Weiser River Pillow Book #14

[Here’s the final installment of Eberle’s Weiser River Pillow Book—although some editing has been done along the way, the majority of the work is now available on Robert Frost’s Banjo, & the link to this writing will continue to appear in the sidebar for the foreseeable future.]

THINGS THAT SHOULD BE SHINY

The fake mother-of-pearl buttons on a rodeo shirt.

Windows on a mirrored glass skyscraper. When these are not shiny, it appears that the whole purpose of progress has failed.

Blackberries picked in late summer.


THINGS THAT SHOULD NOT BE SHINY

Cars.

The interior of a church.

The front doorknob of a house surrounded by trees.


SQUALID THINGS

The smell of an empty school corridor lined with lockers above which are student drawings of ways to save the environment.

A trowel that has rusted with dirt still on it.

Chicory that has flowered close to the ground after being mowed.

An unmatched sock.


THINGS WORTH SEEING

Magpies landing outside the kitchen window after the first snowfall.

On the floodplain of a river, an abandoned house through which vines are growing and covering half the roof with leaves.

A county fair where there are many kinds of poultry and pigeons, also goats.

A forest three years after a wildfire has passed through it.

You are walking through the woods thinking how silent it is and how alone you are, and then you notice at the base of a huckleberry bush, a hairbrush, ruined by weather, the gold lettering on its back almost legible.


THINGS THAT MAKE YOU THINK OF SOMETHING ELSE

The sound of a refrigerator late at night can bring an aquarium to mind—the tiny bubbling treasure chest and diver never reaching it—the trapped light.

It is the middle of summer and you know there is no chance of rain. Nonetheless, a truck going by on the highway makes a sound like thunder and for a moment you shiver deliciously.

When the cottonwood trees are releasing cotton in the spring, it does look like snow in the air and yet does not bring winter to mind.


ODIOUS THINGS

The plastic countertop where it has come loose from the edge of the kitchen sink,

The "Sealed For Your Protection" seals on aspirin and chopstick.

At a community meeting, sitting next to someone who bites his nails.

Gas stations and restaurants that are part of national chains, erupting in the rural landscape like the signs of an inevitable disease.


HAUNTING THINGS

The image of oneself as a child.

On the verge of sleep, repeatedly, being awakened by imaginary alarm cries coming from the guinea hen coop.

When the sun has almost set behind the highway, a passing truck blocks the last of the light and the house goes dark for an instant longer than a blink.


THINGS THAT ARE NO BETTER THAN THEY SHOULD BE

The mop bucket.

Crocuses after their first bloom, especially the large kind.

One's girlhood crushes.



THINGS THAT ARE AT HOME IN THE WORLD

A robin standing on a fence post.

An old seeder rusting on a hillside above abandoned fields.

A dinghy moored in the small pool of a rock-crushing pit.

The desk and window in my studio.

An eagle's nest on top of a power pole.


THINGS THAT LOOK GOOD IN JARS

Dried beans—especially black garbanzos and striped lima beans you have grown yourself.

Star anise.

Pickled beets.

Coriander seed from the garden.


THINGS THAT DO NOT LOOK GOOD IN JARS

Pig's feet.

Scientific specimens of any kind.

Leftover tomato paste.


THINGS THAT GIVE THE SENSATION OF FALLING

Standing in a supermarket aisle surrounded by varieties of canned tomatoes that seem to have proliferated since the last time you were there. Varieties of breakfast cereal also create this sensation; varieties of tea, however, do not.

Thinking about a phone number you have lost.

Being about to fall asleep and waking suddenly.


PAIRS THAT GIVE PLEASURE

When the leaves of the cottonwood trees by the side of the highway are the exact same shade of yellow as the double line.

When the line of a jet trail in the eastern sky is the same color as the clouds around the setting sun.

How sometimes I hear the traffic on the highway above my house and it sounds just like a river.

Eating pears and grapes together.


LARGELY UNRECOGNIZED MASCULINIST ASSAULTS ON THE WORLD

All music on the radio.

All systems of measurement.

Women who give their children the last name of their husbands.


THINGS ON A GIANT SCALE

Rolls of hay stacked in shelters; three rolls on top looking like an enormous clover leaf.
Erosion on the side of a small hill can create the impression of a massive distant mountain range seen from above.

Near the spring that feeds the house under a wild plum tree, there is an ant-mound that is two feet high. In itself it seems strikingly large; still, the yellow plum leaf resting on it looks huge.


TWO TOWNS NORTH OF HERE

There are many more new cars. There are stores selling clothes for outdoor recreation.

There are no magpies, quail, or black widows. Very few cottonwood trees, lots of pine trees.

In the streams, caddis flies use bits of pine needles in their shell-casings.


INEXPLICABLE THINGS

Electricity.

When continuing a diary in a new notebook, the desire to make a gesture of formal introduction of some kind, however subtle or oblique. To whom?

The pleasure of shining the old chrome-covered clock-timer on the stove. It doesn't work, is not attractive, and yet the tenderness I feel for it never fails to spring up when I’m cleaning the stovetop.


THINGS DESIRED FOR A WHILE BUT NOT ACQUIRED

A clothesline.

An extra steak knife.

Two large steel-covered bass drums.


THINGS DESIRED FOR A WHILE AND RECENTLY ACQUIRED

A blue enamel bucket to hold scraps for the chickens.

A medium-sized doumbek.

A jumper for fall. The perfect fall jumper is of medium weight, very soft, not binding anywhere. Long enough to give a feeling of serenity but still allowing for easy motion. It should not create a feeling of loudness or of primness.


THINGS THAT MARK A POINT IN TIME

Planting garlic.

Taking down the hammock.

Putting hats and mittens in a basket on the dryer.

Eberle Umbach
© 2000-2010

Weiser River Pillow Book #13

[Here’s the December installment of Eberle’s Weiser River Pillow Book, & good news for Pillow Book fans: there’s enough left over to make one more post in January. Hope you enjoy it!]

THINGS THAT DISTANCE CHANGES

The new black boots I bought in Boise look remarkably sophisticated by the time I arrive home with them. And the vinegar and spices that were tiresome to buy in a crowded store take on a hint of Arabian treasure when they are unpacked in the kitchen a hundred miles later.

Bittersweet picked in Massachusetts, now in a vase by my keyboard.

In Pernumbuco, a colorfully printed package of herbal tea that arrived from the States; it was the packaging that seemed unbelievable, such delicate designs; the tea itself was unremarkable in a place where you step outside the door and gather a handful of lemon-grass and orange leaves for tea.



THINGS THAT DISTANCE DOES NOT CHANGE

A miniature white carriage from Chinatown looked as exotic in San Francisco as it does on my bookshelf.

Doritos, Pepsi, Milky Ways—the food items that have infiltrated the highway system and look the same everywhere.


ARDUOUS THINGS REMEMBERED FONDLY

A man talked to me of spending a winter 30 miles from the nearest passable road; his eyes gleamed when he spoke of shoveling snow off the roof of his cabin.

I smile when I remember hauling water in Pernumbuco from the cistern in a wooden-handled bucket to take a shower using a tin cup.

When I go out before dawn with water for the poultry, I usually hate it until I'm halfway across the snowy path and then I feel a particular elation.



THINGS THAT CLUTTER THE MIND

Dreams that are filled with anxiety, but not quite nightmares.

Having to think about work-for-money, especially the people you must think about.

Social interactions where you are not sure you have acted appropriately.



THINGS THAT PARALYZE THE MIND

Old wounds, from family.

Tiredness.

Worries about money.



THINGS THAT FREE THE MIND

Daring.

Nonsense.

Laughter.


THE LARGEST MOVING THINGS

Manufactured homes being trucked on the highway.

The Life-flight helicopter on its way to Boise.

Trucks carrying two layers of cars.

Fog rolling in.



THERE IS NO WAY TO REMEMBER EXACTLY

There is no way to remember exactly from year to year how beautiful the plants become when fog has frozen on them. There is a tall stem of chicory on the north side of the house I kept forgetting to pull out last summer. It is transformed now with delicate crystals differentiating its varied surfaces. Instead of being an annoying, presumptuous presence, it is a surprise, like a present—incongruous but delightful among the everyday things.



I DREAMED THERE WAS A COUGAR

I dreamed there was a cougar in with the guinea hens, also a tiger and its baby. The cougar ate the tiger's baby. The cougar was full, the tiger was mourning, and so the guinea hens were not in danger—but there was no sense of safety.



