Real-Life Geology

Watchful.

When I drive into Lexington, I travel a picturesque stretch of Highway 68 that winds through steep limestone cliffs surrounding the Kentucky River known as The Pallisades. There are some narrow passes on that road that can make uninitiated drivers hold their breath; wedged hard between jutting overhangs of rock rising a hundred feet above the road and a tiny guardrail that my grandmother could have stepped over on a bad rheumatism day, even us veterans of the trip count ourselves lucky when we don't encounter a semi or a big old John Deere tractor pulling a swaying wooden trailer stacked high with hay bales.

Coming back southwest this afternoon on 68, about a quarter mile before the bridge separating Jessamine from Mercer county, I noticed a potentially disturbing feature on the rock wall about fifteen feet above the roadway. A boulder roughly the size of a Chevy Tahoe seems to be intent on loosing itself from the rest of the mountain sometime this decade. I hadn't noticed that chunk of rock before; that in itself isn't surprising, as usually I'm intent on jamming my thumb repeatedly at the 'Scan' button on my radio in search of something I can listen to with a clear conscience. Today, though, for whatever reason, the geometry of how that slab of the mountain is clinging to the cliff face just didn't look right to me. There are streamers of honeysuckle and Virginia Creeper cascading down the face of the boulder, and it occured to me that perhaps the roots of all those vines are busy probing the fissures behind the rock, looking for a piece of real estate to call their own. Perhaps all those vegetative interlopers are hastening the day when that block of limestone slips free of the thousands-of-years-long grip of inertia and goes ambulatory - so very ready to give us latter-day visitors to the mountain a lesson in gravity that we won't soon forget.

What Do You See With Your Eyes Closed?

There's A Window In The Sky

It's Saturday, and I stood on the front stoop for a few minutes. It's a good idea to keep an eye on what's out there, I say. Shelby took the opportunity to chew on some grass and flinch every time a car passed by or a lawn mower sputtered to life around the corner. She bolted back inside. 'Out there' is not for her.

I looked up in the general direction of the sun...did you ever do that? And I squeezed my eyes shut, tight, and watched for what would appear. It was a stone-arch window opening, minus the tower wall that it should have been mortared into. It just hung there against that no-color bluegrey that I see inside my eyelids, with the monotone kaleidescope of fishscale glitter all around it.

I thought maybe someone was in the window, standing back in the cool shadow away from the opening, but regarding me - or all of us - with a sort of predatory detachment. Not hungry right now. Maybe later, whoever-it-was seemed to say.

The sun is still shining out there. I closed the door; that helped a little. All morning long I've had the same song cutting across my consciousness like a knife. It hurts, but at the same time, it's good to know that sometime in history back, as they liked to say in the Mad Max films, somebody was feeling like I do and sat with a guitar across his knee and didn't spare the rod until a song was done.

If you haven't heard of the Godfathers, look them up.

"Boys and girls don't understand - the Devil makes work for idle hands.
Birth. School. Work. Death."

Sheer Genius

Sometimes, you just have to let art find you. This morning, I got run down by a brilliant and colorful and sometimes disturbing piece of poetry, and I swear to you people, I never saw it coming.

The small jewel that follows was tucked down at the bottom of an email from my good friend Annievavantioch8@huffinternet.com, letting me know that "We have a HUGE selection of top quality REPLIKA watches on sale NOW!" and that I should hurry, because "His & Her Watches - 26% OFF! While Supplies! Last!"

(if you're interested, you can check out these great deals by visiting www.gtbhbxhw.steelsenzation.com -- I haven't gone there yet; let me know how you like it.)

And now, the accidental verse. Let it add its life to your day.

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as koenigsberg in kahn it corpus as coherent
it cadmium not campion some soda or grip that cavil but commend
a thistledown and quaternary not jacobi not bechtel

it's scurry what buy when blind as frey
it's cocklebur when powerful it eclogue when schelling
but osiris it snuffer

some wavelength an aspartic
some demure when disembowel
or eardrum when slid in foamy as pink but cleanup

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Blistered Again

A Very Short Story

Just Because

He ran the bottle, unopened, all the way to the back of the cabinet. It rang a couple of dull tones that didn't inspire him at all as it passed too close to his half-empties, and he closed the door. Another virtuous near-miss that would stick with him like a deep splinter for the rest of the night, through all the unpleasant business at hand and beyond.

With a grim sort of purpose usually left to the damned or the unbalanced, he raked his car keys off the countertop and turned toward the garage to fetch his shovel.

