"No Voice" // Episode Two

You're listening to I Have No Process. I am your host, Nicholas England. This is the second episode of No Voice, a collection of poetry whose writing spanned more than a decade. In the first episode, we entertained many surreal vignettes, dreams, and nightmares. Now... The poetry is going to become a bit more grounded, more personal. But don't worry. It's even angstier than anything we've shared before. Why bother writing poetry?

Every generation inherits the controversy regarding poetry's social value, and that of art, generally. These days, a degree in the fine arts is akin to a dunce cap or a bullseye. Fashionable elders look at our cohort and wonder. What kind of moron takes out student loans to read Russian literature with their peers, only to abandon those libraries and lecture halls out of predictable necessity, to then take up a sustainable career in data analysis or real estate instead? The middle class

is shrinking. We don't need tax reform. We need more plumbers and carpenters. agronomists, and civil engineers. God is dead, remember? Society has no need of shamans or prophets. We have athletes and movie stars for that sort of thing, and clever memes reminding us that someone out there feels the way we do. When you go to the doctor, You know the reason why in advance. Your leg hurts. Your lungs are full of mucus. Your headache won't go away. Or maybe it's simply been too long since

you had your vitals taken. You're an adult. You understand the value of routine maintenance and preventative care. Because even when you don't know what's wrong with you, You know what could be wrong with you, and that's motivation enough to seek an exam. Your body has cholesterol levels, white blood cell counts. You want their number. You don't want to suffer Alzheimer's disease. You don't want ovarian cancer. When you go to a poem, you can't know ahead of time what you're

about to hear. Nothing can directly prepare you for the experience of opening yourself to the text. You can't have a result in mind before you start reading. You can't determine the output of the poem in advance. Nor can you measure it against anything quantifiable within yourself. The spirit lacks a pulse. The soul. a waistline. A poem either pulls you effectively out of your

routine observations or it doesn't. No matter the talent of the poet, no matter the skill in the verse, whether or not a particular poem speaks to you is almost impossible to justify. When it comes to the construction of a poem, There is a proportionate relationship between how complex it is and how widely it will be resented by regular people. It is the exact opposite of engineering in this regard. Like electricity, poetry should

be for the masses. But if we only designed and built turbines that anyone could understand how to assemble from scratch, then every turbine in the world would be small and our total capacity for power greatly diminished. The donkey would walk in a circle, the river would push the watermill, and we should never have cause to ask for more than that. Take heart. We are modern people.

We have experts who studied physics and chemistry and materials sciences to the point that they are capable of building nuclear reactors all across the world. And now billions of people have access to an incredible amount of electric power because they get to benefit from the results of an esoteric education. You and I can't be expected to know how a nuclear reactor really functions, all the way down to its depleted uranium.

The contemporary engineer may be utterly anonymous, so long as the product of their education can be enjoyed without an education of one's own. The poet, on the other hand, does not have this luxury. If the poem is to sing in the heart of the common man, then the poet must refrain from climbing very far up the beanstalk while they work. From a certain point of view, I have never published a poem in my life, nor will I ever, because every poem that I write is just an instruction

manual. for a poem that you will build within your mind. I cannot know what poem you will read as you scan my lines. I can only know what I have laid out for you within the glittering umbra of the potential. The secret is, you write the poem when you read it. You either know what I mean, or you've never really read a poem before. Because of this odd quirk within the transmission of artistic meaning, there is nothing to publicly celebrate within the bounds of any given poetic

work. You will never read the headline in your newspaper, Poet discovers new phrase unlocking glimpse of heaven. It is beyond absurd. For it is impossible to have an ecstatic feeling spoon -fed. It has to be carved out, discovered, as though the reader alone had the astonishing ability to parse it from the wilderness. As Nabokov said in his lectures on literature, every new type of writer evolves a new type of reader. Every genius produces a legion of young insomniacs.

