Sinking

If you've never said something so terrible. Wait- let me rephrase that. Have you practiced saying it, thought about it, dreaded it? You know, then, the shape it takes in your mind. The weight, the heaviness. Like a bag of terribleness. How the tendrils wrap themselves in the soft places of your mind. Saying it won't free you. If you think it will, I have to stop and laugh for a moment before resuming.

Say your something terrible, then. You will see it, in that moment, take form in the space between your lips and realize that, still attached to you, but released into the air, it will pull you down

down

down

I cannot be sorry. I can't take it back. I can't consume it again because it's become bigger than I am and now the fit is all wrong. I wait, suspended between my thoughts and those words and the bottom of everything (like Alice), I hang here, wishing you would - wishing something could- release me, so I can finally find out whether I'll fly or fall. I didn't think it would happen this way.

If these cathedrals could talk: inventory

This hour I tell things in confidence. I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you. 

Your Communist Manifesto copy, your Buddha now balanced on my laptop. Tambourine, Robert Lowell, Mao, pile of flannel shirts, a 2-lb calculator, Schonbrunn Tickets, "If These Stones Could Talk: A General Guide for Cathedral Explorers," ("who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America?") your parents' wedding pictures, an apologetic letter from Icelandair with the sweet preface: DEAR ICELANDAIR CUSTOMER. Leaves of Grass, a stash of Sharpies, your diplomas, a Hindu goddess incense holder ("I hear the Hindoo teaching his favorite pupil the loves, wars, adages, transmitted safely to this day from poets who wrote three thousand years ago"), piles of pictures of your cousins.

The voyage of those who sought a New England and found it.

The EYES have it

As of this month, my left eyelid has been spasming for six months. I have had eye exams, used eye drops, had Botox injected all around the socket. Until I can't close my eye all the way. Until I can't feel the eyelid. I would do almost anything. I would go so far as to have someone place hands over my eye, the way my mother once placed her hands over a tree stump in the backyard to pray it away. She said it worked.

Addendum 1: In which I realized you will never come with me. In which I realized that someday, my eye will fall out (possibly into my open palm) and at that point I will realize I should have cared more about animals, about carbon footprints, about marriage licenses.

Addendum 2: In which I realize, "It will only get worse before it gets better" is probably complete and total bullshit.

Addendum 3: In which I realize, "How is a raven like a writing desk" has no answer.

Addendum 4: In which I reiterate to myself that you will never come with me. In which I pore over my dissertation with a magnifying glass, searching for clues like one would comb the beach for seaglass, which is not a natural occurrence, but is in fact trash that has been washed clean.

Labor Day 2009

Maybe the last words you said to me were, "My Ami," or maybe they were an unintelligible string of consonants and vowels that meant so much to you but so little to me. In any case, there was the door opening in 2009, Labor Day weekend when I drove up to check on you, "My Ami," and I went upstairs and slept for an hour before trying to talk to you again, because I had been on the road since 5am. Second year of graduate school, I brought some books with me to read but instead you pantomimed college football to ask me -could I find a game for you on the television while your right arm hung helpless by your side? It took me 15 minutes before I gave up and you had to find a game yourself and then after that I couldn't read any books. I couldn't have imagined that ten days later, I would be measuring morphine in your syringe like my guilt. Maybe more mgs than my guilt.

I had this story laid out in my head that I thought I'd give you before you died, but then I was so sure you wouldn't die so I didn't write it out. The story was about 4th grade and the way you trained me for the 50 yard dash. When you asked me what my dreams were in 1981, and I thought that other girls at school most likely dreamed of ponies and roller skates and pink skirts, but I wanted to beat all the boys at the 50 yard dash at Game Days at the end of the year. That was my dream. So you took a can of spray paint and you marked off 50 yards on Palm Street. When the streetlights clicked on we went out and I ran sprints from spray painted mark to spray painted mark under the yellow lights. You timed me and I improved. 

