INTRODUCING...
... a man named Blake, called Carpenter, three weeks into his first long-haul OTR gig.

[april 2014. new york, ny.]

--

Nobody is noticing the way that grace is coursing through the floor to meet the corners of this university hallway. My life is simpler now. I do my best to care for the neglected parts, see their sturdy craft, study their humble arts. I hear the singing in the hinge of a heavy door. It’s a melody trying to straighten its notes on the way out.

Didn’t know if I’d make it in time. Didn’t know if I’d make it at all. Didn’t know if you’d care, if I should dig up the quarters for a call. But it feels good, leaning up against this blank sheet of wall. It’s one-fourth of a frame within which a dream shared by great strangers took shape, found form, grew legs & wings. Made fables and gave good work to the storytellers like us, yeah.

Find me downtown, where I am one among a hundred amateur historians - each expecting nothing less than twenty miracles in a space that time & sound made sacred. Well, the one that I hope for? I keep secret. (wish you were here even now, if you can believe it.)

As I cross the corridor, head for the next display, I get this little prayer in my step and let it rise into my face. Offer it up for the other wanderers passing through this place, and it says:

“Fill your lungs to the brim. Fill 'em all with the dust & the particles of this. Trust they’ll mix with your matter, that you’ll carry the tiny parts with you your whole life, and remind yourself of this when memory alone is not enough.”

Pedaled seven miles or so out of town, headed for the farm. Spent every spoke-spin thinking of that afternoon I passed at the Clarence J. Brown Reservoir, and all the hours I could never get back, taken by that bright water. In days imprudent & sanguine, I gave you the coordinates stitched onto a bird’s wing, the hour in universal time (and made a joke about galaxies synchronizing watches)... how I swore back then I expected nothing!

But there was no way to hide my misguided disappointment when you didn’t show, and I drove straight off the road. I kicked my head. I broke my heart. I lost my way, my mind, & my busted rental car in ol’ Ohio, ol’ Ohio, and I let the humid August air

fill my eyes to the brim. Fill ‘em up to the waterline with shadows of a day grown dim. Over my hope, a setting sun. Over everything I’ve ever given up, that I’ll recover from my whole life. I’ll remind myself of this when the will to keep away ain’t strong enough.

May I be strong enough! (even if i wish you were here. can you believe it? even still.) Well, I’ll bury the hatchet when I bury the last of her letters in Watkinsville. And what Susan said is true enough: “I was born in the Big Ugly, but I’m gonna die in love.”