272. Scheherazade

by Susan Elbe
from Eden in the Rearview Mirror (Word Press)


Another night washes up at my feet
and all down the block lightning
bugs drizzle their glow juice.
In tight twos, couples
stroll the vein-blue summer light.

In cafes, undiluted secrets
shared between old friends
over sweets and bitter tea.
In the alleys, damaged men
ration cigarettes and loneliness,

the whole street, an ark
of stories asking Why?
and Why not? me, as mutable
as Chinese whispers or
shorelines remade by water.

And mine too, a story with no wedding,
no milky-mouthed children,
a few hours of abandon in warm beds,
then abandonment.
Loss and lesson, all it seems I have.

A sweet-onion moon, its light
thin as tears, silvers the trees.
How did I get this far
thinking goodness would save me?
Once upon a time is what saves us.

When morning rises up like cream,
its light mimics evening,
as muted, blue. I'm still here,
but one crow on a rooftop
squanders his one and only tale.

****
If someone knows how to insert space before a line using HTML, would you please tell me so that I can set poems correctly?

Thanks!

249. FINAL MOMENTS

From the Archives (11 September 2006) I was going to include a poem to commemorate the five-year anniversary of the day when 2,749 people evaporated in a haze of collapsing beams and staircases and ceilings and falling bodies, but Garrison Keillor read a better one on NPR this morning, so I’ll post it at the end of this entry.

It’s Monday morning, September 11, and I am half awake. Punched the snooze bar for a solid 35 minutes this morning—a typical morning activity of mine that Danishgrrrl finds endlessly amusing—then finally crawled my ass out of bed and drove to work, thinking about what my bestgrrrl Lars said on 9/11: it’s a good thing that the terrorists didn’t realize that most New Yorkers don’t even make it into work before 10, because otherwise a whole lot of people who were waiting in line at Starbucks would have died too.

Thought about all those missing persons posters that covered the city too, and about the grandmother with pink rhinestone-studded sunglasses and a gold lame raincoat who died in the twin towers whose obituary Garrison Keillor described on the air.

And this all led to bad images of my little brother doing search and rescue in unbelievably hot, pitch-black blazing buildings where he crawls around on his hands and knees, searching for survivors.

There are so many awful ways that our lives could end, and so many awful ways that our country has ended Iraqi lives since the twin towers were attacked and I am feeling jaded and overwhelmed by the news right now.

All right. The poem:

FOR THE FALLING MAN
by Annie Farnsworth
from Bodies of Water, Bodies of Light

I see you again and again
tumbling out of the sky,
in your slate-grey suit and pressed white shirt.
At first I thought you were debris
from the explosion, maybe gray plaster wall
or fuselage but then I realized
that people were leaping.
I know who you are, I know
there's more to you than just this image
on the news, this ragdoll plummeting—
I know you were someone's lover, husband,
daddy. Last night you read stories
to your children, tucked them in, then curled into sleep
next to your wife. Perhaps there was small
sleepy talk of the future. Then,
before your morning coffee had cooled
you'd come to this; a choice between fire
or falling.
How feeble these words, billowing
in this aftermath, how ineffectual
this utterance of sorrow. We can see plainly
it's hopeless, even as the words trail from our mouths
—but we can't help ourselves
how I wish
we could trade them for something
that could really have caught you.

231 .JAGGED EDGES

From the Archive (June 2006) I can’t remember who said “Youth will go but passion and freedom will have to be reconquered each day of your life,” but I have been thinking about that line a lot lately.

So many things vie for our time, threaten to reduce us to strangers spasming at the stoplight as we worry about the next commitment we must reach on time because of some artifical frame that we have allowed our need for a salary to place around our true selves.

It is too damn easy to get wrapped up in crap like this and forget to live your life, forget to even notice that beautiful goldfinch right there in the tree beside you.

Work is consuming nearly all of my time right now and would be a twenty-four-hour job if I allowed it to be.

This isn’t surprising, given that it’s the end of the fiscal year—a normal June, really—but I am trying very hard to retain my passion, to hold onto the poet in the midst of my overcommitments and changing job landscape and arrogant yet oh-so-lousy new boss and her disappointing new administration (and did I mention that she has no idea how to perform my job yet keeps trying to micromanage me anyway?).

Mainly, this is very bad news because I must stay here another year before I am vested and have benefits for life upon retirement.

Danishgrrl says I am burned to a crisp and has suggested an impromptu cookout with friends till she can whisk me off to the beach for a long luxurious weekend.

Hope this helps.

•

Nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.—Harry Crews

So did anyone else hear that naval-gazing poet Billy Collins read on NPR last night?

Jezzzuslawd that man is self-absorbed! He read a precious little poem about poetry (with a capital P) that was basically a bunch of masturbatory self-congratulatory lines that didn’t amount to anything, and then Terry Gross practically peed her pants congratulating him.

Ugh.

I guess I need to remember that poet laureates are not chosen from poets’ poets.

As for me, I want to slap the pompous man in the name of O’Hara and Broumas and all the new and innovative poets writing meaningful lines today.

Meanwhile, the New York Times is running a series of articles on how genes move and change, written by the amazingly hot smartypants evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson and wow what a picture of her they have posted! It’s almost enough to make me subscribe to Times Select instead of reading my electronic freebie.

Not much time to read right now though—although I am following the impact of Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Rolling Stone article on how the Republicans deliberately stole the election in Ohio.

This is, what, the fourth report to verify this horrifying reality, but has the story been broadcast by the mainstream media

(who, for that matter, still haven’t reported that Gore actually won in Florid.)?

