I hole up at my kitchen table to work, then go for a run in the late afternoon, then circle back to work. This work is a spreadsheet where I’m sewing and ripping out and stitching again numbers and more numbers. Numbers that signify things and actions. I use my same writing approach: ask questions (what does this mean?), be precise, question myself, care about what I’m doing.
Early October. I veer off my running path and wander along the seam of fallow field and riverbank. Geese wing south, honking. Inexorable.
I grew up in New Hampshire. Autumn, how apples on the trees smell both sweet and rotting, reminds me of childhood, when time meant nothing. Now, one of my oldest friends arrives for dinner, and she shares her retirement plan, a number not-so-far in the distance. She taught me the name of the flower closed gentian. I haven’t seen her in weeks, yet she sits down, and we pick up, talking. Inexorable, the motion of this material world.
In this dry spell, the river runs low, unkempt, crammed with human debris. Wild and human intersect: shorn cornfield, wild asters, bridges, the eagles I’ve spied here, all summer. I keep thinking not of those numbers and the mathematical patterns of addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, but of a recent New Yorker essay about writing and illness, the flimsiness of words in the wake of wrenching pain. Words upon words. The signifier and the signified. I crouch down and tie my shoe. Overhead, all that sky. Underfoot, the immensity of earth. I’ve five things I think I should be doing. The geese slice through the afternoon, then vanish, leaving me in this dusty field. The slow spin of this planet.
Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
…. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.
