Yesterday, before taking my daughter into the mountains for a hike, I stopped at a bookstore and picked up a volume of poetry. I wanted something contemporary, by someone I hadn’t read before. I ended up buying a book by Sharon Olds called Blood, Tin, Straw. 

I was hoping for something good, but I was not expecting anything like this. This is wrenching, blood-soaked poetry. She leaves shame at the door, which is how you write with strength. It is nakedly powerful work, figuratively and often literally. She writes about sex and longing, being a mother and a daughter, the dark spaces in a marriage, and, especially in the second of the poems included here, the way a long loneliness can bend you out of true. I’ve never read anything else like this. I love it absolutely.

The Promise

With the second drink, at the restaurant,
holding hands on the bare table,
we are at it again, renewing our promise
to kill each other. You are drinking gin,
night-blue juniper berry
dissolving in your body, I am drinking Fumé,
chewing its fragrant dirt and smoke, we are
taking on earth, we are part soil already,
and wherever we are, we are also in our
bed, fitted, naked, closely
along each other, half passed out,
after love, drifting back
and forth across the border of consciousness,
our bodies buoyant, clasped. Your hand
tightens on the table. You’re a little afraid
I’ll chicken out. What you do not want
is to lie in a hospital bed for a year
after a stroke, without being able
to think or die, you do not want
to be tied to a chair like your prim grandmother,
cursing. The room is dim around us,
ivory globes, pink curtains
bound at the waist—and outside,
a weightless, luminous, lifted-up
summer twilight. I tell you you do not
know me if you think I will not
kill you. Think how we have floated together
eye to eye, nipple to nipple,
sex to sex, the halves of a creature
drifting up to the lip of matter
and over it—you know me from the bright, blood-
flecked delivery room, if a lion
had you in its jaws I would attack it, if the ropes
binding your soul are your own wrists, I will cut them.

The Babysitter

The baby was about six months old,
a girl. The length of her life, I had not
touched anyone. That night, when they went out
I held the baby along my arm and
put her mouth to my cotton shirt.
I didn’t really know what a person was, I
wanted someone to suck my breast,
I ended up in the locked bathroom,
naked to the waist, holding the baby,
and all she wanted was my glasses, I held her
gently, waiting for her to turn,
like a cherub, and nurse. And she wouldn’t, what she wanted
was my glasses. Suck me, goddamnit, I thought,
I wanted to feel the tug of another
life, I wanted to feel needed, she grabbed for my
glasses and smiled. I put on my bra
and shirt, and tucked her in, and sang to her
for the last time — clearly it
was the week for another line of work —
and turned out the light. Back in the bathroom
I lay on the floor in the dark, bared
my chest against the icy tile,
slipped my hand between my legs and
rode, hard, against the hard floor, my nipples holding me up off the glazed
blue, as if I were flying upside
down under the ceiling of the world.

I want to write about this story in more detail soon, because I think it’s remarkable. But I want to read it again before I do. In the meantime, let me show you two passages from “Carried Away,” collected in her book Open Secrets. I have somehow managed to miss reading her work until now. I think I’m about to go on a binge to compensate for lost time.

The story starts out being a correspondence between a librarian and a soldier during the First World War. The soldier had seen her in passing when he lived in town; she had never taken notice of him. He is taken with her memory and starts writing letters to her. A muted, self-conscious love begins to grow. In this first paragraph she is remembering a letter she sent to another lover, years earlier.

Her last letter had been firm and stoical, and some consciousness of herself as a heroine of love’s tragedy went with her around the country as she hauled her display cases up and down the stairs of small hotels and talked about Paris styles and said that her sample hats were bewitching, and drank her solitary glass of wine. If she’d had anybody to tell, though, she would have laughed at just that notion. She would have said love was all hocus-pocus, a deception, and she believed that. But at the prospect she still felt a hush, a flutter along the nerves, a bowing down of sense, a flagrant prostration.

