here's something that will always make me laugh out loud

This joke:

What do you call a fish with no eyes?

A fsh.

rich

I drove my car on a bed of new snow this morning on my way to my parents' house and I drove back home again just now, sixteen or so hours later, again through a sparkling dust-down of snow. It feels like a blessing somehow, even in my disbelief.
I am full to the ears of good food and friendly faces, cookies and slingshot monkeys, delicate chains to nestle against my collarbone and bold, brassy jingle bells, and of gratitude and uncharacteristic grace.
It has been such a good day for love, for feeling like I am a piece of my family's sweet puzzle and for feeling the heat and promise in the presence of my fiance. I spent half of today in a Santa hat and half of today with my arms around someone or other, and I am feeling (so much beyond my wont)... rich.

season's bright

In my heart it's all Christmas-Christmas-Christmas-Christmas, with a steady drone of Love-Love-Love-Love, and little squeaks bursting in like YES presents wrapped and FEAST and I am still vibrating with the way it felt to look over that whole flocks of poinsettias and take in another candlelit Silent Night, and when I lay my head down on this pillow it's the last Christmas Eve I'll sleep alone.

I am waving my arms out in front of me expansively so that I may include all of the world when I say this,

Oh, be warm and content and full of laughter.

balance

I might always need the kind of reassurance
you always give.

closing the doors

This building is settling down for break. I can tell by the way the heat is turned down and the way we have all become lowercase. There's so very little left I need to do before I can let my guard down. Just a few more papers to shuffle off to the side and then a dentist appointment (rawr) and after that I'm free of alarm clocks and appointments for a whole eleven days. I don't really know for sure, because I have been somewhat all over the place these last few weeks, but I suspect I'm going to really love this Christmas. I'm going to be comfortable in my skin.

full of

There's been a debate inside of me lately over whether I'm full of fireworks or feather-down. Well, I don't know. Sometimes I do really feel like I've got fire in me. Sometimes when I should say, 'oh, please be quiet' instead I say 'fuck you.' And I walk four miles to work through the snow sometimes just because I want to feel that pumping in my blood. But then again, I drink my coffee without sugar and I pick the salt off my pretzels, and at a holiday party I am always happy to be sitting on the couch. I think that's pretty generally true, too.

stumbling along

Today's struggles are
body aches, too much access to chocolate covered pretzels, and irrational jealousy.
But I did get my Christmas presents wrapped (so! much! ribbon!), and I did remember to pull my fingers out of my mouth before I bit them to the quick.

worth it.

NOW AND AGAIN

Now and again some hubcap, jolted loose,
clangs on the pavement, upright, spinning great,
and rolls a distance wholly on its own,
until it slows and ultimately veers
over the rocky shoulder, where it starts
to wobble, bounce, and flip, and finally skids
into the bottom of a muddy ditch--
if only for the once, a sort of wheel.

-Alexander Albertus

April the grumpy icicle

The bank's thermometer said °14 and I tried to look past that, because I was on foot, but it caught up to me and wrapped itself around my neck and snaked down my back. Lacing my veins from head to toes with ice. I don't deal with wind well since I've become a foot- and bike- commuter. It saps me and reverses me from the person I was two hours before, on tiptoe on the step stool balanced on top of the table reaching up to hang glittery snowflakes from the office ceiling. I loved that! I was fearless. But the cold wind must have ripped out the part of my heart that has that joy and delight in it as I walked home, because all that I feel right now is a crunchy sort of brittleness. I need a hot bath. And some hot chocolate. And to remember next time I'm out to pick up a bottle of peppermint schnapps. OH I could use that right now.

fraying around the edges

I am wearing so thin these days and using up so many tears. I think I must be close, by now, to reaching my 1+ limit of Things Going Wrong. I may be just one slip of bad news away from too much bad news. My choices then would be complete and utter despair (so hard to sustain!) or a sort of hands-thrown-up denial. I feel almost ready for letting a total lack of trust in my body and the world turn into a sense of detachment. Like, I give up. There's nothing I can do. Let's go eat ice cream.

shivering in my seat

Part II: last evening S and I were at the type of concert that made the elderly couple sitting in front of us put their hands over their ears and I could feel myself quivering in the heat of it all, in the huge, warm mass of sound filling the concert hall. So much joy. It was all passion and clarity and charming Englishmen and this is the kind of event, the kind of confluence of sound, that will always start a glowing in my ribcage and cover me over in goosebumps.

shivering in my seat

Tis the season of secret pants under visible pants and being never out of reach of my puffy black down-filled vest. When I zip it I feel hugged, and without it I dare you to bike four miles in the cold new day and then sit all morning in an office lined with the kind of windows you can feel the wind through [through which you can feel the wind]. I dare you.

love smackdown

I had another moment late last night when nestled against S, I again let the stress and bother of being and being enough crest over my head. My whole body was tensed and my brow was furrowed--oh, so THIS is stress!--and then I opened my eyes, blearily at first--they'd been closed for so long--and staring into them was a pair of firey brown ones. His eyes were imploring me to calm down, breathe deep, try more of the trusting and less of the doubting. And I did feel that. I felt the stunning gravity of his eyes meeting mine. Not only just meeting my sorry gaze, but watching me all the while beforehand, loving the flushed, torn, sorrowful me. I would have expected pity, but what was there was love and assurance and faith--in me, and in us. I am still stuck in that look and the way in the shock of that moment my mind and my body let go of the shrill worrying and I came unknotted. Ah, you will take care of me. Ah, I will take care of you. I believe it. 

no more tears

I am complaining! I need to stop complaining! I have a gift certificate to Starbucks, and I need to use it to get myself something pepperminty and then, by god, I'm going to just tackle these next few months just one step at a time.

I'm not alone.

brokeassbroke

Well, I suppose all this bursting into tears lately over bills I can't pay --I
am

such

a failure--

is a nice way to sort of do a deep cleaning of my tear ducts. Purgative.

And on the bright side, the best things I have are still free, like welcoming love of my parents, the long walks around the neighborhood, the daydreaming about being married. You know. The kind of things that don't bill me.

*sigh*

phoenix

Well. I guess the good thing about having a complete computer failure was that it happened on a Sunday, when I could take the offending laptop to my dad and be able to have him putter away a Sunday afternoon reformatting the thing and reinstalling Windows. And I guess the good thing about losing all of the files and programs stored on my laptop is that, I guess, I am going to learn how to find again the things I need and let the rest just float off into the ether. It's minimalism.

Well. Here we go from the beginning.

snowdown

Nothing says 'first snow of the year!' like flannel shirts and newly-decorated Christmas trees, Jack Daniels and James Bond, an unconscious catch in my throat at the sight of the glistening world outside the back door, and the dumb way I doggedly insist on sweeping the snow off my windshield with the sleeve of my coat.

30

this
does
not
bode
well.

Oh, the rain and cold forced me off my bike and into my car and on the drive to work the check engine light started flashing. Again. And I forgot my lunch. And my jaws still ache. And.

BUT. It is November 30th and I have done my own little NaBloPoMo and that satisfies me. So my car is useless and my mouth is useless and I will spend today hungry, BUT. I'm at least still finding the little reasons to be proud.

whirlwind

This is one of those days when I am stuck at work until after the sun has set because I was up too early at a doctor's office and because, lo, the scholarly research, it is in season. It is a free for all, I think, in the English department today. I am tightening the muscles in my lower stomach and swallowing one more pain pill (I am still waiting for my jaws to forgive me) as I dive in and out of journals and books and trip over the stack of papers I left on the floor near my desk so I wouldn't miss them. I didn't. Ah. This happens every year.

earthquake

One of the ways I feel like the world is straightening beneath me and making more sense is when it starts getting harder and harder by the day to not be married to you.

tis the season

"Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body."
 
~George Carlin

healing

This morning I am drinking half a cup of coffee in bed and chewing with both sides of my mouth. I feel like I am so close, so close. I took yesterday literally and I really was just grateful from the ground on up for all of the little parts of life that add up to make my own. Body parts. Kindness. Optimism. Colors and sounds. Running up a hill into the wind. I hope I loved you all yesterday as much as I should have. I was trying.
I am not sure what chased them away or for how long they'll stay banished, but right now I am living without my worries. I am putting aside all that long list of we-won't-have-enough, I-won't-be-enough, I-can't-make-up-my-mind. Today I am going to spend on bringing myself up to the present, and using ice cream gift certificates, and hunting up some Christmas bargains. And I'm going to meet my fiance and his family at the Harry Potter movie, and I will probably spend the rest of the day after that laughing and holding on tight.

in love with the whole world

I am going to spend this whole day, gingerly, gingerly, dunking myself in mashed potatoes and love.

