tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18549758849097995982024-03-13T03:57:17.734-04:00THE ADMONISHING SONG...Tell me why. Tell me why you lied. That was not a nice thing to do.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14055608068608736755noreply@blogger.comBlogger47125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-59980801191508808232014-07-13T16:19:00.000-04:002014-07-13T16:30:18.972-04:00That's Not the Sun Up In The Sky<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">That's not the sun up
in the sky, it's a human heart<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">--
The Mountain Goats, “Alpha Sun Hat”<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4tR_ZB09t-Jj4znjnFw2r9Nq-h4YMWQricJFipwzI88CMsPJZEyS1TsfROj__ruedpdCjdRxl41CYqYbzXMEQi25tL35VImOOB0krK9mVXBoahf1bs4vVTgrXY9uaVL0J1s5R2XYuUXcN/s1600/IMG_0046.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4tR_ZB09t-Jj4znjnFw2r9Nq-h4YMWQricJFipwzI88CMsPJZEyS1TsfROj__ruedpdCjdRxl41CYqYbzXMEQi25tL35VImOOB0krK9mVXBoahf1bs4vVTgrXY9uaVL0J1s5R2XYuUXcN/s1600/IMG_0046.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a></i></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
That’s not the clock on the wall, it’s a broken knuckle<o:p></o:p></div>
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That’s not the evening turning gray, it’s a photograph<o:p></o:p></div>
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That’s not the warmth of your skin, it’s a…it’s a… <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That’s not a child’s bicycle, it’s a stray ottoman<o:p></o:p></div>
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That’s not the dried amaryllis our neighbors gave us,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The one in the window in the spare bedroom<o:p></o:p></div>
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That’s not the hammer with the shaky head<o:p></o:p></div>
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I told you, I told you, there’s just not enough light<o:p></o:p></div>
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That’s not the monkey we saw at the Baltimore zoo<o:p></o:p></div>
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That’s not the stale saltwater taffy, it’s an effigy.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOxw5Lhf-asRgmvs9Iu129-VKuoIS2DUm1orzXt4K3Gi57-w88JIXFCvoxPZ-CaZT2Gd_Yg1RysZEAmZSVBBHU97CEEhqcZ3Gvm9rnzkSR8uGpPB8ZgpNSTEaa3f6nFqQvWquEcY4K1P9r/s1600/IMG_0095.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOxw5Lhf-asRgmvs9Iu129-VKuoIS2DUm1orzXt4K3Gi57-w88JIXFCvoxPZ-CaZT2Gd_Yg1RysZEAmZSVBBHU97CEEhqcZ3Gvm9rnzkSR8uGpPB8ZgpNSTEaa3f6nFqQvWquEcY4K1P9r/s1600/IMG_0095.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
That’s not the proper order, it’s a welcoming<o:p></o:p></div>
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That’s not how you spend the evening, it’s criminal<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That’s not the feature of your face I’m familiar with,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s neither this nor that, it’s a cameo, a bit part,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A burgeoning, the way the storm splits the gutters,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Rents the rooms upstairs, plaster and paint chips<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Everywhere. Oh, everywhere. Not mathematics,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Not vestigial fingers, not scales, not historical novels<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That’s not the morning turning warmer, it’s the blood<br />
In our veins, coursing forward, coursing forward again.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgEH8yvGAiCslwwBx6lWE8qSRS612dZxClIOP0R8PsWrTHV7yUXUAFNmY5TyEQhga1dcxOHfReX2-RIWKl8EMPCwwEqCBAwz7LQarTfAb168v_Ytj4hgboJ2YPQSrdG5PAer7Bw7PsmXtC/s1600/IMG_0084.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgEH8yvGAiCslwwBx6lWE8qSRS612dZxClIOP0R8PsWrTHV7yUXUAFNmY5TyEQhga1dcxOHfReX2-RIWKl8EMPCwwEqCBAwz7LQarTfAb168v_Ytj4hgboJ2YPQSrdG5PAer7Bw7PsmXtC/s1600/IMG_0084.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14055608068608736755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-73374683190160322352014-07-06T10:42:00.000-04:002014-07-06T10:42:15.371-04:00Meaningless Pictures from Old Magazines<i>Of </i>the Silence of
William Archibald Spooner: A Ballad<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
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<!--StartFragment-->
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>I write reminders on
my skin<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Clip meaningless
pictures from old magazines<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>I tape them to the
walls <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i> -- The Mountain Goats, “All Up the
Seething Coast”<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p> </o:p> </div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHhfeTEYulN48BuinI7tN-3l0dOET9WsX-2S4zqhTeh-oVCr30wZ0H1CQ9EPSQ6xTLBMDI2xTMtSQDVgPmJByCPCCGB6TtU4_87WKtbUDmOhgGPF-agEFWU0g5BJh9B6Tx3nl4dnNoxL43/s1600/collage.7.6.14.tiff" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHhfeTEYulN48BuinI7tN-3l0dOET9WsX-2S4zqhTeh-oVCr30wZ0H1CQ9EPSQ6xTLBMDI2xTMtSQDVgPmJByCPCCGB6TtU4_87WKtbUDmOhgGPF-agEFWU0g5BJh9B6Tx3nl4dnNoxL43/s1600/collage.7.6.14.tiff" height="320" width="318" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
1. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
After sixty years teaching Divinity, black-robed<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
W.A. Spooner began to accost the strangers<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Who, uninvited, appeared in his classroom: “You <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Haven't come for my lecture, you just want to <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hear one of those, well, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">things</i>.”
Then the students<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Grew ever more restless with his <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.0in;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>silence.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAr1gkCmhFp0Cj_7dknYOI5cyjM1vtbe_fJCm39wGpWkh3MsrnVPVdQMRTlvAX_RzZXNWz7h1gQDdFpTNXz0zmz5Ewpmexiqciky-S6oSD1qH8zZgs0f8ZRf2YXpmbh-WBwGMJc_EHeuV9/s1600/10486117_629002632021_1751841943_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAr1gkCmhFp0Cj_7dknYOI5cyjM1vtbe_fJCm39wGpWkh3MsrnVPVdQMRTlvAX_RzZXNWz7h1gQDdFpTNXz0zmz5Ewpmexiqciky-S6oSD1qH8zZgs0f8ZRf2YXpmbh-WBwGMJc_EHeuV9/s1600/10486117_629002632021_1751841943_o.jpg" height="320" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
2.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Once, after a particularly nasty quarrel, one<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That included her slicing her finger, Spooner’s wife <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Is purported to have said, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You know, I was a fool <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">When I…</i> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>but didn’t bother <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>to finish.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Here’s what I want</i>,
Spooner replied: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">I want to live in a world such that a chicken
<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Can meander across a road without its motives
<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Being questioned. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq3Rj1Niefx1JDBEvH75LPam4YXLqPOm_VZ0ogxf4sAL_wLVYL8HcVOz8thn9hiqhxzT71k6xKuASbOjhHfrOjYmXeWMmNMluEMtRrz2GLCpsZRwmhQV6MoO7XFJUxIH2hos6vPQLKG5CY/s1600/IMG_7653.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq3Rj1Niefx1JDBEvH75LPam4YXLqPOm_VZ0ogxf4sAL_wLVYL8HcVOz8thn9hiqhxzT71k6xKuASbOjhHfrOjYmXeWMmNMluEMtRrz2GLCpsZRwmhQV6MoO7XFJUxIH2hos6vPQLKG5CY/s1600/IMG_7653.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">3.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps his wife simply<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Wanted to improve herself, perhaps by learning <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A new language, or perhaps the problem really <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Boiled down to how best to use prepositions: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">of</i> or <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">For</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">beneath</i>, for example, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a pith helmet</i> (also known, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Let it be known, as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">safari
tin</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sun shade</i>, or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">such</i>).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcE5A3j3-b5n2t1Qig9YjYxQGhCUpwbQ08y814KRhzF7WQqcJERgUcJXYY0VqWYMAXY0-TBwT2Scv2kgWCqexXro-ZtJ-iAdt0xmZNukXBfJ1fcK3cs6QnjuD00zHXUwuzuOcXblMDGYQ0/s1600/IMG_6881.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcE5A3j3-b5n2t1Qig9YjYxQGhCUpwbQ08y814KRhzF7WQqcJERgUcJXYY0VqWYMAXY0-TBwT2Scv2kgWCqexXro-ZtJ-iAdt0xmZNukXBfJ1fcK3cs6QnjuD00zHXUwuzuOcXblMDGYQ0/s1600/IMG_6881.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
4.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But remember that we may not be able to make <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Proper judgment without help. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Perhaps this morning, <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">When you told me you
had met him on a double date, <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You already knew he
used to be a detective. Did you <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Know? Did you?<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And what of it? <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2FRlrcG6zQ9XLg1IuZbdiemSuRFgappjHdGEIXrPMlE76sg0ao8ZcqooUR5D0OIA9WQqC5ZtL7-JPxm8apCQgyVJhNwVv-GKJ21PsLsfOrNDY2LKflblEBGtGAVU3QtHJNmFIqterR2sF/s1600/IMG_0683.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2FRlrcG6zQ9XLg1IuZbdiemSuRFgappjHdGEIXrPMlE76sg0ao8ZcqooUR5D0OIA9WQqC5ZtL7-JPxm8apCQgyVJhNwVv-GKJ21PsLsfOrNDY2LKflblEBGtGAVU3QtHJNmFIqterR2sF/s1600/IMG_0683.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
5. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Well, I’ll tell you <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What of it</i>: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">If you proceed, if you insist on proceeding,
<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You will likely fall
into<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a
pit.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJsQ5AgtBjQTIoqq2i_0ztVzHHZQzDn6SIOHgbn4zlMc1Z9wXMWlhNGtzEkwCovgtkvPYHLfgH4l3Gn1X3DW11F2PWdesCGkqhLEWWvxuUtNx9vmXrEBjUIbgrS4dIyI0ji_SsarSKfTvl/s1600/IMG_8671.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJsQ5AgtBjQTIoqq2i_0ztVzHHZQzDn6SIOHgbn4zlMc1Z9wXMWlhNGtzEkwCovgtkvPYHLfgH4l3Gn1X3DW11F2PWdesCGkqhLEWWvxuUtNx9vmXrEBjUIbgrS4dIyI0ji_SsarSKfTvl/s1600/IMG_8671.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
6.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
William Archibald Spooner would <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Surely answer, surly as ever: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">That’s clever, <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">That. Let’s</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">give it a try then. </i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; text-indent: .5in;">
[Silence.] <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oh, fuck it.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /></i></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-hG8ySI8XtkQtRikROQHErClvkFxBqgdoPmzRLeOB_2xqyC0TbMFFYs39JF50gH9zmZK4sXNToKnWGAOINWF1Iqd0D59cp-aU5pkCXPYwuo_7dVFgNlugzdMwOTwkv0QvXIrkcWiGyMK9/s1600/10385176_622546300561_1613262101_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-hG8ySI8XtkQtRikROQHErClvkFxBqgdoPmzRLeOB_2xqyC0TbMFFYs39JF50gH9zmZK4sXNToKnWGAOINWF1Iqd0D59cp-aU5pkCXPYwuo_7dVFgNlugzdMwOTwkv0QvXIrkcWiGyMK9/s1600/10385176_622546300561_1613262101_n.jpg" height="320" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /></i></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14055608068608736755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-19363061914329313592014-06-06T10:58:00.000-04:002014-06-06T10:58:06.522-04:00Talking to the Statues<i>Yesterday I put in a good five hours</i><br />
<i>talking to the statues,</i><br />
<i>Chased your memory all around the room,</i><br />
<i>didn't manage to catch you.</i><br />
<i> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>-- The Mountain Goats, “Korean Bird Paintings”</i><br />
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I could write about consequence and reason or about the frayed ends of thatched reeds dangling beneath a chair’s seat or about the body’s own poisons. I’d rather recount the famous, dead and gone, whom I’d like to invite to dinner, Monk and Molina and Maravich, just to mention the <i>M'</i>s. But what makes any of us think such geniuses would rise from their graves and straight away consent to share a meal and answer our questions? And what is it we should ask? <i>What was the bright spirit by which you were possessed? </i>or <i>Now? Is there so much as a single shallow breath?</i> In other words: What should we want to know and how much?<br />
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It is fruitless, of course, to aspire to genius, but that never stopped me. I wanted to be a child prodigy, though even then I suspected I didn’t have it in me, that I had something of the second-best coursing through my veins. Oh, what arrogance dwells in such a notion – that one will always triumph until the very end, until all but one other has fallen away, until the last shot in the final game spins its way out rather than in at the buzzer, death without dominion until, of course, its proper reign has well and surely begun.<br />
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The spirit isn’t <i>bright</i> but <i>dark</i>, and I should have said that, having known this for what feels like forever. It can’t have been forever, of course. There must have been a dozen or so years before it. But it can feel like forever, just as our lives can feel like forever: an endless sloping line, perhaps halved from time to time but those halves never amounting to – as halves of course cannot – nothing. Something must always remain.<br />
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Or maybe not. Wallace Stevens’ listener, <i>nothing himself</i>, attends to <i>the nothing that is</i> in the final line of “The Snow Man,” a poem worth recounting whole:<br />
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<i>One must have a mind of winter </i><br />
<i>To regard the frost and the boughs </i><br />
<i>Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>And have been cold a long time </i><br />
<i>To behold the junipers shagged with ice, </i><br />
<i>The spruces rough in the distant glitter</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Of the January sun; and not to think </i><br />
<i>Of any misery in the sound of the wind, </i><br />
<i>In the sound of a few leaves,</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Which is the sound of the land </i><br />
<i>Full of the same wind </i><br />
<i>That is blowing in the same bare place</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>For the listener, who listens in the snow, </i><br />
<i>And, nothing himself, beholds </i><br />
<i>Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.</i><br />
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Perhaps it would be best to be brazen with such men, ask Stevens how he spent his final few Sunday mornings, ask Monk to relay a bit of what swirled through his head all those days at the Baroness’s estate, ask Jason Molina whether the beauty warbling in his throat as he sang tasted bitter or sweet, ask Pistol Pete if he knew somehow, or at least suspected, that he was born with only half a heart.<br />
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Recite these words: <i>While the wolf had her fangs deep in my heart, who’s been writing them songs, who’s been singing and who’s been listening, blue eyes while you’ve been gone, that two dollar hat and them old black stockings, down on the bowery.</i> Then listen to Jason Molina sing them, hear them from his lips and tongue and chest and breath. That is how genius elevates, how suffering ennobles, how beauty transforms. Or perhaps you find yourself unpersuaded. Then go lie down in the tall grass; let the black birds come for you at sunset. They’ll either carry you away or pluck out your eyes, claw at your heart, peck away to get at the sweet marrow of your bones. You decide -- we all decide -- how you wish to be taken.<br />
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I should tell the living what I think of them, let them hear my admiration, let them make of my words whatever they will. Those words are not, I know, worth nothing to them. It does not belittle me to speak. So much easier, though, to talk to statues, to imagine the dead resurrected, to pronounce one’s faith only after the miracle has been enacted.<br />
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To the ones I love, though, <i>this</i>. Only but always <i>this</i>.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14055608068608736755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-30597136342503649622014-05-25T22:16:00.000-04:002014-05-26T01:18:37.709-04:00The Whole Wide World<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12.727272033691406px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">The last of the repercussions</span><br style="background-color: white; font-size: 12.727272033691406px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12.727272033691406px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">died off real slow.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-size: 12.727272033691406px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12.727272033691406px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">The sky was still;</span><br style="background-color: white; font-size: 12.727272033691406px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12.727272033691406px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">the cold sun sank down beneath the snow.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-size: 12.727272033691406px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12.727272033691406px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">I hung by my hand</span><br style="background-color: white; font-size: 12.727272033691406px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12.727272033691406px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">from the tree outside</span><br style="background-color: white; font-size: 12.727272033691406px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12.727272033691406px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;"> and I looked on</span><br style="background-color: white; font-size: 12.727272033691406px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12.727272033691406px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">The whole wide world</span></i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12.727272033691406px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;"> -- The Mountain Goats, "Whole Wide World"</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">What are those famous Susan Sontag lines about illness? <i>Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. </i>Most of us, she writes, make our lives in the kingdom of the well, until and unless we are obliged, at least briefly, to call ourselves citizens of that other, darker place. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">But what about the border town? the nowhere-land between the two? the hazy, dilapidated strip between the <i>now leaving... </i>and <i>welcome to...</i> signs? Mostly it's a place you pass through-- spend a night, or at most a few weeks, sweating it out in some low-slung pastel motel -- and then drive on into the proper provinces of illness or health, where, whatever the state of affairs, there's at least some sturdy government, and you'll know the pattern of the flag and what currency they'll take.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">But even the border town has a population. The ones who keep the motels, and the greasy-spoon, and the 24 hour Cash-for-Checks & Currency Exchange place up and running. Who know the backroads and the menu of the one bar by heart. Who live whole swaths of their lives in the in-between. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">Illness is not a metaphor, Sontag says. And maybe she's right. But I was raised-up in the border town between illness and health, and I'm here to tell you -- it's where metaphors are born.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">Thank the Lord, rarely in my life have I been truly sick. But I've damn sure never been well. Not from my earliest blue moments in the hospital incubator, failing to breathe, and then doing it badly. I'm not dying any faster than most of us. There's no foreign invader in my blood, no fatal flaw in my heartbeat. I can't claim a visa into illness, really, and I shouldn't. But every time I try to cross the border into w</span><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">ellness there's a reason they won't stamp my passport. Pick one: </span><i style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">high muscle-tone, absence of motor control, chronic pain, lack of balance, graceless gate, scar-tissue, bruising, muscle weakness, general fatigue. </i><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">Even beyond my body they claim </span><i style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">brain damage, lack of spacial awareness, persistent depression, severe anxiety, lasting trauma.</i><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;"><i></i>I get sick of this list, and sick of the fact that I know it so well. Everything grows banal if you repeat it too many times. Even pain becomes bureaucracy. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;"><i>No entry for the damaged, darling. </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">So I make my life between hills of barbed-wire. I have a permanent room in one of those stucco motels, and I've taken the bad oil paintings of ships down off the walls and filled the room with typewritten letters written from hospitals and orchids somebody snuck in for me from the land of the well. I'm near the ice-machine and the one balcony where you can see the sky, and the boy down at the diner knows how to make my coffee just right and that I like crab cakes for dinner. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">But here's the thing about nowhere, in-between, border town: there isn't enough there to keep you alive.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">This spring I become inexplicably convinced that I am, indeed, dying, and now. I can't breathe or keep my food down. My ankles swell and my heart is like a bottle-rocket in my chest. I shake in the sweat-soaked covers of my bed, I shut myself in the bathroom, light every candle in my place and pray. I bite my lips raw and bleeding. I beat on the gates of the kingdom of the sick: <i>let me in, in, in. </i>For three nights I sleep on a friend's couch and try to cry softly enough that I won't wake her children.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;"><i>Oh Molly, stop it. </i>My father begs on the telephone. <i>You'll waste so much time feeling like this...</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">The most awful thing is that he's paced his own years in the border town, is pacing them now, maybe. I hear his echo alter: <i>I've wasted so much time feeling like this...</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">From the kingdom of the sick, they send small pale pills in increasingly high dosages. From the land of wellness they send water and chocolate, and small pale pebbles the color of my thumb. From everywhere they advise breath.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;">In my room in the border town I have a desk. At my desk in the border town I write a poem to the mind I fear I'm losing. It is roadkill, a milk bottle, a lover, the water, my body, a disobedient boy. I write through a whole day, Godbless it. In the border town there isn't enough to keep you alive; Goddamn it, you have to conjure it up, out of muted-florescence, and gasoline, and faith. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.532682418823242px;"><br /></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03898497269959409698noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-49857446978494800172014-05-24T21:35:00.002-04:002014-05-24T21:35:31.880-04:00Suppositions: An Interlude<i>If you keep quiet, it will stay like this forever.</i><br />
