February 29, Friday

Happy Leap Year, uh, Day.

It was warm out, the kids we’re at school, then out to grandmas, my 2 PM meeting finished on time (if a bit awkwardly), and I had my bike stuffed into the back of the Subaru station wagon.

I got to the trailhead, got ready like a pro—no fumbling around for shoes, pump, gloves, or sunglasses. No joy-muddling friction today, for some reason.

Some days are like that. Some days are all smooth and everything works: your keys are easily found, nobody calls to complain about something, no one sends you an email that takes an hour to reply to. Today, Leap Year Day (really, what should it be called?) was like that.

I got on the bike, spun around the Green Mountain trailhead parking lot, and whaddyaknow: Riding is bike is like riding a bike. You never forget how, and I hadn’t forgotten.

My lungs and throat burned all the way up, but I worked it in a bigger gear for a while then switched to granny. I hit a steep turn—one that has stumped me more than a few times, less and less over the years—and smoothly cranked through.

A sign, a portent? It’s going to be a good-riding 2008, I thought. Not like last year, which was full of lots of bad friction, tremendous wipeouts, which (thankfully, luckily) involved only one trip to a doctor, for stitches.

I gazed back down at the parking lot filled with cars, the gravel dark, almost black, and felt something like pride.

I hit the top not completely exhausted and found that some trails had been closed, or diverted. I also found that a favorite, which drops and loops down the west side of Green Mountain, had been marked and named. Someone—it really looked homemade—had welded a flat sheet of metal to an iron post, and then hand-painted “Box-o-Rox” on the flat sheet’s face. Surely, it’s a box of rocks, or maybe a snake-o-rocks. No wait, it needs alliteration if it’s going to lose the rhyme: Ribbon-o-Rock. Dude.

As I descended, the sun did too. My shadow lengthened. A tall stick-man on a tall stick-bike with oval wheels rode beside me.

They had dug up the south side of the Mountain—which isn’t really a mountain but more like a large, rounded, mostly treeless hill—to put in an “underground water storage facility,” or so the sign said. A massive, gray, curved wall stood out from the torn earth. I rode by, feeling a bit sad. At that spot, there used to be a run-down shed, with a rusted bed-frame in it. A small symbol of how wild this land used to be.

Nothing gold can stay, Robert Frost once wrote. Golden light hit me as I crested a small but steep rise, and then I dropped into shadow. 5:35 PM. I rode past a guy I recognized, but in our gear we didn’t stop to chat; I think we both pretended that we did not know each other’s face, hidden by glasses and helmets, etc.

I got to the lot, and already many cars had left. Still, some riders were just beginning to crank up the trail, fresh off a Friday at work. A tall guy walked past me, carrying an infinitesimal Chihuahua in one hand, toward the trailhead. A dog so ugly it was cute.

No spills, no give-ups-on-a-hill-cause-I’m-anaerobic-and-about-to-blow-up. Green Mountain isn’t like that.

Which made it the perfect for Leap Year Day. Perfect for First Ride of 2008 Day.

–MJH

Spin Class

My nice black full-suspension bike is tuned, propped up on new rubber, and shiny as new. It is ready to go. I am ready to go, though not in great shape.

But alas poor Rocky Mountain ETS-50, there is snow on the ground, everywhere, it seems. The woods look lovely, dark and deep, but they are white, and I am not a snow rider, sadly.

The bike sits in the garage amidst a bunch of stuff that I wish did not exist. This stuff is either junk, or something that should be stored on a shelf someplace, but I am not in the mood to touch it, to mess with it, to consider carefully where it is supposed to go. (We are all materialists, aren’t we.)

So I do nothing. I turn on the Christmas lights in the front yard though X-Mas is long gone, and that’s about it.

But the next night I go to spin class at the Broomfield Rec Center. It’s not really riding, but my legs burn good. Instructor Steve, if he were an actor, would play the part of an accountant. Brown hair, parted on the side. Strong, wide face. Glasses. He leads us through nowhere, spinning our wheels (but not metaphorically speaking).

But his training CD had The Clash (”I Fought the Law”) playing, and then Iggy Pop (”Lust For Life”), and then a song by by Green Day (can’t remember which), and then one by Laurie Anderson.

Pretty weird. Surprises abound. I get nowhere, but get somewhere.

Still, I miss the dirt.

–MJH

Teeth, For Some Reason

I was driving my daughters to school, and the oldest got mad at me (for something, I can’t exactly remember. You know how it is. Kids are amazing, but sometimes testy.)

She said to me, “I am thinking of something really bad, so bad I don’t even want to tell you.”

“Oh, c’mon, you can tell me. It’s okay,” I said. Usually it’s something rather interesting, so I was eager to hear.

“Well,” she said, “I’m imagining our house, and there’s a giant tooth hanging above it, and it’s going to drop on the house and crush it.”

“But then where would we live?”

“In the forest.” (That killed me. Not the woods. The forest.)

“Won’t it be cold?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because we can wear all our clothes at once,” she said.

A giant tooth–a molar or wisdom tooth, surely–hovering in the sky like a massive enameled UFO. On a sunny day. The house quiet, a thin ribbon of smoke curling from the soon-to-be-decimated chimney. A giant tooth. Vehicle for awful mastication and homelessness.

That’s my daughter, I thought.

The image reminded me of a couple of my favorite poets, Tomas Transtromer, and Thomas Lux. I can’t find the teeth poem by Transtromer, but here’s the Lux poem:

A LITTLE TOOTH

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It’s all

over: she’ll learn some words, she’ll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It’s dusk. Your daughter’s tall.

