Others’ Spirits, Others’ Senses, and Our Own

[Image: “Youth Culture – Mods – Late 1950s to Mid 1960s,” by Paul Townsend on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

I breathe in the soft, saturated exhalations of cedar trees and salmonberry bushes, fireweed and wood fern, marsh hawks and meadow voles, marten and harbor seal and blacktail deer. I breathe in the same particles of air that made songs in the throats of hermit thrushes and gave voices to humpback whales, the same particles of air that lifted the wings of bald eagles and buzzed in the flight of hummingbirds, the same particles of air that rushed over the sea in storms, whirled in high mountain snows, whistled across the poles, and whispered through lush equatorial gardens… air that has passed continually through life on earth. I breathe it in, pass it on, share it in equal measure with billions of other living things, endlessly, infinitely.

(Richard Nelson [source, apparently])

…and:

Of all the forms of voice and communication, a song is perhaps the least mediated by the intellect. It ropes its way through the tangle of our cautions, joining singer to listener like a vine between two trees.

It attests to the life of the singer through our skin and through our muscles, through the wind in our lungs and the fact of our own beating heart. The evidence of other spirits becomes that of our own body.

A successful song comes to sing itself inside the listener. It is cellular and seismic, a wave coalescing in the mind and in the flesh. There is a message outside and a message inside, and those messages are the same, like the pat and thud of two heartbeats, one within you, one surrounding. The message of the lullaby is that it’s okay to dim the eyes for a time, to lose sight of yourself as you sleep and as you grow: if you drift, it says, you’ll drift ashore: if you fall, you will fall into place.

(Kevin Brockmeier [source])

…and:

Horses at Midnight Without a Moon

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.

(Jack Gilbert [source])

Not from whiskey river:

[Computer “architect” Steve] Wallach had now spent more than a decade working on computing equipment. He’d had a hand in the design of five computers — all good designs, in his opinion. He had worked long hours on all of them. He had put himself into those creatures of metal and silicon. And he had seen only one of them come to functional life, and in that case the customer had decided not to buy the machine.

(Tracy Kidder [source])

…and:

We Have Trees Now

more so than we did before, but now we know what to do with
them.
We hang our troubles on them and wipe our shoes against them.
We go lethargic on the porch, we tear the bark with spindly fingers.
We soak up the sun with restless hunger.
So much sky we say in unison, where does it go, do we follow it?
Do we let it get away?
For months we splay without a fence, door wide open—
blue and brash inside and out. Because we can, we keep saying,
because we can.
We face a lush sense of life that we have nothing to do with.
We face our cravings and journey with a new kind, our new people;
They all possess smiles and frowns, but more windswept
expressions—no permanent downwardness of spirit,
the way it was back east.
And since we’ve left the city to be ourselves,
we still must face our needy souls—
full of want, compulsions.
Were we proud of this? The way we turned away?

But we’ve protected these habits, forgone others in return.
What is the profession of the culture-hoarder?
Who are the gatekeepers? Do we grace them with our backs?
Moreover our chests remain empty yet seductively warmed,
burning by the fire, our asses cold and exposed.
All the wood, crisp birch to shield our lazy lobes, rounded bodies,
our cerebrums and other parts.
Are we awaiting cheerless ambivalence to greet us in the West?
Cavernous and cloudless, unaffected by beauty. Let’s be petulant,
this is us now, we say. We can’t help but find ourselves lustful;
crying alligator tears with pails to our eyes, we didn’t know we were
here
we kept saying, we don’t know how it happened. We thought and
thought,
and finally we closed our doors on the trees
to hide what we grew temperate for
but resolve didn’t find us,
not alive with force, we flew out of their arms.

(Prageeta Sharma [source])

…and:

Grandfather’s Cars

Every two years he traded them in (“As soon
as the ashtrays get full,” he said with good humor);
always a sedate four-door sedan, always a Buick,
always dark as the inside of a tomb.

Then one spring Grandfather took off to trade,
returned, parked proudly in the driveway.
“Shave-and-a-haircut, two bits!” blared the horn.
Grandmother emerged from the kitchen into day-

light, couldn’t believe her eyes. Grandfather sat
behind the wheel of a tomato-red Lincoln
convertible, the top down. “Shave-and-a-haircut,
two bits!” “Roscoe, whatever are you thinking?”

she cried. Back into the kitchen she flew.
No matter how many times he leaned on that horn,
she wouldn’t return. So he went inside,
found her decapitating strawberries with scorn.

“Katie, what’s wrong with that automobile?
All my life I’ve wanted something sporty.”
He stood there wearing his Montgomery Ward
brown suit and saddle shoes. His face was warty.

She wiped her hands along her apron,
said words that cut like a band saw:
“What ails you? They’ll think you’ve turned fool!
All our friends are dying like flies—all!

You can’t drive that thing in a funeral procession.”
He knew she was right. He gave her one baleful
look, left, and returned in possession
of a four-door Dodge, black, practical as nails.

Grandfather hated that car until the day he died.

(Robert Phillips [source])