In dream I go back to the old basement apartment with the garden out back my bedroom, a common room I shared with my brother, looked out on.  At night, a small agile jumping goat, dark coat, white footed, small horns, fond of balancing atop just about everything, leaps about, stops to perch on the brick wall, cute, fun to watch, a playful youth.  And then, to discover with some surprise, a lion and a tiger who look in through the windows at me, as they stretch out lazily, with some interest.

I'd forgotten writing, the beauty and mental health of it, amidst the usual toils and the weekly therapy sessions and whatever other concerns were troubling and weighing upon my mind.

And once through the workweek at the bar, the day off, the writing was difficult, impediments in the mind, sins of the week sitting upon me, uncertainty by mood.

I could not easily let out of my mind the incident, my telling a regular customer 'how about just water tonight,' and she said, why, for what reason, honestly puzzled as she was, and I said, no, nothing, but if you want to talk to (the manager by name)... and she said, I'm not dining tonight, and I'm going to go back home and have a glass of wine, and I felt terribly bad, because she'd come in, noticed my haircut, said she'd had a good day, looked fine.  But for the incident the previous evening, and maybe, we speculated she might not remember upbraiding a young woman sitting next to her about how privileged she was, thus upsetting her.  And the boss said, if she's upsetting other customers...  then I'll talk to her.  We were all concerned.  He used to do yoga with her a long time ago.  Tell her she needs to take a break.

What to do on a day off.  First, the dishes in the tub in the sink, after making my little green pot of green tea.  Assemble the laundry for the process.  It had been a busy busy Jazz Night up at work, and the boss, the owner chef in from overseas, was hanging out with his pals late.  Not too much collateral damage, but still, the weird feeling, not so bad, but the anxiousness that follows the events of the workweek, as if one had forgotten to do something in closing.  The big guy with the big belly didn't seem to wish to pay for his Jameson's.     Chef put on some good techno type music and had a great conversation with his chef buddy.

Guilt, embarrassment, mixed with the sense of somehow finding the job a good fit, on my own terms.

I call my mom and she assuages my mind on a number of things and tells me that I was doing the right thing by the person I suggested no wine tonight.  And she's called her oldest friend who lives back in our old hometown, whose concern for her occasional vagueness prompted a minor falling out.  I'd encouraged her to call.

I'm a Capricorn.  Is that the meaning of diminutive mountain goat in my dreams.  What did the lion and the lioness want with me, looking in through the window fixing their eyes on me as if hungry.  The goat had no trouble with them.  And it was, is, a lovely little outdoor place, pebbled, ivy, shaded by trees.  I fed feral cats one year and built a shelter for them for the winter.  And they would look in, coming close to the door to remind me they needed to be fed soon enough, the mother teaching her litter to hiss at the strange animal before them, hungry.  The goat seems happy enough and I am pleased there is such wildlife here, in this little sanctuary within, hidden from the street.

Googling the meaning of goats in dreams, the suggestion of capriciousness and--great--sexuality, is less satisfying than the general dream itself.  A poet should be happy with a visit from totemic animals, I suppose.

Write about the street, Pani Korbonska used to say to me, with some glee over the sound of that.

Bored with myself, I walk over to work, hoping to catch the Chef before he flies out back on his way to his life in Bali, and my friend Jeremy is there behind the bar, and we have an interesting conversation with two nice women who used to be schoolteachers.  And the sort of bad feeling of suggesting to our regular friend that she not drink is today sensed as a great relief, because she is not here to worry about and make adjustment for.  Peace is in the room, there is no drama.  My friend has to go to a bachelor weekend for his best friend out in Deep Creek Lake.   Last weekend he was in Vegas for the same, and he feels a bit partied out, and he wants to move soon to his new apartment out in Annapolis.

It's good to get out of the house.  The ideas seem to flow a bit better.

And so I drink my tea, slowly waking up.  Writing is really boring somedays.  Like you'd rather be doing something else.  You think of the nice girl you met on-line.

It can be nervous work, writing, and the hard thing is to somehow let the anxiety and the nervousness dissipate.  You're trying to harness the nervous horses of the mind, to hope they will pull the carriage and the writer gently and steadily, rather than bolting, and you have to, I suppose as much as anything, accept the pace at which the wilding colts will carry you forward to where there is substance and maybe even meaning.  You know the meaning is ultimately found in things like kindness and honesty, neighborly things, the communal effort to live with respect toward nature, creature and planet.  Maybe you couldn't do it without that nervousness, as Dostoevsky was nervous, as writers can be a shy breed of people, walking between the great polarity of public and private, material and absorption, the reordering in the mind, that honeycomb-like thing we construct to maintain life and environment.   And this is why the idiot is the serious one.

That climb, back and forth, back and forth, the chasm, the gap enough to make you queasy and upset, looking for something to hold onto...  The unsafest spot is that aloneness before the page, the phone calls gotten out of the way, the socializing work gotten out of the way, the workweek trimmed off, pruned, a sufficient cleaning and restock done.

We don't know the meanings of our own dreams, but that they are dress rehearsals our inner minds want us to work out.  To face the lion's den in the familiar, while other creatures go about safely, untouchable.  Fortunate that there is someone there, often enough, to help out, spiritual being or otherwise, comfort.  That must be the pleasure, if you will, of being a Jonah, the sea swallowing you and then the Leviathan, to cough you up, reformed, afresh, knowing of your duties and facing them.  Stunned as you must be by the whole thing.

I was a hurting fellow, and then I got turned around, and faced the good work that falls under tending the old bar.  Medication let me see that, in all its sad but happy lovely beauty, perhaps the most spiritual thing you could have done with your life, though that too could have been rendered in other forms perhaps just as well.

For the writer, it's always, 'depart from me, oh Lord, for I am a sinful man,' thence to be lifted up in all your worry and pain and angst.  You've looked in the mirror of the soul and somehow been forgiven, cleared in some small way to write about it, much as it will always mystify you, nervously.

And so a man must face a woman, in a great state of not deserving her, and she seeing to the forgiveness.  I mean, that's the whole thing, my single bit of offering to the field of literary criticism, that there is this root in all stories, the great happening, when she comes along, or does not, or goes missing for somewhat a long time, changing completely in form.

And even writing itself is the same;  I don't deserve the sentence, the story, the feminine insight, the forgiveness inherent in putting something down on paper.

Wipe your hand across your mouth,
and laugh,
the worlds revolve like ancient women,
gathering fuel in vacant lots.

