The Middlewesterner

LINES FOR MAY 14

Listen. The grass
whispers like rain.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL MAY 15, 2002

A great crash

of blue sky. The lid of night has been torn off, darkness banished; the sun will have its way. A great shining loveliness. The middle of the month is anchored solid: you cannot be more pleased; you won't be more disappointed if you lose it.

The season is slinging greenness like a mad artist with only one color in his palette, too poor to buy others, too rich in green sensation to see the need.

It's as if the poet has only one adjective - green. Well, today it's as if the poet has two adjectives - green and blue. It's as if the poet has only three adjectives - green and blue and bright. Hold the warm light as if it's a blanket. Love this, love this, love this.

Dewy-gilded lawn. A race of robins. A lovely lay of sunlight on everything. How can I complain?

Does the wind blow from southeast to northwest? A slow flap, perhaps. Haziness, far off in all directions. Some clouds, farther off. A diffuseness above the black soil, not as thick as fog, yet thicker than light.

North of Five Corners, a shrub in blossom - white and green along the ditch. Finally - winter has its tail nailed into the northland. It shall not return; for now it shall not return.

LINES FOR MAY 13

Climb and fade of haze,
the well-worn view.

IVAN BURGESS'S ECHO ECHO

"Lynn Devlin spilled the beans,"

Ivan said. "Not in her own kitchen, but in Beverly Lambert's kitchen. Not literally but figuratively. For months Arden Devlin has been castigating Joe Lambert and Kendall Nichols for their well-intentioned vote for George W. Bush. Arden explained, in great detail, what a dumb-assed mistake that was. Then one evening last week Joe Lambert invited Kendall and Hazel Nichols and Arden and Lynn Devlin to a soup supper at the North Main home of the Lamberts. Between courses of the potato soup and the chili, politics reared its ugly head. When Lynn sorted through the conversation, she understood that Arden had been questioning the intelligence of Joe and Kendall for voting for George W. That's when she said, right outloud, 'Arden voted for Republicans in the last election.' Joe and Kendall jumped on that like a linebacker on a loose ball. But, like Arden said to them, 'At least I admitted I made a mistake.'"

"If you missed the sign in front of the Methodist Church," Ivan said, "the one that tells the time of the service, sermon topic, preacher's name, and maybe a thought for the week, it is in David Grey's garage/shop. It wound up there by a circuitous route. Jack Yenne, maintenance man/janitor, noticed that the sign was rotting. He told his wife, Kathy. Kathy told Mimi Grey about it. Mimi volunteered her husband to repair it. So if it isn't back and you want to know what it says, drive out to David Grey's place and look in the garage/shop."

"You know," Ivan said, "if you just listen, you will hear some profound statements. Last Tuesday morning Mel Lyon said something about ten dollar wheat making it imperative that you do a good job of farming. Then someone said with the price of fertilizer, you had to have ten dollar wheat. Then Kendall Nichols made this profound statement: 'I would say that the price of wheat can come down a lot quicker and easier than the price of fertilizer.' Now you just don't get profounder than that. I wonder, with the price of fertilizer, weed spray, and fuel, if the farmers' profit margin might be less than it has been for several years. I don't know, but it seems like the expense has a huge appetite that would chew up and swallow a large part of the profit."

"Martha Coon was here a couple of days last week," Ivan said. "She joined the As the Bladder Fills Club, where she was overwhelmed by the knowledge that was so casually slung about by the ATBFC. She was wanting to take some of it home with her, but she failed to take notes or tape-record any of it. It is doubtful that she will get home with any of the knowledge because she has reached the age where she is even getting senior citizen's discounts here in Smith Center."

"Casey Edell had part of his iron fence knocked down in an automobile accident last fall," Ivan said. "He kept saying that he was goig to get it fixed, but he couldn't get it put up until the frost went out of the ground because it required some post holes. With the advent of the spring-like weather, I would think the countdown of days to fence erection would be dwindling down to a precious few."

