100 Words: Shades of gray

Shades of gray, blue, white on this Tuesday evening rounding my lakeshore loop, the daily walk in pursuit of solitude, in flight from loneliness, soothed somewhat by the ripples on water, the echo of the lakefill pond with a few yards’ margin between it and the vasty lake that seems to go on forever but stops, I know, in Michigan. Boulders piled to no apparent purpose, like a clumsy metaphor for the haste to come out of shutdown with no actual cure in sight. I match my stride to Bach’s third Brandenburg Concerto, its ritornello climbing through registers resembling redemption. 

100 Words: Spring evaporated

Spring evaporated today into overcast skies, mists; but the birds kept plugging away and flecks of sun could be glimpsed at times refracting through window screens. I fall further and further away from what I think of as “the world.” The apartment, our building, a few square blocks, the campus and the lakefront: all I have, all I seem to need. Is it wrong to be so very close to comfortable? Here is the little pot I’ll make coffee in tomorrow, and here is a drawing of that pot. I can’t get the proportions right on the tops of things.

100 Words: Getting medieval

Getting medieval at the drop of a hat in my beautiful bougie town, where I turn from one side of the street to the other to discover indescribably old folks limping together, one with a walker, one with a staff like goddamn Gandalf, both masked. People stand around isolated from one another as protocol dictates, not speaking, waiting for burritos or baked goods or to enter the hardware store. The heart of town that we live so close to, in, sacrificing the pale pleasures of suburban yards, filled now with half-lives only. Sunlight, viscous, benficient, pours over everyone like syrup. 

100 Words: Masked troupe of birders

Masked troupe of birders stalking the university campus as I returned from a morning lake walk, lifting binoculars and long-lensed cameras to the treetops while robins and red-winged blackbirds trilled. Sirens were cresting somewhere not too far off: each species has its song proclaiming here I am, or back off, or someone’s going to emergency / somebody’s going to jail. Thank you, Don Henley, and for this: my love for you will still be strong / after the boys of summer have gone. The songs of youth are never wasted, even or especially when they’re the songs of someone else’s middle age.

100 Words: The ripeness is all

The ripeness is all, the ripening of isolation and the bloom of fantasy, giving way once in a great while to something like contact, heading out early on the first morning of May to be dazzled by high blossoms lining streets and crowding courtyards, Chicago itself a kind of flower bobbing on a branch, with its denizens walking their dogs, resembling dogs in the way a mask covers and flattens the jaw and chops of the face. There are moments in which the pandemic achieves something like irrelevance. Homecoming like that of sailors, borne up by the sea of spring.

100 Words: “Dinner with friends”

“Dinner with friends” worried about their kids, the turbid floodwaters of Lake Michigan, the end times that keep not ending. The house is quiet and the world, friends, is calm. Switch off the computer and pick up another screen—the connection that separates is never far away. I tap this out in the kitchen while my wife works and our daughter watches her hundredth episode of Gilmore Girls. The ordinary is distinct from the normal, isn’t it? It’s normal now to always be at home. It’s ordinary to recoil from walls like flesh, in mutual squeamishness. There’s coffee tomorrow. There’s time. 

100 Words: Rain all night

Rain all night and all day, turning the world outside the window into a gray smear—one truth of the world as it is now in how we see it. I sketch the bedroom window, trying to catch the bleak non-view beyond it, the fact of its bleakness: a wall of white siding, a blank window, and rising above the roofline another more jagged roofline, the brutalist building across Sherman Avenue inhabited it seems mainly by older folks, poor folks, and, on the ground floor, our polling place, where I’ve voted in so many elections. Eliot’s advice: wait without hope.

100 Words: Small joys

Small joys edge us toward hysteria, giggling with the friends in our building with whom we’re sheltering, tripping along the sidewalk to Target with masks on, stumbling home as if drunk with needful things—athletic socks, Sharpies, a box of ice cream sandwiches. Hilarity around a jigsaw puzzle in the high night of the third floor; silent now, everyone asleep except me and my glass of Bowmore and the books I pet more than read, for companionship and a link to normalcy, literacy, worlds in abeyance or gone. The semester slouches toward its end, the world too, always beginning. Real life. 

100 Words: Zoom-zoom

Zoom-zoom all the lifelong day, the calm or anxious or exhausted faces flashing up at me from my screen like fish coming to the surface of a pond, out of habit or hope. Walked in the rain. The face of the lake between squalls seemed every shade of gray and blue, faintest at its penultimate edge before a dark ribbon of crayon lined up the horizon beneath a slow-changing violet sky in which gulls dawdled. The world only seems to be on pause; nature takes its way like fate and has its way with us. The virus is not alive.

100 Words: A friend from Serbia

A friend from Serbia tells us how during the war, when Belgrade was being bombed, some people left their basements, climbed back up into their high-rise apartment buildings, and as the bombs fell, stood on their balconies to watch streaks of light rippling across the sky and milliseconds later hear the echo of bombs, breaking and killing others, not them, as numbed by war they leaned out, far out over their balconies, to see, and fell, and had to be taken to the hospital for broken limbs, so urgent was their need to behold the fate that had overlooked them.

