Song of a Suburb

It's easy to walk late at night in a quiet suburban neighborhood. Danger isn't implied by the darkness that creeps onto the yards in the evening, and I can easily feel like I don't have any pressing reasons to watch my back, even if maybe I do. But even here, among these neat brick bungalows and sandpaper driveways, my heartbeat quickens when the sun falls. The landscape begins to lean, and then escapes into the darkness, leaving us with something new as a rhythm of porch lights stretches out ahead, creating a jagged path with the implied angles of fallen constellations. Orion threw his belt to the floor in a fit of contempt for the suburban sky. Cassiopeia was overtaken by boredom, reclining her chair all the way back to light up leafy trees, casting shadows all along the way. There are shadows on curtained windows, shadows throwing pristine lawns into confusion, shadows impersonating drunken ghosts on the curb. Fireflies join them in bubbles of intoxication.

There are shadows of people too, awake and moving from car door to house door. But we're silent like rabbits passing each other with suspicious night eyes. Finally, there's no pretense of social grace. Finally. Everything is wilder at night, our distances in darkness are both nearer and wider. Driveways reveal themselves to be full of our secret miles. But rounding a corner I can hear piano music pouring through a screen door. And across the street, there are frenetic guitar strums coming from an upstairs window. My neighbors! I wonder who these people really are. Do they even know that they can be heard out on the sidewalk? Do I exist in their imaginations as an audience, even if they aren't quite sure about my corporeality? We're communicating even while tucked away in our rooms, even while shuffling faceless in the shadows on sidewalks. I guess we just can't help it. Our connection moves sideways through the air, creeping up behind us giving low electric shocks. These sounds and smells and images are like a cup and string to each other in the darkness of night.

Cups and strings pull our space together. The guitar and the piano share their space in the air with distant vibrations coming from the expressway below the edge of the subdivision. And from even farther away comes the rumble of trains. They hum over our houses like lost and lonely old songs from a long time ago. They come out to be caught in the thick nighttime air; to be anchored, then transmitted by the tuner of a needy suburban neighborhood. A song is a hum set down onto the tracks of memory. These are our rebel songs, our work songs, dripping silver guitar songs, cowboy songs, saints wandering down namesake street songs, stoned songs, songs once held under gothic arches, love songs, mermaids singing each to each songs, blue songs, go to sleep songs, baby, remember me songs. There are so many songs that travel together on these humming trains. They flood the smallness of our dark space and can no longer be hidden.

A strong breeze comes around the corner of the block. I'm walking with it, along with a sideways community of songs, and people making music alone in the night with their windows open. I can connect to this strange, full landscape that always empties like a sieve when the daylight comes.

Ghostly Doilies

Edward is a picture on my wall,
hanging in the early morning projections,
steeping in the perfection
of a life written backwards
from a past reflection.
He's framed in an expectation
that history repeats and skips along
to echoed beats.
I look for living truth in his face,
under veils of shadow-lace,
but his eyes are only
tintype reproductions --
white blind and moth gnawed
recollections of seduction.
The sepia buttons on his shirt
are forever yet to be unhooked
and the books he never read
and the time he never took
slide off the silhouette
of a precisely vacant look.
Edward is neither hot nor cold,
and the roses have rubbed off
the teacup folded in his hands.
He doesn't even have a heart;
it dusted the doilies of another
part of history, already unraveled
and then re-sewn into the binding
of a a dog-eared home,
no more or less understood than
a note slipped over the floor,
under the wrong door, and brushed
of its meaning and hushed
by dust and time
and shadow forevermore.
It makes my heart break when
I'm newly awake to understanding
that Edward is lost to thought,
never to be truly caught by
my moonlight interpretations
or shadow shifting revelations,
but within these perseverations
there are constant consolations,
unstoppable in life's duration.
Every moment passes away
and has already gone to stay
forever open in the empty-eyed stare,
sharing the invisible air of the past
with Edward.

Halloween River

Walking down to the banks of Halloween River, I see the sky holds a few white cows with damp knees, kneeling in the widest blue pastures, uncertain of what to do, like me down here on the banks of Halloween River.

My eyelashes gather gold shapes when I blink. The sun is so hot it prickles my skin like a holiday sweater, but a cold wind opens the leaves of tall grasses and wildflowers.

They rattle and twist at a rust fence. They have imperious playground voices. A whole kindergarten crunches underfoot. Yellow leaves and yellow light cry sunflower sounds until I can taste the pencil paint. They cry out,

You're my guest here!
I make the rules.
So you have to listen to me,
but you can choose from
a hundred colors
right here, a hundred ways
to make-believe your path
to what's real.
We tell stories
about the future
you hear them as fables,
and then look away,
but why not listen to every
word of every fable
And look closer?
Storytime is alltime.
Wearing costumes all year
That's what we do
running deeper and truer
than what you ever
wore on your first
day of school.

Their leaves turn the pages of brittle books, holding up potions, baking the golden into the moment.

