Suddenly Nothing Happened

Holed up in this rent-controlled bunker dodging unseen variants and political  miscreants. It is not unlike trench warfare, trying to stay alive dodging bulletins instead of bullets and all that virulence it brings. Yet at the same time looking for Wallace Stevens', green freedom of the cockatoo.

I'm alternating good sounds by Gerry Mulligan and Gustave Mahler to accompany my morning melon and cereal. I thought I just saw Joe Manchin's face in my oatmeal so I threw in a few more blueberries to bury him, him with his filibuster. I was thinking of writing to a friend back east but I couldn't get a sixty vote majority.

This week marks the thirty-seventh anniversary of the very week Peggy and I moved into this apartment. Thank you Harry Bornstein. He had been a long-time friend of Peggy through the Valley Center for Arts, an organization of which she was a founder in the mid 1950s. Harry was an artist and designer. One Sunday he invited us to brunch and asked if we were interested in a two-bedroom apartment. YES, we exclaimed loudly in unison. Harry had owned an entire block in this Ocean Park area and built both condos and rentals. We came, we saw, we moved in. 

We were blessed. The Red Sea had parted and we made our exodus to this promised land. Let me hear that trumpet! The eleventh commandment:  Be willing to be lucky. Not as easy as it may sound. Many people, including myself, don't know when they have arrived. There come moments when one would be advised to cease being a seeker and instead become a finder. 

The bird of paradise plant right outside the front door was a sign of welcome and is still sending orange drones of bliss in every flight. It follows me to the laundry room and the trek around the corner to the drop off bags of trash and garbage in their bins. This could be the highlight film of my day.

Now I am thinking of how this block must have looked before Harry's first shovel. How many eucalyptus trees were felled and nests disappeared. Someday those woods will reclaim their habitat and from that garbage I may have dropped a pit or seeds out of which a fruit tree will yet bloom.

My strategy for today is to not turn on cable news. My prescription for myself. If nothing happens I count that as a blessing of good news. I shall read some poetry books instead. As William Carlos Williams said, It is difficult to get the news from poetry yet men die miserably every day for lack of what can be found there.

Raymond Carver wrote, I went for a walk. Determined not to return / until I took in what Nature had to offer.... Kept going until I reached the bluff / where I gazed at the sea and sky / and the gulls wheeling over the white beach / far below / bathed in a pure cold light / As usual my thoughts / began to wander. / I had to will myself to see what I was seeing / and nothing else.*

Now I'm going back to the long-neglected work by Philip Levine, the poet who gave me permission to write what I write.

I had been on my way to work as usual when the traffic stalled a quarter mile from the railroad crossing.... Back in the alley the guys in greasy dark wool jackets were keeping warm by a little fire made from fence posts and garage doors.. A police car dozed across the street.....Around me engines began to die and then my own went. I could feel a deep cold slowly climbing my legs which wouldn't move. My eyes began to blink on a darkness I had never seen before. I knew these tiny glazed pictures - a car hood, my own speedometer, the steering wheel, the windshield fogging over - were the last I'd ever see. These places where I had lived all the days of my life were giving up their hold on me.**

And these final lines from Peggy: A light from a window. Her fingers / will signify. Someone shouts. / Far off, a man deafened by snow / waits for an insinuation of blue.

Thank you again, Harry Bornstein, for these walls and windows with a sliver of the sea to be viewed over the kitchen sink. Hoping for another hemorrhagic sunset before it finds its portal into the Pacific soup. Nothing happened and yet....

*   Raymond Carver poem, This Morning

** Philip Levine poem, The Last Shift