BLAST PRESS at gregglory.com

New Jersey freezes or clings to you. Rare are the cool autumn days or the spring mornings when the leaf is new and the air a softness on the cheek comforting as a mother’s untroubled hug. Most common, cursed and recalled are the deadening August heats when the first glorious release from winter’s chilly wet has been long forgotten. Citizens are salamanders, at home in the BBQ pit, or they are locked in their ice boxes coddling shakers topped with triple martinis and clusters of olives swirling their frozen, envious eyes. Nights are twisted away in sweaty sheets crushing as canvas tarps, and dawn crawls through the window red-eyed with her hot cottony tongue flooding your mouth too insistently to resist. You spend long hazy days in a vaporous crucible and are poured back into bed by exhaustion.

Winter wears on you no better. Dump trucks of blizzard-snow back up to the drive the midnight before a harried commute; the highways are black with road rage and grit by noon, only to freeze into unnavigable slush by quitting time–which occurs, as had the morning commute, in slanderous darkness. When the creep and ache of winter finally set in your bones like knitting needles, you know you are in for six more months of God’s laughter.

Such ugly weathers have been the metronome of my existence. Yours too, if you are one of the Garden State’s millions of inmates. As the most crowded state in the union, we look out the window squinting for nature only to find the battered face of a neighbor staring blearily back. And when we can’t see each other, we hear each other. Or, even more morosely, smell each other, cooking odors drifting through the chemical miasma of polluted Elizabeth. Some medallioned goon revs his polished off-road monstrosity past your drive, a monster truck that will never see an unpaved mile of road before its warranty is out; just beyond the mailbox, a toddler squeals merrily at the God-awful screech of his plastic Big Wheel ripping down the sidewalk while his playmates rehearse an unending Wagnerian death scene.

Little Michele has the face of a lion. A pure golden mane falls back from a square-featured face, hair straight as uncooked spaghetti. Her eyes are two chips of sky, Caribbean pools prone to storms, the intense bezel of an x-ray machine, exposing bones and breaks and the progress of mends deep within the delicate ghosts of muscle. Her nose seems small, almost hidden in plain sight, an odiferous tan mushroom tucked beside looming redwoods, shaded and guarded. Reddened by allergies, sneezes, or tears, it transforms into a ladybug button, an up elevator light making a quick retreat to the roof, the roof a broad perfect dome smuggled out of Constantinople intact, supporting the thousand lines of sunshine arrayed around the dome in a glory. When little Michele hugs me hello at the airport in SF Int’l’s muraled halls, her chin registers against my bent-down neck determined as a hockey stick. She knows now for sure in her lion way that someone else is climbing down into the swamped yellow raft of her life, a second set of feet to look at in the raft’s well as the rains whip the sea, the tide bruising, and ancient fins–a few at first, then more and more in the bloodied waters–glint dully in the whirlpool’s tightening fist.

My troubles travel with me in my old grey-green duffel bag, emblazoned with a bold logo for “The Hunger Site,” where money goes golden into the mouths of starving orphans as you click their web ad. In my bag, no poems. A spare razor that tracks my face to redness like a tornado grinding through moldy Oklahoma soils; what frail flower will wind upward in the destruction’s wake? Out-dated maps of San Francisco crowd against an unbroken three-pack of new underwear (almost enough for the plotted duration), the maps folded and worn at the folds from disuse as they travel stuffed in my tight pockets; will they pinpoint my experience on a grid? My ecstasy, my despair? A toothbrush is here, screwed into a silver tube, one that only sees action in foreign air, drying by sinks from London to Maine. My rose-colored camera’s here, which I had solemnly promised myself to use for photos of faces, not things, during this trip to the buttery-sunny lands of California. I look up to my own face in the sparse living room’s nude mirror as the camera slides to the roomy couch, my bed for the night. In the mirror, all the old confusions arise, painted by pain on an aging canvas. If only I had a bag to carry my head around in, unseen until I really needed it!

Down a steepening path of dust broad as a Viking’s oath we trod toward the “secret waterfall” in Auburn that my friend little Michele had been guided to by a previous explorer who would sling his canvas hammock in the cool mist above a dewy pool, and there meditate until darkness overwhelmed the scene. Several times as we wandered our way to Codfish Falls, Michele was moved to cry out “I love you, river!” to the marvelously green-going glassy water, a deep turquoise vein of living rock brushed by a wet cloth, the cleansing hand as imbued with caring as any docent’s. Our path was crested on the left by a grassy cliff descending to a rivulet that seemed no more than a blue-green thread of film thrown down among shadows. To our right almost the whole way of a good hour’s tromp lifted nearly vertical hillsides absolutely on fire with proud California poppies.

