Note: This was written August 8th, 2019. On the fifth anniversary of Berman’s death, I remembered this little thought existed.
David Berman died yesterday.
This made the three dollar drinks at the hotel bar a little bittersweet, and though the Two-Hearted Ale was near perfect, and Detroit walked off in the ninth, I kept coming back to David all alone in Chicago, or alone enough to pull the plug, and how over the years I too have felt like checking out from time to time – ultimately glad I never did. It is tragic how short life is, how demanding and time consuming, keeping us from what makes us happy.
I don’t know.
I hope David found happiness. I listened to his final music early this morning in the backseat on the drive to the Upper Peninsula. It was there the whole time.
Our boat trip to Pictured Rocks was canceled thanks to high winds and choppy waters, instead hiking to Miners Castle in the crisp afternoon, and at one point I looked over the railing at the scenic overlook and pictured myself jumping, only I never hit the ground.
Sometimes I drive past the blue house with its ashen roof and white trim, note the collected changes of a decade – gone the bushes at the end of the cracked driveway, gone the redbud popcorn bloom of spring. There’s a small garden in the backyard where the above ground pool used to bring the family together, and the wide oak, sick with canker and BB pellets, no longer leans heavy into the porch, lending shade to those unforgiving summer evenings.
I see you, bouncing room to room as if we were too poor for doors, your hair electrocuted, the bottom of my outstretched t-shirt scraping the carpet. I see the home movies where you played all the parts. I see our first dog, scarred by coyotes – still her tail thumps the floor.
The old neighborhood is a horseshoe in the wandering lens of a cold satellite, a postcard with a watermark so fine you don’t have to hold it to the light.
The door is locked, but all our ghosts still haunt inside.
He kneels closer to his work, ninety-two in the shade, cigarette dangling from his mouth as smoke mixes into his stringy, black hair with a little gray like the weathered back of a cattle dog. Ash drops onto the ovate hosta leaf and he brushes it away with his thumb. The air, thick as bathwater, chases the last of the bruised rainclouds that had briefly paused his work, beads of moisture ornamental on the lenses of his glasses. He reaches his hands into wet earth and pulls toward his body like a lucky hand of poker. He digs and digs and I know his mind is elsewhere. He stops and looks at the hole, there on his knees. He returns the dirt inside and lays the base of a new gardenia bush and I wonder where he had gone the moment before.
I used to lay in the dark with this wild idea that great celestial beings stood guard at the corners of my room, shrouded in ten-thousand unblinking eyes and milk-white fire, deputized by Christ to keep Satan and his supporters from scratching at the window and pulling my card. I would ask God to look after me and those I loved and those I didn’t understand, and if I couldn’t sleep, be it youthful regret or the shadowed chimera at the foot of the bed, I would open a gospel and thumb for red letters. Now I close my eyes and breathe deeply, picture myself in Northern California fishing the Sierra Nevadas with Dad and all the dogs we ever had. I picture sitting at the dinner table with Mom and my sister, laughing as the record skips, our feet in the cool sand watching boiler steam from the Ludington ferry stretch clear to Wisconsin as if tethered to the purview. I search both sand dune and marram grass for new angles to old ideas, the answer high in rafters, with the sweet, painful reminder that all roads end – mine a thinning two-track weaving in and out, past valleys and over hillsides before tapering off into row after row of eastern white pine. And with it comes the night, and the dark we all succumb to. Then I dream.
Beneath Broken Arrow power lines, Drummond Island in damp knee high grass, Croton and Henning Park, warmed in last light; the ball turns purplish orange with short tosses upward before landing in soft leather, like the fitted glide of putting on Sunday shoes. I love the motion, the rhythm, the movement of the seams – spinning, floating, dancing, guided by higher, misunderstood things. Deer watch from the edge of left field as coyotes canter in right, in royal view of the town water tower across the river, last in feeling the sun, framed in center. Practicing our knuckles and curves like boys who never wandered into the woods, never stared down wolves in new darkness.
Originally appeared in The Tulsa Voice: October 2017.
I fell from the treehouse as the adults talked in the kitchen. I stared up at the tree that betrayed me, past the leaves and branches at the moon in early evening, nestled close like a piece of fruit, wondering if the tree would let the moon tumble too.
Sitting here now I smell sweet redbud on the tail end of a western prairie fire, rows of Bradford pear looking like winter now more than three months ago. A county burn ban keeps us from collecting kindling and raking sanguine coals, over and over again.