An explanation doesn't act as a complement to a work of art. It takes the place of the art, and with offhanded violence. This fetish for plain articulation manifests a whole system of parasites, from digests to cliff notes. to bestseller lists. We elect to navigate and comprehend these media as much as the works they obstruct. Because it's easier. Because we don't want to be embarrassed misapprehending some vital aspect. Because we're used to following the safest paths to our next

dose of dopamine. Once you follow the logic of this, you'll no doubt see how the reader can be robbed of their own existence as reader, reduced a little more than mere consumer. When you take up a poem, be wary of who's really doing the reading. Is it the obliging socialite, so cultured and up -to -date? Or is it the young insomniac?

clawing their way out of your mind. If I may speak to the poets and other artists listening now, know that there are many people who will look at your work and summarily ask you one question, top of mind. Who is this for? When they do this, you will know it is not for them. Even if it could have been, the moment they say those words, they will have left your audience. Their mantra is anathema. Don't get me wrong, understanding

one's market is a worthwhile effort. But when that concern is the first response to your art, the game is up. The heretic has no clothes. You'll have a choice to make when you respond and after. Is it these people you wish to edify and please with your craft? Will you contort your aesthetics to accommodate their tastes? Illiterate flotsam though they may be, it could be wise to keep their phantoms close. when next you toil in the workshop. After all, we didn't render these works

only for ourselves. We want to reach friends and strangers alike. If everything we conjured were tailored exclusively to our own reflection, over time our art would take root nowhere but in the rank darkness of our rectums. Our poems and paintings wouldn't be wise. They'd be clever. Can you taste the horror of this? So no, do not forsake those who almost willfully miscomprehend you. Break yourselves to their inherent hostility. Reframe your invitations to them just as you

would to an acolyte. or sycophant. Yet take it only so far. For at the end of the day, this cultivation of your aesthetic will be an asymptote. You'll never really satisfy these people. You will never deliver the result that they've required for themselves since before you met. You could spend years yoking yourself to their esteem, while still holding true to your essential aims in an effort to produce a masterful yet savvy

work of art. And just when you sense that you've finally arrived, they will at most see promise in you. Nothing more. See, you took the lesson of their foils to improve your craft and your character. You failed to get the actual message. That they meant to turn you into some shiny, form -fitting PEZ dispenser. Spewing out content for media conglomerates, wrestling for shares within a status quo that will easily survive you. When you reach that point, it's time to

grab your bicycle and go home. Whatever you are, be it a woodworker or a steel drummer, you have an audience. When you're ready, go find them and nourish them. If what you do is passionate, never stoop. If what you do is artistic, never coddle. Assert your challenge without apology. Come what may. You've come to me. You think I'm in this for the acclaim or the renown. You think I have financiers and publishers breathing down my neck, insisting that I remove those pesky

imdashes from my pages. I don't build nuclear reactors. If you read a poem blueprint of mine and it bounces right off your skull or whooshes past your ear, the lights will not go out throughout your neighborhood. Nobody's listening. Nobody cares. In this moment, I am not with you. I set these words down long ago. You are without me. You're on your own. Don't you feel it? In this moment, you are free. Carabiner. I open the door,

walk outside, to the car. And in a moment I know. Less than a moment, really. Before my hand even presses against the contour of my pocket to tap its vacancy. I left the key inside. Won't get very far without that. I remark, as though reading a line from a mock stage play. I often feel that I am missing something, either something or I am displaced. Even before the door closes behind me, it opens in front of me. My eyes will canvas the desks and side tables, under stacks of papers,

in drawers. fingertips scattering across the vaults of my wardrobe. The feeling rarely conjures anything. If I carried less, perhaps I would remember each thing more clearly, discern a searing absence. Not wholly germane, but a powerful warmth sometimes radiates from my head, like an untended foundry. I have to stop thinking, or I'll catch a fever. Each moment in life, spent in preparation of the next. I blossom into this moment. Everything else is a memory. I once had a friend who gave

up on his dreams. His final offering was a book of Rilke's. The bestowal of a name upon a torch. He surrendered this to me, like a shadow. merging into shade and so the torch became heavy as its flames went on parade years have gone and many surgeries later i find myself back upon the operating table or rather for the first time the anvil where stress may now but make me stronger i admit I dropped the bright baton this winter. It slipped

out of my hand. I had to stand very still, with eyes closed, lest any trick of the sun betray this waking world for that one. Two, three days, I recovered what was mine. In no time, a woman was sitting on my sofa, demanding that I explain how to cope with despair. I told her. Total acceptance. If Tsunetomo were my contemporary, he would do the same as I. If he ran out of groceries, off to the store. I turned to face the apartment

