SPRING WIND

 

              Slowly realizing that the bright, cold Spring wind isn’t just itself but full of pasts as I sit there drinking coffee outside Beaner’s Cafe. Richard Morris' last years, ten years ago, Cafe Puccini or somewhere else before there even was a Cafe Puccini in San Francisco. Deborah and Richard and I going into some corny spartan vegetarian restaurant, bean-sprouts and whole wheat cakes all over the place, the window full of junglish vines, the woman on the cash register asking “Are you all related or something?,” all of us glasses and tweeds and brief cases and all like Mahler and Rilke and Celine...and then for a moment it’s Ireland I’m standing on Land’s End, then walking on the beach at Galway and Father Pollard’s writing poetry in Irish Script on the sand, penduluming back between forty, then thirty, ten years ago, and now, a moment at Antofagasta with Alexandra, a walk along the Promenade (Brooklyn Heights) with Harry Smith, or seven years old in San Francisco for the 1939 World’s Fair. The next day it’s cold again, a sprinkling of snow and it’s Frankenstein and the lime pit in Chicago, a touch of rain and it’s Paris, I’m twenty, and there’s Elizabeth Trochee, Alexander has just dropped her for an American blonde and I see her sitting in a cafe alone, on the table black suede gloves stretched across a black suede purse, powder puff face, then that night clothes dropping to the floor in the dark. The rain of innumerable Easters and ten years in L.A., Joe Schwartz’s house the last time I saw him three years ago just after he’d had the third of his lower bowel taken out (“They think they got it all”), he and his wife in their huge old house in Baldwin Hills, and it rained full time the three days I stayed there, hills falling down all around them, hills that had been there for thousands of years. The ten years I lived in Los Angeles it would rain a day or two a year....

              But it’s not just that the sun or rain transport me to other places, but to other times right here in East Lansing where I’ve lived for thirty years.

              It’ll be late October Halloween weather and the air will be filled with little girls now grown and moved away forever, a visit here and there, but Halloween comes and the house is empty, thanksgiving comes and my head fills with Nona, my ex-wife in Kansas for whom Thanksgiving was the maximum centerpiece feast of the years. And I can almost smell the pies and turkey, and the TV in the living room in my head is on and Margaret (now in Scotland) is there with Alexandra (in Kansas City) and Christmas is only weeks away and my bedroom is filled with secret packages that no one knows about, sweaters and boots and earrings, books...and the real living room in real time is empty and the last time I saw Nona she was in a mental hospital, “clinically depressed,” and maybe I wouldn’t have recognized her on the street coming toward me if I hadn’t been forewarned it was her. And my first wife, Lucia, whom I ran into the other day and we talked for a while, is 68 now, black age-spots all around her eyes, looking very much like her own mother in Lima just before she died thirty-five years ago. And my soul reached out to her as we talked about jaguar shamans and Sor Juana de la Cruz and our last trip to the Inca ruin, Pisac, thirty-six years ago.              

              A rustle of leaves and it all comes back. A magnolia in full bloom and my head is full of baby carriages. The grass littered with yellow maple leaves and Margaret and Alex and Chris are there hidden in/playing with the leaves.

              Thousands of pictures, whole shelves of them, only they don’t talk. Even old videos, the talking and all, Margaret’s wedding, Alex getting her belly-button pierced, Chris at the playground, don’t evoke things the way the wind and rain and sun do.

              My granddaughter, Gabrielle, one and a half, and her mother’s in Paris and I’m having a decaf cap at Beaner’s cafe thinking about her for a while and then remembering my grandmother in Chicago on just this kind of cold , bright Spring day, which brings all sorts of strings of memories with it, like pulling up an anchor accompanied by all kinds of special effects bangs and clatters, all the years of closeness and then separation and one last visit before she died.

              “Little Hughie,” looking up at me from her wheel chair, “I wouldn’t recognize you.”

              And then six months later she was gone. Her in Tucson, I don’t even remember where I was then.

              That’s the key isn’t it, this radical discontinuity, people dropping of the edge of the world and my not being there when they drop, Sidney Bernard, Menke Katz, Bukowski, Alexandra Garrett, my own parents, grandmother....never at funerals, never at gravesides, like it all  happens ‘out there’ somewhere and doesn’t have anything to do with me.

              I want every memory to be a door I can walk into, and the problem is that it’s increasingly easy to do just that, suddenly be in Burgos cathedral with Alexandra age one in a stroller, making a kinds of mini-quacking,-squeaking, -murmuring noises because she liked the way her sounds were twisted into grave, interesting echoes by the vast stone interior. Or I’m, on the beach in L.A. and Hughie’s six, Cecilia’s five, Marcella’s three, and I’m stretched out on the sand (Playa del Rey) half-asleep and they’re going into the water, lots of big crashing waves, something could happen to them, could have, but never did...and Carol Schwind comes along wearing her spiked heels even in the sand (“I even sleep in them, I’m crazy,” she told me one night) and she’s mine and I’m hers and she’s twenty-five and I’m thirty-five and whatever happened to the last thirty years...?

              Adios, compañeros de la vida....so long, companions of my life.

              It’s a curse to actually live in REALITY the way I do, the curse of being a poet, I suppose.

              It’s so much easier to be Kosher and center on making a radical separation of different kinds of dishes, or wear veils of commune with the Godhead directly and be on the road to the Great Bye and Bye instead of being corrosively and totally in ALLTIME full time.

              The wind blows, the light cuts. Even the magnolias are late this year. And the lilacs...young Virginia Woolf walks by wearing a sweater and a long Indian cotton skirt, and I want to get up and follow her into some sort of forever-young eternity, but then I look again and she’s sixty-five too, six hundred and sixty-five, six thousand, million....

              I’m a thin fading dot on a piece of yellowing paper flaking off in the blustery Spring wind filled with associations that fade with me as I fade, no one aware of the tortured richness of this cappuccino moment. All they see is just a guy with long blond (dyed) hair, eyes concealed behind glasses so that no one can even remotely guess the varieties of anguish and joy that can come from living in the dying center of what seems like an infinitely complex net of personal poetic omniscience.