Late Coffee and Oranges in a Sunny Chair

There is a beam we can follow, a ray of light. We can cultivate it, add spiritual wattage to it, by being grateful for what we have — air, fresh water, sunshine, the use of our limbs, a child’s smile, iced coffee, a pen and paper. In his poem, “Sunday Morning,” the poet Wallace Stevens speaks of “Late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair.” These are simple things that bring simple pleasures. Our human minds tend to add complexity to our existence, and in that complexity there is suffering. Joy is simple. Joy is freedom. We do not need much. We think we need more, even when we have more. More necessitates the need for more. It is in human nature to seek out these excesses. Everyone, pauper or billionaire, desires one thing that has no price tag: peace of mind. This is outside of the material world. It is only to be found in the spiritual life. Spirituality must be cultivated the way a garden is weeded, watered, and fed. Growth comes with effort, time, and enduring the inevitable droughts and pestilence. The idea is to remain working in the garden, season after season, dusting yourself off and bringing it into blossom. Move forward, further along the way. Even when we do not feel it, we must believe it. 

The Outlaws

Your own flesh and blood

Told you long ago

Something seemed “off”

About them.

They lacked some ineffable

Soul-stitch or hook

In their DNA, a calculating insincerity

At the heart of their actions.

Signals arose along the way,

Papered over with dollar bills, 

And trips to the south of France,

Mexico, and Montana. 

You lapped it up,

Smiling, tasting it,

Even if you detected something foul.

You just didn’t trust their trust.

They lacked soul in that Midwestern way,

Something to do with wagon trains

Headed west and Indians

Coming in for raids at night, taking scalps. 

Everything is hunky-dory and “great.”

They will praise you and piss on you 

At the same time and tell you it's raining.

When the morning comes, the wagons are gone.

Thank God you stick to the rugged granite outcrops

Of New England, the old town centers, the tradition,

Where we developed bullshit detectors over the centuries.

We know where we stand, particularly when we are knee-deep in it.

She Swims (for Nina)

When He made the world,
God had Monday, August 27, 2012,
In mind as His ideal.
I know this much, because I lived it.

Late summer, the day before middle school starts,
And she swims with a friend at the quarry:
Warm water, bright sunshine, wrapped in a
Shawl of dry caressing breezes.

How fortunate am I, having the dumb luck
To take this Monday off from work,
Present and relaxed,
Feeling the essential goodness of things,

Gazing at her 11-year-old self moving through the water,
Full of grace and delight, all mine by not
Being mine at all. All her, in her elegant creation
And glory. Daughter, sweet daughter: She swims.

On My 11-Year-Old Daughter Spotting the Family Dog Who Was Given Away During a Divorce

Old dog,

We gave you away.

And there you were 
One late August afternoon,

When I was 11 and playing goalie

On a club soccer team,

Your traipsed along the field alone,

Near your new private-school home.

On the grassy rise,

I saw you sniff your way,

Looking a little bigger

And milling about.

I remember you

When you were a pup.

How I loved you.

Now great distances

Separate us —
And the narrow passage

Of time in a dog's mind

And the vastness 
Of my little girl's mind

Cracks my heart a little,

Places a fissure in it,

That will scar over,

But never fully heal.

Taking Down the Crib

Everything that came together comes apart.
The screws, the bolts, the springs,
So carefully placed just a few years ago.

There's a faint scent of baby pee and vomit,
Mercifully offset by something sweet that speaks
Of powder and bubble baths.

The Unrecycled Life

On the day I realized my marriage of 16 years was over, I stopped recycling. The plastic Diet Coke bottles, yesterday’s Boston Globe, GQ magazines, the Campbell’s tomato soup cans — they all were tossed into a single large opaque-green plastic bag. I felt a twinge of guilt when I threw it into the dumpster at my town’s landfill under the suspicious eye of the Public Works Department employee, but it was so freeing to put it all in a bag and let it go — plunk — in with all the other trash. Of course, I was at risk of incurring fines, because recycling is mandatory in my hometown. I was able to get away with it, though. Living suddenly alone, I generated less trash and ate in my car, buying chicken wraps at McDonald’s and Diet Cokes. That trash I could toss when I topped off my tank at the gas station in those dark receptacles with the removable top with the small holes that attempt to limit the volume of your refuse. I would jam it through the hole or quickly take off the top and drop the bag in. More frequently, on my way home from Boston, I would pull into the McDonald’s on Route 1 in Saugus and order another divorcingman’s meal of two chicken wraps ("with chipotle sauce, please") and a Diet Coke. After I had paid at the first window and picked up my food at the second, I would gather up the wrappers and cup from the night before and throw the trash into the mouth of the reptilian-like red plastic receptacle conveniently placed now along the driver’s side of your car as you exit McDonald’s. Fast food meets fast trash.

Months into my divorce, which rapidly grew messy and ugly with lawyers and child custody and financial issues, I started using those opaque tan or white plastic bags from the grocery store to collect my trash from the evening meal (paper plates, plastic cups, a couple of paper towels, leftover rice, chicken bones). I’d hang it on the pantry door in my empty, child-less house and fill it up. If I chewed a piece of gum, it would go in there. If I blew my nose in Kleenex, I’d toss it there. A pen lacking ink, boom, in the bag. I was careful not to discard any letters or mail in there, because household trash disposal at gas stations and elsewhere is frowned upon and some unlucky schmuck will pick through what looks to be illegally tossed trash in a search for clues, like an old cable TV bill bearing the perpetrator's telltale address. I have heard you typically get a letter of warning, but I never got one because I was careful. All the mail and envelopes that I didn’t need would go into my Vermont Castings Resolute woodstove. I would use a wooden match to light the paper  — watching with an uneasy delight as the flame licked and crawled across the pyre, my name and address burning from orange to blue to brown to black, destroying and consuming everything in its path. It gave me the feeling of finality and obliteration that blazed all around me.

January 1, 2012

Begin again
In this interminable gray,
The only color left
On the palette.

The color of my mind defeats it,
Dabbing and swirling
Blues and greens and reds.
And so on.

I will never relinquish the fire crackling at my core.
My 47-year-old self seeks out
The boy within — bright-eyed, yearning,
Brimming with hope.

He has endured the years,
Breathing here in the present.
The clock keeps ticking, but my time
Moves to the measure of my heart.