<i>If you just keep quiet, it will stay like this forever.</i><br />
<i>I feel certain of it now.</i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>-- The Mountain Goats, “</i>Noche del Guajolote<i>”</i><br />
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I suppose there is indeed a perfect text and the writer’s job is to struggle toward it, hoping that at best he will manage a kind of approximation of what he ought to have written, the way an umpire can call a strike on a pitch that’s in the neighborhood of the plate – an inch or two high or low, outside or in, of the strike zone – the batter’s knees buckling when he fears the curveball or slider will hit him but instead arcs back over the plate and the umpire contorts his limbs into an approximation of the martial artist’s deadly attack, while the fans groan or erupt, depending on whether their team’s player has thrown the strike or taken it.<br />
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And these the ingredients in the bitter recipe of tortured romantic ardor: mother, child, and angel; pulse, twist, and wretch; terror and longing, prayer and regret. Home, lost. Home, alas. Home, oh terrifying angel. Home, oh mother to the man become brother of the chosen, unchosen himself, the terrifying angel wrecked and torn. That’s all Rilke, I suppose, locked in the chains from which he cannot release himself.<br />
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I will say this about my eye troubles: I have come to understand the precise ways in which our vessels and nerves are nothing but vines wrapped around muscle and bone, shaped according to sinew and skeleton, how a sharp stitch in the eye can stab not simply at spine and scrotum and bowel but at the ball of a foot and the cord of a finger, at temple and ankle and crook of the arm, knee, or neck. Thus, I suppose, we see not merely with our eyes but our entire selves. How else would we detect the dull beast squatting on his matted, leathery haunches in the dark field behind our home?<br />
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I suppose there are certain things you can’t take a picture of, like the yellow orchid in the west-facing kitchen window at sunset. Oh Susanna, don’t you dare cry for me.<br />
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Fourteen years ago, in Spain, in a stone castle dangling above a magnificent cliff, and in Wales, among the gorgeous ruins of Tintern Abbey and on the rain-soaked hills, and at thirteen, seated for hours against an oak tree in Lake Vista, and on the Lake Pontchartrian seawall at seventeen, and at dawn, at my desk, more mornings these days than not, and seated driving in my car. There. There. There. I suppose there is indeed some perfect moment to be captured, but in what manner? At what expense?<br />
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I suppose I assumed that by my fiftieth year I would have a firm grasp of what appears to be going on with, you know, life, love, suffering – the whole lot of it. Not joy, though. I don’t believe I ever expected to attempt such a difficult calculation.<br />
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If I keep quiet, I suppose, it will stay like this forever. My good eye. My bad. The knot on the tendon of my right hand. The impossible beauty of the late afternoon sun in the west-facing window. Rise, rise, rise.<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14055608068608736755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-40911067144516309112014-01-04T09:43:00.000-05:002014-01-04T09:43:06.800-05:00A New Year's Resolutions<i>One whole life recorded</i><br />
<i>In disappearing ink…</i><br />
<i>-- The Mountain Goats, “Lakeside View Apartment Suite”</i><br />
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A New Year’s Resolutions<br />
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To finally find the red ball that, half a century ago, sailed high over our heads into the thorny weeds of our neighbor’s backyard.<br />
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To walk each day the twilight fields beyond our house with such resolute humility the deer do not bother to scutter away but instead consent to demonstrate precisely how one slowly, slowly, bows one’s head in a solemnly orchestrated homage.<br />
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To speak plainly, without shenanigans or wordplay, without costume or cosmetics. To say <i>dog</i> for dog, <i>love</i> for love.<br />
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To welcome back not simply those we’ve sorely missed but those long ago and well forgotten, children wandering the halls of washed-away schools.<br />
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To be <i>we</i> again, not <i>I</i>, though we do not even know how to manage much more simple mathematical calculations: circumferences, square roots.<br />
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To find solace in forgiveness, even at the expense of a proper sentence, a dog set to barking only after the prowler has taken all he aims to steal.<br />
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To cease imagining certain inevitabilities: books never to be read, music never to be heard, beauty unregarded, unremarked.<br />
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To attend to the gentlest of rains, such slow and mournful songs, until the water overflows the garden’s cisterns, seeks gully, creek, and stream with a philospher’s resolve, a poet’s fervency.<br />
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To read and listen, to regard all beauty, with a scholar’s ardency, a penitent’s faith, even as each leaf slips from the branch: sentence and melody and shape become word and note and silhouette become form and sound and ash.<br />
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To wake Mr. Justice from his winter nap, ask his help in finding all we’ve lost: first, the red ball; afterward, the children wandering the washed-away halls; finally, the scrap upon which we scrawled this list.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14055608068608736755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-22009242614512431732013-12-17T21:42:00.001-05:002013-12-17T21:43:11.168-05:00Rooms Like These<br />
<i>Sink low, rise high; bring back some blurry pictures </i><br />
<i>to remember all your darker moments by. </i><br />
<i>Permanent bruises on our knees, </i><br />
<i>never forget what it felt like to live in rooms like these.</i><br />
<i> -- The Mountain Goats, “Birth of Serpents”</i><br />
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<i>The Back Room</i><br />
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The back room was where lizards crawled on the one brick wall, where the paperback Catholic self-help books resided on blonde do-it-yourself wooden shelves, where my great uncle took up residence when my great aunt died, his white shirts suddenly left un-ironed, un-starched, coppery stains blooming at the collars and cuffs, while his black and gray and navy suits slumped and sagged one against the other in the closet, the hollow-core sliding doors sticking like stubbed toes and then, when jostled, slipping clear off their hinges, while from outside the swimming pool’s gurgle and gulp snaked through the back door to join the coughs and throat-clearings and whimperings. <i>He’s fallen apart</i>, or something like that was what we were told, so my brother and I found ourselves sleeping on the sofa-bed in the den, each night the inevitable steel crossbar at the hipbone or knee a reminder that there were far worse pains in this world to be endured.<br />
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<i>The Rooms Upstairs</i><br />
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After Katrina we went up there, my siblings and I, the only place in the house the wretched water hadn’t reached, mold growing up the wall on both sides of the narrow staircase but then stopping suddenly before it reached the top, a smooth line of demarcation as if even a simple-celled fungus – or whatever stuff such mold is made of – could tell that the particular chemical composition of the space above was of a different variety than the one below. And it had become years and years earlier just that, rooms deemed safe from my mother’s or father’s ascent because the time arrived, as one might have expected, when they’d decided it wasn’t worth the climb or couldn’t. Why seek out, in any case, horrors one didn’t dare address, the tang of adolescent despair, of familiar ruin, of incalculable desire? And once the children were all gone off to hunt their own lives, why bother searching for evidence of life long ago extinguished? Oh, but what science was once to be found there. In the floor-to-ceiling cabinets at the top of the stairs, my older brothers stored sulfurous chemistry sets and magnifying glasses and a heavy black-and-silver microscope with insects and drops of dried blood and locks of pig and horse and human hair all squeezed for careful inspection between glass rectangular plates, their edges sharp as knives, and soldier-shaped molds into which they poured – or at least I imagined they did -- melted lead and tin. They kept binders filled with Mardi Gras doubloons, with baseball cards, with stamps from Senegal and the Dominican Republic and the Vatican, silver dollars and buffalo nickels and donut-holed or star-shaped foreign coins slipped into the felt-lined slots of gold-embossed blue cardboard cases. I collected music, books, the poems I wrote – all the useless beauty I could lay my hands on, every unpronounceable, unspeakable moment I could gather in my scrawny fists.<br />
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<i>The Helping Hands Room</i><br />
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504-288-0334. Because we were not allowed to linger on the first line, 504-282-5612, seeing as how any moment an arm or leg might be broken, how our elderly Christian Science neighbor might need a bit of undocumented medical attention for her gout or lumbago or fluttering heart, how the orthopedic ward nurses might require my father’s consent for more – and more potent – pain-killing medication for his newly post-surgical patients, we acquired a second line, ostensibly in the service of my mother’s charitable endeavor distributing discarded clothes to Cuban immigrants, but also for the children – or, more precisely, for all that I cared, for me in the service of my own machinations, the hours and hours of conversation with my girlfriend. I cannot imagine what we said. Did we talk about her alcoholic mother, her two sisters confined to psychiatric wards, her own surgeon of a father, a man who years and years later I would discover, when I’d come to care about such things, was the spitting image of the poet William Carlos Williams? Did we trade Cat Stevens lyrics back and forth? Did I dare to profess my admiration for the long stick-shaped legs stretching out from the bloomers beneath her cheerleader skirt? I don’t remember, of course. We do not ever remember such moments because we believe them – <i>wrongly, wrongly</i> -- wholly insubstantial, fleeting, unaware that they will indeed linger season after season, lodge themselves like clots in our blood, the way the x-rays my father slipped beneath the clip of the fluorescent-lit device in the Helping Hands room are still imprinted on my eyes, the way his mumbled dictation – period, paragraph, salutation – still echoes in my ears, precisely the same sound my footsteps make each evening when I set out near sunset for a walk behind our house. It’s like the scraping of the dried leaves at the field’s edge before there’s nothing but the quiet of the soft fallen grass. Just like that.<br />
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<i>The Living Room</i><br />
<br />
Where we did not live. Where there was no living to be done, or so every grimly appointed inch of it seemed to declare. Where the lights – a 50’s-era modernist chandelier, a heavy table lamp carved in pseudo-hieroglyphics – were not switched on for weeks on end. Where the dining table’s waxen sheen remained unsmudged, the carpet’s warp and weft unscuffed. Where the art – gauzy gray-green landscapes of willow and moss and swamp -- hung in gold-painted wooden frames, unremarkable, unremarked-upon. Where we were not welcome or simply would not dare go when strangers we did not know visited and were offered iced tea or instant coffee. Well, there were the years when my mother hosted a weekly prayer meeting for Catholic women of similar ilk and interest, gatherings that included inedible snacks to accompany the recitation of Bible verses and some measure of Pentecostal shenanigans: speaking in tongues, earnestly raising one’s hands as if to touch heaven, and a fair bit of the Holy Spirit’s thrashing, shouting, and possession. And when all of that was done and gone, I gained occasional claim to the Philips hi-fi in the corner, James Taylor and Cat Stevens giving way to ever greater melancholy, more than enough to fill not just this one room but all of them, the whole entire house, a whole entire life.<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14055608068608736755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-23383165336627954712013-11-20T12:19:00.001-05:002013-11-20T18:04:03.014-05:00[Search] … she was a dancer on her toes, a foreigner who made her home in the flowers of…<i>I've got a message for you, if I could only remember.</i><br />
<i>I've got a message for you, but you're gonna have to come and get it.</i><br />
<i>La la la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>-- The Mountain Goats, "Sinaloan Milk Snake Song"</i><br />
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[Search] <i>… she was a dancer on her toes, a foreigner who made her home in the flowers of…</i><br />
<br />
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She was a dancer on her toes,<br />
<br />
A foreigner who made her home in the flowers of...<br />
And no one took pity on her<br />
And she would go and weep<br />
At her mother's grave.<br />
<br />
When her father and stepmother and two sisters<br />
Came home, and the prince would dance with none<br />
But her; and when midnight came like the earth embroidered<br />
With flowers, and her shoon were made of silver,<br />
<br />
She would buy the flowers herself<br />
And laugh at the girls in their transparent muslins<br />
Who, even now, after dancing all night,<br />
Bustled on, raising roses. Meanwhile, Amanda<br />
<br />
Made her entrance by helicopter.<br />
Deliver Amanda, please, a pizza and flowers.<br />
To Amanda, raise a complaint against her parents:<br />
How she played baseball in the house<br />
<br />
After soaking her feet, toenails clipped --<br />
footbinding mandatory for all girls -- so graceful<br />
that she skimmed on top a golden lotus and formed<br />
a troupe to perform for foreign tourists.<br />
<br />
Little Grace, an imaginary friend whom she brings<br />
Everywhere to make the children happy,<br />
and a foreign woman's baby, a prostitute,<br />
and meanwhile, Niles, all alone in the house.<br />
<br />
And the dancing scene in 1928?<br />
The Gumm Sisters enrolled, a trio<br />
prettier than a garland of flowers,<br />
and her "cute" or "girl-next-door" looks<br />
<br />
flowered in the shape of a whale.<br />
Palaces and manor houses could be glimpsed<br />
through the splendid woods, red flowers<br />
becoming up on deck sailors dancing,<br />
and the Prince finally appearing among them.<br />
<br />
Notably well educated for her time, she bought<br />
a radio station and then a TV station, cities<br />
and highways: <i>Where flowers bloom, so does hope,</i><br />
<i>And as soon as I could stand on my own, </i><br />
<i>I was given dance lessons in nightspots: the Foreign </i><br />
<i>and the Caliente Club, all Technicolor, made of money.</i><br />
<br />
And she asked her friend Hermes<br />
If she could eat at his home and play a teacher<br />
In a low-budget film with the father of her daughter,<br />
And she made no more films.<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14055608068608736755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-33604382378985760622013-11-02T20:58:00.000-04:002013-11-03T08:05:38.364-05:00Transcendental Youth <div style="display: inline !important;">
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<i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Sing, sing for ourselves alone</span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Speak into the microphone...</span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17px;">Try to explain ourselves, babble on and on </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17px;">By the time you receive this, we'll be gone...</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17px;">Sing, sing high, while the fire climbs</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17px;">Sing one for the old times.</span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 17px;"><br /></span></span></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 17px;">-- The Mountain Goats, "Transcendental Youth"</span></span></span></span></i></div>
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Billy says he figures he's got maybe ten good brain cells left to work with, the rest of them blitzed away by the combination of too much acid in the 70s and all the low-alcohol beer he could legally drink on base at 18, because back then, in Alaska, they had vending machines in the barracks. <i>It'd get you as drunk as anything else, </i>he chuckles, <i>you just had to drink more of it. </i>He likes to tell me that now he drives like an old lady, so much wiser and more cautious than he was in all those hapless years of youthful excess. Really, though, he treats the cab like it's the semi he drove for a long time: Turning wide, and muscling it hard from lane to lane, unused to its new, small body. </div>
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When John finally starts singing around 1:30 in the morning, I've been at The Mohawk for almost five hours. Long enough to drink three beers and hear four mediocre local bands, unlisted opening acts, play for a small crowd of their waifish friends. There are four of us here at the end of all that: me, a high school choir teacher and his brand new girlfriend, and a mop-haired drummer who thinks I'm hitting on him because I've spent the last twenty minutes trying to convince him to not leave before the show even starts. Nearly empty, the venue is concrete and cold, and it feels later than it is -- those weirdly seasick hours when you are still awake as the night turns over into morning. We pull closer to the stage to cut into the useless space. Sharp-faced and sallow, John looks like a bird of prey against the microphone, or like whatever wounded animal that bird is circling.</div>
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When Billy finds out I'm a teacher, he's thrilled. He's got so many questions for me. He wants to know about double negatives and prepositions and what in the hell a Freudian slip is. It takes about half an hour to get from my house in central Austin to the elementary school down south, where I have a job this semester teaching creative writing twice a week to thirteen nine-year-olds. Billy volunteers to take me there and back for the duration. He's grateful for the steady work, and he never charges me for the inevitable time we spend sitting in traffic. Tuesday, I teach him what an Oedipus Complex is because he heard a passenger mention it in the cab. We talk about Sophocles and prophecy, and he says, <i>Man, listening to the oracle sounds like it's always a bad idea. </i>I learn that he is adopted, and that though he searched and searched for his biological mother, she never wanted to speak to him. He doesn't speak much to the family that raised him either. <i>I look different,</i> he says, <i>like a dirty gypsy</i>. He runs one hand through his long, damp curls. </div>
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Thursday, he brings me a peach and we discuss the different meanings of the various spellings of <i>to/too/two</i> and how much we love <i>Casablanca</i>. He has three children. His youngest, Rosemary, is my age and has a thyroid problem. <i>She's my favorite.</i> <i>I mean, I don't have favorites, but, she needs me. </i> His oldest is a 911 operator in San Antonio, but a few years ago she danced the evening show at the Yellow Rose in town. <i>Her mother quit talking to her,</i> Billy says, <i>but I figured I better not. Otherwise she'd never quit taking her clothes off and come home.</i></div>
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<i>Here's looking at you, kid, </i>he calls as I climb out of the cab.</div>
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John's album, <i>The Graceless Age, </i>is easily my favorite of the year. It's brilliant, soaked in Mississippi fire and brimstone, in heroin and hurt, in Faulkner and <i>The Odyssey</i> and California space. It makes an epic out of walking through the ashes of a small burned-down town. He has a kind of guttural, intimate voice, and at the end of one song you hear a crackling recording of his mother talking about adopting him from a Jackson hospital. <i>We got home that night, and you cried in the night, and all of three of us, my mother and your father and I, got up and met each other at the doorway. We all had to take turns going in to check on you. We were so excited to have you be our son. </i></div>
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Somewhere after that, or maybe way beforehand, something broke down inside the family and the boy they were so glad to have. And there was a lot of suffering. God and addiction and abandonment. And then we got this album. <i>I pray this light will be her guide / into my arms, these crooked arms, / underneath the southern sky.</i></div>
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You wouldn't know any of that listening to John sing this morning. He just looks wrecked, sad beyond belief, exhausted, hollowed. If I hadn't listened to the whole album fifty times, I wouldn't understand a single lyric. The mop-haired drummer shakes his head, kisses my cheek, and leaves. I pull even closer to the stage.</div>
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My kids this semester are in fourth grade. But they do not know the difference between a noun, a verb, and an adjective. Many of them cannot put a sentence together. For some of them, English is not their first language.
