While my father built a mansion on the mountain, I was chasing my Teresa round the trees. “Can’t catch me!” she shouted, her pink tongue poking out and her skirts hitched to her knees. “Can too!” I replied brilliantly, and leapt over a fallen lodgepole to snag the back of her dress just before she made it across the creek. A rattle of cart wheels along the dirt road announced the approach of my father, sitting perched between a mule and a sweet-smelling mountain of timber, bound upward toward the mountain. With the gold he found at the claim, my father had become the richest man in the valley, even including Teresa’s father, who was the town doctor, and her uncle, who was the mayor. Not that that meant much, back then, just that he got a shiny badge and his first pint free at the Jaw. From atop his lodgepole cart, my father gave a slight smile and touched his cap toward Teresa, his kind blue eyes crinkled. “My father says your father is a lucky bastard.” Teresa informed me, matter-of-factly. “He is!” I responded with pride. “He’s the luckiest bastard this side of the Mississippi.”
And that bastard built a beautiful house. The crisp summer sunlight streamed through the massive windows, toasting the living room rug to cozy perfection, making it the perfect place to sprawl out my long teenage legs and read a book. I loved the rough-hewn walls, the massive cast-iron stove, the wrap-around porch, the trellis sprouted icicles in the winter and clematis in the summer. When Father added a horse to our crew, I was pleased, but Teresa was overjoyed, and begged to christen it Chestnut. Mother worried when Father insisted on installing an indoor water closet, expenses be damned, but I understood. Father was the luckiest bastard this side of the Mississippi, and I hated trekking to the outhouse in the depths of winter to use the necessary. Chestnut and I galloped down the mountain to find Teresa and carry her back to see the miraculous invention, and her goofy grin of amazement lingered in my mind for the next week at least. Eventually, some years later, I was pulling the chain in the water closet when I heard raised voices. Mother and Father were arguing. As I peeked my head around the corner of the landing and into the living room, I saw Mother shouting something about how the nice man from the bank had stopped her in town to ask her sheepishly about the debt, and Father gesticulated around at the grandfather clock, the lace-curtained window, the sputtering oil lamps, and asked who exactly it was that made this luxury possible. I ducked back into my room, eyes stinging, and thought that Teresa would know what to do. The next day, I went to visit her in the little apartment above the doctor’s office. She listened with a furrowed brow and a solemn expression as I explained what I had heard, and once I had finished, she nodded decisively. “Your father may be the luckiest bastard this side of the Mississippi,” she said, “but he’s rash. Your mother is right; he has made decisions that no prudent person ever could. But you, you’re a prudent person.” Her soft brown eyes met mine, with gentle insistence. Some months later, we were bent over an accounting-sheet. Even from what we could decipher of my father’s illegible script, we could tell that we were far, far in debt to Mr. Tabor. My Teresa dragged a rag across my brow. She said, “The weather’s never fair. But you’re stronger and smarter and more resilient than a thundercloud. The wind can only blow your hair.” And I believed her well enough, or didn’t care, as I leaned in to kiss her. Within a year, we were married, and within a year and a half, between Teresa and I, we had pulled my father out of the red. More than that, we had built the biggest mining operation in the state. One night, we had been invited by the governor to La Traviata at the Tabor Opera House. My Teresa was incandescent in a shimmering red dress and ermine stole, her tan and windblown and precious face radiant with scarlet lipstick and darkened eyelashes. I was following her with my eyes as she made her way through the room, asking politicians about their children and sympathizing with waiters about the pompousness of the newly rich, when a clerk tapped me on the shoulder with a telegram. After scanning it, I rushed to touch Teresa’ satin arm and handed her the yellow paper. We rushed across the marble floor sparking with chandelier light and out the ornamental door, into the rain that rushed in rivulets down the road. When we got back to the mansion, my father was drenched in sweat, his slim and frail body arched toward the ceiling. My mother, dampened cloth in hand, turned to me with tired eyes. Teresa walked over and kneeled down next to her, taking the cloth gently from her hand. She felt my father’s pulse, opened his eyes with her fingers and peered into them, and held the back of her roughened but lovely hand against his forehead. The doctor’s daughter turned her sweet face to me and shook her head. We read the writing on the wall and braced each other for the fall. As my father lay dying, he could only talk about the mountain mansion. How he had planned it brick by brick--the river stone fireplace, windows opening into the endless blue, the sun-drenched den, how he had saved every penny for it, built for himself a home and a life that Eastern society could never even conceive of. He expressed, most urgently, his wish that it wouldn’t die with him. There’s only one way off a mountain after all. While my father built a mansion on the mountain, it was me and my Teresa against the world, as it had always been and always would be. After we buried the luckiest bastard this side of the Mississippi, my mother moved into town so that she could have the garden full of lupines that she always longed for, join a ladies’ knitting circle, and meet Teresa’s mother for tea once a week at the Dusty Rose. Meanwhile, at the mansion on the mountain, me and my Teresa took all the river had to give, catching rainbow trout and washing our clothes and soaking in its bubbling hot spring, Teresa giggling madly as she sprayed me with sulphur-scented foam. We broke the pinewood bed that my father built with those lodgepoles in the back of his cart and built a crib with them instead. And eventually, when the ski resorts began tracing tractor lines along the fabric of the forest, we left the mountain mansion nothing to forgive. - K
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My father built a mansion on a mountain.