And a few paragraphs later is this letter from the soldier:

I am glad to hear you do not have a sweetheart though I know that is selfish of me. I do not think you and I will ever meet again. I don’t say that because I’ve had a dream about what will happen or am a gloomy person always looking for the worst. It just seems to me that it is the most probable thing to happen, though I don’t dwell on it and go along every day doing the best I can to stay alive. I am not trying to worry you or get your sympathy either but just explain how the idea I won’t ever see Carstairs again makes me think I can say anything I want. I guess it’s like being sick with a fever. So I will say I love you. I think of you up on a stool at the Library reaching to put a book away and I come up and put my hnds on your waist and lift you down, and you turning around inside my arms as if we agreed about everything.

I’m an irredeemable romantic. It will be my doom. But holy Christ, I love these passages!

What I would like is to get on a motorcycle and drive for days. To find a mountaintop and sit in complete silence. To look out at the folded land. To wait for everything to recede until there is nothing left but the breath of the world. And then, maybe, to solve myself.

The Peace of the Wild Things, by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

It’s snowing inside my car.

The impact is so fast. Time does not stop or slow down the moment before collision, but it does achieve a diamond-cut clarity: there is one vast second in which I know I will hit the car in front of me and that there is nothing in the world that can stop that from happening now. I think I say something. I can hear the sound of my own brakes.

It’s night. Traffic is light. I’m leaving work, and I’m on my way to pick up my daughter. I have worked eleven hours and I’m tired. My feet hurt. I’m distracted by my own life. I know what to change and I know how to do it but I’m trying to decide if I care enough. I am negotiating terms of surrender with forces much greater than myself. In recent days I have come to see myself clearly, and I am displeased. Is there time to change anything? Is there sufficient impetus? Is there a point?

I watch the radiant green sign of a gas station approaching on my left. It’s as dreary and mundane a signpost as one could find, but, with all that light, it’s unaccountably beautiful. It’s a jewel in the darkness.

I turn my head back to the road and there’s a car stopped in the lane, waiting to make a left turn.

Impact.

And it’s over.

The car in front of me, a Mercedes, is propelled forward by the hit, and drifts to a halt across the intersection.

And it is snowing in my car.

Dust from the airbags. The one in front of me has abraded my arm and I can feel, distantly, its sting. The windshield is cracked, and I watch my own arm, seemingly guided by another entity, reach forward to put the car in park. Tomorrow I will limp so badly that I will not be able to match my daughter’s walking pace, but right now I am out of the car and running as fast as I can toward the car I hit, its brakes casting red light in a bloody wash onto the street. I have seen no movement. I know there will be carnage inside.

I think, I am going to go to jail.

The driver of the other car powers her window down and she looks at me. “Did you hit me?”

I want to laugh. It’s an absurd question. But we’re always reduced to absurdity when we realize that our throats are bare to whatever it is out there that wants to kill us.

No one is hurt. The cars are damaged but roadworthy. We drive into the gas station and exchange information. Series of numbers, names, insurance agencies. We wait for the police. Everyone is civil, and by the time we go our separate ways there are handshakes and kind words.

I get back in the car and drive. The lights flow by. The night is huge.

I think, You missed. I think, Is that the best you can do?

I think, Come for me, you motherfucker.

Show me.

Mia just got home from a three-day camping trip for her new school. It’s purpose was to get all the girls together for a few days to break the ice, have some fun, and make some friends before classes start next week. No girl comes to school a stranger. I think it’s a great idea, and I was very excited for her. While she was there, the principal sent out a couple of blanket emails to parents, letting us know what was up and assuring us that the girls were having a blast.

And she did. When I picked her up yesterday she looked tired and happy, and introduced me to new friends. She’s normally a quiet, shy girl, and to see her in this frothy mix of happiness and easy camaraderie was enormously gratifying to me.

When we got home she told me all about it. There was a campfire, and s’mores, and rope courses, and rock climbing, and canoe building, and river-hopping, and snail hunting, and skits, and god knows what else. There were spiders in the cabins at night, and she stepped on a wasp “THIS BIG!” There was an initiation ceremony at the end, so the girls were officially Hanger Hall girls. It sounded like an amazing experience.

After she was done telling me about it all, she got quiet, and stared off into space. It wasn’t a good quiet. I asked her what was wrong and she shook her head and said “Nothing,” but it was a weak deflection. I asked her again and she leaned her head into my shoulder and her eyes teared up.

“I missed out on the fun stuff because I was too scared,” she said. “I was too scared to swing on the ropes. And I only got five feet up the rocks before I came down, and all the other girls went all the way to the top!”

