3:14am

I've seen 3:14am on my Timex more times than I care to admit. It's become a bit of a sanctuary. It tastes like Pi. Sometimes I get up, other times 3:14 and I smile at each other and go back to sleep. See you in 12 hours. Sleep is sometimes a struggle.

There are a handful of writers who it seems a big deal to me when they have a new book out. W.S. Merwin is one of them. Our daughter Ava and I were book shopping after a good news doctor's appointment, and Merwin spoke to me from the shelf. He teased me with my current fascination for moons, still dark mornings, and blue. The Moon Before Morning. Well played Merwin.

He tells us, "the stars we consider have long been gone." And my mind goes there looking up at the stars sometimes, the science of which I know very little, but in whose awe I frequently stand.

Our back deck is overrun by carpenter bees this time of year. I have never been bothered by bees, but we still keep a tennis racket handy for sport and self preservation. Or at least a quiet outdoor happy hour.

What is it about 3:14? Why do I keep seeing you and why are you the one time that sticks in my head versus another? What are you saying? I need to touch upon your essence. Maybe.

Ghosts of words
circle the empty room
where I was young
stars in daylight

Ah, Merwin, now you're on to something. Words are stars on the page, once we read them we can't get at the things themselves, the emotions themselves, the people themselves, that they describe. "The [things] we consider have long been gone." The struggle to catch stars and words and meaning is eternal.

That is the struggle, fighting for survival and grace and stars and things in themselves. Fighting for survival and grace and stars and the moon. Maybe 3:14am knows something about the struggle.

Haunts

I wonder if we leave some part of us behind at the different places that make an impression on us. Places that become a part of who we are. Do we become a part of them as well? Is there some part of our soul or spirit that haunts (a good kind of haunts), inhabits, is incorporated into that place?

Let me explain. It has been well documented here that I take our girls to the Oxford Park. This is the park where, when it had cool monkey bars and higher swings, I grew up. When I go there now, I can clearly see us jumping towards the river from the swings at their highest possible point; I can feel the weightlessness and then feel the sharp pain from the landing on the balls of my feet. It's like younger me is still there. In a way I can feel. Maybe that's just my memory taking over, or maybe there is some part of me that has become a part of the park.

How about some science? We all know the notion that matter or energy isn't created or destroyed, it just changes form. So that there are traces of the Big Bang still floating around us. And some folks know Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious, which is saying something similar on a psychic level, that we are part of a larger consciousness that stretches back through time. Maybe we can tap into it.

So maybe it stands to reason that we do physically and in terms of energy, become a part of the places and things and people who help define us. It's not Halloween, but let's call it "haunting."

We all have our haunts. I've been into too many of mine in and around Oxford. I am sure there are stretches of the cross country course at St. James School where I must have left some of myself--learning to run distance, learning to breathe. The same with the C&O Canal Towpath, both for that time and for the JFK 50 Mile Race, where I thought my legs would threaten to collapse and by the finish my sweat tasted like sleep.

I am sure there is some of me, and will be more of me at Crucial Tattoos in Salisbury, as I continue to imprint images that matter onto my body. I can trace the fine black ink, where it will be on my left wrist, of the next to come.

I know there is some part of my spirit still catching its breath in John Brown's Cave in Harper's Ferry, my first experience caving. If Memorial Stadium still stood in Baltimore, and now trips with the girls to Nationals Park in DC. Speaking of DC, the Folger Theater, or our monument to monument 11-mile run from a few years ago.

I have many haunts. I take something from them and I leave something of myself.

At the moment, and maybe I always have been, I haunt and am haunted by the color blue. A little bit of the color around the moon on Laurel Street above. And maybe by Maggie Nelson's "Bluets," as she starts to give me words to describe it. Maybe blue makes me feel wildly, with too much force, but here it is:

...A voluntary delusion, you might say. That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe. How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God?

Blue as a secret code. Instances of blue as the fingerprints of God. Maggie Nelson knows my blue. It's one of my haunts.