Shy to the point of disappearing in an unreconstructed squeak, little Michele is also, in the street parlance of our day, something “fierce.” Hair blonde as beer, a feisty blue-eyed five foot nothin’, little Michele, once you are within the circuit of her active care and attention, comes on as strong as a rap star. More than a few have suggested I start shoutin’ out “L’il Michele” and flashing a gang sign when I tell her tall tales. She has something of Paul Bunyan’s broad shoulders in her lack of compromise, her embittered bravery and willingness to out-face the rules of “Life, so-called.” And something in her, too, as whimsical and saddish as any Blue Ox quietly scraping an itch on the side of the Pecos. She’s the unquestioned queen of another realm, a place of endless wealth and sex, whose passport is stamped in feminine giggles and a toss of her hair. But woe unto the trespasser, the pusher of gates, the brash bandito who lays no homage at the queen’s pale feet! Then the countenance of a Sphinx looks down, carved by blood-sweat and seen in terror-dreams since the before-times, an unforgiving myth whose riddle may make Death your next meal. And no help from those high eyes lost in profound shadows of her own thoughts! No mercy, no mincing giggle or long-prepared appeal to a less-than-celestial court will avail. Those justices, those mysteries are her own book, written with exact clarity in a dainty executioner’s hand–the day-glo notebook doodled with daisies.

Tonight is a simple time of rain. Rare on this California visit, which has been clear and cool every evening, a weatherman’s suicide note written in stars and slow-moving clouds. But tonight there are wet voices, small bodies smashing themselves on the roof to get in, to have a quiet talk. The drops, which disappear on my fingertips, when seen in their steady-state are sweet berrylike beings whittled at their tips, each one hand-carved for the occasion. If I let them in, what would they say to me? Would they wonder how the rainfall inside me stays caught, a bag of water smoking a pipe? I hear, above the muted violence of their splatter, how they are whistling as they come down, firemen down a firepole blowing high-pitched life through their nostrils. When morning arrives and our convocation has dissolved, I walk out a few miles into the clear cool morning. One block over a house has burned down in the night; it is all foundations now, soaked, empty as a blackboard before the teacher hangs up her coat and tucks her damp umbrella between the wastepaper basket and the old metal desk.

A wrong turn bounces the borrowed car onto a riverbed of Old West cobblestones. Buildings around my bubble of idling modernity exchange their sheets of non-committal waterfall glass for wooden faces straight out of a John Wayne movie. I am lost in an antique downtown scissored into a maze of one-way streets under the immense shadow of interstates overhead whose omnipresent ramps lay in wait to whisk the unwary explorer to unlabeled otherwheres in a wink. I have taken a wrong turn into the past, rolling into the Twilight Zone with a cracked windshield and a slipping transmission. This is a ghost-town, large as life and stuck like a sepia stamp onto this forgotten corner of downtown Sacramento. One lone cowpoke leans with leathery authority against a post outside the General Store. I can just see a pickle-barrel and bags of flour piled in the doorway’s shadows behind him. Next to the General Store there’s a blacksmith shop and livery stable, but no horses lounge at the hitching rail shooing flies. Perhaps the four-footed citizens of this past have been seduced onto the open road by the interstate’s hydra-headed entry ramps, just as I have been sluiced to the sidelines to find myself in this pond of the previous century-and-a-half–a pond so still its surface refuses to reflect the curious face bent close, for the tar-dark waters have been sprinkled with a fine, obscuring dust. I let the car decelerate the last mile-per-hour as if letting time out of the tires, dropping the reins until the old gal finds a spot to stop. I crane my neck and periscope around, disoriented and downtrodden. Worn saloon doors swing empty in the empty breeze. Time’s sandglass lies on its side, being without advancing. Perhaps there is something for me here; something in getting lost and in staying lost. Something in Old Sacramento where the wind plays with my untucked shirttail and my glasses slip on the sweat of my face. Something. I almost feel the false assurance of meaning patting my back. But then I realize, unstuck in time as I am, that I do not know where “here” is.

The drive out happens in this flattening heat. Dust like a cropduster’s dust sprays out from behind the old Dodge Dart, the windshield cracked and unprotected by tape or attempts at repair. The dashboard is hard and shell-like, a dead wing flitting hotly along in the dirt. Waves of super-heated air present several horizons to the naive eye, all orange, dividing downness from the timid blue of the skies. Trees, anchored in some undetectable gush of water, watch us skip by like a flung stone. White lines on the highway, tell-tale twine slyly paid out by an Indian captive, suggest a direction. I roll up the string until my hands are mittened with it, cocooned in the silky substance, a white ball of light in my hands. Abandoned fruit stands, side-drifted lean-tos, stand up like unattended mailbox flags in front of the rusted field tractor, ticking unmoving in the pan-fry temperature. The fields sizzle with grain, matchsticks ready for sudden illumination. When the salt drops come to sting my eyes, I cannot wipe them away my hands are so full, my heart set on Half Dome, the crunch and shuffle of a good long hard hot walk, the stiff curtains of cliff after cliff, maybe the shifting curtains of Bridalveil Falls already lifting its cool tassels…. I crack a smile and stick my head out the roll-down window to dry off.