My father - Scabby-kneed and dusty from the hot streets of bombay - Rooted himself, firmly, In this dark and moist soil. Like aspens, our breed grew - They broke a bed and bought a crib - My sister and I were raised children of ice and snowmelt. How many ways are there off a mountain? Zigzagging around trees and through sagebrush, I chased young loves (And hid from them, too) - a woodnymph - Camouflaged in the forest. How many ways are there off a mountain? scholars differ. to some - (the strong and reckless types), only one - bruises and scraped knees, broken bones and punctured lungs, (I know two men who can attest to this method). but I believe in more — i’ve fallen, leapt, bounded, hurdled, off my mountain. landslides tumble, and of course, birds fly. We ache, restless, to find the world Beyond these dusty blue peaks. women, they run. careening downhill, skirts billowing, trails of hair and perfume snagging on pine trees. babies strapped to backs, arms full of fruit and nuts, taking shelter from storms and men. how many ways off a mountain? there’s ropes and rocks, wine and whiskey, Fear, faith, and family. Grown now, I’ve returned to these dusty old hills. My father’s mansion creaks and groans - Aches under the weight of Photo albums, half-finished diaries, And camping gear older than most of us. We took all the river had to give -- Life, laughter, hours by the fire, Roasting toes and marshmallows and listening to legends of the mountain folk. We’ll leave this mountain mansion Nothing to forget. The stories held here - Love letters from forest boys, Polaroids of campfire and rain-soaked tents, Instruments, heavy with the weight of folk songs and Imperfect chords - Warp and bend the creaky pine foundation of this old home. There are many ways down a mountain - Some right, proven, safe and consistent. Some, accidental, leave us stranded, confused, In a stand of lodgepoles and aspens Unfamiliar and frightening. My father climbed a mountain - Poorly, repeatedly, slowly carving his bootsoles Into the dusty trail of the old peak’s scarred face. Lost, he stumbled, took root where he could, And built a home from the pine and juniper, Fed by the glacial river. There are many ways off a mountain. But, returning to these trails of youth, Drinking what this river has to give, Trading chandelier light for starlight and silence - I trace ancient trails yet again. There’s only one way off a mountain, after all - The savvy, seasoned hiker knows, To increase chances of survival and sanity, And protect oneself from the harsh winds of change - The best way off a mountain Is likely the same way you came up. I explored all creative, deep, extraneous pathways of myself, and found within me a will, intrepid, to destroy everything I have been told, about myself and the ways in which this churning, grinding world works. I delve, impatient and ignorant, into the depths of my body, my mind, and the things which pull me from dewy reminiscences of self and into the gruesome monuments of importance.