They associate writing with feeling dumb, and from the first day, it's clear to me that they're angry about the hours that we
spend together each week. They think they've been dumped with me because they're struggling or because their parents are not free to pick them up when the school day ends. They're not wrong. </div>
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My kids refuse to pick up their pencils. They throw paper airplanes at my head. They steal each other's shoes and leap out of their seats if there's even a second I don't have them engaged. When one kid does finally write a few sentences, they are about his father getting shot when he was an infant. At the bottom he draws an illustration of what he thinks was his best day: the day he was born. His mother lies in a hospital bed. He is on her chest. A tall stick figure in the corner is his father. He labels it so that I am sure. Another little boy, when I tell him he has to open his notebook, begins to stab himself in the chest with his pencil. Hard. I hear the lead break. I have never before felt quite so limited by my wheelchair. I cannot fit between the desks to reach him. The kids cry at the slightest provocation, and otherwise they are trying to yell. They are all bluster and devastation. Tiny storms. Microbursts.</div>
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One day, when I stand briefly at the board to write an example sentence, I trip and fall down. They all rush toward me. Warm little bodies; small hands patting my back. <i>I fall down sometimes, too, </i>Jerry says matter-of-factly. Like, <i>Don't worry, you're not the only one.</i></div>
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They deserve someone so much better than me. Someone able-bodied. Experienced. Qualified. But I'm all they've got for these small hours. <i>I'm sorry, </i>I want to tell them every single time.</div>
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It's Billy who starts to call them the hooligans. Like, <i>How were the hooligans today? You show those hooligans who's boss? Oh, Miss Molly, </i>he says, <i>I was such a hooligan. I was such an idiot. If I could do it over again, I'd do it different. I'd learn to read. I mean, I can read the road signs alright, but.... Hey, did you know the salmon in Alaska always come back to where they were born... Hey, tell me again about the Oedipus thing...</i></div>
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Do you know that I was afraid of him the first time he came to pick me up? He was tall. He had grimy hands and a trucker hat and he smelled like sweat. I rode the whole way, that first drive, with my cellphone clutched in my hand ready to dial. Thinking: <i>he has my wheelchair in the trunk of his car; what am I going to do?</i> At the end of the ride he offered me a chocolate and told me I reminded him of his daughter.</div>
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I think about sweet-faced Jerry and everything he'll grow up to be.</div>
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As John sings, I think about how lucky I feel that, even though most of what I write disappears unnoticed into the void, as a poet I don't have to look that fact in the face every day. I just write, and try not to be too bothered by the quiet. But he's driven from California to sing to three of us and fall asleep on someone's couch. <i>Look out at how hard it is to make the thing you love reach truly into the world. Look out at how small you are. Look out at the concrete and the grime and the blackness and live with it. </i>I reach up and put both my hands on the stage. I really hope he can tell that he is breaking my heart. I really hope he can tell that it matters. </div>
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Afterwards, John takes both my hands in his and I tell him that I think he is a genius. I tell him thank you so much. </div>
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In so many ways the last year has been the worst one of my life. I had a plan for my future. I had a clean, shining path down the fast-track I'd been chasing since I knew how to chase. I had prestige and security and a well-honed sense of myself as invincible. Success, as an artist and a professional, was an escape hatch from the hardship of my body. I was going to be so good at my life that no neurological disorder, no pain or bruising or helplessness, was going to matter. And then, for reasons impossibly complicated, impossibly quotidian, and, I've come to realize, deeply inevitable, it fell apart. It's not an especially good story. Suffice it to say that I never planned to be falling to my knees in an elementary school classroom. I never planned to be thoroughly alone at a rock show at two a.m. I never planned to write a book about an old Virginia hospital. I never planned to be discussing the Greeks in the back of a cab for two hours every week. I never planned anything this messy, or this shining, or this hard.</div>
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Even as my kids are pissed-off and badly behaved and reluctant, they are also hugely imaginative and gregarious and inventive. They want to stand up and share all the details of what they ate for lunch on a given day, and why they hate chocolate pudding. They want to tell me the dreams they have about space travel and their ideas for the best possible super hero. They want me to call them by the names of 90s pop stars that I have no idea how they heard of. For a week Salvador goes by J-Lo. Kimani ends every writing prompt we ever do with a list of all the impossibly fancy cars he wants to own. </div>
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One week we read the story of how the camel got his hump. I have them act it out on the rug in the front of the classroom, saying <i>humph just </i>like the camel does in the story,<i> </i>hanging their heads in frustration like the dog and the ox. </div>
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The next class, I coax them into working on the story of how the wizard got her magic. We go sentence-by-sentence. </div>
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How does the wizard get her powers? <i>A magic astroid. </i></div>
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What is her name? <i>Alice the Wiz! </i> </div>
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Who is the enemy? <i>A zombie that wants to get the wizard's power by eating her brain. </i></div>
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Where is it set? <i>A mansion!</i></div>
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Write one important thing about Alice that you might not know if you looked at her...</div>
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And at the end of class Julie looks up and says: <i>you tricked us into writing a whole story!</i></div>
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<i>Yeah! </i>they chorus and nod their heads. They are thrilled.</div>
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Every class, they ask if I'm coming back. Like I might not. Like I might just abandon them and disappear into the ether. </div>
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None of this is pretty or clean. None of it resolves. </div>
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You have to keep showing up: looking for the puncture in the pitch dark, the small thing you can do, the one person listening. Not because it fixes everything. Not because it is suddenly enough. Out of suffering, you make a gorgeous album not enough people hear. You never get another chance to be young or to do it right. The people who should love you do not always love you. You are lonely. You are not a good enough teacher. You cannot do enough. Your body is the wrong body. Your hurt does not have an endpoint. </div>
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But showing up is the only ting we have. Showing up for what we believe in. Showing up to be surprised. It is the only act out of which beauty is ever born. </div>
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So I sit down at my desk to write. So I stay in the empty bar until 2 a.m. So I touch a stranger I don't really know. So every day I tell my kids that I'll be back soon. And I come back. </div>
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One day, as I am packing up to teach, I hear music outside. Billy is early, and he's sitting in the front seat of his cab with the windows open playing a George Harrison song on his guitar. I gather my papers, and I go outside, and I sit on my front steps, and I listen to him sing. </div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03898497269959409698noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-54564058170015874132013-10-20T10:23:00.001-04:002013-10-20T10:55:49.306-04:00Are You Cleaning Off the Stone?<br />
<i>I'd like to begin by saying that I saw you coming, </i><br />
<i>but that would be a lie. </i><br />
<i>I'd like to say that I can hear your voice, </i><br />
<i>but I couldn't mean 'hear' in the accepted sense of the word. </i><br />
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<i>Are you cleaning off the stone? </i><br />
<i>That's a sweet thing to do. </i><br />
<i>Are you cleaning off the stone? </i><br />
<i>That's sweet of you.</i><br />
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<i>-- The Mountain Goats, “Are You Cleaning Off the Stone?”</i><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS5mCD_YVd7CX8i1Y2ZKV0jMtBrhje4vLW9H1DgHiUBMJzGML8WSQN8-i64FGLMGHOj5zDRdZ9YfqSPsku4_5CfL5J6mMUlokvZNMbwDPsV-5RA7rRKffO3LUX4f4bhwepGLs_mv0B7kcn/s1600/2013-10-10+17.03.27.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS5mCD_YVd7CX8i1Y2ZKV0jMtBrhje4vLW9H1DgHiUBMJzGML8WSQN8-i64FGLMGHOj5zDRdZ9YfqSPsku4_5CfL5J6mMUlokvZNMbwDPsV-5RA7rRKffO3LUX4f4bhwepGLs_mv0B7kcn/s320/2013-10-10+17.03.27.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
I’d like to say that I saw you coming, but that would be a lie.<br />
I never exactly <i>see</i> you coming, though there are other words<br />
That might apply, the senses’ usual fragile suspects: feel, taste,<br />
Touch, turn. Others, too: toward, fall, fallen, listen, succumb.<br />
I’m thinking of all these pictures I’ve taken, all this useless<br />
Linger and smudge: light and shadow, pallor and square.<br />
Are you cleaning off the stone? That’s a sweet thing to do,<br />
Except there’s this: all that’s collected there, leaf and twig,<br />
Dried shell, wasp wing, clam chalk, lint and litter – these<br />
Are the tools that through the years have carved my name.<br />
Call it, call me, what you like: I’ll call it with the same<br />
Voice I call my children, the same pleading:<br />
Where are you? How long until you return? <br />
<div>
What do these mean to you: <i>see,</i> <i>stone, linger, given</i>?</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14055608068608736755noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-295243970184862702013-08-09T15:34:00.002-04:002013-08-10T08:32:34.952-04:00Pure Honey<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<!--StartFragment-->
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>I had a thousand good
questions<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>I was gonna ask you
when you finally came by,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>but now that you're
really here<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>there's only one
question that comes to my mind<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>and that question
being:<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>what's with all the Portuguese
water dogs?<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>I'd like to repeat the
question:<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>What's with all the Portuguese
water dogs?<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>-- The Mountain
Goats,“Pure Honey”</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_1Vn3_W8F2THfMclNeuOTvU64FBVaukuhluOiVaTajvUUx2nssZu-HjoaX4CX16IGMacQoL5bHGqp0VgDRXQIJSTwXxyLz2Bz4r8TCMlibqX8IB20IcxfYBtrMvLT4cirkbSBhzeRw4LQ/s1600/66collage053.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="345" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_1Vn3_W8F2THfMclNeuOTvU64FBVaukuhluOiVaTajvUUx2nssZu-HjoaX4CX16IGMacQoL5bHGqp0VgDRXQIJSTwXxyLz2Bz4r8TCMlibqX8IB20IcxfYBtrMvLT4cirkbSBhzeRw4LQ/s640/66collage053.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The stinkbugs have taken over the garden, decorating each
tomato like cloves on a baked ham or simmering orange, denuding the zucchini
and desecrating the squash, and I need four new car tires because, in this
summer’s every-other-day’s deluges, my Mini shimmies and slides line-to-line on
the highway as if to confirm not just that the world is – all evidence to the
contrary – flat but also that it’s now, like an immense and unsteady scale,
tilting this way and then that, and any moment, if I’m not careful, if I’m not
gripping the wheel like Jr. on the final lap, my car might slide right off the
edge and me with it, a Niagran plunge into, well, nothing. (The nothing that
is? The nothing that’s not? <i>Who’s that
talking?</i>)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At the grocery, here’s what I think: Ice cream. Ice cream. And
that’s it, though I consent to buying whatever else happens onto the list: light
bulbs, sandwich bread, yogurt, black peppercorns, the pressure-point
motion-sickness bands you wear on your wrists.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The blast of refrigeration from the gourmet desserts dairy
case fogs my glasses, and the doctor tells me that the two bumps that emerged
on my left palm some nine months ago have a name: Dupuytren's Contracture. Among
those who suffered from this affliction – though there is no suffering to speak
of, no affliction inflicted – is<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1854975884909799598" name="_GoBack"></a> Samuel Beckett. <i>Was</i>, I mean. Among those who suffered <i>was </i>Samuel Beckett. Though, as I said,
he didn’t suffer.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or did, of course, but just not from Depuyten’s Contracture.
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3OSej-JYSrahTTESUn4pIvfK_86YmJ_0yzCmYLor6gD2HPiSRItdRFXlEymNcMBfOVfXSt0YSIX9xojM_9cKqQPLZ43OrVos7FsnSEO2kTYRFhEAjk1hNtpSTs5_v5EDN3QFZATlzZf1J/s1600/Unknown-2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="395" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3OSej-JYSrahTTESUn4pIvfK_86YmJ_0yzCmYLor6gD2HPiSRItdRFXlEymNcMBfOVfXSt0YSIX9xojM_9cKqQPLZ43OrVos7FsnSEO2kTYRFhEAjk1hNtpSTs5_v5EDN3QFZATlzZf1J/s640/Unknown-2.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Indeed he must have suffered – so terribly pale, so
strikingly gaunt, ornithic, unguiculate. (<i>Oh,
go ahead. Look them up. </i>But it’s such a bother.<i> Well, I did. </i>Well, you would.) And all those photographs: seated in
a corner, on a rubbish bag, a folding chair, fire escape steps, a narrow bed.
Spectacles perched on his high forehead, cigarette pinched between his fingers,
his expression a grimace or frown or prefect’s pinched-lip displeasure or– lo
and behold, one out of twenty – a sly grin.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>What’s that mean?<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What? A sly grin? A prefect’s pinched-lip displeasure?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>No. “Well, you would.”
