6.29.2010
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
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
6.28.2010
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.
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.
6.25.2010
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.
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.
6.23.2010
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.
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.
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)
(in Poetry Magazine, October 1985)
6.22.2010
6.21.2010
what it is
I have a lapsed biker's butt bruise, a coffee-soaked storage key, and plans for a picnic in the park tonight before an evening of Sousa.
6.20.2010
fireflies in the fields
I went to the funeral today of a man who on the first day I met him invited me and my family to his house for lunch, and that same afternoon, when I asked, described to me the disease that was killing him. It was hard for me not to cry when I saw the bowed heads of his grandchildren in the pew and when my father's voice from the pulpit began to swim with emotion. It's not fair, but I'm beginning to see that justice isn't heavy-handed.
The rest of today was sweet and in love. The fireflies in the fields beyond the firepit, the burning bench and the burning smile. Meatballs for lunch and pizza for dinner. Time in between for mourning and piano chords and snuggling flush into a pair of strong arms until the heartbeats speed and slow down and duet.
I felt so much bleeding-out affection today. I am so lucky to be here--HERE--with such promise and s'mores and a shrinking (shrunk!) tumor. It's life.
The rest of today was sweet and in love. The fireflies in the fields beyond the firepit, the burning bench and the burning smile. Meatballs for lunch and pizza for dinner. Time in between for mourning and piano chords and snuggling flush into a pair of strong arms until the heartbeats speed and slow down and duet.
I felt so much bleeding-out affection today. I am so lucky to be here--HERE--with such promise and s'mores and a shrinking (shrunk!) tumor. It's life.
6.18.2010
my truth on the line
I think I used to be an iceberg and now I'm a flock of starlings. I think I used to love you with your truth on the line and now it's mine.
I bet this means I'm growing into my version of reality, of ethics. This is the wine talking but it doesn't make it less true: I am real.
The wine, which is a reward because I've made it through a week and the dishwasher is humming. I had some scattershot days when none of my bones made sense. I think it's probably just hormones, but I really am pretty good sometimes at looking at a beautiful porcelain plate and only seeing the places a crack might form.
I tell myself I don't want to be fixed when I'm clumsy and irritating and volatile. I tell myself that I just need to pull inward, spend three hours, four, five, alone by the side of the highway. I tell myself the salt at the bottom of a bag of pretzels is what will help. I tell myself that turning the lock on the door and soaking up to my neck in the hot bathwater is the right choice. It's not. I won't say it doesn't help. But it's not going to cut my craving so much as changing its dimensions. Better that I sit in the late afternoon sun and tear down my defenses to let music sink into my soul. Better that I stay even when I just want to run and let myself be pulled 'round to burgers and fries and beer and I genuinely like you and you, well, you. And the ambush kisses? The reverence with which you view me as the most wonderful sort of challenge? This is how you take the shit that's clouding my mind and flush it down the toilet.
So I make it through the week. I end it with an evening of the best sort of family--all of mine is--and after a meal and a walk around the neighborhood and an under-the-moon talk I am here, with a clean kitchen that smells of onions and with a half glass of wine beside me where I sit on the floor.
Where was I going with this? I thought I had a thesis. I've... never mind. Cheese, tacos, Elbow, bleach, bikes, keys. I have put myself through a lot these last few days. I think I like the fact that I know this.
I bet this means I'm growing into my version of reality, of ethics. This is the wine talking but it doesn't make it less true: I am real.
The wine, which is a reward because I've made it through a week and the dishwasher is humming. I had some scattershot days when none of my bones made sense. I think it's probably just hormones, but I really am pretty good sometimes at looking at a beautiful porcelain plate and only seeing the places a crack might form.
I tell myself I don't want to be fixed when I'm clumsy and irritating and volatile. I tell myself that I just need to pull inward, spend three hours, four, five, alone by the side of the highway. I tell myself the salt at the bottom of a bag of pretzels is what will help. I tell myself that turning the lock on the door and soaking up to my neck in the hot bathwater is the right choice. It's not. I won't say it doesn't help. But it's not going to cut my craving so much as changing its dimensions. Better that I sit in the late afternoon sun and tear down my defenses to let music sink into my soul. Better that I stay even when I just want to run and let myself be pulled 'round to burgers and fries and beer and I genuinely like you and you, well, you. And the ambush kisses? The reverence with which you view me as the most wonderful sort of challenge? This is how you take the shit that's clouding my mind and flush it down the toilet.