Like the snowflake-like sweetness of real salt, the floral minerality upon the tongue, far beyond the politician, or the administrator, but of He who layeth the foundations of the world.

Writing, like science, will put the fear of God into you, and you know, like your mother, the whole thing could come falling down, breaking apart, particularly should that divine foundation be upset of sufficiently offended.  The lion's den, the facing of peril even in your own backyard, for the lion and the lioness could reappear at any moment, eyeing you with hunger burning bright.


The great literary things and forms are often the obscure things, created, hammered together out of some strange whim or reason, the invention of the play, Pepys' diary, Samuel Johnson, the poets, as they will always carry within their bones and heart that highest aspiration, those done through a series of low fall-like things as adult walking is falling in control.

The barman's diary that forgot to write down much of the specifics, the juicy details of any evening, as if a commentary on invisible things, fancies, chimera that only those who are alone would recognize and understand.  Who knew, the general fodder of the position, even if not revealed or seen directly, as most would conceive of the writing about things that happen, he said this, she said that, this happened, and then that followed and when I woke up the next day I was a bit hungover or dry in the mouth with strange indefinable aches throughout.  Part of the fishing and hunting life, realized, and then controlled now that it should be understood.

When, then, shall the captive of the den be released, if ever, the den of lion to be transformed into that of Christ in symbol.

Fictional Sketch from Notes from a Barman's Album:

April 2017, the 17th day.


There is the new waitress.  I think of the line at the end of The Seven Samurai.  "The farmers always win."  Type A in blood, and perhaps in temperament too.


I'd come in from the Saturday night shift, never easy, and my help that night, as almost any night, rarely soothes me, but rather provokes me into anxiety, moving about as they do like hoofed creatures, loud, barreling, bumping, linebackers now as they fancy going home.  Is it a show?  It must be intentional somehow.  Their bodies signal they want to go at the soonest hour by how they move, by their actions;  they are only hear to make money, then leave, never how I saw it.  Can I go, they always ask me, and because their physical presence, after their jostling as they sweep, the indignant noise they make, picking up the heavy Hefty five gallon bag of empty bottles, or dirty plates, drumbeats to their attitude that otherwise presents itself as the stare into the cellphone screen, because of all that I am happy to tell me, yes, go, leave me in peace, leave me in peace, and I need a glass of wine anyway after all your jostling and pretense.  They are more masters of the economy than I am.  They know how to use their time without any extra, then just go drive home.  And I, on the other hand, need to unwind, Jesus Christ.  The barman is jostled anyway, tortured really, and anyone who comes up those stairs, every time the door opens, can potentially be an inquisitor, poking you.


Easter.  It was an easy enough interpretation to make, that, looking at her behavior, her speech, her focus, that she's been drinking, in a relatively bad way, not necessarily so much before me, but the glass of rose some sort of iceberg tip of a greater problem.  You've tried to be patient with her, Lord knows, but just could not stomach it anymore, no way to tell yourself that there was good in her being there, at her regular stool at the end of the bar, nor of her coming in right not two minutes after we opened the door.  Not the best time to come and bug a barman with a long night ahead of him, anyway, as he'd like to make a small foray into social media, have a quick chat with a friend or a mother, before, now that things are almost set up as other coworkers never really appreciate, this general having everything ready to go when it comes, and I won't or can't say that about anyone else of my colleagues.  With all this in mind, it seemed like a foregone conclusion, cut her off from the drink.

Her dining experience were often interjected notes of dissatisfaction, a need to substitute the vegetable for this or that, doesn't want blue cheese, doesn't like the chef's penchant for sweet and sour with his braised dishes.  And then it seemed when she'd reached a point numb enough she'd to ask to pay and then screwing her eyes up to look at her check and take out her cash or credit card...  none of this was going well.  A smart lady, a good person, and yet, things had come over her, negative things, and she had started to weigh everyone who came in down down down, and not quite ready to keep her opinions to herself, some disconnect in conversation, too much, too candid.


So, when she pushes her empty glass forward, her fingers on the base of the glass, I ignore her.  Go out from the bar over to the room over in the back, where three familiar friendly people sit.  They're talking of the daughter and son-in-law's trip to Venice.  "No, Harry's Bar is nothing like it used to be. "  Back behind the bar, pressed again,for another glass, looking straight at her, and again, "may I have another," I stand and quietly say to her, "how about an alternative beverage."  "what, you're out of rose," "no, that's not what I meant by 'alternative beverage.' " She asks for a water, no ice.  I pour her some evian.  Doing all this quietly.    She takes another bite of cheese.  Asks for a to-go box and 'may I pay you.'  "No check, it's on us," I say.  And just before she leaves, standing up, she says to me, "I have no idea what just happened.  I don't understand.  We can talk about his later."  Okay, my friend.  Okay.


The stories we tell ourselves...  The narratives we create, to explain to ourselves what we see.  In my mind, part of it was, I was simply losing my patience, the daily 5:35 arriving like a horror ghost out of a Japanese movie to haunt me with problems.  A good ear, good advice, she had, when we could talk one on one, alone, before the bar had other visitors.  I had long defended her, stuck by her, engaged her.  But to watch her go that way, wherever she was going, doing what she was doing, with detached laughter, to listen to the drama of her housing situation, her deadbeat ex, it was wearing, and other customers noted that too.



At the end of the night I left a note explaining matters for the manager, and the next day, of course, he was supportive of my doing the right thing. If I wanted to 86 her...  Mid week I talked to my therapist about how to deliver the bad guy news to her, the recommendation being to sandwich the bad news with good positive compassionate notes both before and after.    She'd been back in, and in fact, sober, and of alert normal mental state.



A week went by, and her behavior markedly improved, but perhaps for a lapse or two toward the end of her visit.

She knows enough, quite a lot, about food and dining.  A smart sense about a lot of things, and yet, I suspect, like me, a Type O as far as blood type, and with all that, all the problems of early humanity attempting to stick into the modern crossroads, the granary, all that.  I felt for her, I knew myself the gut problems, the sleeping problems, the anxiety, all those issues, and the need for the sedative quality of a glass of wine low in alcohol.  And she was going through some stuff, housing stuff, income stuff, that was unsettling.

One night she confides in me, as we had discussed the same earlier, off and on, about the changes in her medications, those used to treat her anxiety and help her sleep.  She clearly saw now what the medications were doing to her, how hard it was just to get up, how hard to be part of a conversation.  We've returned to a good place of conversation, even if she is right on me early all by herself.

