White Buckwheat

Posted on July 15, 2002 in Plants Reflections

Another one of those fallow days when the low, dull dome of my scalp shimmers a bland gray. I don’t much feel like writing and the material doesn’t dance. For relief, I watch moving things — birds, cars sliding down Lake Forest Blvd. while I sit drinking coffee, the antics of the barristes at Tully’s. On another sheet of paper I write scatter — fragments of thought, anything that comes into my head, some of which sometimes actually seems like it can take me somewhere.

I don’t know if it is good or bad to read John McPhee on a day like today. He can say so much about rocks and mud coming off the mountains where I might have dispatched the subject in a dim paragraph or two. It’s a day for feeling sorry for myself, I suppose, and I don’t want to be comforted because when I am, I lose my last excuse for not working on the fiction project today.

I need a recharge and a few days when I am not taking any xanax. I ate a total of one tablet over the weekend. While it fulfilled my immediate need to blot out the itchy pain that shot up and down my calves and the nervousness that caused me to wonder if I was going to kick my wife in my sleep again, it also brought me to my present torpor. Such a choice I had: either this or the worse fate of finding myself exhausted by the lack of sleep. The Muse only hums in the one state and utterly refuses chirp even one note in the latter.

To rehabilitate her, I look outside at the sharp sandstone ridges and half domes and I feel like them — half-clothed with “soft chaparral” like buckwheat that cracks when you pick a piece and explodes when you set a spark to it. (I dislike violence — the waving of the arms and the sudden stops as my fists come in contact with something just don’t release anything except a hail of splintering recriminations.) Beneath the eroded geology lie the alluvial fans, covered with dry grass that has turned a soporific brown. What I want is for the clouds that keep ignoring us here to scream out their rain songs and beat the typanni drums like a cartoon I saw many years ago when television was black and white. Then I could relax like a deity, comfortably couched in cumulus.