There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark when Americans have to listen to the BBC to find out about the demise of our democratic principles.

LISTENING TO: the wheels go round and round (I really love to watch them roll)

READING: Sartre’s Existentialism and Human Emotions

SANG IN SHOWER: Kasey Chambers’ “Pony”: When I grow up I want a baby. I’m going to name it after Ralph Stanley...

BEST-OF SPAM: Anything to please your woman (uh huh)

214. CYNICISM SURVIVAL KIT

From the Archives

(April 2006) The New York Times recognizes today’s somber twenty-year anniversary with an interactive “Chernobyl’s Legacy: 20 Years Later” online exhibit that includes these observations:

We all know what Chernobyl is, what an atomic plant is, but I’ll tell you how we saw it. An enemy had come to our country. We had to defend ourselves. And we set out to protect our country, our people. We all had those feelings, all of us in the 100-man brigade (that initially went in to create the sarcophage). But of course it differed from a real war. In a real war, shells explode, bullets fly, bodies fall, blood flows. Here, the sun was shining overhead. Beautiful gardens stood all around, bulging with fruit. Birds were singing. You couldn’t possibly have imagined that all this was death.—Arkady Rokhlin, Nuclear Engineer and one of the Chernobyl liquidators

In war you know where you are, where the neutral territory is, where the enemy is, where the plane is, how its bombing you, how its chasing you, how it catches you. There you couldn’t see the enemy. You see it when you’re burned already. When you’re a corpse. It’s invisible. It’s everywhere and nowhere.—Constantin Baskin, Nuclear Systems Specialist

Your soul is covered in blood. You want to cry, but you can’t.—Leonid Shavray, Chernobyl firefighter

This reminds me of a poignant poem that French surrealist and working-class hero Jacques Prévert wrote during his military service in WWII.

BARBARA
(translated by Harriet Zinnes and published in Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness)

Remember Barbara
It rained without letup in Brest that day
And you walked smiling
Glowing ravishing drenched
Under the rain
Remember Barbara
It rained without letup in Brest
And I passed you on the Rue de Siam
You smiled
And I smiled too
Remember Barbara
You whom I did not know
You who did not know me
Remember
Remember that day just the same
Do not forget
A man was taking shelter in a doorway
And he called out your name
Barbara
And you ran toward him in the rain
Drenched ravishing glowing
And you threw yourself into his arms
Remember that Barbara
And do not be angry with me if I call you by your first name
I call all those I love by their first names
Even if I have met them only once
I call all who love by their first names
Even if I do not know them
Remember Barbara
Do not forget
That gentle, happy rain
On your happy face
On that happy town
That rain on the sea
On the arsenal
On the boat of Ouessant

Oh Barbara
What shit war is
What has become of you now
Under the rain of iron
Of fire of steel of blood
And he who held you in his arms
Lovingly
Is he dead missing or still living
Oh Barbara
It rains without letup in Brest
As it rained before
But it is not the same everything is ruined
It is a rain of mourning terrible and desolate
No longer even a storm
Of iron of steel of blood
Only of clouds
That burst
And disappear like dogs
Down the streams of Brest
Like dogs that will rot far away
Far away very far from Brest
Of which there is nothing left

If it’s raining for the fourth day in a row tomorrow, then I will probably hang out in a café and write another entry before I get on the plane. Otherwise, I’ll be back late next week with plenty of stories from NYC.

Now, however, I'm going to a play.

Ciao.

209. COMFORTABLE AS A FLOAT

From the Archives (April 2006)

BITTERNESS
by Olga Broumas

She who loves roses must be patient
and not cry out when she is pierced by thorns.
—Sappho

In parody
of a grade-B film, our private
self-conscious soapie, as we fall
into the common, suspended disbelief of love, you ask
will I still be
here tomorrow, next week, tonight you ask me am I really
here. My passion delights

and surprises you, comfortable
as you’ve been without it. Lulled,
comfortable as a float myself in your real
and rounded arms, I can only smile
back, indulgently
at such questions. In the second reel—

a season of weeks, two
flights across the glamorous Atlantic, one
orgy and the predictable divorce
scenes later—I’m fading out
in the final close-up
alone. As one

heroine in this
two-bit production to the other, how long
did you, did we both know
the script
meant you to wake up doubting
in those first nights, not me, my daytime
serial solvency, but yours.

Yesterday—the same day that a child was testifying before Congress about being abused by online sexual predators—a high-ranking Bush official was arrested for pedophilia. Yes, Bush’s deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security tried to solicit sex from a fourteen-year-old girl.

This also from the Post:

Another Homeland Security official—Frank Figueroa, special agent in charge of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Tampa—faces trial this week on charges of exposing himself to a teenage girl last year at a mall. Figueroa, who has been suspended, pleaded not guilty.

As my Baptist mother used to say, be sure your sins will find you out, yo.

SANG IN SHOWER: Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” (which dates me, huh?)

READING: The search warrant for 610 N Buchanan St. (AKA the lacrosse team house beside Duke campus).

BEST-OF SPAM: I FAILED AND STILL MAKE 94K! [but apparently cannot find the caps lock key on his computer]

206. SUDDEN AZALEAS

The Rider
by Naomi Shihab Nye

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn't catch up to him,

the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.

What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.

A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

SANG IN SHOWER: Alison Krauss’s “There Is a Reason” (for it all—which I sing an octave lower than this angel-voiced woman)

READING: The Epoch Times, which someone tossed in my driveway. It appears to be a Falun Gong publication.