The story I see is funny, or pretty, or the most frightening thing as the sun scorches
and the wind casts ashes into a brightness as extreme as the darkness of night. The sky is so blue
it could be black with a double death of scorched decomposition.

Everything on earth is finding out about a new autumn or an old spring. We don't know which one it is. The warming costume clothes aren't coming off. The warnings are the true stories I've got to walk with to learn how to hear.

Names and places

Beautiful and Ugly are two strangers walking side by side on the streets of the city. They're barely acknowledged by each other, barely understood by others as two separate entities in the blurry flow of figures rushing in the same direction. But halfway to their separate destinations they somehow run into each other. There's a moment of confusion and stumbling as crowds push past them. Beautiful apologizes and laughs in embarrassment, as does ugly. They reflect each others' blushing on their faces, catch each others' eyes, and immediately become aware of an uncanny similarity that exists between them. They could be distantly related. Maybe their ancestors come from the same little village in Latvia.

Beautiful accidentally picks up Ugly's hat and puts it on her head. Ugly realizes the mistake, but doesn't say anything. Beautiful is about to miss her train, and is already late for feeding the three cats and one unicorn she shares her tiny attic apartment with. Ugly is on her way to a dinner date with a trapeze/tattoo artist she has recently met. He seems smart and interesting. If nothing else she'd like to be friends with him. But Beautiful and Ugly hesitate before moving onto their evenings; both have the sensation that they could switch places at any moment. Why was it that as soon as they collided, any difference between them suddenly just seemed like a big, lame joke? Why weren't the people on the street stopping to laugh at the revelation of a silly mistake that everyone on the entire planet had somehow been making for eternity? Nobody was really looking at Beautiful or Ugly, though.

If Beautiful and Ugly were a little younger they might have been amazed by the general indifference of passers-by, but by now they were mostly used to it, and even comforted by it. Through the years they had each learned to give up trying to understand the thoughts or feelings that their presence might consciously or unconsciously evoke, or exactly how they were being defined at any given moment. Being understood is such a dependable uncertainty, no matter what you're called. But even if you're as well adjusted as Beautiful and Ugly are, there's no denying that the unquestioned feeling of actual recognition is pretty great. Ugly had spent her whole life trying to create beauty while carefully holding up high, fragile expectations that never allowed her more than a few scattered moments peace. But here, just recognizing beauty in front of her feels like the same thing that she had tried for all along, and exactly what she wants to do every day in her life. Beautiful stares at Ugly and sees that the cloudy halo of sky around her head suddenly looks so much deeper than it ever has before, and the cracks in the sidewalk under her feet begin to reveal hard won years that can never again be hidden by square block symmetry. The universe she knows is expanding by the second. In her mind, her tiny attic apartment's windows shatter and smokestack lightning bolts inside to singe her unicorn's mane. The cats lick their chops.

The two women stand there on the sidewalk for a moment, transfixed. "Oh crap, watch out for that pigeon!" Ugly suddenly says as a giant bird with a weirdly shaped head lands on the half-eaten danish that Beautiful has been absently holding in her hand. "Shii-it! That's a big-ass pigeon," says Beautiful, letting the danish fall to its predator. They watch the bird tear apart the pastry until it retains nothing of its former danish-ness. They must keep walking after all. All of these revelations must follow them home or go where they will. Beautiful and Ugly both know of a few park statues, perches for pigeons called by so many different names around the city. Some are called ugly, some are called beautiful. But these women are not ready to stand so silent and still under their names quite yet.

11/11/11

Power ballads

A while back, I wanted to remember my dreams as much as possible. So I tried, and it worked, but I'm really starting to think this kind of decision must influence the things that happen after you fall sleep. I woke up, conveniently, in the middle of a total parody of a meaningful dream moment. There were gigantic outcroppings of rock set against a pink sunset sky and the words, "love is full, love is full, remember that love is full" coming right from the place where the rock met the light. But the disembodied narrator (was it me?) was talking like she knew I would overhear, and she was clearly aware that she had to dumb down her message in order to make any sense to me at all.

I bet if I were the sort of person to dream up music more often, there would have been a soundtrack of sweeping guitarmonies, or at least some weeping sugar icing strings. I swear the credits were just about to start rolling before I opened my eyes. Still, who wouldn't want to wake up to monoliths and sunsets and grand statements about the completeness of love? It's like the best overblown 80's power ballad you've ever heard -- somewhere in the middle of making fun of it you whip out the air guitar and realize you're totally moved in a beautiful way.

That morning I was running late to work and had to park at the very top of a parking structure in downtown Ann Arbor. It made me remember that on one of the first sunny helium-balloon-days tied right to the end of winter, a couple of Community High School kids came into the cafe around lunch time. They seemed so excited and happy, and were picking out desserts with intensity of purpose. The more talkative of the girls told me they were buying food for a picnic at the top of a parking structure for their lunch hour. Wow, I thought. They are smart. The farther I am from when I was a teenager, the more I'm amazed at how good kids are at seeing the other sides of things such as parking structures. If you're downtown during lunch, of course that's the most logical place to really celebrate the sun. Just like that, still behind the counter, I woke up with that amazing feeling of possibility. It was a typical unlocking, melting feeling, or whatever it's best-named during the other seasons of the year.