And I suppose if you look at a person long enough, rather than being critical, you see your own problems clearly before you, which sometimes is hard to do, looking at yourself.

The writer does not always know what he is doing.  Indeed, his work, if you could call it that, is the case of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing.  But somehow, you keep at it, reaching for the non-judgmental perspective.  Which can be unsettling.  It feels like you have to use it for some end, for some increasingly spiritual recognition that rings like, "there, but by the grace of God, go I."  In need of seeking forgiveness and of prayer.  As Peter Matthiessen sees it, the embarrassment felt from being alive, in his observations within The Snow Leopard, as if one simply waits, marking time, until the great rug is pulled out from underneath... that conundrum oft paid homage to in pubs and watering holes, "what is life for, anyway..."

I wonder if it is those happy kids who'll later run into problems in life, their self-regulatory good disposition toward their fellows no longer enough to sustain one over and through all the worries that set in upon us in our maturity, our adult lives, our attempts at responsibility.

I take the medicine to get me out of the winter clock change night shift funk, feeling better now, less cravings, and up at a decent hour today, writing again.

Rousing myself from tossing and turning, wide awake, with a great sense of dread, I prepared myself to face a first shift in a restaurant new to me.  Chilled green tea, a shower, a tunafish on brown rice bread sandwich.  Told what to wear, and "you will have fun," I got ready and out to the door for the walk up Massachusetts Avenue, the day hot, sunny, traffic already backed up at 2:30.

Past the mosque, a beehive of activity, a faction across the street delivering through a portable PA system, then the men streaming out at the end of service at the gate in front of the mosque itself, high volume.  Then over the bridge, and a breeze as I climbed, walking up toward the Finns, a young woman walking in running gear as she talked on her earphones, pretty, thin, maybe from the UK, passing her as she stopped at a corner, then she passing me, then I passing her.  Past the British Embassy at the curve, just passed the Khalil Gibran garden on a knoll, she walked past me on my left mast as a robin climbed before us low, with a little worm dangling in its beak.  "Eat your worm, robin," I say, as the bird climbs into the trees beyond the grass, and the gal turned her blond head slightly and chuckled and I felt reminded of soldier humor from the Civil War.  Swinging away from sidewalk construction at the corner of the main avenue intersection, cutting through the school on the Cathedral grounds, handsome parents waited in their high end motorcars by the prestigious school to pick up their uniformed boys with ties on.  Sweating, now past the great Cathedral, crossing the street, the restaurants up ahead, running five minutes late, picking up the pace, turning the corner, and there the patio and in through the open door.

Shake hands with the boss, tall, trim, neatly dressed, confident with business success and a little gem of an eatery French in refinement and simplicity.  This is David, who will be training me once he finishes a few things, I go down and change my shirt into a white button down, putting on some worn work shoes with the metatarsal support inner souls that have seen years of service.  And back up the stairs to face my night alone behind the bar, the weather promising a busy night in the open air.

The set-up of the bar is long.  Facing forward the dishwashing machine, which handles all the bar glassware, is at the extreme right, and turning around, the point of sale computer system linked in to kitchen and server.  Then, facing back forward mid bar, a tap system.  Then, to the left, the bar ends with an ice bin, then, a step down a level to that of the dining room, ice bins the server reaches for the chilled wines, the wine glasses hanging on a rack by the back swinging door to the dishwasher's hallway, where bread is warmed and cut, coffee is made, and the dishwasher with his racks and machine and stainless sinks back in the far corner.

The night starts quickly around 5:30, with three Plantation rums served neat, then two lemonades for kids, a few glasses of wine at the bar, and then the quick lead-up to the grind of the night's hit, martinis, whiskey sour, and I handle it all well, but there's nothing one can do about the buildup of glassware back at the far service station, to bring all the way back to the right to place upon the dishwasher compartment's top black matts and in the meantime, verbal drink orders I strain to hear, and a few bottles of wine, and I need to tell someone like a busboy I need bread for two with olive oil.

Finally, the end of the night draws nearer, the drink orders settle down into dessert wines and digestif, and still, beer, bottled and tap.  I'm nursed through with a few pointers throughout the evening by the men who have worked the bar and now how to best handle it.  At some point a sweet short man, Pedrito, or Jose, in the blur of names, the nice man I met early on in the basement, with a Nike cap and a wrist brace, as he stood why a mop and yellow bucket, comes back to help me with the wiping off bar cloth polishing of each and every glass inside and out, as I file them back away and servers take any wine glass they will get, one or two ahead of them in the chaos.

The man with the freshly shaved head, lean and strong, self-confident, kind to me, helps me through what I need with the restock.  I've done fairly well keeping up with everything, the chilled wine coolers, the disparate orders, at least for rookie night, and not made an mistakes ordering or been indignant toward anyone, and rather, with the sense of humor a veteran might possess after twenty five years or so at it, keeping a bar running and getting the crucial work of delivery done as best one can, with a smiling demeanor and distant attentiveness ready to strike when needed to.

The manager, an Asiatic woman, approaches at the end of the night.  She's been cool, understanding the chaotic rush I've weathered.  "Didn't know what he was getting himself into," she says to the chef.  At one point toward the end of the busy part of the server's night, a Caucasian handsome young fellow with neatly trimmed hair and stylish glasses mentions to me, "such bullshit," referring to being back there and the system, speaks of enduring two years of it and the weekday nights where you have to also come round and handle the four four top tables in front of the raised bar, and I reach across the zinc service platform that folds upward should you need to get out from behind the bar and put my hand and his shoulder and say, quietly, in return, thank you.  Thank you, nodding.

The manager mentions the checklist, you have to go through the checklist, it's back there somewhere by the cash register computer screen, you have to go through that line by line.  I look at her.  Yes, the guys instructed me what I need to be doing.  And indeed my friend the shaven man comes back and helps me take out the recycling, looks over the shelf where the back-up wines are kept like a bookcase, open, six bottles of Lirac, five Bordeaux, seven Sancerre, and I mention I've drawn up a list from everything from the beer to the large house wine bottles from Coté Mas, red and white, and of course all the rosé, four of them including the sparkler, both in the cooler and upon the shelf.  Yes, the checklist, and inwardly I roll my eyes, to me it being pretty obvious that one must restock and then conscientiously clean all surfaces in some order as she sits and picks at the chef's mushroom fricassee, and then the lamb short ribs as she sips a glass of wine.  Ring up everything (meaning the drinks for the higher staff and personalities of the end of the night), okay.

