“These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.
The dog says,…
Mark Helprin
Dear Devin,
The other day I was at the driving range, setting up four
golf balls in a row, then speed hitting them, not even thinking,
just whacking one after another, and this made me think of you
and the rounds we used to play during the last call for tee off
when the sun was low and our drives would get lost in the horizon.
Only yours landed anywhere near the green. Mine were always
bouncing into the rough, sometimes even further than that.
I don’t have any new stories to send you. I haven’t written a word
in weeks. Isn’t that sad? I’ve been getting along with this girl,
but I don’t think it’ll last. If I can’t even write a story, how could
I possibly love a girl longer than a month or so? We write as
we live. Tolstoy had as many children as his novels had characters.
Raymond Carver only had one facial expression. Isn’t that sad?
Don’t you see how sad that is? I am an on-a-whim kind of writer.
A cocktail napkin poet. I’ll never finish a novel, so I’ll never have
a marriage that lasts. I am the kind of writer who never checks
his grammar, so I’ll be stuck always losing my car keys, leaving
my fly undone, walking around with my shoes untied, with my
phone battery dead. I wish it weren’t so. If I could write any way
I wanted, I’d write like your golf swing. That classic, easy approach.
I don’t think you’ve ever paid close attention to the way you swing
a golf club. The wood falls like a pendulum and the ball doesn’t know
what hit it. Its suddenly soaring, lifted, carried, out through the wind.
Not me. No, my good hits are few and far between. They come at random
and I can never retrace my steps to see what I did right, or what I
did wrong. I just close my eyes, say a prayer, and swing. Most of the time
my ball bounces off the fairway. Most of the time I shoot from the rough.
But if I could be like anything, I’d be like your swing. I’d let my pen
be a golf club, the blank white paper a white ball, and my knotted
desk a tee sticking out of the Earth. But that won’t happen. No,
most of the time, when I can’t write a single sentence, when I catch
myself staring at the blank computer screen in front of me, I’m half
convinced that I am still stuck out at some golf course we played,
long after sun down, fishing through rock and rubble with my club,
looking for my goddamned ball.
Sincerely,
with love and friendship and envy,
-D. K.
The best covers are hardly covers at all.
(Source: natashakane, via confessyour)
Rosie Thomas-Where Were You?
Probably the best choice I made at this year’s Record Store Day excursion.
Inside my heart you make yourself at home
taking off your shoes, lying across
red velvet couches, using generic floss
to clean organ stained teeth, while phoning
long distance friends in Wales, in monotone
voices you talk of Christmas, when snow was tossed
from lowly clouds. How you are no longer lost
walking around naked, singing songs alone
in ventricles and arteries, clogged with old
newspapers. Sometimes a friend will ask after
me, but I haven’t been home in weeks. Not
since you changed the wallpaper and cleaned the mold
Not since you changed the beat of my laughter
to stressed, stressed, unstressed. To love, then love, then not.
