As Winter Depression Subsides; Third Year of the Covid 19 Pandemic
Sometimes it’s more excruciating than watching your favorite team in the Super Bowl. It’s like praying to God in overtime. Or after your second wife leaves you. Sometimes she comes back. Sometimes you have to chase her across the world so she’ll come back. Sometimes your team never reaches the Super Bowl. Sometimes you sober up. Sometimes your favorite team wins. Sometimes your wife is happy for you.
Sometimes you wake up in the freezing cold, middle aged digging a grave. Sometimes you are just a boy, and spring smells so good you sprout pubic hair. Sometimes it is summer, in a sand trap under the stars at an Arnold Palmer golf course. You share a cigarette because you think you are going to live and love forever when you’re eighteen. You can’t imagine you will outlive her. Or that girl you had a crush on in elementary school will be stabbed to death by her husband in a murder suicide. These things really happen. Sometimes they come back only in dreams. Sometimes you wonder what is real.
New York City looks like a movie or a galaxy from the Staten Island Ferry at night, in June. Sometimes it is so cold at the muddy bottom of an open grave, you think about the Atlantic breeze in summer. The first time I went to Nashville I was so drunk I can’t remember even one stripper’s fake boobies. I can remember the Ohio River at Louisville. I can remember the moon over the Green Mountains in Vermont. I can remember so many things, the Pacific Ocean at Half Moon Bay, and everyone I’ve ever loved. I love any place because of the beings who give life to it. Alone in the Pennsylvania woods, I saw a huge black bear. His six hundred pounds of contentment scared me out of depression.
Sometimes you wait twenty years to paint a picture. Sometimes you intend to never have children and then your daughter is born and redraws the map of the world. Sometimes you wake up an hour from the war in Aleppo and become fertile. Sometimes you look out over Lake Van from a five thousand year old castle and think about Noah and how you were as much a drunken fool as some of the prophets. Sometimes you try to explain your faith in God to Atheists. Sometimes you confess your skepticism about organized religion to conformists. Sometimes you wait twenty years for a prayer to be answered. Sometimes a poem writes itself, as if sprung from the ink in the pen in your hand. Then you can believe that Muhammad heard Gabriel .
Sometimes you see Jesus sawing a board in Kentucky. Sometimes you see Buddha giving yoga lessons at a Turkish kindergarten. Sometimes you fail utterly to see the thumbprint of divinity on every leaf and cheek. Sometimes you wake up in a fancy hotel bed but feel like you’re lying in the bottom of a grave.
Sometimes you try to impart wisdom to young adults under florescent lights. The best you can do is send them to consult good books. Sober up. Read more. Love more. Sometimes you are so fed up with the phoniness of formal education, you miss the days of chopping lettuce and peeling potatoes all day in a hot kitchen. It’s good sometimes to swing your body to music and produce something useful. Words and pictures rise up from the human body like flowers bloom from plant stems. Sometimes it is good just to sit in the cold sun on a mountain, solitary in your body but not alone.
Someday I will die. I was thinking about that on the tramway today in Gaziantep, but I didn’t feel afraid about it. There are still things I want to do. I want to stand under the dome of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul with my wife. I want to publish a book—maybe many books. I want to see my daughter grow up. I want to write many more poems and publish a book. I want to peel some potatoes. I want to teach young people who desire something more than mere survival. I want to hear the echoe of Gabriel’s voice, vibrating through the centuries. Sometimes I want to wake up every Lazarus and sink the Arc with whisky. Sometimes it’s like that. I never want to dig another grave.