BEST-OF SPAM: Smart brain: the subliminal software they tried to ban!

201. I AM A COMMON WOMAN. . .

...There are a lot more just like me
Holding the whole damn world together,
Day by day, week by week.

Turn to your neighbor;
Look in her face.
You can read it in her eyes:
We all are common women,
As common as bread,
And will rise, will rise.
—Mary Beth Elliot/Joan Simcoe’s song “Common Woman”

From the Archives (March 2006) This afternoon, we held a reception for an employee who retires next week. Our fearless leader applauded her “quiet contribution” (at the rate of $26,000 annually after 30 years of service), praised her diligence and attention to detail, then presented her with a gift certificate to a big-box office supply store before we partook of reception fare together.

I’m glad we honored her publicly, glad she retired with full benefits after dedicating so many years of her life to this place, but couldn’t help but remind myself that this same fearless leader told me to get rid of her just four years ago.

(I’m cocky, so replied Why don’t you tell me how much money you need instead [big boy] and let me find it for you?)

So perhaps readers will understand why the edges of my parched lips curled into an uncontrollable snarl when Fearless Leader shook the hand of a woman who will retire having no idea how hard I had to work to save her position and benefits just a few short years ago.

Everybody knows that the deal is rotten. Old Black Joe’s still picking cotton for your ribbons and bows. Everybody knows.

What’s that Percy Bysshe Shelley line:

The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature

Today I need some poetry so, okay, I’ll end with a poem:

MY HEART

I’m not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don’t prefer one “strain” to another.
I’d have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar.
(...) and my heart—
you can’t plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.
—Frank O’Hara

183. KLEPTOCRACY, AMERICAN-STYLE, OR ANOTHER DAY OF ARMCHAIR ÜBERLIBERAL RANTING

From the Archives

(January 2006) MLK Jr. Day 2006, so most businesses are closed. I am perched in a rocker with a nice cup of tea, looking out the window at the remnants of a two-day snowstorm that is now being washed away by a gentle rain.

“It’s easy to be an armchair überliberal,” a Sun magazine letter writer notes, but “out in the confusion and hubbub of the world, people of different races are living flush up against one another, doing what they can to build bridges of understanding and create small spaces of kindness in their daily lives.”

I want to believe that is true. And I know that is sometimes true.

I know that people who have very little can be incredibly generous, that a few brave souls will eventually rise up, refuse to sit in the back of the bus or organize Freedom Rides through KKK territory, that, every once in a great while, humanity will make an incremental step forward.

I also recognize that I am talking about kindness in the era of Abu Ghraib, in a year in which the VP of our democracy is lobbying Congress on behalf of cruel and unusual punishment.

When my pal Rosa was a peace corp volunteer in Africa, a woman whose younger sister died told her matter-of-factly that her deceased sister’s infant twins would now die too. This is reality in a place where scant resources and massive starvation are the norm.

Resignation in the face of atrocity is ocassionally the norm in the underbelly of US culture too, where families struggle to survive —sometimes for generation after generation and sometimes by learning to work the system—but the twins would have had a much better chance of surviving in this country.

... so let’s all sing oh oh your worries ain’t like mine now, shall we, and turn back to our reality TV shows because, as Barbara Bush says, look how well those poor people are doing!

Meanwhile, it is almost certainly no coincidence that MLK was assassinated when he began to criticize capitalism.

The twins fought to survive in a landscape in which the strongest takes the food and therefore thrives.

In our landscape, the ones with the most resources claim others’ resources as their own—through business transactions and increased profit margins and decreased benefits for workers and abysmally low minimum wages and diminished workers’ rights and confiscated pensions, through supply and demand.

The rich rob the poor legally because they have the resources necessary to do so.

If you grew up among poor but honest Americans, as I did, then you scrimped and saved and did without and followed the Golden Rule and lived in accordance with the tenets of the bible—that disastrous tome that has helped so many politicians and ambitious popes and robber barons keep generation after generation of people compliant—while you kept your eyes fixed firmly to the afterlife.

(Sounds like a bad spam subject line, doesn’t it?)

It’s no coincidence that, when I lived in DC, it was the drug dealers who bought the shoeless children their shoes, not the government or any of those money-laundering nonprofits that Republicans open right and left.

Talk to dealers and gang members and you will learn that many recognize the social structures that oppress them and they’re understandably infuriated by the fact that our society allows members of their extended family to roam the glass-strewn streets barefoot while others have so much.

In some ways, the drug dealers and gang members who sprout in our squalor are the true entrepreneurs, the disenfranchised who somehow discover a way to achieve the American dream.

Listen to good rap music or good indy music or good art or, well, many things and you will discover an undercurrent of unrest along with a determination to deviate from the predetermined suburban script for having it all.

•

So okay I’ll jump topics again and end with a poem:

WATER PRAYER
by Stuart Kestenbaum (From The Sun magazine (12.2005)

And this morning I awoke to rain, which makes
its own rhythm on the window, and the world is full
of these rhythms, rhythm of water, rhythm of the heart,
which sounds like an underwater pump, the lub-dud
of all it knows, which is making all I know possible,
and on the roof rain falls and turns to hail, then snow,
then rain again, running down the shingles to the gutters,
the gathering-up that makes rivers and lakes and oceans,
from cloud to drop to torrent, how nothing is lost.