We trained for three months and you told me I should think about sprinting at the Olympics. I agreed. I wore a green tank top with rainbow stripes and matching shorts that looked like a sprinting uniform. (This is all the stuff I was going to remind you of, I was going to write out this story and give it to you asap, but I was fairly sure you weren't going to die so I told myself it could wait. I couldn't have imagined squirting mgs of morphine into your open mouth for five days until you finally agreed to die, is what I mean.)

I don't know if you understood the importance of Game Days, the most dreaded two days of the entire school year in my estimation. The "Days" were a series of competitive athletic events, at which I never excelled, and of which I was so apprehensive that most years (1978-1980) I faked stomachaches in order to avoid. But this year was different due to our trainings on Palm Street after the streetlights clicked on. Spray painted line to spray painted line when the black tar of the pavement looked soft under the yellow street lights. 50 yards on Palm Street, an unused side street that ran beside the snowball bushes along the perimeter of our yard.

Anyway, the culmination of this story I was going to give you (in printed form) related the starting line, the slow motion glances between the competitors, the sound of the whistle signifying GO!  The most important part of this story I was going to write out for you (but didn't because I thought it was pretty dramatic for me to believe anyone would die after a seizure) was the look on Kevin Platt's face when the whistle blew (because he was the fastest sprinter in the 4th grade and by the way I would have laid all this out in the beginning of the story I was going to write for you), because I frankly outran him. ME, a skinny, socially awkward, un-athletic, loser of a 10 year old. Frankly, I outran every 4th grade boy on the starting line of the 50 yard dash during the 1981 Game Days. Someone eventually beat me in the final heat of the 50 yard dash but for the life of me (and for the life of you, obviously), I don't remember who. The point of this whole story that I was going to give you, had you not died, was that, no matter what dream I had, you believed I would achieve it, no matter how ridiculous (because really, I'm no sprinter, and you had to have known). Because, let's face it, I don't have much athletic ability, but I thought this story might be a reminder of the way you helped me when the streetlights flicked on at night after we watched Buck Rogers, sprinting down Palm Street, the journey my little cheap tennis shoes took night after night between those spray-painted marks that measured 50 yards total.

Found objects Atalaya Mountain hike

I am finally trying to get my bearings after having been gone to conferences for 3 weeks. Here are some found objects on my hike one day through the Santa Fe National Forest. I think about what I found there, and the smells, and the color of the sky...

Labor Day Special: Regret in bulk $19.99 (supplies limited limit one per customer not valid in AK and HI and DE)

I tell you this, that regret comes in great gallon-sized industrial vats like mayonnaise for church camp. That people who say they have no regrets are the same people who say they never fart in public. REGRET comes in different flavors too, lemonberry zing and white tea ginger peach and roast beef. All those at once, sometimes. REGRET for sale and you buy it - I've seen you! It's on a high shelf, one of those Costco "please ask for assistance" shelves but somehow it winds up in your shopping cart every Thursday when you've stopped for only a variety pack of potato chips for your kid's school picnic. Last minute like- there it is- REGRET next to the little cheap Made in China sandals you had to have and the wheel of Brie that will probably go bad in the back of the refrigerator. Right next to the Ivory soap and the Lucky Charms. REGRET that makes a racket when you heft it out of the cart onto the conveyer belt. The cashier's raised eyebrow and no eye contact. It's on sale? Tell the people behind you you'll be right back as you skim over the cement floors for another jar.