For you, too, I am thankful.

not enough keys on the keyboard to convey all of my thanks

I am writing this on painkillers, but my heart is not numb.

I am so thankful for quiet love, for the blanket your body can be over mine.
I'm thankful for my amazon woman mom, who fought and kicked cancer's ass over the last seven months, for my thoughtful, gentle dad whose voice is always echoing in my heart, for my strong and capable sister with her eye for appreciation and color and the lines of a story, for my incredible baby brothers who live with so much fearlessness and adventure and whose huge hearts attract the same--for the new sisters they give me.
I am thankful for that reassurance of, 'we'll figure something out.' For mentors and co-conspiritors and friends who make me laugh and pluck me up when I'm reeling off on a flight of worry.
I'm thankful for my ability to laugh easily and often, for my ability to heal.
I am thankful for the excitement of a wedding that is building in me, hotter and hotter. And I am oh so thankful to be able to share and witness the wedding of my dear dear brother taking shape and taking place within the reach of my arms.
I am thankful for the solid feel of the road under the tires of my bike, for the way it feels to coast down the hill to my apartment. I am thankful for the colors of the sky and socks without holes in them. I'm thankful for book carts whose wheels don't squeak and I'm thankful for the industrial strength papercutter.
I am thankful for orchestras and for being invited back again and again to play. I'm thankful for courage and showmanship and that unexpected ability to take a step back and remind the audience that it's not really about who's on stage.
I'm thankful for the meals I've shared around big tables with both of my families and I'm just plain thankful that I have two. I have the family I was born with and I have the family who has chosen me, or allowed me to be chosen. A family who shares diamonds with me and who shares their oldest son. I do know how much of a treasure this is.
I am thankful for thrift stores--oh what would I do without thrift stores?! I am thankful for an ability to be more, with less.
I am thankful for proud cats, and winking cats, and the dog in between.
I am thankful for the certainty, the calm assurance I feel when I look at my future. I see myself and I see love and it's going to fit, and we're going to be partners and each other's backbones. We're going to be meeting each other in all sorts of places for all our lives. I am so thankful that I know this and I trust this.
I am thankful that I have become a woman, and that I have learned how to love as one. I have been taught how to open myself and to believe in my own beauty. I am thankful that I finally see what you do when I look in the mirror--I see a blossom.

unmolaring

Who's the sad sack who has to have two teeth pulled two days before Thanksgiving? I'm that sad sack.
I have wisdom teeth only on the left side of my mouth and I guess I hoped lopsided was something I could just... be. The dentist has other plans. By the end of today my teeth will number evenly on both sides and I'll be hoping, hoping, hoping I heal quickly enough to enjoy some Thanksgiving turkey. I woke up this morning a half hour before my alarm and my jaw was already clenched. Damnit.

I like myself better when I'm optimistic

I think I would like a small shot glass rimmed with lime and something salty covered in cheese (I won't be particular). And I would like painlessness, and a goose that lays golden eggs. I would like a room filled with candles and a new pair of shoes and I would like New Years Eve. Or maybe just a sense of assurance from the inside of me instead of outside. A way to tip out of my mind all these figures and dates and niggling worry and collect them in the drawer of my desk with the lock and shove it closed. Walk away lighter and back to my baseline sense of contentment. I'd like myself better.

XL

It seems to me that perhaps one of the best reasons to fall in love is so you'll have access to an endless supply of comfy guy t-shirts to sleep in. The one I am wearing now is from a high school musical way before I knew him, and it's stretched and lopsided and probably hasn't been actually white in years, and I just love the way it sags toward my knees and I just love the way the neck is worn from a thousand piled-up nuzzles.

limits

I spent an hour at both ends of last night lying still in the dark, counting minutes and feeling the limits of my lungs. Last night it was the only remedy to an upset stomach--perfect stillness, the night cooled air running across my bare feet. This morning, after I woke feeling less at war with my body, I still felt like I needed more of the silence, of the no-distraction breathing. I am perhaps waiting until my body tells me it can run on full power again.
I have a dress rehearsal in an hour. A long, gossipy lunch date. A hot shower, an orchestra concert. I need to find some clean black clothes and a way to smooth down my hair.

pats

I think I deserve a merit badge for the citation I just tracked down. Or at least a firm handshake. I don't think I will ever use my powers for good, but I am apparently developing the type of research instinct that will lead me straight to the wrong journal with the right article somehow in it anyway. Oh, and yesterday, I walked down to the reference section and found the right book without any sort of call number because I remembered vaguely what the spine of the book looked like and thought it was somewhere near the P section. My GOD I do this job right some days.

I say this with such fervor because there is coffee dripping through my blood and because it is a bright day for a Friday and because if I keep myself in line with strict joy I think I can keep this up. 

50/50

"The oboe is the sensualist of the woodwind section. In movie soundtracks, you tend to hear the oboe when the woman is taking her clothes off. Also a little later when she asks the man for a cigarette. You start playing the oboe, you're going to have babies, take my word for it."

-Garrison Keillor

leaves leaving

I think all the leaves took a dive last night sometime between the thunder and the wind. I biked this morning across a carpet of the last oranges and yellows and reds of the season. It kept going into the library and across the halls. The leaves dotting the floor like footprints.
I should make that more interesting. Leaves leaving footprints. Meh. Oh well.

Last night I dreamed about pancakes, and broken phones, and coming home only to be stuck on the outside, peering in through the windows and thinking, 'I used to BE there! I used to BE!'

storing

The stack of broken down boxes hanging out like a roof above the storage cabinet makes me want to crawl inside it and become just another printer ink cartridge or box of staples.

body being

I felt like a girl all weekend. Deeper than wearing a skirt and the smoothness of my legs and back. I felt the burden of quick imagination and slow body. I felt very un-absolute. I felt like I was sledding down a steep snowy hill and dodging inflatable pine trees.

Or maybe, I felt like you were reading down my lines and you expected a serif and got none. More likely the reverse. If it's too smooth you'd fall right off the loop of the y. Pick up too much speed going down the hill. Good thing I come equipped with speed bumps.

Oh ho! You think I'm reasonable! Moments before you watch my quills flair out. You think I am kind and gentle! So I dig my fingernails into your skin.

There seem to be a lot of nudes today in the research on my desk. Maybe this is underlining my feeling of body and body being unexpected. Sometimes I just sit and turn them around and around. Make the top the bottom. Close one eye. It's all me.

Sunday night

Sitting on the floor. STAND UP, body, and go rinse off the dust and peel off your skin. The prize is smooth sheets and warm blankets, a pillow doubled up under my cheek. This is when I wish I was on casters, or hooked to to a high wire that could just swing me up and ready for and into bed. Off the floor without having to stand. In my pjs without having to undress. Lights out, Lights Out without having to flip the switch. I am imprinted.

I am too kind

I have just granted myself permission to stay curled up in bed all day reading Harry Potter, and for this I am very grateful.

release

I am very lucky to be tease-out-of-a-funk-able. And luckier still to have within my reach, after a long and disheartening day of appointments and work and rehearsals, the always open arms of a man willing to be the teaser.

tensing

Today I have an early morning dentist and a long day of thinking, 'well, this is not the day...'

I am just annoyed, annoyed, annoyed that the little bits of paycheck left can't go to Christmas presents and wedding invitations and instead are mashed up between my molars and sucked out of my mouth through the dentist's suction device. Ka-woosh.

bzzt

On days like today I come with a static-based force field.

I am
to
be

feared.

growing up

I was a late bloomer in a lot of ways. Like emotional honesty. And the desire and willingness to chop and freeze vegetables for the winter ahead.

oh, publishing

Sometimes the fact that I am in the middle of a Monday is not much of a hardship, because I'm also in the middle of rows and rows of bound journals and databases with titles like this:

Recreational Mathematics
Frozen Foods Quarterly
Journal of Happiness Studies
Pattern Recognition Quarterly
Journal of the International Listening Association
Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge
Hernia: the Journal of Hernias
The Lady & Gentleman's Pocket Magazine of Literary and Polite Amusement
The Progressive Fish-Culturist
The International Journal of Lower Extremity Wounds
Molecular Pain
Journal of Investigational Allergology
Journal of the American Mosquito Control Association
Small Ruminant Research
Journal of Mundane Behavior
Journal of Politeness Research
Nursing Made Incredibly Easy!

sweet clown

I love that man of mine and the impeccable aim of his silly.