"Some car company makes a car called Probe," Ivan said. "Wouldn't that make an excellent car for a proctologist."

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL MAY 14, 2002

Blue sky and sunlight.

It may be a lovely day.

Dew on the windshield of the car. An urgency of birds. The sound of water over the dam. In the distance, trucks on the highway. The world goes about its lonesome business.

There are clouds to the west and northwest, dark and broken. The land rolls away like a blackness of sea, a smoothed darkness.

LINES FOR MAY 12

Why try to
make sense

of my
nonsense

or why
not?

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL MAY 13, 2002

The trees in Des Moines

are leafed out fully - I'd say they are probably a week or so ahead of the trees here. There - it's a great green murmuring. Here - it's a whisper perhaps.

We've got greyness overhead. That extended all the way west to Des Moines yesterday. Saturday was a hanging grey day too.

I have not been writing much. My writing likes a regular schedule, to bed by 8:45 p.m., up at 4:00 a.m., else it plays hide and seek and I can't depend on anything. Sometimes I can't depend on anything even if I do my voodoo rituals and my regular sleeping pattern. That's because when it finally comes down to it, writing is not something you choose, writing is something that chooses you. All you can do is be ready.

An oriole in a branch of the willow at the end of our driveway, in all its fireball orangeness. Color in the tulips along the garage, a few are nearly ready to open. The peonies are stretched to their full height, they don't seem to have set buds yet. The sky is starting to disappear behind some of the trees - those half-leafed out to the half-hidden sky.

LINES FOR MAY 9

The sun did
come up, he said,

yet I wonder
why so late?

LINES FOR MAY 8

I ask these
questions and
sometimes

scare myself.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL MAY 9, 2002

A rainy night in Wisconsin.

Wet streets this morning. Flowers in bloom in spite of the weather, because of it. The two-sided, double-edged nature of things. The ying and yang, up and down, yes and no of things. Goodness and evil are different ends of the same string.

With leaves in the trees, the wind roars this morning. It's not a hard wind, but enough to keep us alert. There's a heavy greyness in all directions. Whatever you think I mean, add 10%. That'll be closer to true.

The brightest spot of sky is not where the sun is. The sky is a pack of wolves.

We want to believe in redemption yet the world keeps going the other way.

Sometimes hope is a lesson in disappointment.

LINES FOR MAY 7

Morning delight and a dim
simmering of joy.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL MAY 8, 2002

A May day. Gray day.

A kind of heaviness here, thick as conversation even when I have nothing to say.

It is spitting some rain as I step outside.

North of Fairwater, the field that used to be alfalfa is worked to black smoothness; and so is the field across the road from it where, all spring, geese had been setting down to feed.

It's a day neither this nor that, neither hot nor cold, not spectacular. It is only and exactly what it is. Now, if we could get that much truth from everything....

LINES FOR MAY 6

No, he said,
knowledge

is not
nothing.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL MAY 7, 2002

This morning, the sorrow

of the dove. How much sweetness would be enough of it? Is the mourning dove's call like the light of those stars which still shine for us but have long since been burned out? Does the dove's sorrow come to us from a million years ago? How should we respond?

The greening has been coming on, we've seen it, yet yesterday it seemed so sudden, intense, like falling in love.

There must have been some drizzle or splash of rain during the night. There are raindrops on the windshield of the car still.

A flash of Baltimore oriole streaking across the driveway. Robins, oh robins are everywhere.

Today the wind seems to be from the north, blowing yesterday back to where it came from.

The question on the radio today is: is public art in the public domain? My question: who owns the skyline? who owns the sky? Who owns the air we breathe, who owns our sunlight, who owns your laughter, your sorrow?

LINES FOR MAY 5

Like an overturned pot -
the spill of sadness

and desperate wisdom.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL MAY 6, 2002

Again, a wetness.

Moisture could be the love of God. Could it be that we've been praying wrong?

There is moisture on the street, greyness overhead. I'm a little foggy-headed myself this morning. I'm getting ready to go to work but I don't know why. I don't know what I want today.

