Where I've Been (Asking the Shy Dog)
Dear Friends,
Thanks for your patience while I was away on winter retreat. I’m delighted to be back with you.
Next week, I’ll share the talk I gave while I was away—so you’ll have a report from the silence—but for now, here are a few places my mind and words have traveled in the New Year.
I’d love to hear where you are and how you are doing.
— Sal
Someone is awake in the night. Someone and their animal friend, dog or cat, awake and breathing in the dark house. Someone is reading an old encyclopedia, heavy in their lap. The pages are weighted with pictures and explanations. From one page, a tropical wind. Salt water in the corners of the eyes.
A ship going upriver, its name in white paint: egret river. Regret, regret. The deep cold, the hard frost. The curiosity we bring to everything.
Come with me somersaulting. I’m asking the question without knowing what it is. Water comes unexpectedly, as a gift. Like getting lost in your own city. Like weeping at an afternoon movie. There is absolutely nothing that words can do to meet the world.
I ask the shy dog to tell me what it knows about living and I ask the small plants which survived the frost. My eyes are watering from the wind. My hands are holding on. Already I’ve lost track of my destination.
A pirate. A mystery left by past civilizations. A journey both arduous and meaningless. An airplane. Document: a document, to document. Lush description of the physical landscape. Unbelievable coincidence.
Dreaming of travel, dreaming of distance, dreaming of becoming someone else. In a train, going north. Imaginary train. Imaginary north.
For the time, for the time being, for the future, good fortune. I do not know what the gesture means when she holds her hand at that sharp angle. The pleasure is all there in the first pages as you understand the game, but what pleasure will there be at the end?
A lone black boot in the steaming street. The way a photograph shifts color as it fades. Cities become blue. What color is this city? Light reflects off windows across the way, and illuminates a table top, a hand. Where have we been, where are we going?
Tell me where you’ve been and where you’re going.
Ahh! A prose poem from Sal and the River Egret. Just came from a class introducing students to bound volumes of a nineteenth-century magazine. Headed to a class in which students will take the semester to write the syllabus. The sky is very blue outside my office window. The hospital helicopter passes low. Construction vehicles rev and beep where a new dorm is going up. Otherwise, it’s quiet in this building. I drop in on Substack for a few minutes. I will sit with the treetops before printing an assignment for class.
this is beautiful. it feels both huge & almost nothing at all, which is how I have been feeling. I appreciate you taking your time with things, I really do.