In Milwaukee I find the mother lode of literary magazines and park my ass on the dull carpet and scan the titles, plucking first one and then another off the shelf to read beginning with ‘A’ for Antioch and moving to ‘Z’ for Zoetrope. Most of them I’ve never seen despite all dire warnings of read the markets before you submit. I can’t help it. I write and write with little care of who will take the offering.
But here, now, I intend to find out where I belong.
I read the Braille of my culture in the clip, clip, clip of the new writer, leaf tip curling from early frost, fruitless buds, hearts frozen, all memory of blooming gone, cut short, can’t. The style is an email style; short, staccato, cut it until it bleeds truth, bony finger language, incomplete sentences. Stop. Staccato, wings clipped, flight impossible in the mutation of language, in the marriage of current culture and language, in the deep abandonment of soul.
There is no generous, voluptuous language swinging its hips, stretching a finger across space to touch a blemished face, across time to spy on a mother’s first moments with her newborn, no loose limbed walk across an open field filled with the scent of soil, sage, and sex sticking to your jeans.
More like jab, poke, flip.
I think back to my radio days when the NPR style suggested we edit the breath itself for efficient sound bite, sound chunk, bits and bites and no chewing, no time for digestion or digression or exposure. I think back to my German teacher who says all neurosis rests in a failure to complete the reaching out movement. Infant to mother, soul to life, the complete outward stretch.
I test it out and think Colorado peach. I want, I desire, I long for, I reach and reach and stretch and elongate, in elegant braids of desire and need, in a moment, one moment more, the breath caught in my thought, salivating, the zen movement, satori movement of breathing through the obstacle until yes, feel it, smell it, touch it, bite it, suck it, juice dripping, wet, water, life flowing, yes, yes, mine.
Tension releases. I eat the peach.
Life is wet. Oh well. I slip the magazines back on the shelf-and buy nothing.
And then I drive again through Wisconsin gold and red, autumn in the leafy world, along the river, through the farmlands of Minnesota, back across the long, dry prairie, counting cows and counting minutes until I can get back to my page of blank white paper and play and dance and sing the muse out of hiding and demand she disrobe before the grand council and do a river dance until her toes bleed and her heart sings once again for the sheer love of it, the sheer love of life, the sheer love of language.
She sheds her widow’s weeds and joins me in the dance.