Ah, the pond is full of algae, it's a mush surface, a greenness more death to the pond than life. The knife is always double-edged, isn't it, cutting both ways.

The wind appears to be from the south. Downtown there is a slow flap of flag. There is no flag at the cemetery.

Two miles north of the village, a county grader works the shoulders of Highway E.

A field is showing a faint green rug where a drilled crop is coming up already - peas, I suppose.

I think we make secret compacts with ourselves, each of us, but I'm not sure we know all of them, nor that we necessarily fully understand them.

LINES FOR MAY 2

Clanging,
like the rhyming
bell of hell.

Spare us
the obvious
musics,

Muse.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL MAY 3, 2002

A morning glory morning.

A kind of wiseness to the wind. The way the shadows lay. The play of everything.

I feel my aging. My shoulders have been sore for months. A man ages in body; he ages in mind and soul if he lets the years restrict him rather than allowing them to open up possibilities. I can see that it is so easy to say "this is enough, there is nothing more." That's a trap we all get caught in. Yet, each time, I want to pull myself free of it, start fresh with no preconception about how things should be.

The trees are leafing out. We should all be leafing out, continuing to set blooms, growing. Yet it is so easy to stop growing. A little adversity, sometimes, we throw up our hands, turn, retreat. Though sometimes we do put our shoulder into it. I want to put my shoulder into it, every day.

Each sentence I write is a leap, I fall towards the period at the end of the sentence; but - starting - I don't know where I'll end. It is freedom to acknowledge that it is okay to go off-track, to run yourself into a failure you don't foresee. You can't tell yourself beforehand what perfection will look like: that would freeze you up.

Part of the challenge I face is learning to stop driving the bus. It is so easy to think you are in charge. You are not in charge. Yes, we have to accept responsibility, but we are swept up in so much more than what we can be responsible for. What fate has in store lands on us: sometimes it's star dust, sometimes it's shit.

LINES FOR MAY 1

Sun. Rain.
All day
the wind.

I push on.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL MAY 2, 2002

A light rain yesterday

as I drove home from work, a wetness during the night, the streets are still damp this morning; there are beads of moisture on the windows still; the sky is grey; the day, such as it is, is underway.

I am set to retire as the end of August of this year - I will no longer be making this workday morning drive to Ripon. What will this change mean for this journal? What will I capture if I am not forced to go anywhere, do something other than sit at my writing desk at home? What will come of this habit of creating a kind of repository? A fellow never really knows what he will do. I think I shall try to continue - to keep setting aside a time and place to make this side-wise kind of record. It's not a log of doings, so much as a log of "seeings," real and imagined.

I keep two kinds of journals - a daily events log that won't mean much, I suppose, to anyone but myself and some future foolish biographer (Tom laughs); and this log of observations and ideas. This one holds superior interest in the long run. I also keep a tally of random notes - not really a journal, but phrases, ideas, and observations that I set down as they occur to me, material that I sometimes eventually find useful in other contexts. None of my experience with keeping journals really prepares me to teach anything about journals beyond what I've learned here. Though I would like to teach. But I have nothing to say, no ideas but in the things of my experience. If I find opportunity to teach, that's the place I'll have to teach from.

I step outside to leave for work, some patch of blue sky. Far off to the south, storm clouds. A lighter cloud cover in other directions. It's a chill morning, even in the greenness with some sun.

There is still no flag at the cemetery. Nothing flapping to indicate the direction of the wind.

Out in the country I see storm clouds off to the west, too. And far to the east, over Lake Michigan.

Do we invest ourselves in each day, or simply swim through it as through water, there but not committed to it? What is this investment, this grabbing hold?

A flag just south of Ripon says the wind is hard from the west.

I guess the investment in the day is every day choosing to live as if it's the last day. That kind of meaning in the acceptance of what is. Can a fellow do that? He can hope so, he can strive his damned-est to do it.

LINES FOR APRIL 30

What if
the silence

swallows me?
What if

I can't return?