From Light So Late

Abstract

from Light So Late Bill Coyle (bio) What struck me most was not my father’s fall while he was going for an evening walk, or his not being able to recall falling—that I could put down to shock— but that he went in to the hospital with only a dull aching in his side, and no one nagging; not his style at all. Good thing he went, though: he might well have died. They took him quick, got him x-rayed and scanned. A chest tube helped the lung to re-expand. Two days in the ICU, and he’s permitted to go home but has been banned from spending every good day as he planned this summer, in the garden on his knees. As for us, speaking selfishly, this means we board our flight with relatively clear consciences, flip through inflight magazines, marvel it’s already been a year. Soon we see on the hundred little screens positioned at eye-level on the back of each seat’s headrest the unlikely greens of Iceland, and its basic, basalt black, making it look as though all the minds on board, numbered and separate, are of one accord. You and I, Love, have been on different pages— in different books—too long, can ill afford to waste more time now we are winging toward the desolation of our middle ages. [End Page 3] Like a bad joke this 100% post-consumer waste “Decomposition Book” I bought at the start of the summer in a health food store in North Conway now, in Stockholm, in early August, is falling apart. No sooner have I finished copying over pages of unused lines and ideas from the previous one, than I have to do it all over. (Not that I have to, really—I mean, no one’s standing over me with a gun.) Some lines are just punchlines waiting for the right setup: I can’t recall the last time I was blackout drunk, others just lists of potential rhymes and a topic, here charm alarm fear appear filed under chipmunk. There are the found poems that, however much I like them myself, seem not really poems, or not really me, I guess: iTunes noting vis-à-vis an Alice Coltrane album that it’s “importing Universal Consciousness”; there is a healthy dose of Christian Platonism, as always: Nature is her own iconoclast; there is, as always, one after another helpless defense of living (at least part time) in the past. I’m conducting this salvage operation out on our borrowed balcony while you are in the shower. Neighbors are watering or just sitting down to dinner, swallows hunting, the sun ripening, despite the hour. From over the corrugated roofs on the amber light come shouts and bright young laughter bound for the bars. Several species of gull drift in the lower heaven, sounding like clowns or spoiled children or bottleneck guitars. Decomposition. Turning the pages I encounter failure and unfulfilled promise everywhere I look. The water is a hop, skip, and a jump away. If it weren’t so un-green, I’d be tempted to drown my book. [End Page 4] Maybe it’s not a total loss: Folded up in the back’s this sheet of lines that never felt complete, but that I couldn’t bear to toss. Maybe they just need the right setting, or they or I needed to age. Maybe I’m desperate. Hard to gauge. So many things slip through the netting of space-time and are lost to sight, it’s not as though I can afford ever to heave overboard the record of a day so bright. Fragment or not, I bring it back and set it in a transparent case with its approximate date and place of origin on a small plaque: Slite, Gotland. August 2007 The past three days the wind has blown offshore, leaving the water here warmer than the air and clear to a floor ridged like the desert seen from a great height and grazed by shadows of transparent little fish in tight formation hanging fire in a current too miniature and mild to quite feel but...