LISTENING TO: the tea kettle starting to boil

READING: The Sun magazine

178. ANOTHER YEAR OF APOCALYPTICAL EVENTS FINALLY ENDS, OR, ON TO THE HOLY WARS, BROWNIE!

From the Archives

(31 December 2005) Bush, when touring the country to promote his dumb idea of privatizing Social Security, said that his objective was “to kind of catapult the propaganda.”

I like a president who kind of does something, don’t you?

The kind of logic behind that official statement makes about as much sense as the Family Research Council's and other conservative groups’ response to the new human papillomavirus vaccine.

We can virtually eliminate cervical cancer by giving every 12-year-old girl this vaccine, yet socially conservative groups oppose it because they believe it provides an incentive to engage in premarital sex.

(Yet they called themselves pro-life.)

•

And now, a poem for the new year. I hope yours is filled with love and hope and creativity and passion and good health and prosperity and music.

LUTE MUSIC
by Kenneth Rexroth

The Earth will be going on a long time
Before it finally freezes;
Men will be on it; they will take names,
Give their deeds reasons.
We will be here only
As chemical constituents—
A small franchise indeed.
Right now we have lives,
Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,
Like everybody had once—

Here at the year's end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once west through deserts—
The precious metal of our mingled hair,
The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses—
Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.

Since that wonderful poem was written by Kenneth Rexroth (a poet who once sold pamphlets promising a cure for constipation), I suppose I should include a link to some jazz music here, but you’ll just have to find that new Miles Davis compilation on your own because I am far too busy pondering the fact that three poor counties in my state are apparently competing for a five-thousand-ton-per-day solid waste dump that will turn the eastern region into the fourth largest waste dump in the nation.

It sucks to be poor

(and stinks too).

•

So while I was sipping mulled wine and not even thinking about my New York Times electronic subscription last week, a jury ruled that Wal-Mart must pay $172 million to employees because the chain failed to provide meal breaks to nearly 116,000 hourly workers (who, let’s face it, probably purchased their uneaten lunches at Sam’s Club anyway, thus giving the Waltons even more money).

Meanwhile, word leaked out that our government has been conducting secret radiation searches in the homes and businesses and mosques of Muslim Americans (can you say guilt by association?).

Here’s a response from the Council on American-Islamic Relations:

This disturbing revelation, coupled with recent reports of domestic surveillance without warrant, could lead to the perception that we are no longer a nation ruled by law, but instead one in which fear trumps constitutional rights. All Americans should be very concerned about the apparent trend toward a two-tiered system of justice, with full rights for most citizens, and another diminished set of rights for Muslims

. . . or Quakers. Or queers. Or liberals. Or . . .

Hmm. Remember when the US attorney general labeled all environmentalists communists whom our country will weed out one by one by any means necessary?

(Damn tree huggers fucking up our social security system ...

... or something.)

And I’ve been asking myself what it means that King Bush the Younger now flaunts the fact that he so flagrantly broke the law.

Does he actually believe that he is above the law?

(He must.)

Or is this a desperate response from a desperate criminal who got caught red-handed?

Will distracted citizens fall for this preemptive preening?

And ’tis the season, so let’s note a not-so-stellar anniversary: on Christmas Eve 1992, King Bush the Elder (who is not often confused with a wise man) was watching over his thousand points of light when, lo, a star appeared in the east and told him what he had to do—pardon former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger and five other neocons for their Iran-Contra criminal activity as American citizens focused on our eggnog.

(Your illegal actions will still be noted in the history books though, boys.)

Meanwhile, in the hopeful news department, at least 1,500 people attended a Christmas Eve mass held by an recently excommunicated St. Louis priest despite warnings from their archibishop that doing so would be a mortal sin (the definition of which sure has become pedestrian of late).

And Merriam-Webster Online reports that these are the most looked-up words in 2005: (10) inept, (9) levee, (8) conclave, (7) pandemic, (6) tsunami, (5) insipid, (4) filibuster, (3) contempt, (2) refugee—and the word most people needed defined: integrity.

(That paragraph is a found poem, really.)

And, finally, something to keep in mind as you wake up with your champagne hangover: At the first light of the new year, Buddhists all over the world will begin reciting prayers and meditating for peace.

Okay. I’ll close with something to consider as we slide into this new year.

Do you think there’s any correlation between the surprising success of that lame, feel-good, anthropomorphic penguin movie that has nothing to do with reality and how stunned we all felt as the many apocalyptical natural events of the past year wiped out so many of us?

SANG IN SHOWER: Summertime, and the Living is Easy (don’t ask me why ’cause it sure ain’t summer here)

READING: A week’s worth of the New York Times

LISTENING TO: The Holly and The Ivy, as performed by the Washington Men’s Camerata

BEST YEAR-END QUOTE: I’ve never trusted the number 10, or five, or any other multiple of fingers on a simian’s hand when it comes to recognizing excellence. (critic Byron Woods)

165. OF PRESIDENTS AND EMPERORS

From the Archives

(October 2005) This just in from Writer’s Alamanac:

OF PRESIDENTS AND EMPERORS
by David Ray (from The Death of Sardanapalus and Other Poems of The Iraq Wars, Howling Dog Press)

Comparing our imperial leader today to Nero,
whose troops were also engaged in occupation
of Parthian lands along the Euphrates, with about
the same luck as today, we surely must temper
our judgments, forgive a few lies and lives lost,
give thanks that most of the deaths are uncounted,
and not ours. After all, our leader did not murder
his mother. He and she are on excellent terms.

