What is the Meaning Hung from That Depend

A dog bark, the engine of a truck, an airplane hidden by the trees and rooftops.
My mother’s childhood seemed a kind of holy melodrama. She ate
her pudding in a pattern, carving a rim around the circumference of the
pudding, working her way inward toward the center, scooping with the spoon,
to see how far she could separate the pudding from the edge of the bowl before
the center collapsed, spreading the pudding out again, lower, back to the edge
of the bowl. You could tell that it was improvisational because at that point they
closed their eyes. A pause, a rose, something on paper. Solitude was the essential
companion. The branches of the redwood
trees hung in a fog whose moisture
they absorbed. Lasting, “what might be,” its present a future, like the life of a
child. The greatest solitudes are quickly strewn with rubbish. All night the radio
covered the fall of a child in the valley down an abandoned well-fitting, a clammy
narrow pipe 56 feet deep, in which he was wedged, recorded, and died. Stanza
there. The synchronous, which I have characterized as spatial, is accurate to
reality but it has been debased. Daisy’s plenty pebbles in the gravel drive. It is a
tartan not a plaid. There was some disparity between my grandfather’s reserve,
the result of shyness and disdain, and his sense that a man’s natural importance
was characterized by bulk, by the great depth of his footprint in the sand—in
other words, a successful man was no lightweight. A flock of guard geese are
pecking in a cold rain, become formal behind the obvious flower’s bloom. The
room, in fact, was used as a closet as well, for as one sat at the telephone table,
one faced a row of my grandparents’ overcoats, raincoats, and hats, which were
hung from a line of heavy, polished wooden hooks. The fog burned off and I
went for a walk alone, then was lost between the grapevines, unable to return,
until they set a mast, a pole, into the ground and hung a colored flag that I could
see from anywhere around. A glass snail was set among real camellias in a
glass bowl upon the table. Pure duration, a compound plenum in which nothing
is repeated. Photographed in a blue pinafore. The way Dorothy Wordsworth
often, I think, went out to “get” a sight. But language is restless. They say there
has been too much roughhousing. The heat waves wobbled over the highway—
on either side were flat brown fields tilted slightly toward the horizon—and
in the distance ahead of the car small blue ponds lay in our path, evaporating
suddenly, as if in a single piece, at the instant prior to our splashing in. I saw a
line of rocks topped by a foghorn protecting the little harbor from the tide. Fruit
peels and the heels of bread were left to get moldy. But then we’d need, what,
a bird, to eat the fleas from the rug. When what happens is not intentional,
one can’t ascribe meaning to it, and unless what happens is necessary, one
can’t expect it to occur again. Because children will spill food, one needs a dog.
Rubber books for bathtubs. Coast laps. One had merely to turn around in order
to see it. Elbows off the table. The portrait, a photograph, had been made so
that my grandmother was looking just over the head of the observer, into a
little distance, not so far as to be a space into which she might seem to be
staring, but at some definite object, some noun, just behind one. Waffle man
everywhere. She had come upon a set of expressions (“peachy” being one of
them and “nuts to you” another) which exactly suited her, and so, though the
expressions went out of everyone else’s vocabulary, even years later, when
everyone else was saying “far out” or “that’s nowhere,” she continued to have a
“perfectly peachy time” on her vacations. This was Melody Ranch, daring and
resourceful. As for we who “love to be astonished,” we might go to the zoo and
see the famous hippo named “Bubbles.” The sidesaddle was impossible, and yet
I’ve seen it used successfully, even stunningly, the woman’s full skirts spread like
a wing as the horse jumped a hurdle and they galloped on. Lasting, ferries, later,
trolleys from Berkeley to the Bridge. This is one of those things which continues,
and hence seems important, and so ever what one says over and over again.
Soggy sky, which then dries out, lifting slightly turning white—and then banks
toward the West. If I see fishing boats that’s the first thing I think. Insane, in
common parlance.