Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
—John Updike
Gangs of sparrows choke the feeders just outside the windows, swinging them like censers in a barren sanctuary—or like the tall fire escape at the end of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
The neighbor's bathroom light goes on and off, meaningfully.
The mailman is suddenly on the porch, in mid-conversation, and the dogs go wild. Who talks to him all day, block by block?
I talk to myself all day.
I want to write the way Clara Ward sings "When the Saints Go Marching In," looking briefly skyward before impaling us with another perfect bar, flawless and confident. I want to make someone smile or cry without their wanting to, from deep within—as I smiled when, sitting alone in the row, I had my first take-off on a PanAm jet out of LaGuardia in 1986. As I cried on the first syllable of Gary's wedding vows.
They are moments when the water and air is squeezed out of life, when it is crushed and concentrated like grapes, and rhythm lures the mind from indolence or compromise.
Every hello and goodbye is pressed between two brass bookends, every late sunny weekend morning in bed with someone wonderful and heartless, gorgeous and long gone.
But gospel never fully translated into soul or pop, and its effect on us has just a single conduit, with an outdated premise. But like having a Sangria, we lift the fruit aside and swallow the contents.
I have no stories to tell this month, and I will not write about myself.
I look out the window at the birds, upside down, pecking at the seed.
Apparently His eye is on them.
But they're managing quite well on their own.
