100 Words: What do we remember

What do we remember on a day when the past is as elusive as the future and as unreal? Is it quantity or quality that turns Lisa into sacrifice? Today we knelt on the grass by the campus Shakespeare garden in full view of aggressive twisted blooming trees of magenta and of white, the white stalks of flowers bobbing like so many phalloi—tree full of dicks, we called it, half laughing and half sobbing, walled in by the moment that’s swallowed what we used to call time. The past isn’t past, yadda yadda. The touching tenderness of her time-traveling flesh.

100 Words: Life shifts into the streets

Life shifts into the streets with no more public interiors—kids cluster on corners listening to hip-hop, folks pull down their masks to yell to each other along blocks, and a whiff of anarchy scents the otherwise mild bourgeois airs of Evanston on a holiday weekend. People bump into each other with six or two or no feet of air between them and spin away again like pinballs. The young inherit the empty center and leave the leafy expensive fringes to us, the ones who are supposed to know better. A stiff breeze pushes a forlorn wild mask down the street.

100 Words: Does water break

Does water break its own surface
absent the intervention of hull or gull
or rock? Doubtful Lake Michigan simmers
like a pan on the stove 

or like the pan of a miner
on his heels by a creek
probing with filthy fingers
flashing gold mica and quartz. 

The surface heaves and ripples.
Heat sinks into water and spreads its molecules
whores out the waves that fall in painted strokes
of the axe upon our shoreline. 

It is a human thing
to regret but not enough to change.
My face bears its lines like these waters
swallowing every single cast stone.

100 Words: Depths of green

Depths of green invade the shallows of spring, clinging as if wistfully to what may be one of the last days of cool air and brilliant sunshine before things heat up, and the spring that was somehow never there is eclipsed entirely by one of the awkward new summers of our age. From where I sit it’s getting harder to ignore the stink of cat pee where he’s been missing his litterbox out of laziness or spite. People move gently in the streets, greeting each other at a respectful distance, as though the world were a church service. The age.

100 Words: “Bucolic interludes”

“Bucolic interludes laced with light anxiety”; thus Parul Sehgal in the Times on the relationship of writers to time in these times. She’s not wrong. I have exchanged the bucolics of campus life for life in my semi-abandoned college town, which can include trips like this to the beach in Wilmette where a woman walks her dog and a man stares out over the water and a handsome young couple with a Seventies vibe saunters by, he with a thin mustache and she in a shiny jacket, all of us unmasked. We play at normality, but the normal escapes us.

100 Words: Step into late light

Step into late light a few minutes before sunset with Beethoven’s piano sonata #5 in my ears, played with deliberative fury by Igor Levit, one of the beacons of humanity in this black time, with his impassioned solo concerts broadcast via social media—one per day until he took a recent break. I walk the same old circuit to and from the lakefront, but the red scabs of light falling off of rooftops and treetops do their best to light my way. Steam billows in misty gusts from a depopulated building engulfing me as I pass; I almost leave a trace.

100 Words: The lake’s gone feral

The lake’s gone feral, its fur slicked in hackles as it slams against the shore, eating the beaches, finding faults in concrete. The water is rising. And the sky’s gray lid seems to shudder against it, like the lid of a pot on the boil. People in brown studies pose against the dark baize of the grass; two girls perch on the rocks serenaded by anonymous pop from a tinny speaker. University cops pace in their sinister SUVs along paths intended for pedestrians. Trees hold their breath. The lake cries out, I wish I were a sea. And it is.

100 Words: The figure in the carpet

The figure in the carpet eludes my eyes, trained and dulled by the daily routine. My upper back and shoulders are tight from too much heavy bag work, or maybe not enough. The day suspended in mists. I’m glad to be summer teaching, glad to feel minimally useful, though in the present parlance far from essential. Poetry is non-essential too: I read Joseph Brodsky for his sensuous genius in the face of the life-denying extremes of our once and future austerity. The beloved waits: “What matters is not what life has, / but just one's faith in what should be there.”

100 Words: Rain on the skylight

Rain on the skylight all day, up and down with the laundry, down and up with groceries, and the line of storms keeps threading the needle of our town until tonight when the backyard floods to six inches and the building kids come out to frolic in the changed climate of their inheritance, voices ringing; are they ignorant of its meaning or wiser than we, the true realists, the abstracted brief chroniclers of our strange times, the only times, as Billy Joel sang, they’ll ever know? A time for meditation in cathedrals of our own. The rain, falling like walls.

100 Words: Despair is ordinary

Despair is ordinary as joy; ordinary as in ordered, regular, customary, usual; ordinary as flowers, ordinary as eggs for breakfast, ordinary as an afternoon nap, a plummet into unmotivated exhaustion, a swoon. My therapist reminds me that everyone is under continuous stress, becoming habituated to it, stress a thin sheet of ice to plunge through at the least provocation. Tears are always close, and so is numbness in the face. But the spring comes on, and nature, though mutilated, is undeterred. And something in me answers that nature, that mutilation, that flower seemingly oblivious on its stem, on my shelf.

