Peter Yovu


Asphalt

My whole body aches. A dull, distant ache, but an ache all the same.

A road goes by my house. At this hour here’s an almost constant hiss of tires turning at great speed pressed down by thousands of pounds of carweight against the asphalt. I am reasonably certain one could travel, on foot, by car, bicycle, scooter . . . from here, Vermont, from twenty feet beyond my door, to California or even Alaska and never lose contact with the asphalt.

Maybe the distant ache is really the ache of the asphalt itself. Millions of tons of car truck van bus bicycle pressing down on it constantly. Maybe an angel has been assigned to me, her angelic bodytissue like a sky inside me that registers what I am feeling. Her job is to regulate me, absorb some of my pain, but maybe she is also an angel of asphalt, maybe angels have to multitask these days, (especially if it’s as hard to get by financially in the angelic realms as it is here), maybe she can no longer keep the weight of so much asphalt, so many cars and buses pressing down on it, from affecting her, her tissue, her skin, is hurting, and maybe I am so sensitive now that I can feel her pain, as if she really exists. It feels awful. It makes me want to run, go on a road trip, but knowing what I know, how could I do that to her? I think I’ll just take her for a walk in the woods, away from the paved roads and the sound of traffic, ask her to remember the time when these woods stretched across the continent without a break . . .



My friend

suggested some poems to me. They’re pretty easy going poems, but not simple. I don’t think my own poems are easy going. Sometimes you hear a grandmother say that the secret ingredient in her bread is love. I suppose some grandmothers are thinking of their grandchildren while they are kneading the dough and the love comes through their knuckles and fingers and palms.

There are poems that have the word “yes” silently kneaded into them. I think a lot of easy going poems are like that. Not all, of course, but some.

Reading them is like going for a walk in the woods. It occurs to you that the woods are beautiful though you don’t get stuck on the thought. You’re just there, walking, not thinking about anything, not wanting to be somewhere else. You see an animal you’ve never seen before, a pine marten, say, and it seems like a blessing. Or just ahead on the path you see a very young child. You don’t think at first where’s his mother, where’s his father, you’re just delighted to see a child in the woods and only a little later, a fraction of second later, you get a bit worried until around the curve of the path you see the child’s parents, they catch up to the child, they walk by, you put your hand on the child’s head as she passes, it feels like a blessing, and you continue your walk.



What I like

about this place is that here, there are so many things to say. Where I come from (never mind, you wouldn’t know the place) there are things, many many things, but not one of them can be said.

Here I can say the quetzal sings, though I don’t know for sure if it does..

In that other place, where I come from, if I say the quetzal sings . . . but no, there’s no if about it. it has never been said there. it cannot be said and never will be said.

There are things there that never enter the mind. The mind is one of them.

I can say that here, that’s what I like about this place. And that’s what makes it hard to know one day I will have to go back.



The Root

I was walking in some dense woods, where you could trip over things if you’re not careful, if your attention is on the tree tops, or the light streaming down between trees, or through leaves. Best to stop walking if you wish to do that.

But I was walking, and looking at the ground, and there, under a particularly large pine, an exposed root looped out of the earth. I stopped. In fact, it seemed as though the whole world had stopped, and might at any moment tumble out of its orbit. I had to shake that thought out of my head.

But there was this strange root. It looked like the handle of an otherwise buried suitcase, very smooth, the rough bark worn off as if it had been handled many times. But handled by whom or what? The idea was ridiculous, and in that mood I bent down and took it in my hand, as a child might just to feel the root, which seemed to invite such behavior.

I gave it a tug. Maybe I would lift a suitcase free, maybe it would be full of earthly treasures. So, bent over with the root in hand, I tried to stand. And I did stand, with the root still in my grasp. Apparently I had raised the earth, with me on it. Ridiculous, just a trick of the imagination in those shadowy woods. And yet . . .

What might happen if I let go? I could not take the chance. So I continued my walk, the earth and all its contents, all its inhabitants and me among them, in hand, all of us, turning, turning as must be, in orbit around the sun.

And so I go on. It’s a tremendous responsibility. Oh, if I only I could stop for just one minute, to look up at the sky, to see the sunlight playing in the canopy above me, to see a few stars in the gaps between leaves.



A Prediction

I don’t remember the name of the cemetery, probably Mountain View or something like that. There was one headstone which featured, in a glass-fronted case embedded in the stone, a photograph of the one buried below, taken when he was young, years before his death.

One day, headstones will be replaced by devices whose screens will stream videos from different periods of the dead one’s life, downloaded from the Cloud.

Some will take days, maybe weeks to watch, if the dead one had lived a long life, and an interesting one.

There will be cemeteries with hundreds of such memorials— like rows of television sets on display in an electronics store— each with its own channel dedicated to one who passed over . . .

Solar powered, they will go off around midnight. But some few, with no living soul present to watch, will come back on, the flat faces of the dead shining at 2 A.M., looking out toward the moonlit hills with such longing . . .



The Sandbox

When he was a child there was a large playground nearby— seesaws, monkey bars, swings. And a sand box, which interested him the most. But there were always other kids there, picking up his dinosaurs, destroying his dunes . . . Nothing he could do about it.

It happened at work too, when he was older. Whispers from other cubicles. There was nothing he could do about it.

Later, when there was something he could do about it, he went to live on a desert island. It was his own private sandbox. But at night the few trees that were there loomed over him like big kids, dropping coconuts. Wind whispering through the fronds.

He moved into a cave. It was good to be alone finally and he wanted to celebrate by writing about it.

He opened his notebook and began:

I’m writing this for myself.

He paused, looked it over, and thought: I am writing. My self is reading.

It was beginning to get crowded in there.



Dear

Mongoose, Dear Noodle, Dear Number 7, Dear Radiator, Dear Fascination, Dear Exit and Eels (Moray and Electric), Dear Everything:

Forgive me for not writing to you individually. And I hope the many millions of you named and unnamed whom I am lumping together as Everything but addressing nonetheless will forgive me too. After all, we are supposed to be, deep down, All One, are we not?

Admittedly (you know how I try to be honest) you are not all equally dear to me, Dear Things, except on very very good days, when Radiator, you don’t annoy me, or Eel, you don’t creep me out. Etc. Today is not one of those days, so forgive me for that as well.

Anyway, how are you? Well, I hope, though surely there are varieties of well. Noodle I am sure what is well for you must be described differently from what is well for Exit. That’s the way of Things, isn’t it?

What have you been up to? Silly question, because I fully realize that what you do is what you are, which is your only and unchanging response.

Which brings me to something else I must admit: what I do and what I am change all the time which is why, when I write these letters to you, I do not include myself, I do not add “Dear Me”, which apart from being selfish would also be wrong, as I do not yet feel I belong in your company, Dear Ones, except on very very good days, when I have that old faith that says we are all one, and all well, and all draw from the same well deep deep within.

But not today. Today I am lonely. Oh how I wish you could answer me.



Peter Yovu lives near Montpelier, Vermont, which recently was under several feet of water.

 
 

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