Days continued to be sunny, snow continued to melt, moments of possibility continued drip in and scatter. And then came that strange dream, and the morning after, which was the first morning of "Spring Forward." Running late, of course, and more than a little tired just like nearly everyone. But I was shocked when after work I reached the top of the parking structure to find the most beautiful pink sunset stretching out over the sky and the tops of the tallest Ann Arbor buildings. It was the same pink sky of my dream. It was so expansive, warm and calm, but nearly pulsating with the voice of something even bigger. So then the guitarmonies exploded over the landscape. Which made me see that one of the good things about these songs is that everybody always seems to know the words to the chorus. Love is full.

Lady Sunshine

I saw a lady sing at a bar attached to the Holiday Inn right off the freeway. She was wearing a bright candy red number that puckered and plunged without apology. She was a large woman who moved her body with ease and enjoyment. Beneath her platinum blonde wig there was an aura of satisfaction so unobscured that it seemed to reach out, take me by the shoulders and make me a little more comfortable even in my own body. I never spoke to this woman, but when she opened her mouth to sing, the stage lights glinted off of her golden front tooth, nearly blinding us all with love and insolence. The songs she sang were composed almost entirely of sexual innuendo, but had as much authority as any gospel song or Shakespearean sonnet. A particularly dirty line or two make me remember that we were dancing to those words, in public, with unbridled enthusiasm, and were therefore somehow complicit in their meaning. But making yourself complicit is one of the things dancing is for, I guess. The crowd was mostly middle-aged and older, and some of them were dirty dancing, which was both bizarre and sweet to see, becuase it seemed that this was the only place I would ever see middle-aged men and women dirty dancing. I had never seen it before, and it certainly never happens in the movies. I stepped on an older woman’s sandaled foot, which was much more horrifying than stepping on the foot of a club goer my own age, and the women seated behind us kept telling us to move out of the way so that they could watch the show. But we knew we were in the free zone of the dance floor, and my friends are forces to be reckoned with. Sari’s movements are rapid, seamless and completely un-self-conscious when she dances. She is able to interpret the joy that music brings to her without pausing to find the right language of expression. It’s all right there, right on the level of melodies and beats. Sami has the sort of cool you probably have to be born with, and she uses her arms in the smoothest way when she dances, without flailing them or holding them like limp tentacles. When dancing she periodically piles her long black hair up on top of her head and then lets it fall past her shoulders like a flock of silky birds. Just because she can.

A woman who was anywhere between thirty five and forty nine would periodically burst onto the dance floor, placing her flip-flops next to the stage, shouting “woooo!”, and weaving through the dancers with unfaltering enthusiasm. She kept coming up to us saying, “oh my god, you are so cute. I can’t believe it. Will you dance with me? We’re going to have so much fun.” She would grab our hands and squeal. “You are like the dancing queens! You are like Abba.” She told us that she had to make tonight count, to party like crazy with no shoes, because she only gets to go out once every three years, when she is able to escape her strict Christian husband and the demands of her children. She was enjoying herself frantically, in a world of her own making, finding company throughout the room and all down the bar. Her thin face was weathered like a true barroom girl’s, and we wondered what the true story was, if this wasn’t exactly it.

And It was hard not to wonder at the volleyball court right outside the glass doors overlooking the parking lot. Some sort of impromptu game was happening at the same time as the show. People were gathered in loud groups at large tables by the windows, and there seemed to be birthdays and business trip debaucheries and engagement parties going on all at once. The people watched each other, the singer, the dancers, or the volleyball players in between their laughter, their conversation, and their lipsticked sips. With all of this going on, we nearly forgot the world beyond the music’s province, but even that changed when the slap of a ball and the tap of a cymbal were echoed by a loud thunderclap. The singer’s gold glinted when she smiled and this thing she was saying between the words all night echoed in the dip of her hip, “it’s no crime to love this life.” We kept on dancing in that strange, strong shelter of song, completely complicit.

I saw this lady sing a couple of months later, in an entirely different venue. It was a family friendly show to an audience of young, old, and middle-aged people (who dutifully withheld their inclinations for dirty dancing.) She wore a gray sequined, high buttoned jacket and long flowing gray slacks. She sang straight laced and well known blues and R and B songs with that same authority I had seen before, this time right under the rumbling sky. There was dancing, but there was also a slight chill in the evening air and we buttoned up our sweaters, our hearts secured a maybe little more firmly in our chests. In between songs she talked about the churchgoing life, and how she needed to save her voice for the Sunday service the next morning. She said she’s a dirty old woman, but not when there are children in the audience.