ONE THING I LIKE ABOUT WINTER

One thing I like about winter is the sense of doing battle. But this troubles me. I can so easily imagine early Germanic peoples telling stories of war in front of a fire in the winter months. It is the essence of abstraction—tales of war becoming cozy as the snowstorm rages outside and inside the stack of wood is high. The rest is European history.



BEWARE THAT SENSE OF VIRTUE

Beware that sense of virtue which comes from watching the sun rise—smugness creeps in on the superstition that you helped it.


THINGS CAUSED BY TOO MUCH WORK FOR MONEY

Buying too many things.

Many stress-related illnesses; a loss of personal identity, values, and sense of beauty.

After too much word processing, a dream where I see the formatting of my mind in a Reveal Codes screen.



ALL I HAVE IN MY HEAD TODAY

All I have in my head today is music. The writing I'm working on could not be farther from my mind. Everything in my head organizes itself into rhythmic units of 2's and 3's, building into 8's, into 12's. The leaves on the ground where they appear between patches of snow are doing it, the straw bales, the clumps of bushes against a white hill, everything is doing it—as if an audible pulse in my mind is going through my eyes and becoming visual.



STRANGE HOW THE WORLD SEEMS BRITTLE

Strange how the world seems brittle when a layer of fog closes in just behind the line of the closest hills. There is an illusion that things have gone two-dimensional and, if struck, would be shot through with tiny cracks.



THINGS THAT ARE GOOD TO HOARD

Days with no social or work-for-money commitments.

Bubble bath, in winter.

Buttons of all kinds, especially old ones, and pieces of cast iron from the dump for garden ornaments.


SIGNS OF THE WINTER MIND

You can spend the entire day making up drum rhythms.

You notice that the lace edge of a curtain is grimy with dust and your reaction is complete despair.

You forget to call your friends for days at a time.

Wanting large hunks of meat in the freezer.

Wanting to read Herodotus.

When the shape of the satellite dish is the only distinct marker in the freezing fog and you look up eagerly at the appearance of the flashing lights of the county plow as if a sister ship is passing your drifting house.

When you and your partner are talking about how to repair the water-damaged ceiling and feeling acutely aware of the lack of money, the lack of work, and a sense of bleak reality is mounting—and then there comes a loud sound of scratching from under the floorboards. You both fall silent and look intently at the floor. The sound is being made by something way bigger than a mouse and it is accompanied by gnawing. For some reason though, you both start laughing and the bleak reality disappears completely.


MY FRIEND TALKS ABOUT A GRAY STUCCO HOUSE

My friend talks about a gray stucco house she saw that had vines trained up the walls. Now in winter, she says, the brown lines of the stems and the blue berries looked perfect. Her sense of beauty is terrifying to me because it demands the subjection of everything to an ideal that is so exacting—the berries could not be red, the stucco could not be new, the stems could not be half-green half-brown. Who could live in a house that had attained such ruthless perfection? This kind of ideal is always seen from outside, by an authority that roams ghostlike, disassociated and judging. This is not a ghost I would choose. It would make life like a cliff-edge, it would make the stakes so high, and for what? Ultimately, art can't be based on snobbery, it just doesn't work out.


WHEN THE SUN COMES BACK AFTER DAYS OF FOG

The craters that appear in the crusted snow are lunar in their sudden focus and make you giddy.

The dead grass looks sharp—at first, everything looks dangerous with the glitter and knife-edge of frost. You don't quite want to go outside at first.

For a moment, there is the illusion that everything has become glass and could shatter, could fall in fragments and disappear.

The stop-sign up on the rise where the road meets the highway flashes out like a shield in a return from battle.

Eberle Umbach
© 2000-2009

Weiser River Pillow Book #12

[Fans of Eberle’s Weiser River Pillow Book posts take heart—since my division of the manuscript into months involved quite a bit of guesswork, it turns out that there will be a post in December as well to complete the material. In the meantime, hope you enjoy the November entry; & you can stop by Eberle's blog for more animal adventures!]

THINGS THAT MESMERIZE

A design of squares on a linoleum floor.

The grain and knots of pine paneling.

Water stains on a plaster ceiling.

Lines of print when you are very tired.



THINGS THAT ARE PRIVATE

Love.

Grief.

Writing.


IMAGES THAT BRING COMFORT

Fields of tulips and daffodils in Holland.

Hibernating bears. Also, strangely, hibernating wasps. Not, however, hibernating squash bugs.

A rusted dredge in the rock fields outside an abandoned mining town high in the mountains; the snow piling up.



FROM THE WINDOW IN RENTED ROOMS

In Baltimore, past the electric candle sconces with paint drips imitating wax, a helicopter hovering.

In La Paz, the cold and writing with fingerless gloves, watching pigeons in mud niches under the rooftop across the street.

In Ohio, just room enough for a huge four-poster bed, climbing out the dormer window and onto the roof sheltered by the leafy boughs of an enormous tree.



COVER-UPS

In the nineteenth century, piano legs, table legs, all decently draped in upper class parlors.

In the twentieth century, trash compactors, stereo equipment and televisions hidden in wood cabinets; at the turn of the century, expensive wood housings for refrigerators.

In my own house, it is the electrical outlets I wish to cover up in one way or another, especially if they are unused.


EXCESSIVE THINGS THAT MAKE SENSE

A small plastic fountain, indoors, with plastic waterlilies and lights and on top a ballerina twirling, powered by the water flowing.

A garden crowded with ornaments—gnomes, deer, butterflies, wishing well, whirligigs.

A lot of broken-down cars in a field by a house.



EXCESSIVE THINGS THAT DO NOT MAKE SENSE

Pasta shaped like miniature pizzas.

Sports Utility Vehicles.

Mount Rushmore.



ON THE WAY TO THE POLLS

At the corner, a line of cow skulls, very neat and clean, on fencepost. On the way back, a herd of cattle coming at us, turning into the old homestead I call Shangri La. It has the most falling-down buildings and equipment. Even an old schoolhouse and two small silos. No one lives at the house, where there are curtains in the windows but no glass.



FIRST SNOW

It would be hard to explain the phrase "blanket of snow" to someone who has never seen snow. How the blanket is not only a visual image, but also involves the muffling of sound, a fleeciness, a sense of warmth. Also how the phrase itself is not fancy and can be used by anyone. Like a nutcracker. Some people choose the smooth metal kind, simple and elegant but slippery. There are ones in the shape of a squirrel that some people find tacky and others consider adorable. Then there is the nutcracker from the fairy tale and ballet—the staring soldier, wooden and bearded. Originally handmade for an aristocratic family, now these can be bought for the price of half a tank of gas in large chain stores that offer inexpensive imported goods. In the countries where these nutcrackers are produced they would be too expensive for the people who make them to buy. In Pernumbuco I was shown how to open cashews by placing them in an old oil can on a fire until the shells cracked with a small explosion. That was drought country. They did not have the phrase "blanket of snow" but they did describe an unsatisfying rainfall as "grasshopper spit."



THINGS THAT HAVE BECOME PART OF THE WILDERNESS

Baling twine.

Airplanes and all-terrain vehicles.

Beer cans.



GHOULISH THINGS

Talking to two women whose husbands have retired. One weaves and one paints. They speak of the difficulty of finding time when their husbands won't interrupt them. They have raised children, continue to run the households, cook and pay bills. Their husbands can't bear them being alone long enough to do work they love.



THINGS THAT WINTER CHANGES

The bottle of soy sauce in my cupboard seems wildly improbable—so exotic, sitting there, as the snow piles up and the temperature outside could kill.

My cleaning frenzies are happier, less panic-struck, and have more to do with spaces than surfaces. More like a squirrel burrowing into cupboards and closets.

The pumice stone becomes a place you travel to, a narrow blue bay in Greece lined by white pumice cliffs and white bits of rock floating on the water.

The flowers on the Christmas cactus seem in motion—salmon leaping or bright birds in flight.

Seeing a wasp or even a Chargas beetle—instead of an impulse to destroy them, there is a sense of kinship, of being survivors together.



RECTANGULAR THINGS IN THE LANDSCAPE

Bee boxes.

Hay bales.

Headstones.

Trailer houses.



FRAMES IN THE LANDSCAPE

Gateways.

Fence lines.

