The house I grew up in was built in 1810 by a retired sea captain from Newburyport, Massachusetts. People were always surprised that a man who had spent his life at sea would retire to the dry hills of southern New Hampshire. Those people had never looked out at the south field on a windy day to see waves upon waves of tall grass rolling away toward the trees. They didn't know that at night the sky was dark and wide, as over a small sea.

We didn't know much about the captain or his family. But my brother and I found a tube of brittle, yellowing nautical charts in the attic one summer, and after that we imagined a lot about him and a lot about the sea. The charts were beautiful and complex, with tiny numbers and shapes like constellations drawn around them. I didn't know how to read the charts, but their usefulness didn't depend on my knowing; they were heavy with purpose in my hands. Sitting on the roof of a dilapidated chicken coop, my brother and I would imagine ourselves lost in some exotic sea with only a chart and compass to guide us. The thought of all that deep, watery mystery solved by the chart in our hands never got boring. We played that game for years after all the other games had stopped.

Eventually we left that house and left the charts with it. We moved to town and our parents built a new house. Once, in high school, I went back and asked the people living there for permission to walk the land. The chicken coop was still there, slumping a little more deeply into the ground. I walked through the south field and the woods at the edge of it to the old dump. Strewn over the rocky hillside were all kinds of rusted cans and mattress springs, broken chairs and bicycle wheels. That day I found a beautiful magnifying glass. The metal rim was rusted and the wooden handle split, but the glass was clear and miraculously intact. Instinctively, I brought the glass above my hand, examining the tiny lines. For the first time in a long time, I thought of the sea captain and wanted so much to see with his eyes. All the criss-crossing lines of me, stretching out in all directions, mapping out a life I could not see.

The Mythology of Bed

Our bloodlines go back much farther than we usually imagine. Most of us are thrilled to trace our lineage back three, four, five generations- days of migration, of doing without, of honest work. What we inherit is tangible: a homeland, a physiognomy, a name.

What has been passed down in my family has landed me in New England- a tall, lean body and hair that is prematurely graying. I have a large, fleshy nose and a taste for pungent foods. My sense of smell is acute, and I am a masterful sleeper.

Long ago, when my ancestors slept in trees, their busy bodies and watchful eyes would relax into sleep as they secured their places in high branches, large hands and feet gripping just enough. We need to sleep. In order to be alert enough to survive, we need to enter into states of complete release, controlled vulnerability. A bed makes us safe.

Our sleep deprivation is ancestral- mutates over time so that we are genetically predisposed toward bed. My ancestors were ever watchful. My ancestors were deeply tired. I sleep their thousand-year-old-sleep. I take a lot of naps.

He loved Iris

When Iris died

He wrote her a letter.

C.D. Wright

Iris appeared one night in August when there was heat-lightning along the horizon. The day had been so hot that the barn had begun releasing hundred year old scent. I'd spent the day processing firewood, a dissociative work of reason against nature. I didn't know that I was grieving, didn't know that grief can come without sadness. My grief was a cessation of my body's limits, felt free, felt like swimming underwater without needing breath. That summer I cut, hauled, split, and stacked sixteen cords of wood.

Sitting on the porch after dark, I thought that the house had always been lonely- not for people, but for the years that had filled it, aged it, and left it emptier. As a child, I'd wanted to step into the walls of smooth, undulating plaster, glide along the sloping floors into a time that seemed just out of reach. I would have said then that I wanted to travel back in time. Now I can say that I wanted to live the life of the house.

After my parents died, I felt a special kinship with the house, felt acutely the longing to be known as we can only be by those who have made us. I have lived in this house for most of my life, but there is so much yet that I don't see, because I don't know enough to see it. I am overwhelmed by losses I cannot quantify.

When Iris came, I was used to being alone with the company of a swinging door and a humming light. Iris startled me with movement and intimacy. And then she was gone.

The Ritual of Skinned Knees

1.)  Pedal hard, the ferns and moss a green streak alongside the road. 

2.) Pedal on the down slope, even, as your heart rises up into your throat.

