TEN WORDS

Alcohol

Bombay Sapphire, jewel-bottle blue.

Also wines, the grape varietals I do not know.

Noise

“Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.”

In Missoula, muted hum of cars on I-90.

Loud-throated magpies.

Deer scattering in the bracken: a system.

What’s all the bellowing about—you’ll frighten the fish!

The men on the bank fall silent.

Postcard

I often buy postcards when traveling, or take the free ones, intending to send them to this or that person. But I never send them. I am always muted by the small square of space—so small and white—by the extremity of saying something so brief—by the ungainliness of my handwriting, magnified by the spareness of the frame. I have many stacks of postcards in my desk, from many trips, all blank on the back, which this or that person will never know was meant for them.

Civilization

Flood waters—median strips—wheelchairs—rats.

Depression

When not depressed: the American Depression Industry, with its pills, books, experts, tinctures, talking cures.

When depressed: saturate, leaden blackness in skull and chest.

Study

Brown study, gray study—fugue, absorption. I study languages for their raucous dispositions, constellation of intelligent sounds.

Worries

Inquietude, unquiet, disquiet.

A word is a worry. And never sorry.

Newspapers

I let only a few in the house each week. They quickly grow from thin sheets to massed blocks, and it is almost impossible to remove them. A few months ago, after much effort, I carried some blocks to the garage—an intervening step to putting them on the street for collection. Now the garage is full of newsprint blocks. Some have begun to tilt or slip from the top—making them less implacable, but more menacing, capable of impetus, momentum, mutations in form.

Reading the news online, an occasional spasm grips the screen, as the latest update is imprinted. This violent amendment has its own mode of disquiet, but its proliferation, immaterial, stays thankfully out of sight.

Medicine

My insomniac pills. The first, Donormyl, came from a pharmacy in Paris. A tiny white cylinder of 30 pills cost 30 francs, while a small pack of Nurofen (ibuprofen) was a staggering sum. I tried other European pills—the homeopathic Dolisedal (requiring three doses under the tongue, at specified intervals before and during sleeptime)—the frightening Stilnox from a pharmacy in Spain (warning of possible impact on the central nervous system). Now Temazepam is my nightly potion, Ambien for extreme occasions. I’ve read of a next generation of pills, from a lab in Japan: Lunesta, beautiful, pseudo-Latinate name.

Do these drugged sleeps tint my dreams, my wakings? Dark stain behind the eyes which never sees.

Simplicity

Nullity. A word and never sorry.