The gruesome monuments of importance. Wealth, influence, the fleeting and impossible notion of mattering - all of these things drive me from myself and into the arms of those who want to move my body, my mind, and my labor to the will of their own design. What is my body? A vessel, imperfect, with whom I rage and quarrel, stifle and shrink, to fit into ideas of whom and what I ought to be in this world. Who moves me, and with what intentions? I am growing weary of allotting parts of myself to others - I chain bits of me, ragged and bloody and raw, to the hearts and minds of those wrapped within their own self-dissections. It is selfish, I suppose, to expect to see oneself in the eyes of others. The eyes of others are too often preoccupied, warped, blended, and serve not the delusions of importance we seek within ourselves. What do we seek, when we seek to matter? I seek to dissolve into goodness - to have the good that I create to serve, even while I rot. The world burns around me, and I, biting at the bit to leave some imprint of myself, scramble to write it down, scream loudly into the night, and etch myself into the sandstone of this crumbling city. I want to be pressed within the stone and soil of this moment, buried between fossils and roots, to be discovered and remembered once I am gone. I don’t believe it does us any good to dream of posterity. For all I know, posterity doesn’t exist --- the world may end with us, in these rooms, grasping for one another on dusty keyboards and cracked touchscreens. And yet, I dream of our children still - those raised with echoed stories of this time - and the ways in which they will build upon our wreckage. These days, I feel like wreckage - a ship, draped in algae and broken, crashed upon a white and sandy shore. Parts of me, I am sure, are floating somewhere in the Pacific, off the coast of Australia, or else moored on the shores of southern India. I am a captain, set to chart an ocean I do not know, stranded, and broken, and somewhere far away from you. - P Like a lot of things, the West is recognizable only by contrast. Happiness without despair is unremarkable, comfort is nothing without the contrast of suffering, and intoxication only exists in relation to sobriety. Similarly, for me, I realized the singularity of the West only after I moved East. Like any kind of nostalgia, missing the West is an ache right under my sternum that never goes away—I have a couple of those aches there, vying for room.
One of my fondest memories is of a trip we took West, driving from Frisco to the Sequoias in California. We stopped along the way in Buena Vista, Mesa Verde, and a couple other spots before entering the ancient, giant forest. We drove through the wasteland of Utah, Arizona, and/or New Mexico (I don’t really remember now). I would sideways in my seat, the soles of my feet pressed against the window, looking at the rusty landscape zoom past, pretending I was on Mars. We stopped at Area 51, and were guided through a dingy museum that was air conditioned but somehow also sticky, and saw weird 70s molds of little grey aliens, displayed behind glass on rolling gurneys or in faded polaroids. Before that, we got caught in a snowstorm, huddling in our RV while the world took on that puffy-paint, fluffy marshmallow-like quality that accompanies a big dump. Anyway, I digress. I didn’t realize I loved the West until I moved East. Like any college kid, I was homesick, imagining the aspens turning golden without me and missing the first snow. But the West is more than that. I think it’s a sensibility, an understanding that your role in the universe is small compared to the grandeur that surrounds you. City people, East Coast people, never really get to see the stars, or know how a moose grazes (on its elbows like a big old doofus). Not to say there isn’t beauty there, but the West is something else. I used to walk along the streets of Hyde Park, stepping around sun-filled puddles, listening to John Denver and imagining the mountains in springtime. I used to, to the extent that I used to do anything in New York, lay in Central Park on my lunch break with my top few buttons unbuttoned and Fleetwood Mac in my ears and pretend I was basking on dusky red sandstone, and that it was aspen, not oak, leaves rustling in my ears. Now, though, I have all of that. I sit on my porch railing in the mornings and watch the mountain chickadees swoop and chuckle at each other, and smell the dew rising from the pines, and even though this is the most upside-down the world has ever felt, I’ve somehow also never felt more at peace. -K There’s a sentiment in Aboriginal Australia --
“This land raised me”. It’s a sense of spirituality, of home-ness, Of belonging On soil, within trees, in and among the wild things. I’ve never known god well - Never found him in books, temples, or prayer. The idea of purpose for me Has always rested in the earth I can call mine. (note - this earth is not mine, really). And yet, it is in pines that I understand the way This earth breathes and shudders and sways. It is in blue skies that I find clarity, Harsh alpine winds where I hear truths. This land raised me. My notions of homeland are scattered across oceans, Distant and dusty; They pale in photo albums and hazy recollection. But here, with heavy greens and thick, earthly browns, Something has welcomed me home. Do you hear it, the way your home sounds? Do you smell the blue of early mornings, Chase after a morning dew on the grass Under your young, bare feet? This land, it raised me -- Held me in its cool blue mountainsides, Sent me tumbling through fields of sagebrush and dandelion Dusty, bug-bitten, and beaming. In my open and eager eyes, It showed me the slow, deliberate trek of beetles Through evergreen pine wood. In my palms, its soft and mossy soil Crumbled, revealing squirming and overflowing life. And this land, it shall bury me. Empty and rotting, I will sink beneath its roots. I will feed the things I can, and Love the things I cannot. Turn my palms to soil, Root dandelions in my collarbone, Bury moss behind my temples. Let me lay here, Vanishing. This land, It raised me. This land - Let it churn me into dust. -P The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is a public benefit corporation responsible for public transportation in the U.S. state of New York, serving 12 counties in Downstate New York, along with two counties in southwestern Connecticut under contract to the Connecticut Department of Transportation, carrying over 11 million passengers on an average weekday system wide, and over 850,000 vehicles on its seven toll bridges and two tunnels per weekday. The MTA is the largest public transit authority in the United States.