Nero murdered his wife Octavia, also Poppaea,
his second, by kicking her while she was pregnant
with his child, guaranteed divinity. In Washington
you see no such abominations. The lies are genteel
and murder is at the far end of Pathfinders,
Tomahawks, gun ships and Patriot missiles.
Back home we can thank our stars that tribunes
and freed gladiators do not arrive bearing swords
and platters for heads. And because Congress
consists of the deferential they would never be at risk.
Our leader needs not assassinate sassy senators.

He would never set fire to Washington or build
an ostentatious mansion like Nero's over the ruins.
As a God-fearing Christian he would never thank
Jupiter for throwing javelins of fire at his enemies,
nor would he go on tour to read his poems or play
his harp in the provinces. Yet for his speeches
our President gets as much applause as Nero,
whose soldiers prodded those who nodded off.

In the Oval Office no visitor is obliged to fall upon
knees and weary the President's hand with kisses.
Yet the fear Tacitus expressed could be voiced today.
He worried that such "a monotony of disasters"
as those ordered by Nero might, if recited, disgust all
who heard them. He preferred not to sicken his readers
lest they be "fatigued of mind and paralyzed with grief."
In Rome thousands like us could only pray for relief.

162. AFTER LOVE

From the Archive (October 2005)

AFTER LOVE
by Maxine Kumin

Afterwards, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries.
These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.
Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.
The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar
and overhead, a plane
singsongs coming down.
Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when
the wolf, the mongering wolf;
who stands outside the self
lay lightly down, and slept.

... And that is why fucking is so incredibly wonderful.

It is 11:52 PM Wednesday night and I am having a glass of wine and I’m sitting out on my semi-wet deck listening to the evening and owls unwind.

Don’t ask me why, but a song from Yentl is stuck in my head tonight: I’m a bundle of confusion but it has a strange appeal; did it all begin with him and the way he makes me feel?

Weird.

I have had Seattle dreams for two nights running—probably because I discovered an excellent Seattle-based photographer on Flickr and really like his work. Well, and because the Pacific NW is my favorite part of the country.

I look at his photographs and smell the place, feel my feet sinking down into that Keith Haring beach san as my hair blows back in the stiff coastal wind and here I am longing to be there again.

... Okay. So now it’s 1:30 AM already and I am going to be very tired when that 7 AM alarm starts shouting.

I attempted to watch TV but Howard Dean was being so stupid on David Letterman that I turned to HGTV, but then they advertised an upcoming show about “the last drink glass you’ll ever buy” and then a show that is actually called I WANT THAT, which features a graphic of a man with his face pressed against a plate-glass store window.

Reminds me of Ann Pancake’s story about her niece looking at a catalog as her West Virginia grandmother notes that “there she sits, just learning to want.”

I’m sorry, but how could anyone see those HGTV advertisements and not understand that corporations are paying for product placement to convince them that their life won’t be complete until they need something they probably never even thought about before?

Ugh.

LISTENING TO: Jennifer Daniels’ Oatmeal (you didn’t have to tell me stories of how your mother made you oatmeal and all while the sun was pouring down across your bed. You didn’t have to make believe that you were in love with me when you were in love with this vision of this vision in your head.)

SANG IN SHOWER: Slip-Siding Away by Paul Simon

159. LUMINOUS DEBRIS

From the Archives
(October 2005)
”Luminous Debris was the title of Gustaf Sobin's collection of essays (UCal Press, 1999) on the landscape and history of Southern France, where the American expatriate has lived for more than forty years—but it might just as well describe his poems: like shards of some distant and immemorial linguistic eruption, they are full of middles and sometimes of ends, but their beginnings are lost in silence."—KultureFlash.net

LINGUA FRANCA
by Gustaf Sobin

frivolous with immensity, let your
fingertips slip over the
very contours
of
inception, grazing as they did its pleats, ripples, the
slick
contracted expanse of its muscles, laminated in
dark oils. loom and
dissolve; heave and succumb. for there, furtive, epi-
phenomenal, you'd only transit—vaporous—through all
those flexed
de-
terminants. does the mirror know what the
mirrored doesn't? wouldn't the

resonance enter, root
resplendent, there where the voice,
manifestly,
couldn't? thus drawn, solicited, even the air's
for

inclusion. so, too—you'd noted—each
dis-
tended member, its least
emitted murmur, but

only wrapped, enclosed in the whirring viscera of its own
un-
wording. for only then, in its very
ex-

tinguishing,
spoke.

158. NO PLACE FOR A POET

From the Archives (September 2005)

Laura Bush
First Lady
The White House

Dear Mrs. Bush,
I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival on September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the breakfast at the White House.

In one way, it's a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents—all of us who need the pleasure, and the inner and outer news, it delivers.

And the concept of a community of readers and writers has long been dear to my heart. As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a women's prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology ward for children. Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged, has been running now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA candidates and their students—long-term residents at the hospital who, in their humor, courage and wisdom, become our teachers.

When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost nonmoving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing. When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely nonspeaking and nonmoving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self expression, accuracy, honesty and wit—and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person's unique story and song.

So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country—with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain—did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made "at the top" and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism—the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to.

I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness—as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing—against this undeclared and devastating war.

But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.

What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting "extraordinary rendition": flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us.

So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.

