Here

Santa Monica

Back home
I dream of the water
beyond the break
and wake older
angry at borders
that keep me foreign
and dry.

Did my wretched ancestors
who walked inward
abandoning shorelines
and settling centered
fear the power
tides gift me?

And will my absence
pull from both coasts
to my landlocked city
salt water so deep
as to drown
their evil
guiding star?

— July, 2017, Toronto

Your Call Pulses Through Me With A Glorious Dynamism

I've felt this wave before,
in Havana and Piles, too. 
You were with me, then,
and the water senses your absence.
I lay back and conspire with the tide.
The sunlit Santa Monica sky turns black and star-pricked.
I drift, whispering your name,
until I feel your faint but unmistakable touch.

— December, 2017, Santa Monica

It happened. That strange sort of serendipitous coincidence thing.

I contacted Elisa Gabbert for the first time to ask about the release date of the audio version for her new book. (Her previous collection, The Unreality of Memory, is genius.) I had considered doing this many times over the last few months but ended up doing it today. We emailed a bit, and then I looked at her website again, following links that led me to a NYTimes piece where she does a close read of Auden. In it, she writes of Brueghel's painting, The Fall of Icarus, which is mentioned in the poet's Musée des Beaux Arts.

Hours later, I'm on a walk, listening to an audiobook of Maggie O'Farrell's I Am, I Am, I Am and she writes about the same painting. I don't even care what the odds are. What I want to know is What is this?! What happened here? — And yes, I'm aware of pattern recognition and confirmation bias, but this seems beyond. Does it not? (Obviously, I need Gabbert to write about it so I can understand it.)

I am listening to the O'Farrell book, which is subtitled Seventeen Brushes With Death, because for years now I've considered a project called My Death Inches. I'll write about all the injuries I've suffered and how each inches me closer to death.

I had the idea while in Spain. I was wearing shorts and a straw hat. I sat down, crossed my left ankle over my right leg, and popped my hat onto my raised knee. The heat from my head had warmed the hat, which then warmed my knee. I wondered if that escaping heat — that transfer of energy — took some of my remaining life with it. I wrote a poem about it, and the poem made me think I should document my kidney stones and many fractures, my food poisonings and bike accidents and shower slips, the animal attacks, the overwhelming wildfires and crushing, lung-filling salt water, the broken glass, broken bones, and broken spirit.

There was the time I wouldn't stop crying as a toddler and the babysitter fed me rum to shut me up. I had to be rushed to emergency to have my two-year-old stomach pumped. Was my life shortened by this ordeal? Or the time M—— and I decided to try unfamiliar fruits each Thursday. That week was Mangosteen. I didn't know it wasn't ripe and I didn't know that unless ripe, it's all but impossible to open. The knife slipped, the serrated knife slipped, and cut the first knuckle of my left index finger to the bone. ("Bone white is very white," as Keanu Reeves says.) I should have gone to the emergency room, but: I didn't want the date to end. It wasn't even a real date. I don't think she was interested in me in that way. But I didn't want the night to end. Didn't want to say goodbye. So I held that finger under unbearably cold water as long as I could and M—— wrapped it in gauze as I grimaced and groaned. Then, we drank cheap plonk and talked for hours while the sun came up and the bandage filled with blood.

Obviously, I'm still alive. I didn't bleed out. I'm alright. You can't bleed out from a finger, no matter how deep the cut, can you? And it's pathetic, right? The whole thing — not paying attention while slicing is pathetic; neglecting the wound is pathetic; being so lonely you'd risk losing part of a digit or fainting from blood loss is pathetic.

Did that knife move me a little closer to death? Who can say? I do have a permanent lump on that knuckle. Twenty-five years later — tonight — I'm stroking it with my thumb. It has a tiny significance. What is that significance? Of what is it made? Is it misaligned bone? Severed nerve endings aching to reconnect? Or did my skin heal over and trap forever a manifestation of a memory of when I was so needing someone to love me that pain meant nothing — and, for the rest of my days, I could touch it and be back with M—— in that kitchen, both of us wanting to taste new fruit, but neither of us aware that it just wasn't time.

I used to own a great many books. More books than is reasonable for a person to own. You can see some of them in the photo above. Just under 1900 titles. In 2022 and 2023, I sold the vast majority of them, keeping just a small shelf worth.

I thought it would be interesting to occasionally do a post about one of the keepers and write a bit about how it came to be mine and why I've kept it.

The first title is Kenneth Rexroth's One Hundred Poems from the Japanese. I believe I purchased this copy from Iliad Books in North Hollywood, though it might have been The Last Bookstore in DTLA. Either way it was definitely in 2010, during my first trip to California.

