Linz, Austria (http://www.sternwarte.at) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6756468
-
Cabrillo Ave
The sun has set on Santa Barbara and off-shore oil rigs at the horizon are lit up like a row of Christmas trees, each platform out there mining the seabed for countless giga-Joules of energy. Below them, marine life tries to survive, though tankers threaten whales’ safe passage: too many of their giant carcasses – crushed by hull, disfigured by propellor – have fallen to the deep or washed ashore. Even so, petrels dart among the waves. Murres dive where anchovies group near the surface. Sea lions pick starfish off the pilings. Fathoms down, sharks rove and crabs meander; squid luminesce with brilliant trickery; hagfish scavenge dead whales at the bottom. From under the silt, crude oil siphoned up powers commerce, holiday travel, sport. To say the ocean is agnostic to this would be untrue. No, whales are patient until the day when those rigs and tankers crumble, capsize, then sink to the abyss – becoming, perhaps, new habitats for octopus, anemone, oyster. In the fullness of time, centuries later, waters again will roil with their great bodies: their feeding, their mating, their migrations.
-
Blood Moon
At 4am, the flower moon is pale and brilliant in loam-dark sky. A cloud passes in front of it but does not alter how it shines through the dining room window into our darkened apartment. The glass vase on our wood table holds a bouquet of white roses eerily aglow in its light. Each blossom’s petals have opened almost to the phase of decay. My wife and I in our forties, lately we discuss another baby. Did she become pregnant tonight? Every month, for a while, the option for seeds to be sown and take root. I have shared with her my concerns; do we have enough resources? She urges us on, undaunted. Hours earlier, the earth’s shadow dimmed the moon and turned it copper. We had just put our son to bed, then took turns going outside to watch the eclipse at its peak. Back indoors, I made us dinner: poached eggs slathered with hollandaise. Now I rise from bed before dawn, addled mind fertile for worry, transfixed by the radiant moon which relishes its moment of fullness.
-
First Beard
My first attempt to grow a beard was when I was hospitalized for cutting my wrist with a knife. After some days of patchy growth, I saw myself in the mirror of the psych ward’s common bathroom and decided to shave it off. Closely monitored by a nurse, I used a razor on my face to remove the overgrown scruff that made my eyes look like windows in a droopy, neglected house whose lawn was in dire need of care – the kind of job I often did in summers as a teenager, before I really knew what harm depression can wreak on the mind. Back in those days, mowing the grass – money earned saved up for college or a trip to Costa Rica – I was a mostly hopeful youth having not yet experienced the sensation of my future being ripped out from under me: a sinkhole beneath the front steps of that house, unrepairable, spreading toward the foundation. The best recourse is moving out, trying to settle somewhere else. I was discharged a week later – my face now smooth, my eyes clearer – spent another year in the home where I became miserable, then packed my clothes in a suitcase and flew across the whole country.
-
Goya’s Eagle Hunter
The ink has faded to burnt sienna, depicting a rust-colored precipice. A man in a harness lowers himself to where a nest is ensconced in a crag. His torso horizontal, he reaches inside the roost, abducting eggs and chicks. From the upper left, a full-fledged eagle flies toward the hunter, oblivious to the impending conundrum they share. Will she release her quarry, a rabbit clenched in her beak, in order to protect her brood? Will he drop the basket he holds by his waist so he can fend off attack? The moment suspends, the outcome unsure.
-
Grandma’s Violin
For twenty years before grandma was born my great-grandfather played the violin. “It was a Stradivarius.” She claims, though I wonder if she is mistaken. He played for dances in Nelson County then stopped when his daughters came along because he did not allow them to dance – it can lead to drinking, and other sins. But Friday nights he still had a small band with two friends on their guitar and banjo. The three of them walked up a hill at the border of his property’s vast acreage to perform each week for the farmhands who worked for him and lived there in shacks. “After I’m gone, you find that violin under the floorboards in the attic.” She once instructed me on the phone from her house in Lynchburg, forty miles south of great-granddad’s land, what he passed on having been sold to pay for her long-term care. “I know it must be worth a lot.” She said. A year later, now in a nursing home, calling me again to ask if I received the package a friend sent in the mail, she says the residents were entertained by a bluegrass trio. “They played some hymns and I sang along.” She tells me. I let her know I have the family treasure now – when I put it to my ear, I hear breeze whisper through fields of alfalfa, flutter among poplars in a hilltop grove, and the faint strain of “Abide With Me.”