complex, what I've agreed to call my home. From the outside, it is characterless, as nondescript as an empty pantry. The bricks in the wall never touch. Without eyes or nares, without dripping tongues, how can they picture their part, the whole? One brick dislodged before we came here. It fell into a common garden bed and has lingered there. Which is more a brick, the one lying upon the ground or the one surrounded by mortar? and other bricks. One says to the other, Come, this

is the way. No atom has any opinion as to what it's about. The slug stares up at the dog as the dog licks itself. How should I reckon the face that moved over the waters? The world has the weight of a tone of color. I enter through the foyer, just as an Asian man lifting a bicycle passes me in the corridor. He descends the seven steps of the staircase, then bounces outside, without regard. I palm the railing as I climb

the bisected flights until the top floor. From the landing, I look down upon clusters of fungus. the spawn of rain upon the awning. A long crack runs down the eastern wall, another down the west. I pray they are cosmetic, some mere separation of plaster, nothing structural. A clock somewhere hammers forward, one minute more. I am a teacher now, now running late to a lesson. The girls call me teacher anyway. I care for them, little birds, nesting on the far side of their planet.

Will I know them when they are grown? It doesn't matter. It is enough to know them as we are. We study language, the form of things, but they ask so many questions, entangling us in substance. Life lessons. Feeding marshmallows to children. Echoes of conversations I have with my wife. The guiding of those who cannot read the hieroglyphs. Teaching. Modeling. You drop down to them, then climb back out. Training the mind means you don't have to listen to it anymore. You let thoughts

work spontaneously. Without words, proofs, or programs. I argue that Luke was a man before he went to see the Emperor. I tried to explain to my father what it meant to lose a child. Three hours of talk. He failed to understand. At last, I mentioned a film we had both seen. A tragedy. It's like that, I said. My father wept. Where do we go when we die? Take a cup of water. Pour it back into the sea. Inside, I do not see the keys upon the rack. Different jackets in the

closet. Slacks in the hamper. Yesterday's backpack. Or tomorrow's purse. I would ask my wife. If she were home, I do not want to call her. The keys are not behind my borrowed babbit, nor did I place them, for whatever reason, beside blind chance. It isn't that things happen despite our interests, only then to work out for us when all is settled. That we let success conjure doom. That we fail. only to defer our triumph. The

calculating mind is senseless. It measures the immeasurable, tries to index the universe, goes hungry comparing apples and oranges, pomegranates and handkerchiefs. Even if we live in the best of all possible worlds, some grass is greener than other grass. Where are you standing? Living for others, seeking answers, aligning with the virtues of public expectation. I do what occurs to me. I bide my time. The rest is waste. When

I was young, I called them fever days. When I was swollen with anxiety, I called them days lost to the void. They were a clearing, a gap between the boy and man. I lived then, too. A hermit has a beating heart, especially when the mind dances around cause and effect. Enough flogging. I learned to give up scaling mountains. The mouths of the masters never moved before me. I unfolded. like an origami crane. It is the same for those who stare at walls until the dinner bell is rung.

My first teaching is as follows. Calm is the lid on the bowl. Peace is the love for everything within it. The cricket in the bowl of shit calls for you. I should dial my wife, if only it did not mean what it means. Stalling for inspiration, I stop and gaze upon a painting on the wall. Representation, motion in stillness. We yearn to leave a mark, even muddy footprints, knowing that whenever a star goes dark, somewhere in the night sky. It has been gone for centuries.

I was terrified of Spangler's intellect until I learned he also suffered panic attacks, living with his mother. I hear that Julius Caesar wept once upon the stone of Alexander. It can be difficult to remember that da Vinci, no matter his renown, shares an equal and overlapping dignity. with the anonymous orphan who dies with a needle stuck in their arm. So, do not say no to the bull that charges at you. Just make it your work to get

out of the way. My wife answers, though does not have any special knowledge regarding the keys. She recommends I look where I already looked. It is not her problem. Why ought she do differently? Then I spot them, the carabiner half -concealed beneath some mail bound for the trash can. I tell her, and then, with nothing more to say, I leave her. Now, somebody write the last line here. The tree, the baby, and me. If I didn't