What’s “Well, you would” mean?<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Nothing.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>It means nothing?<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It <i>is</i> nothing. It
doesn’t mean anything.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Okay, then. Just
asking.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2KAe2bEQROb0Dd3rnUZyPQl2MI9Jd0zE7cU7Mcf06oGUd6__1935EO3rw3COHqpaTbi4q-vSLuuwhwASZAAhcKaZUzehcgQJ4FL-6X2TknGeju4AuCNGs43PCm0zP6dbfxGgxbve-tahB/s1600/2013-07-24+16.23.25.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2KAe2bEQROb0Dd3rnUZyPQl2MI9Jd0zE7cU7Mcf06oGUd6__1935EO3rw3COHqpaTbi4q-vSLuuwhwASZAAhcKaZUzehcgQJ4FL-6X2TknGeju4AuCNGs43PCm0zP6dbfxGgxbve-tahB/s400/2013-07-24+16.23.25.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Okay, then, since you haven’t yet asked, here it is: I’m
done taking pictures. Ten thousand of them over the last fourteen months, which
means two dozen or thereabouts a day, every day, for sixty weeks. And those
just the ones I kept, posted, shared, documented, Instagrammed, as it were. There
were hundreds more – thousands, no doubt – that I did not keep, that I deleted
from my phone a moment after they were taken. A whole world of them, as the
expression goes.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A shuttered world. <i>Shutter.
Shudder. Shuddering</i>: shiver, tremble, quiver, shake.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Right now, it’s not so much all those pictures I’m
interested in as it is the stopping: how my seeing might have been changed by
this project and will now no doubt change again – how it is changing already, my
days suddenly as bare, now that I’m done, as a Beckett stage: mounds of dirt, a
leafless tree, an old desk, a naked bulb. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
These, of course, were the very sorts of things – dirt,
tree, desk, bare bulb – that served as my subject. And me, I suppose, or not <i>me</i> so much as <i>me</i> <i>seeing, </i>though I’m not
sure exactly what that means – or even inexactly. Or perhaps at all.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Exact. <i>Exact.</i>
Precision. Extract.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcq0KmS4PuuWM4MXedE-2riSCVf93dQJuQZy9o6xXteVy1BUrQLE_Nuce95pChofd2rvG6HPuXBU2DVJMF19CjaqA9I6LynOTbWM-7F5lLKly0hnrfo-ucgG1tT96HxogEcl9B79n-bKZh/s1600/2013-05-20+16.38.53.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcq0KmS4PuuWM4MXedE-2riSCVf93dQJuQZy9o6xXteVy1BUrQLE_Nuce95pChofd2rvG6HPuXBU2DVJMF19CjaqA9I6LynOTbWM-7F5lLKly0hnrfo-ucgG1tT96HxogEcl9B79n-bKZh/s400/2013-05-20+16.38.53.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of the ten thousand, I took ninety-one photos of the view
from our front porch, forty-nine of myself. Three hundred seventy of the images
are collages comprised of four squares, four hundred eighty-five are of nine
squares, eighty-six are of sixteen. I did not count the rest – could not
possibly have counted – all the images of trees, of sky, of blooming or wilted
flowers, of reflections in windows, of light bulbs and lamps and dead
butterflies and twisting vines, of the noble and comical pug James Brown who matched
me step for step as we trudged again and again through the same woods and
fields near Sanctuary Cottage, into the dilapidated barns and – always
reluctantly by James, as though we were fording the wide Missouri – across muddy
ditches and shallow creeks.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I learned, I guess, to better see shapes, follow lines,
discern shadows, to notice the small squares into which the world can be
divided. But that’s not really, I know, what matters. And I never imagined that
the images themselves -- how evocative
or uncompelling they might be, how successful or not – were the point of my
undertaking.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Undertaking.
Undertaken. Undertaker.</i> Such curious words. I was certain that <i>The Undertaker</i> was a Harold Pinter play,
but I was no doubt thinking of <i>The Dumb
Waiter</i> with its pair of bantering hitmen reminiscent of Beckett’s two banterers
in Godot.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Banter. Bandolier.
Dandelion and burdock</i>. (This last a drink of fermented roots akin to
sarsaparilla, concocted by a parched St. Thomas Aquinas after a sleepless night
of prayer in the open country, the sort of place where I live. Or so the story
goes.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFjV6aJIlnVlJz69l0rjKAtgFOzddSpAMypp_xhWE-29Gvkf3akT6XUT9vSC_3QNfjSAN6Y5mrB7apCQhYxD1e_Cru8jt3OsDv3Rzo-97StwdANqbyoXNXxJaeJrwP4956XQFhz0cFITPZ/s1600/2013-07-25+09.02.44.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFjV6aJIlnVlJz69l0rjKAtgFOzddSpAMypp_xhWE-29Gvkf3akT6XUT9vSC_3QNfjSAN6Y5mrB7apCQhYxD1e_Cru8jt3OsDv3Rzo-97StwdANqbyoXNXxJaeJrwP4956XQFhz0cFITPZ/s400/2013-07-25+09.02.44.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And another story, this one true as true: the photographer
who took my first author photo was the same one who took the shot of Beckett
sitting in that corner, a small ottoman beneath him, his shirt buttoned to the
throat, socks sagging down above a pair of tan Clarks wallabees. Years earlier
I’d mailed from Baltimore to a friend in Nashville a postcard with this very
photograph of Beckett. The card took two years to be delivered and arrived torn
and faded, stamped with a stamp that read: FOUND IN A SUPPOSEDLY EMPTY
CONTAINER.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Where else, one might ask, would one expect to find Beckett?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Let me tell you this as well. The Undertaker may not be an
absurdist play, but it is, I’ve learned, something far far greater: it’s the
moniker of a wildly famous wrestler, this paragraph from Wikipedia so stunningly
wonderful that it must be quoted in its entirety:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>The Undertaker gimmick
has two polar opposite identities. The first is the "Deadman," an
undead, occult-like figure which has consisted of several different versions.
He debuted his first version of the Deadman during his on-camera debut at
Survivor Series 1990. Here, he was clad as a Western mortician, a zombie-like
powerhouse donned in black attire with gray accessories. By SummerSlam 1994, he
began appearing as a mystic, chilling superhuman represented by cool colors,
replacing the gray with purple and using blue fog for the first time. At
Survivor Series 1996, the Deadman was reborn once again, this time as the
gothic "Lord of Darkness." By January 1999, he began appearing as the
ritual-performing dark priest of a stable called the Ministry of Darkness. The
Undertaker's alternate identity is a biker dubbed the "American
Bad-Ass", which he portrayed from May 2000 to November 2003. Since
WrestleMania XX, Undertaker has appeared as a hybrid of all of his previous
incarnations. At the same time, the hybrid has seen sharp contrasts, most
notably appearing while shirtless and sporting a skinhead/Mohawk.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I would trade all ten thousand pictures I’d taken -- and I’m
sure you would, too – to be in firm possession of such minute, detailed, and colorful
knowledge on this undead dark priest/biker badass Western mortician.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Hail Satan! <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And I’d trade them a thousand times over to have seen the
sick and frail Harold Pinter perform Beckett’s <i>Krapp’s Last Tape</i>.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Hail Satan tonight!</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And three times over to be able to sing.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Hail hail!<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggbcUY2hyphenhyphenlNlvitTGkT8PkpV39a4ecJNiyjLE2hShGRgWx-sF42EJhITDIDZO2GsVFyslY1bEgbWYszXnCmc06ax0wg7OW2nxcXhUb_KL2W0P515HNd24ekReNMWqMHdafINpgqBsobKSj/s1600/66collage052.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="345" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggbcUY2hyphenhyphenlNlvitTGkT8PkpV39a4ecJNiyjLE2hShGRgWx-sF42EJhITDIDZO2GsVFyslY1bEgbWYszXnCmc06ax0wg7OW2nxcXhUb_KL2W0P515HNd24ekReNMWqMHdafINpgqBsobKSj/s640/66collage052.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Though no doubt I won’t ever figure out moment-to-moment
what I’m doing with my life, I expect I will eventually figure out what I’ve
done. It may take years; it may take a fall into nothingness like the one I
imagine when my car starts to slide on the wet highway. It may take a thousand
more walks with the noble James. It may even take ten thousand more pictures. Until
then, I’ll just have to keep going.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Pull on your trousers,
then.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Pull ON your trousers.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Well? Shall we go?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Yes, let’s go.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<!--EndFragment-->Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14055608068608736755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-60251417032069281522013-06-16T18:49:00.003-04:002013-06-17T09:00:24.282-04:00Dance Music<pre><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>there's only one place where this road ever ends up.
and I don't want to die alone.
let me down, let me down, let me down gently.
when the police come to get me
I'm listening to dance music.
dance music.</i></span></pre>
<pre><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i> -- The Mountain Goats "Dance Music"</i></span></pre>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>When my siblings and I were young my father liked to play a game with us whenever we were driving in the car. He would start a song on the stereo and ask<i> okay, what is it?</i>and we would scramble to be the first to shout the song and artist, and start to sing along. The game was impossible to rig or predict; my father's taste was eclectic and mercurial: he was as likely to play the Smiths as Ella Fitzgerald, as liable to pick out a Johnny Cash song as an aria from <i>Madame Butterfly</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I grew up able to identify any version of Thelonious Monk’s “'Round Midnight” within the first few notes and sing every verse of “Losing My Religion.” I knew REM had formed in Athens and that you could hear Country in their Rock 'n' Roll, but that if you wanted real Southern Gospel, you had listen to the Blind Boys of Alabama. I could tell you that Prefab Sprout’s “Cars and Girls” was a tongue-in-cheek rebuttal to Bruce Springsteen and "Born to Run," and that the girl in "Thunder Road" was Angelina before she was Mary. Once, in fifth grade, I threw a Halloween party at which I tried to seem cool by playing Elvis Costello's <i>My Aim is True. </i>It was a rude awakening.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Pictures of my father's childhood are few and far between, and he rarely talks about it much detail. Largely, I construct an imagination of it from the pieces of his writing, the particular memories he sometimes lets slip as long as I don't ask him too many questions, and the stories he tells about the songs he loves. I make up my father playing basketball with his siblings in the eye of a hurricane in the driveway of their house on Chatham Drive. I make him up calling in to the radio station at ten years old and winning that first Bread album on vinyl. I make him up coming home to find his mother conducting church groups on their couch, speaking in tongues, and going upstairs to listen to the Cat Stevens albums he inherited from his older brothers. I pretend him sneaking in and smoking in New Orleans jazz clubs in the French Quarter, and I call up a baby-faced teenager with a filched copy of <i>Grapes of Wrath </i>or a paperback of L<i>eaves of Grass</i> creased from too much time in his back pocket. He's walking around outside Jesuit High School thinking about Hurricane Carter the year Bob Dylan put out <i>Desire. </i>Over and over again I play<i> </i>"Wasted Lives and Bluegrass" and imagine my father alone in North Carolina before graduate school, in those big round glasses he wore. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I have one strong memory of being on the coast in England with my family. It was misty, of course, and we were looking out over the water for barking seals. My father was a little ways off from the rest of us, walking farther down the cliffs with his hands in his pockets, not looking back. <i>Your father is sad, </i>my mother said. I was not to follow him. He has a thing for fado music: this horribly beautiful Portugese wailing, fated and long. He has a thing for the recordings Billie Holiday did near the end of her life, when her voice grew coarse and started to fail. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In another memory from the same trip, my father and I go out together every morning before everyone else. At the little cafe in Tolosa we drink <i>café con leche</i> and eat chocolate croissants and watch the city sky get bright. He makes the young women who run the bakery laugh. He has brought a beret and fallen in love with José Saramago and the hard cider from the Hotel Oria and flamenco. He loves the pageantry of it, and can never clap on the beat. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The first time I hear a song that feels like <i>mine </i>I am in seventh grade. It is 2004 and I am newly old enough for contemporary literary fiction. I've just finished Elizabeth McCracken's <i>The Giant's House </i>and Myla Goldberg's <i>Bee Season. </i> I climb into the car after school one day and my father says: <i>Molls, I found this band that wrote a song about Bee Season. </i>All of a sudden Colin Meloy is singing:</span></div>
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<i><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 16.046875px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Still now you're waiting to grow</span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 16.046875px;">Inside you're old</span><br style="background-color: white; line-height: 16.046875px;" /><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 16.046875px;">Sew wings to your pigeon toes</span><br style="background-color: white; line-height: 16.046875px;" /><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 16.046875px;">Put paper to pen</span><br style="background-color: white; line-height: 16.046875px;" /><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 16.046875px;">To spell out "Eliza"</span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">He had a weird, whiny voice and a fake British accent, and I have never loved anything more in my entire life, this song like a book, this pinched, sad shanty. It can't have begun this cleanly, but in my memory this is the beginning of our love affair with indie music. In the next few years my father and I would discover Neutral Milk Hotel and Joanna Newsom, the everybodyfields and, yes, The Mountain Goats. We would drive to the 9:30 Club in the middle of the week to see the Decemberists play and follow Anais Mitchell to hole-in-the-wall shows all over Virginia. We made friends with the guy who ran the independent record store near our apartment in Charlottesville, and we bought <i>The Crane Wife </i>there the day it came out while we talked to him about Tom Waits. During my loneliest adolescent years, we'd leave the house in the evening after dinner and drive into Lynchburg with the windows down and <i>Hymns for the Exiled </i>pouring out onto the highway in the heat. As I recovered from yet another surgery the summer before ninth grade, we played "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" again and again and again. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">One year, I am in high school, we go to hear Marshall Crenshaw play in a tiny little club in Virginia. We are inches away from the stage. He is seated, close to the microphone, balding and wearing a fedora. He sings mostly new songs, but also a couple old hits the crowds knows and buzzes for. When he sings "Mary Anne" it is beautiful and weirdly devastating. This is the first time I realize my father is getting old. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">These days we live across the country from one another, and still he is the source of every song that I have ever loved. Right now, we're obsessed with that particular kind of alt-country sung by newly-sober or just-can't-get-there southern men who've read too much Faulkner and spent too many nights in rattly old motels. That beautiful ring in the voice. Jason Molina, John Murry, Jason Isabell. It's hard to hear. It is the greatest thing. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I am my father's daughter. In shorthand, this means I am prone to excess, obsession, and introspection to a fault. It means I am performative and shy, all bluster and volume, deep sadness, and boundless joy, that animal thing you can't help but feel welling up when John Darnielle sings "No Children" and bangs on his guitar. That kind of love song.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Sometimes, even now, in the hardest moments of my life, my father will call and apologize for the difficult pieces of the legacy he's passed to me<i>, </i>for the fact that I can't stand the goddamn clouds. I wish I was always good enough to remember to tell him: <i>I have never wanted anything else.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Love what you love unashamedly; take equal joy in the highbrow and the low, at McDonald's and at the Opera. Never say that a song or a painting or a book is bad, only that you don't like it, then talk about why. Pretension is worthless. Almost anything can give you pleasure; the world is wide, after all, and full of things you haven't found yet. I will always be cooler than you. </i>These are the best things I have learned from my father.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">One afternoon I get into the car and he is playing Taylor Swift's first album way before she is famous. <i>Don't judge</i>, he says; <i>It's great</i>! He's right. We sing along to "Tim McGraw." I still know all the words.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And still, about half the time we talk, he tells me like it's news, like I don't know, like he's discovering it all over again: <i>Man, Molly, I really love Rihanna! </i></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03898497269959409698noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-86310498695024036092013-06-12T11:23:00.004-04:002013-06-12T11:23:56.352-04:00Journal of My Bad Eye (or Floreat Majestas)<br />
<i>And I lose my footing and I skin my hands, breaking my fall,</i><br />
<i>And I laugh to myself and look up at the skies,</i><br />
<i>And then I think I hear angels in my ears</i><br />
<i>Like marbles being thrown against a mirror.</i><br />
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<i>-- The Mountain Goats, “Wild Sage”</i><br />
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1. Prepare yourself for obfuscation: I have begun seeing the shadows of shadows.<br />
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2. These, these days, make me weep: rosemary pinched between finger and thumb, flecks of tobacco in the corner of a rusted tobacco tin, Latin pop songs from a concert on HBO, Stieglitz’s adoration of the young O’Keefe, oak floors in need of refinishing, red-shaded lamps at night in an empty room, unmowed fields beyond the apple and pear, and certain street names (Gravier, Esplanade, Spanish Fort) though maybe not, I don’t know, the streets themselves. I’d have to go there, I guess, slump down against the trunk of a burly oak and just see if, say, Cat Stevens starts strumming and swirling in my head: <i>Ruby, my love. You’ll be my love.</i><br />
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3. I have this notion that every poet from Eastern Europe exists only as a grainy black and white author photo, thick dark-framed glasses magnifying his eyes, balding head bent down, as inscrutable as the alphabet characters of the native language from which his words have been shorn, the tear at the dust-jacket’s corner threatening ever greater ruin. The men, I mean. In their pictures the women poets wear bulky cardigans, wispy gray hair spilling across their too-broad shoulders, a smudged window’s pot of flowers well out of focus behind them. A cigarette, perhaps. No one smiles, not ever. Do any poets? In their pictures, I mean – though perhaps it’s worth pondering even in – even <i>of</i> – their whole lives. Mary Oliver’s, I remember, looked more like a grimace. She walked her dogs through the fields and along the creek early mornings, and I’d sometimes see her, through my office window, in the hazy dawn: frozen, stock-still, peering down, eyes squinting, mouth pinched… -- this could not have been a grimace, could it? It must have been a smile.<br />
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4. Now, when I think of a number between 1 and 10, or when I calculate the change I’m supposed to be given, or when I try to recollect the artist whose song accompanies me through the aisles at Food Lion, I close my right eye, the bad one, as if not having to attend to that single irritant for a few moments will create greater space for the brain-work at hand. <i>Seven. Thirty-three cents. Duran Duran.</i><br />
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5. It may be that I’m not exactly seeing the shadows of shadows but somehow merely detecting them, as if they’re an echo or aftershock or the negative image of a gone-out light. That would be a good band name, I think: The Gone-Out Light.<br />