100 Words: Drag myself up

Drag myself up, out, across, up, down, over the face of the day. Iron and rust. The seam, visible, between inside and outside on the decayed Nissen hut where a friend plants tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini. I’m a weight I deadlift over the day. Chicken sandwich. An hour trying to draw the Art Institute from a photograph—a lurid lion in the foreground glowing pale gray and green. The walls watch me closely. Rain. Crying. I get the news from poems—men dying miserably every day, anyway. And women. Pretending to be something I’m not. Pretending I won’t decay. The day.

100 Words: Forms of life

Forms of life: these fungi live off the slow decay of a tree trunk chopped in sections to divide one neighbor’s lawn from another. Do we know what we are or where we are? Gnosticism, I wrote this morning, is nothing more than a revolt against the wrong sort of love, and the wrong sort of love is nothing more than Alfred North Whitehead’s Blakean definition of evil: creativity at the wrong time. Is that Joan Armatrading thrown up at the deep end of the playlist? It sure is: I am not in love / But I’m open to persuasion. Sing.

100 Words: A lapsed day

A lapsed day, an abstract. Somewhere a homicidal clown is telling people to let light into the body to kill the virus: Gnostic Trump, Demiurge Trump. Can’t seem to move, if movement means changing places, locales, perspectives. The bed’s weather is steady like the climate in a cavern. Shades of gray, cotton, and cream. Our hallways are lined with unhung pictures like patient pets. The toilet runs late into the night; I get up and lift the lid, stare at the mechanism, the mechanism stares back. Flush. People are dying. The heavy hemlocks, are they crying? That isn’t the line. 

100 Words: Somewhere near serenity

Somewhere near serenity or arrest, today’s template for all the days behind and for many in front: inchoate dreams, coffee, a bit of reading (Joe Donahue’s splendid new book The Disappearance of Fate), desultory work, Zoom with students, boxing in the basement, leftovers for lunch, more work, rain, a walk along the shore listening to Emmanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma playing Rachmaninoff’s Cello Sonata, watching the lake pitch up oceanic waves, home to cook lentil sausage stew, watching Some Like It Hot with my daughter for the second time this week. The world goes away; you were never really here.

100 Words: Busy griefs take a break

Busy griefs take a break in the wake of good news long expected yet somehow shocking: I’ve been promoted to full professor, and the ceiling feels like the sky. Evening walk by the lakeshore with whitecaps thrashing the rocks in respectable imitation of the limitlessness symbolized by the sea. Home to flourless chocolate cake, a glass of Prosecco, and a family celebration in all its small joys and awkwardnesses. I am touched to have arrived at last at a destination I had never before clearly visualized: a learner licensed to be fearless in the face of ignorance, especially his own.

100 Words: Monday and a black dog

Monday and a black dog comes and sits on my chest. The apartment is too small and I feel like I’m always at work. Gentle mild morning everywhere, blossoms on the tree in front of our building—is it an oak? Why don’t I know what kind of tree it is? The streets of the town are like the apartment, clean and empty except for a few idlers with no place to go. I follow my daughter to the lake, wondering if she’ll remember my presence or feel my absence more. This thing will drive you crazy if you let it.

100 Words: This morning pedaled

This morning pedaled my undersized bike up Sheridan Road past the Baha’i Temple to the Wilmette beach, where families paced and frolicked anxiously in the sand—some masked, some not, some distanced, some not. Fresh breeze and sunshine just warm enough to sit in watching two little boys in facemasks dumping sand by their dump masked parents, cello and piano trading gentle complaints in my ears: Rachmaninoff’s cello sonata in G minor. An old woman smoking a cigarette strides up the beach in blocky high heels. Normalcy is on its way without ever quite arriving. Drawing is an aid to memory. 

100 Words: Sketching teaches

Sketching teaches the elements of art, art as elemental, art as exclusion: I draw the absolute minimum needed to suggest something larger, more complex, more dependent upon the world. How many budding branches are in that vase? How many bricks in the neighbor building are visible from my kitchen window? Quantity becomes quality when what’s omitted guarantees what’s absent; the void on the page, the presence or absence of color, of fine detail, presents as evidence of things not seen. Feebly I suggest, with lines more or less crooked, some minimal fraction of the deserted world that meets my eyes.

100 Words: Fridays

Fridays you find you’ve been running a marathon and are almost completely out of gas. Nothing is easy, neither breakfast nor love. Snow again in the morning turned to irresolute rain by afternoon. Look at yourself. Look at yourself looking. One must have a mind of winter, Stevens said, though here it is April on a rapidly warming planet. The nothing that is not there and the nothing that is—between these nothings swim the almost empty streets, the shut-up stores, the masked faces. Always somewhere sirens, and we listen, tied to the mast, with nothing to stop our naked ears.

100 Words: Is it what Conrad meant

Is it what Conrad meant by the shadow line—the greasy smudge separating the waters of Lake Michigan from the mood indigo sky? The Große Fuge’s thirty-six chambers divide in my ears and partition my skull. A good day, a bright day, almost a vacation—then the curtain comes down and I have to get away from myself. Here I am again in the freshwater night. Cradling my rectangular glow, my 21st-century candlestick, closer to my chest, reaching for the way things used to be. “Remember lingerie?” Bruce Sence sighs in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985). See you around, Max. Raggedy man.