100 Words: Buy the rumor

Buy the rumor and sell the fact. There’s a floor on despair and a ceiling on hope, and less and less distance between. Rain again this morning, then the sun came out and the earth breathed with it until the afternoon became luscious, gravid with light. In the evening the warmth fled the stones—late light glimmered and witched in the stand of trees between buildings as the sun dropped into its narrow channel. Fire, wet with fire. The sky pressed down indifferently as if we hadn’t supercharged it with our own indifference. I live always underneath, wishing I didn’t care.

100 Words: Awakened by thunder

Awakened by thunder, loud and variable in angle: heavy horizontals that strike flat the thick rotundity of the world, interspersed with incisive verticals that split the moment between the flash of light and the gray rain after. By afternoon the sun arrives and warms the wet earth—my daughter and I ride bikes in empty streets, in gentle airs. Pluck sweetness wherever you can find it, lend wings to the present moment, words to follow me through the pandemic to assemble something resembling a past. Flowers burst from a branch, budding directly, like dull stones made brilliant by wetness and sun. 

100 Words: Overlapping flowers

Overlapping flowers strike a sense of spring into my eyes walking around Evanston, by now more than half-used to my town’s half-abandoned feel. Storefronts stand empty—we lost a lot of retail before the shutdown in a kind of prolepsis—and restaurants limp along selling takeout; cars are few, bicyclists increasingly common, birdsong is audible most hours of the day. Squint and everything resembles a kind of paradise—the future is lapsed and the past unreachable, so the present stretches into its bad infinity. Trees, birds, and flowers mark space with their colors, their sounds, their pollen. The season is our only time.

100 Words: People come out

People come out to the lakefill to watch the Blue Angels fly over our city—a nauseating extension of the military metaphors by which we are grievously captured: a salute to the “warriors” on the “front lines” by fighter jets reproducing the terror of aerial bombardment as thrill in a population that has never known such terror. Or perhaps we are merely resignedly curious, out to see the spectacle of powerless power for ourselves, as we’d gather to watch a piñata of the president beaten to pieces. The fuckers fly by in formation, their roar a beat behind their idiot beaks.

100 Words: The workout

The workout doesn’t change much. At midday I swap pajama bottoms for shorts and go downstairs to the communal basement to meet my regular sparring partner. He doesn’t say much but he’s reliable. Jump rope, shadow boxing, burpees, stretches. I’ve got the Creed soundtrack going tinny on my phone, or maybe Led Zeppelin II. Put on the gloves and go to work: double jab and straight right, left hook and straight right, left uppercut and right hook. Get sweaty, do some pushups, hit some more. I don’t imagine anyone’s face; my opponent is abstract, inertial, myself. Down for the count. 

100 Words: Mother’s Day madhouse

Mother’s Day madhouse trying to get some kind of takeout dinner together, but the Afghan place is slammed and outright cancels our order, while the pita place resembles nothing so much as the Citadel from Mad Max Fury Road before Max and Furiosa took down Immortan Joe. More and more of us look like Joe these days, pained human eyes hovering over the blank ferocity of black fabric or medical blue or the Cubs logo reproducing the planes of the cheekbones, hugging the chin, pinching the nose. Everyone seizes his plastic bag and rushes home to mother. Don’t be late.

100 Words: It had to happen

It had to happen sooner or later—a day like any other that carried me into its eddies and set me spinning, unfolding hour by hour into a dream of panic or a sleepless reverie. And so here are words for yesterday. What I’ll remember: sketching a bad postcard Yosemite; my daughter’s new bangs; the curtains of quarantine drawn closer and tighter. It was sunny, I recall, and cool. We rode our bicycles past an outdoor concert setting up, the crowd or anti-crowd in little clusters ranging up and down the street, on stoops and lawns. Music, going to be played. 

100 Words: Solitude like surface tension

Solitude like surface tension bears me up lightly walking past quiet houses in the sunlit chill. The difficulty of concentrating follows me like a beaten dog, insinuating itself in any room I enter, crawling under my chair and whining softly, perpetually. When I can read and write life is almost normal; when I draw something I am that thing; when cooking and listening to music I am the joyous center of all forgetfulness. Then there are moments like now, very nearly silent. The clock ticks. My wife turns a page. A magazine slides to the floor from my dreaming lap.

100 Words: When do you know it’s midnight

When do you know it’s midnight—when does the climax come? We live in Olson’s pejoracracy magnified—not merely governance by the worst but government for the worst, worsening as strategy, cynicism pursued for its own sake, a power no less demonic for its hollowness. Meanwhile the day lurches onward and inward, hour by hour. Grading, attempted writing, a walk in freshening airs past mute mansions by the water. Cui bono? I stare into the pantry willing the image of my desire to appear. What do I desire? What is desire’s nature? The supermoon tonight has its eye fixed on an elsewhere. 

100 Words: Full moon tangled

Full moon tangled in branches over our street, like the arms of gravity that keep our satellite moving in time with us, marking that time, perpetuating a perfect and perfectly unequal relationship; yet both bodies, in the end, are primarily reflectors of light. There is no foreseeable end to any of this. Labor, in Arendt’s sense, swallows work: making the bed, doing the dishes, folding laundry take the place of anything enduring, singular, nonrenewable. As for politics—as for the agora—as for the public sphere in which one might exhibit one’s excellence, one’s valor…. The world and his wife sleep on.