June Notebook

JUNE NOTEBOOK

Parable of Masks

She took good care of her masks. For example, each of her masks had its own mask, and she went to great lengths to ensure that each of these masks of masks themselves had a fine set of masks of their own. But there her generosity ended.

She waved to him from behind a wall of water.

He stared at the waterfall. A tear ran down his cheek.

“Just look at all that information,” he whispered.

As he was telling her this, his face suddenly took a bruise right before her stunned eyes, as if he’d been punched by the nimble, well-moisturized, invisible fist of an angel.

Her face was her handwriting.

His anger a musical phrase, his joy its notation, his limbic system singing the lyrics. But, as the casual reader might wonder, do the lyrics even have a plot?

“Great shit,” he congratulated.

His facial expression was in perfect C. But his hands sang in D minor as he spoke.

“Interesting song. You must be an academic. Where do you teach?”

“Thank you so much. I’m an Assistant Professor in the Cryptobiomusicology Department at Garbage College.”

Two ringtones singing to one another in a dark theater.

The first ringtone hides in the hills and repeats anything the second ringtone says.

The second ringtone is so in love with its own voice that upon hearing this it leans in, and drowns in a pool of sound.

Proust’s grandmother’s true self appears, for the first time, on a telephone—true because she is there, by dint of being only a voice, without the armor of manners. This might also explain why otherwise lovely people are so terrible on the internet.

Be still and let your eyes adjust to the subtler tones of its motion and you will see, from across blushed desert vistas or from the cramped bough of a restaurant awning under which your waiter is catching the manna of his smoke break, the tender, almost bashful way rain hides the fact that it always falls the way of hell.

Dream, 6/15

I’m in the airport near Boston, “the Harvard airport,” where I ask someone’s father where the bathroom is. He says, “Upstairs or downstairs.”

The airport is nearly empty. I walk down a long ramp.

The best medicine, as they say, is advice.

Driving up to Norton Island today. eyes for governor, says the sign on a lawn in Maine.

Death, a going down for the final dirt nap.

“Where you headed, Steve?”

“I’m going to fix the generator, then I’m going down for my dirt nap!”

A thunderstorm bearing down on the warm chrysalis of his mood.

Parable of the Feed

There once lived a man who took pictures with his eyes. He looked at the cormorant playing in the gentle ocean swells, blinked his eyes, whispered, “Click,” and then cried out, “It me!” He was adored by his neighbors, who alerted the press about this behavior. He became something of a local celebrity. He continued taking these pictures for all his remaining days.

But when he did pass away years later and an autopsy was performed, the mortician noted a curious fact: despite the man’s famed lifelong practice, his cadaver contained no images.

The cry of a nearby bird hidden in the darkening spruce: “Pizza! Lavender, lavender pizza!”

He was interested in trends. Interested? No, he loved them. Each, in every patch of lichen that grew in the manifold crevices of its exquisite masonry, for all the eons that it stood.

Rich with honor and devoid of sense.

Rich with sense and devoid of shame.

Rich with shame and devoid of worms.

He tried to perform a song, but a cloud of flies kept muting the strings of his lyre.

“After escorting the Princess of Parma to her carriage, M. de Guermantes picked up my greatcoat with the words, ‘Let me help you into your skin.’” (Proust, Guermantes Way)

The Guermantes way is not a path through lilac—it is the art of keeping distances intact.

“Pardon me,” he said. “I have to go tie some food to the end of the dock before I go down for my dirt nap.”

Parable of the Good Knee

His bad knee felt bad all the time. But his good knee, to tell the truth, felt like no knee at all.

A “chain of events” is surprisingly easy to envision. For example, picture a waterfall. Or a chain.

I have a few minutes before the dinner bell rings. Reasoning that I must start looking for new work, I open LinkedIn. A job is listed. It doesn’t require a cover letter, so I apply.

The eye, in a certain crepuscular light, appears to be a different color—though the same material—as the rest of the body; “and,” as Niedecker had it, “dreadfully much else.” In reading you become yourself.

Being struck on the skull, second after second, with the blunt instrument of time.

Vertical clouds that catch light like bits of a sail.

Locked outside the hour, sunlight left its footprint on my glad face.

Cassiopeia dropped its sparkling gossip down upon their skins.

And there he sunned himself under reluctant flames.