The Middlewesterner

LINES FOR JUNE 27

Evening falls now, and
I would let the day

sing itself to sleep.

LINES FOR JUNE 26

Shine of the wind.
The evening silence.

LINES FOR JUNE 25

Curve of a knife,
that vulture
above the

bleeding sky.

LINES FOR JUNE 23

Base elements.
Primary colors.

The world in patches.

LINES FOR JUNE 20

Skin of light.
Slap of sky.

Crow is too
tall today.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL JUNE 21, 2002

A thunderstorm rumbled through

between 4:00-5:00 a.m. It left rain behind. The street shines with moisture. It was hot yesterday, temperatures into the 80s. It is about 60 degrees this morning. A cool breeze comes in through the dining room door.

The sun tries to poke through the remaining haze, peeks at us like a man awakening and not sure he wants to get up.

A stillness to the surface of the pond. Squirrels on the roof of the house down the hill from us. The greyness above the pond is a kind of sadness. Three big trees along Washington Street have been taken down. The sky where they stood is an open question. Will our weather remember where the trees stood? The drift of snow? Dryness in the rain's shadow. Shade's coolness?

As I head north to Ripon, a light rain falls. A dripping sky.

LINES FOR JUNE 19

The wind. The wind.
Like desire in daylight.

The bliss of it.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL JUNE 20, 2002

It is nearly 70 degree

this morning, the air thick with humidity, a haze overhead. We are promised heat and humidity. Bring it on! say my sore shoulders. The warmth may comfort them.

I have offered to speak to a friend's students about the value of keeping "a writer's journal." Do writers think they don't have to practice? This is good practice. Some of it will be useful later no doubt, for poem or essay; but the real benefit is practice. Repetition of the moves, "reps" as the athletes say. Try out all the tricks you know, try some new tricks you haven't used before. Content: anything that is of interest to you. Write to a level of detail that you will find useful in the future. Explain to yourself how a machine works, paint a street scene, sketch a character study, run some rush of nonsense language that sloshes in your mouth and sounds pretty. Dig with a shovel. Use binoculars or microscope. Listen so intently you can year the worms crawling beneath you. Taste the air, the grass. Smell for the skunk killed far off, dead along the roadside. What do you see and hear and taste and smell and touch in this single instant? By what principle shall you organize your information? What shall be the controlling metaphor? Who is it that is speaking in your words? To whom are the words addressed? What effect are you trying to achieve? What specific tricks are you using?

So much that we do comes undone, it is perhaps foolish to think anything is ever finished; more likely something is at a moment's rest, waiting to come sneaking back into your sack of work. We cut and cut and it's still too short.

A thrumming morning, blood in its veins, a heartbeat loud and regular as the march of time. Haze in the distance hides the distant farmsteads. The sun goes about its business, burning off the haze, boiling its pot of water for tea.

No one can have what everyone wants. Why would you even want what everyone wants?

LINES FOR JUNE 18

All the standing water.
All the kiss of sky.

This holiness of the low ground.

A TRIP TO THUNDER BAY(6) TUESDAY, JUNE 10, 2008

I drove west from Kakabeka Falls yesterday to see where Highway 11-17 had washed out, and I found the place. Workmen were still repairing the road, but it was now passable. I drove farther west looking at the countryside, and when I turned back I brought Highway 102 into Thunder Bay. Along Highway 102 where there was one oncoming lane and two lanes on my side, the asphalt for a large area of the outside lane had dropped down about two feet, as if all the supporting structure underneath had washed away. The unsafe area was clearly marked, and the lane I was driving was fine. The size of the damage surprised me.

In late afternoon, as Peter was headed home from work, he and his wife stopped at my motel room to invite me over for "leftovers." Supper wouldn't be anything fancy, they said, yet it turned out to be a lovely meal. It doesn't matter so much what you eat as with whom you eat it. And I was in lovely company.

Before we were done, they had loaned me Sharon Butala's Wild Stone Heart and Charles Williams' A Wilderness Called Home. Funny how this works. People who come to our house often leave with books too.

Soon enough it was getting dark and Peter was needing to get to bed. Once again he had to get up for work in the morning. I had to get up for the drive back to Fairwater.

And that's where I'm headed, as soon as I get the car loaded. Home.

That's why I go away: so I can go home.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL JUNE 19, 2002

We still enjoy

the coolness of early June. A grey haze still shades us. The seasons run like clockwork, yet it still seems more like spring than the buzz of full summer approaching. Our days are as long as they are going to get - the full length of them is ours, the full rush of our dreams, the full shove of our desires. Yet too this lingering coolness to be enjoyed.