#2

Today is a day when I actually do feel like I'm going to get married. I mean that today the fact of marriage seems real, not that I've officially decided against running away into the night.
I think it has to do with being suddenly second in line as far as family weddings go. If it's real for my brother, well then! It's easier to feel real for me. I do tend to be more of a 'I'll let you go first.' Not humility, not selflessness, not generosity. Just, I slide into things well when there's already a groove in place. My elbows aren't quite sharp enough to get in there first. So today was mother-of-the-bride, sister-of-the-bride, finally feeling at ease with the idea of hiring a photographer, finally saying out loud 'sage green!' and 'persimmon!' And scouting out available gmail addresses for when I take on a new last name. I mean that!
I am so tired this evening. With the extra hour I get back still waiting for me, even! I slept so well last night, so, so, so well, but I think today was long enough to use up all of that last night's peace. It has been a good day. So very much a good one. But full of talking and thinking and adding up totals. I am looking forward to ending today and falling asleep on the theme of love.
Love like cracking pecans and hot applesauce and a rainbow of dresses and a dog saying please! I will clean your bowl!

not yet

I actually said aloud this morning, still lying on my back in my warm, soft, impractically tall bed: 'I want to go home.' I wasn't thinking.

I think this is a knee-jerk reaction to feeling

unrooted.

I scold myself for this. How selfish, to give over to feeling small and directionless. It's not fair, coming from a girl with a sweet life, with a fantastic family and just a pinch of the best kind of friends, with a loving man who fully intends to MARRY HER despite the seeming insanity/inanity of anyone wanting to commit to THAT.

It IS selfish. But I am (still) feeling so very This Is Not Right, Not Yet.

I think it's because I'm busily focusing on -and fearing- all the little roadblocks and pinpricks and thin times that will probably not BUT MAYBE stand between the here and now and the... Yet.

visioning

Today's sky is gray and wet, but I'm thinking in colors...

and imagining the way they would feel between my fingers.

brothers

I know that the best part of my life today was when my work-brother stepped into a trash can. Into. I was saying, 'turn on the lights!' because he was working in the shipping room in the dark. And he responded, 'Hey. I can see just fine' just as he was accidentally backing into the trash can. Into. It came up to his knees and he flailed his arms just in time to keep from crashing to the floor. This is perfect. Not perfect in the way the diamond ring from my real-brother catches the light on my new-sister's finger, because that is also perfect. But the trash can tipping and buckling was perfect like if I've been outside in the cold rain for three hours and then come home to warm garlic bread. The engagement? That's like a Brahms Symphony. Just so.

{ }

"This is a world in which everything that comes to an end may be ending forever; it is well to complete every encounter with all the motions of grace, to give expression to every kindness, every gratitude, to make the clearest declaration of love. Better to give too readily than to keep back gifts for another meeting, when there is nothing certain even about tomorrow, and what is withheld now may wither away unused, divorced forever from the creature whose due it was and who had need of it."

-Edith Pargeter

stunted healing

I am not enough.

prickly thoughts

I am scratching at an itch on my forehead and I can't reach it so maybe it's buried deep down inside.

three mornings

I think I love today. It just feels like a good one.

along with all of my heavy

Some days I feel as if my two poles are soldered together, but magnetically opposed. I both want desperately and reject constantly and
it’s
becoming
exhausting.

I advise me to pick my battles.

I wonder what winter will mean to me. I eat plums and pistachios. I develop an affect. I squeeze. I number things again.

I want to color and smash playdoh between my fingers. A constructive (deconstructive) fist. I want to read Little House on the Prairie and crush pine needles so I can smell Christmas. I want to start a fire and pick a bouquet of dandelions. I want to squish mud between my toes and then immediately run under a waterfall to wash the rime off. I want to stand out in a summer downpour, arms outstretched, heart beating in the tips of my fingers and in my tongue, reduced to organs and bone ‘cause my skin’s washed away along with all of my heavy waiting.

KISSING

“Why is that fun?” I wondered as a kid—
the press of mouths, rubbing of lips,
sharing of saliva and stinks: peanut butter
with jack cheese, tuna with milk.

Did the kissers mean to form an air-tight seal?
Would they twist together like lead pipes?
Were their skulls like tortoises trying to mate?
Later, I learned that some kissers are vacuums,

Eager to yank out their partner’s guts.
Some are shuttles that link up, hoping
to construct a safe station in space.
Some lips, when kissed, are rubber bumpers;

others, suctions cups. In the “French kiss,”
tongues embrace like slippery snakes.
Kissing, for men, is more intimate than sex;
the mouth’s portcullis lifts to let the female in.

If breath is life, and human life has soul,
A kiss is two souls mingling. But breath is waste,
a by-product of oxidation; so shared breath
is shared excreta—intimate, yes; but romantic?

Not all cultures kiss. Some tribes rub noses,
or just fuck, struggling not to knock heads.
Kissing may be a safety precaution for heads,
Like bracing melons so they won’t roll off a truck.

I’ve felt lessened by kissing—emotionally shrunk.
With you, though, it’s a perfect trade.
We part, having given what we have in surplus,
having gained exactly what we need.


~Charles Harper Webb



(from Webb, Charles Harper. "Kissing." Amplified Dog. Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2006)

again

I just yawned and drooled on my desk. I think I've been double-clicking too slowly. But at least I did the cheerios right this morning. Milk in the bowl, juice in the glass. Drip drip drip.
If my shoulders are relaxed it's because of the massage last evening. If my eyes are sparkling under their drooping lids it's because I'm sitting on a bright future. If you can read my mind and cut through that high warm buzzing that comes first, you'd see all that I laid out before myself last night being echoed back. Look, April, you were this, you were the girl who stood on her desk and dipped into glitter and painted her lips bright red when you were on a precipice.
I have been reading back through my archives, trying to encourage myself to remember, remember that I'm still tall and that I'm taller.
I refuse to accept your pronouncements of 'wrong.' I know what I saw and I know what I felt when the bodies and the sounds all came together, when the line of high school boys advanced across the stage, arms linked, bottles balanced on their heads, when the marching band lifted their horns even higher and rushed toward the stands. Again, again, again.

little death

Today there is a lot of silence, and a long, slow recovery from the orange juice-soaked cheerios.

bwaha

"I went to the zoo the other day, there was only one dog in it. It was a shitzu."

jacksquat

I wonder if I'll ever fully understand how someone can look at me and think, 'jackpot!'

what's left

When I was eighteen I had this list of a hundred things that make me full and happy and I've since culled it down bit by bit, throwing up shields. Or maybe editorializing... maybe becoming less of a presentation and more of a just am. What's missing now is adding on, making the list of what I was become a record of what I am. The key to keeping myself authentic, though, would be keeping it in my own language, behind closed doors. What went awry the first time was collecting these things in order to air them.

I like cleaning the lint trap in the dryer. Waking up a few hours early and knowing I can just float back to sleep. Quirky cats. Poetry. Secret smiles. Reading the instruction manual only after I've figured it out myself. Deserted highways. Yarn. Mountains. Depressing songs. Certainty. Easy decisions. Curiosity. Shampoo. Answers. Changing into someone new. Second chances. Touch. Pine trees. Winter songbirds. Feeling the cool of the ground through the soles of my shoes. Counting by 3s. Jigsaw puzzles. Laughing first. Taking things apart. Libraries. Being alone in a crowd. Minor keys. Knowing what I'm coming home to. Dwelling in possibility. Your hands. Languages. Airplanes. Goofy grins. Orange juice. NPR. Roller coasters. Basking in reflected glory. Swans swimming in pairs. Music teachers. Feeling securely loved. Cozy couches. Grammar. Sun dogs. Procrastination. Strength. Toast.