She keeps an even tone, not particularly supportively positive of my brave and honorable effort.   "It's a strange set-up," I offer, "a lot of ground, from one end to the other (not very convenient a layout for its function), and you can't always hear the server's orders very well."  "The servers should ring their drinks in before you make them.   (Honey,) "that's not how the system works."  She holds to her terms, "nothing should be made in the kitchen without a ticket," and yet I've seen clear example of how the chef is happy to pass  along an appetizer to a lady here for happy hour my guy pulled me aside to warn me of, seven o'clock, that's it.  (Happy Hour people are regarded as consummate cheapos;  where I  might regard them with a bit more humanity, a nice chat with a Brit working on a Ph.D. on British influences in the Middle East during the WWI period, asking him if he's ever been to Dorset to visit T. E. Lawrence's Clouds Hill, known for its simplicity, and indeed he has, a nice moment before he's joined later by a friend;  and oddly enough at the other end of the bar I'll wait on another couple (oh, sorry, I just found out from the kitchen that we are out of the cod cheeks) with a very prominent Germanic name from that era, the kind with a Von in front of it, the kind you might name an early battleship over, as if the subtle balance that happens in bars will always present itself like yin and yang, bookends.

Sipping her wine, dryly taking a bite, she looks at me as I explain to her what the system in actuality and functionality actually is, a verbal system, there's no other way.  She looks at me, "maybe you could come in, say, an hour earlier to get set-up," she says.  No, it's not the set-up;  I did fine with the set up, we ran out of nothing, the flow was happy enough for the servers and they raced back and forth with plates as I focussed on keeping afloat.  A pause after I render my insight, picking up the narrow matts from the well at my end of the bar, those with the names of liquors and such on their rubbery faces, textured to hold spills with the top not swamped, placing them into the dishwasher, wishing there was a compartmentalized rack to hold things.  Picking up the matt where water glasses sit, I find that below the matt sopping with moldy moisture, commenting with a  guttural reaction, whisking it off into the washer, the spraying away with the windex and the rag.  And again, underneath the black matts by the service end underneath the big low buckets that hold with chilled wines on ice, there's a lot of water, sitting, and wetness underneath.

I look up at her, after her suggestion sinks in, of my coming in earlier, and I was an hour early, I say, Well, to tell you the truth I'm going to sleep on it, whether I'm coming back here next Friday.

She wishes me a good night as she leaves, entrusting me with the chef and his buds, and the last antics.  Later I leave with the chef, turning the lights off, watching him punch in the code.  He's always gracious with me, the general vibe of the place.

The night ends, I take a cab home and slump on the couch without even any interest in the small glass of wine I pour.  I wake later, a put myself to bed, difficultly falling back to sleep, have a beer and a valerian capsule.  And all the time I've wasted, drinking wine, when I could have been keeping my old mom company.  All the years of frivolity, thinking myself incapable of any sort of grown-up job, living not far from paycheck to paycheck, what was I thinking...

Mom calls, she has a cold, sounding like she could use some help getting dinner.  Afterward I sit down on the couch on a pair of reading glasses, then getting ready for work.

Those new plans people spring on you from time to time, they boil over, in a Buddhist way, much ado about nothing, just the angst, the stress of getting through them and the decision to say, no thank you.


You can't really be much of a teacher, when you have to run around like a monkey all night, playing a kind of handball with dirty wine glasses and drink orders, service bar.  It's an obscure and not necessarily perfectly respected position to be in anyway, to stand behind a bar, waiting, serving,  a 'beverage engineer,' as there are important credentialed people who deal in matters of life and death out there in the city, with large cars not bicycles, with big houses and unimaginable responsibilities.  And even to realize that you are, or might be, potentially, a form of the teacher that might come from being, well, cut from the image of the Divine, God, the spark of creation, requires a look around at the potential totality of the being, who you are, what you do.  To be achieved, this look, as always, in the very skeptical and no-time-for-it, let's-be-practical, and-then-finally-once-we've-achieved-that, then-we-can-relax-a-bit-like-those-TV-ads-for-financial-advisors (God loves them too.)  But the look for the potential totality, for maybe a glimmer of, as silly as it sounds, a Gandhi, or one simply with a pleasant and caring sense of humor that sees a lot, as can only be accomplished through years of time and human interaction.  And even then, the voice asks, 'then am I teacher,' and one has to always work on that, a bench warmer called to play now and again.  The potential is all we can now, and even that necessitates a poetic license employed.

Some jobs, they might allow for that totality to come into light and focus, the assembly of a full person, less obscured in their efforts, driven largely by instinct, to write here and there, to play a bit of music on a wooden instrument or other, to talk to people as a job, in a congenial truthful way.

The Buddha was a writer who took his message public and in person.

Does it make a difference, anything we write?"

is there some point,
to this.

Like forgotten toys, Sears Roebuck catalog wishes,
come materially true,
or old trips to the Utica library,
mom and I counting how many green lights
we could pass through from all the way through
New Hartford.

We write because birds are in us,
as trees are in us, waiting to give form
to the world of living cells, that tree branches and fronds,
limbs and leaf metamorphosis into
little animals of different sorts, fauna,
to climb those very trees.
Bird calls in April morning, the most agreeable of
cacophonies, the sound of the Universe itself, between
swoon of dove, crack of woodpecker,
towhee, beautiful morning birds all agreeing
on the conductor's spaced symphony.

what does reading do, reading someone else,
but pull us out of our own minds, our own mental states,
our own chagrins, to finally forget our own impending
neuroses, as if by some rehydrating
and mineral laden fruit
soothing and reviving.

I am not a writer, a hack like anyone else,
a Hallmark card, for better or worse,
as if my rocking chair,
made by Amish, purchased at a fruit stand
made of bent twigs simple and wooden,
comfortable was that of Lincoln, or JFK,
just so, with the green chamois shirt of winter
draped upon it,
like some sort of bird or dry manta-like sea creature,
or hide,
chest pocket button becoming an eye.

wood goes with wood, good to leave it plain.

night is hard when you cannot sleep.
Reading is the best soothe.

I feel better now, now that I have read,
somewhere in the night,
something about Lincoln,
a cemetery, the life in between this one and
the one beyond.

So doing, I join the pattern,
the greater, the leaf shape,
the bird's whistle, cheep, coo,
song of regular notes each time, perfect,
without question.

Mental health,
is regained,
one no longer
so alone.




Shape of the head
makes one a writer,
karma, the adjustments
of DNA.

Poking in inner watery electric fire of the mind for flame and ember, you sense what you're looking for, to explore, write about.

