The Logan Notebooks

Beautiful Things

13 The evening we spend trying—replaying the Internet video—to learn the steps to “Thriller.” Barefoot on a linoleum floor under a naked bulb, between a deep exhausted laugh and a swig of purple wine from a box, I realize I don’t feel alone. When, after plucking fine weeds from the tomato patch all morning, I reach up to scratch my cheek and my skin still smells like sunned-on vines. Gramophones are beautiful. Anatomical models of the heart are beautiful. The canyon, in summer.With my sister and her husband, we sit by the river eating bread and cheese and drinking apple-juice-colored beer.The sun’s doing its thing with leaves.We’re all a little red-handed from tree-climbing, my guy keeps throwing his knife into the dirt. It sticks some of the time. Many stones are beautiful. Obsidian, grooved like an old record. Agate, like a cross-section of water. Candy-banded malachite. Scrimshaw is beautiful. Horrible and beautiful. A walk on a winter beach, snow along the water’s edge trimmed with a thin filigree of seaweed, like so much unraveled cassette tape. Salt-stain across the toe of a boot.The coin-cold tang of raw oysters drizzled in vinegar. We were in this field, where wild spring onions grew. Everywhere we stepped, we crushed pale shoots into frost-softened ground and the air tingled with their faint savory smell. Old glass soda syphons are beautiful. Olivewood spoons are beautiful. I came to talk you into physical splendor I do not wish to speak to your machine —C. D.Wright, “Key Episodes from an Earthly Life” beautiful things 14 If a woman with an exquisite face has a bad amateur haircut, somehow it makes her all the more beautiful. The Salt Flats make vast mirages that seem to flood the road.You can see the mountain range, the clouds reflected in them.They seem so whole. Little silver fillets of boquerones, pickled with garlic and parsley, olive-oiled and forked onto torn bread. Small almejas, baby clams steamed with bacon and green wine—we pluck their pink tongues.Things you can only find in the places where they come from, rare and impossible to replicate here, are beautiful and haunt me. TheTree of Life in our backyard is beautiful because it holds up a swing. No, because it conceals the pheasants. No, because it drops its leaves in the creek. No, because you love it. No, because everyone loves it. No, because its origins are a mystery. No, because it is ours. No, it is not beautiful? O, it is beautiful. It is beautiful. Arguments may be elegant, but exclamations are beautiful. Sometimes these include language like Hosanna! or Goal! Sometimes it is someone closing his eyes. ...