But no matter who's reading, I'll always end with a word like toast.

novocaine

Yesterday I picked blood from under my nails and hiccuped eight times in a row. Today a dentist reached into my mouth and pried out the small sliver of tooth that had, like an iceberg breaking free from a glacier, splintered away from my molar and lodged itself deep in my gums. Stiff in the reclining chair, I couldn't stop thinking of horses, of the way my hands circled each other, strangling, of stretching my neck free and letting
it
all
become

falling.

scraped clean

My toothache is stopping me from eating my favorite apples and I have a sore finger, bitten and torn by the physical world, which I do, indeed, trust too easily.

dipped in good fortune

I am feeling like I have been dipped in good fortune today. The skies, the polka-dot shirt, the warm bowl of soup waiting for me, the evening ahead full of giving and receiving music. An upjump in number levels for our transactions at work--60000000 becomes 70000000. I have a way of zeroing in on the call numbers and which email to send. Things are stacked so nicely here! And I have a mother with downy new hair who adds the shampoo I like to her shopping cart, a best friend living a five minute walk from my home with generous arms and emotional truths, a man who drives across town in the evenings to tease and pet me to sleep. Do you KNOW how good this is? I'm laughing into the receiver of my phone.

living down

I have an illegitimate desire to punish
you
for worrying that
you're punishing
me

seasonal affection

I wouldn't have bet that I'd be handling a week like this one as well as I am. I'd have said, April, you'll be a grumpy mess by Saturday. I'm not, though. I'm NOT. I don't know who to thank for my continued energy and high spirits, so I'll lift my hands to the beautiful blue that is October. This season has me securely in its pocket.

HUMMINGBIRDS

Who, in cold lands where hummingbirds

                are rare, would see a bee-like bird,

and not a wee green man or pixie girl

                in emerald gown, with crystal wings?

Who wouldn’t hear in hummingbirds’

                metallic twitters, elfin tongues?

Finding a nest the size of a child’s teacup,

                woven of moss, lichens, spider web,

who wouldn’t think some fair princess

                had slept there, naming her Titania,

Tinkerbell, or Calothorax Lucifer (light-bearing,

                as the morning star)? Who, seeing a creature

sip from lily-throats, emerging covered

                with gold pollen, wouldn’t think of fairy dust?

Who wouldn’t see sequin-sized feathers—

                ruby, pink, azure, magenta—as coats

of iridescent mail, and feel the wearers

                of such wealth could call down mist, and weave

rainbows—that they could turn invisible

                (buzzing off, too quick to see)—that they came

from a world untouched by disease or time,

                where a mortal who spent one day,

then returned to his own land, would find

                his friends long dead, himself an old, old man?

~Charles Harper Webb


(from Webb, Charles Harper. "Hummingbirds." Amplified Dog. Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2006)

flat

It's true that in the past four days the only time I've spent with my lover is the thirty seconds it took him two days ago to get permission and then climb up on the set on the theater stage and join me, kiss me, tell me he loves me, and slip back away before the curtain call.

This is the part of life when I grab a deep breath after rushing home from work and then re-square my shoulders and fade into spotlights and entr'actes and one-more-time play-throughs until my contacts dessicate into my eyeballs and I DON'T EVEN CARE when I've stopped making sense. Sometimes it's hard to sleep after one of these five hour rehearsals and I am remembering now that this does tend to happen.

Then the alarm in the morning plays itself out. I never press snooze. I never have. But sometimes I will let the alarm play, and play, and play. I was dreaming this morning that I was covering my skin with green powder and that I'd just met a cousin I didn't know I had, and hole-punches. And warmth.

I got a flat tire last evening. I'm not sure if even I believe this, but it was my first one. I mean, I've never actually had a flat tire on my car, ever. This is why I haven't fallen in love with this new car. I do not trust it, and see? I shouldn't. I was late for rehearsal anyway, and it was blustery chilly, and the feel of the flat tire flapping didn't inspire me to action, it ripped me up a little and after I got out of the car to inspect it I just stood there, lip quivering. After a time, I tossed my oboe into the bike basket and pedaled across the neighborhood. Should have been doing that anyway.

S came over later to put the spare on for me while I was gone. I don't know how to express my gratitude for this, the simple feeling of safety his presence and constant willingness to come and help provides. I am coated in a layer of foam.

I didn't sleep for a long time last night because I was pinching pennies in my head, and I realized I can't pay for new tires until the next paycheck. I am embarrassingly down near the bottom of my checking account, again. AGAIN. I'm remembering how hard three weeks without a car at all was on me and trying to convince myself that I'll be able to do it better this time, this time when the car just stays parked until I can afford to re-shoe it.

I am not going to stay down, not today. I'm going to be well.

telling the sky

I'm instituting a strict non-negotiation policy with the Big Dipper.

inhaling the sound

I am trying to be honest because I think
you think
I am.

Last Friday the President’s Own Marine Band gave a free concert at the high school. S and I found seats in the second row and this was good. I felt that. The band, as an ensemble, is probably as close to perfect as I will ever hear. One of the pieces they played was music from the Firebird Suite, and as I kept being struck by the wholeness of their sound and the redness of their uniforms. It was so real that I lost my body and unconsciously grabbed onto S’s arm and buried my face in his shoulder. And then I looked up and saw that S himself was hanging by a wire and then he was crying—tears running down his face. The music was that big, that close, that beautiful. It got him. I do love him so much when he’s feeling music that way. He hears and feels sounds differently than most people do—much stronger even than me. Me, breathing deep to inhale the music, goosebumps coating my arms. I’m still not as open to it as he is. I’m still not quite as close to understanding how this all comes together. I sat there with my head against his shoulder thinking that a year from right then we’d be escaping somewhere together on our honeymoon. Probably somewhere mild and cheap (sadly) but escaping even so, and we’d be able to just be for days. Him, me, our selfs, our newness. It’s going to feel similar, I think, to the way the finale of the Firebird Suite sounded.

PUMPKIN-ENVY

How many hours did I lie in bed, thought stapling
my sixteen-year-old arms to the sheets,
thought's curare, when I finally did dial Tami Jamison,
numbing my lips too much to speak?

How often did I think, "I'm dead," feeling
my strength leak away, phlegm drown my lungs,
sarcomas thrust like red toads up out of my skin
in the three days between the blood-drawing

and the doctor's benediction: "Negative."
Thought is a rope that pulls the kite out of the sky--
a cramp that locks the boxer's chin as fists hiss
toward his head. "What sharks?" my friend demands,

launching the sea-kayak that gives him so much fun.
How many odes would Keats have traded for one
night with Fanny Browne? What did understanding do
for Nietzsche, but make him more insane?

Thought is more deadly than crack or heroin.
Its pipe to my lips, its needle in my vein,
I loll in my dark room, and envy pumpkin vines.
Whatever's in their way, they overrun. Unafraid

of blight, birds, drought, or humans' being,
they stretch out in the heat, let their roots drink deep
and--never giving a thought to anything--
make a million copies of the sun.

~Charles Harper Webb


(from Webb, Charles Harper. "Pumpkin-Envy." Amplified Dog. Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2006)

restraining

I'm a horrible listener when I tell me 'no.'

-1

You and me, baby. Let's do this.

serenity

I have been splitting my time between the rain and the rehearsal stage. I always say yes when I'm asked to play in a pit orchestra, and for a time I regret it as it drudges and fills my evenings and then suddenly a spike of 'this is why! this is why!' will come through when the end of the four hour rehearsal is approaching and then is passed and we're still playing and still laughing. I don't know, it just always feels good to be who I am then. For this musical I am being built into the set, and I am falling in love with the way I feel when I'm sustaining a low Eb, when I'm watching, over and over, seduction and resolution, stone angels marking my place.
And then after tonight's rehearsal I walked out into the rain to find my parents had been by and had left a bag of fresh apples in my car, and because of how the evening felt and where I was going, this is the most natural thing in the world.

in faith

I showed restraint today because I could have said, 'if you don't bring this back to me I will elbow drop you,' but instead I just let it go.

busy

This morning I cleaned out the pencil holder that's been on my desk since before the desk was mine and I threw out five dead pens and two stubby pencils and I think this should be enough. I think these piles of papers all over my desk are irrelevant.

Saturday

Today was buckets and buckets of apples crushed and ground together and pressed into cider--long brown streams pouring down, bees aside. And it was barbeque chicken and sticky juice and thick grains. It was a long, long, long bath and drying off on the porch in the hot autumn sunlight. The fever of fall is hitting me and I am--as always--filled with a deep sort of euphoria. I think it's the air. And today was also Jasper Fforde and it was 30 Rock and driving back over for dinner and for chocolate cake, and a sky filled with starlings and with light clouds layering under dark ones until the moon came out. And today was loving. It was seeing the ring on my finger in the wedding pictures of the generation before me. It was running my hands up and down the back and sides of that man who is so good to me, so gentle and patient. Funny, too, and possessing of an incredibly sexy mouth. All of this day I was into the being of it and full of fall and apples and at the end of it, ready to wind down in a game and a third and forth and fifth 'woah, I love you' and the stereo cranked as I drove home.

majuscule

Sometimes it's hard to know when to use capital letters. I mean THIS. I MEAN this. I. do.

the valorization of sadness

The title is nothing, it's just what's on my desk right now and I appreciate the feel of those words together. It's poetry in a book of psychiatry ethics.

