Tethered Literary                      

You can see, as you ride, so many abandoned lengths of railroad track, a parallel throughway, tracks forgotten and becoming woods, tracks interrupted by crabapple trees, their blossoms falling like snow. In that same breeze, on that same breezeway, the crinkle of new cottonwoods, girls waiting for the train in their new summer dresses, not full summer, yet, but the heat of the day makes you consider the medicinal qualities of gin, and remember a particular sticky sweetness: a basket of peaches. I don't live in a wilderness but I'm straining to be wild.

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That specific loneliness: the day when you did nothing but trim back some unruly philodendrons, and then nap like it was a job you were getting paid to do. Look up, The swallows, those paintbrush tips, busy themselves, adding another wash of blue to the already wide summer sky.

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Misty morning and unseasonably cool, still this is the first day that crickets sing from their cabins, tucked between the stones on the railway bed.

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I have never seen the ditch lilies in bloom without some blossoms withered, some blossoms dead. I love the flocks of them, momentary birds.

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On my walk to the train I could feel that burn, the sun on my skin, with all the weeds lanky and cocky in their sidewalk cracks, like new conscripts in Chicago's long war between pavement and meadow. For a moment I was sixteen years old, and the rest of summer stretched out in front of me like a cat in a sun-beam needing to be stroked. This guy on the train, I'm sitting above him, all I can see are his ropey arms, and the open notebook where he's penciling some calculations, about summer, I bet, a math problem about summer and sunlight and our ill-spent youth. When I look out the window I'm a weed myself, nameless and thorny and stubbornly alive.

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The air smells of worms, and puddles linger at curbsides and low places in the walkway. I didn't hear the rain last night when it fell.

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On Sunday, the wind moves through the trees with a vigor that sets them nodding, reaction to a music I don't hear, yet. But sometimes I stand at this bay window and look for so long that I feel on the verge of reading the notations: maples dipping, a bow, a flash of silver undersides, this language—any untenured professor of linguistics would tell you: it has all the same roots as that of the sea.

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The hour long song of the Indiana road trip: hawk on a fencepost, hawk on a light pole, hawk circling over last year's untilled field. And everywhere turkey vultures own the sky, they rise on updrafts, on soot dark wings.

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In July, God released a new basket of sparrows, to gladden sidewalks, wire fences, the patches of ragweed low in the grass. Sparrows hop, or startle, one after another, from sideyards to bushes.

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On their bellies they crouch, and shiver their wings in a low place at the curb, a saucer of dirt; God loves his creatures when they bathe in the dust, the end and the beginning of every creation.

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October blue sky today. If there are dog days, they're curled up and snoozing somewhere south of here. The cottonwoods murmur, though I don't feel any wind.

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No one said anything about a storm this morning, even so here's a wall of thunderheads, mountains to the west. This patch of sunflowers on Ravenswood glows, rows of candelabras lit up against the dark. I name this the sunflower celebration, not only for goliaths who currently tower over Chicago front yards, but also the million nodding suns at the side of rural highways, or blooming in hidden corners, only seen by people staring out the windows of this early morning train.

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The sky remains daylit but the streetlights click on; I've just stepped down from the shaky temporary platform, disembarking from the 6:43, and all along Ravenswood the cicadas ascend, claw by claw, they cling to the tree trunks, they sing from the branches in this, their final symphony, a masterpiece of cacophony called “Last Days of Summer.” A blast, a crescendo. “Man oh man,” my neighbor Joe says. “They're singing right up into their microphones tonight.”

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No sun out today, but the daisies are blooming. Meanwhile, in Rosehill cemetery plenty of moons, the headstones.

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August, the month that brushes up against eternity, every hot day is also the day before, every day an abundance of windowbox flowers, every evening the screech of cicadas in the canopy of trees, this will go on, and if the long evening ends it will begin again. This August I have been reading a biography of Thom Gunn, the poet, he seems to always know the Big Topics he wants to write about: the Will, how to be Force and a Person with a Purpose in the World. For my part, I wait for topics to come up and tap me on the shoulder, and usually these are things like the again and again of the seasons, the eternity of August, the long lives of trees, the small lives of sparrows, and the joys of being a commuter, back and forth, every day the same journey, same two stops. I don't need to be Thom Gunn, who anyway, is dead, and does anybody read Thom Gunn anymore? He knew all the poets—Carolyn Kizer, Donald Hall, Yvor Winters, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath—I would like, in eternity, to have a martini with Sylvia Plath. This summer I would like to have tea and scones with Chen Chen, though this seems unlikely. August, each day you are the same, and here I sit in the café I enter every morning; I am staring at the window washer's legs. One thing I know is that lust is eternal, and renewable. Thom Gunn, for his part, never relinquished his close relationship with lust. Like me, he was lonely. If he lives, somewhere, somehow, on heaven's street corners and corner bars he is still falling, in love or lust and who can tell the difference, falling again and again for his lanky boy angels, their black leather jeans.