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6. This would make me weep, too, I suspect, if I thought too much about it – how many great band names I could choose from if I had, well, a band to name or my youth returned to me like a lost book (<i>see No. 16 below</i>) or a garage or basement or spare bedroom in which to practice or, say, even an ounce or two of musical talent. Perhaps I could write a record guide in which everything was a fabrication, the way as a boy my son used to make up lists and lists of baseball prospects he’d invented. Pultree Davis. Plaxico Beaufort. Jeremiah Sims.<br />
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7. One mistake above: I do have a spare bedroom. <i>Three</i> of them, actually. Add that to the list of items in No. 2.<br />
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8. <i>Who’ll be my light? You’ll be my light. You’ll be my day and night. You’ll be mine tonight. </i>And then a chorus of <i>aaaah</i>’s and a verse in Greek. That's “Rubylove” from <i>Teaser & The Firecat</i>, of course, but it was the next Cat Stevens album, <i>Catch Bull at Four</i>, that really did me in: the Zen woodcut of a child gently touching the bull’s snout on the cover, the songs darker, more desperate, harder-edged than anything he’d ever done or would do again: “Freezing Steel,” “O Caritas,” “18th Avenue,” “Ruins.” He was ready, years before he finally did, to disappear. “The mood here,” Stephen Holden wrote at the time in his review for Rolling Stone, “is of pessimism, terror, apocalyptic foreboding.” I flat-out loved it, so great was my thirst, I suppose, for pessimism and terror and apocalyptic foreboding. Or for that particular clawing, cloying, romantic ache.<br />
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9.When the temple hinge of my reading glasses came unscrewed the other day, I couldn’t see well enough to align the screw to the hole to twist it back in – without my reading glasses, that is, the very ones, of course, that lay broken in my hands. This seems to me an apt parable of aging.<br />
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10. <i>The insect eye</i> (another good band name: dubstep? glitch?) with its thousands and thousands of <i>ommatidia</i> (doom metal perhaps?) can see every which way <i>in darkness and in light</i> (Ommatidia’s debut album?) but cannot discern palm pad or <i>phalanx</i> (post-rock?) or the nail’s <i>lunula</i> (Irish Middle Eastern New Age fusion on the Six Degrees label?) but merely the outline of the hand. It’s that easy.<br />
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11. I have always known, I guess, that there are two ways of seeing, just as there are two ways of reading. One is <i>to see</i>. The other is <i>to see that you’re seeing</i>, to recognize precisely what you’re attending to -- shape and shadow, color and light, texture and distance, angle and juxtaposition, contrast and complement. This is what, in the 8,785 photographs I’ve taken this last year, I’ve tried to teach myself. It’s a bit like trying to read <i>Moby Dick</i> on one’s own while knowing nothing about ships or the Bible or Shakespeare or whaling or love or wit or subtext or parody, which is exactly what I tried to do as a kid. The effort of it made me so lonely, my ignorance flowering like a bruise into despair, the book so heavy in my hands, I had to turn the transistor radio on and fall asleep to the Houston Astros broadcast, Gene Elston doing the play-by-play alongside the corny Loel Passe who, when an Astros pitcher recorded another strikeout, would invariably gleefully exclaim, “And he breezed him [<i>dramatic pause</i>] one more time!” I was asleep long before the game was done and the Astros had, much more often than they had won, lost again.<br />
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12.Perhaps it’s this effort to see that I am seeing, to discern those things we attend to as we see, that makes me feel as if I’m now seeing the shadows of shadows. Or perhaps it’s just my lousy right eye.<br />
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13. That instrument on “Rubylove,” by the way, is a bouzouki, a Greek lute, usually strung with three sets of paired strings. There are two of them playing together in the song, I think, though I don’t know the musicians who played them. In Wikipedia’s list of notable bouzouki players, the tenth of the ten listed is Decemberist frontman Colin Meloy. Oh, pop goes my heart.<br />
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14. Photography is the one art in which the unskilled can stumble upon greatness. I will never write a moving aria or produce an exquisite sculpture. Of the 8,785 photographs I’ve taken this year, though, I think one of them – only one – may be great. I’d never say which one, of course; it’s not for me to say.<br />
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15. I tell my students that if they can write one great sentence, just one, they can be a writer. Of course, I add, they have to know when they’ve written that sentence, and they’ve got to know precisely why the sentence is great, and they’ve got to desperately want to write that same kind of sentence again and be willing to try to find their way there even though they may make one wrong turn after another, one stumbling step after stumbling step.<br />
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16. I remember sitting on the school bus in eighth grade in my basketball uniform, the shorts a satiny white with red stripes, the jersey’s number 12 crinkled from countless laundering. I held a wooden circle onto which my girlfriend had painted the cover image from <i>Catch Bull at Four</i>, the boy with his hands gently touching the bull’s snout. It was the greatest gift I’d ever been given. How exactly, and when, did I lose it? There’s that Elizabeth Bishop villanelle "One Art": <i>The art of losing isn’t hard to master.</i> Well, I lost Pistol Pete Maravich’s signature on a Sports Illustrated photo my father asked him to inscribe to me when he paid a visit to my dad’s orthopedic clinic. I would have been -- I must have been, I was -- ten. And I lost the copy of Steinbeck’s <i>Grapes of Wrath</i> I’d stolen at thirteen from a Penguin paperback display, this pilfered book the one that, when I was finally bored enough to read it, made me want to become a writer. I lost the Signet <i>Leaves of Grass </i>that, the following summer, I kept stuffed in my back pocket to read on the bus ride to work. I lost girlfriends, friends. I lost my father. I lost a daughter.<br />
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17. That’s a word, <i>lost</i>, isn’t it, that lacks any manner of meaningful precision. It’s really not so bad, for example, this idea that I might eventually lose my lousy right eye if one considers everything else there is to lose. <i>Two rivers</i>, Bishop writes. <i>A continent. </i>And though she doesn't write it:<i> Worse.</i><br />
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18. As for these shadows of shadows I’ve begun to see: is it possible that they are there to show me the way back to all that has been lost, a light (that is not, of course, a light but a shadow) steering me not toward something new but, in the manner of shadows, back toward the thing itself casting the shadow, the whatever it is that is already there? I know this doesn’t make much sense, so I’ll try it another way: maybe I should return to trying to do what I tried to do for so many years – as a counterweight to all that loss, knowing now, as I do, as I stumble wide-middled and eye-muddled through the final days of my fifty-fourth year, that I will go on losing and losing until all is lost – maybe I should try again to write that one great sentence in the desperate, glorious hope that should I somehow succeed I will have given myself this, at least: the chance to write another. And another and another, though I will make – have already made – more than my share of wrong turns, of stumbling steps, the years slipping by one after the next like the endless drops I apply each morning and each night to my one lousy tear-stained eye, the shadows multiplying when I tilt my head back down and peer into the mirror, the blurry figure before me as unfamiliar, as surprising and perplexing, as it has always been.<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14055608068608736755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-24108036569644408412013-05-08T19:52:00.000-04:002013-05-08T19:56:06.027-04:00Tell Me On A Sunday<br />
<i>I know how I </i><br />
<i>want you to say goodbye: </i><br />
<i>by the circus tent with a big trapeze. </i><br />
<i>Tell me on a Sunday please.</i><br />
<i> -- The Mountain Goats, “Tell Me On A Sunday Please” </i><br />
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Tell me on a Sunday how, when you were a boy, the crushed cigarette packs in your bedroom drawer possessed the same earthy bitterness and bile as the sweet stink of skunk rising from a highway in June.<br />
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Tell me on a Sunday how one summer – how old could you have been? – you marveled at the ordinary miracle of an avocado growing with virile ferocity beyond the back door, understanding nothing about earth or seed or sun, while the hedges out front were kept trimmed with the same precise severity as your father’s hair, a geometry of rectitude and vigilance, the mulched earth below marred only by unwithering succulents and spiny yellow-tongued ornamental grasses, a single Japanese plum offering fruit so sour it hung there until it rotted.<br />
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Tell me on a Sunday how you rode your bike home from Ronnie’s Records with a teenager’s desolate joy, <i>Catch Bull at Four</i> or <i>Desperado</i> or <i>Close to the Edge</i> or <i>Selling England By the Pound</i> cradled beneath one arm, the exact same route each time because otherwise superstition wired your legs and arms with the pulse of an electric current, the metallic sting of a transistor radio’s nine-volt battery affixed to your tongue, the same route you’d take to the Crown Drugs and the 7-11 and to Clifton L. Ganus, the Church of Christ school you attended, where the parking lot was paved with chalky clam shells bleached so white that, when the sun was out, you had to shield your eyes against the glare.<br />
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Tell me on a Sunday how you and your little brother, when your great uncle moved in, slept on a sofa-bed in a room filled with shelves of Catholic self-help books and James Michener novels and National Geographic and the philosophical musings of Thomas Merton, Hans Küng, and Teilhard de Chardin, how one wall of the room was red brick because that room and the two above had been added on to the original house and you would wake up more mornings than not to a lizard scuttling diagonally brick-to-brick, floor-to-ceiling, or sometimes standing stock-still and staring, red throat obscenely swollen.<br />
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Tell me on a Sunday of your own geometry, not of vigilance but of shadow and erasure, of hesitation and desire, of your father’s photography manuals and magazines stacked and sprawled in the Helping Hands room, named for the tiny Catholic relief agency your mother invented as if from air, collecting and distributing clothes to Cuban refugees fleeing Castro, shirts and pants and dresses spilling from cardboard boxes beneath the shelves lined with medical tomes and ever more of Michener’s novels – <i>The Fires of Spring</i>, <i>Sayonara</i>, <i>Hawaii</i> – and with slide carousels in yellow and black boxes and the cameras your father collected, Leicas and Nikons and Hasselblads, and in velvet-lined black cases dozens of lenses powerful enough all told, you imagined, to photograph the most distant of stars or planets or constellations – or, as your father did, the smallest leaves, buds, and blossoms on the African violets arrayed on the dining room table, these squat plants with their hairy stems and smudged gray-green leaves as inexplicable a subject for art as the splayed wings of cockroaches or overcooked roast beef dryly perched beneath a blanket of aluminum foil or the dingy bathroom in the laundry room reserved for the colored maid, hardly worth a moment’s notice much less the scrutiny your father bestowed upon these flowers those ungodly silent pre-dawn hours he claimed for himself, drinking instant coffee and smoking Chesterfield Kings before heading off for the business of repairing broken bones and stitching torn tendons.<br />
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Tell me on a Sunday how the glossy pages of those photography magazines, with their psychedelic bursts of color and their decorous nudes, all line and curve and silhouette, the model’s faces turned away or shadowed or shrouded, skin as smooth and pristinely lifeless as glass or adorned in surreal double-exposures – sensuous lips hovering in the sky above a barren field, a pubis imbedded in the blunt base of a just-fired bullet – with portfolios of earnest portraits of debutantes or coal miners or sublime landscapes of silver-etched clouds above triumphant mountain peaks and pristine icy streams – tell me how these pages, endlessly flipped through, imprinted themselves again and again against your eye or in your brain, or whatever it is that makes of lens and retina, of synapse and nerve and cell, of the tips of your fingers and whatever other secret pathways you possess, an invitation to a particular sort of immensity and daring, a declaration that not simply beauty and desire but something more complete was to be found there, something that might save you from everything you suspected you needed saving from: sorrow and loneliness and longing and, well, you know, yourself.<br />
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Tell me on a Sunday, please, what you imagined all those years, how you tried to find solace when no solace was forthcoming, the Walt Whitman you carried one summer in your back blue jeans pocket, the wildflowers you collected and dried in a matchbox, the birds that followed you one tree to the next -- to herald your presence? to warn you from their nests? – as you walked along the London Avenue canal. What kind of triumphs did you imagine? What further greater losses?<br />
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Tell me on a Sunday, please, and not just on any Sunday but on one when the dogwoods and azaleas are in bloom, when the trees are unfurling their translucent watery leaves, when indescribably small and sweet white and purple and yellow and blue flowers blossom in the grass beneath your feet, why it is that you remain haunted by this single dark notion: that once, when you were young, perhaps still a child, you accidentally killed someone – a girl, perhaps – but have forgotten what happened, have made yourself forget, as one would do, of course, to escape such a horror, the burden of it, the impossibility of carrying on in the wake of such a monstrous act.<br />
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Tell me how that smoke used to feel in your lungs, inside your chest, the warmth of it. Tell me on a Sunday when all that remains for you, for me, is a final breath.<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14055608068608736755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-19813629085290530592013-04-18T18:29:00.001-04:002013-04-19T10:51:48.704-04:00Like the American South (Part II)<i>And you pointed your headlamp toward the horizon,</i><br />
<i>we were the one thing in the galaxy god didn't have his eyes on.</i><br />
<i> - The Mountain Goats "Jenny"</i><br />
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I don't really know the guy whose truck we're driving in. Six months ago the girl in the flowered skirt was a stranger and now she is asleep with her head on my lap and her bare feet on the dashboard, as we churn through the middleofnowhere Texas dark. Her shoulder bites into my stomach; I have my hand out the window, where I can feel it push against the coming air. Smooth jazz weaves in and out of country music in the small, constant static of the radio and there are fields and fields and fields: desert and brush and barbwire fence and the occasional weird Live Oak looming up in the distance. My wheelchair rattles like the bones of an animal in the truck bed. Behind us, these occasional fistfuls of bright dust flung-up.<br />
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I am already heartbroken.<br />
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Soon, low concrete buildings will begin to collect along the shoulder. And then the skyline. And then the city. And then my feet on the ground again. These days, all I want is to drive forever in some strong stranger's truck, out across Texas, down into the Delta, and then back up into North Carolina and Virginia and the green of the Blue Ridge in Spring. I want to make it in time for the summer cicadas, loud like a beautiful plague. I don't want to talk; I don't want to change the radio station. I want to stop occasionally for black gas station coffee, and not eat until we're animal hungry. I want to get whittled down. I want to take photographs out the rear window of the cab; I want to get back to the land: clay under my fingernails, sun falling off the edge of the world when you hit the parkway near dusk.<br />
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If you had told me at sixteen, when I was busy plotting my way-ahead-of-schedule exit from the mountain town where I grew up, that almost six years later I'd be obsessed with the rural American South, I wouldn't have heard you. I was wider-world bound, and besides that raised on a steady diet of progressive politics and indie music, Russian literature and art museums. All of this had no place, as far as I could tell, in our single-stoplight corner of the Blue Ridge or its neighboring fundamentalist sprawl. <a href="http://admonishingsong.blogspot.com/2011/07/like-american-south.html">I've written before</a> about the complicated ways in which the part of the world where I was raised has mattered steadily more and more to me since I left and, <a href="http://admonishingsong.blogspot.com/2013/01/garbled-trasmissions.html">more recently</a>, about how my struggle with/for faith is tangled in the literal and spiritual geography of the Shenandoah Valley. I'm aware I'm treading complicated territory here.<br />
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In an issue of the<i> Oxford American</i> awhile back Jesmyn Ward had an essay about the thing that keeps her returning to the South again and again even though so much of it <i>"frustrates the hell out her." </i>In it, she writes that, by now, she's mostly <i>"numb to the profusion of Confederate-flag paraphernalia (and the mind-set behind it.)"</i> but that, even still, the prevalence of racism and oppressive politics sometimes makes her <i>"want to soak [her] region in lighter fluid and strike a match.</i>" It's a blow of a statement, a radical and historically loaded gesture to employ, but she follows it immediately with: <i>"And yet-- I love this place."</i><br />
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And that's it. She loves the South because it's home. It's where her family and her roots are, and we belong to nothing so intimately as our point of origin. And it's true, the wrecked, wild way I love the South has a lot to do with home and family: the all-of-a-sudden Dogwoods in April, the boys in camo coming out of the Chevron on the first day of deer hunting season with cigarettes and gatorade and beef jerky, my mother in the kitchen singing Randy Travis, eating Quickie fried chicken or Silver Pig BBQ at a picnic table in the fields in summer, sliding down into little hidden-away hollows and coming home hungry and covered in red clay just as the sun is setting, clambering over barbed-wire to play with the cows. So much of my childhood, much more than I ever realized living it, is Virginia geography and drawl. My little brother taking backwoods banjo lessons from a born-again musical genius; The good-old Southern Gentleman my sister loved through high school and college, dogs on chains outside of double-wides crawling with honeysuckle. Christ-haunted, and poor, and out of the way, and lovely. Everything I've said before. </div>
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And probably all of that is enough to explain why these days all I want to do is listen to Willie Nelson and some weird, wailing alt-country two bearded guys made in the backwoods of Tennessee, re-read <i>The Moviegoer </i>and <i>Kate Vaden</i>, and sneak into the back-row of Baptist churches, why I can't stop fingering the cross around my neck, or looking at the hundreds of photographs my father is busy taking of the insides of dairy barns and what's blooming in the mountains. But it doesn't feel like all of it.<br />
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When I watched Quinten Tarantino's <i>Django Unchained </i>I was in Boston , and it was snowy New England Christmastime far away from the South. I certainly don't feel like I'm in any position to comment on the quality, or even really the sociopolitical complications, of the film. All I know is that, watching men be ripped apart, and all the violence in that big plantation house, I kept thinking: <i>I grew up on the bones of all this. Literally walking around on top of it. </i><br />