A picture of a young woman thirty years after you last saw her.

The brain is an organ, it collects, records, exchanges remembered.  It has done its Shakespearean job, laborious, saving words and feelings, like a cherished tool box waiting to be put to use with some old craft.

And the brain has a reaction.  The picture, a lesson, the disappearance of all regret, a sudden thing.

You'd waited for what?  This, probably, this freedom to breathe again and live.

"No, honey, you were too fancy for me.  You could never have accompanied me on my voyage physical and spiritual, and a lot of other people came to bear me along, my body and my time.  And you see, I was, and remain, a sort of politician, a man, a creature whose bearing deserves the fable and dignity we all deserve."  Something like that.

That was how you acted then, and how you would act now, I'm afraid.  I didn't see it as mutual;  it was, I, going one way. my own way.

I kept writing.  That was all I could do.  I give that person, myself, I guess, some credit.


Storms in the mind clear, winters are passed through, clouds break, the sun comes out finally.  You've got to give the weather time.  You have to walk through the woods in all seasons for years and years.
A private person, I took care of my business, on a daily basis, living, even when the whole old thing and memories would kick me almost everyday, first thing.


The bigger, the longer the telling of the joke, the better the punchline.  It was only through writing that I could see clearly and work things out, achieving peace, see the good in myself, the part that was ready to do some work, mysterious, strange as it was.

I had the artist's love of simplicity, a cot with a Buddha statue, incense, a bottle of wine maybe, something to eat, a guitar to strum.  She was too fancy for me.  She was my own embodiment of the selfishness the Buddha shows us to be illusion.  I kept the thought of her for years, until one day I found a picture of her on the web and it all disappeared.



Sketches, Irish Wake.:


Lincoln, as a young fellow, in the failing tavern in the town no longer on any map, the dignity of going broke, into debt.  A story.  The dignity of work, failures and all.  The storied quality of his life, the web of craziness below the surface, of all ancestors in all situations.

Lincoln, in the ideal realm, bridges, almost, the ideal politician and the problem of finding 'right profession.'  He was strong, a  wrestler, ambitious politician of the 19th Century perfect for him.  Was he 'just a politician...'  

I rested on the couch, asleep, still fighting a cold after four weeks.  Bloody Valentine's Day had did me in, the completion of a whole holiday cycle coming at the worst time of the year, on top of the general high stress of having to entertain--you try it--with that whole stupid clock change thing putting me into darkness...  I'd been back to work all through it, and got through each week, but when the days off came, as for weeks in a row, I coughed and slept, croaked to my old mom when I spoke to her on the phone, feeling bad for not being there, and barely had energy to get groceries.

The days off were typically bad enough as far as being low on energy, (though my coworkers seemed to not comprehend the strength it took and what it took out of you)  but it was worse with a cold, the tail end of winter, some days remarkably warm, and others very cold by Mid-Atlantic standards.  My coworkers were meeting Friday night, but I had no energy.  Rousing finally to take care of a few things, figuring to myself how I'd hear soon enough what a great time I missed, with hot women, I turned on the television, as one does at a quiet late hour, wanting to get the dishes done, finding the account of JFK Jr., the last flight, the HLN news account, with interviews and information pieced together.  Long enough ago an event, you end up watching it, first to remember an era, then out of sadness, nostalgia, a whole nuclear kernel, and then hoping for some form of satisfaction somehow, knowing better, and being reminded of what a guy said to me during a day shift--he worked for AllState, came in at lunch for a few Lone Stars, a former bobsled guy who'd done the infamous Lake Placid run, knew something about flying--of how the young man wasn't trained for instrument flying (where there are no external clues of things like where the horizon is and must fly blind), how disoriented a pilot can be.  Alone, at night, still sick, feeling funny in the head anyway, unable to turn it off, there was raised in me no small amount of anxiety and sadness of a kind not easy to shake.  And then, having slept so much, I was restless, and thinking of how things can go wrong, very wrong.  There was traffic much worse than usual in Manhattan around rush hour, a whole string of events, choices.  And at a certain point, the pilot knew, in the dark soup of night, things had gone very wrong, despite being so very close, so very close.

Earlier, much, in the day, before again a lot of rest and sleep with dreams, I'd found a book of mine I'd not seen in awhile, bound in blue, specially printed with engravings of lotus blossoms and scenes, the story of the Buddha.  (Buddha:  A Life & Teachings, Peter Pauper Press, Mount Vernon, New York.)  And sometimes it is the early part of the story that seems to be the meat one craves, in this case of how the young prince gets curious, ventures out, through no fault of his own, and rather to his credit, and how he, with this chariot driver, sees old age, sickness, death, impermanence, suffering, and how that young prince, Gautama, wends his way with some purpose to find out something very important to human existence and sanity and the life of the mind.  How to put that is up to you, but it has something to do with not being exacerbated into chasing personal participation in the things our minds might tell us will bring something we would like, in the way of pleasure and satisfaction and some sort of worldly enjoyments we would like to find eternal, and they are, of course, not eternal.

Having satisfied myself that my immune system truly needed the downtime, to fight the damn thing, the cough, the sluggish ache, the depressed feeling, having listened to my body and not dragged the old bartender's body out into the cold of a Friday night to meet people half my age intent on things like crowds, music, dancing, and not feeling like checking my ragamuffin system of coats, well, I was asleep anyway.  But when I woke, there still was some vestige of a being aware of a self, a self in need of some form of satisfaction or entertainment, something to put a finger on for the night, and wanting to satisfy both my deep respect for the Kennedy family and its story and my love for what could have been had he been given the gift of years on top of all his other gifts, I watched the television screen at night as the account went on.

And somewhere within there is a lesson of Buddhist nature, of how our minds can quite easily be taken over.  The very sad thing we'd like to turn away from but can't, driving into our stomachs, taking over us, our body, our cells, bringing the real sense of tragedy such as proof of the grim tragedy that any life, looked at honestly, could be.  A lesson wrapped in a lesson?  With the sting of angst, and with images of the well-bred faces, with all the ironies, with a sense of all the bravery of a family to weather such impossible loss, so was the rest of my quiet evening quiet in the dark, a light on, waiting for more sleep to come.



A Tathagata... has great love for all creatures, has a knowledge, a truth of so many things, so much insight, gained through meditations available to us all, to let us bypass suffering, as much as we can.  A father to all beings who undergo that cycle of birth, life, death, rebirth, compassionate and wise and understanding, one whose vision encompasses assassinations, tragic death of worthy people, the losses that survivors must contend with in anguish...