I'm not all that valorous. And I'm not sad. I had a moment last night when I was on my way home from a rehearsal, driving (in car 2.0) down a steep hill in the dark and I had the windows open and I was CONTENT. And then I came home by way of an ice cream stop, and I took a hot shower and cuddled up with my man and I kept smiling, because I still was.

I think what helps is giving into temptation, and also denial. Oh and yes, it does make a difference to have a working car again. It is a weight off my shoulders. Regardless of how offended I am at the gods of Car for letting my little silver one die, I am incredibly grateful now to have a replacement.

Now my biggest task is facing and not just denying my worries about finances and careers and cancers. Tomorrow.

where I'd rather be at noon on a Tuesday

I want to go home and transpose music down a fifth and melt cheese over a bowl of chili and leave my pants crumpled on the floor.

end of the road

I think there should be a new axiom, sort of along the lines of 'Don't drink and drive.'
It should be 'Don't PMS and sell for junk the darling little silver car which was first car you've ever owned, which had never let you down during the six years you've driven it, and has over this period of time become the inanimate object to which you have felt the greatest degree of attachment.'

Because, really, folks, it is NOT a good combination.Trust me.

Waaah.

oh slow down

After I broke the second mirror in two months it begins to occur to me that I may need to impose martial law in this place. I may need to do-or-die on the careful, on the oh slow down for god's sake and the you're better than this, or at least, you could be.

I am a heavy heart to carry

I am toxic. I don't know how I turned a poor night of sleep and a long morning in the sun into an aching shared misery, but I did. I am the alchemist who made a slight trip off balance into a fight. I am the jackass who reacted to my inability to synthesize and express my needs by hitting my thighs in anger and bursting into tears and letting you drive away.

I remain needy but unintelligible until the door shuts and then I am a waterworks of frustration and regret and Oh, I just want to run to you, but I can't--I am still without a car for another few days. And I want to call you, but I can't--I know enough to recognize that a goodbye like that needs to be burned off by time and will only be made more painful by incoherent semi-declarations into a phone. I will only be saying 'I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry' and this does not change the fact that I opened my mouth in the first place.

My bike's locked up at work and I am afraid I've messed today up beyond salvage, but maybe the way to give myself a fighting chance would be to walk across town to get my bike and then pound back up and down the hills until I'm home and a little tireder and a little less fixated on my self-inflicted emotional bruises and a little more fixated on the tension and release in the muscles of my legs.

I think the problem is that my mind and spirit can't always hold up under the weight I place on my body, and I am so, so, so sorry that sometimes when I'm panicked and flailing, my flying fears bruise you, too.

I keep saying I will be ok. I will be. I am a whole barrel of resilience. That's not the issue, though.
That's not an excuse.

set

Well. It's been a pretty big day. Bought a car. And a wedding dress.

halfway

I think it was a spring and a half ago that I once woke in the middle of the night in a sweat, in a terror that I was going to become irrelevant.
My identity is so firmly stuck down the middle of my oboe. Being asked to play and respected for the results has been for so long the thing I hold up as what-makes-me-worth-being. The idea that I might not be able to stay a first choice or that the world might not always see me as An Oboist used to sink me, because it was me.
I am saying this in an easy sort of tone because I have suddenly made it halfway to irrelevant, just like that, and in the process have discovered that I am ok! and that there are a whole lot more things I have found to like about myself! and whole lot more reasons to look y'all in the eye than just my attachment to a worn down box of double reeds.

butterfingers

I have been in such a hurry to catch things before they hit the ground, but maybe it's just as easy to let them fall.

HOW TO BE ALONE

by Tanya Davis

If you are at first lonely, be patient.

If you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren’t okay with it, then just wait. You’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re embracing it.

We can start with the acceptable places, the bathroom, the coffee shop, the library, where you can stall and read the paper, where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there. Where you can browse the stacks and smell the books; you’re not supposed to talk much anyway so it’s safe there.

There is also the gym, if you’re shy, you can hang out with yourself and mirrors, you can put headphones in.

Then there’s public transportation, because we all gotta go places.

And there’s prayer and mediation, no one will think less if you're hanging with your breath seeking peace and salvation.

Start simple. Things you may have previously avoided based on your avoid being alone principles.

The lunch counter, where you will be surrounded by “chow downers”, employees who only have an hour and their spouses work across town, and they, like you, will be alone.

Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.

When you are comfortable with “eat lunch and run”, take yourself out for dinner; a restaurant with linen and Silverware. You’re no less an intriguing a person when you are eating solo desert and cleaning the whipped cream from the dish with your finger. In fact, some people at full tables will wish they were where you were.

Go to the movies. Where it’s dark and soothing, alone in your seat amidst a fleeting community.

And then take yourself out dancing, to a club where no one knows you, stand on the outside of the floor until the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you. Dance like no one’s watching because they’re probably not. And if they are, assume it is with best human intentions. The way bodies move genuinely to beats, is after-all, gorgeous and affecting. Dance until you’re sweating. And beads of perspiration remind you of life’s best things. Down your back, like a book of blessings.

Go to the woods alone, and the trees and squirrels will watch for you. Go to an unfamiliar city, roam the streets, they are always statues to talk to, and benches made for sitting gives strangers a shared existence if only for a minute, and these moments can be so uplifting and the conversation you get in by sitting alone on benches, might of never happened had you not been there by yourself.

Society is afraid of alone though. Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements. Like people must have problems if after a while nobody is dating them.

But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless, and lonely is healing if you make it.

You can stand swathed by groups and mobs or hands with your partner, look both further and farther in the endless quest for company.

But no one is in your head. And by the time you translate your thoughts an essence of them maybe lost or perhaps it is just kept. Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those “sappy slogans” from pre-school over to high school groaning, we’re tokens for holding the lonely at bay.

Cause if you’re happy in your head, then solitude is blessed, and alone is okay.

It’s okay if no one believes like you, all experiences unique, no one has the same synapses, can’t think like you, for this be relieved, keeps things interesting, life’s magic things in reach, and it doesn’t mean you aren’t connected, and the community is not present, just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it.

Take silence and respect it.

If you have an art that needs a practice, stop neglecting it, if your family doesn’t get you or a religious sect is not meant for you, don’t obsess about it.

You could be in an instant surrounded if you need it.

If your heart is bleeding, make the best of it.

There is heat in freezing, be a testament.




(and here it is again)

slowly

It seems I keep my balance better when I'm swaying side to side.

to my lover after a week in your ocean arms

I am sorry—it’s not fair that I kept swimming out in the ocean until the water was higher than my head and only stopping when you’d call me back to earth. It’s not fair that I do let my emotions run away with me until I run away myself because I know you’ll follow me and bring me back. You always do. I realize this is who you are—you were dealt the protective nature and have honed it over years of being the watcher, the caretaker, the one who stifles your own wants and impulses in order to help your family. I am already coming too close to taking advantage of these instincts in you by leaving myself out in the open and unguarded. You are right—my self-preservation instinct is not always strong. I am so certain of you. And I do become so easily tempted to just let myself float away now that I know you have a watchful eye in my direction and will reach out to pull me back before I get too far. This is a theft. I need to be my own watchdog and not let the burden of caring for yet another human fall solely to you. Not to not ever fall needy. Just, as a general rule to answer my own cries of alarm myself. With, all the time, the sheltering certainty that if I do ever get out of my own control, I won’t hit the bottom before I’m caught up in your arms.

And I, you.

Monday

I am having the thickest layer of work-dread I've had in quite some time this morning. Because I know it'll be much bigger than my apathy is asking after a week away. It just seems so thick.

home plate

I AM a blunderbuss. I guess, though, if I was drinking orange juice in bed, I was asking for it. It is laundry day.
I've been away for eight days, and I come back to hammers at my front door as the deck is torn up and replaced, and I come home clumsy and content and with wide open windows in my bedroom and a grateful sense of calm. I am stranded for the day, but I'm pleased to be so. I have so much of life and love added up in this last week, and it's nice to be home again and withdrawing carefully into my juice-sticky cocoon to think it all through.

Oh, I have loved this week.