I'd gone because a film director had read Chimera, a screenplay I wrote in 2008. He called and said he wanted to meet and talk about me writing a sequel to a hit film he'd made in 1990. (A film I'd seen in the theatre when it came out and that most people of my generation will have seen. Yes, I'm purposely being vague.) He told me he lived in Venice Beach and that I should head down.

I took the month of May off and flew down, staying in an AirBnB a few blocks from the director's house. To quickly answer the questions you're probably asking: nothing came of Chimera, my script that he'd read, and I never worked with him on a sequel to his film — or any other film for that matter. In short: he stiffed me. I spoke with him the day before I left Toronto — "Oh, yes, great, great. Looking forward to meeting you, Lincoln." — and then he avoided my calls for the entire month I was there.

I've been asked a number of times if I'm bitter about the experience, but the truth is that I'm thankful for him having called, as he motivated me to head to Los Angeles, something I probably should have done as a teenager or in my early 20s, instead of going to film school. I fell in love with the place and lived there for three and a half years spread out over the next ten. In all that time, I never did come face to face with that director, but I did make some great and lasting friendships.

As to the book of Japanese poetry:

For as long as I can remember, I've lived an unrequited life. This means I'm often thinking about someone from my past. I chanced upon the Rexroth book and opened to a random page:

In the empty mountains
The leaves of the bamboo grass
Rustle in the wind.
I think of a girl
Who is not there.

Nice. I flip again:

I wish I were close
To you as the wet skirt of
A salt girl to her body.
I think of you always.

Very nice. Once more:

Others may forget you, but not I.
I am haunted by your beautiful ghost.

Sold!

If memory serves, it costs me $8.

Though I have most of my favorites from the book memorized, the thin trade paperback often accompanies me when I travel. I had it with me in Spain in 2017 when I was sending my own poems out to my Burning the Days mailing list. All those miles means it's pretty beat. It was dog-eared when I got it. It's water-stained now. I'll replace it with a hardcover first edition if I ever find one in person. (They pop up all the time online but I hate paying for $30 shipping on a $20 item.)

There is a sequel with the inventive title One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese, but I can't recommend it. Rexroth also did two volumes of poems translated from Chinese. Again, they don't strike the same chord as this original Japanese collection.

One Hundred Poems From the Japanese is still in print. It's published by the stellar New Directions and you can purchase it from Bookshop.org, Abe Books, or Amazon (Canada, US, UK), or maybe get your local book store to special order you a copy.

Years ago, I had a small stroke that caused me to reevaluate what I was doing with my life and with my work. Invitations to my next birthday party went out with a photo and readings of two poems, one by James Wright and one by David Whyte.

In the years since, a number of the guests to that party have told me how much they enjoyed the poems. Here they are, along with the photo:

Robert Pattinson reads a poem by James Wright

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Everything Is Waiting for You written and read by David Whyte

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I’d taken the photo post-stroke, while bathing in a client’s bathtub in Beverly Glen, her dog Bailey watching from the sidelines. For some reason, the framing of it reminded me of Alex Colville's work, so I later tinted it in his style.

Outside that bathroom, not far away, the Skirball Fire was having its way with Bel Air, the neighborhood that was literally across the street from where I was staying. I'd spent the morning feeding the chickens and cats and walking the dogs as ash fell from the sky. I'd become consumed by chaos and worry about when it would be our time to evacuate the neighborhood. (If everyone flees simultaneously, no one gets anywhere, so you wait until instructed.)

My client was incommunicado, so I'd taken it upon myself to load her SUV with what I assumed were her prized possessions, leaving just enough room for me and the pets. Thankfully, on the morning when the street's more experienced residents had predicted we'd have to leave, the wind changed and we were able to stay put. Though the fire continued to blaze, the flames never crossed that street; the ash never returned. I drew a bath to celebrate and re-center myself.

Unpredictably, with a glowing reference from that Beverly Glen client (neighbors conveyed my preparedness, which they witnessed through their windows), I started getting job offers from people living in danger zones with their pets. A year later I got calls from a couple in Malibu, and would have accepted the gig had I not already been booked in Santa Monica. While there, the Woolsey Fire scorched that beach-side town. I heard numerous horror stories from fleeing residents who'd moved into the Santa Monica Fairmont Miramar, where I'm a regular at the main bar. They literally had nothing left but the clothes on their backs. Then, I booked a 4+ month gig in Vanuatu during cyclone season which I completed without incident. Less than a month after I left, Cyclone Harold ripped through much of the South Pacific archipelago, including the property I'd been living on, sparing my clients and their staff and their buildings — which had been built to withstand cyclones — but laying waste to much of the greenery.