So one returns to a purpose, a job, a professional situation, as best as one can, given the circumstances,and sometimes there is Buddha's handwriting all over everything, to the foreground his understanding of the physics of human experience and the mind and all sensations and feelings.  And it is not the wine, necessarily, to be faulted, as wine is food, necessary, sometimes, to some of us, to some of us in certain states, perhaps, as it is not what goes into a man but what comes out of him that is indicative of good or bad deed.

And in trying to cope with any offering of the media, perhaps it behooves the human creature to be careful, to be aware of how much influence a selection of media past time, information or entertainment might be...   Look at what the environment we have put before ourselves as a media source hath wrought, the perfect tyrant not to play by the rules we thought were imposed upon it, through fairness, discernment, properly informed subjects and objects, the educational element, but to ride it, to manipulate it, to make himself a giant and the rest of us small, ready to wipe away instruments and institutions of fairness, legality, equality, values, beliefs, understandings, in order to allow individuals of corporate greed and unsound decision-making, bowing to the god and goal of personal profit, a vision of golf courses, and escort services and lavish hotels where no one wants them to be but to feel wealthy to come upon us and use the structure of democracy for his own.

In need of some mind change afterward I put on a dvd about Catholicism, Word on Fire, narrated by Rev. Robert E. Barron, usually something I get something out of, but on such an evening it seemed full of dualistic thinking, statements of a story, simplified, in need of backing away, nuance, perspective.  (Really, did a baby as such bring forth such an army of angels to fight, almost in a mockingly superior way the crucifying armies of the Roman Empire?  Or is such a man who has something wise to say necessarily an imposter if he claims something wise to say?  Father Barron saying one would claim to be wise, maybe an evil type...  Meaning there's only one Jesus.)  Sometimes it's better to think of things purely as a believer, but that night I felt older and wiser, burdened in such away as to lose a certain amount of patience, while still being a believer in the story.  If you've completely bought into the story, and it sounds a bit much as far as reality as it appears to us, then maybe you're not the best teller of that story.  And so would my own literary rendered Peter or JC be a bit more earthly and profane, as if they went to, or even worked in, restaurants and bars amongst publicans, sinners, gluttonous men and wine bibbers... fallible normal people fighting perhaps with their own minds and the things people tell them.


Melville stood out on ship's deck in the night, listening to the prow cut through the waters, and sea shanties in his mind, silence, the stars, life in the waters, Biblical stories wriggling alive all round him.


The next day when I awoke the dishes were done, the teacup clean, the living room in order, myself in a reasonable state, a gentle peace having fallen over me for not going out, as much as I missed my friends.

A long time ago, it seems, I wrote a piece about watching the Tour de France, in many ways, and numbers, my biggest blog hit, though who gives a .hit.  It was about finding something worthy of watching, finding a kind of mythos, I don't know what you'd call it.  I guess by some vague calling I wanted to be a media critic, sort of an F.R. Leavis, or Matthew Arnold, meaning to be a believer in the democratic capacity of readership.  The cinematography was worthy as we watched the Tour from that higher perspective, looking down from helicopters on human endeavors with history, churches, castles, rivers, bridges, mountains, monasteries, Cathar hold-outs, farmland, vineyards, inns, plane-tree lined streets, Provence, in mind.  It matched, it gelled, even with the shouting byline of the race story and odd factum.  Hannibal took this route through the Galibier...  The gut digestion, as remembered by a schoolboy before a fire alarm in French class, and then, as if by miracle, found thirty years later...  And what sticks in your mind, your own mind, about any sort of media?  There was something JFK, the president, as Jackie herself tells us, about listening to the record before bed, before kneeling for his nightly prayer, Camelot, Camelot...  Richard Burton.  And by projection, Malory, Mort D'Arthur, and any number of King Arthur old literature, and by expansion, poems, Donne, Shakespeare, Irish kings, the kinds of things the eternal reading schoolboy--who else it is who is the inner reader--loves and spends time with in that glorious free time of life, reading, say, Lord of the Rings trilogies...

It's the storied man who will save us, who knows no bridge, no distance between the stories of myth, who finds the tales awakened ever and ready to be applied, rather than the cold cynical pols game of controlling the ins and outs of a day, bashing away....

This night ends with remembering the old clip of The Pogues, Shane MacGowan, singing the old song, Dirty Old Town, and anyone who remembers Saint Patrick's Day, or by extension anyone literary, like, say Dylan Thomas, or Larkin, still has a cloth to wash their faces from the sticky consuming insanity of the non-literate creepiness.


You see, I was afraid to say anything, I was afraid to be myself, because, well, being poor, living on paychecks, shifts, compared to everyone else in the town.  I was afraid to listen to music, and tune my guitar so I could play along exactly with the You Tube of my favorite songs, and yet I kept to them because of some deeper drive related to the things one does not question when it comes to their own brains basic procedures of digesting and processing.  I love to pull out a guitar and hear in it an old song...  And I should think I'm entitled to that, after all, (and I try not to bother the neighbors at hours of night.)  It's important, music.  (Who will Trump invite to play his WH?)


And Lincoln, to remind myself, yes, he wrote that letter to a woman he liked, about the woman he was almost, maybe was, engaged to, and how, he observes, ever the Buddhist, yeah, the picture of her changed...  Let it go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=244EmfdANvA  (What writing looks like...)

I found it healthier to write, to occupy the world of my own mind, rather than to listen, get sucked into CNN, much as we all need to be informed...  It was better to listen to the old music, and in that way be armed, have an armor out into the world, even if it was  Monty Python armor, and the babble of our brains.

Dear Buddha,

I find the joy, at least in bar tending, and in probably all things, is when someone confides in you.  It may be over time, taken a certain amount, an inkling here and there, and admission, an honesty, a candid moment.   This was something I could not easily translate into talk, or profession, or tangible accolade, just that people spoke to me in candid moments, and let me in, like they wanted a little bit of light on something, and understood that I needed a little light too.


In media times such as this, maybe the positions of people who speak wisdom have been replaced.  SNL offers a bevy.  Where would that mystical horse-rider-in-the-night Lincoln be, that ballast of things Presidential...