I have been here:

with this guy:

and I have been very, very blessed.

prep

I am trying to keep my head on straight and feeling a sense of empathy for the vegetarian subjected to stories of lobster death.
I probably need to stop watching weather forecasts and making lists and just get through the stack of papers under my right elbow--before I leave, before I leave, before I leave.
I am escaping to the beach. I am escaping to the beach for an entire week. I am escaping to the beach for an entire week with my fiance and his family.
I heard something on the radio the other day about the phenomenon of vacation-relaxation and how it sometimes takes three days to set in. Well, I will have three days.
I am going to feel a lot. Sometimes I don't--sometimes I go for weeks at a time in a state of imperviousness. But this time, this trip, is going to be very real and I am going to taste and touch and see and feel it. All. That is my plan. That, and a stack of books.

in spite of

Well, my mom's in surgery, a hurricane is barreling toward my vacation destination, my car's undriveable, and I've got a head cold. But what the hell, I've got a perk in my ribcage and a bounce in my step. The skies are really very blue.

wheels

I am sitting with my chin in my hands and thinking that I probably handled this wrong. I address this to the half empty bag of Reese's cups and the pizza crusts. You were the wrong salve. The right salve was flat on my back on my bed and Mozart and I did get there. But anyway, a car is a car, and as much as I have loved my tiny silver one, I shouldn't be surprised when its age and northern heritage catch up to it and the mechanic writes in bold ink on the bill SAFETY ISSUE: DANGEROUS TO DRIVE, and then traces this statement in highlighter--as if I'd forget his warning. The short stick of it is that I don't have the money to trade up, or over, or even down and probably won't for some time. I am chronically short of funds. But the long stick of it is that I can indeed live my life pretty damn well without a car--I have biked and walked the miles across town for work for years, I have a grocery store just up the hill, I have a free city bus pass, and I have a lover with a car like a chariot who always promises to come when I need him. And just last weekend I learned that I am indeed capable of biking the twelve miles out to my parents' house, and not having a car to drive at the time that my mom is having surgery to scoop out the rest of the cancer will certainly not stop me from getting to their house of my own steam if I need to, and I won't, you know, I won't have to, because even without a motor of my own, I am not alone.

smug

I am beginning to feel smug. I am beginning to be so, so certain of my love and the validity and promise of the way I know it will lay out in front of me. It makes me feel a sense of stability I've never felt before. It makes me confident and grateful and facing-the-right-way and it makes me feel smug. Like the heart buried within my own is not going to cease its beating. Smug. Like I'm one of the lucky ones.

rime

Today was about salt, and the way it rimed my body after two hours on my bike as I pushed over the hills and to the next town north and then back again.

I keep testing myself, and the answer is salt, and the answer is lenience.

it's kind of nice

Today I am embracing my own ignorance.

ice for the drinks

My hands won't warm up today. Maybe it started when I walked this morning from my car with a heavy bag of diet coke and what else? I don't even want to try to remember what all I bought last night for the birthday party today. The bag was heavy and I had to keep switching hands. Since then I have been cold. I keep a clingy darkheathergray sweater on the back of my office chair. When it's on I think to myself that if I cut a few holes at the end of the sleeves I could pull them down past my palms. If I sewed the ends closed. I'm not going to say I am not tempted. I never used to be this way--I used to have fire in my fingers. I worry that this is a hallmark of getting-closer-to-thirty, but this is stupid. I know I'm still doing well because I can blow up ten balloons in short order and still have the air to laugh about the way I become a living ball of static--me with my sweater and thin, flying hair and shuffling feet and balloons all around.

shades

I bought a pair of sunglasses at a dollar store. They're brown and they're missing a nose piece and I'm not sure--I haven't decided yet--whether they make me look badass or just backwards with 99 cents of plastic perched on my face. I'm not sure that I mind which. Bought them because I sat on my last pair of sunglasses a week ago. Sat on them because even though I have a legitimate chair now I've been using the floor as my desk chair for four years and it's a hard habit to break. Don't ask me why my deceased sunglasses were on the floor. Don't.

I AM THE COWARD WHO DID NOT PICK UP THE PHONE

I am the coward who did not pick up the phone, so as never to know.
So many clocks and yardsticks dumped into an ocean.

I am the ox which drew the cart full of urgent messages straight into
the river, emerging none the wiser on the opposite side, never looking
back at all those floating envelopes and postcards, the wet ashes of
some loved one's screams.

How was I to know?

I am the warrior who killed the sparrow with a cannon. I am the
guardian who led the child by the hand into the cloud, and emerged
holding only an empty glove. Oh--

the digital ringing of it. The string of a kite of it, which I let go of.
Oh, the commotion in the attic of it--in the front yard, in the back yard,
in the driveway--all of which I heard nothing of, because I am the
one who closed the windows and said This has nothing to do with us.
In fact, I am the one singing this so loudly I cannot hear you even now.

(Mama, what's happening outside? Honey, is that the phone?)

I am the one who sings, The bones and shells of us.
The organic broth of us.
The zen gong of us.

Oblivious, oblivious, oblivious.


~Laura Kasischke

trying

Shored up by a thermos of coffee and a roof sheltering me from the rain, I am trying very hard to convince myself that I am not not ok.

displaced

I'm craving winter.

I'm glad that my library is full of right angles today. I need them. Without a shelf to follow, a rail to grasp, I'm not sure where I would end up.

the fuss

I think perhaps I'm a bigger problem before I open my mouth than after. It's funny that way.

Anyway, this was a great weekend. I'm talking 3-D black light mini golf great. Bill Bryson, haunted houses, burgers and fries, Scott Pilgrim, wine-hazy board games great. Late nights and air mattresses great. Pixel blocks and newlyweds great. There was even a stop for German food and live accordion music on the way home last night, just the two of us, and then after I was home, as it was during the whole trip, a hot, low-hanging brand of love between my man and me.

What the fuss is wrong with my mind and body that kept itself directly in the line of limbo all this while?

I am going to be the sticky spot

I am going to have to be very strict with myself in the next few days over just how much there is to enjoy about a weekend trip to visit friends in North Carolina. Going to have to give myself an ultimatum that involves a MUST NEED DO to self about getting out of my own damn skull and letting this life be lived.
I am going to be the sticky spot.

staring into my apple core and thinking

I want cake.

paralleling

I am still thinking about
fruit flies.
Fruit flies and Octobers and pennies,
and I know these things
are not alliterative

but they feel that way.

swarm

I automatically think 'fruit flies' when the cloud of dust flies up around my feet and when the flock of starlings lifts away from the roof of the old hospital next door. It's a familiar feeling, probably because the same swarms of little winged thoughts have been circling through my mind for weeks now. I'm setting traps, and the flying things are so easy to fool into complacency with sweet fruit, but they're never quite all gone. Just when I think I'm clear another I catch sight of another cloud poised for liftoff.

flight delay

I am setting my alarm for 4:15am and looking up directions to the Baltimore airport and trying to temper my grump by being thankful that, were our roles reversed, my brother would gladly do the same.

[TITLE UNKNOWN]

I will take me away
To a foreign place

Where a language
Is unnecessary.

                       I
Shall move my mouth
In deepest darkness,

Sculpting sentences
That none shall hear:

They are mine alone.

A place where the one voice
That is heard is the wind

In strange trees, rustling
Branches of gaudy leaves.

Perhaps there is a sea
To respond--softly,

Implacably: a duologue
Of sibilance and fluting.

We shall collaborate.
(Me atop a barren hill,

Arms outspread, gesturing
To the sea, the dark sky.)

We shall indulge ourselves
In deepest conversation:

Wordlessness, movements,
Fullest comprehension.



-David Joshua Sharp

shattering

I'm trying not to be superstitious, but I'm about to leave for the funeral of a woman I never met and early this morning I broke a hand mirror and last evening while my brother was saying a blessing over a meal and was just at the part where he was mentioning my... (HOLY CRAP) fiance and me by name, the untouched dinner plate in front of me exploded outward like it had just been detonated, shards flying in all directions with a noise like a gunshot. I sat very still and sucked the blood off of the pad of my finger until all the sharp pieces had been brushed from my arms and legs and swept and mopped away.

Perhaps it was the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe.

betrothed

Didn't really think that my reaction to seeing a diamond ring being held out to me by the man I love would be 'what the hell are you doing?' But then, when this same man first told me he loved me, my response was 'you're crazy.' I will have to work on these reactions of mine so that when the time comes to say 'I do' it won't come out 'schwaaaa?!'

I am not good at shorthand

but it feels important that I put a stamp on what I've just been living.