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And the irony is not lost on me that my body is not made for any of what I'm obsessed by these days, this place of labor. Right now I want the tractor, the muscle, the hoe in the ground, the carpenter, the boots on gravel, the raising of the barn the climbing of the hill, the steadiness of a man who works with his hands. I want to pick apples, bale hale, jump headlong into the James River where it flows through Goshen. I want to go to Cowboy Church and sing hymns and put my hands around a horse's neck and smell like red clay and Texas and sweat. I am the wrong girl for all of this, a fact I'll have to remember when that stranger's truck trundles to a stop and he helps down and puts me back in my wheelchair.</div>
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Always, there is the danger of romanticizing.</div>
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I'm working on a series of poems about <i>The Virginia State Colony for the Epileptic and Feebleminded</i>. Now, it's a residential facility for people with disabilities. In the early and mid 1900s it was a colony where they sterilized hundreds and hundreds of mentally and physically disabled children, adolescents, and adults, and people who were neither, but were uneducated and poor. Decades later, some of these people would be released back into the world not knowing what had happened to them. </div>
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A woman marries in West Virginia, struggles her whole adult life to have children, doesn't know why until, in her sixties, a reporter comes to her kitchen and tells her her own story. What they said was an appendectomy was not. </div>
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The old colony buildings are now mostly abandoned, but they stand like ragged, sand-basted ghosts next to the center's contemporary facilities. White-washed porches peeling, the ocasional curtain still in the window. Sixty-five years ago, born in my hometown, I would've been in that colony, or dead.</div>
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I've always said that the thing that gets me most about the rural South, and especially the tiny Appalachia mountain towns I grew up driving long, slow hours through, is that everything looks all the time like it's about to fall down or rise from the ashes and it just can't decide. That night, driving out of Central Texas, back toward the city, after a quiet poetry reading in a scrubby town, I just want to keep going 'til the land makes a decision. 'Til I make a decision. I want go up and out or plow into the ground. I'm ready to follow it to ruin or redemption, as long as it promises, <i>Please God, </i>to take me somewhere, to take me with it.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03898497269959409698noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-69842492942786956372013-01-17T16:58:00.000-05:002013-01-18T00:28:29.612-05:00Garbled Transmissions <i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">God does not need Abraham, God can raise children from stones.</i><br />
<i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">dream at night</i><br />
<i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">girl with a cobra tattoo</i><br />
<i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">and try to hear the garbled transmissions come through.</i><br />
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<i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> - The Mountain Goats "Girl with a Cobra Tattoo" </i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">A few days ago, rooting around in my jewelry box, I found among the earrings and hair-ties a little red and silver cross from a Valencia cathedral. My mother bought it a decade ago when we were living in Europe and I took it for my own a few years back. I fingered it a long time, before I strung it on a chain stolen from a rarely-worn necklace and put it on around my neck, careful to tuck it hidden underneath my sweater and my shirt. In my last two years of college I wore this cross all the time, perplexing my liberal Jewish boyfriend and my radically secular friends. I went regularly to Catholic Mass and sat in the back and learned all the prayers and never spoke to anyone except in the moments immediately after the <i>Our Father</i> when ritual dictates you turn and greet your neighbor. A few times I almost asked the preist about converting, stopping just short of actually having a conversation. </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Those years I read a lot of Milton and Hopkins and Donne, and carried Christian Wiman's </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">E</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">v</span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">ery Riven Thing</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> with me like a bible. I read King James scripture and dogeared most of the pages in an anthology of stories about Belief. </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> I thought and wrote almost exclusively about faith and its absence and from all this I built and took apart a hundred Gods.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> I dreamed the wild lover who took over Margery Kemp's body and made her wail, and the God Flannery O'Connor scratched on Parker's back. I wrestled with the personal, inflexible Christ the billboards in the mountains at home promised, and mapped the Lord onto a boy I'd adored as a child: with a Carhartt jacket and a soft southern accent, a fucked-up family and eyes so clear, pale blue they sometimes looked like ice or air. I searched out God in the Virginia clay and the wood-heated house of the neighbor who played Christian television to herself all day and liked it when I read her Psalms out loud. I wanted so badly to make him the reversal of my sister's absence: gentle and young and flawed and looking like me. I wanted a God who was rustic and resurrected and<i> material, </i>who would talk to me in the static-y silence I heard playing in my head all the time. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">My mother was raised with a lot of manners and no particular religious observance, and my father has a Louisiana Catholic boy's love of saints and a real distate for pretty much everything else about the church. When I was young we made some half-hearted sojourns to the Presbyterian church in Amherst, but that had much more to do, I think, with my mother trying to figure out how the hell to belong in our little rural community than with God. Whatever my attachment to God, it did not come from them, and it persisted in spite of growing up in the heartland of what often feels like the worst religion has to offer: bigotry and prejudice, rabidly anti-intellectual attitudes, the inability to yield even a single hard-edged certainty up to kindness or questioning or complication. My faith in <i>something, </i>some kind of higher power, <i> </i>feels built into my body, borne up out of something animal, dogged and deep.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">But I should be honest. In the last year I largely forgot about God. And I did it for banal, daily reasons, and I did it almost without noticing. I got busy, I moved, I got pulled away by so many other small things that cropped up to take away my attention. I never made the decision to take off the old red cross. One day the chain I was wearing it on snapped, and I thought: <i>I'll restring it,</i> and then I didn't, and then months passed. And because my faith is a quiet, messy, and uncertain thing, largely secret and unspoken, because I am young and full of flaws, because I am distractible and sometimes so angry that I care about this probably god-damned impossible thing thing in the name of which so many awful things are done, it's easy for it to go under like a silent, sinking city: fence, and smokestack, and finally steeple disappearing... </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Often, I feel like a tourist in church, like I lack the discipline or selflessness or certainty for real belief and just want the trappings: the lovely church, the chorus of voices, the candlelight and the ritual and the firm hand taking mine. But I'm fond of those great lines in André Dubus's <i>A Father's Story: "having to face and forgive my own failures, I have learned from them both the necessity and the wonder of ritual." </i>His protagonist muses that <i>a prayer, whether recited or said with concentration, is always an act of faith. </i> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And so I put the cross back on, not as an adherence to any particular creed, and not as any public declaration, but to make my searching material: to set it against me, to hold it in my hand and let it insist upon itself. I murmur and murmur to the shape shifting in the distance. I want to hear the garbled transmissions come through. I want so much for all this searching to be a labor of being better and braver than the fool I am. But also, while I'm being honest, mostly what I'm saying is <i>Please God, whatever you are, don't leave me alone. </i>That little prayer over and over and over again. </span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03898497269959409698noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-2952570858260443242012-12-14T16:20:00.001-05:002012-12-14T17:05:43.452-05:00Enough<br />
<i>Thunderclouds forming a cream-white moon</i><br />
<i>Everything's going to be okay soon</i><br />
<i>Maybe tomorrow</i><br />
<i>Maybe the next day</i><br />
<i>-- The Mountain Goats, “Game Shows Touch Our Lives”</i><br />
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I’m prone to obsessions.<br />
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Just ask my children. They can attest to the hours upon hours they lost of their childhood, forced to listen, in the car as we drove, to one version after another of Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” simply because I couldn’t get the song out of my head, convinced as I was (yes, I admit, I still am) that it was the greatest jazz composition of all time.<br />
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I have a hard time owning merely one book by an author. If I’ve read one that I love – José Saramago’s <i>Blindness</i>, for example – I then want to read them all, which of course I do not have the time for. But I can own them all, at least. I can line them up on the shelves in shimmering anticipation of that day when time opens like a delicate flower. (I know, of course, that time does not <i>ever</i> open like a delicate flower but instead pours forth toward some impossibly distant, never-to-be-seen ocean like a torrential storm-swollen stream. But that – by which I mean <i>practicality, reason, logic</i> – is not the point of obsession.)<br />
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Yes, I want to possess every work of the poet whose one perfectly made poem made me collapse in grateful misery. I want to taste every dish at a restaurant like the River & Rail in Roanoke simply because their sautéed Brussels sprouts with chicory and crème fraiche made me weep with exquisitely unadulterated joy.<br />
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Moderation is not – has never been – my other middle name.<br />
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Right now, I am obsessed with the green Thai tofu curry at Bull Branch in Lynchburg and the subtle differences in taste between mid- and high-shelf vodkas (between potato and wheat and rye, between Russian and Polish, Tito’s and Glacier, small batch and organic). I am obsessed with the poems of Rilke with their pensive ache, the funk-thump of a certain bass line (think: “Brick House” or “Mr. Big Stuff” or, best of all, James Brown’s “The Payback”) but also, you know, the tinkling piano in the next apartment and Eno-esque absences and drones and James Blake’s computer-concocted glitches and those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant, with both music and lyrics – and, by the way, as my children could tell you as well, with <i>Music & Lyrics</i>, that dreadfully loveable Hugh Grant & Drew Barrymore movie.<br />
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But what I’m really obsessed with these days, to get right down to the meat and bones, are my eyes, with the regimen of drops (four of this one, three of that, twice for two others) by which I divide each day’s hours, with the blur that descends across a book’s pages like a too-often-shown film spooling through the ever-dimming bulb of a school projector, the window blinds imperfectly drawn so that light sluices and slices like a trickling stream across the floor’s dusty gray linoleum squares and onto the desks’ chipped wood surfaces and rusted metal frames.<br />
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And because of all that stuff going on with my eyes, I’m obsessed with the exquisite but ultimately impossible pleasure of encountering the world through a persistently mindful aesthetic sensibility.<br />
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I know, <i>I know</i>, that last sentence wound up as pseudo-Buddhist mumbo-jumbo. What I meant to say was this: I’m obsessed with trying to view the world and everything in it in a particular manner, as a concoction of light and texture and shape, each component replete with resonances and associations.<br />
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All of which is to say: I’m obsessed, at the moment, with seeing.<br />
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And so, as those who know me already know all too well, I’ve been taking photographs lately, lots and lots and lots of photographs – though not <i>real</i> photographs exactly. Instead, I’ve been using Instagram, that Facebook-acquired iPhone app that is a kind of visual equivalent of the haiku: tiny square images that can be manipulated in only a few particular prescribed ways: light, shadow, contrast, focus, saturation – or whatever the technical words for such things are. I’ve got no idea, really. I press a few buttons until I’ve got the closest approximation to beauty (which is to say <i>sorrow, symmetry, asymmetry</i>, <i>grace</i>, which is to say <i>art</i>) that I can manage.<br />
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I’m usually, I realize, a long way away from art with these pictures: there’s a kind of dullness, a lack of clarity, a lack of vision, so to speak, if you look too close. Of course, again and again that’s what the artist, any artist, comes up against: everything that the art he’s made isn’t. I would like to write an opera, compose a symphony. I would settle for singing one song, any song, with the right notes; I would die happy to write one verse of a hymn I could imagine a church choir singing.<br />
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My father, by the way, was obsessed with cameras. He collected them they way I do Mountain Goats minutia (For some Christmas, perhaps not this one but the next, won’t someone please get me the DVD of John Darnielle playing all of <i>The Life of the World to Come</i>? I’d be ever so grateful; my life would be nearly if not totally complete.), and while my father could explain the germane differences between Leicas and Hasselblads, while he could also cut open a body and reaffix ligament to joint, muscle to bone, I can only – well, to be honest, I don’t know exactly. What can I do?<br />
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Is it enough to demonstrate the American Sign Language gesture for vodka – two quick stabs with a pointer finger at the side of your throat? Probably not.<br />
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Is it enough to walk the pug James Brown through the fields and take in the line of trees, the curve of hillsides, the exquisite tangle of brush, the silhouettes of bare limbs against the sky at twilight? Is it enough to notice how all the world – books and children’s toys and silverware, tables and sofa cushions and slipper chairs, candles and jewelry boxes and wicker baskets, bowls of fruit and jars of pennies – organize themselves into colors and shapes and light and even, if you look close enough, as I’ve been trying and trying to do, like the real thing, like life itself, every bit of it: muscle and sinew and ache and solitude and grace and whatever name it is we give to transcendence. Maybe love. Maybe.<br />
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I think that’s enough.<br />
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My pictures aren’t much, I know, but they’re my own quiet stammering, the whispered pronouncement every artist, good or bad, tries to make: <i>Look away. Look over here. You just might, for half a second, get a glimpse of your own life.</i><br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14055608068608736755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-70586713731118218572012-12-10T15:32:00.000-05:002012-12-10T18:14:27.668-05:00On Your Way Up to the Light<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Do every stupid thing to try to drive the dark away</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Let people call you crazy for the choices that you make</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Find limits past the limits</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Jump in front of trains all day...</i></span><br />
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<i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">... Play with matches if you think you need to play with matches</i><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Seek out the hidden places where the fire burns hot and bright<br />Find where the heat's unbearable and stay there if you have to<br />Don't hurt anybody on your way up to the light</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: DroidSansRegular, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;"><br /></span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And stay alive</i><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Just stay alive</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><br /></i></span>
<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> - The Mountain Goats "Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1"</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="text-align: left;">I'm kneeling on my wheelchair right up next to the club stage. It's all concrete, and dark, and the steadily increasing press of bodies behind me. My feet, tucked up underneath me, are already going to sleep and John hasn't even come on yet. A group of college students who are, it occurs to me, probably at least as old as I am, have their arms around one another and are rocking back and forth more and more rapidly as their excitement mounts. They are profoundly loving and unlovely: the boys are heavy and sweating and in glasses; the girls are gangly and stringy-haired; their sweaters are too small. They tell me they are a semester from graduation. They ask how much it hurt to get my eyebrow pierced, and when I tell them that it bled a lot but hardly hurt at all, they don't believe me. During the concert they will know the words to every single song from the new album, and call out requests for tracks released only on grainy cassette tape in the early 90's. They drove all the way from San Antonio. They will scream all night. During one brief pause after another song about a slow and terrible divorce the tallest girl leans toward me and says: </span><i style="text-align: left;">the funny thing is, aren't we really too young to love a song like that? </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">My life has had a lot of constants: poetry and music and mountains, my family and the bright open door of my childhood home, the scores of lovely people walking through it. Profound pleasure and grace. Also: the small, dark fist of sadness at the center of everything, flexing when I wake. Sometimes it is a small pulse that matches my heartbeat, and I hardly notice it. Sometimes it is all I notice. I know by heart the litany that needs to go here: that I am lucky, that my life is good, that my struggles have been surmountable and that I've had enormous help, that at all costs I need to avoid being precious about sadness and art. I know all this utterly. I know that to some extent I can and must labor through it and beyond it: get up in the morning, go to the desk, make an incantation of small pleasures and regular gestures to keep me moving, do it all when I am the worst version of myself, when the world is greyest, and flattest, and least like a place I want to live in. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The night after the concert I go to a party. It's at a big house in East Austin that a friend just bought. The night is weirdly warm and we all collect outside on couches and folding chairs in the car-park. For a couple of hours people drink whiskey and beer, and flit conversation to conversation. Late, someone turns on music in an empty room: and people drift to the dance floor and become animals. Dancing will always have for me the particular allure of the foreign and impossible: the body completely let go, completely controlled. Tonight it seems particularly wild and weird, limbs hurled around the room, heads thrown back, mouths open, all about excising something. People dance for hours, and I let myself be pulled to the floor to bob my own head to "Dancing in the Dark." It's cold and dirty. We go to bed in our teeshirts around dawn. The bodies of the women next to me are warm and they are asleep instantly. Usually, I hate being young and feel ill suited for it. Tonight, it feels like the greatest gift anyone has ever given me, and I am all of a sudden desperately afraid of losing it. I am twenty one. The darkness knocks and knocks and knocks against the brightness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I'm working on a longer essay about music. There's a line in it which says that listening to the music that means the most to me is an exercise in loving what breaks my heart, in delighting in having it broken. <i>Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive...</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Sometimes I think I can smell the darkness on strangers, that the scent of it is part of what identifies them as people I could love. This is comforting and dangerous. <i>Jump in front of trains all day.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The day after that party we all sat at the lake and agreed that often we'd happily give up writing, and the extreme joy that sometimes takes us up completely, if, with it, we could also excavate the dark and find our way to some sort of solid middle ground. <i>Seek out the hidden places where the fire burns hot and bright.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">A friend told me her mother called her selfish to be so pulled under by such rootless despair. On the phone, my mother repeats to me my own litany of cautions. Often, I scare and baffle her. <i>Don't hurt anybody on your way up to the light.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">At night, this friend and I assure one another we will come up out of the dark, and that the things that sustain us will hold steady. <i>And stay alive.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I know I'm risking sounding overly dramatic here. I can hear it. And I'm sure you can hear my youth and my propensity for navel-gazing and all those awful things. Is it better if I tell you that mostly I go to the grocery store, and do my laundry, and try to learn to make risotto, and burn it? Is it better if I tell you that as often as we all talk about darkness and poetry and how inexpertly we're trying to sustain and shape our lives, we talk about movies and food and how best to stay abreast of what's going on in the wider world? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Because we do. <i>Just stay alive...</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It's the encore of that night and John is playing "This Year." Everyone in the audience knows every single goddamned word. It is completely ridiculous that I have actually wept tonight, and I know it. Tonight I would not give it up: any of it, being young or sad or wounded or dumb. I am one of many devoted. I am some twenty-something girl. I am only here because of the darkness and the way it collides with the light. Knock. Knock. Knock. Like a bird against the window, like a fist against the door, like a heartbeat going on through to the next morning. It is lucky to love something like this. Like this one small thing could in fact, absurd as it seems, kill you or keep you alive. </span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03898497269959409698noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-84353815466367108742012-11-14T20:43:00.001-05:002012-11-14T20:43:07.520-05:00Rilke Again<br />