According to Wikipedia. According to me, the MTA is a much smaller, much more personal entity. My first experience with the MTA was the summer of 2016, while I was living in the dorms in Barnard University, taking a summer film course, but mostly galavanting around New York in the way that only optimistic 16 year olds from a small town out west can. My subway stop was 110th street, on the 1 line (the red line). If I walked down the extra seven blocks to 103rd - past Tom’s Diner, the indie bookstore I still frequent though I live 100 blocks further south, and the bubble tea shop with the best lavender earl grey I’ve thus tasted - I could take the 2 or the 3, express lines that would shoot me rapidly downtown, into the bowels of Chelsea, Washington Square, and Soho. Back then, these weren’t places I ever thought I could think of as home. They were distant dots on the straight, red vein of the 1-2-3, a southern pole to my uptown, ivy-league framed portrait of Manhattan. Two years later, I moved into a dorm on 14th street, on Union Square Park. This is the best subway station in Manhattan. Widely connected and convenient, a tangled rainbow of green, yellow, grey, and blue lines, yet without the pompous delusions of grandeur of Grand Central or Penn Station. An inverted neighborhood, populated by buskers and cardboard-sign holders, ever rumbling with the sputtering beats of pickle-bucket drummers. This is the subway station that became the backdrop for the life I was building for myself in New York. In my first week in the city, I remember slouching, drunk, on one of those orange and yellow seats, in a group of beautiful strangers, clutching a pretzel from a cart somewhere in midtown, where we had gone to our first official New York club. I don’t remember much, except that I didn’t like the club nearly as much as I loved the pre-game, the drunken dancing on an empty subway platform, the sloppy pursuit of greasy street food, and the lazy anticipation for the arrival of a screeching chariot to deliver us home. As we spilled out into the dark glow of Union Square after midnight, a stranger asked if he could crash in my absent roommate’s empty bed - the trains to Brooklyn had stopped running. Drunken, sleepy, and happy, I absentmindedly agreed, and woke up next morning to the boy who would later become one of my best friends. God bless the inaccessibility of Brooklyn. On early Tuesday mornings, I would wait impatiently for the infrequent and perpetually under-construction L line to jettison me into Brooklyn, where I would volunteer to teach ecology at an elementary school. With downloaded podcasts, a dirty chai, and a tofu cream cheese bagel from Think Coffee, I would stare at the grimy tiled walls of the underbelly of New York, thinking about how much I felt like I belonged there, a piece of driftwood floating through the waterways of NYC commuters. Above ground, I was plagued with imposter syndrome, dwarfed by towering skyscrapers, dripping scaffolding, and people walking faster and with more conviction than me. Here, all forced into stillness by the perpetual lateness of the L, we paused, read, and observed. I was a New Yorker with a bagel and a purpose, waiting on a subway platform, to get to a place that I was running late to. I felt like a character in a movie, a photograph of the life I’d dreamt of leading two years earlier. The subway had slowly carried me down from my uptown delusions of New York into my Lower East Side reality. I couldn’t have been happier. There’s a strange rhythm in entering the MTA. The quick hop-steps of descent from street level into the golden, tiled basement of Manhattan, a pause, a turn, to locate one’s metrocard and the grey-silver turnstyles, sentinel guards to the churning seas of the city’s underbelly. The cautious flick of the metrocard through the steel reader, the pause of anticipation, a fermata in this great sonata, wondering if the transaction took. The exhale of relief as the turnstile gives way, allowing entry. Two dollars and seventy-five cents - the barrier to entry of the subway, of New York, of all the places that are so accessible, so within reach, if one happens to be lucky enough. My best friend, he of the aforementioned drunken sleepover, king of the Brooklyn-Manhattan commute, didn’t pay a single subway fare our entire freshman year. Young, limber, handsome, and white, he went sailing above the turnstiles with remarkable ease, darting under the notice of the lethargic subway officer. I always envied his confidence in these gymnastics - certain that he wouldn’t be caught, certain that if he was, nothing would come of it save a chiding reprimand and a reminder to be more complacent in the future. I always feared authority far too much to take this risk, even though ideologically, I resent the notion that $2.75 is the price to pay for access to the city in which one lives, works, and plays. There are different types of transportation for each