The Book of Leaving: notes, drafts & extracts

By Geoff Peterson

The Book of Leaving feels that way. Like a bag is packed and the engine’s running. Only this time, the guy is old and he’s got to do it place. In situ, as it were. Call it a hard-nosed meditation with coffee and bathroom breaks. It’s good to rejoice at such tender small things as your own life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9798823022224

Geoff Peterson

Born just after World War II, Peterson inherited his mother's nervous system and went on to memorize and perform poetry in a lyric vein for family and card parties. Raised Catholic, the boy learned the value of dreams, visions, and the soothing aspects of prayer in unison. He later earned degrees in Literature and Writing at Eastern Washington University, and served as poetry editor for Willow Springs Magazine. With the publication of his first novel in 1989, Peterson turned his back on mainstream publishing and has not looked back. Since 2007 he has published nearly thirty books of poetry and fiction. He lives in the Southwest and still gets around.

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© 2024 geoff peterson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  02/23/2024

ISBN: 979-8-8230-2221-7 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-2222-4 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Cover art: ©geoff peterson, 2024.

author photo (back cover):©jackie goldman, 20024.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

for Jackie Fay

whose heart’s as

big as

a Harley-Davidson

[Stories]...originate in strong, disorderly impulses; are supplied by random accumulations of life-in-words; and proceed in their creation by mischance, faulty memory, distorted understanding, weariness, deceit of almost every imaginable kind, by luck and by the stresses of increasingly inadequate vocabulary and wandering imagination—with the result often being a straining, barely containable object held in fierce and sometimes inefficient control….

—Richard Ford

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dares fail…

—Samuel Beckett

Contents

Introduction: Annual Report

False Start

Ambience

The Value of Zero

Sports Talk

Sports Talk, cont.

Ghost Ranch

Signs & Wonders

The Fall of Man

Reunion

Acknowledgments

Selected Sources

About the Author

Introduction: Annual Report

a letter to Sweeney

Hello, again:

So good to hear from you as I much appreciate the sincerity of words on paper. Old school, as they say. And your words touch me deeply at the end of another swollen year. Thank you for recognizing that I’m still above ground and responsive to news from the other side.

Much of the news is distressing, of course, given our membership in the society of missing persons. News of friends encamped in motels while the country slackens and sinks. But still we persist, and if we could summon the phantoms in the popular press, we’d wet our pants in merriment.

Anonymity, my friend. Talking to you is like talking to me. It’s been a while. Bear with me.

In the spring my first born and I had a falling out—over pronouns, presumably. It meant a snag in my travel plans as my concern for language can best be described as custodial. So much work goes into who we are. Everything comes from deep inside us—that goes for our children as well. Time for an old man to cash out and live in his car.

As you know, I recovered from the flu in time to catch a flight back last summer. What I hadn’t told you was that while making my east coast rounds I learned that M had married, which came as a shock. We’d been together in one form or another for twelve years. But not as a married couple, I fear. And now it was over and I didn’t even know. Well, I can’t say you didn’t warn me. People don’t stay on the shelf forever, waiting for you to make a move, you said.

It marked the end of the last chapter I’d remember as vital, or should I say virile? She wished me the best and said she’d always remember us as being separated by three time zones. I stayed on a few days, but my heart wasn’t in it. I went to church to visit myself as a child. Everything I saw and did felt like the last time.

Then, upon my return, a freak desert storm struck and an Aleppo pine rolled over on my place, crushing it. As there was gas leakage and power lines down, the city barred us from entering our homes until the work to repair the property was completed. That would take months.

Four exactly. So I headed north to visit friends I hadn’t seen in twenty years. I’d forgotten what it was like to go someplace and have it matter—that people traveled without taking everything, but moved in dreams and a desire to be lucky.

In Wyoming they welcomed me, and I even got invited to do a radio interview. It was strange looking back over that life: my first house, raising my kids, my first book. Everyone had aged and bent under the weight of memory. Dear friends and their dogs and a vast stretch of highway…

On my way back I stopped at a casino in Nevada and got a room. It was relaxing to watch baseball in the lounge, soak in the pool, or walk in the desert. I’d talk to the ghost of my grandfather like I’m talking to you now. It felt like a pivotal point in my journey, and that everything was equidistant from where I was. Everywhere at once, I suddenly had nowhere to go.

The day before my money ran out, I decided to park in front of a certain house near the Valley of Fire. It was an old adobe at the base of a mountain, and I sat in my car thinking about it. I’d almost bought the place years before. M liked it, and when I came out to close on it, I took a last walk-through and met the woman who was being displaced by the sale. A retired school teacher, she’d been renting it for years and wasn’t sure where she’d land. I remembered her. I remembered squeezing her hand.