-
After Thanksgiving
The Day After Thanksgiving, 2019 It is still dark when I get out of bed and go downstairs to begin my morning. Dawn starts to brightens the kitchen window. The metal pot in the coffee maker sings a merry tune as hot water drips into it. My wife and son still asleep, I have a rare moment to be alone with no agenda except admiring a pine ridge to the east dusted with snow. It speaks to me of calm and solitude and I am grateful for the reminder – though grateful as well for this house filled with loved ones, yesterday’s laughter fresh enough in my mind that I can hear its echoes tiptoeing gleefully from room to room.
-
Martini
How to Make a Martini First you need to dim the overhead lights. They are far too harsh, and in such a glare the spirits, claiming modesty, will not leave the bottle the way they were meant to: sultry, debonair, almost clandestine. Next, you select precisely four ice cubes. Tap water is okay, distilled is best. What matters is their dimension: no less than one inch per side, and no chips or cracks. Tilt a stainless-steel shaker ten degrees. Slide the ice cubes along its inner wall, taking great care that they do not fracture or make much noise when they hit the bottom. Add in three ounces of gin or vodka, then take a bottle of extra dry vermouth and pour it down the drain of your sink; as the vapors rise, let them condense around the rim and insides of your shaker. Close the top and shake with marked vigor an odd number of times – preferably a prime number, though not more than twenty. Strain into a glass. Any one is fine, it only needs to have chilled overnight in your fridge on a shelf by itself. Now embellish with a single olive: a Castelvetrano, its pit removed and in the round hollow space that is left a tiny Manchego wedge wrapped tightly in a little Soppressata kerchief. Never mind the toothpick, wood or plastic – for it is cumbersome and will impede your lips from taking the sip they are due.
-
“Keep Moving”
My 90-year-old grandma said when I told her I was bereft after my first wife called it quits. This was almost ten years ago and even now what comes to mind is a nurse shark on the seabed slowly scoping their feeding grounds: a sluggish but deliberate motion to keep a vital flow of oxygen over their gills, never certain where they will find either their next morsel of food among the silt and reef debris that carpets the dark ocean floor where at night they are keen to hunt, or a partner with whom to mate and produce a litter of pups – only confident in the swish of their tail to pump them forward and the guile of their whiskered snout, electric with sense to survive. So, I too, with a salve applied by time’s passage, tried my mettle at the gradual beckoning of opportunity; grandma’s advice ever present, crucial for her decades of endurance, words to move me out of sadness.
-
Downstairs Neighbor
She is screaming something at somebody in a language we do not understand. Long past midnight, the commotion disrupts sleep and causes acute unease of mind. Her voice’s enraged tenor rises up from the floor and comes abrupt, unbidden through open windows into our bedroom where it flies chaotic on blackbird wings: in and out of the doorway, careening from wall to wall, then pausing to hover above our faces awakened by fright. Sudden quiet. It dissolves. We are left only with concerned imagination as to what is happening below us. A mystery that will remain unsolved, evidence of ill erased by morning. The sun shines through the balcony’s glass doors. A smudge of incense wafts inside our home, its apparent source the downstairs neighbor. Strange-to-smell, and potent enough to be offensive, we close ourselves in against this heinous spirit, whatever it is – though it now feigns to be tame and bleary – so it cannot take residence with us.
-
Elephant Family
The matriarch is named Gaia. She has led them hundreds of miles from the savanna through salt flat to a river where they can drink. Thirst slaked, the herd continues south to the Okavango delta, passing through veldt rife with lions. One night, the parents must scramble to shield their young from the big cats. The stress is too much for Gaia and she collapses on the ground, where they find her in the morning – their trunks caress her great body and sip the last breaths from her mouth. The lions persist. To survive, the elephants need to move on. They leave Gaia to be scavenged. I watch this documentary with my three-year-old son, who seems not bothered by the savageness. He enjoys sitting together. Across the country from us, my mom – his Nana – lies in bed healing from a back injury. My sister’s family cares for her. Their toddler daughter brings books to share when Nana is awake and has the strength to read aloud. After we turn off the TV, my son asks to talk to Nana, which means we video call her. He holds up a piece of his toast to show her what he is eating, then puts his blankie to her face as if to snuggle in person.
From the Firefly Galaxy 