We have a grey haziness, a temperature about 62 degrees, a swarming greenness, the sounds of birds. My desire is no desires. I want to give up wanting. Yet you cannot demand that, you can only accept it as a gift when it comes, if it comes. It is the paradox - the caring, the not-caring. There is no gift when you've asked for it. It must come of its own, freely; even so you prepare yourself to recognize it when you see it, to be ready to benefit when it finds you. There is nothing I want but emptiness, and I don't want emptiness too much.

Our peonies along the garage, red and white heads full and magnificent, stems bent under the heaviness, petals wind-blown and lovely, the front edge of warmth cheering them.

North of Fairwater, a small field of rye is headed out, creating a light green surface above the darker stems, like clouds floating above the dark, productive land.

LINES FOR JUNE 17

The wind would
push me, yet

I refuse
to hurry.

A TRIP TO THUNDER BAY (5) MONDAY, JUNE 9, 2008

People are permitted at Kakabeka Falls today, and I have just been down to see them, and to feel their power. The constancy of water. The obstinance of rock. The struggle is heroic. Water goes where water will. Rock holds its place.

Beneath all the other sounds hums the deep bass note of the universe - that E-flat octaves below the range of our own hearing, but we can feel it in our chests, in harmony with the rumble of blood through the heart.

*

Saturday evening I had supper with Marg and our friends Cindy and Patty, and with Marg's daughter Alanna and her son Douglas. Marg grilled burgers on the patio behind the house. Alanna barbecued bananas, a family recipe:

Slit the skin of the banana on the inside of the curve so that it will close back up. Split the banana itself lengthwise, and put a mixture of chocolate chips and marshallow sauce between the banana halves. Wrap the banana with tin foil. Grill long enough to soften the banana and to melt the chocolate chips. Serve with a spoon for digging the goodies out of the banana skin.

*

What is friendship? It is the connection and the caring, this feeling of belonging on someone's patio in a foreign country and a far place, having hamburgers and salad, potato salad and grilled new potatoes, etc., and belonging. Yes, belonging. Feeling part of a greater community. If enough Americans would meet this way with people of other countries, on  terms similar to those in which we met Marg and Cindy and Patty, I think war would come to an end and there would be, finally, peace on earth.

*

On Sunday evening I had supper with Black Pete of Red Wine & Garlic, and his wife and 17-year-old daughter. Again, hamburgers on the grill, potatoes, beer, friendship, and a bit of music. Yes, music. Peter with his 12-string Guild and his 6-string Sawchyn. Me with Miss Thunder. Peter is more folk-singer, familiar with the folk progressions; and I am more country bassist, familiar with country progressions and fiddle tunes, and yet we found some common ground. And at one point Peter cut loose with Ontario's anthem for me, "Black Fly." We played for a bit in the universal language of music, the blues, in the keys of D, then E,, then A. A river of notes flowed over us; any differences that might exist between Thunder Bay and Fairwater were subsumed in the music. Our instruments were sisters, and the two of us playing the instruments were brothers. Photos here and here and here. Thanks, Peter, for the music, and for letting me try to keep up with the flow of it. There is nothing quite so lovely as making music with a new-found friend.

Afterwards, we had some chocolate cake with a dallop of ice cream on the side. And then soon enough Peter had to think about getting to bed so he could get up in the morning to go to work. The Middlewesterner, on the other hand, was "on holiday," as they say up here, and could get up whenever he wanted.

I did get up and walk this morning, in the spit of rain, six miles. I walked ten miles yesterday, eight miles the day before, a total of forty miles during my stay in Thunder Bay.

The world is a wonderful place when it embraces you the way I have been embraced here.

*

I am sitting in the car at Kakabeka Falls making these notes, and I feel the roar of the water's constancy, and I am as happy as I have ever been. It's a grey sky and the world seems a little damp and it doesn't matter. I find heaven in this single moment, if I am ever to find heaven at all. There will be no heaven there if there is no heaven here.

IVAN BURGESS'S ECHO ECHO

"Maybe it's just me,"

Ivan said, "but I don't seem to see as many people carry bottles of water as I used to. Maybe they decided to take a drink of water before they left home."

"You know," Ivan said, "I don't get out much, so I guess I wasn't aware of this. I heard some farmers talking about the rainfall, which I thought had been adequate. They were saying the rain has been coming as far south as the state line and as far north as the county line, leaving Smith Center in kind of a dry hole. I wasn't aware of that."