Partially ruined buildings.

Weiser River Pillow Book #11

[Here’s the October installment of Eberle’s 2000-2001 Weiser River Pillow Book; as written, this would have been the end of the manuscript—so you should indeed put some stress on the final word of these lists. We began posting the Pillow Book entries last December, so next month’s installment will be the last]

THINGS ORNAMENTING THE WOOD SHED

Drifting sea background, 4 purple diamonds, 1 dawn-pink circle.

4 hubcaps.

Large metal hoop mandala encircling: teapot, trowel, sawblade.


FIRST RAINS, OCTOBER

The smell of the earth, a soft pungent gratitude.

Looking at the roof, trying to remember where the leaks were last year.

Sitting on the porch steps watching the clouds roll down from the mountains.

Summer-hatched guinea hens, who have never seen rain, sounding affronted.


GODS ON THE MARKET

Ajax cleanser.

Mercury automobiles.

Olympic stain and paint.

Toyota Cressida.

Argo cornstarch.


IMPROVISATIONS AT WOMEN’S FANTASY PERFORMANCE NIGHT

Being in a dance routine with bathing beauties.

Being coronated pope.

Running a school board meeting with a hammer for a gavel.

Witnessing one’s own funeral.

Flying.


I DREAMED I WAS WRITING MUSIC

I dreamed I was writing music, and when the hoot owls started outside, I dreamed I had written music for hoot owls, who then came in, right on cue, at intervals of a perfect fourth.


MARKETING THE WAR

America on Alert!

America’s New War!

America Strikes Back!

Now More Than Ever.


BEFORE YOU GO TO BED WITH THE FLU

Cellophane rattles like distant thunder, echoing with all the flimsy disposable flotsam of the last century.

Dead leaves look like mice.

It seems overwhelmingly tragic that the chickens have no scraps to eat that day.


HOW ENGROSSING CUTTING LABELS

How engrossing cutting labels from computer print-outs my companion designed for the feed containers: turkey grower, scratch, crumble, and rolled oats.

I remember how intent I was, years ago, cutting out place cards for my mother’s formal dinner parties—cards that would be inserted into the mouths of the golden metal insects that served as place-card holders.

How lovely to have animals instead of formal dinner parties.


ACTS OF RESISTANCE

Knowing that all lives are equally valuable. Consistent action based on this knowledge would eradicate hierarchy, elitism, war, oppression, and car commercials.

Not having children.

Making art instead of money.


THINGS THAT ABOUND

Listerine beetles.

Duckweed.

Hawthorn.


THE PURPOSE OF ART

The purpose of art is not so much even a question of product, but of commitment to a process that takes you away from the life proscribed by the agents of greed. It returns you to what is sacred, it ritualizes connection.


FAST FOOD, FAST CULTURE

Strange sight, a fast food roadside shrine, children of a superpower lining up quietly to eat what will kill them.

Putting down money for it too, the hush at the altar of the cash registers, the softly spoken orders. Many people have the verses memorized, don’t need to read the phrases posted in the place where, in church, the hymns would be posted.

Strange method of ritual suicide, within earshot of the roar of another monster to whom we make regular voluntary human sacrifices—the freeway.

Fast food is pseudo-sustenance based on omission: communicants participate in the omission of connection to its production—the land where it came from, the people involved in growing it, making it—the omission of making it, sharing it.

Fast culture works on the same premise—the cult of celebritism substituting for human connection—no involvement in its production, buying it, not making it: the whole business is just another death cult. Of course, death cults are not an illogical response to life in this country.


VACUUM CLEANER MODELS DESIGNED TO FIT TYPE A

Hoover Concept.

Decade.

Elite.

Innovation.

Legacy.

Power Max.


THE PURPOSE OF EDUCATION

At best, education provides for an ability to entertain oneself without having to pay for it and feed the beast of consumer culture. Like learning to make love instead of supporting a sex industry. Learning to get ideas for free instead of supporting the non-information industry. In this country, recreation without consumption is a radical act, and leads naturally to freedom of thought.

BREEDER'S CUP CLASSIC HORSES

Orientate.

Include.

Galileo.

Freedom Crest.

Gander.

Albert the Great.

Aptitude.


SAVING GRACES

On the lawn, among the browning leaves the occasional underside of a cottonwood leaf bright and silvery as a coin winking up at you.

The internal voice, that laughs at itself. A friend, who echoes it.

Coming home on a cloudy night, past Mesa Hill, the scattered lights of houses around the post office and the store down in the valley.


INVINCIBLE SECRETS

The beating of your heart.

The stories you use to make up the world.

Joy.

Eberle Umbach © 2000-2009

Weiser River Pillow Book #10

[Here's this month's installment of Eberle's Weiser River Pillow Book series. In case you've forgotten, Eberle wrote the Pillow Book in 2001, which will put these September musings in a larger context.]

CHILDREN OF A SUPERPOWER

What we are, I suppose, is inevitable: dull-witted, guilt-ridden, violent, joyless, smug masters of denial, good at video games.

Possessed by the remarkable ability to believe ourselves deserving of privilege.

Believing in the inherent goodness of the parent superpower, in spite of the continuing tradition of astounding brutality.


THINGS THAT RETURN

Strange to discover that fall is a time of things returning. Instead of counting off the disappearances—basil, plum tree leaves, marigolds--I watch for what returns: magpies, quails, owls. The pumpkins and acorn squash emerging all at once and abundant when their vines shrivel under frost.


WAITING FOR RAIN

The dryness of the leaves.

Then the insects come.

Dust pillowing the ground under wild apple trees where the cows take shelter.

Mice rustling loudly in the dry grasses.

Hawks circling overhead.


SLEEPLESS FULL MOON

The house is brimming with moonlight.

Wind rushing in the cottonwoods, the far roar of highway trucks.

Rapture.


WE CALL THE PLACE PLUM ALLEY

The curve in the road past the last trailer house, wild yellow plums and the rosy kind as well. Now the weather has turned and there are quail, wild turkeys sometimes. Cattails and rose-hips in the ditch. I’ve watched a large sunflower stay the same solid yellow as the fields behind it dry to brown. The No Hunting sign attached to the barbed wire fence with baling twine, a large rusted piece of farm machinery sticking up as if it had toppled, nose first, to the ground, a mastodon caught unawares by an Ice Age.


THINGS THAT SUSPEND TIME

Walking into the forest.

Drumming, especially outdoors.

Writing.

Making love, especially in the afternoon.


SPENDING THE WHOLE DAY WRITING MUSIC

When it’s easy, it seems that the sounds are already there, all I have to do is listen. All it is, is suspending fear, listening past panic and sense.

Rapture is simple, but not comfortable.

That night, sleeplessness: the sound of rain dripping onto the straw bales unbearably loud, the moths crashing into the screen window.


THE BEST STATES OF MIND

Longing.

Resting.

Making.


THINGS ABOUT FLAGS

People have put up, everywhere, flags printed by the big city newspaper. But using colored pencils to make your own flag is apparently not as socially acceptable an option.

A lovely flag would be pink and green stripes, with an eggplant among the stars.

Re-reading May Sinclair’s description of the outbreak of flags before the declaration of Britain’s involvement in World War One—the same hysteria, the same blindness, the same rush to curtail civil liberties.

CUSTOM-MADE WARS

It’s the third time in twenty years this country has gone to war against people it empowered: Noriega, Hussein, Bin Laden.

The technological direction we have chosen creates the arsenal—sky-scrapers as weapons, DNA research enabling biological warfare.


IN SPITE OF LOGIC

In spite of logic, I feel so sick and depressed. Logic says terrorism is bound to become another part of life, and in fact it is no more brutal than all the other brutalities people have decided they can live with in this country. But it is sad.


ASHES ASHES WE ALL FALL DOWN

Not finding bodies, realizing that they were part of the ash cloud falling on the city.

Cats and dogs, dead in locked apartments whose owners never returned, where neighbors didn’t know each other well enough to do anything.

In Afghan refugee camps, millions facing death from starvation.

During the Taliban takeover, computers, videos, cassettes, nailed in masses to a pole; children vowing murder.


FULL CIRCLE

Giving Native Americans small-pox infested blankets as part of the genocide campaign.

Killing countless people to control oil, and enabling the Taliban to come to power.

Fearing Taliban-backed suicide artists infecting themselves with small-pox and walking among us.