know better, living here as I do, I'd think this was a real rough neighborhood. To glance across onyx barricades of wrought iron, blocking the narrow portals of interred tenancies, sunken businesses. Cascades of packages and trash flowing up so many cold, grey stairwells. Each person treading past either too young or too old. Nobody middle -aged. No one in their prime. The train that screeches and aches around each turn, no

matter how broad the thoroughfare. will stop at Blanford Street, east of the university, before it performs its inexorable slide down into the smooth, spare bowels of the city, which echo, as with the hot gusto of a Byzantine pipe organ, the ungodly shriek of mechanical friction. At that final skybound station, which marks the border between what people call downtown and whatever else is not downtown, but only looks and sounds and sprawls just like the downtowns

one might find anywhere. In view of Blanford, there is a tree, tall and generously bowed, which stands unperturbed within its oneness, there at the boundary of a metropolis. that has turned septic in its uncowed masculinity. Old, angry, rheumatic demon, whose day has long since passed. Its artifice tangled and calcified. Jostled parade of the historic, the intellectual, the working class, the transient. Brackish flood of disparate diasporas. Every shipwrecked wanderer piled atop

each other. Backwater of the cramped, defensive, self -centered, cool. Yet here, as anywhere, a tree is a tree. Vital. Timeless. And even this midden heap has more than one. For what is a city without its trees? Whenever the train descends and the lonely arbor disappears, I think of Kikuchiyo in his anguish as he clutches the orphan he saved from the mill. This baby is me. the vole. I feel

robotic at my workbench, another ponderous contraption of flesh scratching arthritic questions into its skull. I have no use for mirrors. I prefer to measure the weight of my breathlessness, the heavy shape of the cavity once the air has gone out. Existence has compelled my attitude to cherish every last setback as the fare of a sacred feast, a private promise beckoning a grain of truth. It's common to find me prostrate, even genuflecting, in spite of my bum knee. I grin and grovel, begging

aloud for more disappointment. The alternative is madness, unyielding grief. The world's great vaults and arches, from Potosi to the pyramids, and from there the stars. Wave by sober wave, their visions dash upon the scree. They won't eclipse the silver ring, that vintage ornament. reclaimed, fitted down and bound to the permanent vigilance of my passive hand. I recognize my dreams for what they are, the wakefulness I find

at the base of their trench. Here the vole burrows deep beneath the butte, further and further onto stone. Its choices the fewer, the deeper, till there is no place left but where the critter stands. And that becomes the answer. The forum the vole was, somehow, always meant for. I accept you, even without knowing you. What impact could the facts of the matter have upon my discipline? Some poor souls get their legs hewn off, their

eyes burned out. Others feel the razor slice of silver medals, mistakes in championship games. What complaint can I maintain that when I set my teeth into the swelling sweetness of a peach, I do not linger. I chew it scornfully, that I could never impart its taste unto another. They say that everyone has a book these days. At least the peaches speak for themselves. So how's the

book coming along? Has anyone enjoyed the asking of this question? Saltwater When my wife came

out to fix herself a noodle dish for lunch, she hovered over my shoulder to steal a glance at my writing. The watched pot boiled. And she ate in silence. Love as a process. There is no such

thing as rational love. Observe it under a microscope. Throw its diagrams up in lecture halls. It vanishes. I know where to find some typical lovers. In a copse or hedgerow. Those turtle doves whose wings flutter in daydreams. I have invented nothing. The kind of lightning one can capture in a bottle. Toss that to the mob. I yearn for you when you are here. I do not let my eyelids take their rest. Listen. You can hear my heartbeat without even pressing your ear upon my breast. What is

love but to wake up beside you? What is love but the smell of peanut oil on our hands? What is love but a promise your lips gave mine? Open your Melville. Read every last expository word. What can you tell me about the whale? Our spirits dance together in the quiet of the days. I love you. I arrive at these words the same as anyone. Do you know what Sisyphus whispers to his stone as he pushes it up the mountainside? I belong

to history. to hopefulness. I have adored you for so long, it is hard to pinpoint the moment of saltation. Many autumns have I shaken acorns from your boughs, just to watch them tumble toward the leaf -strewn ground. I carry a basket with me now. I gather them. Is that the only difference? The teleology of the self. This day led to that one. So on. I find it crude to coalesce them into a single yesterday. The past fails to ripple upon the surface of the present. Those memories,