"Claude Gripp called my attention to something last Wednesday morning," Ivan said. "Claude observed that all of the older men that comprise the As the Bladder Fills Club are clean-shaven, while Baby Boomers who have accumulated enough to have motorhomes have facial hair – beards, mustaches, goatees, and five o'clock shadow."

"Heard one of the new clerks at Gene's say he wasn't sure just what a seed potato was," Ivan said. "I wasn't sure either, so I asked resident expert Gene Conaway what the difference between a seed potato and a regular potato was. He said nothing. He said you can save potatoes over and have your own seed potatoes. However, he recommended you get seed potatoes. All I know about potatoes is that they are good fried, baked, or boiled. And if you rub a slice of raw potato on a wart and throw the slice away, when it rots the wart will disappear. You don't think so, huh? Well, I said it, and I'm standing by it until proved wrong."

"On Father's Day," Ivan said, "I hope the church pianist plays 'When the Saints Go Marching In' for the prelude. I didn't hear 'I want a girl just like the girl that married dear old dad' at any of the churches I attended on Mother's Day. There is a parody of that, entitled 'I want a beer just like the beer that pickled dear old dad.'"

"Sammy Burgess, caretaker at Cedars of Lebanon, don't like snakes any better than I do," Ivan said. "One of the ladies who lives there told Sam that she had a small bull snake in her apartment and that she had shoved it out the door with her foot. She told Sam, 'I almost called you.' Sam said, 'It wouldn't have done you any good to call me.' I think he was indicating that they would have to get ahold of someone who wasn't afraid of snakes. When someone asks me what kind it was, I just tell em I didn't hang around long enough to find out."

"You get virgin wool," Ivan said, "from ugly ewes."

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL JUNE 18, 2002

Sunshine and blue sky

this morning. Temperature is in the mid-50s. The aroma of coffee brewing for my wife as she sleeps yet a few minutes more. I'm showered, facing the prospect of some tough days at work. A young dove at the end of the driveway, in shadow. The sound of doves calling, the sound of summer's birds, the bright sun burning dew off the blades of grass. Ah, blue sky and song.

A child walks along Church Street this morning, alone. Is he lonely? What does he know of life, of love; what does he know of his dreams? Does he know where he is, what he's got? Does he know what it all means?

Certainly I don't know what it all means, but I know enough to have a pang in my heart. Yesterday as I read the weekly papers I receive from twelve middle western communities, I saw the enormity of my undertaking - to understand what it means to be middlewestern. We are a people wide and deep and varied. Yes, there are commonalities. What are the commonalities? I want to find the stories that tell us who we are.

The green corn shines with the sun on it. In the coolness of the new day, the new week, I think "I could be on vacation, or retired...." This morning could be an open invitation, yet I go to work. Duty. Duty. Duty. It is the middlewestern virtue; it is the middlewestern sin.

LINES FOR JUNE 16

I make my notes.
I race the sun.

How long can
this go on?

A TRIP TO THUNDER BAY (4) SATURDAY, JUNE 7, 2008

I walked the breadth of Thunder Bay today, down Algoma from Munro, west on River Street nearly to the Thunder Bay Expressway, south on Junot to Red River Avenue and back to Algoma, up Algoma to Fountain Lake, across the dam, and back down to Munro. As I came off the dam, headed towards my motel room, I encountered the lead runners in a race that stretched back up along the lake as far as I could see. It was serious enough a race that the lead runners were grim and determined, but not so serious that it excluded runners of middle school age. Young and old were stretching their stride, and the bounce in their steps got me excited about my walking again, and I put a little bounce in my step.

I have to say I was surprised how quickly I walked the length of River Street, how quickly I got across town to the Expressway. I hadn't imagined a walk across the city was so manageable.

You do notice the ups and the downs of the landscape when you are walking. Summit Avenue and High Street have earned their names, and walking legs know it.

WE ARE STILL HERE

Four tornado sirens
in half an hour,
then one again later.
No tornadoes.

Five inches of rain
on top of five inches
the day before.

Water running over
the road by the dam
was stopped with
two truckloads of gravel
being dumped on the road.

We are still here.

I'm trying to find out
if any roads are open
between here and Baraboo
where I'm to give a reading
tonight, God willing.

It was a heck of a
night, but

WE ARE STILL HERE.

LINES FOR JUNE 13

Road crew -

The work takes
one man.

The watching,
three.