AUTUMN MATH

Three sisters by a river, planting trees; twenty years.

Two friends, a ladder between them.

Four boxes of pears; the dehydrator.

Pear-shaped skin-thin slices, veined and grained with summer.

SKELETAL THINGS

A leaf, colorless and dried where leaf-maggots have been.

Empty hay shelters.

Telephone poles along the treeless road, looking invertebrate after the fields have turned to a uniform khaki.


GOOD GIRL GOTHIC

Shirley Jackson. Rebecca West.

Anna Kavan. Jean Rhys.

Barbara Comyns. Stevie Smith.

Mary Shelley. May Sinclair.

Angela Carter. Lynda Barry.


WAR RESOLUTION

The superpowers have to figure out that they can’t wantonly wreck people’s basic rights without eventual reprisal. This is not a moral premise, since a superpower, by definition, is incapable of thinking morally, but a matter of pragmatics. Eventually, people will fight back, and they will be able to do damage. Eventually, the smugness and self-encumberedness of a superpower means that is incapable of running a war against anything but another superpower competently. We ourselves created this mine-field.

Eberle Umbach, © 2001-2009

Weiser River Pillow Book #9

[Here's the August installment in Eberle's Weiser River Pillow Book series; enjoy!]

AT THE LADIES’ LUNCHEON

Edible half-masks with chocolate eyebrows baked in.

Poetry, and stories of thefts that the ladies had committed in earlier years, including a P.A. system and a Canadian flag.

Columbine boutonnieres from the garden.

The idea emerged for Women’s Fantasy Performance night at the local theatre.

Joan wore: shorts and tennis shoes, and carried an evening purse of shiny red leather.


THINGS THAT DEPEND ON SUMMER FOREST FIRES

Next year’s mushrooms.

Fire-fighters—whether or not they will be able to buy prom dresses, new truck tires.

Victory for softball teams with older players when the smoke-jumper team has to forfeit.


THE WEIGHTIEST DECISIONS

Deciding never to have another job where stockings would ever have to be worn.

Deciding to write every morning.

Buying land.

Deciding to love my beloved.


AT A HOUSE UP NORTH

A single tomato plant in a small greenhouse.

Buttons, handles, and furniture made of antlers.

A pair of emu feet.


THINGS THIS WEEK THAT COULD NOT BE DONE WITHOUT A CAR

Cover an archeological dig in a mining town up in the mountains for the newspaper.

Meet a friend for drumming practice.

Sell concessions at the theatre two towns away.

Get materials for mending the garden hose.


THINGS THIS WEEK THAT COULD BE DONE WITHOUT A CAR

Buy herbal tea over the internet.

Write, garden.

Make green plum chutney.

Go to the courthouse restoration meeting.

Mail a book to a friend in California.


SUMMERY THINGS

A bullfrog’s bright green head resting on duckweed in matching green.

The smell of apples fallen into the spring from the wild apple tree in the draw.

Filling the swamp cooler at night by starlight, and the thick swathe of the Milky Way.


THINGS THAT MAKE YOU REALIZE LIFE IS GOOD

The berry-picking buckets hanging inside the pantry door.

One yellow leaf on the front porch.

Cats lying on the sunny walkway.

Your darling’s crossword book lying open next to the bed.


THINGS THAT MAKE YOU REALIZE LIFE IS PERFECT

Light falling on the open doorway to the music room.

Rain falling on the tin roof of the garden shed.

A wind so gentle it would be unnoticeable except for the rattling it makes among the dry cornstalks.


THINGS YOU KNOW THAT GIVE YOU A SENSE OF BELONGING

The difference between chokecherry leaves and serviceberry leaves.

Where to buy the best mouse-traps.

That the tiny pond-dragons are actually dragonfly nymphs.

No longer being afraid of leeches, black widows, or the long fat black slugs that drape their wrinkled lengths along the mown path to the draw when twilight comes.


ON THE WAY TO VISIT MY FAMILY

I imagine the living room, the beautifully upholstered furnishings, everyone very polite around the coffee table with the glass top that makes everything directly under it wavery and murky in an underwater way, and, sticking out from under one end of it, a pair of human feet. They are never discussed.


BALLET OF CHICKS IN THEIR SHELLS

Twenty years ago I choreographed a dance to this piece. Yesterday I saw, for the first time, an actual chick pecking its way out of its eggshell.

How strange to have images that are abstractions, that miss the point so completely. The struggle of the chick to peck its way out is way more horrifying than playful, its peeping from within, a sound that is desperate with exhaustion.

Typically, the eggshell is the dominant image, in the abstract-- the hard shape cracking cleanly. What’s left out is the elastic membrane, flexible as the shell falls away, the opening slits in it that swell and widen as the being within moves.

© Eberle Umbach 2001-2009

Weiser River Pillow Book #8

[Here's the July installment of Eberle's Weiser River Pillow Book series. Enjoy!]

SHARP MOMENTS IN VERY HOT WEATHER

Finishing the storage box for the corral, we sit and watch a single ant carrying a wood chip around and around on the cracked earth.

In a nearby field, a neighbor loading hay for us into the truck. My darling steadies the load as the hooks pull out of the bale, cruel looking hooks so close to him, and my heart skips a beat in the beautiful field at the foot of Sage Hill.

Deciding that my distaste for leeches is less than my desire to cut down cattails, and finally wading into the pond with my fierce pink-handled knife.

INCURABLE

It doesn’t matter what the words are, when your beloved is tested, diagnosed. The cottonwoods with their terrible beauty went spinning out of reach, untouchable. As the hours passed, the presence of death made poetry everywhere—absolute perfection of line and form—it was appalling. How did I live through those two days? He said, please don’t cry any more, he said it very gently. I went to sit in the draw where the spring comes out of the earth and runs down. When I came out, I had stopped crying. I took his hand, loving him so much. And now we have begun.

WHAT WE DID IN THE FIRST DAYS

Drove to the city to have the belt sander fixed.

Pulled the pump out of the swamp cooler when it broke.

Put chicken wire around the young plum trees.

Went to a Historic Preservation Commission meeting.

The first time we were apart, he went to softball practice, I went to drumming practice.

Put a nest of guinea hen eggs under the broody bantam hen.

REFLECTIONS ON LIT CRIT

Taking things to their logical conclusion, all texts became of equal value—all criticism also becomes of equal value. Yet strangely the idea of a canon persists, of authority and hierarchy, it was not killed by the silver bullet manufactured for its heart. You can’t really kill the undead, or stop the living from offering themselves as food for the undead.

Still, it’s strange to think how they continue, the oddly dismal halls of academe—with the frosted door-windows of offices, the colored posters, the clicking of respectable shoes on tiles visited nightly by the other world of the maintenance staff. And the few insects who have found a niche, silent within the walls, where, secretively, they live and eat.

I DREAMED THE DITCH

I dreamed the ditch, although it was in another country, vaguely reminiscent of Bolivia, and the ditch was filled with fleshy-bony fish, so full that there was no water to step into. The horizon was distant, but flattened, the way it is in the land of death.

INCURABLE, REVISITED

Incurable hope.

Infectious laughter.

Untreatable irreverence.

PIGEON HOUSE

A man who plays on the softball team with my darling has a lung disease too.

Surprisingly, also, raises pigeons, which I have wanted for so long.

Inside his trailer, a helmet from the Vietnam war, a large TV, and a cat on the TV tray.

Inside the pigeon house made of plywood, truck windows, scraps, it is another world-- the beautiful colors and the muted light, the sound of wings, the unbreathable air.

SAND HOLLOW

A pocket in time, containing a diner and grocery store in one large room.

A large gumball machine, and in the bathroom a “Pandora’s Box” condom dispenser.

Salt and pepper shakers in the shape of pieces of toast in a toaster.

THE ROAD THROUGH EASTERN OREGON

Onions from the onion trucks lying on the roadside.

In one field, piles of different colored onions, reminiscent of crop circles, sand paintings, and other ancient mysteries.

A house in the shape of a lighthouse on the edge of a dry field rippling dust.

LAST CHERRIES OF THE SEASON

Coming home from the city, we stopped at a fruit stand. The cherries looked past their prime and the thought that there would be no more this summer overwhelmed me with the fear of death—his death. He saw, and began filling a bag by the handful, to assuage my sudden anguish. The woman behind the counter shook her head indulgently at him. “Look at you,” she said, and told him she’d get a damp towel for his hands. The sharp moment softened as they spoke over the damp towel, across the counter, and when I got back into the car, I was glad of the cherries again.

