calls save the cardinal and the mourning dove, both of which I learned before my fifth birthday.

The grey doves roosted beneath the eves of a tool shed at my apartment when I was small, their low cries in the hedges and along the swamp came sometimes later in the day and I asked my mother why they were called “morning doves.”

A cardinal couple nested in the evergreen by my window. We watched as they threaded yarn from my brother’s hat into the nest, bright blue mingling with clay and twigs, and the patient mother waiting for her chicks, spring time and hatching, summer and flight. After they left in the autumn, we gently pried the nest out the branches and studied it.

My grandfather fills his bird bath and watches the birds, still. He would tell me who the calls belong to and then maybe the hedges and the oaks and laurels would belong to me, actually.

Wendell Berry conjectures that you only truly possess the land through an intimate knowledge of its names. When a tree becomes more than a pine tree and is a hemlock. When a bird song becomes the call of an oriel.

We possess the land through words, Berry says, and maybe my grandfather was trying to pass that possession on, those mornings when we were small, sitting on the back porch of the Cape Cod house and learning Latin names.

Turdus migratorius, was the Robin Redbreast that we saw so diligently yanking up worms. Deciduous trees were maples and oaks and any others that lost all their leaves in the winter.

My grandfather lives on the same property where he was raised. He knows where the flying squirrel hides and what time of year the crows start crying at an ungodly hour of the morning.

I want to know the name of every plant in my backyard. This is mostly because I am reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek but also because of my grandfather, I think. I want to name, and thus possess, every uncurling fern, every bluet blossom, every soft mushroom appearing on rotten wood—not just the common names but the proper ones.

And I want to know which bird is singing, even if I can only hear it through my unrolled windows when I drive to work.

1.2.3.4.

attleborough station, south station, silver line, boston international airport--one year ago--when you came home.

It's so much more final, shooting with a film camera.

I remember this, holding Chris' Nikon, as we stand on a bridge in the Franconia Notch, and I am afraid to take pictures of anything.

Each second is indispensable; each shot is final. The click imprints an image on the film and--given our recent record--it will be months before these photos are developed, before we finish this roll of film.

All the un-captured days will stack up between the ones we memorialize and those we don't. I will forget this bridge with silver-grey rails, this afternoon drive home.

I've already lost the things I wanted to imprint: the highway guardrails rusted to brick-red crisscrossing over the snow as we reentered the highway; ice cascading down the cliff faces carved through the pass; the river running beneath frozen stones and a crust of snow; the whiteness of Mount Washington when the sun strikes it.

There is also a smokestack in a valley. Between the passing pines we can only see the top of its round lip puffing away into a clear blue sky.

That's where clouds come from, I tell Chris.

You live in your own dream world, he says, smiling.

And maybe when I write, I do.

lydia "tarantino"

[This too is an ocean just discovered: the thrashing beyond the clearing, the tides of wind through oaks, a hollow wail all night.

I awake to the hollowness: this could be a river rising, this could be reservoir's flood, this could be the ocean coming--except there is no water, not even rain, only gales and dried boughs scraping against a black sky.]

chalk factories and other observations

The only noise is the noise that you carry;
your own clogs scraping, the zipper on your coat,
your inhale and exhalation of frozen breath.

The palette today is washes of grey;
power lines heavy, beaded with pigeons,
barren trees swaying, ripe with finches,
minor motions against a still slate sea.

(In the winter there are no new cars.
Last night you drove through a chalk factory,
just to match the arid pavement, cracked white with salt,
the tawny grass and penciled-in trees.)

Forgetfulness of self, of place, of life itself
can be justified by this:
sudden remembrances and stark unveilings,
when you notice the shape of each grey stone stacked in the walls,
when you realize that dark oak limbs, bent against the sky
are the only thing holding the snow from falling.

the signal man's wife

I am driving Hemingway down Main Street past the RIPTA stop by M. G. Jewelers and across from the Bank.

I wonder what he would take as true and write in his notebook.

He is fanned out across my passenger seat--white-haired and bearded, black-haired and mustached, always tall--gazing up off the torn pages of my paperback volume of A Moveable Feast--split down the binding, splayed in three sections.

He would not fit in the envelope that I mailed to Spain. So he drives with me and reminds me that anything true that I know or see or hear someone say is mine to write down.

Maybe it is the image of the Signal Man's wife, at least eighty, sitting in their Newell Street apartment with her pinkish-red hair piled high, curls across her forehead, lighting a cigarette and flexing her long narrow feet in moccasins as she flips nonchalantly between TV Land and the History Channel.

I rang their bell two minutes ago and have come by to get a photo of him, on the deck of his destroyer escort from World War II, because he was honored by our Senator this week. The photo is small and worn in the center. I can barely make out his features or the ship. I say I'll scan it anyways.

"Sit down he says," and leaves the room.

The apartment walls are bare except for a faded Monet print in a plastic frame. All the end tables are covered with framed photographs--kids I assume are their children, them dancing at a party. Her hair has been red for several decades. Before his hair turned white he still had a short little mustache no wider than his nose, no thicker than his upper lip.

She hands me a box containing his medals, while he settles at a back table to write the list of guests who were at his ceremony on a piece of stationary. She hovers between the couch and the ash tray, telling me how much she loves her caller ID, apologizing that the kitchen table is covered with nearly a dozen pill bottles, and saying how very nice the Senator was, "He's funny," she says. "He's so sharp."

"Don't make me out to be any hero," he tells me as I leave. I promise not to write anything he didn't tell me.

Driving back to my office I consult Hemingway.

What would he think of this city, divided into villages that fan our around old mills?--divided in memory into past and present, a horizon of mill smokestacks and causeways, the sturdy fieldstone and bricks still standing, waiting, silent bell towers and still-turning clocks--the river snaking through.