Capturing the Details
Can it begin as simply as that? Is this how to find my way to writing, to a poem? Heading home, Wednesday morning, seeking inspiration, what gets noticed in the moments:
—The sun a white bright a hole in the clouds that looked like a cover of shredded cotton, slowly burned away.
—The road surface dry, whirr of tires on asphalt, and the iridescent green of the iris, tulip, berry, and grass fields along the highway after a month of soaking in wet.
—Puddles and more than clouds are reflected in them for the first time in weeks: muddy sheep, the branches of a hazlenut, every-which-way raspberry canes.
—How in one day, the vistas that are the wide, fertile Willamette Valley are back. Foothills of the Cascades, peeking up peaks, snow-capped of course. The Coast Range too, the entire valley with its mountains on either side, three-dimensional and shimmering.
—Everything made by humans at exits, along the side of the road—whether shopping, food, gas, or motels—all chains, all ugly, all the same.
—Inside the car, I can pretend there is still beauty and hope. Woo sanctuary when I dial the iPod's wheel, settle on Led Zeppelin II. A favorite from in 8th grade so the music is in my cells almost, that familiar. Listening to the words, I realize how many are sexual and wonder, did I know that back then or just feel it, visceral and unstated, adolescent hormones astir?
—Which then leads to reflections on when I ever felt truly happy. Long ago times in the foolish flush of new love? Before all the hard knocks and disappointments? And did I decide, consciously, to give all that up or it just happened with this living of a life, day after ordinary day?
—And does everyone else feel this way at one time in their lives or are people and their emotional responses to events, to people in their lives, to emotion, economically, socially, and culturally determined?
—Feeling momentarily cheered by the existence of one property, south of Salem, a haphazard collection of algae-greened trailers and wooden outbuildings, pens for animals perhaps, really quite beaten down. But still, in black spray paint letters on the side of one trailer facing the highway, something to the effect of "Don't bother asking, not for sale." Millions rejected in favor of what? principle? tradition? home?
—The rest of the day, the only time I spoke to another flesh-and-blood person was when I asked for a ticket for Match Point at the 3:40 matinee.