ABOUT MY BELOVED

When he moved in, he brought a colander with his kitchen things, so that we had two in the household. This upset me at first, giving me the sense of panic I get when there is too much stuff. How he persuaded me, gently, that it was all right to possess two colanders. Then the first night, making supper together, that we used both of them: one for salad, one for pasta, and I laughed at how useful, in fact, abundance could be.

THESE STRANGE STORMS

These strange storms have created moments of stillness unusual for July. Not the false stillness of numbing heat, buzzing at the edges with insects, the swamp-cooler—but the stillness that comes between storms—a lack of breath that makes me terrified of breathlessness—the stillness of stilled leaves.

AT FIRST

At first I thought that living with the shadow of death would somehow invalidate everything. But the opposite is more true: it is that shadow which completes things, which creates the thin bearable edge of unbearable beauty—which returns that beauty to the everyday, the immediate, the inalienable. I always forget this, and, always, remembering it again seems insurmountably difficult—at first.

Eberle Umbach
© Eberle Umbach 2001-2009

Weiser River Pillow Book #7

[Well here we are after all, thanks to Eberle's Weiser River Pillow Book series. If you're interested in past installments, simply click on the link right above the Blog Archive list. Hope you enjoy it!]

A DOUBLE VISION OF WORMS

1971.
A family camping trip, two rubber rafts on a lake.
The worm suspended over the water between the rafts which are too full of people and dynamics, all the dynamics somehow focused on the worm which has been packed miles into this mountain lake, now suspended over the water, the focus of the question:
Who shall impale the worm?
If you are afraid of doing it, you will be asked to do it, you will become the center of horrible attention instead of the worm; until you are not afraid and then you will be ignored at the moment of impaling, which becomes a sacred privilege reserved for someone else. A brother, a father.

2001, my garden, the worms are in the earth where they belong and I have a reverence for them, as gardeners do. I know when the tiny young worms start to appear, and which beds have the most. I’m standing in the mint bed and one comes out of the soil, making visible that incredible connection between air and earth—I have put the bodies of guinea hens and cats into the earth, I can almost imagine my own there, going into the worms, the mobile intestines of the underworld.

PANIC IS WORSE WHEN THE SKY IS BLUE

arched high the way it is in June, the plants budding and blooming so fast and furious you realize things are really out of your hands. Everything suddenly alive. This is when you don’t want thundering hooves coming out of the sky, panic, your heartbeat shaking the earth, worms for miles around shaken numbly from the earth, lying there draped and drunkenly exposed.

FENCING

Stretcher, wire, fencing pliers.

Staples, string, a thermos of cool water with mint and lemon balm and ginger in it.

Stout boots; leather gloves are good.

Our neighbors are fencing too and the day is very hot. We all watch each other with increasing wariness as the sun moves higher, and we stretch the wire tight, tighter.

IRRIGATION

We probably won’t see rain again until September.

In June, rose petals will fill the dusty ditch.

The sound of the sprinkler will make Pablo the parrot doze off dreamily, just as he would during a rainstorm.

THINGS ABOUT THE CATALPA TREE

Its heart-shaped leaves seen through the kitchen-sink window and a section of spiral staircase.

Its late-leafing and rather coarse abandon-- and then the perfection of its blossoms, the speckled funnel and whorled lips.

The strange, sweet-astringent smell you can smell from the pumphouse. Then the tree goes invisible until the dangling pods turn brown and catch your eye.

THINGS THAT APPEAR WITH NO WARNING

One morning, one field over, large bales of hay.

The beginnings of blackberries.

A sore throat.

THINGS THAT BECOME COMPLETELY ENGROSSING WHEN THE TEMPERATURE IS 100

Watching Pablo the parrot eat a cherry.

Leaning on the corral fence with the llamas nearby.

Watching the guinea hens plop themselves down in the shade of the plum trees.

Looking at the various plants growing in the pasture. Thinking about them.

PROJECTS ALWAYS LOOMING, NEVER SCHEDULED

Cleaning the pantry, the crawl space.

Scraping the last of the varnish off the wood floor.

Covering the old lime-green linoleum with new linoleum.

PROJECTS WE DID INSTEAD

Built a wood shed.

Made a sculpture of an old culvert and hanging lamp.

Painted animal silhouettes in the corner of the living room.

LATE JUNE

The morning sun is golden-- a deep gold that makes things seem to glow from within—it is unlike the light at any other time of year. It makes the idea of death seem a betrayal—a trick by an adversary not acting honorably. The mesh of light and hammock, leaves and sky, looking as strong and single-minded as the idea of eternity.

THINGS ABOUT HIKERS IN THE WILDERNESS

They fly in from other places and assemble gear—brightly colored and made of high-tech fibers. They make going into the wilderness into an act of consumption. Choosing a mountain, a lake, as they would a car—for what it reflects about their idea of their own elusive identity.

THINGS THAT FLOAT ALONG IN TIME

The spent heads of the irises bearing the memory of spring.

Dry grassheads, that bloomed unnoticed, now making waves across fields in the wind.

Elderberry blossoms like foam carried on the upper reaches of thickets.


WEEDS

Medusa-head.

Rush skeletonweed.

Mexican Sprangletop.

Weiser River Pillow Book #6

(Here's the May installement in Eberle's Weiser River Pillow Book series. If you'd like to know more about this work, please check the links here & here. You can find links to all the installments so far—December thru April—on the links under * Eberle's Corner * about halfway down the page.)

FROM ANGUISH TO PIE

Anguish angoisse angular arugula angel ungulate
angle angst agonia origami
Aragon, tarragon, paragon pie.

THE THING ABOUT WITCHES

The thing about witches is that they were independently minded—loners. That’s European witches, anyway. In Brazil and Bolivia they seem more integrated into the social structure. But it strikes me that all the lore about books of spells and other paraphernalia has been added to obscure the important fact that witches had no formulated tradition, that what they did was make up their own rules.

And learn from the land, about plants. But not to come up with poisons or medicines, not just for that, mostly to be connected—to the land, through what is observed and what is taught by the slow process of growth. Last week I told myself that if I felt inclined toward religion what I would do would be to learn one from this land—that ten acres of land with water would provide all you need for a civilization—with its own art forms, religion, values, and sustenance. I went outside and put some dried lavender beneath the metal pig-lady goddess, who lives in a shrine made from part of a tractor.


TOWELS ON THE BATHROOM SHELF

The faded pink one, with holes—for orphan days.
The thick black one that sheds slightly—when the illusion of opulence reveals its flaws.
The deep blue one—perfect, a reward reserved for harmonious days.
Striped ones—always go on the hand towel rack, for unexplained reasons.
The peach one—somewhere between the pink one and the blue one.
Turquoise—you have to be feeling a bit brash for this one.
The ones my companion brought with him to live here—still look exotic and exciting.
My grandmother’s, with rose appliqués—are fading, poignantly—death again.


THE FIRST LADYBUG

The first ladybug seen from beneath the cottonwoods starting to fill the air with cotton somehow makes me want to let the wild roses grow right into the laundry room—prying the siding apart as they have already started to do, and twining into the secret place where the totem umbrella lies month after month, untouched.


THE PARADE OF LEAVES

Cottonwood, willow, currant already jaded, the spiky blackberry and the elegantly down-curving elderberry, those of the serviceberry have serrated edges, those of the chokecherry do not, these are the ones I have come to know and it is strange to think that they unfurled in their stately, hurtling order before I came here to live among them.


THE SUMMER IS FULL OF GHOSTS

The summer is full of ghosts—of longings from other times of warmth and sun—longing built upon longing, in some kind of endless algebraic proof of itself. And yet this place comes closer than any I have known to containing what I love. Still, there are rustlings in the bushes—invisible things on the wing, with sharp beaks and singing.


THINGS THAT LOOK WELL AGAINST GREEN HILLS

Black cattle.

Ploughed fields.

Crayon-colored farm equipment.


THINGS SEEN ON A SHOPPING TRIP TO THE LAND OF THINGS

Garden hoses colored blue and purple instead of green.

A display of beef jerky in the men’s underwear section.

Bubble gum chips sold in miniature milk cartons.


LUCKY STRIKE AT THE DUMP

3 fans, various sizes.

