well, what did you expect?

this is the prettiest thing i have for the first day of fall. it should be read out loud. with passion. especially the dog's part. go gather up a pile of folks and read it out loud right now. go on.

How To Like It
by Stephen Dobyns

These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.
The dog says, Let's go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let's tip over all the trash cans we can find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.
But in his sense of the season, the man is struck
by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories
which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid
until it seems he can see remembered faces
caught up among the dark places in the trees.
The dog says, Let's pick up some girls and just
rip off their clothes. Let's dig holes everywhere.
Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud
crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,
he says to himself, a movie about a person
leaving on a journey. He looks down the street
to the hills outside of town and finds the cut
where the road heads north. He thinks of driving
on that road and the dusty smell of the car
heater, which hasn't been used since last winter.
The dog says, Let's go down to the diner and sniff
people's legs. Let's stuff ourselves on burgers.
In the man's mind, the road is empty and dark.
Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,
where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,
shine like small cautions against the night.
Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.
The dog says, Let's go to sleep. Let's lie down
by the fire and put our tails over our noses.
But the man wants to drive all night, crossing
one state line after another, and never stop
until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.
Then he'll pull over and rest awhile before
starting again, and at dusk he'll crest a hill
and there, filling a valley, will be the lights
of a city entirely new to him.
But the dog says, Let's just go back inside.
Let's not do anything tonight. So they
walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing? The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich.
Let's make the tallest sandwich anyone's ever seen.
And that's what they do and that's where the man's
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept—
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.

brother

my sister made the threats first. this is how she works. she anticipates the potential foolishness of a person and just goes right ahead and threatens that if whatever she thinks might happen eventually does, someone will get a near-fatal dose of her wrath. the thing is, i know she didn't just threaten me. she threatened him, as well. i guess she figured she didn't know any two people further away from each other in every way and the possibility of the two of us killing each other must have seemed pretty high. she just wanted us both to get along. this seems funny now, considering she's generally been known for roiling things up just for the excitement.

i want to say i got into town on the bus and that he was there at that raggedy station over on second, but i can't be sure and it may have been the train. i am pretty sure my hair was long and wild and i can tell you i was wearing some sort of hippie skirt and birkenstocks. i'd stopped shaving my legs and underarms and had never quite figured out makeup. i was exactly the way she must have described me. but he was not what i expected at all. you can't always see young republican on the outside. of course, in her haste to anticipate every potential problem she'd listed what she thought might be every thing i'd hate about him and then insisted i not hate it. and as i said, i'm sure she did the same when she spoke to him through gritted teeth about me.

he took me fishing. we got up early and drove nearly an hour down to a place around noel, if i recall correctly. and we talked. about all the things she warned us she'd kill us if we talked about. politics. feminism. hunting. all of it. in addition to finding we had plenty of common ground, there was the thrill we both felt disobeying a direct order from her. i don't recall whether we caught anything but i'm pretty sure we didn't. i just know i laughed a lot at a time in my life when i hadn't been laughing much at all. and i could imagine this little sister of mine laughing a lot, too, which is really what you hope for when you think about the futures of the people you love. that they will find people who can make them laugh.

she decided she'd keep him years back, or maybe he decided he'd keep her. i suppose they decided together. but he is our family, my brother now for nearly as much of his life as he wasn't, and that is just fine by me.

happy birthday, alan.

labor day

 the delaware and ulster railroad starts out sitting up above the high curvy cut of the bush kill. it heads through town along dry brook, crosses the intersection by casey joe's, slips past the caboose with the delicious scrambled eggs, then cuddles itself up next to the east branch delaware river. the two, the river and the railroad tracks, wind through a valley the river itself has been working on for a very long time. they go all the way up, eight miles, to roxbury, passing the round barn farm market, a long, skinny lake and a pheasant farm along the way.

