[Image: “Elko Feather,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) Most days have at least some little thing that distinguishes from the general calendrical background noise, but every now and then something genuinely big comes along…]

Blogging one day a week, even for 14-1/2 years as I’ve done, requires no great powers of concentration or persistence — especially if the once-a-week routine rests on the shoulders (as mine does) of someone with genuine staying power. Often over the course of three or four posts a week, going back to at least the early 2000s, the anonymous whiskey river blogger has continued to surprise, delight, and inspire me with the things the gems of quoted wisdom they’ve unearthed: sometimes of a mystical bent, sometimes suffused with fiery rage, sometimes a-dance with whimsy…

(When I’m searching for the original source of one of these quotations, it often happens, unsurprisingly, that whiskey river itself turns up among the results. Furthermore, I’ve gotten used to the slightly weird phenomenon of finding one of my own Friday posts returned by the search, too; this happen when whiskey river extracts from its own deep archive a quotation it already used in the past — at which time I cited it in a Friday post here at RAMH.)

This past week, whiskey river has offered up the following poem, from one of its favorite poets; the quotation is one of those pulled out of the attic steamer trunk called whiskey river’s commonplace book — specifically, this page. No idea if I myself might’ve have used the poem before, but I wouldn’t be surprised. What I present below includes the poem’s last couple stanzas, omitted (for whatever reason) by whiskey river:

Wait for an Autumn Day
(From Ekelöf)

Wait for an autumn day, for a slightly
weary sun, for dusty air,
a pale day’s weather.

Wait for the maple’s rough, brown leaves,
etched like an old man’s hands,
for chestnuts and acorns,

for an evening when you sit in the garden
with a notebook and the bonfire’s smoke contains
the heady taste of ungettable wisdom.

Wait for afternoons shorter than an athlete’s breath,
for a truce among the clouds,
for the silence of trees,

for the moment when you reach absolute peace
and accept the thought that what you’ve lost
is gone for good.

Wait for the moment when you might not
even miss those you loved
who are no more.

Wait for a bright, high day,
for an hour without doubt or pain.
Wait for an autumn day.

(Adam Zagajewski [source])

Over the last few weeks, as The Missus and I have been turning our attention to questions like Now what?, I’ve been thinking, off and on, of the writing I’ve done over the decades. Oh, not the published writing (which truthfully doesn’t amount to much anyhow: one novel, around a half-dozen technical books which never sold very well). No, I’ve been thinking of the writing I’ve completed, rather listlessly submitted here and there and now and then, and then just… stopped.

Specifically, I’m thinking of preparing a short-fiction collection, and bringing it to something like life in an e-book edition (with the option of getting a printed copy). It seems it would be a silly shame to just let it all go, without ever letting anyone (beyond writing-workshop participants) having ever read it…

Anyhow, whether that project comes to fruition or not, I’ve been re-reading some of this stuff. The largest portion of the “anthology” would be a section — maybe a wholly separate volume — called Webster, Unabridged, featuring a main character who goes by that name. (You can read a bit about the Webster stories here, in a post from back in 2008.)

I workshopped a couple of Webster’s stories, and the participants seemed to appreciate them; but when I actually did a Webster novella, one of them dubbed it “the Moby Dick of Webster stories.” (That still makes me laugh.)

I’ll share here an excerpt from The Dark — the last couple of paragraphs. In general, as background:

• The time is the late 1980s: no cellphones, no online world to speak of, and a car — the Ford Galaxie — which existed both in sedan and station-wagon form.
• Over the course of the story, Webster becomes entangled, apparently inextricably, with a woman named Mary. (One episode of this entanglement involves, among other things, a tire iron thrown through the windshield of a Jaguar.)
• His life is therefore about to change in ways he cannot predict, except that he knows there’s no turning back.

So, then — here’s the very ending of The Dark:

He drove slowly, carefully; despite the night’s earlier frenzy and later coffee he had, after all, had an awful lot to drink, on top of which his eyes were still jagged with burrs of near-sleep. Setting the radio to the first clear station he landed on, a country-western station — he normally never listened to the stuff but it felt somehow right, at this time, to be twined-about by jangling guitar chords and voices yodeling in heartbreak. Mary’s scent everywhere, all of her scent, the vanilla and the clover and all the rest of it, everywhere, he could not not sense it: in his hair, in his chin and brow, pressed into the backs of his hands and wrists, rubbed like liniment into his pores; indeed, while he wasn’t literally inhaling it anymore, now he seemed to be exhaling it. Scent of desire.

He rolled down his window. The twilit morning cold came roaring in at him and he hung his head out the window and into the wind; it roared around and over and into the pores of his face and scalp, blurring his vision and scrubbing scrubbing his skin but leaving untouched the scent at his core. A thousand questions glittered down at him from the sky, one question per star, only the least consequential of which were sure to be forthcoming from the Jaguar owner’s insurance company but for the most part unanswerable questions about what he was — well, thought he was — and what he wanted (or, well, all right: thought he wanted) to be, and what he had done and would have to do now, what he could do now and what he would never be able to do again. Lined up behind a tractor trailer which was mysteriously obeying the speed limit, on a wild impulse Webster reached forward and shut off the Galaxie’s headlights. Bobbing like a cork, borne on desire, face to the wind. Heart racing, alone in the dark.

(JES)