Large iron hook.

Dishwasher part.

Large metal hoop.

Stove part.

Electrical box.

Bucketful of small metal bits.



SOME COLORS AT THE FARMSTEAD

Pumphouse: drifting sea and pink.

Pig-lady shrine: John Deere yellow and green, pomegranate.

Western shop wall: sombrero.



BLOOMING, MAY 22

Honeysuckle, columbine, iris, lilac, wallflower, geranium, phlox, dianthus, syringa.

Edible: watercress, sorrel, chives, cilantro, thyme, oregano.

Theoretically edible: cattails, camas root.


TIME AND TIDE

Charcoal vacuum filters, change twice a year.

Air filters, every three months.

Swamp cooler, clean out in the spring.

Refrigerator, when relatives are coming to visit.

Is it better to clean under the stove burners when the moon is new, do the dust bunnies increase when the moon is on the wane and trailing behind it the glittering flux of the object world—a milk jug emerging in the draw, a beer-bottle cap winking in the corral.


BIG HOT DAY

2 starlings trapped in the chimney—dismantling the stove pipe to let them out.

Cleaning out the swamp cooler pump and pan.

Hanging 2 sheets on the southwestern windows-- from the Hospital Auxiliary Thrift Store—torn, darned, and nibbled. One pale blue, one pale green. They make an underwater light pour across the living room.


THE ORDER OF THINGS

Dandelions.

Peonies after the lilacs, before the hedge roses.

Irises after lilacs.

Elderberries flowering after the currants berry.


TREES AND THEIR BEETLES

The bane of the locusts and their elegant branches, a borer resembling a wasp, cleverly, since that is its great predator. The box elder trees growing around an abandoned homestead I drove past hundreds of times before finally exploring it. The familiar deities of these localities presiding: a toppled refrigerator, large car parts—and swarming cities of box elder beetles.


EARLY MORNING THOUGHTS

Every embarrassing thing you’ve ever done.

Thinking how pleasant it is that two days still remain in the month of May—then remembering how you used to hate the calendar and drew up lunar calendars to follow instead.

Thinking you can give up some high-minded principles that made your first few decades more noble, but uncomfortable.


STRANGE SIGHTS

In the pond, in slow motion, a bullfrog which has its mouth almost entirely around another’s head.

A baby porcupine in the garden, without quills, defenseless.

A wasp wrapped up like a mummy in a black widow’s web.


LATELY WE HAVE ASKED ALOUD

What is the process of galvanizing?

Why bush league?

Why the card in the carding of wool?

There it sits, the Oxford English Dictionary, but sometimes we love a mystery.

Weiser River Pillow Book #5

(Here's the April installement in Eberle's Weiser River Pillow Book series. If you'd like to know more about this work, please check the links here & here. You can find links to all the installments so far—December thru March—on the links under * Eberle's Corner * about halfway down the page.)

LONGINGS WITH NO DOUBT ATTACHED

For a pigeon house.

For a world without US-trained death squads.

For the embrace of your beloved.


SIDEWAYS THINGS

Egyptian people in paintings.

The branches of sage and bitterbrush.

A backhanded compliment.



UNEXPECTED THINGS

Finding a guinea egg in the grass by the draw.

When you go to a city, men are wearing suits and ties, quite seriously. You have forgotten how completely ludicrous this looks.

When you are so happy with a manuscript, then the sudden sense of panic.

After making love, the window across the room seems to disappear and the outside world is completely alive, a vast jellyfish in which everything floats—connected—with faintly luminous bodiless threads.


THERE IS THIS SUPERSTITIOUS THING

There is this superstitious thing, after finishing writing a book, where my soul seems in abeyance, more vulnerable to the zombie-makers. I find myself setting up defenses against the whole range of them, the ungenerous, furiously empty horde. It is not a rational thing. It is as if until I start the next book, choose the next leg of the journey or am chosen by it, I need to keep an extra guard over my unprotected soul. On the other hand, the ghostly voices of my writer-companions and ancestresses become louder, are woven like a shining horizon around me.




SPRING IS NOT

Spring is not compassionate—it’s every bud for itself and there is no time for sadness, no sense in generalizing from the superabundance of specifics, the undifferentiated inundation of detail. The sorting mechanism is slowly dismembered under the tiny, relentless tendrils of vines.


RAIN IN APRIL

A day of leisure, no work outside, this is lovely.

Gray sky, green fields.

The idea of drops clinging, then falling, from buds.

The landscape of lowering clouds brings a desert to mind, chambers carved into
rock—small spaces contained within great distances.


HARD FROST

You might as well be exiled to the moon.

The anxiety of winter and having no money returns, a distorted echo.

The color of frozen daffodil foliage keeps me inside all day.


BAD BOATS

Good gadflies.

Sad squashes.

Desperate daguerreotypes.

Timely toes.

Wistful wampum.



DIORAMAS

Sunset. One tree in silhouette. The family dinner table on the savannah.

A test-tube wildebeest in the grade school science lab.

Antlers on the bridal couple.

The salt and pepper shakers locked in mortal combat.



A RECREATION DISTRICT MEETING

On the way there, a snowstorm unrolling itself in the sky at the perfect distance.

The lingering snow-light turning to dark outside the Forest Service building. Inside, things happen when people gather around a meeting table.

A pixie was present, and one woman resembled a fish to a remarkable degree. A squat, square, ruddy man was straight out of Trollope. Rules of procedure govern these meetings.


GEE GAWS

Trip the light fantastic.

Trap the dark ballistic.

Trot the sea pacific.


TABLE OF ELEMENTS

Star

Beach ball

Fish Lipstick

slowly intricately breaking




OCCASIONAL THINGS

A branch with decorated blown eggs hanging from the arching twigs.

A hubcap, placed on my gate as an offering.

Capping a highway fence post, a work boot, sole pointing skyward.


THINGS THAT CREATE A COMFORTABLE SENSE OF WISTFULNESS

A cold day and a relentless north wind.

Making soup out of leftover vegetables and rice.

Holes in your favorite jumper; wearing it anyway and curling up with a book by the fire.


ONE COUNTY OVER

One county over, they don’t have zoning regulations, and we visited a subdivision that was a little piece of wonder compared to the more familiar new wave of second-home communities—mansions with expensive plastic fencing made to look like rustic post and rail fencing but supposed to last forever—conferring a sort of rich-folks’ immortality, a modern version of the pyramids, I suppose.

This subdivision looked a bit like a rural Brazilian town because you didn’t have to be rich enough to buy a lot of land in order to be allowed to have a cow or horses. There they all were, right next to each other in little plots with chickens too. We saw guinea hens, and a strange abandoned structure like an enormous tree house. One narrow strip of land had only room enough for a trailer plus a very large water-wheel in the irrigation ditch, painted bright red. How charming a break from the relentless visual litany along the roadside of who shall have what, and how it shall look. The constant reminders of the continuum that has smugness and righteous snobbery on one end, and all the varieties of sanctioned brutality on the other.


LOVELY LEADEN THINGS

A cloudy April day.

A fishing-line weight.

The soft seal on a bottle of Italian vinegar that smells of distilled sunlight and underground rooms full of barrels.



THE PEOPLE ARE EXTRA

Even though I feel totally disenchanted today with how people act, and unsure of the value of my attempt to create a social reality for myself, I am still so glad that I live here, in a place containing landscapes I loved as a child. I see the road reaching into the hills, disappearing below snow-covered mountains, and I feel grateful for this abiding love of place. The people have always been extra.

HERALDIC CREST

I Shall Elude Them.

With teapots rampant and crossed gardening tools, a recumbent pen on a paper sky.

All the wrong colors.


THERE ARE TIMES

There are times when it feels like you have to make up the world every day-- when there is no carry-over at all from the day before. Somehow, during the night, it was all washed away—the bulwarks against doubt and shame, the levers that adjust the delicate balance of anger, compassion, and independence. These and all the other triangulations simply fall apart, and there you are again, unprotected, with the howling voices of your mutilated culture coming at you, and you try again for one more act of wizardry that will deflect them, turn them into gargoyles so you can walk away from the castle, find out how the rivers have changed course again, in the dark time.


THE FIRST MOWING

The first mowing brings with it the memory of the strange agitation of mid-summer-- the heat-struck immobility and the restlessness of the body, muscles twitching as grasshoppers across the whole landscape are twitching, tufts of grass, incessantly.