3.) Allow the wheels of your bicycle to catch on the sand-filled split in the pavement.

4.) Notice how time slows down and the world is absolutely quiet as you fall to the ground, your hands and knees hitting the road.

5.) Now hear your heart as it flies out of your mouth, a yell or a cry or a curse.

6.) Feel the skin of your knees roll away, sand crushing in, the burning of it.

7.) Blow cool air over the red patches. Sit very still while you do this.

8.) Hate your bicycle for a little while, hate the split in the pavement, hate everything until you don't anymore.

9.) Leave your bike lying on the side of the road- no one drives by your house anyway. Go back to the house for a band-aid. You can come back later to get your bike.

The Book of Change

Outside the double window of my purple childhood room there was a great open field bound by evergreens. Behind the trees, hills. And behind those, the modest mountains of southern New Hampshire. Nights passed with blinking red lights in the distance marking elevation, marking the flight paths of airplanes, marking my breath and sleep.

I still have dreams about the barns that stood near the house on Perry Road. One was wide open and wooden, full of hay warm from its own sweet rot. A hay barn is clean because it only has one purpose, contains only one thing. I didn't know the people who came to hay the fields. I'd see them in the summer, small against the evening sky, slinging hay bails onto the flat-bed pulled by a tractor round and around until it was night. After that, the barn would be full and golden, the field blunt and sharp where the hay had been.

The other barn was massive and dark, covered in tar paper, cracks stuck with bits of rubber and rope. I'd walk through stalls upon stalls of unrecognizable hardware and brittle tack- air as old as the things in there, always cooling, always falling to the floor. The hay barn was more comfortable, but I liked this darker, danker barn more.

I cried on the last night I slept in the house on Perry road. The moving truck was loaded and my mattress was on the floor, the only thing left in my empty room. Looking out the double window into the night, I could feel the field, feel the trees around it, feel the bulk of two barns that hadn't changed much in a hundred years.

What's Anti Anyway?

Forrest is learning about the world through his toys, which are a mix of legos and transformers and bionicles. He built something out of all three that was a scary skeleton-horse, and my step-mom said, "Is that your anti-pegasus?" Forrest responded in the derisive tone he uses when you know something he doesn't, "What's an anti-pegasus anyway?" "Well," my step-mom said wandering into the kitchen to make peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches, "Anti means opposite. So if a pegasus is a good horse, an anti-pegasus is a bad horse. If matter means something is something, then anti-matter means it's nothing." Forrest looked toward the kitchen where her voice was coming from with a blank expression. Later, when I was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a white russian, Forrest came over and put something tiny in my hand. I looked at what was the cutest lego creation I've ever seen, a single unit grey lego with a little white skeleton lego head of the same size stuck on top. "That's an anti-mouse," says Forrest very seriously. "Thanks, Forrest, " I say, and kiss him while I burst inside.

"When you organize one of the contradictory elements out of your work of art, you are getting rid not just of it, but of the contradiction of which it was a part; and it is the contradictions in works of art which make them able to represent us- as logical and methodical generalizations cannot- our world and ourselves, which are so full of contradictions." Randall Jarrell

Alice worked out at the gym, did hot yoga, cooked from scratch, rode a bicycle everywhere, grew tomatoes in a little pot on her kitchen windowsill, and worked for a non-profit. In addition to all this, she tried to cultivate healthy relationships. The only thing that didn’t fit was her smoking cigarettes. Her sister argued that this was the obvious reason to stop. “It’s just not you,” she would say. But it seemed to me that this was a very good reason for her to continue smoking- that last habituated trace of her life in New Jersey where she also wore gold jewelry and red lingerie. Otherwise, she would be too cohesive- and when are we ever cohesive unless we are also contrived? Smoking kept her authentic. If she didn’t occasionally smoke, wouldn’t she be like all the other people with eco-sneakers and Sigg bottles; vegetarians (except for fish), avid recyclers, buy-localers?

Well, she did quit smoking. And I think that, more than my moving across the bridge, more than petty jealousies and leonine competition, is to blame for our friendship falling off. I mean, who wants to be friends with an identity?