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.