I DREAMED A GARDEN

I dreamed a garden, and I was so surprised that my cup-and-saucer plant had come back—the thick, fleshy cup on one stem, the saucer on the stem next to it. I didn’t deserve that kind of luck, I told myself.

THINGS THAT GO TOGETHER

Daffodils, currant buds.

Music, sex, cooking.

Winter, geometry, crystals, ballet.

The Weiser River Pillow Book #4

(Here’s the March installment in Eberle’s Weiser River Pillow Book series. In case you’ve missed the earlier installments, there are links to them in the left-hand frame. The first installment also has some background info. A note on the picture—yes, those are our guinea hens on our property. We were notorious in those days for the color of our outbuildings—take a guy who’d lived in California & a gal who’d lived in Brazil & that’s what happens. That building’s gone, however; where it stood is now our front room, kitchen & my office).


THIS IS EARLY SPRING

This is early spring—the harsh light that reveals the spots on the windowpanes, the streaks. Suddenly you notice that the ceiling is adrift with patches of cobwebs, soot, and feathered dust. Even the walls are encrusted with a faint lichen-like growth of grime you would never have noticed a week ago. And body-parts everywhere, from the slain pioneers of wasps and flies.

This small burst of horror is the last struggle against new life—this disbelief that verges on anger, this not-wanting to be tricked, this winter spirit that judges hope to be a corrupting luxury.


THINGS WORTH SEEING IN MARCH

The frantic happiness of guinea hens on the south-facing field when the snow first melts.

Geese flying north-- three vast V’s of them-- moving against the sky, shifting positions, shifting shape as cars on the highway slow and veer, watching them.

Buds on the currant bushes flushing red.

A light early morning snow and mist on Weird Hill, the moon in the southern sky.

EXTRA THINGS

A rock from Crystal Mountain in the zippered pocket of your purse.

Murder mysteries.

Small bottles of shampoo from hotels.

A pleasing sexual encounter in a dream.

IT IS GOOD TO BE A DISSIDENT IN EARLY SPRING

It is good to be a dissident in early spring when there is no packageable beauty to trick the eye, none of the candy-hued flowers that are made use of to sell tissue paper and room deodorizers—it’s all raw power—not brutal like government, not showy like cars packaged to assuage the insecurities of the hopelessly wealthy—but quiet, enormous potentiality-- complex, with the inevitability of buds and stars: rain and mud. A giving-up of one’s consciousness for a moment to the gnarled branches of the locust, and returning, restored, to one’s own convictions.


OVERWHELMING THINGS

The spring thaw.

A mall.

Desire.


THINGS THAT TRAP

Debt.

The idea of success.

Love.


MARCH REVELATIONS

At home, red rhubarb uncurling, and yellow crocuses. On the edge of the highway, the fawn-colored carcass of a deer, flattened into the ground by snowmelt, and a fragment of blown-out tire emerging as glossy and black-purple as a crow.

On the window, a tiny ant crawling, and by the wild plum tree, the ant hill swarming again.


FULL CROW MOON

It’s the only time of year that there are crows in abundance here, though the next town to the north has them all spring and summer.

They appear at the same time that the willows suddenly glow their pale moon yellow.

Crows, like magpies, catch the attention as individuals. They can trick you. They don’t get hit by cars.


THINGS NEAR AND FAR

Stop light: 55 miles
Rice vinegar: 52 miles
Fast food: 75 miles
Hell’s Canyon: 75 miles
Mall: 120 miles
Airport: 120 miles
Rodeo: 14 miles
Lettuce: 12 miles
Gun club: 2 miles
Church: 2 miles

THINGS FALL APART

The wagon wheels set in metal frames to make gates.

The outbuildings leaning as the mud moves around them.

Plastic bits of the truck interior, detaching.

The cracks on the southeast corner of the house expanding, making homes for wasps.

A dress you’ve worn for two decades wearing through in spots—time is passing.

Friendships, too, can come apart in your hands.


CLEANLINESS, GODLINESS

When the red wine spills on the carpet, people say “Salt,” in unison and then do not move for a moment, as if it were an invocation.

How happy Medieval theorists of demons would be to have the computer graphics used to depict germs on commercials advertising cleansers.

FIRST SPRING RAIN

I am back at grade school in Illinois, a Latin class—RANA: FROG. It was raining outside and I used that to memorize the word. Then the sky cleared, becoming enormous, and I realized all at once, for the first time, that school was merely a building.

In Florida almost twenty years ago—I sat with Pablo the parrot on my shoulder then too, on a porch during a rainstorm. The storms back then were frequent, short, and furious. I remember undergoing jealousy and smashing empty beer bottles into the gutter. I live in the desert now, much calmer, with Pablo on my shoulder as I write these pages on the porch in the mornings.

The storms and porches of Ohio are still too laden with sadness to remember for more than a fraction of a second at a time.

Rain in Virginia was so much less real than my own thoughts that I don’t have a single clear memory of a storm. One time, actually, when lightning made unconnected wires meant for a television burst into brief flame between my lover and me, and I thought, yes, that expresses us perfectly.

My perspective seems to be changing so quickly—like a river that is wider but moving faster and faster, around the bend into the uncharted landscape of middle age. So broad and inviting at times—at others, the awareness through ripples on the surface, that the deadly rapids are hidden now, underwater rather than exposed.


SMART THINGS

Asymmetrical hats, with hatpins.

Plants with root systems exuding toxins which prevent other plants from growing.

Imperialist capitalism.

Clamshells with paper flowers inside, unfolding underwater.

Using grade school and high school as a forcing ground for the dynamics of hierarchy.

McCall sewer worker: “After what the scientific cult of intelligence produced in the twentieth century, the only truly intelligent act that remains an option would be to say yes if an alien life-form wanted to have sex with you.”


THINGS THAT GLEAM

Lighted windows at night, seen from the highway across dark fields.

A small brass faucet, in moonlight.

A broken piece of china, half-buried in the spring that runs through the draw.


THINGS TO CONTEND WITH

Cattails taking over the pond.

Grasshoppers.

Snobbery.




EXOTICA

My composition notebook, last year manufactured in Ohio, now identical but manufactured in Brazil.

Dandelions, first brought to this country as decorative plants by early settlers along with Puritanism.

One’s own body, seen in parts, looking down, or whole, in a mirror.


ACTIVITIES WITH NO DOUBT ATTACHED

Fencing in the spring.

Feeding the guinea hens.

Drinking tea on the porch and looking at the mountains.

The Weiser River Pillow Book #3

Here's the February section from Eberle's work The Weiser River Pillow Book. In case you missed them, you can read the December & January sections here & here. The Weiser River Pillow Book is a journal Eberle kept over a 12 month period from 2000 thru 2001; a generous excerpt was published by Impassio press in their anthology In Pieces. Eberle's writing was inspired, of course, by Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book. This is Eberle writing in February 2001:

NO MONEY IN FEBRUARY

You wake up so worried that you can’t stay in bed, you run barefoot to the porch to get wood for the fire.

He was awake too, and runs after you, apologizing, as you carry wood to the stove, for not getting up and building a fire. He has knelt already behind you, is handing you a tightly twisted length of paper for kindling.


THINGS HARD TO UNDO

Words spoken in anger.

Backing the car into a snowdrift.

Debt.

An improvised harness for a large drum.

Leaving an ingredient out of a recipe.

Bitterness and families.


THINGS THAT MAKE THE HEART SINK

Car trouble.

Friends who don’t speak honestly.

Any mention of the president on the radio.

Dump-dwellers in Mexico City.

Having to dress for a meeting.

Hearing about an old lover from whom you parted in anger.


IMPOSSIBLE BIRDS

The chick hatched in a week of below-zero weather-- I had neglected to take the eggs out of the nest. This tiny black chick looking like an apostrophe when it stretches, as tall as it can, if the hen leaves the box.

The voices of the songbirds are so unbelievable that they seem to make visual shapes between the sky and the snow, trailing out like colored banners with brave symbols on them.


THE FUTURE EXISTS

Seed packets appear in the grocery store.

On Saturday, friends gathering to sing move outside to a sunny porch.

The sump pump is running as the snow melts and groundwater runs into the cellar.

A patch of mud in the driveway.

A blackbird, calling from the draw.


THINGS THAT MULTIPLY

Cobwebs.

Birdsong.

