where there's smoke, there's clementine

I tossed the peelings into the sink and turned the disposal on. I am not enamored of such devices. Is it because the one we had in The Projects broke? Didn't it break so often we gave up on having them repair it? Did its guttural grind scare me? As the disposal was gargling the skin of the clementine, I thought I saw a cloud of smoke puff up from the bottom of the sink hole to the right of the disposal. Smoke? Uh-oh. The next day, I kept an eye out for smoke. As I was uncurling my clementine at breakfast, I spotted -- and smelled -- a sudden burst of citrus spray escaping from the tender fruit.

Mystery solved. Mystery epiphanied.

Where there's smoke, there's not fire. Not necessarily.

And the day after that, steam uncurling heavenward from my hot tea with half and half no sugar. Swirling skyward. As if a genie were about to appear and offer to grant me wishes.

Wishes already granted.

Because in seventy years I had never seen my breakfast tea in quite that light.

Vaticanated Mystery

You know how colors in the modern world are adorned with evocative, picturesque, poetic names? I wish I had that job, naming colors. Take yellow. Bumblebee lemon banana peach corn cream Tuscan sun butterscotch canary gold daffodil mustard dandelion pineapple blond(e) trombone eggnog flaxen. And so on. Hold that thought. I exited my building from the side door by the stairway between the first and second floors. I walked up a small set of stairs to ground level, to traverse a snow-covered sidewalk. The snow had both melted and been packed down. I turned left, the roadway to my right, and spied yellow somethings littering the snowscape. I had seen these a day or two earlier and did not pay them much mind. This time I stopped and picked up one of these adornments. Who put them there. What are they, these yellow dispatches from elsewhere. How did they get to their seemingly random positions in the snow. They looked like peelings, of paper or plastic. Picking one up, I concluded it was a paint chip. A morsel of yellow paint, separated from the object it had adhered to. I stopped. Turned around. From whence I just walked, near the building, I saw half a dozen yellow bollards that surrounded and protected a utilities box. The yellow bollards alert drivers and prevent an accidental crash into the electrical utilities, causing danger and mayhem. However, the bollards were not quite yellow, not uniformly. Bits of yellow paint had flaked off, exposing steel-gray. Hence, the paint chips in the snow. Or so it seems, lacking more or better evidence. A mystery lingers: how did the yellow paint chips become airborne and land on the snowy sidewalk and adjoining landscape. Wind. Hard to believe. Even a fierce wind. Wouldn't other damage be evident. Placed by human hands. Doubtful. Who would go through the trouble. Ever see the flag of the city-state called Vatican City. Yellow and white bands. This sheds absolutely no light on answers to the aforementioned questions about the paint chips. (I could be wrong. Maybe plastic shavings, not paint. Perhaps enamel or some sort of coating, clearly not weather-resistant, or the bollards would not exhibit exposed portions as if zoo lions or tigers were using the bollards as scratching posts.) New colors: bollard vaticanate sneeze pee popcorn kernel caramelite bunion callous fartish strawstrewn toothstained maltanned sweated toasted oolong dentured custard flame sunsplashed parchment nicotined diapered lamped earwax caution amberesque . . . 
 

curvilinear urban legend beauty

You venture out to retrieve the black plastic empty trash can and the blue bin for recyclables, peering at your car and, as you typically do, surveying for slashed tires or a window broken and beaded from last night's anonymous mayhem. On the road surface (a road paved merely months ago), you spy an imprint of white paint that nearly outlines your car, a 2007 VW Rabbit, 111,000 miles, the way the police delineate chalk lines where a dead body formerly sprawled, in its last restless resting place. You look left and see where the paint seemingly originated, several houses south, on Avery Avenue, where a resident likely deposited it, improperly, in last night's trash. This "waste management" accident paints a brushstroke of curvilinear whimsy and beauty. (Curvilinear strikes this observer as an especially feminine word, owing to female curvature merged with sweeping linearity as opposed to male angularity and polarity.) The alabaster alphabet consisting of one long L with hints of an S at the end is punctuated with accidental or purposeful blockprints from someone's steps, or else owing to the fruits of a performance or avant-garde visual artist who has staged this elaborate design, which trails off into the intersection with Chemung Street, toward the final feet of the old West End of Syracuse. And later in the day, and in the remains of subsequent days, you see vestiges of more curvilinearity: the palimpsest of the dawn street sweepers, meandering against curbs and around parked cars, reciting a visual poetry of fading hieroglyphics.

creating coincidence

You walk the path you trod, the air colder and the sky brighter. You go to this or that music, food, or lecture venue, this time alone. You tell yourself timing is critical. You picture the "coincidental" rendezvous, its texture, complexion, the reactions, the heartbeats. But you discover you cannot create coincidence, can you. It's not so shocking or surprising a revelation. The bigger and more cogent epiphany, however, is that you are content with the absence of so-called coincidence as you traverse your world, step by vigilant step.

questions for a new year

Is it a year of the rat?
Or of the hat?
Maybe the sloth, the lemur, or axolotl?
When is the lunar new year?
How about the solar?
Or the plexus?
Where will I be a year from now, days after Epiphany?
Will I *be*?
Won't I *be* a "someone else" in any event, no matter what?
What epiphanies await me this year?
This day, this second?
And am I ready for them?
And does it matter, ready or not?

