The Wreck of The Hesperus

 

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Happy Easter.

 

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Another beautiful day. Work continues apace on the house and environs. After long neglect, we are endeavoring to bring things into shipshape. I tackled the back deck while the woman turned to indoors, giving the bathroom and laundry room a field day. I swept and pressure washed the deck, the adirondack chairs, the big heavy dining table and chairs. Hauled trash, cut out dead growth, weeded, generally spruced up.

Now it’s spanking clean, and feels fresh and wonderful, like the day itself, all blue sky and mad with birds, just crazy with them. Our yard backs up to miles of open land, and we’ve got loads of trees and bushes that are packed with sparrows and finches, with roufus throated towhees, black chinned towhees, Lincoln’s sparrow, pine grosbeaks, doves, scrub jays, ravens, carrion birds circling overhead, all manner of gulls drifting in from the sea, great woodpeckers and red-tailed hawks and kestrels in the tall pines on the hill. They make a hell of a racket and fill the branches of every bush and tree with music and movement. The light plays and dances on every shimmering surface and the breeze comes all tinged with salt and iodine from the sea and it reminds me that heaven is here all around us, just waiting for us to notice.

Maybe I’m cleaning out something inside myself at the same time. Opening some long-shut windows. Letting in light and noise and all the mess and clamor of life itself.

Maybe that is the case.

 

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With that wild girl of ours living in the back now with her little baby, everybody healthy and happy and nobody locked up and nobody acting scandalous and no sleepless nights waiting for the cops or the hospital to call, it feels a little bit like the world got put together again after somebody shook it all up like a snowglobe for a few years.

The big machine turns yet again.

 

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Last night I dreamed one dream about reconditioning the cast iron skillet and one dream about floating along in a meandering track of an endless waterpark, the water warm and blue, the walls slick and shiny, the water rocking me like a fat baby. It felt nice as hell, and seemed to last almost forever.

 

I don’t want to die for a long, long time yet.

 

I don’t want for you to die, either.

 

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Let’s sit here till the sun goes down, then I’ll light the bonfire and we can have a couple of beers and listen to the crickets sing and the fire crackle and watch the stars spin slowly above us and shit we’ll just ride it out till we all fall asleep in our chairs. Or pass out in the embers of the dying fire.

 

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Namaste.

 

 

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When I Went Down In The River To Pray

 

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Today was a glorious day of wind and sunshine, of long walks on the cliffs and down to the sea, of weeding in the garden and cooking and eating and cleaning of the house. A day where the breeze and sunlight and dirt brought our bodies into life, where the air was sweet in our lungs and the day lay easy upon our bones.

 

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The other day the Wild Woman of Borneo and I went out and met this goofy kid in the parking lot of a McDonalds and we bought his mashed-up 1998 Volkswagen Jetta with all the money my kid ever had at one time, plus another handful of greenbacks from me.

The window don’t roll up on one side. You have to open the back driver’s side door before you can open the driver’s door. The windshield is spider-webbed in the upper corner. It’s mostly black in color.

 

But it has mad rims. And low-profile tires. And a stereo system that makes the doors rattle for blocks around. And a stick shift.

The kid loves it. And the Woman on the Verge will be happy not to have to run her to drug court and parenting class five times a week.

We drove around our little burg all weekend, getting her to learn that stick shift mojo.

 

It ain’t easy.

 

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My wife is buried in laundry and diapers and dishes and yard mess and every five seconds the kid runs up to her and gives her a screaming baby with a dirty diaper. And yet she makes beautiful jewelry, something new every day. Or some kind of art.

And she doesn’t murder us, not even when we deserve it.

 

“I’m so irritated right now, I could scream my fucking head off.”

-overheard near the kitchen.

 

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I love her superbad.

 

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I took the dog for a walk on the northern cliffs at Lone Palm after dinner. It was still warm and sunny and the wind was picking up. There were a couple of guys out on the rocks in the tidal zone, fishing for rockfish or blues or something. Gulls all in the air, screaming and careening. A lone egret in the weeds on the hill, a couple of black vultures in the tree line over a deer carcass near the highway. Sea lions on the exposed rocks, far from the fishermen.

I go to the place where the sea meets land and I feel the whole immensity of time on this small planet. Feel it in my bones.

Our troubles are but small.

 

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I better go tend to my wife before she sets the house on fire.

 

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Namaste.

 

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Lester In The City

 

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I do the best I can.

 

That’s going to have to be enough.

 

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Of course, it never could be, could it? The list of shit I’ve left undone grows longer day by day. Maybe that is what getting older means. Although it should be the other way round, shouldn’t it?

I’m running in place.

 

 

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I got a tender regard for the humans I know. I love my wife and no matter what I will continue in this regard. I have used what strength and goodness I’ve got in me to raise up my kid, and although nobody could call it a success, she’s alive right now and she’s happy and she’s got a damn fine baby to call her own.

We’re all of us cashing checks, hoping they won’t clear till we’ve got a little something in the bank.

I kid around saying come sit by the fire, bring a beer, watch the sparks rise up spiraling into the star mad vault of the night sky. Like we’re friends. Like it matters.

 

Well, I say you are. I say it does.

 

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The provisional and half-broke is the good stuff.

 

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Just like us.

 

 

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Namaste.

 

 

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