Sincerely,
SHARON OLDS

•

Here's a quote from Friday's New York Times: "I find that I am becoming more and more angry," said a 40-year-old priest on the West Coast who said he had not decided whether to reveal his homosexuality publicly. "This is the church I've given my life to and I believe in. I look at every person I come in contact with as someone who's created in the image and likeless of God, and I expect that from the church that I'm a part of. But I always feel like I'm 'less than.' "

157. IDLE AND BLESSED, OR, JUST ANOTHER SPECK IN THE STEW

From the Archives

(September 2005) First day of autumn, my favorite time of the year. Our days are getting shorter. The air is getting crisper. And our grandmother trees are transitioning from busy food-making preparations into their long party season of stored sugar highs. The state fair. Apples. Rakes and leaves. And finally we leave the steamy 100° days behind. Full speed ahead to the chlorophyll—seep into those branches and turn our leaves to gold!

I like to think of those sugar-loaded winter trees as statelier versions of that annoying little addicted sister in John Waters’ film Pecker, petulantly shouting “Me want SUGAR now!!”

But we were talking about autumn, weren’t we? The mountains’ fine crispness and leaves.

Mary Oliver says she doesn’t know exactly what prayer is, but she does

know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

What do I plan to do? I plan to be outdoors—making art, making music, making love.

A pal and I have been talking about death a lot since the hurricane hit. She’s terrified of dying and says her fear interferes with her ability to enjoy life in the present tense. “Just knowing I’m going to die ruins it for me,” she says.

I’m not particularly afraid of dying, but really don’t want to die in pain.

Still, I rage against the dying of my light as much as anyone else, mourn and miss loved ones who have been dead for years, and go to the gym on a regular basis in an effort to stave off the inevitable.

And, unlike my friend, I don’t believe that there’s some benevolent being with his eye on this particular sparrow, that one day he will come scoop me up in his kind godly hand and set me down on some proverbial street of gold.

I don’t believe (or disbelieve) in previous lives either, have never once though that I might really be Cleopatra or Edna St. Vincent Millay or Sylvia Beach reincarnated.

I am, on the other hand, very fond of the notion that, since I am composed of matter and antimatter (which doesn’t disappear), then I might simply change form and continue to exist, with possible awareness.

If this is the case, then I would like to settle into the form of a Pacific NW river rock that can smell the air. I recognize that it’s just as likely that I could wind up a speck of dirt stuck under some stinkin’ cow turd in rural Texas though.

Frankly, I know that I probably won’t settle into any particular shape at all, but will instead mix with all the other dispersed beings in the universe to form some giant universal stew that, with luck, is cognizant of our universality.

And that notion doesn’t bother me much at all.

155. A THOUSAND POINTS OF ... SOMETHING

From the Archives

(September 2005) I won't be writing much till my laptop returns from its motherboard-replacement vacation to California, but I do have a question before I disappear: Has anyone else noted the irony of the fact that King Bush the Former made his thousand points of light speech (in which he promised to help the poor) in the Superdome?

Anyway. It’s car-free day and a whole lot of people have lost their things, so here's an apt poem from Writer’s Almanac:

THINGS
by Liel Muller
from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems

What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image:
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safely.

•

Meanwhile, I came across this signature on Bowlie Whisper It: Feminism:

I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.

153. COLLABORATIONS

From the Archives

(September 2005) Here’s another piece from shock and awe: war on words. It’s Adrienne Rich—which means, of course, that she has odd line breaks and deep indents ... only I can’t figure out how to create those deep indents in HTML so you get it all flush left. She wouldn’t like that one bit, would probably come up with some kind of hyphenated obscenity with which to put me in my place.

collaborations
by Adrienne Rich

I
Thought of this “our” nation :: thought of war
ghosts of war fugitive
in labyrinths of amnesia
veterans out-of-state textbooks in a library basement
dark
didn’t realize it until I wrote it

August now apples have started
severing from the tree
over the deck by night their dim impact
thuds into dreams
by daylight bruised starting to stew in sun
saying “apple” to nose and tongue
to memory

Word following sense, the way it should be
and if you don’t speak the word
do you lose your senses
And isn’t this just one speck, one atom
on the glazed surface we call
America
from which I write
the war ghosts treading in their shredded
disguises above the clouds
and the price we pay here still opaque as the fog
these mornings
we always say will break open?

II
Try this one on your tongue: “the poetry of the enemy”
If you read it will you succumb

Will the enemy’s wren fly through your window
and circle your room

Will you smell the herbs hung to dry in the house
he has had to rebuild in words

Would you weaken your will to hear
riffs of the instruments he loves

rustling of rivers remembered
where faucets are dry

“The enemy’s water” is there a phrase
for that in your language?

And you what do you write
now in your abandoned house tuned in

to the broadcasts of horror
under a sagging arbor, dimdumim

do you grope for poetry
to embrace all this

—not describe, embrace staggering
in its arms, Jacob-and-angle-wise?

III
Do you understand why I want your voice?
At the seder table it’s said

you reclined and said nothing
now in the month of Elul is your throat so dry

your dreams so stony
you wake with their grit in your mouth?

There was a beautiful life here once
Our enemies poisoned it?

Make a list of what’s lost but don’t
call it a poem

that’s for the scriptors of nostalgia
bent to their copying-desks

Make a list of what you love well
Twist it insert it

into a bottle of old Roman glass
go to the edge of the sea

at Haifa where the refugee ships lurched in
and the ships of deportation wrenched away

IV
for Giora Leshem

Drove upcoast first day of another year no rain
oxalis gold lakes floating
on January green

Can winter tides off the Levant
churn up wilder spume?