The Subjunctive of Epiphany Eve

Were the subjunctive to speak
I doubt that
Would they
If molecular biology
Were kings to fly
Or stars to speak
Contingent desire
Breathy
Breathless
Is more
Is just plain everything
As in this daily epiphany
The bread (crumbs) of life
Ordinary
As my my morning toast
Luscious in butter
And tea
For too
Too much

An Early Merry Christmas to You, Too

In my office, not the Holy Office (HAHAHAHAHA, inside joke for Roman Catholics or, um, especially Inquisitive folks), in back of my HP printer, and near the window, is a manger inhabited, so to speak, with little statues of Joseph, Mary, Baby Jesus, the Three Magi, a shepherd boy with a lamb around his neck, and a donkey. Straw on top of the roof; an angel with "Gloria" on a cloth at the entrance above the manger. On top of the roof rests a metal garland holding Advent candles, unlit, three purple and one pink.

This arrangement has not made its way to the attic, yet, from last Christmas. That's my only explanation. [The photo is not accurate in two respects: 1) no cameras were available back in those days -- REALLY?? 2) for illustrative purposes only; not an image from my office.]

What can I say?

If we get scorching temperatures (so far, we have not had a very warm late spring, thank you; fine with me), maybe a glance at a Christmas manger scene will cool things down mentally and spiritually.

Or perhaps, with the Three Wise Men huddling nearby, if I need an epiphany, sudden or otherwise, it's there if I am open to it.

Evanescent Epiphany

Burnet Park. Three vehicles roll down the hill. They stop, lined up as in a parade. Amber lights flashing atop the vehicles. Hard-hatted people emerge. Three Kings? Three Queens? Two Jacks and an Ace? They walk up to lightpoles. A polar eclipse? An elliptical polarity? They are fussing with extension cords. They are here to de-light the park of holyday hollyday holiday illuminations. I head home. I stop. I turn back, facing lightward, waiting for proof of my ruminative illuminative de-lighting delightful theory without recrimination. An epiphany in reverse, as it were, as it was, as it ever shall be. The dog tugs. The lights are still on. Homeward. Eponymous day night eve ever everyes.

The Sounds of Eve

It is nearly 9 p.m. A summery evening. Robins trading solitary, twirling chants. A cat yearning hungrily -- for what? Another cat. The voices of neighbor's children. Broken phrases. Competition medals hung near a bed clanging like wind chimes. A window fan, on the floor. The robins' songs diminish, slow, and then start up again, full-throated. The chair creaks. The tapping of keys. Tires distant on pavement. A slight rumbling in the stomach. A cleansing breath. The slam of a neighbor's falling screen.

Never, anywhere, in any form, will this moment be precisely echoed.

The ephemera of an evening turning into night. In May, a Monday.

It is now. It is here.

And as you read this, it is gone.

Lights Alive

Entering Burnet Park, at the top of Syracuse's Tipperary Hill, I noticed the presence of absence.

Missing were the strings of festive amberish-whitish lights draping several mature trees. More accurately, on closer inspection, many of these strings of lights remained on the trees but were unplugged, unlit. To paraphrase Hemingway, a clean, unlighted place. Darker, moodier in the night wind.

Higher up the winding drive, gone was the banner of lights, high up between two tall trees, announcing HAPPY HOLIDAYS, demurely (or cowardly) declining to declare exactly which holidays, as if the secular gods would gripe about the explicit nomenclature of the God-incarnate In Nomine Patris feast.

Some lights still shone.

Within the gates of the pool, an image of a toy train illuminated the space between two lifeguard stations, tall seats, sentinels overlooking a white and snowless empty pool, bereft of the excited jeering and obscenity and glee (mostly in Spanish) of its frolicking residents.

Back near the zoo, some trees or streetlights had, what?, snowmen or holly or candy canes brightly shining.

Sirens in the distance got the coyotes or wolves stirred up at the zoo, singing their own eerie siren songs.

In the distance, downtown, the Niagara Mohawk building (I'll never call it the NationalGrid building) and M&T Bank were wrapped in lights of green.

Spotting a skateboarder, with shorts on, passing me, I circled back to monitor him, wondering if that was a spray can in his hand.

Did he paint the now-gone LIFE graffito?

The echoes of his skateboard antics forced me to conclude, no, for now, he was too busy just skating along, skimming the surface, riding the landward wave.

A Sentence of Holy Smokes

En route to my car on the fourth level of the garage at midday, I am arrested by a vision of reality across Montgomery Street: powdery pockets of snow sliding down the emerald patina of the copper roof of St. Paul's Cathedral, accumulating just enough weight at angled wedges to glide downward in a puff of alabaster swirling smoke, eddies of epiphany that pour down, then pop, then dissipate in a gust, only to do it again, and again, surrounded by a curtain of endless flakes.

Hello, I Must Be Going

Ain't going nowhere but here.

The title is stolen from The Incredible String Band, or "The Stringies," as some of us called them, back in the day, the "day" being 1967, the year that The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album came out. That year, people in the U.K. selected 5000 Spirits or The Layers of the Onion by The Incredible String Band as album of the year, if memory serves me well (and, really, does memory ever serve any of us faithfully, Monsieur Proust?). The weekend of Woodstock I saw ISB at a folk festival in NYC, along with Odetta, Tim Hardin, and others.

Hello. Goodbye.

Surrender to Win.

Lose to Gain.

"Come in we're closed."

Our paradoxes are our epiphanies, if we but see the signs before us.

The sign above was seen in a doorway of a closed bookstore, last Sunday, in Geneseo, New York, just after our trip to Letchworth State Park, "Grand Canyon of the East."