“Now you regret not doing it?” I asked.

She nodded her head. “It seems like I’m always backing down,” she said.

I put my hand on the back of her head and pulled her in. The thing is, I knew exactly how she felt. I told her about a time I went to sea camp when I was a kid in Florida. It lasted a few days, like Mia’s, and the highlight of the trip for all of us was the shark pit.

The shark pit was a huge, murky salt water pool in the center of the camp, where several non-kid-eating sharks lived. Every day a group of us would get to swim around in there, with our snorkels and masks. We were advised that in order to see the sharks, it was best to swim out toward the middle of the pool; it was deeper there and that’s where they liked it. We only had ten minutes, so we were advised to not waste time.

My group was picked for the last day. I couldn’t wait. Like many boys my age, I was a shark nut, and I had a small library of books about them at home. Nothing else we did that weekend mattered to me. It was all about the sharks.

But when I finally got in, splashing in from the shore until the bottom dropped out and I was floating over empty space, peering through my mask at a blackness thronged with drifting motes of plant matter and foam, I was overcome by a primal fear.

Sharks are in here. Are you fucking kidding me?

Fear stopped me cold. So I swam around the outskirts of the pool, listening to the splashing of the other kids in my group with a dismayed frustration as the braver among them powered out to the middle. I heard their voices raised in fear and excitement. I was eating myself alive. Get out there. Get out there. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Finally, when I knew that time was almost up, the shame managed to overcome the fear, and I moved toward the center. A little. Maybe six more feet. Still far from the true middle. I had my mask in the water, and all I could see was a briny dark. I couldn’t figure out how anybody could see anything in here at all.

And then a shovelhead shark — probably about five feet long, but it seemed as big as a train car at the time — emerged from the murk below me. It was a monster from another age: weird, tooth-spangled, predatory. It was a member of a species that was designed to kill me, and it was mere feet away. I felt exalted. It gave one gentle twitch of its powerful caudal fins and surged ahead, disappearing again.

Less than a minute later the whistle blew, and we had to get out. I listened as the braver kids talked about the different sharks they had seen. I was shamed by my fear; more so because I had finally caught a glimpse of the terrible beauty that was down there, and I knew I could have seen more.

That day has never left me. And I use it still to spurn myself on. When I’ve done things that were reckless, or a little foolhardy, it’s often because I’ve taken that memory down from its shelf and studied it. I moved to New Orleans without a job or a home because of it. A few years later I moved to New York under the same conditions. I’ve told a woman I loved her because of it, though I knew I had no business doing so.

Sometimes it’s worked out, and sometimes it hasn’t; but I have fewer regrets now than I might have had. And I think that’s important.

I told Mia about that day. I told her I still regret not having done it. That I knew exactly what she meant. And I told her that one of the reasons people go to camps like that is to learn a little something about themselves. That usually that didn’t happen, but that she’d been lucky, because for her it did. Not that she was afraid; because everybody is afraid, and learning that is no wisdom. She learned that when she gave in to that fear it cost her self-respect, and it deprived her of an experience she wishes that she’d had. I told her that the next time she was faced with a situation like that, she would have this memory to inform her.

She seemed genuinely calmed. Her eyes had dried up and she just leaned onto me for a few minutes. (It never hurts to tell your kid of an even worse thing that happened to you to help them feel better about themselves.) And then she got up and went about her day.

She gets to go again next summer. She’ll get another chance.

And I have become so complacent. In my job, in my life. I’ve become enslaved to old pains; new fears have taken deep root. And there’s that memory, gnarled and dust-covered. I find myself staring at it.

I find myself thinking ceaselessly of that shark, sliding from darkness into darkness.

It’s terrifying. It’s gorgeous.

My latest story, “The Good Husband,” is just about wrapped up. I had a good workshop session last Sunday with Alexa Duncan and Theodora Goss, and the end is finally in sight. This short story collection will be in the mail before the month in done. Really, this time.

I have long been referring to this as my ghoul story, though now it’s something a little different. I don’t know if there’s a ghoul in it or not. But I know there’s cold air, and heartache, and death. There are things moving under the earth. And that’s what makes my blood move.

