American Idyll: Post 1,000

{photographs are from the american idyll blog, property of TW and ruuscal}



Congratulations to TW (and sidekick ruuscal) on the publication of the 1000th post over at American Idyll.

I remember my first visit -- that would have been in the wee hours of 4 January 2008, about 12 hours after receiving my first ever email from this talented Brother-Unit of mine. I had only recently learned he was still alive and had inundated him with pesky overtures.

I followed my heart and, despite the steady silence, sent a copy of the "new" Oppen collected works as a Christmas gift, thinking that the poet's own gift with words (and silence, too) might speak a better language.

a substantial language / Of clarity, and of respect

It was a very blue time.

I had sent off to him a final email and was kicking myself for it -- too long and too clingy, it had ended:

Make of all this what you will, but please believe me -- I have never been allowed any knowledge of you, except that which my memory guards, and I bring to you no agenda or pre-conceptions. I would prefer not to be the foil for the anger you bear toward some notion of a collective "family" -- but if I need to play that role, I'll give it my best shot.

I wish... so many things. That I could touch your face. That all of this massive stupidity and meanness had never happened.

So it was with exceeding joy -- that has not finished with me yet -- that I found this among the detritus of my inbox late in the day, Thursday, January 3 :

dear x -

thank you for the very generous and most appreciated gift of the poetry, your xmas card and emails. it has taken me longer than my usual tardy brooding tendency toward mute unresponsiveness to answer at all due to a recently broken shoulder, a loathing of christmas in general and a too-slammed-to-do-anything-but-try-to-survive workload of helping to keep an understaffed sportsbook afloat during college football bowl season.

plus, as you may surmise from the breezy fashion with which [one of our unfortunate relatives who had attempted to thwart our reunion] feels so free to reduce someone about whom she knows so little into a bite-size caricature, i am not one for busybody blabbermouths in general, and neither care to be anyone's project nor consider that there is any fold which i am longing to be brought back into à la the long lost lamb. (no prize find for some oprah/dr. phil instigated genealogical scavenger hunt moi)

but you seem very likeable. just enough snark and darkside to make me think we may just get along. at any rate, by way of new year's greetings i forward a link to one of my tiresome blogs in the hope that an amateur's photos celebrating grand canyon backcountry may assuage some of the insomniac wanderlust that is sure to afflict a cerebral soul confined to a wheelchair: american idyll.

more soon,
tw (haven't been called xxxxxx in 35 years)

Honest to God, I had no recollection of the Dr. Phil/Oprah reference, but isn't that timely?!

I had -- in the dead of winter -- made wonderful gazpacho that afternoon and Fred and I had fought before he went off -- purportedly, to run errands, but probably just to get away. The details of the fight escape me, but I recall it having stemmed, in large part, from my sad and poorly controlled frustration at not having heard any word from Tumbleweed.

You know, I think the spat involved whether or not we needed a new model PUR water filter. Why do I remember that and not how the green of his shirt set off his hazel eyes?

When Fred came home, I was awash in happy tears. We rejoiced together and I was so overwhelmed and exhausted that I decided to put off checking out my brother's blog. *One* of his blogs.

But I couldn't sleep that night, couldn't rest. In the dark, I pulled my laptop into bed and fumbled until I found the link to American Idyll.

Word and image! ut pictura poesis! You'll not be surprised to learn that my graduate work was organized around the excessively cute dialectic of "lutte" pictura poesis. So how perfect and what a testiment to the Nature::Nurture struggle was the sight of his powerful photography and the sound of his chosen texts.

He was right, of course, and American Idyll has assuaged considerable wanderlust and has served to defy both physical and mental limitations.

It's a place for mindful meditation and the occasional romp in the water...

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun’s going down


whose secret we see in a
children’s game
of ring a round of roses told.


Often I am
permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,


that is a place of first
permission,
everlasting omen of what is.