There is a lone dandelion blooming in an otherwise manicured lawn, next to the red swinging chair. June, and yet no fireflies. I expected them in May. I wait, in an otherwise pleasant rainy mood, on the back patio in my underwear, with a cigarette and reading glasses and blue-painted toenails while I peck on the computer keys about nothing at all. Not about fireflies. This afternoon I thought I heard the cicadas outside my office window. What if there is no summer, only a series of disappointing hot days that you've built up in your mind because of childhood summers? What if there really is no summer because of the windows and the walls and the air conditioning? My student from Vietnam says everything is open there- a seamless transition between outside and inside.
What if you felt a breath in your ear that told you only have twenty years left to live?
How would the ocean make you feel then? The mountains? Big or small?
What if, after your father's funeral, you felt him standing in your living room?
What if, the smell of rain hitting the sage leaves makes you remember sitting beside an open window in the late summer?
What if, life is only a series of disappointing hours strung together with just enough hope to make you hope for more?
What if, your parents punished each other for thirty years, outlasting suitcases and boxed dishware, outlasting presidents, outlasting each other's sold houses and wrecked cars and obituaries in the Sunday paper and the ozone hole and grandchildren's birthdays?
What if, say, you were the fastest typist in the tenth grade?
What if, the car behind you is always honking because you miss the green light because you're perfecting a phrase like: "My life has been relatively difficult" or "In the grand scheme of things, this has been a long, hard road, relatively speaking" and this is because you're thinking about water-borne diseases in Darfur.
Once, I saw angels on a cloud from my airplane window, and my mother said I was imagining things.
If I had a story to tell all of you, this is how I would begin. With the sound of the typewriter banging out a turn of phrase through the night. This is how I would begin. What you think are ordinary hours are actually tiny miracles, waiting for you to see them.

1st week of June

a rose by any other name...

I have been having so much fun over the past few months on ancestry...some lines go back over 300 years. I'm so impressed at the digging many of my distant relatives have done. I wanted to document my favorite women's names from long ago:

From my paternal line:

Deliverance (1695-1762) Massachusetts
Elizabeth (1636-1691) Massachusetts
Sigurbjorg  (N.D.) Iceland
Briet (N.D.) Iceland

From my maternal line:
Elizabeth (1772-184) Virginia/Kentucky
Elizabeth (1783-1835) Illinois
Elizabeth (1861-1943) England/Los Angeles
Maren (1793-1848) Denmark
Engliche (1683-1746) Denmark

What's in a name?

“The Ocean” by Gordon Preston Gordon Preston THE OCEAN has always spoken to me sometimes just blue sharp as a thorn and sometimes cold like a human and down from the sea cliff there are no strangers to her sound all animals know waves dance their way to the shore in shouts at high tide and dreamlike at low when night comes in its darkening face climbs the horizon and the poor bones of driftwood wait to rise as peaceful smoke from a fire ring to a heaven trailing like a veil between us —from Rattle #21, Summer 2004

The brain should be treated like a fine machine. And PS: there is nothing more cliche than constantly writing about dead parents

I have cried all yesterday and all today. I took an allergy pill to clear up my eyes for the dissertation proposal defense. Then I went back to crying. I cried for that 1974 video, I cried for your 25 year old faces- my GOD how can anyone's parents look so young. And I cried for me.

Whatever ravaged my mother's mind with sharp teeth, whatever species of thing lodged itself and grew inside my father's brain, I have cried for those things for two days without stopping (reprieve for the proposal defense. I told the committee I was nervous and jittery and had allergies). I have cried for two days like a stupid baby, crying against whatever took hold of the both of them and took them away from me.

I'm not a pretty cryer. Mary Ingalls on Little House On The Prairie, now SHE was a beautiful cryer. But I sob until I hiccup and break out in rashy blotches. I can only see through slits in my eyes. I get that puffy eye thing from my mother.

I found an orphaned space through the grainy film where nothing exists but me and my pigtails, my newborn sister, and the merry-go-round. I don't understand where the two of you went- what crevices of the mind you crawled into and decorated the walls and put on some records and made yourselves at home and goddamn-who-cares who's out there knocking on the door.

I have always written to make sense of my world, but words fail me now. The failures and horrors of a routine daily life aren't unique enough to be memorialized, even through an exquisite turn of phrase. Everyone dies, lots of people go crazy, it's not special enough to be paid a great deal of attention to.