hushed within the undertow. Revolutions that waned. Lives as long as ours defy biography. There is so much to unlearn. The person I once ached to be. Cherry -picked composite of misapprehended heroes. I stamp my feet upon their faces. Lend some spit to the tree roots that crawl over the bases of their monuments. When I kneel upon these shrines in twilight hours, I like to break out yodeling. The song that gushes out is gallant lunacy. I send it with purpose. I am not confused

about why I carry on the way I do. You, the primrose of my evening, ask me what is for dinner. I decapitate a bottle of champagne with a scimitar, then let the fizzle froth upon you like a fumarole. It is no business of mine if the sky should fall. We haven't stopped collecting acorns in the wilderness. I choose life beside you. Life, in all its absurdity, its beauty, its caprice. My impermanence is yours.

What shall we do with it? That is... What shall we do after we go and sit out on the porch and watch the sun go down over the silvered sea, the sun frowning at us a moment as it bids its reluctant goodbye? The clouds will swarm under a full moon tonight. Come, take us both to Curacao.

Realized. Hold it all together. Take the long view. The ivory vessel could shatter in an instant. And it can shatter only once. Don't forget. Did you invite this danger in? She asks this of me. I already thought of that. It is a tempting notion. It has its own logic. But the answer to her question is no. Thursday night. I should go to bed. It is she who says this, though in the manner of

one giving a prologue or disclaimer. as if those words alone will excuse the incoming torrent of half -baked insults, accessory to her percolating, undigested thoughts. My wife stays right where she is, there on the sofa, then spreads her anxious mind about the room. Our friends are better than us, the other couples. Each partner has a great career. We'll never have the money they do. A house needs two incomes, and one of ours is so

small it barely counts. We'll never be able to afford a house in this economy if we're competing with our friends. And who wouldn't want to live among their friends? It's okay, though. We have different values than them. We're not settling for less, exactly. It's just that, together, we make less. The straw that breaks the husband's back. Just a straw. Nothing inherently worthy of histrionics. She was half -witted, fatigued,

didn't mean a word of it. Didn't even say it to me, just said it aloud, as though I wasn't there. Whatever snaps in me is a long time coming. I have braced against her multitude of winds, her cauldron of angst, her symphony of woes. But what my endurance was for, take that away and why brace at all? Friday. The delayed reaction. The long fuse. Too long, more often than not. I take a walk, despising my surroundings with

fresh acid. I find a bench behind the school of social services at the university my wife attends. I wait there. though could not say for what. Half an hour. A light rain falls. Everyone else collects themselves and heads somewhere inside. On the grass. On the berm. By the statues. The fountains. No one feels secure enough to stay but me. Another disappointment. The drizzle ceases. Sunshine returns. New people flock to

empty tables and open swaths of lawn. I stay on the bench in my false presumption of calm. False because when I later walk home, with each brisk step, my blood whips back toward anger. That I am to have the tenth. Or is it twelfth variation of a tired conversation? She knows we need to talk. When we sit down together, I say to her the words she said to me the night before. She cannot remember any of it. On the same sofa, I utter her words and she weeps. Why

would I say something so awful? If she is the one asking this question, how should either of us find the answer? And if she cannot recall the degradation a mere 18 hours after, how should either of us stop this from becoming anything but routine? I do not require reconciliation. I do not pursue the feeling that all will be well again. Another time is already approaching. Always another time now. I must continue to brace. I must hold on. I must forgive. Allow. Brace.

Be generous. Brace. These things take years. Hold. Have patience. Hold. Another hold. It's okay. Brace. Rather, brace. It will be okay. Hold. We've been here before. Brace. With far worse. Brace. Can stand up against. Hold. Anything. Hold. Anything. Lessons will be braced, learned. Growth will be held, earned. No matter what, when it matters most, each partner will hold up their side of the pact. I have not given up, not by any stretch. I have simply given out.

We go to a concert that night. Three drum sets. Starless in Bible black. My spirit wails. I have the dream again of the man on the beach. Thirteen years, that particular dream. Twenty -nine years, give or take, for the archdream. of who I am. It feels so far away. Hold, you stupid son of a bitch. There's nothing to do but hold. She carries me home. I can barely walk, collapsing in fits of tears. She does not question them.