Think Crusades, remember Acre
wind driving at fortress walls

everything returns in time except the
utterly disappeared
What thou lovest well can well be reft from thee

What does not change / is the will
to vanquish
the fascination with what’s easiest
see it in any video arcade

is this what the wind is driving at?

Where are you Giora? whose hands
lay across mine a moment
Can you still believe that afternoon
Talking you smoking light and shade
on the deck, here in California
our laughter, your questions of translation
your daughter’s flute?

(First published in The School among the Ruins: Poem 2000–2004, forthcoming)

152. THE UNDENIABLE PRESSURE OF EXISTENCE

From the Archives

(September 2005) From the Writer’s Almanac:

THE UNDENIABLE PRESSURE OF EXISTENCE
by Patricia Fargnoli

from Duties of the Spirit (Tupelo Press)

I saw the fox running by the side of the road
past the turned-away brick faces of the condominiums
past the Citco gas station with its line of cars and trucks
and he ran, limping, gaunt, matted dull haired
past Jim's Pizza, past the Wash-O-Mat,
past the Thai Garden, his sides heaving like bellows
and he kept running to where the interstate
crossed the state road and he reached it and he ran on
under the underpass and beyond it past the perfect
rows of split-levels, their identical driveways
their brookless and forestless yards,
and from my moving car, I watched him,
helpless to do anything to help him, certain he was beyond
any aid, any desire to save him, and he ran loping on,
far out of his element, sick, panting, starving,
his eyes fixed on some point ahead of him,
some possible salvation
in all this hopelessness, that only he could see.

150. WE CLEAN UP GOD’S DISASTERS, BUT DO NOT DANCE

From the Archives

(September 2005) Writer's Digest ran this timely poem:

MENNONITES
by Julia Kasdorf

We keep our quilts in closets and do not dance.
We hoe thistles along fence rows for fear
we may not be perfect as our Heavenly Father.
We clean up his disasters. No one has to
call; we just show up in the wake of tornadoes
with hammers, after floods with buckets.
Like Jesus, the servant, we wash each other's feet
twice a year and eat the Lord's Supper,
afraid of sins hidden so deep in our organs
they could damn us unawares,
swallowing this bread, his body, this juice.
Growing up, we love the engravings in Martyrs Mirror:
men drowned like cats in burlap sacks,
the Catholic inquisitors,
the woman who handed a pear to her son,
her tongue screwed to the roof of her mouth
to keep her from singing hymns while she burned.
We love Catherine the Great and the rich tracts
she gave us in the Ukraine, bright green winter wheat,
the Cossacks who torched it, and Stalin,
who starved our cousins while wheat rotted
in granaries. We must love our enemies.
We must forgive as our sins are forgiven,
our great-uncle tells us, showing the chain
and ball in a cage whittled from one block of wood
while he was in prison for refusing to shoulder
a gun. He shows the clipping from 1916:
Mennonites are German milksops, too yellow to fight.
We love those Nazi soldiers who, like Moses,
led the last cattle cars rocking out of the Ukraine,
crammed with our parents—children then—
learning the names of Kansas, Saskatchewan, Paraguay.
This is why we cannot leave the beliefs
or what else would we be? why we eat
'til we're drunk on shoofly and moon pies and borscht.
We do not drink; we sing. Unaccompanied on Sundays,
those hymns in four parts, our voices lift with such force
that we lift, as chaff lifts toward God.

For some reason that baffles me, I have received the 102-page magazine INSIDERS BETTING DIGEST: The 2005 Pro and College Edition. This magazine is addressed to me, not to Resident or Household, and articles include “Why Betting with Offshore Sportsbooks has Its Advantages” (wanna place bets on how often the editor follows basic capitalization rules in the table of contents?) and “Texas Hold’em Seating Position Strategy.”

The editor observes

It’s official. We are a betting nation. Every year, more and more Americans turn to wagering as an exciting way to enjoy their leisure activities. ... Even some of the world’s most captivating and popular celebrities are either endorsing or betting with sportsbooks.

(Now there’s a reason to gamble away my hard-earned money.)

... Think Tiger Woods will be a father in the next 12 months? I’m sure there are odds on it. What major volcano will be the next to erupt? Check your local sportsbook for the favorites. Indeed, all of these new and marvelously entertaining possibilities are a product of the influx of new and diverse bettors.....So why have we decided to fork down money on anything from choosing the next Pope to who will win American idol?

Uh. Because, as a nation, we quit valuing education and decided to worship superstition and fate instead?

Their strategies for winning poker tournaments include this gem: “if you can’t spot the worst player at the table within 10 minutes its [sic] YOU.”

Now. Could someone tell me WHY in the world I received this magazine in the mail? My hunch? I filled out a NCAA basketball tournament bracket at the ESPN website and so some list service has now determined that I’m a likely candidate to bet on Tiger Woods’s love child.

Great. Just great.

141. DEAR CHICKEN

From the Archives

(August 2005) Just came across this in a poetry journal and will post it without comment:

DEAR CHICKEN
by Gabriel Gudding


Dear Chicken,
I'm sorry the farmboy punts you. Our housecat is a racist and considers you a brand of Arabian sparrow. Most butterflies are just hinged shabby paper. I don't get your feet: you are such this dressed up lizard. What if I were to plug the tail of a cow into its rectum? Would its hooves frizzle and short-circuit? Is the pumpkin a Catholic or a Lutheran? The evangelist exploded on my mother. There was missionary-slurry all over her.