I want to make sure it's all real to me: the sinus infection that took me to a fever and the passing of time and love that brought me back. And the trip to the north that followed.
I think I have always told myself that I am capable of one day having Big love. Well. I am feeling it every day. I am feeling it in the old friends who have in them a lifetime of stories I share. When I am with them I always wish I had another day or two to spare to let my me out and to catch a little bit more of their them. And I was feeling Big love at the wedding by the river last weekend. By far, my favorite. The bride and groom walked down to meet each other in the middle of a circle of green to the beat of the music coming from my horn and from the mind and body of the man at my side. We do that well. I loved so much the bride, the bride who found treasure deep inside me long before I could see the reflection of worth in my own eyes. I was there to lace up her wedding dress and fasten the pearl necklace and settle it down on her strong collarbone. I could cry picturing it because she was that beautiful and I was that close to it all when she was opening her hands and heart and taking her lover inside. I know that look, because I have it, too. I have it, too. I am hilariously loved. And for a year I have been in three minds about how I should be and how I will be but now I know. I know by the way he brought me painkillers and kissed me even when I was sick and I know by the tone of his voice when we sat on the rocks watching the river run past us talking about our futures and I know by the way the sunset reflected off of his cheek and I know by the way much later into the night we snuck away from the party to dance alone, just the two of us and the stars. I know: you are the one.
I don't understand and have no way to pay for this gift, but my life has been just given to me like this and it's not only mine, it's ours and I can't wait.
I have been full and humming with I-like-you. We kept celebrating this weekend: birthdays and Holy Shit, One Year and bonfires and jello shots and red velvet cake, and yesterday before finding our way back to the highway four of us had lunch together at a place I'd like to take along home with me with a waitress who said 'yous' and made me smile because that sounds right. I wish I could always let it be written in my face and coming from my mouth how much I love your welcome and your time and your lifetime friendship. When I say thank you and I'll miss you what I mean is: y'all are like little pieces of my heart.
S and I drove home in a car that smelled like spilled wine and pasta sauce down a highway with potholes and traffic jams and I am sure again that he is real because there's no one I'd rather be stuck in traffic with and lost in Frackville with and nose to nose and toe to toe with once we're finally home.

on the road

I am feeling... sleek with love and pointing my bare feet toward the highway. I have been overwhelmingly blessed.

VII (I do not love you)

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.


-Pablo Neruda

burning

I am awake at 4:00am because I have a fever behind my brow. Behind my left eye. In my neck. Down my back. My toes are curling in disappointment as the rest of my body sinks deeper into the mattress.
I have yet, in my more than three years at the library, taken a legitimate sick day. My fingers are tempted to flip the switch, but what stops me has always been what stops me: I can. I will wake to the alarm and slip myself from the bed and fumble for my glasses and slowly, slowly creep to the office and spend a few quick hours making a difference before skulking back to bed. I almost certainly will.
I have a day and a half to resurface and to clear the heat from my vision before S and I are to take a trip up to the top of the country for loving and bachelorettes and birthdays and anniversaries and a wedding--and playing the processional as my favorite bride walks down the grassy aisle. I cannot be There and not be Well.
I can't sleep--my heart beats too quickly and my arms are covered in goosebumps. There's no way to skip this part, is there? A cool cloth for my eyes, an allowance of time when the morning comes. There is something so human about fevers. I'm being offered up.

I have good taste

I love you from the roof.

I love you late at night with half-closed eyes to the sound of a ceiling fan.

I love you over tic-tac-toe and green elephants on white napkins.

I love you from the smell of the hood of your sweatshirt and the drag of your heels.

I love you to accidental fires and back, I love you to minor chords and major resolutions.

I love you in the deep coral red of your tongue and the
pleats where
your lips come together.

I have good taste.

I'm giving this to you as a gift:

A mother raccoon and her three babies were walking through the forest. The first baby raccoon said, "momma, why did you name me Mapleleaf?" The momma raccoon said, "when you were born, a maple leaf floated down off of the tree and landed on your forehead." A little while later the second raccoon spoke up. "Momma, why did you name me Rosebud?" "Well," said the momma raccoon, "when you were born a rosebud landed on your forehead, so we thought we'd name you Rosebud." Pretty soon the third little raccoon spoke up. "UMHHHG ANNG?" The momma raccoon said, "what's that, Cinderblock?"

vibrating

today's word is hyperactiveimagination

sugar

I am loving my life today--I am dancing around my kitchen with a cake and curling ribbons and Joanna Newsom.

LITANY

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine


~Billy Collins


[I love them all, but I really love this one] 

potluck

I spent this evening out in the goldening glow of the summer sun, listening to the guitar and fiddle and keyboard and drums drums drums played by my library coworkers. Dipped my feet into the water of the fountain at whose edge I ate my mock chicken salad and tater tots and fresh fruit salad and dark fudge brownies. And when we were done and the potluck packed away and the maracas put back in their place, I walked a half mile back to where I'd left my car barefoot, swinging my sandals by their straps and stirring around in my mind all the ways the sounds and the silence fit together. I am thinking to myself: aha. I do understand now the whys of summer.

soaked

I spent hours yesterday evening in an indoor waterpark in the heart of an outdoor rainstorm with a break in the middle of the evening to climb the steps to the bar overlooking the water and eat a burger and drink a beer and soak up the funky music coming live and hot from my boyfriend's band. Could you think of anything better?
There was a moment last night when I was standing at the hand dryer in the woman's restroom, wringing as much rain as I could from a rusty brown t-shirt, and I was thinking, damn, I don't even like this shirt, but I know that doesn't matter and it will never matter. I love the man the shirt belongs to and I suspect that I will always be willing to spend ten minutes in front of a hand dryer in a crowded, steamy restroom for this guy.
I'm not sure what else to say
to myself
about this other than to
ask me
please, please,

to own this.

dripping

My car has been leaking brake fluid and my mind has been leaking self assurance.

composition

You might have a mind full of melody and I may be always stuck in a chord, but I'm not concerned. The flat line that straggles along when I'm by myself grows into something with depth and height when we sit side by side and put our halves together.

plump with the correctness

I have been having a rather slumped-shoulders week and I think maybe that means I'm ready for fall. It gets to the point when a pair of legs danging from the first floor ceiling is no longer a mood booster. I mean! For a time that was the best thing I'd seen!
But anyhow, I've been just fine this week other than the dragging of my feet. I have grown fond of spaghetti squash, and I have my best friend's wedding dress hanging safely in its pink garment bag in my apartment. Last night by lucky chance I happened to cross paths going different directions with the man I love and he flew to me across the parking lot and picked me up and kissed me as if it'd been months since we'd been together instead of a day and a half. It made me spin. My mother and I finished a 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle we'd been plodding at for thirteen days. And I was putting in the last few puzzle pieces with a mouth full of fresh, juicy blackberries from their neighbor as a thick summer (finally) rain pouring down in the darkness out beyond the dining room windows. The community band concert this week was full of kids' music, of theme songs to superheroes and kazoos and glow sticks. I will never begrudge you your glow sticks. When I got home from work the other day I got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed my bathroom floor and mopped the kitchen and emptied the trash and bought a lamp for the side table by the couch, and every time I walk in the door I breathe a sigh of relief, a sigh of this is such a good home.
What I'm saying is, there's just very little wrong. At all. My life is right. Discounting, of course, the all-day work conference I have to go to tomorrow and goddamn money issues and my never ending cycle of heel blisters from all the walking I've been doing. But, I am feeling plump with the correctness of this all.

it has been one of these days:

Why shouldn't you wear snowboots?
Because they'll melt.

What kind of horses go out after dark?
Night Mares.

Two silkworms were in a race.
They ended up in a tie.

What did the termite say when he walked into the bar?
'Is the bar tender here?'

Why does a milking stool have only three legs?
Because the cow has the udder.

What's round and really violent?
A vicious circle.

How do you find a lost rabbit?
Make a noise like a carrot.


(am pretty sure the last one's my favorite)



(YES, that says something)

summer weekend

S and I spent the weekend riding roller coasters and water slides. I have yet to find anything better than love + adrenaline + delight + sunshine.

The colors and the sounds of an amusement park are almost enough. It's almost enough to watch the families and the faces parade past with their sunscreened smiles and bare backs and think: this is why I paid admission. Forget the mind-bending roller coasters and addictive music, forget lunch in Germany and a drink in Ireland and a dinner in Italy. It's almost worth it just to be there and be human.