Just then I saw my time on earth as a long, fruitless search. I couldn’t think straight, maybe I never had. As much as I loved her, I saw my life with M played out, and it felt like dread—the crawl of time beneath a sky as wide as God. I told the real estate lady it was no use, I couldn’t sign the paper. And it wasn’t about the renter being displaced; it was about the emptiness called my life. I’m sorry, I said, she’d get my deposit; she’d earned it and I understood her frustration. It was a nice property, fireplace, back yard, a doghouse…

How many times was that scene repeated over the next twelve years? An emptiness as vast as the Texas llano prevented me from unpacking and saying, Yes, this will do.

After weeks of wandering and visiting old shrines, I got back into my place. Now I make coffee and stare at the damage—not to my place so much, but to the book. I have spoken to you before of my pride, satisfaction, and worry over my book. Things had conspired to keep me from touching it. Unpaid bills, locking myself out of my car—not once or twice, but thrice, each exacting a toll.

I’d already gone through five or six titles before deciding on The Book of Leaving. Yet when my editor asked me for the title of the new work, damn if I could remember. I riffled through my loose-leaf brain but came up empty.

That’s when I knew I had something. A man knows, if he wants to. Just as he knows the nearness of lost things—if he wants to. You told me that.

I write in the backs of books. Open any text I’ve read over fifty years and you find columns of scrawl that hope to become something, a poem even. So when I began off-loading books from my damaged apartment, I stumbled upon John Berger’s The Shape of a Pocket, inside which is an essay on the sculptor Brancusi. While scanning its pages to assess water damage, I spotted a sentence I’d underlined years ago. All his work was about leaving. That’s it, I thought. The Book of Leaving.

It summarized the whole enterprise: leaving as a spiritual exercise—not necessarily in flight from something, but as destiny. It takes an entire life to accept who we are, and yet I persist in leaving—even when I’m not. How many times have we left ourselves, until we lose sight of the crucial passage that makes our lives remarkable.

The art of leaving then, an assigned provenance. Especially the point at which leaving and its testimonies tip the scale between insight and psychosis. That fine line, that razor’s edge, is the flash point from which every word herein has sprung.

It’s been ten years since I moved here. After the storm last summer my place didn’t recognize me, and I doubted I could resume as before. But I have stuck around when the rooms screamed to get out. Save yourself! I know how to do this now. I bow my head to those who hear voices. I pray for the strength to endure my seizures and listen closely. Now come the sensitive hours. The night is clear, sparkling, and divinely channeled.

feliz año nuevo,

Tucson, 2024

False Start

Begin with the author at his desk among gnarled papers and pens run dry…

You don’t have to do this.

—the clinician

You’re sick of it. You’ve told it so often by now it’s recorded on a loop. It wears you out thinking about it. Told enough times, your teeth rot and fall out. I can’t do this, your words, buddy. Anyway, it’s done. Now sit and see what happens. Light a cigarette and wait like a deserter before a firing squad.

You struggle with the difference between a desire to write and the desire to have written, at the exact point where words crack up and run aground. Look at the works of anyone who’s ever said something. Tonight the quotidian life drops off and a gate to the Great Silence opens.

You’re sitting in it now. You’re tired and driven by a need to endure. Bach’s "Komm, süsse Tod" on your playlist: Come, sweet death...I am tired of this world…

My God, is it true? I don’t want pills. I don’t even want a woman. You got that? I don’t even want that.

Of course alone is the best friend you’ve got. Any artist will experience tension between doing his work and being with those he loves. Not just the hours spent apart but the solitude that needs be cultivated. Don’t get me wrong, only parts of yourself go crazy—the part that’s talking, the part that’s left after the tender parts have raided the shelves. The part that refuses to bear its pain elegantly. All praise the tender parts, they rave. Hosanna the tender parts!

In truth you’re a mangy old dog whose last orgasm coincided with a Latin American junta declaring a bank holiday. Old man, single, deluded by notions of posterity: the perfect milieu for issuing bulletins to disaffected lodgers. I crave oblivion, said Dante, since copied in notebooks, hi-lighted.

Your first book of poems was cranky and snark-infested. Admit it. Then there was the one under another name you finished and looked up: Who am I now? A jumping off place, they said. Where a man begs for a last burst, a final raid upon the unspeakable—not even to publish but to chew on like a dog with a shirt that belonged to his mistress. Sages have struggled throughout history to experience what you’re feeling at this moment.

After decades in montage, the one constant that’s kept you alive in all the bad marriages of the world: the book. Behind every calamity: the book. Career in ruins? Write it. Mislaid your keys, your mind, a lost-and-found lover? Write it. Collapse of empires or bulletins from the Tarantula Black Hole—write it! And maybe you’ll crack the