thirty in the a.m.

I walked the dark frontage road to my office, with passing headlights of cars refracting off the wet concrete into my eyes. We’ve been carpooling, Annabelle and me. And when we’re running late, she drops me at the corner gas station, a 15-minute walk to the employee entrance of our building where I swipe a badge, it beeps, and I begin the ascent to my cubicle. Four flights of stairs. I could take the elevator, but exercise is in short supply these days. This is the part of my job I don’t like: sitting all day before the computer screen. But at least my chair is ergonomically designed, I’m told. I should be grateful, they remind me. Mine is an expensive chair, they nod with wide eyes of reproof.

But the morning walk that’s becoming regular, despite the cooling weather, is a quiet, reflective time. A surprising joy. Even the car noise from the highway, those heavy steel bodies thrumming along pavement in bursts and shifts, becomes meditative fodder somehow–as if men and women in their machines were a river, arrhythmic, spilling over asphalt. Sometimes, in lesser moments, I imagine one of them overrunning its banks. Popping over the barrier, bumper sparking on the ground as the frame crashes against tires: could I dive away in time? Would the windshield crack under my weight as I rolled from hood to glass? Or would I witness two tonnes of metal being twisted like a rag, flung over the hillside into the ravine?

In better moments I pray. When the sun throws off its cover and the sky turns to fire, and the breeze is just so, and the clouds are few enough to deliver the promising hue of dawn, a new day, I’ll try to look beyond the atmosphere, perhaps at the moon now trailing off to its cave, a lapsing star blinking one last time until nightfall, an early jet flitting off to anywhere. I don’t comprehend You, I’ll say. When I feel close, I see that You are still far away. We are still strangers. And I’ll be thankful to feel this way. I won’t be afraid. For once I’ll think that I know Him and better than I have my whole life, the blood pumping through my legs, my face flush in the wind rising over the morning hill.

My professor told me this would happen. He said writing fiction is like speaking a foreign language–if you don’t use it, you lose it. I didn’t expect to stop entirely, but I wanted to write songs more than anything. I tried my hand at journalism. I continue to write poems. But fiction. Now that I’m coming back to it, I see that he was right.

Years ago I traveled the Andes, winding through Peruvian villages by bus and train. I walked the streets of Tegucigalpa, Honduras and built homes outside the city. And like any good Arizona boy, I crossed the border to drink my first tastes of beer and tequila. After a few semesters of studying Spanish, I spoke with the locals on those trips easily enough (with some help, of course), made a few jokes even. And I swear that one night I dreamt entirely in Spanish (a sign of fluency), buried there beneath a pile of heavy alpaca blankets on my hay, crater of a mattress. Sure, it might have been the Spanish of a three-year old with average intelligence, but who’s counting?

Spanish doesn’t come so easily to me these days. But, even now, months and months removed from the occasional flow of conversation in a foreign tongue, vocabulary slipping, grammar fading, I’ll overhear a couple in the train station, or read a sign on the highway, and know what they said.

Fiction is like that. It is another language, in one sense–difficult to write after a long break, but never completely gone. As I dust off the skills I learned in those hours spent hunched over my desk in days gone by, clacking away at the keyboard, it’s all coming back to me. Slowly. But what I learned is still there under layers of distraction and failed pursuits in other directions. Each day I come to my desk, and open the bound notebook with pen in hand, I’m buffing the surface of my forgotten craft. It’s not quite shining yet. But maybe soon it will reflect my face.

No, we haven’t become heavy drinkers, contrary to what the boxes in our living room might suggest. We’re moving in a week from this apartment–the one below neighbors with that wildebeest of a dog who romps across our ceiling during movies or the reading of books. Can dogs have hooves? You’d think so from the sound of him up there.

We’ve rented a small house, built in the 1880s, that’s been beautifully renovated. It has laundry machines. We’re letting that sink in. Laundry machines. After three years without them, we couldn’t be happier about the prospect of washing clothes in our own home. No more rolls of quarters knocking about. No more driving our dirties around town. No more threat of  death by a mountain of laundry erupting, bursting wide the closet door, covering our bodies like the ash of Vesuvius as we slumber.

There are other benefits and upgrades, not the least of which are the screened porch and garden we’ll be enjoying shortly. But we still have a lot to do to get there. So much to do.

We’re going to need more boxes. Off to the liquor store.

“I think ideally I would like, in a poem, to operate by way of suggestion, to say only enough to enable the perceptive and wide-awake reader to have his or her own experience or interpretation of some things I might have felt, noticed, thought about–and a renewed sense of awe at his or her own comparable experiences. In some way any good piece of writing is a mirror, don’t you think. Or maybe a window, as George Orwell said, which is not supposed to draw too much attention to itself but provide the sight of something else. In any event, I like your analogy of the sculptor. Although I must say when things are going well in the composition of a poem, I have more the sense of being the stone that’s being worked on.”