Merry Holidays, everyone! And please be sure to brush and floss every day.
–MJH

Dreams, Lately

Lately I’ve been having some very vivid dreams where I visit people and places that I’ve long ago left behind. My first inclination is to say that they are regretful dreams, but that’s not really the right word. Sometimes I say that I am sorry, for a thousand things. Mostly for letting them down in some way. I am glad to be back in those places. I am happy to see those people I have left; in the dreams they seem reticent about my return, although no one ever refuses my apologies.

I am also eager to tell them that I am okay, and I am eager to see how they have fared over the years. They have gotten along fine without me. Not too surprising. And a relief. I look into their eyes and we know that we were better off traveling separate paths.

It seems like sometimes my entire writing life is an attempt to make sense of the past. A past which is also playing out in my dreams.

Two Good Quotes on Memoir

From “Stone’s Diaries,” by Walter Kirn
a review of Prime Green, Robert Stone’s memoir
New York Times Book Review, 1/7/07

Time passes, and what it passes through is people—though people believe that they are passing through time, and even, at certain euphoric moments, directing time. It’s a delusion, but it’s where memoirs come from, or at least the very best ones. They tell how destiny presses on desire and how desire pushes back, sometimes heroically, always poignantly, but never quite victoriously. Life is an upstream, not an uphill, battle, and it results in just one story: how and alongside whom, one used his paddle.

From “Why Write?” byAlan Shapiro
Best American Essays 2006
(originally appeared in Cincinnati Review)

So the work itself always entails frustration and failure; it can damage our most intimate relationships; its public rewards are illusory at worst, fleeting at best. And if you write poetry, hardly anyone is listening. So why do it?

Elizabeth Bishop provides a possible answer in a famous letter to Anne Stevenson. Bishop writes that what we want from great art is the same thing necessary for its creation, and that is a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. We write, Bishop implies, for the same reason we read or look at paintings or listen to music: for the total immersion of the experience, the narrowing and intensification of focus to the right here, right now, the deep joy of bringing the entire soul to bear upon a single act of concentration. It is self-forgetful even if you are writing about the self, because you yourself have disappeared into the pleasure of making; your identity—the incessant, transient, noisy New York Stock Exchange of desires and commitments, ambitions, hopes, hates, appetites, and interests—has been obliterated by the rapture of complete attentiveness. In that extended moment, opposites cohere: the mind feels and the heart thinks, and receptivity’s a form of fierce activity. Quotidian distinctions between mind and body, self and other, space and time, dissolve.

JANUARY 8, 2007

BLUE HAZE, GOODNIGHT MOON

Black smoke courses along the blank hills,
There is a crack that runs the length of it.

Shouts in the far-off dusk; the radiator bashes and clinks.
First night heat, late September. Soon all the leaves

Will collapse their canopies, like umbrellas.
Then the summer of fire will no longer burn

My lungs or clot my eyes, those plumes
Stretching from the west

Like vents from some volcano.
Upstairs, the kids sleep, white noise in

The shape of a running fan, night light burning
Their room gold from within,

Glistening cocoon. Ten o’clock.
I tip-toe in, listen to their sleep,

Gaze at their shadow features.
It is like drinking cold water from a well.

MARCH 8, 2006

MAN, IT’S COLD

Frigid day, hands cold.
Em and Jo and Mom are home.
Me: Lonely, working.

EMERSON’S IMAGINARY BEST FRIEND IS NOW A GOOD BAT

Betty Bat is good
now, when he was bad before.
He has seen the light.

He has moved from Croc
Island, to a good-bat place.
He likes it there, she says.

He sings the good song,
she says, not the bad
song anymore.

(Which went like this:
Bad people, go away,
Betty Bat will take you to jail
and you are bad, so you’re
going to jail
with all the other bad people.)

BETTY BAT, ONE MORE THING

He’s a bat. Small, black,
he sleeps upsidedown and he
has taught her to
sleep that way as well.

* * * *

November (early)

EMERSON DOESN’T LIKE TO GO TO BED

No, wait, don’t leave yet
She grabs my arm, holds it tight.
Pull away, empty.

But you have to sleep
What a lame statement.

JOANNA HAS LEARNED A BAD WORD

It begins with F,
ends in ing. I said it, she heard.
My bad, my real bad.
(Adjective, not noun.)

WHAT ELSE CAN I DO?

They are still so small.
I chase them and scare them up,
squeeze for all I’m worth.

October 2005

EMERSON HAS A NEW BABY DOLL

Her name is Crispy.
She is small, pink, and plastic.
Tilt her back: eyes close.

WHAT EMERSON SAID THE OTHER DAY

You get hamburgers
first, then I’ll make toovalroo (sic),
then the cherry melts.

JOANNA IN THE BATH

She likes to narrate:
“Wash knee. Wash knee. Wash toes; toes.
Wash chin, wash tummy.”

JOANNA HAS A SENSE OF HUMOR

Or maybe she’s just
being nice. Say something dumb,
she laughs way too hard.
Teeth shining, she says Funny.

August

AT THE BEACH

Emmy sits on shore.
Water laps cool at her legs.
She shivers, she smiles.

AT THE BEACH, II

JoJo on blanket,
bonnet-shade. She eats crackers
in great, grand fistfuls.

DINOSAUR RIDGE

Not too jazzed about
the footprints. The fake stega-
sauri? A big hit.

LEARNING TO SHARE

Not easy, no, no.
Jo holds toy; Emmy yanks it
away. It’s not yours!

HERITAGE SQUARE, ALPINE SLIDE

Worker-girl spills coke
on guy’s butt. Emmy and I
watch the commotion,
then fly
down
the world.