You cannot look at any of it—the latest Russia investigation, the current climate, the climate overheating, the overheating economy, the job, the losses, the state, the flux—and suppose your matter settled, chaos being, phonetically, what Russians call your home. In fact, I can. You’d like to see your Beatles back together in the USSR, but you’re in more of a Stones mood, long since having painted black the sails in which you want the unwary to see the white sails of rescue. I would. I do. Even in a speech so lovingly rigged, you’re the first person you do not trust not to ship yourself to other shores. Not so long as they’re yours. You cannot be your own mutineer, echo of old music over water, the echo of water as it reaches land. I am.

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Against Idleness

for Jerry Costanzo

Jot down tomorrow’s to-dos and don’ts. Pick up excess kids. Lay suppressing fire for months. Take cover without lids. Return the wrecking fun, playing serious or not. Gifteth thou a coupling. Let the others rot. Take care of all the witnesses, then calibrate your score. Ask the tower what your twenty is and ask for twenty more. Clean out all your eyes and ears with dictation from the birds. Reconsider all your clothes. Murder all the words.

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Before sleep, after enough light has passed for proper reflection, I give thanks to the downpour that melded the pages of my Biblia pauperum and taught me traditional medicine. If only I knew where to find some jute in this flood. The trickling chimney, the dripping faucet, the mysterious eye-shaped wound on my arm that weeps like it has been watching me since the virus came for my father: each is keeping its own time. The crickets singing the morning rain to return do not know how things pass or that they are surrounded by tiny arsonists in the hayloft, but who are we to judge? We who have been caught repeatedly donning the uniform of once-and-future rebellion? After sleep, before I think of riding from station to station, the morning feels like sliding into subtropical waters, or like slipping into dry sheets after a day of refusing to leave the sea. The ordinary and the exception have conspired to recalibrate what it means for me to be in this skin. To remind me again that a half-life is a measure of time, yes, but only as it pertains to the decay of something precious or dangerous or both.

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It was the long of times, it was the nice of times. Feelings were just facts, one of my best therapists had insisted, like the weather. Did I say that right? That feelings are facts, facts are like weather, weather insists. Today, the facts are awful, and the weather outside our fuselage is as insistent and cruel as vaulted interiors, magnificent cathedrals, atrium lobbies, or flying to someone who has never been afraid. Forget our desire for Romantic self-annihilation, communion with the sublime, alpinism. If you’ve never been even a little bit electrocuted, at least you’ve seen it in every American movie set in Iraq, muscles rigid, eyes bulging, breath arrested, organs screaming like tin. I was afraid of flying over Greenland again, seeing snow, shadow, and cloud merge with their future, mountains with their present. Time, the opposite of now, as our now is running out. Those who prefer the window seat are saddled with misfortune, my son reassures me, like winning a lottery. Have faith in the autocorrect, my wife would add. Whatever happens, my mother might have said, it will all be over soon.

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After a night of bare sleep, the mountains work themselves into a thunderstorm I can really snore to. It’s different here than downbeach, the shore more familiar to me, even now, dozens of years since I left, yet still counting the rhythm of my life, its regular pulse, like the heartbeat of Voyager 2, only noticed when it goes silent, though that’s egotism, too: here, on this planet, we’re the ones tilting things from center, we’re the ones who will have to move to reestablish the signal. The will is not always there. The rumbling rounds the mountains’ bowls and cuts, insinuates itself into the constancy of the brook, the rain, the more occasional car crawling down the gravel of our up-down road (not really ours, nothing ever is, but we pretend), the pouring of the gravel all week by an admirable trio of men who have been rebuilding the road by hand, measuring, digging, laying the curbstone, measuring again, indifferent to downpour and clarity, but not today. (Shabbat.) Time to leave. All morning the nuns have been carrying their luggage down from the guesthouse opposite, almost indifferently, showing me how it’s done. Truly, there is no such thing as unskilled labor.