The End.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Tribute _______________________ "The war is being waged with unbelievable cruelty and in a fashion so out of character with American instincts of decency that it is seriously undermining them." - William Sloane Coffin _______________________ On Wednesday, April 12, 2006, those of us who are believers in Christ lost a brother with a profound and important voice about how our faith touches and influences this world. William Sloane Coffin, political activist, former chaplain of Yale University, and Presbyterian minister, died at his home in Vermont of congestive heart failure. Friday, the NPR program 'Fresh Air' with Terry Gross aired an interview with Rev. Coffin originally broadcast in 1985, and I listened, rapt and intrigued, as I drove home. Of course, Rev. Coffin's views are more liberal than mine (which is saying something), but he made one observation in particular that has gripped me and left me committed to reading some of his books. He was talking about the singular tendency of Christians, when faced with a life tragedy, to intone, 'Well...it must have been God's will.' He spoke of families who have lost sons and daughters in war or to disease or in accidents...and people, he knew what he was talking about: his own son died in a senseless car wreck in 1983. He made the point that it does no service to God or to the memory of the loved one lost to ascribe God's will to their passing. I loved what he said next...that instead of God somehow being complicit in our sorrows, that truly, God who loves us so much is the first to have His heart broken by our loss. Now, I know that this flies in the face of more traditional Christian thought, that God numbers the hairs on our heads and notes every sparrow that falls from the sky...but I'd submit for consideration that the utter and complete omniscience and omnipresence of our God is something that we are unable to understand. The philosophical challenge presented by the merest contemplation of God's will is daunting and and shouldn't be undertaken lightly. I always return to God's ultimate proclamation on this subject in Isaiah 55:8. ' "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD. ' Further, I'd suggest that we are taught to endure and manage our lives with grace and dependence on the Lord. Peter touched on this in his first letter, chapter 4:12: 'Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you.' He understood that this life here below is full of opportunities for sorrow as well as joy. I'd urge everyone who wants to experience the spirit and courage of a man committed to the conscience of Christ to learn more about the life of William Sloane Coffin, who rests now in God's peace.

Another Chestnut From The Vault

The Dig

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The dreaming started again, the very first night after. He slept in the only patch of trees he found, a spindly group of yellow pines huddled in the corner of a soybean field. The ground between them was shot through with blackberry bramble and poison ivy, but he felt hidden from the relentless ribbon of blacktop; as soon as it was full dark, sleep took him like an angel of mercy. His right hand covered the place in the center of his chest where he imagined Hope had pierced him, where he imagined all his dignity was seeping out between his fingers as he slept. He shivered, remembering the coldspark flash of her eyes as she snatched her hand away from his.

In the humid blackness, he dreamed himself far down the mirthless belt of roadway; however far he might have been, though, there was no end to the blanket of agriculture spreading out on either side of the blacktop. Corn, soybeans, tobacco and cotton alternated to form a choking patchwork of green that left him disoriented and constantly scanning the horizon for landmarks. Here and there, rusting machinery that once groomed the fields settled down into the soil an inch at a time. He dreamwalked past these with the uneasy sensation that some bailer or harrow was going to lurch out of the ground and heave itself at him.

In a bare patch of dirt carved out of a cotton field, a small house had been reduced to a jumble of kindling and cast-off fixtures by a bulldozer; the packed earth around the wreckage seemed unwilling to yield any quarter to the roadside weeds seeking a foothold. With the senseless purpose peculiar to dreams, he found himself reaching into the tangle of crushed materials and extracting a worn, simple window frame fashioned of rough, uneven strips of poplar, empty of glass and stripped by time of any remnant of paint. He turned his back to a lowering sun and dropped the rectangle on the ground, framing his shadow from the waist up. He stood a moment, regarding the soft silhouette of his shade contained in the wooden box. Turning back to the shattered pile, he reached in, grasped a handle and wrenched a dented shovel from the mix. Following the choreography of his subconscious, he began to spear the shovel into the earth described by the worn window frame. Working carefully at the baked, dusty ground, he hacked a rectangular depression just inside the frame. His dream-mind offered up a forgotten song as he dug: 'Broken bodies, broken bones / broken voices on broken phones...' He dropped the shovel in the dust and settled down crosslegged in front of the hole. Bob Dylan's disinterested wail sang him down: 'Take a deep breath, feel like you're chokin' / everything is broken.' Rain began to fall into his dream; fat, oily drops that blackened the dirt around him and began to fill his shallow digging.

In the next moment, the rain stopped and he leaned over the reflecting pool in front of him. Dragging his fingers through the mud, he found a pebble and dropped it dead center into his unhealthy visage in the puddle, shattering himself into a fractal swirl. He shivered again and shook himself out of his uneasy sleep before his image settled back across the dark water.

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Conserve. Reuse. Recycle.

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Three Twenty Five
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He walked unsteadily down the road, blacktop scar healing between two broad shoulders of cornfield. Overhead the New Sky, as unfamiliar as if it held two suns, stretched from side to side, colored waxpaper gray and featureless, promising nothing. A sleek black wasp droned and labored across from field to field with a grasshopper the size of a sparrow chick grasped beneath its jointed body. He remembered Life (his Old Life) the way it used to be -- a dependable disappointment; a cradle-to-grave miserygrind, but easily survived if only Hope could be avoided. Earlier, though (moments ago? or years?) he met Hope on the road -- caught in the open with an armload of distractions, no camouflage and without the sense to look away. She battened on him and kissed his cheek; then scales fell and she smiled and made introductions. "This," she said, prying his fingers from her hand and backing away down the road, "is New Life." And he saw. Hope was already far-off down the way, a tiny doll with her feet lost in oil-black heatshimmer and touching someone else's cheek. New Life, surprising and treacherous with hood lowered and gloves off, met him there by the road. He closed his eyes and watched the yellow-gold motes and paislies spinning against the brown-gray darkness inside his eyelids. "Thirty-one, thirty-two," he said, without knowing what he was counting. "Waterdog-Trickster. Changling." His eyes snapped open and the New World hove into view.
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