A mourning dove rests at the edge of the roof as I start to shiver in the shade – the shadow swallowing the new grass of the courtyard. Her song asks for warmer days and spring showers and I tell her the rain will keep coming till the rain gets it right.
I heard his braided stories of cowboys and astronauts on the radio through the charcoal filter he was known for, a handwritten receipt of the wry Southwest. In San Luis he leans against a door frame – thin with sheep’s wool hugging the neck of his denim jacket, cattleman cowboy hat tilted, brim over his eyes, taking in the room.
The mountains from where I drink their shadows slide into the sea, and still their rivers breed continuity, hands cupped in the cool, trickling flow like the moon naked behind clouds.
Last night a coyote pup darted in front of my truck on the way home. I should’ve known it was you.
Originally published in The 3288 Review: Autumn 2019.
This weather confuses the birds, I’m told. Seventy-three degrees in January on a Thursday afternoon. The trees talk of former windfalls, widow makers, cradled for baptisms under Cherokee skies – bark stripped white like antlers tangled in black hickory, dried leaves the rustle of balled paper.
Winter is barely out the gate but spring chews in our ear.
This bar is lit year-round with Christmas lights reflecting off the varnished oak, drinking glasses, and liquor stock, and a dozen little tiki lamps sporadically glow from their stationed posts; an aura not unlike votive candles flickering at the feet of the Blessed Virgin.
I’m redefining what it means to sit here in the dark. It’s a shame they won’t be talking about this in the next century: the way he pronounced vacuous when asked to describe the room, or the shot-glass clank tuned in perfect collective pitch. It’ll either be too hot or too cold by then, and reading will be as ancient as laugh tracks and patriotic cowboys, Monument Valley now a beatific dementia that rises with Abbadon and sets with Big Sur.
But I’m not thinking about that right now. I’m thinking about you, whoever you are, wrapped carelessly in a coral, melon-white Mexican blanket on Zuma Beach with your back to me, and whether or not it’s really been ten years since I’ve seen the ocean.
Originally published in Sugar House Review: Fall/Winter 2018
She sat quietly with her lunch, overlooking the Chippewa River through the dining room bay windows as sunlight pierced through the clouds for the first time that day.
From the screened porch I spoke to my aunt and uncle and cousin as grandma watched the bend in the river knee, its banks plump with snow.
I still don’t know if she recognized me standing there, or simply waited for the right moment to speak, but after some time she looked up and smiled and said “It’s good to see you, dear” before returning to the river.
Kodama
I wander the dark house after everyone has gone to bed, looking for any sign of my grandfather’s ghost. Under the streetlamp the streets shine from fresh rain like sweat on a damp forehead. As a child the signs of life were the police scanner in the living room, sometimes accompanied by his silhouette in his recliner, listening in the dark, and later, as an adult, his constant coughs and groans, signs of life from the room below, my grandmother beside him, awake, holding his hand.
But he did not die here. He left in the middle of the night, unable to breathe on his own, seven miles south in a nursing home where he spent the final months of his long life. Maybe his ghost is still out there, wandering, turned around in a cornfield or pulled by the scent of his past life to the creek he crossed as a teenager, the fields of high grass covered in dew, his pant legs soaked to the knees on his nightly walk in the dark to see June, his love, years before they married.
The signs are everywhere, they just are not here.
The white figure out the living room window is not my grandfather and I don’t ask his name. He belongs to someone else, and I wave him on. He heads through the trees to the river where a spirit can travel twice as fast. The ballfield near the river where I chased grounders and pop flies has gone through so many changes, I struggle to recognize my own memories
The light that warms my face is death.
Maybe grandfather’s ghost is ashamed now the family knows of his numerous infidelities, like the woman at the bar he saw often, a ten minute walk from home. Where do you go if you can’t go home? The river lets out at the Great Lake and there it is separated from the sky by a line only the dead are willing to touch.
Mt. Pleasant
We identified the callery pear tree and paradise apple, both white as cherry blossom. Grandma said this was the first time she had sat in the garden, though she had the best view from her bedroom window. She gave her blessing to my sister and her boyfriend and their plans to move to Hawaii and I admit disappointment in myself for not being able to offer her the same.
As we left she gave me a hug and said “If I’m not here next time you visit, you know where I’ll be,” just as she had the last five years, but this time I think she means it. The sun broke through the clouds on the ride home yet the light continues to dim.
Evening Panoply 