This is the poem that first inspired the story. It’s my favorite poem from my favorite poet. Even reading it now, I get goosebumps.

Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.   by Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

That was the deep uncanny mine of souls.
Like veins of silver ore, they silently
moved through its massive darkness. Blood welled up
among the roots, on its way to the world of men,
and in the dark it looked as hard as stone.
Nothing else was red.

There were cliffs there,
and forests made of mist. There were bridges
spanning the void, and that great gray blind lake
which hung above its distant bottom
like the sky on a rainy day above a landscape.
And through the gentle, unresisting meadows
one pale path unrolled like a strip of cotton.

Down this path they were coming.

In front, the slender man in the blue cloak —
mute, impatient, looking straight ahead.
In large, greedy, unchewed bites his walk
devoured the path; his hands hung at his sides,
tight and heavy, out of the failing folds,
no longer conscious of the delicate lyre
which had grown into his left arm, like a slip
of roses grafted onto an olive tree.
His senses felt as though they were split in two:
his sight would race ahead of him like a dog,
stop, come back, then rushing off again
would stand, impatient, at the path’s next turn, —
but his hearing, like an odor, stayed behind.
Sometimes it seemed to him as though it reached
back to the footsteps of those other two
who were to follow him, up the long path home.
But then, once more, it was just his own steps’ echo,
or the wind inside his cloak, that made the sound.
He said to himself, they had to be behind him;
said it aloud and heard it fade away.
They had to be behind him, but their steps
were ominously soft. If only he could
turn around, just once (but looking back
would ruin this entire work, so near
completion), then he could not fail to see them,
those other two, who followed him so softly:

The god of speed and distant messages,
a traveler’s hood above his shining eyes,
his slender staff held out in front of him,
and little wings fluttering at his ankles;
and on his left arm, barely touching it: she.

A woman so loved that from one lyre there came
more lament than from all lamenting women;
that a whole world of lament arose, in which
all nature reappeared: forest and valley,
road and village, field and stream and animal;
and that around this lament-world, even as
around the other earth, a sun revolved
and a silent star-filled heaven, a lament-
heaven, with its own, disfigured stars —:
So greatly was she loved.

But now she walked beside the graceful god,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
She was deep within herself, like a woman heavy
with child, and did not see the man in front
or the path ascending steeply into life.
Deep within herself. Being dead
filled her beyond fulfillment. Like a fruit
suffused with its own mystery and sweetness,
she was filled with her vast death, which was so new,
she could not understand that it had happened.

She had come into a new virginity
and was untouchable; her sex had closed
like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands
had grown so unused to marriage that the god’s
infinitely gentle touch of guidance
hurt her, like an undesired kiss.

She was no longer that woman with blue eyes
who once had echoed through the poet’s songs,
no longer the wide couch’s scent and island,
and that man’s property no longer.

She was already loosened like long hair,
poured out like fallen rain,
shared like a limitless supply.

She was already root.

And when, abruptly,
the god put out his hand to stop her, saying,
with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around —,
she could not understand, and softly answered
Who?

                           Far away,
dark before the shining exit-gates,
someone or other stood, whose features were
unrecognizable. He stood and saw
how, on the strip of road among the meadows,
with a mournful look, the god of messages
silently turned to follow the small figure
already walking back along the path,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.

Mia is making the jump to sixth grade this year, and last night her new school held a potluck picnic at a nearby park so the new kids and parents could meet the crew, buy some used uniforms, and fill out the requisite paperwork.

Yes, you read that right: potluck.

I used to work in a kitchen, but that was years ago. I was younger, and foolish. Doing things that I didn’t really know how to do did not intimidate me. Most of my experience was behind the line at a restaurant, which is very much like working an assembly line in a factory, or heating up gruel for roughnecks in the Gulf. Since then my culinary ambition has not extended beyond scrambling some eggs or slapping some lunch meat on bread. If I ever had any skills in the kitchen, they are long gone.

Now there is only fear.

My kitchen has a microwave oven, which is where all the action happens. Everything else is storage space.

I’ve been meaning to change this for a long time. Since, oh, Mia was born. She’s eleven now, so I think it’s time to start. I was going to bring something to the potluck, and it wouldn’t be bean dip. My friend A gave me a recipe for homemade macaroni and cheese, which she assured me would be easy.

