There are certain moments when everything is clear.
Sitting on my front porch on an August morning, I watch the breeze gently sway the branches of the acacia tree in the yard, my neighbor’s cat stealthily weaves his way through the bushes as if I can’t see him, his big eyes frozen for a moment as he spots me before hurrying off. A squirrel is climbing up the gate to the side-yard to hop up on the pergola and mingle with the purple morning glories.
The young trees that came from new seeds dropped by an elder giant next door are getting tall now, reaching toward the roof of our house and shading the front window. A yellow bird stops and flaps his wings in the bath at the base of the trees, sprays water on the walkway, and a butterfly floats above the handful of remaining Mexican poppies, lands briefly and moves in slow motion as bees buzz harmlessly around its spot on a leaf.
People walk by the front gate on the way to yoga or coffee or the other way towards the park. Just as they do every day, a long trail of men from the halfway house in the old church march by laughing and talking loudly on their short journey to the park. Some wave at me, most don’t. After the parade, a teenage boy runs by and throws an empty can of soda in the bushes, the homeless camp in the alley next to the 7-Eleven is being rousted by the cops, and cars drive by blasting corridos, classic rock, hip hop, and AM talk radio chatter.
Then, there is a lull, a caesura in the din of street life. I close my eyes and listen to the birdsong coming from the trees in the yards along the block, the distant sound of an airplane, the wind blowing through leaves nearby and making the windchime next door vibrate in waves of spontaneous music.
When I open my eyes, a hummingbird is sitting on our feeder, rocking back and forth as it eagerly sips with its tiny beak. Its rival spots it and they whiz back and forth in the air, chittering away at each other until one of them retreats, leaving the other to return to its solitary perch and finish drinking.
Done for the moment, my red-breasted friend darts over to the acacia and hides on a branch, moving his head back and forth with a graceful intensity. Suddenly, I seem to see everything at once and each individual thing in its distinctness. The light comes through the trees in scattered glimpses making shadows dance on the walkway. There is no consistent pattern, just a multiplicity of isolated moments, one after the other.
The hummingbird darts from its perch and heads back to the feeder, drinks again and zooms to a distance of a foot or two in front of me as I remain motionless and gaze at him, suspended in time, whirring, yet perfectly still, completely attentive.
There is a thick thereness to this instant that is so stunningly beautiful I cannot think of anywhere else in the world I’d rather be.
Nothing to do, nowhere to go.
When my companion whizzes off, the sharp focus of my sight and hearing linger on indefinitely. I think about the final words of the final song that Leonard Cohen’s son put to music not long after he died:
Listen to the hummingbird
Whose wings you cannot see
Listen to the hummingbird
Don’t listen to me
**************
Komorebi is a Japanese word for the shifting patterns of sunlight filtering through the moving leaves of trees.
***This is the last Summer Chronicle of this year. Next week I’ll return to regularly scheduled programming during the Democratic National Convention.
Note on the Summer Chronicles:
A decade ago, during my time writing for the OB Rag and SD Free Press, I penned a series of pieces over the summer that moved beyond the blog/column form to something a little looser and more open to improvisation and the poetic turn. Last summer, a health crisis intervened, but I made it through to the other side of that and here I am again, writing, word by word, breath by breath.
Below is the original preface for the first series of chronicles:
In the summer of 1967, the great Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector, began a seven year stint as a writer for Jornal de Brasil [The Brazilian News ] not as a reporter but as a writer of "chronicles," a genre peculiar to Brazil. As Giovanni Pontiero puts it in the preface to Selected Chrônicas, a chronicle, "allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes. The general tone is one of greater freedom and intimacy than one finds in comparable articles or columns in the European or U.S. Press."
What Lispector left us with is an eccentric collection of "aphorisms, diary entries, reminiscences, travel notes, interviews, serialized stories, essays, loosely defined as chronicles." As a novelist, Pontiero tells us, Lispector was anxious about her relationship with the genre, apprehensive of writing too much and too often, of, as she put it, "contaminating the word." It was a genre alien to her introspective nature and one that challenged her to adapt.
More than forty years later, in Southern California—in San Diego no less—I look to Lispector with sufficient humility and irony from my place on the far margins of literary history with three novels and a few other books largely set in our minor league corner of the universe. Along with this weekly column, it's not much compared to the gravitas of someone like Lispector. So, as Allen Ginsberg once said of Whitman, "I touch your book and feel absurd."
Nonetheless the urge to narrate persists. Along with Lispector, I am cursed with it—for better or worse. So for a few lazy weeks of summer, I will try my hand at the form.