There's always a shyness to thoughts and thinkers.  What if a creature thought beyond itself, not that it would.   A butterfly imagining being a bird?  A human being imagining writing a book length piece, a novel?  Don Quixote, it would be.  And all relationships are metaphysical, not the direct confrontations we make them out to be, poetic things, I have seen this and know it to be true.  Daniel Boone went to a wilderness, and he fought it out with the tough things in the wild, and there is new territory for us as well.  If and when we say so, it is hard to be heard above the noise.  "The point of literature?  What is that?"  the people, dumbed down into some skepticism, allow to be led so.  Could it be, people speak at a distance, through warps of time and space?  Bobby Kennedy is speaking on the night of April 4 in Indiana to you and me.  Pope Francis is cutting across waves of sedimentary thinking of a church lacking the imagination it proposes to support most integrally.    The liberal college is ossified.  You are sensitive, just as much as I, and you know, as well as I do, that education is about content, about what interests a soul.

I would consider a glass of wine necessary at certain hours, in certain circumstances.  I hope the Buddha would too.

There is always a terrible shyness attached to such things, as wisdom, as speaking out, as truth telling, and that is why, I suppose, we have these old, maybe now archaic systems, like when we listen to the Clancy Brothers (or write laws into order) and we protect and teach because of the very shyness of these enlightening moments and thoughts.  There is always a greater purpose...

Irish  Wake
revisit

http://www.firstofthemonth.org/irish-wake/

Walking at night, somewhere in Washington, DC.

Lincoln:  But a light can change your mind, the way lights have become, what you call them.  They'll change your words, the whole spooky interaction of blood and brain and man we have no real control over, but record, each to his own.  The new lights are bright, and they can change what you have to say, or rather, mainly make you forget, the revery, I mean, that makes them happen to you, an idea, a thought.  Trees in springtime, with a clear sky, a weird gushing wind, coming like ripples on the old Sangamon, blowing over forgotten towns, outcrops, really, collections of hewn timber made into squares with walls and roofs...  The stars at night when you're walking home at the end of the workweek, having slayed the awful dragon, cold, but could be worse, walking past the cemetery, the high iron fence, a road almost secret at night.

The tulip magnolia, that year, my boy died, they came into bloom early, just as they laid him down, just like this year.

I'm reading Dostoevsky now.  Of course I would.  The Idiot.    And that little bit at the beginning of Karamazov

(JF Kennedy mute, still, portrait like, as if in rocker, legs crossed, cigar in Irish fist...)

That bit about "a sudden flooding wind," it's only there in the author's introduction, and these are forgotten things, such revealing author introductions, guiding hand, that crucial immersive admission, that the writer is imbedded--if you will--in the writing.  He became a writer in the same way the writing became writing.  Who knew?  When did it happen

And these days, of course, we'll know less and less how that happens.  We'll bow to the new little I don't know what to call them, like demigod or demiurge or demisomething.  The distraction.  The light, the images, the people talking on the images as if it's them.

But that's all thrown off now...  I mean, unless you're allowed to walk around at night, a ghost like me, no one seeing you, no one giving a shit, completely anonymous, your footprints, your very trace, disappearing completely from the face of the earth, no matter what you do.

I crossed Sheridan Circle, one of those little field like places I wander, this one reminding me of fields and battle, I cross there, a ghost, no one sees me, I stop beneath the one old tree left--it's had some surgery lately, and many of the lindens have died now, but thank god the elms are still with us--and a Mercedes, what do you call it, drives by, and there are many of them, oblivious, even if I were alive they wouldn't see me, enwrapt as they are at attentions.  And there's that scrawny little runt of a fellow, Sheridan, and often it's the small little guys, the shorties, who have it in them to he emperors over fields of men.  Little terrors, really.  I could never have been like that.   The elephant moves slow.

And you, in your pain, Jack, I guess that kept you sort of in my realm, that old realm, the old Irish way, ha ha.  Go wander, the trees at night, the flooding wind, the weird stuff like that....

But we come back from our happy living oblivion death, our insignificance, our complete anonymity, we have to come back into some form of light, I would hope gas or candle, not electric much as I might have espoused such innovation, generally, but not for the creative spheres, to do our work, and then we're left to salvage our thoughts, and it's only through some great self-control or practice, that we are able to write down those few things of insight that establish, that establish our common base.

And look at now, look at what we've become, look at who the speaker is now, what he says, the light he is so stuck on being attracted to, the revenge of all electric lights upon us, the abandonment of the quiet lonely cemetery and the rain falling on the fresh entombed.  Rain falls drop by drop upon the soul until by the awful grace of God...     So as once was said, so still let it be said, and that's you, your brother, who said that.

That's Irish music...


All the little creepy men who sit under strange lights, thinking of such things as murder...  Let them walk, a ghost in this town, all the living gone to bed, strange folk out, and cab drivers, for exercise, for a break, when they could walk past the cemetery, feeling something human, I suppose.


MacGowan;

And it's 'how are you kid, and what's your name, and how would you bloody know...
In blood and death 'neath the screaming sky, I lay down on the ground,
and the arms and legs of other men were scattered all around...



Lincoln:

A writer is a writer by being a writer.  That's the only way.   Dostoevsky hated electric lights.  They turn us away.  More and more until the writer is as much of a ghost as I am now, obscure, a shadow in the night, writing about what appears to be nothing at all.  Forgotten.  Things from graveyards.  Nature at night, trees, the sky, water.  Birds.  We go full circle, from birth, back to obscurity.

The thing is not to fight it.  Lesser men, they always see it differently, grab for the attention of all the people, and the people, enchanted by the electric lights, will be numbed into hypnosis, believing the lies.  There's dignity in obscurity and dreams, in spooky things.

But so much of it, the chatter...  The puffed-up claims.

And the vehemence with which they attack.  Calling you a baboon, a tyrant, a creep...
Then you die, and truth comes out, as death is truth.  Then they leave you alone.

Kennedy:

It's enough to make you paranoid.  Like my old friend Dick Nixon.


Lincoln:

Yes, old Dick...  Well, the things you do in life...

And then afterward, after your act, there's that thing, there was always that thing, you wanted to be a writer, you wanted to be writing, up there with the oldest of stories, Job, Jonah.  Write that feeling you have when you feel that home is gone, that you never have a home, no more than you have any place to write, who are you, what experience do you have, and some would say I had a lot, sure, but at the end of the day, and life, we're all just amateurs.

And you, Jack, you had that gift.  No one doubted, this guy has a way with words, and life.

Kennedy:

silent

Lincoln:

You're still in flashback mode.  It's okay.  You'll get past it.  Despite, despite your schoolboy mischief, you were always a good student at heart, old boy.  And your old man helped you regather the dust of what it's like to grow up out on some prairie town and all that life will hold for you, the earthy people, the muddy circuit, the cross section of human legal misery, that great oozing mass or watery mess that in hindsight makes me feel like I was some frog, half submerged, my eyes sticking out above the water.