<i>When the last days come,</i><br />
<i>We shall see visions</i><br />
<i>More vivid than sunsets,</i><br />
<i>Brighter than stars.</i><br />
<i>We will recognize each other</i><br />
<i>And see ourselves for the first time</i><br />
<i>The way we really are.</i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>-- The Mountain Goats, “Against Pollution”</i><br />
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I’m reading Rilke again. I’m here to tell you it’s not easy grabbing hold of poets, taking them by the scruff of their necks and shaking, demanding to know precisely what business they’re up to – and it’s especially maddening when, like Rilke is, they’re forever consorting with angels and gods and wandering spirits, ducking into the half-remembered twilight of childhood, forever turning toward us and then slipping away, these appearances and vanishings as abrupt and unexpected as the weather.<br />
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There’s always, in Rilke, some distant song, some strangely familiar melody, swaying the branches, rippling the leaves, the urgent whistling of a plover, a blind man’s, a drunkard’s, an idiot’s song. He grants to Orpheus the magic that is rightfully his own: he builds a temple inside our hearing, fills it with his song. Every day for Rilke is the Sabbath; every word rings slowly, as it does for Dylan Thomas, in the pebbles of the holy stream.<br />
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One moment Rilke strides forward, sheathed in wisdom’s armor; the next he cowers, admits he knows next to nothing. He searches and searches for the kingdom between joy and longing, between silence and song.<br />
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Really, in the end, all that matters to Rilke is the singing, not the song. <i>A god can do it</i>, he writes. <i>But will you tell me how / a man can penetrate through the lyre’s strings?</i><br />
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<i>Our mind is split</i>, he goes on, and by <i>our mind</i> he means, of course, his own, this mind that dreams up, over and over, again and again, its own earthly undoing, its ceaseless lamentation, its sorrow song.<br />
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<i>Learn / to forget that passionate music</i>, he completes the third of his Sonnets to Orpheus.<i> It will end. / True singing is a different breath, about / nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.</i><br />
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Don’t believe him, though. He’s just whistling in the dark. He is, as he knows full well, the singer. He is the one and only source for the song. God is dead or is otherwise occupied or has fled. Angels flutter their wings, foreboding but silent, at his ankles; dogs nip at his heels and scuttle away.<br />
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Only the poet remains, sheathed again in his armor. <i>Let your presence</i>, he declares, <i>ring out like a bell / into the night.</i><br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14055608068608736755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-80176290978151550812012-09-24T14:12:00.001-04:002012-09-24T19:22:53.865-04:00Planting Again<i>and the plum tree hung heavy in my head</i><br />
<i>and the plum tree hung heavy in my heart</i><br />
<i>and the plum tree hung heavy over me</i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>-- The Mountain Goats, “Quetzalcoatl Eats Plums”</i><br />
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<i>The loneliest people in the whole wide world</i><br />
<i>Are the ones you’re never going to see again.</i><br />
<i> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>-- The Mountain Goats, “Harlem Roulette”</i><br />
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So I’ve been planting again, the usual fall crops: broccoli and Brussels sprouts and cabbage, cauliflower and spinach, butter crunch and romaine lettuce. I’ve pulled the sweet potatoes out early because they were getting eaten by some sharp-toothed varmint, a squirrel or rat or rabbit that has cleverly eluded the lethal dangers of the garden’s electrified fence, the gouges in the sweet potatoes’ flesh truly alarming, like wounds scabbed over into dry dusty leather and then picked at, gnawed at, again and again. And though darkness arrives earlier with each passing day, the last of a dozen or so tomato vines is hanging in there for the slow, uncertain ripening. And my eyes are still not right.<br />
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This is the season when a certain sort of music swells within me, music with the vast reach and melancholy grandeur of a composer like Mahler, though Mahler (and classical music in general) always speaks to me less – especially given my intellectual and artistic inclinations – than I feel it ought to, as if its country of origin, and thus its accent, is so unfamiliar that I’m forever having trouble discerning, no matter how wise it might be, just what’s being said. And my eyes, my eyes, are still not right.<br />
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Instead, I find myself listening this time of year to what belongs to the sub-genre of rock-n-roll (or <i>sub-sub-genre</i>, perhaps? what do I know?) called post-rock, bands like MONO and Mogwai and Balmorhea and God Is An Astronaut and Explosions in the Sky and Caspian and Hammock and This Will Destroy You and Rothko and The Album Leaf, names that, taken together, precisely convey the weather this music portends: the clearest of evening skies gradually giving way to gentle ocean swells and gathering clouds and swirling winds that then coalesce into a calamitously relentless assault. And then, just when it seems the sky will crack open and the earth will split apart, a peaceful calm descends, something almost but not quite an absolute stillness, almost but not quite a perfect silence. It’s <i>a silence</i>, as John Ashbery writes in his poem “Some Trees,” <i>already filled with voices, a canvas on which emerges a chorus of smiles, a winter morning</i> – and just like that the clear evening sky returns, though now it crackles with some new electrical charge, heat lightning far far away, barely slipping above the horizon, like a camera flash at 2 a.m. in the house next door. What could <i>possibly</i> be going on over there? And still my eyes aren’t right.<br />
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I won’t list all the books I want to be reading right now, but there’s none more than Salman Rushdie’s <i>Joseph Anton</i>, his account of the time he spent in hiding after a price, as the saying goes, was placed upon his head. That was 1989, when I was in graduate school at Johns Hopkins. Rushdie was scheduled to read for us but didn’t; his whole life had been diverted. I noticed this week a small item in the news: along with the riots and demonstrations and embassy attacks across the Arab world because of the absurd and childish anti-Islamic video posted on YouTube, some Iranian cleric has announced that the reward for Rushdie’s execution has been raised from $2.8 to $3.3 million. Because of inflation? Just for the hell of it? Will there be a semi-annual adjustment? Time takes care of the devil’s work, doesn’t it? We’re all, by God, sentenced to death. Until then, though, what I’d like to do is read and write.<br />
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Here’s what happens, though, when I try to read, sometimes immediately, sometimes only after twenty or thirty minutes: my right eye waters and begins to ache; the sclera (the white of the eye) becomes lined with red; my vision gets blurrier and blurrier; sometimes I feel – or feel I feel -- a nerve running from my eye through my body (through head to back to groin to leg) and down into my toes. It’s a spectacular sensation though not particularly painful or intense, more like that distant flash of lightning on the dark horizon. It portends worse things to come, perhaps, and that’s when fear sinks its teeth into the flesh. Five doctors haven’t yet figured it out; I see a sixth this week. Maybe she’ll do better.<br />
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At least there’s this: No one has put a price on my head, and I love my plodding work in the garden: weed and hoe, plant and harvest. And I love more than ever, though I never imagined it could be so, the rise and swell and sway of music, the minor fall and the major lift, the incredible worlds to which music transports me, even with my eyes closed, in utter darkness. Especially then.<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14055608068608736755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-75163685851679204402012-03-16T13:16:00.002-04:002012-03-16T16:03:08.965-04:00Dust Off the Idols<i>Dust off the idols.</i><br />
<i>Give them something to eat.</i><br />
<i>I think they're hungry.</i><br />
<i>I know I'm starving half to death.</i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>-- The Mountain Goats, “Elijah”</i><br />
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Again and again I need to relearn how to be alone, how to fill those sudden silences. It’s Spring, so I can leave the doors open, keep an eye on the fox in the field beyond the line of trees: a blooming peach, three budding apple, four dogwood with still-coiled leaves, wood shavings set to twirl from the saw blade. He’s stalking something.<br />
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There are endless consolations: melancholy choruses, minor keys, words rising from the page, a procession of impossibly distant stars, a new constellation. I can tell myself the stories I already know: that I was once young, that joy settles upon a life like the sweet breath of a sleeping child, its sweetness already tinged with the faint, nearly imperceptible scent of something sour.<br />
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Oh, go on now. It’s only March, and I’ve already prepared this year’s garden, though I was too lazy – or possessed, as usual, of too little faith – to mark what I planted where, so in a few weeks when all the leaves begin to sprout from the rocky soil (I sift and sift but the rock-to-dirt ratio is never altered) and it’s time to thin and weed, I’ll have to ask someone who knows what’s what what’s what, if you know what I mean. <i>These tiny twin crescents? These little green hearts? Spinach? Chard? Peas? Beets? </i><br />
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And for fun, for the sheer pleasure of the asking: <i>Turnstiles? Winnebagos? Cauldrons? Pantaloons? Krispy Kreme?</i> Boy, this is getting away from me. It’s what always happens, my words gone wild, the very language itself supplanting the purpose to which I’d meant to put it, a gardener who again and again winds up growing only what’s inedible, favoring weeds over flowers, thorns over leaves, James Stevenson’s Worst Person in the World gone vacationing at Crab Beach.<br />
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Back to the matter at hand: my laziness, my garden. I know, of course, exactly who I’ll ask what’s what: the shy Buddhist come home to care for his mother. He kneels in his garden’s bed like a supplicant, cradles in his palm the seeds he has gathered as though they are prized relics: the dry chalk of saints’ bones, the petrified tears of the Virgin Mary. Which tears, though? There could be so many. <i>When she first learned that she would bear a child? When that child was born? When he was crucified? When the stone was rolled away and he was – without first visiting her, without offering her succor or consolation – gone?</i><br />
<br />
Maybe he’s not really a Buddhist; maybe I made that up. But he ought to be or, to look at it another way, he is to me, and that’s all that matters. His industry is endless: plywood sawn to repair the barn, dirt sifted through and dug and planted, patterns of leaves examined, pinched, evaluated.<br />
<br />
I am always amazed how little I’ve learned in my going-on fifty-two years. I would like to build a cold-frame, patch our walls’ peeling plaster, play music, sing, speak another language, believe.<br />
<br />
Yes, that’s the one more than any other, of course: <i>believe</i>. Who doesn’t want to believe, to have faith – that spring will follow winter, that the seeds will sprout, that there is beyond all this struggle and worry some real measure of succor, some consolation?<br />
<br />
I will say this. It is when I am alone that I move nearest to belief, feel it lurking somewhere near in all that silence. I am not in such moments the stalking fox; I am instead whatever it is that he is stalking: bird or mouse or vole, whatever it might be that’s trying to make its way through the immense and terrifying and beautiful field.<br />
<br />
All around: The scent of peach and apple, blossom and root and loam.<br />
<br />
And above: The wide, unending sky.<br />
<br />
<div><br />
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</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14055608068608736755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-19867465354848955252012-02-20T16:08:00.001-05:002012-02-20T16:30:25.130-05:00Who Can Say?<i>There's going to come a day when you feel better.</i><br />
<i>You'll rise up free and easy on that day</i><br />
<i>and float from branch to branch,</i><br />
<i>lighter than the air.</i><br />
<i>Just when that day is coming, who can say? Who can say?</i><br />
<i> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>-- The Mountain Goats, “Up the Wolves”</i><br />
<br />
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<br />
Back home in New Orleans, tomorrow is Mardi Gras. My brother Blair, who lives in Maryland, has gone down there; it’s his first Mardi Gras, he told me, in thirty-five years. Mine was thirty years or so ago, probably; I don’t really remember. But thirty years ago is when I left.<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br />
<i>Back home in New Orleans.</i><br />
<br />
I don’t know why it is, but I’m still stuck on this idea of home – of exactly where it resides inside me and why, of what I’ve got to do with this place that contains, now, nothing of me that isn’t <i>history</i>.<br />
<br />
It’s words like that – words like <i>history</i>, <i>was</i>, <i>once</i>, <i>remember</i>, <i>lost</i> – that again and again rise to the surface when I think of home, muddy lures bobbing in murkier and murkier water.<br />
<br />
That’s not all, though, of course. There are thousands and thousands of images: a monumental psychic flea-market table lined with all manner of priceless – which is to say worthless – items, every one of them dingy and ruined and dented and chipped, every one of them, well, <i>old</i> – left too long in some dank basement or dusty garage or moldy shoebox, every one affixed with a price that is, when push comes to shove, when banter and bluster give way at day’s end to humble concession, merely a token gesture, a frail assertion that surely each must possess something of abiding value.<br />
<br />
Here’s the strangest thing of all – or maybe it’s not so strange; maybe it’s true of everyone’s past: I remember, at one and the same time, both everything and virtually nothing about my childhood. I can summon the precise degree of sharpness in the blades of grass on our front lawn; I can smell the sun’s scratchy heat on the pink and black brick wall of our house; I can feel the recoil of my limbs at the scuttling of lizards on the wooden fence in the backyard, the males rearing back their heads, red throats obscenely swollen. I can hear the briny crack and split of roaches’ smashed shells beneath my feet. I can feel the glow from the bulbs of the Philips stereo, the rough weave of the speakers’ cloth covers, the chill of the bent-fingered spindle at the center of the turntable. I can remember sliding along the smooth branches of City Park oaks or standing on the Filmore Avenue Bridge above Bayou St. John and letting the crab nets’ twined ropes crookedly uncoil in my cupped hands, feeling later the sharp pinch of a claw on a finger while trying to disengage one crab’s grip on its brother gripping its own claws to another, a game like the barrel of plastic monkeys except these crabs would fall, when they finally let loose, into my mother’s boiling pot in our kitchen.<br />
<br />
Where’s the truth in all that memory? Where’s not just its skin but its substance? My adolescence was scarred, like a knife’s blade cutting into wood, by a lingering sorrow, an unrequited love, various attachments forsaken, the whip and recoil of anger and fear. But that must not be the whole story; there must have been, before the sorrows I can name, sorrows I cannot. Perhaps there’s a whole chain of such sorrows, all of them strung together like a devil’s demented version of a charm bracelet or carnival beads.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdHblhrnULdvE74iV0TGbvExPsIP34Vi645dg12GuLSkdY2If3t1qPWnA3b9a4ebaw2d26WThG_CDla-Ih0SEClAf9Txv_xxF8usjGOb3OsQbcpFTRwhFL99C1XjgQizQlKqIWHmp31ACz/s1600/vision.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdHblhrnULdvE74iV0TGbvExPsIP34Vi645dg12GuLSkdY2If3t1qPWnA3b9a4ebaw2d26WThG_CDla-Ih0SEClAf9Txv_xxF8usjGOb3OsQbcpFTRwhFL99C1XjgQizQlKqIWHmp31ACz/s320/vision.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br />
<br />
This is all too vague, I know, too inscrutable, too masked by metaphor, but there are still places to which I will not go – items laid out on that flea-market table that I will not buy or even pick up to inspect. The price is, I guess, still too high for me to harbor any hope that I can haggle it down to something I can afford.<br />
<br />
I can’t afford any of it, not any more. I’ve got more years of happiness going now than I ever thought I’d get.<br />
<br />
But there’s a price to that happiness as well, and it’s one that in many ways I’m weary of paying. I tell this to my students all the time: once there’s happiness, the story is done. When the conflict is resolved, there’s not much left we want to hear. <i>They lived</i>, we’re told, <i>happily ever after.</i> And that’s enough. We don’t need – don’t want – any more details.<br />
<br />
There’s nothing to say about art that isn’t in one way or another about loss. It’s all those same words I mentioned earlier: <i>was</i>, <i>once</i>, <i>remember</i>.<br />
<br />
That’s part of the answer, I suppose, why this place that is gone from my life, that has been gone these thirty years, remains alive for me. <i>Back home in New Orleans</i>. It is the place where sorrow lives.<br />
<br />
<i>For me.</i> That’s what I meant to say, nothing more: <i>For me it is the place where sorrow lives</i>.<br />
<br />
How odd it is to work myself toward such a conclusion on this particular day, on the eve of Mardi Gras, of the city’s giddy exultation, its celebration of all manner of earthly desire and delight.<br />