So I make it through the week. I end it with an evening of the best sort of family--all of mine is--and after a meal and a walk around the neighborhood and an under-the-moon talk I am here, with a clean kitchen that smells of onions and with a half glass of wine beside me where I sit on the floor.
Where was I going with this? I thought I had a thesis. I've... never mind. Cheese, tacos, Elbow, bleach, bikes, keys. I have put myself through a lot these last few days. I think I like the fact that I know this.
6.16.2010
Wednesday morning
I am
struggling with paranoia and a desire for corn chips,
streaming soccer games at the back of my computer and
wondering how long this
rain
will hold off.
struggling with paranoia and a desire for corn chips,
streaming soccer games at the back of my computer and
wondering how long this
rain
will hold off.
6.15.2010
tails
I opened the book and a penny fell out. It landed on my desk tails up and I thought, 'well, I am not surprised.'-- I could build a whole day off of a library penny falling from the binding of a book and landing lucky side down.
6.14.2010
community band
I like when I can send out feelers of wryness and they are caught. Do you catch the twinkle in my eye? Wink wink nudge back? So much better that than waiting until I say I'M JOKING. So much better to be sitting beside a man fifty years my senior with a clarinet between his knobbled hands and to tease the tubas together and to catch him smiling when the dog barks along with the Star-Spangled Banner than to be smirking down my reed alone. Where I sat in the band before we used to call the 'dell' --the oboes in the dell-- sitting in my chair like the nipple in a breast of flutes. But now the seating has shifted and our curves have straightened, and I'm off to one edge, which is fine, and it's especially fine to be sitting next to a man who might in another life have been my grandfather and if so I would have liked to inherit his easy grin.
400
do you know I've written
four-hundred
of these?(and here's where I am honest and say that this is more or less Selfish (read: they are for me and I'm just letting you watch) just as are the miles of word documents saved on my computer under the heading of me)
if my life had a more fluid narrative I could have written you a library.
I have a lot on my list this week. Work juggle love check family band. I'm trying to be end oriented rather than process oriented to keep my brain from noticing the fuzzy cotton nest it's resting in. I will not have a cold.
I will not have a cold.
four-hundred
of these?(and here's where I am honest and say that this is more or less Selfish (read: they are for me and I'm just letting you watch) just as are the miles of word documents saved on my computer under the heading of me)
if my life had a more fluid narrative I could have written you a library.
I have a lot on my list this week. Work juggle love check family band. I'm trying to be end oriented rather than process oriented to keep my brain from noticing the fuzzy cotton nest it's resting in. I will not have a cold.
I will not have a cold.
6.12.2010
spending a Saturday
I had a nightmare last night that there were sharp knives cutting across my skin and I couldn't fast forward quickly enough to the end where I woke up. But then I did, heart racing and uneasy, and I was surprised that it was morning already--that the sun was bright and warm and thirty minutes on the deck made the sweat collect between my breasts and in the crooks of my elbows. Had lunch and tea among floral prints and lace, my knee perpendicular to the knee of the wrong-handed boy I love, completely at ease. And there was soccer this afternoon--pumping my fist and biting my nails. I do get involved. I would. The game ended and I have been draining ever since, the energy and caffeine and clearheadedness seeping away. I felt for a while today that I could speedwalk to my parents' house and back and I almost think I could have, but now I've lost that temptation and all the others that would take me outside or to a public space. I am muzzy and soft and have had too many cookies today, I think. There's part of me that wants nothing more than to cut my day off right now. No more. I'm done. It was good, but I've spent all the day's confidence and am left with not much more than hot eyes and a head drooping to the side. Done. Let's crawl into bed and just see how long until I'm dreaming again.
all that is good
Sometimes I just want to list a cocktail of all that is good. Cheerios. Fame. Sibelius. ESPN.com. Nude naps. Loofahs. Text messaging. Pages and pages of journaling. Leftovers. Hand weights. Heel cream. Diet coke. Indian food. Mexico. My round green coffee mug. Oboe reeds. Spinach. Bill Bryson. The phrase 'fart blossom.' Lover's eyes. The color of my shirt matching the color of the ice cream. Coconut rum. Self confidence. Commitment. Chests. Porch lights. Nalgene bottles. Clean pillowcases. Burt's Bees lipbalm. Cats. Eyelash curlers.