Yesterday I inserted a frozen caterpillar into my urethra. It thawed and crawled out. I am punching the bunny in the head. I am not going to put the bunny in my mouth. Won't fit. Even a small bunny won't fit in my mouth. You are my chicken. I will send you some nail polish, you can paint your beak with it. That way you can be a pretty chicken.
Sincerely,
Gabriel Gudding

Gabriel Gudding is the author of A Defense of Poetry (Pitt, 2002) and rhode island notebook (currently under consideration at a press near you). An assistant professor of English at Illinois State University, he is a trained mediator and practices Vipassana in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khon.

132. MIND THE GAP

From the Archives

(August 2005) Writer’s Almanac features the following:

REUNION
by Amber Coverdale Sumrall

In your old pickup we drive the length of the island looking for
blackberries and trails that lead to the lighthouse, tell stories
about our six cats, the ones we divided when I left. I took your
favorites, the ones that were mine before we met. Your fifth
marriage is faltering. I am falling in love for the third time since
we separated. All you want to do is fish in your father's rowboat,
build a small cabin on five acres of land. Beyond right now,
I don't know what I want. Somewhere on Orcas another woman
dreams of you, waits for you to enter her life.

We smoke from your well-seasoned pipe, nervous as new
lovers. Those last months I refused to get high with you; we
always fought afterward. I remember why I loved you and why,
after ten years, I left. The reasons blend together, rise with the
smoke and dissipate. You ask me to tell you why, once again.
Each time the story is different, a work in progress. Days pass
in one afternoon. Is there still a chance, you ask.

We smile at one another, our defenses down. No one knows
us better. At the trailhead you pick purple flowers, hand
them to me, suddenly shy. I trip over exposed roots as we walk,
instinctively take your outstretched hand then let it go. In the
lagoon a pair of herons dance for one another, lowering their
long necks in courtship. Hidden behind boulders, we watch in
silence until the birds lift and disappear beyond the lighthouse.
There is always a chance, I say.

I like a few images here, but those exposed roots are more than a little obvious. Ditto instinctively taking his hand.

I have a question though. Can someone tell me exactly what makes this thing a poem because it sure strikes me as three paragraphs of straight narrative. She’s telling a story and makes no use of the line breaks, which are, uh, a basic tool that poets use to further or create meaning. What's gained by using this form as opposed to a paragraph?

The poet may have used another format if she’d read Tuesday’s New York Times article about poet August Kleinzahler, who said “Most poets are shiftless, no account fools.”

(Actually, I believe it was this same poet who publicly criticized Garrison Keillor, the publisher of said Writer’s Almanac, for his middlebrow tastes in verse. Hmmm. It's all making sense now....)

Anyway, here’s my favorite Kleinzahler line: “If you’re a poet, you’ve earned the right to blow off whoever you want.”

(Very fortunate indeed that the New York Times did not drop that second three-letter word while typesetting this line.)

And now, a portion of the Kleinzahler poem “On Waking in a Room and Not Knowing Where One Is”—a poem that does make use of end stops:

In a moment or two you will know
exactly where you are,
on which side of the door,
your wallet, your shoes,
and what today you’ll have to do.
Cities each have a kind of light,
a color even,
or set of undertones
determined by the river or hills
as well as by the stone
of their countless buildings.
I cannot yet recall what city this is I’m in.
It must be close to dawn.

Have been thinking about a couple of things today. First, there’s this argument that we should downgrade Pluto to the status of icy sphere and admit that we were mistaken when we declared it a planet. Does this mean that we can downgrade, oh, idiots like GWB to low-wattage shrubbery and admit that we never should have elected (well) him president too?

I’m in favor of that, but worry that too many of us prefer a bobble-headed jingoistic cowboy for a prez.

(Guess I’ve ranted about that enough though for now though, huh?)

Rob Breszny refers to people whose “good intentions get derailed by modest challenges” as people who suffer from Intention Deficit Disorder. His brother, a realtor, frequently encounters IDD people who “act as if they really want to buy or sell a house, but then never get past the first few fledgling steps toward that end.”

My recent actions surrounding reimbursement of my new bifocal (sob) expenses fall into this category. See I requested the paperwork I need to obtain reimbursement from my vision insurance plan right after I got my glasses. No reply from the benefits office after a few days, so I surfed their site again but still couldn’t find the forms online. Left another voice-mail message, then got busy with deadlines and took a few days off. So now here I sit staring at my receipt, which has been sitting on my desk for over 2 weeks now waiting for me to file it.

The other thing on my mind is the Pacific NW (which I’m still willing to believe I can visit in November, even though financing a car for my mother will probably mean that I can no longer afford the trip).

I love the Pacific NW and am concerned about the news that unusual weather patterns have disrupted the marine ecosystem all the way from CA to BC this year. And scientists don’t know why. Water temperatures are higher than normal, so fish catches are low. Unusual wind conditions have resulted in very little plankton, so dead birds litter the beaches at 4 times the usual rate in some areas.

“The bottom has fallen out of the coastal food chain, and there’s just not enough food out there,” says Julia Parrish (UWA seabird ecologist).

Sigh. Sigh. Sigh. I plan to scream at the first SUV driver I see on my lunch break today, but know this means absofuckinglutely nothing. And the measly funds I donate to preserve the place are no match for a president who's loosening the few protections that were in place.

So what exactly do folks believe will happen when the fish and birds die? That we’ll be so preoccupied with our Nintendos or some computer-generated cartoon animals that we’ll fail to notice that the real thing is gone?

I want to go to Whidbey Island and hear the owls. I want to smell Douglas firs. Soon.