WEEKLY WRITER’S PATH #20
Almost every evening now, when I used to take a break and go for a walk before it’s too dark, I instead don my sister’s Chicago Bears hoodie, my Dunkin Donuts cap, my yellow West County gardening gloves and generic white sneakers and head to the shed to sort through a few more boxes of mouse-detailed papers from my past.
It’s like a treasure hunt without the clues. Last week I found my college diploma, obviously too distasteful to rodents—not a nip or turd upon it. What was it doing out there?
I’m actually scared of mice; I jump and squeal like a girl when one darts out. Then I feel foolish and talk to them, saying, Time to go, buster. This is my space now. That makes me feel even more ridiculous, so I get my oldest son to come out and dump boxes on the ground for me to pick through, paper by paper. I really just want to toss everything into the back end of the truck and haul it away to the dump so I don’t have to see another stiff, dead mouse, jaws open in apparent painful death, or maybe just a yawn before dozing off forever. Then I find something amazing.
Last night I came upon a set of five folders that I recognized instantly. One was tiger-striped, one had Batman in his cape and wide-stance (the 1989 Michael Keaton version), one had an upside-down skate boarder in neon pink with the words, Rad Dog in green. Inside I found all the writing from the time when I had no computer, including copies of the papers I had written in college. Like “From Infinity to Infinity,” for my junior mathematics tutorial in 1985:
“Unlike Euclid, Newton strongly differentiates between the process and the goal. He states, in corollary IV of lemma III, that the ultimate figures, ‘are not rectilinear, but curvilinear limits of rectangular figures.’ He defines the process of infinity as rectilinear, but the ultimate derived figure is that of a curve. The emphasis here that seems absent from Euclidean geometry is that of limit. There is a time, Newton seems to be saying, that we can stop and actually be at the end of the process.”
Even more surprising were the poems in another folder. These I didn’t recognize as being mine, which was a very strange feeling. There were minutes when I read through them and almost knew them as mine, then reconsidered. It was like when you see someone getting coffee in the line ahead of you, and you know you know them but just can’t place them. I saw a man in Starbuck’s with a thick wiry ponytail and I knew him, but from where? From when? The intricately detailed image of a tiger on a red background came immediately to my mind. Later I remembered his name, and that I had designed a book cover with a tiger on it for him ten years ago.
It was finally the imagery in the poems that told me they were mine: a particular Chagall poster, a blue ribosoo with gold thread, the cost of a cotton dress equaling what I paid for my last car, how it used to rain at 4:15, and a place where all numbers lean into zero. Images that only this mind in this body through these eyes could have seen. Images are clues; when they repeat, you know you’re onto something.
I’ll leave you with this old poem about the beauty of deterioration:
Blue sky from pain
Morning from last night’s empty whiskey bottle
Weed seeds saved and arranged in diamond formation
On Bodhisattva’s lap
Blue sky from pain
Electric humbuzz of warmed coffee
Flowered oilcloth spread over the kitchen table
And the tracks of roach families
Blue sky from pain
Spray-gold chairs with turquoise peeking through
Rag rug hiding a scar from a hot pot
Set on linoleum
Blue sky from pain
Hope from heavily curtained windows
Bone, marrow, beloved flesh
Blue sky from pain
Hard to tell the difference