In life, I took great gallops around, wherever, whenever I could, when I got restless.  No one hounded you back then.  No one insisted, following you, bubble topping you.  In this after life I am the same weird night adventurer.  I go walking, out where the wind blows, where there are old trees out somewhere in the universe, made of all the elements...

"I am confined to fast in fires, until my sins are burnt away..."  Old Bill.

I'm out there walking, or riding my old horse, the same fellow he was, we know each other, and out there, yeah, there are still pigs stuck in the mud, and kittens, abandoned, species on the verge of extinction, cheetah spirits as they near mortality themselves, white bears, the poor whales, and out there there is no need of congressional acts and pork barrel legislation, thank god.  It's already been sorted out by the divine hand, as if the closest we might come to that is that nice park up in Gettysburg, you can drive your carriage through the points of the battlefield, Roundtop, Bloody Angle, the Peach Orchard, look down on Devil's Den.  Ever go through?  Well, you'll find all sorts of people getting all kinds of things out of it, leather POW MIA guys on Harleys staring off at sunset, not all of them innocent, except the school kids and the parents who take them there.  Where I stood to say a few things, well, I chuckle, because it's kind of obscure.  There's no sign.  Hah.  I was in and out.  Famously.

Well, that's all part of the fabric of the universe, like anything pithy we might say, knowing we're fucked, but knowing we still have a good long ways to go, and meanwhile the body is aging, and the possibilities are narrowing, and we are in political binds deep as molecular things spinning about, little genies of good and bad and...

Non duality.  That's what wisdom says.  Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.  You know who said that.


I was, in life, given this great character.  Who said it...  "I saw his face, and what a face."  Whitman, the poet?  That face was an instrument of the divine, as much as yours, Jack, as much as yours.  As much as yours.  I knew, take some pictures, let them make a cast or two.  You left before they could do much of that, but, on the other hand, your voice was recorded, cut into little groves to make waves of sound for eternity.  Mine seems largely a thing of conjecture.  It was different from yours, Jack.  Different accent.   But as easy as yours to have fun with.  "Mr. Ch(ia)eerman..."  They were ready to laugh at the hick in New York, just as they were ready to laugh at Little Lord Fauntleroy in PA, WV, Texas, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina...  My suit was ill-fitting, yours was perfect...




It is all about music really.  Beethoven was right.  And some of the music the kids listen to...  A politician should be a musician just to prove himself.  No one ever thought of that, except back in the caves, bison and deer in ochre.



Dostoevsky, he'd been through some horrible thing for his youthful rebellion, almost for the very same urge, off to some shitty place out in the sticks, worse than, worse than anywhere I'd ever seen or lived in.  For being a literary sort of gentleman, a reader.  A rearrangement, I guess you'd call it.  A reassignment.  A transformation.  An utter defeat.  One of those things.  I laugh at what I went through, in comparison.  A failure to get elected.  Well, back to the old law office.  Defeat.  Mary wasn't happy there anyway, Washington, and in a way I should have listened to that.  She would never have fit in.  Nor would I.  But, circumstances...  a divine need, if you will, something beyond us all, the universe needing some words, some words about its atomic structure, energy, all those things we float on, waves that we are.

Afterward, harried as he was, he loved the nighttime to do his work.  I've said it a million times, to myself, here in the hereafter, where this weird stuff counts,where personality and character really come out.  You go get your groceries, cook, eat, clean up, in the cold, and then, when everyone's gone to bed, you open up this fantasy life, and you write.  You write things down according to vision, something, and even then you have to figure out what you can get away with.  Brothers Karamazov.

He'd sit at his desk, doodling in the margins, rolling cigarettes the doctor wouldn't let him smoke.  He'd been in the hands of less than scrupulous publishers, and they even tried to take advantage of him, and to get through it he wrote about his greatest weakness, a compulsion.  He had to open up about all his sins, gambling, losing everything, his wife's jewelry and you know how they like that stuff.

He was a man.  It took him a while, a lot of figuring.  He'd sit on benches and listen to the way people talk, record such things in little notebooks.  All adding up to some vision.  Before he died.

You can't blame a fellow for being in love with the night.  Frost has that poem, the two roads in the woods, basic physics, really.  What are you going to do?

Now those planes fly over you, just as you reach that quiet time, just before the birds start their singing.  Roaring over the trees, you can't hide, can't think, can't hear your dreams anymore.


I wish he'd written about those things, you know, the things that make you feel a bit stupid.  Like that beautiful face, that girl who was part of you boyhood, Grace Kelly, but you weren't Gary Cooper yet. The things that you outgrow, the sort of things you never want to admit, what a hick you were, your own misplaced sense of attachment when you suddenly felt like you had no home, not here, not there, nowhere, and you felt like the girl would give you some sort of continuity, as if she knew who you were, deep in your heart, just like you know yourself deep in your own heart.

But the clock embarrasses you.  Time is time.  And you're still stuck being you.  And, well, the vain things, they boil away, and leave you with... well... you.


Daylight comes too early, my friends.   And I have failed.  Failed at everything.  But even then, I have still managed to bend space and time with my own little gravity, my own little love for the world and its creatures and sometimes its people.  You know what failing is like?  Well...  It's just weird.  In the end we're too gentle to do anything but.  But fail.  Live in some old soldier's home with our effects.  Strange it all is.


Kennedy (perking up):

So what's with that girl you were talking about?

Lincoln (turning):

(... chuckle...)  I don't know.  You always think of The Winter's Tale with these things.  Alabaster.  Statue.  Is it her?  Looks like her.  But you've let her down.  You could never live up to those particular standards, or... really, who knows why.  So clever, so smart, so gifted with words, and yet lacking a particular kindness in my direction, as I thought I always had for her, but now, it's kind of worn out to tell you the truth.  Years wasted because of all the strange stuff in me regarding her, telling the story over and over to myself, writing some strange sort of long poem about it, when we knew each other, sort of.  It cost me.

Mary, her embodiment, she came along, it was complicated, it worked, it didn't work, then it was done, how things happen.  She fit.  I fit.   The story worked.



But I was a master manipulator in life.  I played people.  I'm in no way the saint they make me out to be, no sir.  I was a politician, a lawyer before that, of course I knew how to play people, shrewder, more calculating than the next.  I got things done, but...