The Torn Key: A Zuihitsu
1. Driving all night through New York, Ohio, Indiana, on my way to Chicago to see some friends, I napped for a couple of hours at a rest stop in Indiana and when I woke and turned the key in the ignition, it tore in half.
2. My on-again off-again girlfriend had a key to her grandmother’s apartment in the Village full of glassed-in bookcases. The old gal had translated Thomas Mann and probably been his lover but I never met her since we only stayed over when she was out of town.
3. “We performed on a mat that a family of cats had been shooed off,” Flaubert wrote in his journal, “and after, she helped me get back into my clothes.”
4. I knew no one in Indiana and figured this was it—The end of everything!
5. Worried about low grades and split off from family freshman year, I stumbled on Haydn whose hundred-plus symphonies, brilliant, brazen, and even at times euphoric, lifted me out of my funk. I bought them by the dozen and loved them all, even the gloomy ones whose wailing horns tore into me and taught me that Haydn had low days too and honored them with his art.
6. My father figured I’d go into science, while my mother hoped I’d become an architect.
7. I wrote my first poem in eighth grade. It described a team of galloping horses which were compared to a racing heart and stood in my mind for death and for sexual passion. The rhythm tried to imitate their thunderous headlong rush.
8. When the Met came to town, my freshman roommate, an opera buff, signed us up as supers for Verdi’s Otello. Dressed as sailors we lined up at the back of the stage and waited for the curtain to rise. Later, with a pirate’s bandana, an eye patch and a curling grease-paint moustache, I trudged across the stage in chains, while Tebaldi’s gorgeous soprano floated over us.
9. We were cautioned not to sing along with the chorus, a warning my roommate ignored.
10. Scrounging a rusty pliers from the glove compartment, I retrieved the business end of the key and thumbed my way to a gas station. The mechanic at the station had no blanks that would work for a Peugeot. But this was middle America where ingenuity reigns. He filed a ridge in both halves of the key and welded them together using a small piece of steel as the link, then dropped me off back at the rest stop.
11. “After Herzog,” the Times reviewer explained, “no writer need pretend that his education stopped in the eighth grade.”
12. When the engine came alive, I felt it in my arms and legs, a vivid river of hope like a trumpet call.
On Weeping: A Zuihitsu
1. At eight or nine I defeated tears. A boy mustn’t cry. But where are they now that I need them as an old man? One death following another, and the pile grows into a landfill.
2. “The bright snow the winter after Mother’s death made her weep—the glare itself.” Kimiko Hahn.
3. A blue hoop glides from hip to knees, then down to her ankles, and, rising again, it circles her strong body, the star at the heart of this system.
4. As the cancer spread, my brother signed on for hospice. Learning this brought a shock that I felt in my chest, in my knees. Still, no tears.
5. Then up past her waist, her breasts, as she slips her arms through and it whirls around her neck, and again descends and circles her hips as she spins and bends, unaware of my eyes as I watch through the exercise room window, just content with her own splendid skill.
6. When I was bored I would drop in on whatever Tony was doing in his room and expect him to entertain me. This got so bad that at one point he started shoving a bookcase in front of his bedroom door to keep me out.
7. A gate’s loud knocking wakes me in the night, and in the morning a strong wind blows rain and garbage. A flattened cardboard package on the lawn, a priority mail parcel flung from an overturned can. I gather the soggy things, return them to their can and set it upright. Later, an elderly neighbor does the same thing. I watch him through the window thinking, “Christ, we’re so damn middle class!”
8. In the suburbs of our youth, the furnace ran on coal which rattled down a shoot to a basement bin. No refrigerator, but the back entryway held an ice-box. Milk was delivered three times a week and our mother would leave a note with her order sticking out of one of the empties on the back porch.
9. I learned to read late, not proficient until third grade, but soon I was tackling Ivanhoe because that’s what my brother was reading in junior high. And now I remember the hammered copper plates and portraits he worked on as a teen—how impressed I was by his patience, his dedication to that obscure craft.
10. “The freedom of the bourgeois writer, artist, or actress,” Lenin wrote, “is simply masked dependence on the money-bag, on corruption, on prostitution.”
11. I’m just back from my brother’s memorial event, his ashes shipped off to be turned into pebbles and skipping stones like the flat round stones you might pile by the shore to make a tower. A Zen ritual.
12. “I love the zuihitsu as a kind of air current: and what arises is very subjective, intuitive and spontaneous—qualities I trust. It is by its own nature a fragmented anything. I love long erratic pieces into which I can thrash around—make a mess.” Kimiko Hahn
13. At the memorial, one of his sons couldn’t help bringing up their conflict over Tony’s disapproval of his marriage. “But I don’t want to talk about that,” he kept saying, but he couldn’t help himself.
14. And then a total stranger, someone I’d never met who’d known my brother late in life and played tennis with him, read a prepared tribute and burst into tears.
John Morgan
John Morgan moved to Fairbanks in 1976, to direct the creative writing program at the University of Alaska. He’s published eight poetry books, an essay collection, and four chapbook, most recently The Nancy Poems from Cirque Press.
Header artwork: “Ghosts No. 5” by Issue 16 Featured Artist Emily Morgan. See originals HERE.
Emily Morgan
Emily’s collage practice is bolstered by a strong combination of self-directed education (through teaching and collective leadership), a growing body of curated and juried exhibitions, multiple creative commissions in publishing and music, and consistent recognition from arts organizations and media outlets. Emily lives with her partner, Alex, and their three cats in Columbus, Ohio.
