bookworm / can of worms

I went to the library at the U today for two things.

1. To get some outlining/writing done on a longer fiction project. (Today I taught my students the word “satisfying.” Exhibit A.)

2. To check out some books now that my card is up and running. I just about passed out when I stumbled upon a yellowed 1985 anthology Contemporary American Poetry. Poetry is so hard to come by here. (Given the luggage limits, I only brought over a slim volume of poems, which two months later I have re-read probably twenty times.) I had some time to kill after work, so I buzzed on over to the courtyard of a temple that has a cluster of picnic tables in the shade of these old, gigantic trees. I cracked open my new-found literary lifeline to a random page. The first stanza I came across was from Louis Simpson:

As a man walks he creates the road he walks on.
All of my life in America
I must have been reeling out of myself
this red dirt, gravel road.

Forgiving Louis his omission of the ladies and their roads, I must say these verses hit me like a ton of bricks. This needs to be a painting! (Or maybe the next project in my printmaking class?) A fishing line or the cable of a kite drawn out of him, pulled taut, pulled farther yet by an off-screen fish, wind or fate. My oh my, does that ever sound familiar. The spool keeps turning, linked to a tether whose end I can never quite catch up to. And who knows where in God’s green tree, red clay Earth it’s headed.

He’s writing about Australia. He’s writing about the future, but it made me think of the 1979 red Ford Ranger I first learned to drive, of the thick ruddy mud in the barranca outside Horn Canyon after a flooding, of slowing at the gravel of Loffs Bay Road in Coeur d’Alene. All of my life in America I’ve been tugged along the road that leads to the library this morning, the temple courtyard this afternoon, to the plaguing question the past few months of What To Do With My Life. (NYT, anyone?) After four years of syllabi, I felt ready to unwind, to unreel. I came to Thailand in part to give myself the space to ask these questions, to find these poems, to watch the road. Louis Simpson found his in Australia. I’m still looking, still reeling, still reading.