YOU died at quarter to midnight on a Friday and the funeral home van backed up to the front porch and wheeled your body outside. Unceremoniously, as they say.
YOU folded yourself up until you were the perfect size to fit yourself inside your mind and you slid into those mazes where no one could ever hope to follow and it was warm and quiet and you withered away from the outside in.

And goddamn guess who's knocking at the door now?

Landslide

Lately, I've been missing my dad a lot. I'm a page of text with too much white space. Noise with no sound. The creativity and boldness and joy I bring to the front of the classroom-- I look for him from that place. 
Dad's date of birth: March 9, 1949. Maybe why I've been thinking about him this month.
I showed his basic training photograph when we discussed the Vietnam draft in class.
I've been listening to Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" all during February.

Anyway. And so on. I think about the music we discussed. I have a habit of showing music videos in class and discussing them, breaking them down by lyric lines and themes. This is probably, I finally realized, because Dad and I always did this. Or rather, I sat there and listened while he went on and on about some song or other.  So I thought I would try and come up with a list of all the songs he and I broke down.

Oh, mirror in the sky 
What is love? 
Can the child within my heart rise above? 

1. Steve Winwood "Higher Love"

2. 'Til Tuesday "Voices Carry"

3. Quarterflash "Harden My Heart"

Can I sail through the changing ocean tides? 
Can I handle the seasons of my life? 

4. Sting "The Russians"

5. The Bangles "Walk Like an Egyptian"

6. Murray Head "One Night in Bangkok"

Well, I've been afraid of changing 
'Cause I've built my life around you 


7. Madonna "Like a Prayer"

8. The Eagles "Peaceful, Easy Feeling"

9. Kenny Loggins "Meet Me Halfway"

But time makes you bolder 
Children get older 
I'm getting older too 


10. Donna Summers "She Works Hard for the Money"

11. Poco "Crazy Love" (on this one, he also wrote out the guitar chords for me, it remains the one and only song I've ever been able to play on the guitar)

12. Bruce Hornsby "That's Just the Way It Is"

13. Don Henley "Dirty Laundry"

And if you see my reflection in the snow covered hills 
Well maybe the landslide will bring it down 

Maybe I can remember more if I try.

Now I Become Myself

Now I Become Myself

Now I become myself. It's taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people's faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
'Hurry, you will be dead before-'
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun! 

May Sarton

Goodnight, Elizabeth

February 13, 2008
"Y'all want some dinner?"
Memphis streets are all but abandoned in February, the day before Valentine's. It's a good time to visit, if you're on the run and that's where you and your beloved might have decided to meet up, incognito. Under the radar, if you will. Under the name of, say, "Holden Caulfield" and a cash payment at the motel's bullet-proof office window. The north wind howls through an empty guitar-shaped pool in the courtyard, here at the motel across the street from Graceland. I'm a blues chord, a harmony of dissonance twice removed from the progression in this song, someone's magnum opus maybe- not mine, of course, because everything I say, everything I think, is cacophony. Hum of jet lag and Wellbutrin+Xanax and three maxed-out credit cards. I'm spilled wine on the sidewalk and a pothole chiseled by ice into Beale Street. At that restaurant name-forgotten:  The oyster-shucker gives the evil eye because he has to abandon his cell phone, but the lights are so dim all I see is you across the table. Memphis in February. The empty pool. When the maitre d swings that big door open, there is no one else there in the dining room. It's red inside, draped and heavy with velvet- VELVET! The oyster shucker fiddling with his cell phone.
"Y'all want some dinner?"

i will wait for you in Baton Rouge
i'll miss you down in New Orleans
i'll wait for you while she slips in something comfortable
and i'll miss you when i'm slipping in between
if you wrap yourself in daffodills
i will wrap myself in pain
and if you're the queen of California
baby i am the king of the rain
and i say
good, goodnight elizabeth,
goodnight elizabeth
--Goodnight, Elizabeth (Counting Crows)