After a long absence, Cape Cod journal

After a long absence, my greatest fear is that I will have nothing to say, that the roots of writing will have fled to that secret place were poems go like a lone heron stalking the marsh in the fog, mute, testament to the ghostly light.

My greatest fear is that I will find words, both ordinary, and plain, with no soul. It’s not the words themselves that I fear, because the words themselves are not empty, but the mind, devoid of thought, appears in the void, and fills it with randomness. My greatest fear is that the suburban odor of words, strung together, like endless days without meaning is a one-way Alzheimer’s journey into the mundane.

Mornings I awaken in a strange place, and face the confines of the marsh, and I understood for the first time why the writers and poets saw responded so emphatically to the majesty of the west. I felt corralled and hemmed in by the myopic shelter of shore and low lying scrub, what passes for trees on the Cape. 

I yearned for the vast distances of the west where we measure time differently and take for granted the hills, or that glimpse into the distance of the bay beyond in the fog coming in. We take for granted the artist perception of distance, how it stimulates the psyche.

And suddenly there are words everywhere—in the distance, and on the horizon of thought. 

The mind laced with ill-equipped equipage, yet the carriage hearse rolls on, the horses are nervous. I heard it as rifts and departures, and I thought of how hasty a departure might be punctuated with a rifle in hand like Annie Oakley. 

I thought of lovers’ quarrels and quick exits compressed like cartoon characters clamoring off the celluloid page, with Woody Woodpecker, exiting stage left, faster than a speeding bullet. He took off on the margins of the celluloid, hidden until the next week’s installment. 

I always did mishear things. It keeps me occupied. Never a dull moment. I live a compartmentalize life, with suitcase at the ready. Once I dreamed that I forgot I was leaving for Russia for a long stay, and I forgot to pack. In those scant hours before departure, I was madly packing a portmanteau of words in tránsito. I was stuck in purgatory, baggage baggage baggage everywhere.