Later, she will say that, when she looked at me in the audience, I appeared dead, pale, bloodless. Did you enjoy the show? Somewhat. There was some bliss hushed within that devastation. Saturday I head to work. I listen to the same visitor for six hours. We have one of our delicate skirmishes, where I believe in him and he does not. Sunday. I head to work again. The visitor returns. We pick up where we left off, which is to say, all over again. Neither of us has slept. We yawn

throughout our solemn slog. Monday. My one day of the week without a shift or lesson. I'm exhausted, and I'm running out of runway. Time to summon a last -ditch effort. Acupuncture worked a minor miracle before, near the end of the bad old days. I stagger to a neighborhood clinic, mistrusting my own hope for an easy fix. It's sort of peaceful there, but I grow to loathe that sitting in the dark with my restless heart. When the session

ends, I cross the street to the dispensary. It is my first time entering such an establishment. I purchase one bag. It is very affordable. I walk home, enveloped by a strange dissociation, as in a dream. I am bemused by my station in life. The mentor. The teacher. Even the husband. The worldly everyman. As though I know a single rotten thing about the world. So the vessel shattered. The realization is nowhere near so bad as its anticipations. The fractured pieces, strewn about.

Make something new from them for Christ's sake. Treat them as an artist does stained glass. Everything just as it was, only more so. I concede no regret for the tack that brought me here. I executed my responsibilities, dauntlessly took on new enterprises, endured each challenge without complaint. I did well for myself. And for those around me, there is no cause for regret, for fear, for shame, just because I snapped. I am not bowed. It is merely a case of rent nerves. A farmer rotates

their crops. A general rotates their men amongst the lines. Just need a bit of R &R is all. When you have my wealth of experience, you don't fret uncertain times. You trust that it pans out. A person works with what they have, and what you have is often plenty. There's no relief in self -pity. You follow your instincts and you come out the other side and you don't forget a damn thing because you're bringing it all with

you anyway. so you might as well reckon what the hell you've been carrying each and every day of your life. Do that, and you'll know your way through puzzles you've never seen before. These symptoms, Monday's symptoms, they'd send a lot of folks to the hospital. Dizziness, disorientation,

tremors, stiffness, shortness of breath. heart palpitations, flutterings of panic, exhaustion, demoralization, despair, the valid concern that years of effort and sacrifice will go unrewarded, unrequited, and unsung, and that your most fundamental ethical and moral concepts are fruitless anachronisms that will yield nothing but embarrassment, poverty, and unbreachable solitude. I took care of such a man a couple days before, at the drop -in center. He was a first -timer, wasn't sure what he was

doing there. His family had taken him to the emergency room, then the doctors sent him to the beds. The system placed him there, and then he wandered over to me and all my wisdom, and I took good care of him. even as I suffered Saturday. I call off my lessons for the rest of the week, and I call out of work. My employee's handbook dictates that if you're out only three days, you don't need a doctor's note. My own discretion

will be sufficient. I am a professional, after all, and I know my patient better than anyone. The foremost priority is to cut off the adrenaline flooding through my neck. The acupuncture was a modest opening. Now obliterate the rest with cannabis. Sleep and wake refreshed. My methodology is sound. The treatment works. The adrenaline, at least, is abated. In my ensuing lays, I watch a documentary Kozlowski made about workers and managers at a factory. In the honesty of their

efforts, they are enough. Kozlowski films them. He is enough. I watch Kozlowski. I am enough. My wife comes home. We talk some more. She mentions... with rueful predictability, the promise I made to her the first month we were together, about my mental illness, about how I was recovered, how I was never going to kill myself. She brings this up as though any episode of mental crisis spells utter disaster, an atavistic return that

renders vows undone. She leans on her own insecurities, acting as though my former frailties are not exactly what drive my present virtue. As she is the person who benefits the most from that virtue, she should know the difference without being told. My wife's stepmother warned her before we moved out here. Artists can be temperamental. If a man doesn't do what he feels he's meant to, he can crack up. Well, I cracked up. And? Would my wife's stepmother like to know why?