I
could
go
on.
I
could
go
on.
6.11.2010
Cricket
There's a small black cat named Cricket who watches for me in the mornings as I walk to work. He sits on the porch of the big brick house on the corner by the mimosa tree and catches my eye and I his and then jumps down to meet me on the sidewalk and winds his way around my ankles and peppers me with chirping meows. I kneel down to tease at the butting parts of his head and his long, whippy tail. I would if I could keep him with me, an ego boost, a reminder of the pleasure in 'oh hey, it's you!!' throughout the rest of my long walk through town.
6.09.2010
daughter
There was something about the way I was sitting very still this evening while my chemo-haunted mother fell asleep with her head on my lap that reassured me that I could learn to love someone the way she loves me.
6.08.2010
wide eyed
Ever have one of those days when each time you glance in the mirror you seem to have the look about the face of someone who's just removed their glasses? That's me today.
fluttering
I like very much that I work at in an office that lets me run NPR in the background and part two of my thankfulness is in my ability to take a break to talk my brother through the maze of an unfamiliar city from 130 miles away. I've always been able to answer my phone if I want to, and I can't say enough about how that feels.
What I've been up to these past few days is not really a voyage of self discovery, because believe me, I make only a LITTLE more sense to me than I do to you, but more of a continued acceptance of my own anti-linearity. My bursts of emotion and my expansive gestures to fix them in place. I think I'm becoming a person who is ok with driving six hours north to where I grew up and then locking myself in a stall in the bathrooms in the public library and crying for five minutes before I recover myself and walk back out with a bounce in my heels. I have always been the person who does this--I am learning to be ok with admitting it. I am not like the rest of my family in that I react with my stomach, with my heart first. The head comes later, if it comes. The logic may or may not seep in and influence my actions. I guess I'm learning to be ok with that, to be accepting of my own fluttering, and to realize that there just may be a reason and a place for my inappropriate heart bleeds and my ability to get from point A to point B by taking a stopover at point Y for a few hours and then sprinting back.
I have been very soft. Y'all have been making me melt with your low, sweet voice and your brown eyes and the way you let me back into your life for an hour even though I haven't seen you in eight years. I have been turning to mush in the face of an old sheepdog named Blue and the squeak you inserted into your wedding vows and the beautiful fall of the green fabric of your dress. I am internalizing the way you told me I'm beautiful and the heat of your skin under my fingertips. I am a soggy, soggy mess when I try to limit my empathy to the truth, when no matter how tightly I'm hugging you you're not close enough to me and I wish you were even more tightly woven to me.
I'm not magic. I'm not clever. But I feel pretty good.
What I've been up to these past few days is not really a voyage of self discovery, because believe me, I make only a LITTLE more sense to me than I do to you, but more of a continued acceptance of my own anti-linearity. My bursts of emotion and my expansive gestures to fix them in place. I think I'm becoming a person who is ok with driving six hours north to where I grew up and then locking myself in a stall in the bathrooms in the public library and crying for five minutes before I recover myself and walk back out with a bounce in my heels. I have always been the person who does this--I am learning to be ok with admitting it. I am not like the rest of my family in that I react with my stomach, with my heart first. The head comes later, if it comes. The logic may or may not seep in and influence my actions. I guess I'm learning to be ok with that, to be accepting of my own fluttering, and to realize that there just may be a reason and a place for my inappropriate heart bleeds and my ability to get from point A to point B by taking a stopover at point Y for a few hours and then sprinting back.
I have been very soft. Y'all have been making me melt with your low, sweet voice and your brown eyes and the way you let me back into your life for an hour even though I haven't seen you in eight years. I have been turning to mush in the face of an old sheepdog named Blue and the squeak you inserted into your wedding vows and the beautiful fall of the green fabric of your dress. I am internalizing the way you told me I'm beautiful and the heat of your skin under my fingertips. I am a soggy, soggy mess when I try to limit my empathy to the truth, when no matter how tightly I'm hugging you you're not close enough to me and I wish you were even more tightly woven to me.
I'm not magic. I'm not clever. But I feel pretty good.