<br />
Even so, even remembering Mardi Gras, I can’t get away from myself. I remember less the raucous abandon and fabulous feathered masks than the dirty pants-cuffs revealed beneath revelers’ costume hems and the sour smell of warm beer drifting through the air and the stoic faces of the unshaven men who drove the grimy tractors that pulled the parade floats. I remember the unconvincingly tinny heft of silver and gold – and then purple and blue – doubloons and how they sailed through the air and then dizzily spun in the street until someone’s thick heavy shoe stomped them still. I remember the dirty wake behind each parade’s final float, the frighteningly stark spinning lights of police cars and fire trucks as the crowds scattered, occasional hoots and hollers here and there but mostly a silence that felt somehow resigned or even shameful, a reluctant admission that no one knew, really, what all the fuss had been about.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIp53R6dJVix0aVvFa_HP0C5q2ToHq5QbotVhhxaJTFGxBtH9aO_B8cpq55NtunPk944q8yFXy5NnCXKycm8qNQuZMlzrT0fxKJ_hd_YhNtDxrnDKxKmIZPqmTDxdDO3x5e4nfvIlpV6y0/s1600/implausible+beauty.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIp53R6dJVix0aVvFa_HP0C5q2ToHq5QbotVhhxaJTFGxBtH9aO_B8cpq55NtunPk944q8yFXy5NnCXKycm8qNQuZMlzrT0fxKJ_hd_YhNtDxrnDKxKmIZPqmTDxdDO3x5e4nfvIlpV6y0/s320/implausible+beauty.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br />
<br />
I am – I have been – a lucky man. I am grateful beyond measure for my life. I feel a bit like a weary refugee who, in all his aimless wandering, discovers that he has, by some great gift of grace, managed to cross the very border he’d given up any hope of finding. With a single step his despair becomes opportunity, his sorrow supplanted by joy.<br />
<br />
Is this new country a place where he can live? Or will he forever, no matter the anguish left behind, find himself longing for home?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14055608068608736755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-53889865931042201272012-01-27T06:30:00.003-05:002012-01-27T07:33:20.250-05:00Just Another Thing About The Body<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>We were becoming what we are,</i></span></div><div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Collapsing stars.</i></span></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>- Collapsing Stars</i></span></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><br />
</i></span></div></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TvwNORLLGsY/TyIzBLa9nyI/AAAAAAAAAlo/2u-4jY-zFX8/s1600/Nude_1927_61N.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="252" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TvwNORLLGsY/TyIzBLa9nyI/AAAAAAAAAlo/2u-4jY-zFX8/s320/Nude_1927_61N.jpg" style="cursor: move;" width="320" /></span></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><br />
</span></span></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><br />
</span></span></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">Think of your body in pieces: slight, pale shaft of your ankle; cup of your lower lip; gulf above your collarbone, deepening at the shoulder; palm; knee; thumb; thigh; cheekbone; stomach; wrist. Sometimes I play this game with myself— focus insistently on a single shinbone or fingertip. The word for the cleft in your upper lip? it's <i>philtrum. </i></span></span></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><br />
</span></span></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">*</span></span></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">There are all kinds of reasons to be occupied with your own body: pain, pleasure, vanity, hypochondria, medical necessity, grief, growth, aging, sudden scarring, or that cataclysmic shift into beauty that sometimes happens to girls about sixteen, who wake up, look in the mirror, and think: <i>Jesus, where did this face come from? </i>My own desire to map myself has some measure of most of these things in it. </span></span></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><br />
</span></span></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">In its wholeness, my body betrays me on a regular basis: all stumble and stutter and shake, all soreness and bruising and tripping on the bathmat and lurching like an awful thing, but in parts— <i>in parts </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">my body is remarkably unmarred, remarkably smooth and good and sometimes even giving. A few little scars: one soft one on my spine, some others at my ankles and in the furrows behind my knees. Small reminders I've been peeled open, but not much. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">It always shocks me. I think, somehow, that there should be more evidence. How is it that looking at my face, or my feet, or the widest moment of my wrist you can't see how wildly flawed it all is? </span></span></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><br />
</span></span></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">*</span></span></div></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B6fes-cq7jg/TyJwaAkGrXI/AAAAAAAAAl0/KXFDARToR3I/s1600/braces.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"></span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Some things I've known my whole life: it is not degenerative; I am not dying, at least not any more rapidly than most of us.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> I will probably need my knees replaced by forty. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">When you fall, you should turn your face away from the ground and, if you go hands first, bend your elbows or you'll break an arm. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Pain can often be mostly concentrated away. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Hierarchies of pain are impossible. I am</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> so lucky.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Some things no one prepared me for: I will probably never carry my own child. If I do, the stress on my body will rob me, maybe forever, of my ability to walk. A dear friend desperately wants to have a baby before it's too late, and worries she's waited too long, so I think about this more and more. </span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">When I stole myself to ask a lover if it bothered him, my faltering body, he said: </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>it doesn't matter; it's such a small thing. </i></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><br />
</i></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i> </i>Often I am angriest about my inability to be really, truly, safely solitary.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> It's sometimes a problem for m</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px;">y work; my best readers learn to say<i>: the body can't be so many things everywhere all the time. </i> </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px;">It awes me: stock-still, or in my peripheral vision, sometimes even moving: my arm coming up and down off the table. <i>My God. </i></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px;"><i><br />
</i></span></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eQj5mZZ_Ns0/TyJ-R8AtCMI/AAAAAAAAAmA/ZoXyzK4mx-w/s1600/image_pepper_index.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eQj5mZZ_Ns0/TyJ-R8AtCMI/AAAAAAAAAmA/ZoXyzK4mx-w/s320/image_pepper_index.gif" style="cursor: move;" width="263" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I am afraid of this essay. Afraid it will be trite or self-pitying. Afraid I am doing it badly, or just wrong. Afraid it's rabidly selfish. Afraid I am only re-writing some version of this over and over again my whole life. But there have been so many reasons to write it lately.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> A few weeks ago I sat with a friend on her studio floor. We'd been talking about women and gender and birth, and I said that I often felt left out of these kinds of conversations about the feminine or what it means to be a woman, because there isn't space inside them for my kind of body or my experience of the world, and there isn't enough writing about it out there. <i>That's what you're for, </i>she said, and I wanted to kiss her and kill her: for seeing me, and being so goddamn unflinching about the whole thing. She's right, of course. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">*</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Listen, body, we are nobody's tragedy. Listen, I know you, I can name you all over. Listen, just a little farther to the desk chair, the sofa, the bed. Just a little more trouble. Just somebody's hand on the back of your neck. Just your shadow on the street. Listen, I love you. Listen.</i></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><br />
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</span></span></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03898497269959409698noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-67959593239223951312011-12-30T13:40:00.001-05:002011-12-30T15:27:43.705-05:00Interlude: Work<div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times;">Window facing an ill-kept front yard<o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times;">Plums on the tree heavy with nectar<o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times;">Prayers to summon the destroying angel<o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times;">Moon stuttering in the sky like film stuck in a projector<o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times;"> -- The Mountain Goats, “Tallahasse”<o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RPEWIcRaTh4/Tv4FTfdQFVI/AAAAAAAABU8/Wvr3M1zDY7s/s1600/bigbridgeLowerNinthWardStRoseMissionaryBaptistCh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="220" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RPEWIcRaTh4/Tv4FTfdQFVI/AAAAAAAABU8/Wvr3M1zDY7s/s320/bigbridgeLowerNinthWardStRoseMissionaryBaptistCh.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;"><o:p><br />
</o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">What kind of work is this<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">The scrimshaw idols<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Stacked on the shelf,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Popcorn shards<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Littering the floor,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Long legs and loafers<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Halved by white socks,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Spanish moss dipping<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Into the frame like<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Water stains<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Don’t I know enough<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Already to distinguish<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">The boats curving<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Along the river’s arc<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">From the sad man<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Leaning, arms<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Crossed, against his<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Typewriter’s keys<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Or the chapped-lip boy<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Clutching his dog<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">From the dry<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">burnished field<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">With its shadows<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Stretched out <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Behind them<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">So the garden is brittle,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Almost dust,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Peach and dogwood<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">A shamble of wire,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Pulse extinguished<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">To a dull scrape<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Of stick against sky,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">And why is it<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Each season is quick<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">To append what’s next<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">To its every inflection<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">And a single night<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Casts about for its<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Own synonym,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Yes, what kind of work<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Speaks the wrong name<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Over and over,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Calls the father a man,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">His son a boy,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">The field behind his house<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">A field and doesn’t<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Ever say precisely how <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">He loves them<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">What kind of work<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times;">Is this<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hIPE4iRx08Q/Tv4FdWwsf8I/AAAAAAAABVQ/OkgkctDXs3Q/s1600/WEBSITE+Church+of+the+Living+God+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="251" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hIPE4iRx08Q/Tv4FdWwsf8I/AAAAAAAABVQ/OkgkctDXs3Q/s320/WEBSITE+Church+of+the+Living+God+2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14055608068608736755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1854975884909799598.post-91316435151741108382011-11-29T21:54:00.001-05:002011-11-29T21:57:02.083-05:00Song For Lonely Giants<i>Face in the leaves, song in my throat.</i><br />
<i>Fall through the air, hoping to float.</i><br />
<i>Practicing my solitary scales 'til they grow heavy,</i><br />
<i>Too heavy to carry.</i><br />
<i>Watching them go where they will go.</i><br />
<i> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>-- The Mountain Goats, “Song for Lonely Giants”</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifGfqKkmwvSj8NQVrprLcwbBqMDVAqQplasGhJBQy6ZDGrw7YqwvKBW7F5s0IfEgi14CptmE5kVQG1ES2wyeXIkVZIMbvYxKfOKgy3VrXbD01CNg7yr0TffECtb_I4rmXMg42lpyoaRzbo/s1600/299983_187156451365645_187085101372780_404893_1224580248_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifGfqKkmwvSj8NQVrprLcwbBqMDVAqQplasGhJBQy6ZDGrw7YqwvKBW7F5s0IfEgi14CptmE5kVQG1ES2wyeXIkVZIMbvYxKfOKgy3VrXbD01CNg7yr0TffECtb_I4rmXMg42lpyoaRzbo/s320/299983_187156451365645_187085101372780_404893_1224580248_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><i><br />
</i><br />
<br />
I am the father of a poet. It is a strange thing to be, especially since being a poet is what I first wanted to be, soon after – or perhaps concurrent with – my longing to be Pistol Pete.<br />
<br />
How different is it, really? The graceful swan’s neck of the wrist, the sagging gray socks, the long bangs hiding the eyes, the sloped shoulders, the desperate impossible grace, the certainty that the clock has ticked down to its final seconds, the beauty that forever trumps strength and, even better, again and again tricks it, robs it blind.<br />
<br />
But I would have to wait for years and years for poetry to enter my life the way I’d imagined it to be in the life of a true poet: sacramental, essential, without which not. I would have to wait for the daughter for whom the music of the spheres rang in her ears with the echoing pleasure and portent of Sunday church bells.<br />
<br />
So I was listening last night to the poet Lisa Spaar explaining the origin of each poem she’d chosen to read, and I was filled with some measure of gratitude that I did not have to be a poet myself, that I could merely be a poet’s father, for the poet must, if she is the real deal, as my daughter sadly and splendidly is – the poet must respond to every moment, every encounter, every word on the page, every pigment and accidentally encountered animal, every memory and shine on the shoes and plink of finger nail against glass as though contained in it is both beauty and horror, the gasp and yawp and cry of everything it means to be human. How hard that must be! How incredibly impossibly unbearably hard to live such a life.<br />
<br />
So my daughter says on the phone that she wakes up every day filled with sadness and must then find, must name for herself, all the reasons to cast that sadness aside: the promise of friendship, the prospect of accomplishment, the beauty of the one small moment that one might miss if one were not, well, attending to life.<br />
<br />
That’s what the poet does, isn’t it? <i>Attend. Be present. Be there now. And now. And now.</i><br />
<br />
And So what I will beg and claw for the rest of my days is that she be granted every single goddamn moment of her life that morning’s wish: promise and prospect and beauty.<br />
<br />
So I go to my daughter’s room like a penitent to a dusty abandoned shrine, and I root around on her shelves for the poets who will speak to me as they have spoken to her, who are gentle and generous enough to offer something of what I need.<br />
<br />
This week I found, as I had never found in my fifty-one years to heaven, as Walker Percy describes a life, James Wright’s <i>The Branch Will Not Break</i>.<br />
<br />
And here’s what occurs to me, though it may be as wrong as sin: that James Wright is the poet I’ve been searching for, poetic father of the son John Danielle whose epigraphs grace these pages. James Wright is the muse that JD may have never encountered, may have never read, though I suspect he has and would be willing to wager good money on it. If he has not, though, it doesn’t matter, because it’s all there in Wright’s poetry as it s in JD’s songs: the desperate son searching and searching, scrounging and scouring and scavenging the vast and familiar and unknowable American landscape for meaning, for the promise of transcendence, for love.<br />
<br />
For love, of course. What else is there?<br />
<br />
Here’s one of the poems in Wright's <i>The Branch Will Not Break</i>:<br />
<br />
<i>In the Face of Hatred</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>I am frightened by the sorrow</i><br />
<i>Of escaping animals.</i><br />
<i>The snake moves slowly</i><br />
<i>Beyond his horizon of yellow stone.</i><br />
<i>A great harvest of convicts has shaken loose</i><br />
<i>And hurries across the walls of your eyes.</i><br />
<i>Most of them, all moving alike,</i><br />
<i>Are gone already along the river.</i><br />
<i>Only two boys,</i><br />
<i>Trailed by shadows of rooted police, </i><br />
<i>Turn aimlessly in the lashing elderberries.</i><br />
<i>One cries for his father’s death,</i><br />
<i>And the other, the silent one, </i><br />
<i>Listens into the hallway</i><br />
<i>Of a dark leaf.</i><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_i6xkLFGiuW4rmx9sDzIZsrKUhUR7a5L5IkgCNLNxkbRshH6I7MVPMewporRw5yahd0IYwW9wJ5NDgbG-wxq6qCvI_Qk5mbMEoJjHbIiZw0_gziXQxxJubABCHt6A-lZGABgAXUSfmfdE/s1600/318591_187151498032807_187085101372780_404880_1519229127_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_i6xkLFGiuW4rmx9sDzIZsrKUhUR7a5L5IkgCNLNxkbRshH6I7MVPMewporRw5yahd0IYwW9wJ5NDgbG-wxq6qCvI_Qk5mbMEoJjHbIiZw0_gziXQxxJubABCHt6A-lZGABgAXUSfmfdE/s320/318591_187151498032807_187085101372780_404880_1519229127_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<br />
I may be wrong, of course. I am nothing if not an expert at being wrong. But I think it’s possible to imagine the young poet choosing to strum, with fierce and frenetic strokes, the strings of a barely tuned guitar and then to try to sing these words only to discover that he, more than singing, is shouting them out against the awful wretched unbearable silence.<br />
<br />
And the shouting is a good and fine thing. There's music in it.<br />
<br />
Tell me you can’t hear John Darnielle’s brittle pleading nasal voice in these lines: <i>The sad bones of my hands descend into a valley / Of strange rocks.</i> Or: <i>An eagle rejoices in the oak trees of heaven.</i> Or: <i>All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home</i>. Or: <i>I do not even have ashes to rub into my eyes.</i><br />
<br />
I’m sure there’s a formula for all of this: a certain American childhood, a Christ-haunted landscape, the glow of street lights against dented cars, flowers left too long in their vases, candles burned down, papers yellowed.<br />
<br />
Whatever the equation, the answer is not me, no matter all my longing, all my inclination toward the exquisitely ecstatic beauty of melancholy. I am not musical, not a poet, though I try again and again to hammer my words into some ghostly echo of the real thing, the real deal, the without which not.<br />
<br />
I am the father of a poet, though, and that is enough for me. It is actually, in the end, even better, because my own words, no matter how well I’ve crafted them, never make me cry, never make me bow down in silent gratitude. But the poet’s do; my daughter’s do. And that will always be enough.<br />
<br />
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