Because it isn't the fact that I'm a provider now, instead of the artist of my ideal. It isn't that I put all of my seasoned ambitions on hold. just for my wife's pursuit of her own self -improvement. It isn't my students, my peers, or my employers. It isn't the money, the bills, or the privation. It isn't steady down the line, or the exacting price of vigilance. And it sure as hell isn't because I wanted to suicide more days than not

for nigh on twenty years. I cracked up because everything I have done out here, I have done for my wife and myself and for the dream of the life we want to build together. But I no longer trust the life that's being built because I no longer trust my wife. Anybody got a rusty knife to stick between my ribs for that? On Tuesday, a man comes to repair our bathroom door. A different man, a man named George, took the measurements

a week ago, but refused to jot them down. George then came back a few days later, measured the door again, and again refused to put any figures in writing. Tuesday's man performs his duties a bit more expertly. From the window, I am surprised to hear George's voice outside as he confides to the man who is doing his job for him. I can't go back up there again. Their work truck has a slogan written on its side. It is the slogan of the company that manages our property. We

do it once, we do it right, and we move on. George's foibles bring more joy into my life than anything I have experienced since Thursday. I listen to an old pop song. I am tempted to thrust my hips, dance around the apartment some. I saunter over to my wife, then flash her a fancy step as if to say, See? I remember this. Every now and then, a person receives the dossier of their life and reads it over. We see what appeals to us, what

works for us, what we can work with. It often feels like playing a part, or even studying an opponent. Amidst this current episode, I don't feel much like the prisoner, but rather more akin to his protean number two. The voice in me that fiercely fumes, What's it all about? is smaller than the calm, steady authority, which replies, Sit down and I'll tell you. Even in this novel angst, I feel not in control. but in charge, I alone. It is not me, in my entirety,

that is ailing. It is but one crucial part. So nurse it, lend it comfort, then tear the muscle that aches for use. I choose to play a game of witchers, not just to pass the time, but to have someone take me on an adventure for a change. Halfway through, a hideous, cursed thing needs to be saved. It has to be transformed by a potentially fatal procedure in order to recover its lost identity. The ritual might not work. The body must be made pliable, which is dangerous. But

sometimes one has no alternative. I know all about it. Later, my character comes across another cursed person, this time the forlorn leader of a rugged island clan. Something called a hyme has made a home in his despair. Once freed from the clutches of the parasite, the accursed man feels as though his spirit has been sucked through a whirlpool. He feels empty, rudderless. The witcher I am playing says, It is natural. It will pass. Days. Weeks. It passes. Wednesday

brings a bit of gentle mania. I do not mind. I saw it coming. I merely ask myself, should I write it out or tamp it down? I generally prefer to let things fly, to see where strange new waves might usher me. There is a song my wife adores. It's just a ride. I'm on it now. The self -conscious ride. The look how the machinery works inside me ride. As though I designed this Nicholas contraption ages ago and now have but to explicate its grand design. It would be better to discard every memory

and look around right now. Gaze and gawk slack -jawed at my wife. How the light bends around her. Observe our cat, who lives always in the moment. Regard the books on the shelves, weigh the corn in the belly. Add up the money that's growing in several different bank accounts. You earned it all, whether by valiance or luck. So what, precisely, would you have otherwise? I handle three jobs, plus the housekeeping and the husbanding. Peer work abroad. and peer work

at home. I am in love with my favorite peer, whatever her struggles. Something had to give. This breakdown is part of her process too. If I always have it together, she will never need to be the more capable. Yet sometimes, she must be the one to have the answers and to make the toughest choices. To watch me suffer will do her good. Necessity may not be the mother of invention, but it is the mother of reinvention.

On Thursday, we have a toast with lunch. Here's to the fact that life is long and the world is so very large. When people say life is short, They mean to say, life is precious. It is not a way of saying the same thing. And when people say, it's a small world, they mean to say, oh, what a coincidence, in a world so vast as ours. For if the world really were so small, such happenstance would never merit mention. To my mind, at least, the matter is cut and dried. I harp on it all

the time. Friday comes at last. The last day before I must tend to others. Before honor compels me to get back to work. The calculations begin. The hours and the tasks. In my heart of hearts, I wish I had more time. But then that's to be expected from a man preparing to gulp down reality. I know my prospects will improve, though there's no mistaking, they're dreadful now. Dreadful because I was already fairly certain that I've been unhappy all this time. And now... With unquestionable