socio-economic level of New Yorker -- those who stubbornly stick to taxis and ubers, despite the clogged arteries of traffic and inevitable carsickness, those whose commute allows them to splurge on the metrocard unlimited, allowing them two journeys a day for a cheaper cost than a single ride, the college kids and those whose lives only occupy a single neighborhood, for whom venturing outside their locality is a willing $2.75 adventure, and those who stay resolutely above ground, trekking dozens of city blocks and generating a vibrating hum of heat, energy, and life in and around the island. I like to think of the subway as an equalizer, a place for New Yorkers to pause, wait, and move together. A place where confused mountain kids can land and feel as if they belong in this city. Of course, it is not those things. It is a function of a city built on greed, ambition, and propriety - a city built on stolen land, whose wretched guts devour the land, water, and labor of this earth - the subway system is the gastrointestinal tract of New York, consuming, digesting, and spewing out all that venture down its grimy throat. And yet, I love it so. I never loved rats before I moved to new york. I never loved trains before I moved to new york. If I were to make the list of things I never loved before this city worked its way into my veins, it would be long, rambling, and incomplete. The hot sticky breath of the underground, a respite from the biting january cold. The claustrophobic clustering of the masses in a rush hour car, swaying and heaving and breathing together. The feeling of being alone, surrounded by strangers. Perhaps that is what I love most about the MTA - too often, it is something easier to hate than to love. Too often, it is a midnight train that has stopped running, leaving us stranded in a foreign borough, forced to seek shelter and friendship. It is an infrequent and late train on a Tuesday morning, allowing us a moment of pause to eat a bagel, listen to a podcast, and pretend we belong in the life we are leading. It is a small yet insurmountable fee that we must pay in order to fully become a part of the tangled web of a city we have found ourselves calling home. It is $2.75, and it is unfair, and it is grimy, and hot, and crowded. But it is something we can all be frustrated at together. I give the MTA 3 stars. (in the style of the anthropocene reviewed) -P I’ve been thinking about bones a lot -
And when i say i’ve been thinking about bones a lot - I mean to say I’ve been thinking about the way I am stacked upon myself. I am thinking about the cool white core of me - The bits i am built around, The bits that will last the longest. And when I say I’ve been thinking about bones, What I mean is I’ve been thinking about aspens. The way they shudder, knock together, Reach, pale and slender, for one another. And when I am thinking about bones, How could I not think about Coral? A house for a life, An empty, eager host For a multitudinous, colorful, swirling soul? I’ve never put much faith in my bones - And I've never thought much about yours. I know them though, these bones. This creaky old house that is mine, Full of tweaks and catches A little off-balance Not the sturdiest foundation - But still, solid, hardy moving parts. Do you feel it in your bones? What is it, and where? Was it I alone, who craved a broken bone as a child, Curious, frightful, eager, Aching to know the pain of breaking apart? And i’ve been thinking about bones Because i’ve been thinking about bodies And the way mine will rot, and already has, And how it is the only universe I know. And when I think about bodies, I think about death And the places we exist Somewhere in between the bones and the breathing. Where do you plan on rotting, my love - Rapidly, in a burning flame, Or slowly, eaten by the forces of this churning world? I plan on maggots, i’ve decided Slowly, soft and white, A life of rebirth still ahead of them - I’ve never cared much for things happening quickly. I don’t hope to be remembered - Bones disintegrating under soil, concrete, boot soles - I hope to preserved, casted in dust, In a brief lifetime’s geological epoch. I’ve been thinking about bones these days And when I say I’ve been thinking about bones, What I mean to say is I’m thinking about what I have to offer - What I know I can leave behind. - P We came from the trees, and our bodies know it. Our ancestors were tree-dwellers, grasping at supple branches with hands and feet as they leapt, racing up a trunk and across the canopy in flight from predators, and nestling among the heat of each other’s bodies at night, far above where any prey could reach. I learned recently that all these long generations later, when someone’s personhood begins to be consumed by dementia, their bodies assert their connection to the trees: when startled, a dementia patient will exhibit the moro reflex, arms flinging upward and grasping for a branch that isn’t there.