“Don’t be intimidated by the roux,” she said.

Roux? That’s some old-school New Orleans shit. Real cooks fuck with roux. I was starting to get scared. But I went to the store to get the ingredients anyway. I was going to push through this. There were going to be a lot of people very happy to judge me at the picnic. I was determined to blow their minds with my mac and cheese.

I had to buy basics, like flour, and salt and pepper. I thought food already came with all that stuff included. What the hell?

We went home, laden with foodstuffs, and I set to work. Mia patted me on the shoulder. “Congratulations, Dad, you’re actually going to finally cook something after talking about it my whole life!” Then she retreated to her room, well out of the blast zone.

The recipe told me it would take me ten minutes to prepare. It took me more like twenty-five, and things did not go according to plan all the time, but it got done. The resulting batch was enough to feed two hungry people. Not enough — at all — for a potluck.

So we made an emergency call to my mother and she promised to make her tater tot hotdish the next day. She did, there was plenty of it, and people devoured it. A culinary success.

I am, however, heartened by my first real kitchen experiment. I made a roux. I used pots. There was some flour involved in there somewhere. The end result both looked and tasted like macaroni and cheese. This first minor success has encouraged me to try cooking more often.

Fire, knives, and Tabasco sauce … what could possibly go wrong?

Brit Mandelo reviewed Naked City over at Tor.com, coming down decidedly in its favor. She highlights a few stories, one of which is “The Way Station”:

“Nathan Ballingrud’s “The Way Station” is another story of the sort I’ve come to expect from him: emotionally intense, riveting, and deeply upsetting in many ways. It deals with loss, with the aftereffects of Katrina on a homeless alcoholic who’s haunted by the city itself before the flood, and in doing so it’s wrenching. The strangeness of the haunting—city streets in his chest, floodwater pouring from his body—creates a surreal air, but the harsh reality of the world the protagonist lives in anchors that potential for the surreal into something more solid and believable. It’s an excellent story that paints a riveting portrait of a man, his city, and his loss.”

Dave, at Hellnotes, has this to say:

“An expert example of embracing the theme of the collection, is “The Way Station” by Nathan Ballingrud. Alternating between the cities of St. Petersburg, Florida, and New Orleans, Ballingrud looks to the latter as ghostly inspiration. Beltrane is a former inhabitant of that tortured city, and literally carries its woes within him. Now haunted and homeless in Florida, the disenfranchised African American remains at loony loose ends. The reality of his world is allegorical and ambiguous: “A small city has sprouted from the ground in the night, where he’d been sleeping, surrounded by blowing detritus and stagnant filth. It spreads across the puddle-strewn pavement and grows up the side of the wall, twinkling in the deep blue hours of the morning, like some gorgeous fungus, awash in a blustery evening rain. It exudes a sweet, necrotic stink. He’s transfixed by it, and the distant wails he hears rising from it are a brutal, beautiful lullaby.” Tinged with poignant pathos, “The Way Station” exemplifies the lingering horrors of the souvenirs of loss.”

Thanks, Brit. Thanks, Dave.

I’ll be going to get Mia on Sunday, and life will be back to normal here. I can’t wait. She’ll have a full month before sixth grade begins, so there will be plenty of time for end-of-summer activities, like white water rafting and blueberry picking. While in Alabama she got a mild case of what might be poison oak. When I asked her how the itching was, she said, “It’s doing its job.”

Damn I miss my kid.

Last weekend Jeff and Ann VanderMeer were in town for a Steampunk Bible/Thackery T. Lambshead event at Malaprop’s Bookstore. I hadn’t seen them in a couple of years, so it was nice to spend the evening with them. I’d forgotten how much fun they are to talk to. It was a very cathartic and welcome experience. We went to the Battery Park Champagne Bar and Book Exchange the night before the event, which is one of my favorite places in the city, and had champagne cocktails.

It’s possible that I’ll be going to World Fantasy this year, and sharing a room with Lucius Shepard and Bob Kruger. As with all things, it depends on money, but this looks pretty doable.

And the writing continues apace. Revisions are nearly done on the last short story before submitting the collection (behind schedule, but what else is new?), and the novel is still in progress.

Life barrels on.