and so on saturday we head down the street to the train station, me, the sweetie, a friend and his four year old boy. there are women with hoop skirts waiting at the station. there are men with strange mustaches leaning against fencerails. quite a few of them have badges. all of them have hats and guns. we get our tickets at the window and we all get on the train. we, the four of us, are hatless, gunless and badgeless. the train starts with a deep breath and a leap forward. we edge past old engines and under the trees.

once the train is clear of town, once is is running along the east branch delaware, it picks up speed, stretches itself out in the fields of corn and cows and hay. some places bales are already wrapped in white plastic. we ride past joe pye weed, morning glories, ferns and swamps. the mountains sit behind everything, row after row of them dipping down to where the train will go. low stone walls crop up and run a bit along with us and then slide into the weeds and the water, then rise up again from nowhere.

in roxbury we step off the train and wander around the museum, see this place the way it was a hundred years ago, a hundred fifty. everyone in the photos looks like the mustached men and hoop skirted ladies on our train. the land in the photos hasn't changed as much. we get a snack and head back to the train. that's when the shooting starts, cracks and smoke and powdery air. when the air clears the men with badges haul off a woman in a red dress. they bustle past us into the first car of the train. she hollers to a bunch of men without badges who head up onto the train after her. we roll back toward arkville on a train full of gunfighters under a sky that's scooting down lower, closer to the tops of our heads.

the rain starts, soft and misty but cold enough we're glad to have jackets. we wave at folks in cars and on bikes as we sail through crossroads. we wave at a sandy colored cow standing alone in a field near home. a second gunfight breaks out as the train pulls into the station. the rain is heavier now, but we are back at arkville, named for that big boat, named for safety. we have stocked up on food and water at the freshtown in margaretville, so after dinner, after sitting up visiting and trying to find on weak-signaled phones any information about folks back in a city we think is under attack, we walk ourselves upstairs and go to sleep.

the fire department siren goes off at 7am but nothing has changed from where we sit. our trees are all still as branched as they were yesterday. the metal lawn furniture still sits on the porch. the sweetie heads into town to get a few things we forgot the day before and he is back a little too soon. dry brook has climbed right out of its bed and is rolling over the road, over yards and up into homes. it is creeping toward the laundromat. it has shoved itself hard up against the railroad track but the railroad track is, at least for now, shoving back, making itself into a levee for a very small part of town.

we are an island. not all on our own. the post office and fire station are with us but we are cut off from brooklyn, certainly, cut off from margaretville, a town over to the west, and fleischmanns over to the east. we do not know right away that margaretville is being swallowed by the delaware or that fleischmanns is being carried away by the bush kill. we only know that dry brook has gone out of control.  but we are on high ground. we have what we need, really. we can get by here a few days in this house, the four of us, with no problem. the power flickers from time to time but never goes out more than a few seconds. the water in the pipes runs clear. we cannot imagine how strong the water is.

the sweetie and i walk down to casey joe's, to where the work crews are watching the water get higher and come nearer the pizza place. we wander down the railroad tracks, the ones we rode on the day before. the rain is still coming down, pushing the edge of that redbrown river just a little higher. it crashes along on our left where we can see through broken trees the crumpled remains of trailers and sheds and little wood houses now halfway or more underwater. we see a neighbor who says her family is fine, then tells us about a cow pulled from the mud and water, nearly washed away. and we walk on a little more down the tracks to see that cow, the same one we waved at the day before, standing bewildered on the tracks, her owner pacing nearby. we walk back and something cracks. a building shifts into the water.

we leave monday for brooklyn. we leave three times and are turned back, sent away from a questionable bridge. we are trapped in the catskills! says the child each time we head back. we promise him we are having an adventure. finally we cross over the esopus and move toward the thruway and brooklyn. the ugly brown water and the brokenness slide back through the rearview mirror for miles. but we will drive through the dark tomorrow to get ourselves back. we do not know what will be there, will not be able to see what's left after the water has crept back where it belongs. it doesn't matter. we will wake up in the morning and we will get to work. certainly things will not ever be the same for these towns resting in these valleys but they will be what we make.