Reset Forty, Day Nine

[rejectomorph]

There was more rain Saturday, and though part of the area got a major downpour in the evening it bypassed my neighborhood. There was distant thunder, but all the strikes were miles away, and here we had only a few minutes of light rain and then nothing. There wasn't even any flickering of the lights. I suppose we got lucky, but I felt oddly neglected.

A few times in the last few hours I felt tired and was tempted to go to sleep, but something has always distracted me. I remembered being the kid wo wandered around the suburban streets of Los Angeles sixty some years ago, through scenes I still recall, having thoughts that must have engaged me then but which have vanished from my memory. The images of the place do not summon those lost thoughts. The me I once was has become as vague as a ghost, while the places, though now changed, and in part entirely gone, remain substantial. I know exactly where I was, but who the hell was I?




Sunday Verse

Ray

by Hayden Carruth

How many guys are sitting at their kitchen tables
    right now, one-thirty in the morning, this same
time, eating a piece of pie? — that's what I
    wondered.  A big piece of pie, because I'd just
finished reading Ray's last book. Not good pie,
    not like my mother or my wife could've
made, but an ordinary pie I'd just bought, being
    alone, at the Tops Market two hours ago.  And how
many had water in their eyes?  Because of Ray's
    book, and especially those last poems written
after he knew: the one about the doctor telling
    him, the one where he and Tess go down to
Reno to get married before it happens and shoot
    some craps on the dark baize tables, the one
called "After-Glow" about the little light in the
    sky after the sun sets.  I can just hear him,
if he were still here and this were somebody
    else's book, saying, "Jesus," saying, "This
is the saddest son of a bitch of a book I've
    read in a long time," saying "A real long time."
And the thing is, he knew we'd be saying this
    about his book, he could just hear us saying it,
and in some part of him he was glad!  He
    really was.  What crazies we writers are,
our heads full of language like buckets of minnows
    standing on the moonlight on a dock.  Ray
was a good writer, a wonderful writer, and his
    poems are good, most of them, and they made me
cry, there at my kitchen table with my head down,
    me, a sixty-seven-year-old galoot, an old fool
because all old men are fools, they have to be,
    shoveling big jagged chunks of that ordinary pie
into my mouth, and the water falling from my eyes
    onto that pie, the plate, my hand, little speckles
shining into the light, brightening the colors, and I
    ate that goddamn pie, and it tasted good to me.

---

After-Glow

by Raymond Carver


The dusk of evening comes on. Earlier a little rain
had fallen. You open a drawer and find inside
the man’s photograph, knowing he has only two years
to live. He doesn’t know this, of course,
that’s why he can mug for the camera.
How could he know what’s taking root in his head
at that moment? If one looks to the right
through boughs and tree trunks, there can be seen
crimson patches of the after-glow. No shadows, no
half-shadows. It is still and damp…
The man goes on mugging. I put the picture back
in its place along with the others and give
my attention instead to the after-glow along the far ridge,
light golden on the roses in the garden.
Then, I can’t help myself, I glance once more
at the picture. The wink, the broad smile,
the jaunty slant of the cigarette.