nakedness, I know it is so. It doesn't matter that I've learned so much, that I've performed my duties admirably, and so on. At the end of the day, this endeavor does not satisfy me. Still, I must put on my overalls and trudge back out. Into the one life I have. Only now disabused of the pretense that I can make the most of it. As my mind reels and winds the while. I did well for myself. When I was deluded. In the mode. So much for carrying on. The time has come to

draft another ego death. My instruments had better be sharp. Or else I'll make a casualty of my anesthetized dreams, and the man in me will disappear. And all of this virtue, too. It's funny. I'm the one who said I'd be happy with my darling almost anywhere. Running a gas station in Iowa. It's a life. Well, fool me once. Quick as quicksilver, I reject this poison. I can't have been a true man all this time, then act as though I've become some wretched thing. It can't have all been waste.

I'm not returning to prison, and the gas station in Iowa isn't prison anyways, and we're not even in Iowa, though part of me wishes we could be. I have everything I need, and so does she. We are both cresting the wave, walking the path, our paths. We are what we are. If that isn't enough, nothing ever could be. So, where am I to rest the tip of my index? How shall I shift my world until it hums? Despair is an annoyance,

a gnat to be swatted and crushed. Two strokes of a pen, two flashes of an oil -soaked brush, I will be golden again. I am a sturdy vessel, tried and true. Time to resume the business of life. Point me in the right direction. Then shoot me out of a cannon. Wear shine -bright teeth within the sky. I shall meet them anywhere. Be the truth, or be a damn good dream of the truth. Unmoor me. Let me catch the dead -now wind again. And then be off. Time has slowed. I age beyond

time. Again. Old man. Takes a whole day to do my errands. The masculine shape stepping out in front of you. Determined. Yet going nowhere. And as I walk. The dead leaves dance before me, chittering heralds of the cold wind. A man about town, a soul in hibernation, serve me up as a plate of beef lathered in a Nicholas reduction. Make me small, grind me down. Buff out my legion jagged edges. When I walk out of here, my eyes will be sapphires, and my heart will be a burnished

stone. Vignettes on the route from South Station

to Old Saybrook. A boy stands beyond a chain -link fence, staring at what he alone can know. But look, a slowly curling smile. Through the train window, cityscapes slide past. A tent on a hillside strewn with trash. An excavator. a mound of rubble, the homes that were built for our parents. A gray -maned photographer presses his nose into a camera, grimacing lest he miss the moment. Pine trees keep to their green cloaks as autumn's laughter. shivers the naked oaks.

The Chain Ten years ago, I obtained a copy of Edward Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Crucial as it was to the collection of time -honored works I sought to amass for myself, in the vain hope that I could blitz and cheat my way into a classical education, if only by scraping together a bit of hoarfrost. I kept Gibbon's gold -lettered spine on my highest shelf, there a daily reminder

that I must find maturity in its shadow. I took a gold chain necklace, the provenance of my grandfather, and nestled it inside, there to act as a proper bookmark for such a monumental work. The years went by. The pages went unread. One day, a student of mine asked me to elucidate the history of the known world off the top of my head. I knew the brushstrokes of Paleolithic man, Unta Ur, Vishnu, Confucius, Homer, onward to the satraps and armies of the Achaemenid Empire. The road

led inexorably to Rome. I felt bound to tell that tale as vividly as I could, even if it were to mean calling upon reinforcement from the dead. From Gibbon, bastard though I was to his high patronage. That night, at home, I removed the magnum opus from its vault. Yet when I opened the cover, I saw the chain had been displaced and torn a small section three pages deep at the center of its base. I was aware it had always been impractical. to emplace the heavy chain

therein. Observing the damage, I suffered only the soft sting of perplexion, the absence of concern. I promptly surrendered the book to the local library, without a thought. Let someone else claim its wisdom, for a dollar or not. The following week, I told my pupil what little I knew of the purple clad, from the genius of Octavian to the command of Theodoric, and all was to the

boy's bombastic glee. In the time since, I have kept the chain unadorned upon the bookshelf, in plain and present view, that I might take it in my hand sometimes and let it drift between my fingers. squeeze its gleaming scales, absorb the magic of their warmth, the energy of time anchored, of influence returned, petroleum wells and spark gaps, the constellations of an organizing eye, an amulet that testifies in perfect silence. Why?