Committees.


THINGS THAT DON’T RETURN

Places you have seen on trips.

Money spent foolishly.

Summer vacation.

Misplaced trust.


THINGS THAT BREAK WITH NO WARNING

A cold spell.

Your morning coffee cup.

A mood of frenzied happiness.



MORE SIGNS OF THE FUTURE

Mud.

Buds.

Wasps.

Smells.


THINGS THAT ROAR

The north wind.

Trucks on the highway.

Runoff in the draw as the snow melts.

Panic.


THINGS THAT SQUEAK

The chair at the computer desk.

The door to the vacuum cleaner closet.

Pablo the parrot imitating the sound of the door to the vacuum cleaner closet.



WHEN THE NORTH WIND BLOWS

The door to the crawl space blows open when I go into the studio.

The studio never gets warm.

The fact that your car has broken down seems more tragic than inconvenient.

Pablo the parrot and the other birds are nervy. The cats are nervy. We are nervy.

You wish for a legend about this wind that would make it seem less like an assault-- both personal and impersonal—as if it is directed at you but by something that cares nothing about you.


LEGEND OF THE NORTH WIND

A cruel princess from the kingdom of used cars was walking one day and found herself in an arctic icy landscape where she had never been. She didn’t think much of it, except it interested her by being new.

When she saw the puffins, however, she became entranced and knelt down. One came to her readily because because puffins are curious and curiously unafraid. Well.

She gathered that puffin up into a metal fold of her skirt and returned to the kingdom of used cars where so many have come to grief and sanctified their belief in their own unluckiness.

Puffins, as you know, have a kind of group mind and rely on each other for everything. So this puffin that was separated was in a terrible condition. She experienced things puffins have never known before-- such as longing, prolonged and unassuageable, and fury—also prolonged.

Her longing and her fury continued until she became enormous-- knowing no bounds, in fact—and blind as well. She became the north wind. In that formless form she hurls herself with all the vague memory of icy cold and chopping chill. Never resting. But heading in the opposite direction of where she means to go.


END-OF-WINTER GAMES

Kittens born in late fall play with dead leaves that have emerged, pretending they are alive.

The parrot lifts the open door of his cage and drops it so it bounces and rattles.

Wasps come out and congregate on an empty plant-hanger hook.

I walk on the frozen crust of snow by the pond, naming the prints: coyote, raccoon, quail, cat.


EMERGENCES

The edge of the fountain patio with its inlaid bits of broken pots.

A Tupperware lid, mysteriously, in a flowerbed.

The top of the overturned yellow bucket stuffed with straw on the outdoor faucet.

THINGS THAT DECEIVE

Sunlight in February.

False friends.

In my dream, a cafeteria with the dishes labeled in English but you must order them speaking Portuguese. My sister wants eggplant and I can’t remember the word for it.


WOBBLY THINGS

A young chick walking.

The board on the henhouse path in mud season.

The porcelain cockatoo on the bookshelf when the dryer is running.

The Weiser River Pillow Book #2

If you’ve been following along in the Robert Frost’s Banjo world, you know that my wife Eberle Umbach wrote a journal called The Weiser River Pillow Book over a 12-month period in 2000-2001. A generous excerpt from this was published by Impassio Press in the anthology In Pieces in 2006. You can read the first installment of Eberle’s book on Robert Frost’s Banjo here, & you can find more background on Eberle’s work & its connection to an 11th century Japanese writer here.

Without further ado, here's Eberle writing in January 2001:


UNBELIEVABLE THINGS

Greed as the defining principle of our culture.

The floats in the Rose Parade.

One's own death.


THINGS THAT REVEAL THE DYNAMICS OF A HOUSEHOLD

Pets.

Meals.

Illnesses.

Storage spaces.


IT IS RARE FOR A THING TO BE BOTH POIGNANT AND AMUSING

You go down to the lakeshore to skate, and on a snowy dock extending out into the ice you see several pairs of brightly colored boots, pointing outward. There is no one in sight all the way across the frozen lake.


FINE LINES

Between gentleness and danger when handling a parrot.

Between faith in yourself and overweening pride.

Between a love of beauty and affectation.

Between intense joy and a loss of center.

Between neighborliness and falsity.

Between splendid decay and discomfort.


PHRASES IN AMBER

Shiver me timbers.

Bearing the brunt.

Right as rain.


I BRING A BEADED AND FEATHERED HOCKEY STICK

I bring a beaded and feathered hockey stick to the frozen lake where people are out skating. Among friends it is a thing to smile at, and adds to the giddiness of skating. Women, invariably, are drawn to it, and young girls. Certain men, incredibly enough, appear to be deeply threatened by this sacrilege of a masculine totem and are moved to criticize. Imagine—skating on this expanse of beauty, and these men still can't stop themselves from taking out their insecurities on other people. Imagine—how they are not even embarrassed at doing this. Imagine—there are women who live these men, day after day after day.


THINGS THAT HANG LIKE JEWELS IN THE MIND

The ability to create.

The knowledge of beauty.

The invincibility of humor.

The sense of yourself in solitude.


IT IS HARD TO KEEP A SENSE OF PURPOSE

It is hard to keep a sense of purpose when small-minded people pluck at you. Wanting to play at one of the endless variations of the game of hierarchy. But this is not a fun game, it's only the game of choice of the brainwashed. Are these people unable to invent their own games? I think the answer to that question is yes, actually— which paints a rather horrifying picture and explains a great deal.


THINGS MAKING SHIFT

A can of peaches patching a hole in the cast-iron drainpipe from the kitchen sink.

Dental floss, putty, and a button to fix a toilet flapper.

The tube from the vacuum cleaner running from the sink to the bathtub when the bathtub pipes are frozen. How marvelous to have a vacuum cleaner.


ELECTRICAL EQUATIONS

One hundred and fifty trips to the henhouse to bring in the waterer at night = an electric element to heat the water.

Flushing the toilet with buckets of water in January = a light-bulb under the floorboards to keep the pipes from freezing.


THINGS WORTH DOING

Drumming in the Winter Carnival parade.

Seeing the flocks of wild macaws in the Pantanal.

Putting summer cherries in the freezer to eat during winter.


THINGS THAT HAPPEN WHEN YOU FINISH A DRAFT MANUSCRIPT

Songs from musicals you hate play in your head: I Enjoy Being a Girl, and Put on a Happy Face.

You snap back into the world without buffers—the face and hair of your beloved are heartbreakingly beautiful, you feel unbearable tenderness.

You want to hold close the things that you love and thank them—the frost crystals on the screen door and the match holder on the wall by the woodstove where you kneel to build a fire.

You want to drive all the way to Boise to see adventure movies with fighting and danger.


THE THING AT THE HEART OF WINTER

It seems that, one by one, the things of ease and familiarity are removed to reveal the heart of winter. The car won't start, the pipes have frozen all but two, it's too cold in the music room to work on music.

My beloved is sick and there is this overwhelming tenderness, surrounded by empty space. Anguish at the thought of ever losing him.

There was nothing new left to see about the winter, I thought. Until this morning, elaborate frost crystals coming out of fog—even on the icicles themselves. It was an uncanny excess—making the chicken-wire of the guinea-coop door unrecognizable, making it into a portal of terrifying beauty into nothingness.


SIGNS OF EXTREMITY: JANUARY

Walking outside around midnight, so restless, down the snow-covered road to the bridge. Looking for some kind of solace in the sound of the cold rushing water, the shape of the brush. How different this spot looks, the next day, from my window.

Shoveling snow in the chicken coop and the frozen ends of lettuces, the scattering of old rice. Feathers and blood in the snow—the sight of a cat carrying off a half-dead flicker makes me feel crazed with anguish, a sense of failure.

When you decide that love is no longer something you can afford, that it has cut too deeply into your storehouse and you look ahead, counting the hungry days, calculating.


HORIZONS

The satellite dish on its mast docked at the edge of the snow-lit blue pasture and the lights of Indian Valley rocking gently on the horizon.

The dry grasses, islands of them in the snow— some forming reefs, a peninsula, and the young trees standing neck-high in the deluge.


The pic shows Payette Lake in McCall, ID in January 2001. That year when the lake froze solid it was clear of snow for quite close to two weeks, during which time we made the trek to McCall almost daily for skating in this gorgeous setting. We really explored the lake in this unique way, skating out past various islands; it was a memorable experience.