I don’t think a compound modifier of that absurd a dimension is actually legitimate in the indicative mood. I don’t care. Well if we are to bend rules we might as well break rules. Oh, no, that is not true. That is not the case. I would say, “Don’t go jumping to seclusions,” except it is imperative and not that funny. That look that the dog gives the gentleman in denial who modifies his dominoes queerly — that look contains an essence we are after and cannot state. Look — a well clad family on the street! I will not respond to that. Point taken.
The dog sees the birds flush an instant or more after he has smelled them sitting there in the bush like roasting hens. The birds blow up just off the ground in this agreeable burst of flavor and noise, and then get some air inside their feathers making the entire place smell like bird hay, and sit there generating the sufficient energy and correct air pressure for an actual flight that will carry them out of reach of his mouth, and the click of metal and the explosion that usually immediately signals birds being in this dog’s mouth does not happen. The dog follows the flight of the birds and his gaze comes to rest on the man in a smooth unbroken arc, not unlike the way one moves his fingers through his hair after someone has declined to shake one’s hand.
You mean the dog does not follow the birds one way until they are out of sight and then snap his head back at the man as if to say What the fuck you sumbitch did you do that for? I will not respond to that. Point taken, I will reform it: the dog looks smoothly from the disappearing birds to the man in one motion, almost like an eyeroll. Yes. Like the time we saw that girl go into the seizure who we thought was just rolling her eyes. Somewhat like that. My point is she appeared to be doing one thing with her eyes and then it proved she was really doing something else. And in just this way the dog appears to be following the quail and then he is looking at the man, with one eyebrow raised. The eyebrow raised says, What did you not shoot for? Oh, yes, and it says more than that. It says, Why are you not a man? It says, You are not a gentleman with an estate with quail on it with a whiskey back at the house that will need be refreshed near where I lie not on the stupid rug which feels much better than the wood floor, you do not even have the house or the whiskey or the lamp or the rug, you are just a boob who thinks he wants to weave a rug. He says, Who do you think you are, a Senator from Mississippi?
Dogs never roll their eyes. That is their chief appeal to man. If you could get a dog that would do an eyeroll, and you were convinced it was always at the expense of others and not at your own expense—man! The eyeroll dog would set a new pace in dogs, would it not? Not accepted. The eyeroll dog would set a new pace in dogs. You could make a million dollars with a dog that would roll its eyes. It’s a niche wide open.
Losing the Wax
How did I go from being full of bluster and cheer to being empty and afraid? Usually a man has to be incarcerated, or see his fellows slaughtered, or lose a child, or. . doesn’t he? Normally, in a normal person, yes, I think a blow of some sort would be required to install the fearful void where there had been the hale stand-and-deliver. But a coward may just lose his sheen, as it were, and precipitate into his true state, overnight, or over a few nights, or over some modest period of time, without any sudden cause. The sheen after all was false, a gloss, like the thin wax sprayed on an apple.
The wax wears off. Spots appear, the flesh softens, consumers (friends, lovers) back off, and one is taken from the top shelf, even if just in his mind, and is headed for a bag to be sent to the sauce factory. One defense is a commensurate loss of mind, which will allow the sodden apple to be giddy about the soddening. The commensurate loss of mind can be voluntary, as a tactic of camouflage or diversion, or it may too come naturally as a contingent wearing off of essentially the same wax. At any rate the empty, afraid, ex-hale, post-stand-and-deliver fool will not accept at first that his wax is gone and that he is in decline. And then he will.
Marbles
I am sitting here without my marbles together, envying other people sitting where they are sitting with their marbles together. I have in mind a certain poet in New York, seventy-five or so, in his apartment knowing all that he knows, arranging some lines on paper that advance evidence he knows yet a little more than the prodigious sum we already knew he knew.
Bebek
Bebek up the way is so green that I start weeping. Why on earth would a spectrally green village on the Bosphorus, in a country not mine, make me weep? Do I really mean weep? Or was I not just blubbering, or chortling sad, chuckleheadedly morose, and perhaps not over Bebek or its green but over something else — like my lost loves, all the girls gone, the women who’ve woken up and left? Perhaps I was snotting up for those numberless waves, triggered by the improbably fresh green of trees along blue water. They’ve taken their underwear and gone, Captain. Let us make eggs, then.
It is not that Bebek is green but that the green is containing so much yellow, suggesting perhaps that the trees are artificial, possibly high-quality synthetic trees, that makes me burst into tears. But I burst into tears less than I. . crumble into tears. I see these bright trees, who knows but that they are not Robert Penn Warren’s infamous arsenical green, off-color in a way that suggests they are fake, or under klieg lights, which suggests deep down that Bebek is Miami, which is a globalization crime of the first order, and I begin to blubber. Blubber, and wander toward the phony trees or the trees that are so well lit and real that they look unreal, and blather. The uncertainty as to whether the trees are spectrally real or spectrally unreal is enough to make a sane man cry, and I am not a sane man. The last moment I was arguably sane was in the sixth grade. I could spell, I could impress the teacher, I thought I was the smartest boy in the room — already, alas, the seed of lunacy was present. I was never sane. Are infants sane? If they are, when, at what moment, does the bending begin? Is it a pang of hunger not satisfied immediately, a pang of hunger satisfied too soon? Is it a soiling of the body? Is it the assault of phenomena impossible to comprehend — like plastic-looking trees?
Yesterday I was sitting in my golf cart not golfing but reading when I saw peripherally an orange thing moving that I expected would prove a tabby cat, odd out in the field where I had parked the cart in the sun to read. It was not a cat but a fox, trotting at a good smooth clip, a bright yellowy fox on his way past with business on his mind. His big puffy tail followed him straight out. His pencil legs were a scissoring little blur. His head did not bounce but glided a foot above the ground on a perfect level line. He was indeed tabby-cat-orange, or — yellow. I gave him a little kissing noise which made him speed up to relative cover and distance, where he stopped and regarded me, and then resumed his course, perceptibly a little more quickly than before. This fox was entirely sane.
Hoping Weakly
I have spent some time this morning cleaning the gradu from the thumb notches on my Randall Number 23 knife. That occupied most of my mind for the duration of the cleaning. A small portion of my brain was left over with which to speculate simultaneously that I will be non-productive if I take a sabbatical next year, that I am in fact non-productive now. Which is why the bulk of my brain is engineering how to run a fingernail back and forth in the thumb-notch grooves cleaning out the gradu. The gradu itself is most likely actually metal polish with which I have idly polished the knife itself when similarly occupied by nothing better to do than shine up an already shiny knife.