The human body is deeply familiar with the trees—it is a longstanding and intimate relationship to which we are an awkward addition. But the moments of grace between the two bodies are lovely to watch, even as a bemused third party. Put your nose to the soft form of a leaf and watch the condensation form, imagining the exchange of air as you pass molecules back and forth to each other. Wrap your hands around a low branch and observe with startled interest how your foot knows where to go next, your stomach knows which branches can hold you, and suddenly you’re looking down at people’s heads and wondering if this is how you were meant to see the world. Scramble up the tree that your father grew up in and imagine all of you, father, mother, baby, and you, curled into the broad divot at the tree’s ancient base. Trees, of course, don’t know us back. They talk among themselves, crane their branches toward the sun, nurture their children, and occasionally lend a nook of their branch to a wandering sneaker, in the same way we might lend the crook of our elbow to a roving mosquito. Like mosquitoes are to us, we are the trees’ most dangerous threat. Despite this, we love them—the smell of warm pine in sunshine, the crunch of desiccated leaves underfoot, the unmatched tranquility of a tree blanketed in snow. Whatever we may do with or to them in the interim, trees are near us at the beginning and end of our lives. Our moro instincts are strongest as newborn infants. A baby, with its mother still lying bleeding on the table below, is able to grasp a doctor’s branch-like hand and hang there by itself, supporting its own bodyweight. Our deepest instinct, if we do not suppress it, is to cling to trees. -K When I was six years old,
My best friend was a tree. When I was seven years old, My father cut it down. It was already dead, he promised me. My hours spent in its shadow Singing songs and telling stories, trying to Coax a dusty green from its branches, Were to no avail. There was a time when I didn’t know what death was. When I thought my whimsical world Knobbly knees And arboreal best friends Would last forever. Perhaps I have been lucky in this life, That I learned the language of mourning From a pinon pine, planted in my memory. Distraught and enraged, I spent hours considering a decapitated stump bleeding thin, pale sap, Fresh from the gnawing tooth of death - If you want to know how much I’ve lived, You must slice me open and count the rings. How could a thing I loved so devoutly, die - And I fail to notice? I am older now, and my mind lingers on death easily. I have seen trees grow, and I have chopped them down myself. Life, then so precious and certain, Steady and infallible in the winds of childhood, Quakes like an aspen in the evening breeze. Years later, the garden has changed, And I - Taller and sturdier than I was before - Stand rooted in the same place. - P My heart is an unidentified flying object
Hovering somewhere over New Mexico, Captured on fuzzy vintage film. My heart wants to beam you up into the sky analyze your dreams, your hair, your fingertips, And the way your sleeping chest rises and falls. My heart is full of little grey aliens Who do not understand the strange beings on this planet. It wants to take in earthly things -- Rubix cubes, dental floss, Miscellaneous charger cords souvenir t-shirts And smutty chic-lit Ana dissect them in its cool steel lab. My heart wants to know Why you like your favorite fruit so much And how those songs made you cry. My heart does not understand some things about your world - Reality TV The electoral college Or breakfast foods. It can’t help pouring over them anyway. Flickering and silver, my heart orbits your pale blue planet Drawn closer and closer - Even as you try to shoot it down Capture it Ground it Debunk it Even if you don’t believe in it. It draws closer, persistent, eager -- A galactic stranger, Surveyor of stellar mysteries and miraculous, magical life - My heart is curious And comes in peace. |
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October 2020
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