I have very little fear when it comes to the big drops or the sharp turns. I like the heights, the sensation of coming back to the pool below. And I love the wetness. The floating. The splashes and the sinking under and the water droplets running down my back and flying from the tips of S’s hair as he shakes his head. My senses find it rich. I wouldn't ask myself to stop screaming along with the rushing water. It is incredibly freeing to be thundering down a long, twisty waterslide in the front half of a two-man inner tube and to just yell with delight and the sort of surprise that doesn’t go away even after the fourth time.

I dare you to try to convince me that something so sweet is not defensible.

ENDING

Maybe there is a Me inside of me
and, when I lie dying, he
will crawl out. Through my toe.
Green on the green rug, and then
white on the wall, and then
over the window sill, up the trunk
of the apple tree, he
will turn brown and rough and warty
to match the bark. But you'll be
able to see--(who will be
able to see?) his little jelly
belly pulsing with the heart inside
his transparent hide.
And, once on the top bough,
tail clinging, as well as "hands,"
he'll turn the purest blue
against the sky---
(say it's a clear day, and I don't die
at night.) Maybe from there
he'll take wing--That's it!--
an ARCHAEOPTERYX! Endless,
the possibilities, my little Soul,
once you exit from my toe.
But, Oh,
looking it up, I read:
"Archaeopteryx, generally considered
the first bird... (although)
closely related to certain small
dinosaurs... could not fly."
A pain... Oh, I
feel a pain in my toe!

~May Swenson

appreciation

I love the girl crying into the laces of her taffeta corset and the mechanics with cheerful salutes and the coworkers with ready OMGs and the uncles with knotted finger joints and the boy who responds to my pleas for attention in all caps and spelled correctly.

holiday

I had a fantastic day today--is it any wonder? It was full of spaghetti squash and coffee on the deck and sticky sweet little apples and loose screws of enthusiasm and cold beer and a good movie and better company and a community band concert from a stage packed shoulder to shoulder. Even though the air was so thick, so warm all day, I forgot that I'd been sticky and slow as soon as we were again on the highway after the concert had ended and been put away, windows down, night air flooding through. My hand on you, your hand on me. There could hardly have been a sweeter way to live a day off of work. I have been seeing so many fireworks.

boom

Up on the hill tonight I had fireworks all around me--red blue yellow white green purple--from all sides, in all sizes, untethered to the echoing booms across the rolling ground. You would hardly know which flashes were from spirits and which were from backyards and which were from city squares. It didn't matter.

unspooling

Oh lord, what a head, that leaps away from me when I need it most. I can be so incredibly incoherent when you hand me exhaustion and frustration and confusion all at once. It ends up coming out who am I? and what the hell do I do next? My brain is speaking a different language than the rest of my body.

It frightens me whenever I can't weigh the balance of I need me vs I need you. I think, if I don't even know this, of course I don't know how close the laptop screen, turn out the lights, and gently put myself to bed.

backhanding

Received this email from a patron today:

'Thanks for all your help. I could do my work nearly as well without you!'

My self-deprecation meter likes this. I think that's probably always true. You might end up missing perfection by inches, but you'd still be nearly as well without me.

I kid, I kid. I read your meaning. I appreciate the sentiment.

POEM OF GRATITUDE UPON CEASING MY GOD-LIKE BEHAVIOR

Thank you for summer
and the loose-jointed way I walk when it’s hot
I know it’s not becoming

Thanks for the cat
pressing his paw over ants in the patio cracks
the former me would stop him

Thanks for the way I slept last night
deep and long, uncaring
and thank you for the fire we’ll build tonight
it will singe moths and mosquitoes

This world is your doing
and finally I will not apologize
for letting it be done.


~Anne Piper

clearly

Last night I dreamed about jigsaw puzzles and snot.

This morning someone described me as 'unobvious.' I choose to take that as a compliment.

loose

I am not trying to be titillating, but when I'm alone in my apartment it is very hard for me to stay clothed.

FLIRTATION

[The last five lines of this poem are perhaps my favorite, ever.]


After all, there’s no need
to say anything

at first. An orange, peeled
and quartered, flares

like a tulip on a wedgewood plate
Anything can happen.

Outside the sun
has rolled up her rugs

and night strewn salt
across the sky. My heart

is humming a tune
I haven’t heard in years!

Quiet’s cool flesh—
let’s sniff and eat it.

There are ways
to make of the moment

a topiary
so the pleasure’s in

walking through.



~Rita Dove

begin again

It's Monday morning and I'm hunching and I am timing my blinks to the off-beats of the flashing cursor and wearing my self-flagellating earrings.
But,
that doesn't mean this last weekend was rough because it wasn't--aside from muscle aches (mine) and chemo aches (mom's) and sundry other brain and heart disconnects, I could scribble off a litany of other good things I did taste and see and feel in my bones. Like, I don't know, bacon cheeseburgers and goalies and Big Ideas and garden dirt between my toes and Mexican food and thrift store skirts and atomic kisses and draped, cuddly naps.
And then I ended the weekend alone, on the couch in my living room that still smells like a basement (the couch, not the living room), watching a few episodes from the first season of Friends and eating mini marshmallows from the bag until I fell asleep. My 'well, here you are!' gift to me.
Funny how I'm saying the same thing to myself this morning and it keeps trailing off in to ellipses.

part II

The summer has changed. I don't mean the shifting of the seasons way, I mean that I've reached part II. Done with the settling into a new place, learning new grooves to shuffle my feet along as I walk, figuring out the way to balance my reduced hours and wider skies. I have down pat the times and the strength it takes to hop on my bike and get to the other side of town and back. I never drive past my driveway by accident. My life is slow--by choice. It's about to get slower. My cousin/neighbor has left to travel across the country for the summer and that wall will be empty and that garden will be mine. And my sister/roommate and brother/buddy are leaving for seven weeks, too. I've done this before and sometimes it has NOT worked, but this go-round I think I will be happy to be an only child and content to come home to an empty apartment. For a time. It's just part II.

I'll think of it like it's the calm before the storm. In another few months this life will kick up a gear. But for now the remission suits me. My droopy body will fit snug into this light blue July.

very home

I'm never more proud to be who I am when I'm the daughter of a woman who sat through three hours of chemo today and yet just a few hours later is smiling and watching soccer and beating me at card games.

The fireflies of the world are loving this new summer. As I drove home tonight the dark green of the twilit fields was glowing, all these thousands blinking out their codes. I see you. One smashed onto my windshield as I coasted down the biggest hill. It left a glowing schmear in the middle of my vision. An exclamation point.

I'm pleased. I found a wonderful pair of shoes at the thrift store. I had cucumber and melon and pork for dinner. I get to be the one to lace up the back of a dear bride's gown. The neighborhood I live in looks very home in this light. I am, as a body, going to get stronger, and I am, as a soul, continually loved.

COMPOST: AN ODE

The beauty of the compost heap is not 
the eye’s delight. 
                      Eyes see too much. 
                                     They see 
blood-colored worms and bugs 
                                   so white they seem 
to feed off 
              ghosts. Eyes do not see the heat 
that simmers in the moist 
                                  heart of decay— 
in its unmaking making fire— 
                                              just hot 
enough to burn 
                   itself. In summer, it 
burns like a stove. 
                         It can—almost—hurt you. 
I hold my hand inside the heap and count 
one, two, three, 
                        four. 
                                I cannot hold it there. 
 Give it to me, the heat insists. It’s mine. 
I yank it back and wipe it 
                                      on my jeans, 
as if 
               I’d really heard the words. 
                                                And eyes 
cannot appreciate sweet vegetable rot, 
how good it smells 
                                as everything dissolves, 
dispersing 
          back from the thing 
                                 into idea. 
From our own table we are feeding it 
what we don’t eat. Orange rind and apple core, 
corn husks, 
              and odds and ends the children smear 
across their plates 
                              are fed into the slow 
damp furnace 
                        of decay. Leaves curl at edges, 
buckle, 
          collapsing down into their centers, 
as everything 
                      turns loose its living shape 
and blackens, gives up 
                         what it once was 
to become pure dirt. The table scraps 
and leafage join, 
                         indistinguishable, 
the way that death insists 
                                   it’s all the same, 
while life 
          must do a million things at once. 
The compost heap is both—life, death—a slow 
simmer, 
               a leisurely collapsing of 
the thing 
             into its possibilities— 
hollyhock and cucumber, 
                                    bean and marigold— 
potato, zinnia, squash: 
the opulence 
                   of everything that rots. 

-Andrew Hudgins

(in Poetry Magazine, October 1985)