Today, I'm reminded of this bathroom photo and these poems and that birthday invitation, because someone shared The Poetry Atlas on Metafilter and used the Wright poem as an example. Want to know, exactly, where the hammock swings that the narrator is wasting their life in? The Poetry Atlas will tell you.

The second poem is by David Whyte, who's written and spoken many wonderful things. If you appreciated the line, "Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity," you will enjoy his book, Consolations, which has many such pieces of wisdom. One of my favourites is "Beauty is the harvest of presence."

(In my mind, I always link that line to one by Tom Stoppard: "Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late." Perhaps you also have lines or definitions that are forever-conflated? Do I digress? So be it. I digress.)

In What to Remember When Waking, Whyte tells the story of an ancient Irish tribe who no longer wish to fight — he describes them as "no longer wanting to have that conversation." So, when next they're confronted with battle, "they turn sideways into the light and disappear into the originality of it all."

Considering the "conversations" we're having, and reflecting on whether they're helping us be the person we want to be, living the life we want to live, can lead to some of life's great awakenings. Am I wasting my life in the right way?

After that stroke, I sold Good Music, my Toronto record shop, to a competitor, and made a promise to myself that I would no longer do things solely for money. I no longer wanted to have that conversation. Rather, I wanted to live a time-rich life. If that doesn't sound easy, I can assure you that it's absolutely harder than it sounds — for the most part, I've managed to do that while living in some interesting places, despite threats of fire, cyclone, or comfortable hammock.

I have what I believe to be a rare Carl Hansen & Son Hans J. Wegner catalog. I've scanned the pages for your edification...

When I travel, I try to focus on something ubiquitous and mundane that recalls the location. In Autumn, 2017, I spent three months wandering the orange groves of Oliva, Spain, and was particularly taken with the tool sheds and utility boxes. I decided to document them. Here, I've gathered my favorites.

DAY 1

Direct from YYZ to BCN. Easy flight — aren't they all? SIM card. Sandwich. Metro to AirBnB. Marble stairs, 3 flights. The door is huge + heavy. Piotr shakes my hand, shows me the room, explains the fussy shower. Walk to a cafe. Juice and a frittata. So good! The busiest streets I've ever seen. Scooters everywhere. Youth chill in the evening air.

2

Morning Frittata. Clean air and spacious side streets. Bookstores. Beautiful editions of Chandler and James M. Cain. Walk to the park. I give coins to a singer of Delta blues. Gaudi's bedroom is uncannily calming. Cocktails at Elephanta with Anabel Caravaca and Jean Rhys. Good Morning, Midnight.

3

Train to Valencia. Another AirBnB, this one more "factory." Museums. Basilicas. Much porcelain. Grotesques and gargoyles abound. Delicious Charcuterie and the worst Martini I've ever had. I am older than the Font Del Túria, but it has me beat in beauty, poise, and bird shit.

4

Bus to Oliva. Call Joe the British cabbie. "Five minutes," he says, but is there in three. "To Anna Maria's blue house?" Si, I nod. "Are you good friends?" he asks.

"I've never met her."

A look of concern on his face. Something's amuck. Inside, I panic. I should have asked more questions before boarding that plane.

"What's wrong?" I ask.

"I don't understand."

"She's hired me to look after her cat while she travels."

"Didn't you say you were from Canada?!"

"Yes."

"And you're here for 3 months?"

"Yes."

Another look. Something is definitely amuck.

Locked gate. I consider climbing it, but wait. Ten minutes and out she comes, saying she didn't hear me calling. Is she what I expected? What did I expect? "It's hot, let's go inside." An accent, but not a Spanish one.

She introduces Blanche, the cat. My charge. Instantly, I know she's going to be a nightmare.

Anna Maria offers lunch and I accept. Fish and rice. The two bedroom house is charming. "How long have you lived here?"

"A few months."

"And you're off on vacation so soon?"

"I'm already on vacation. This isn't my house."

"I'm sorry?"

5

She rented the house for a year. Paid in advance. After seven months, she wants to leave. "They've found me."

"Who?"

She doesn't answer. The look on her face is either, "You know who," or "I'm not sure I can trust you with that information."

She paces the kitchen holding a butter knife. "Tomorrow, Miguel will join us for lunch."

"Who's Miguel?"

"This is his house. He wants to meet you. He says he never agreed to another 'tenant'. He's not happy I've hired you. He's police." Great.

"Tomorrow? For lunch?" She nods. "But what time's your flight?" We'd agreed she'd leave the day after my arrival.

"I haven't bought my ticket yet. I was hoping you'd help me with that. No point using my phone. Lets talk about it tomorrow. You should take a walk. Get to know the area."

I walk the beach. Wonder what I've got myself into.