Musing Aloud

Leftovers On Toast is the working title for a memoir I seem to be writing. Twenty years ago I wrote a small book of poems using a tape recorder. I was living alone in the desert. I drove endlessly through Paradox, with all windows down and the hot air swirling like a nightmare. A small voice-activated recorder, and I'd devised a cradle for it on the steering column. I had to talk loudly, because of the wind noise, and there's a deeply desperate quality to the sound. I was remembering a particular event, a clam bake on Cape Cod, on a private beach, an assemblage of theater folk, and had the thought that I could more easily record those 3 AM moments of apparent lucidity than keyboard them, because I'm such a terrible typist. But then I remembered how dreary transcription actually was. Still I might try it, just to hear the rhythms. I was working recently, that 3 AM shift, not knowing if I was beginning or ending something, and I enjoyed reading a paragraph out loud. I changed a few small things, because they missed the beat. Hearing the voice is so critical. There's a moment, reading a poet (manifest in hearing one), that you actually hear the voice. From then on, the reading is easier; prose, of course, also, Proust, Faulkner, McCarthy. When I can hear a voice, I'm transported out of myself. The leftover mushroom dish was fantastic for breakfast, morels and cheese on toast, with a fried egg on top. I would only ever feed this to someone who was going to die anyway. I'm running low on butter and I just bought some. A great day in the woods. Found a dried wood-ear mushroom that would be large enough to make a soap shelf in a shower. I've done a couple of these and they're real crowd pleasers: flatten the back, hollow the top, and plaster it into place. It looks like it grew there. And I found a new patch of morels before the turkeys got to them. The down side is that I harvest them young, they'd be twice as large tomorrow, but I know those goddamn turkeys will find them. When I got back to the house there was a vehicle, a late model small 4-wheel drive pick-up, and an older couple looking for the graveyard. They were polite, as you might expect, when I emerged from the woods. I looked a bit frightening, but they held their ground. Rufus (I swear to god) and Betty Blevins, looking to see where some distant kin was buried. I asked them in and fixed tea. They were somewhat intimidated by my house and the ten thousand books, but we had a nice cup of tea, then I donned leather gloves, picked up some clippers, and took them out to the cemetery. They actually knew who a few of the people were, distant great-uncles, and at one point Betty said, pointing to an infant grave, that it was her great-grandmother's sister. Walking out, Rufus said he thought it was strange that I'd own the family plot, talked to me about the church that used to be down on the Rocky Fork side. Corn, he said, in all the bottoms; it was, he said, a corn economy. I was happy to be shed of them but it was an interesting diversion. I'd been thinking about waves all day, now that I could see the wind stirring tender young leaves, the invisible made visible; oh, right, the wind, now I see it. The news of the day, another hundred thousand seeking asylum, 500 dead in a capsized barge, a bomb going off somewhere; and it is clearly avoidance, that I choose hunting morels rather than considering whether Ted or Donald is the better candidate.