6.03.2010
attached
I get very attached--and I'm not saying this is a bad thing--to curling ribbon, and the way a whole mass of it looks in gold and silver and white spilling across the top of a carefully wrapped gift. I get very attached to jigsaw puzzles, to the pieces of dogwood blossoms taking slow shape above the red barn and striped river under the green sky. I learned this from my mom, and that's why last night we almost stayed up too late together trying to finish the one laid out on the table. It was hard to walk away. I get that from my mom, too. They're not vices, the ribbon and the puzzle pieces. Neither is the attachment I feel to my boyfriend's hillbilly voice or the way warm spring lightning sometimes creates the backdrop to a day. I am attached to the silver ring on my finger made to look like a leafy vine. Am attached to the cool, soft sensation that comes when I stretch my clean legs down along the length of my unmade bed. I'm not ashamed of little public indulgences taking the place of the big private ones I keep closed behind my lips. Much easier to admit to my clinging, velcro personality when under the heading of Addicted To I can start my list with curling ribbon and jigsaw.
6.01.2010
I wouldn't change a thing
I don't paint my nails often because I smudge them, I bite them, I dig my thumbnail down in the base of its neighbors while I'm waiting, while I'm telling a lie, while I'm half a mind gone. When I'm do paint them, I'm glad when you notice.
I woke up at midnight and the music from before I'd turned out the light was still playing--the mix cd from the wedding last weekend. Over and over You Light Up My Life.
I hate hate hate--as much anyone would--the feeling of helplessness when I can't take away the pain of someone I love. I want to thrust my fingernails under your skin, being careful not to leave a bruise, and pull out the offending aches and viruses. Wind them up around a spool and throw it in the fire.
I am dumbly trying to reward myself for good behavior with bad. I can walk for hours and stretch out my muscles until the sweat collects in drops all along my chest, down my stomach, running down to my ankles. And then I can crawl up into my bed with a pint of ice cream, and that ache of non-instant gratification dulls. It's a loss, on the whole, but my legs stretch further than they used to. I pull my arms into my side and can watch the muscles underneath my freckled shoulders bunch. I'll learn.
I'm afraid of going home. I mean, the old home. I am almost in tears when I think about the slot I used to slide into that has since closed and healed. I'm going anyway.
I am grateful to have someone to tease me onto the floor and plant a kiss on my forehead. I am grateful to have someone look past all my bumps and blotches and wayward hair and still call me beautiful.
I listened to a recording of a performance I gave five years ago--I stood on center stage backed up by an orchestra and played a concerto. I listened to it three times in a row because the first time listening through didn't go well and the second time I was hanging upside down and the blood was rushing to my face, but then the third time I was careful, and I was thankful that I did that once, and that I have proof. Because at least I can put myself in the shoes of the me who thought that was possible.
Last night I dreamed I was lost in the rain on a bike with tires losing pressure and I couldn't call for help because my cellphone had no service because a couch had been moved in the way. Which is really no crazier--or at least not much crazier--than the actuality of me, with the needing help and refusing to ask for it and the glacial cool that's actually just fear and the mercurial back and forth that makes up my evenings and nights.
I'm healing. I don't think I'll always be so sober. I mean, I think I'll learn to find the joy in it all again. We'll get there at the same time.
I woke up at midnight and the music from before I'd turned out the light was still playing--the mix cd from the wedding last weekend. Over and over You Light Up My Life.
I hate hate hate--as much anyone would--the feeling of helplessness when I can't take away the pain of someone I love. I want to thrust my fingernails under your skin, being careful not to leave a bruise, and pull out the offending aches and viruses. Wind them up around a spool and throw it in the fire.
I am dumbly trying to reward myself for good behavior with bad. I can walk for hours and stretch out my muscles until the sweat collects in drops all along my chest, down my stomach, running down to my ankles. And then I can crawl up into my bed with a pint of ice cream, and that ache of non-instant gratification dulls. It's a loss, on the whole, but my legs stretch further than they used to. I pull my arms into my side and can watch the muscles underneath my freckled shoulders bunch. I'll learn.
I'm afraid of going home. I mean, the old home. I am almost in tears when I think about the slot I used to slide into that has since closed and healed. I'm going anyway.
I am grateful to have someone to tease me onto the floor and plant a kiss on my forehead. I am grateful to have someone look past all my bumps and blotches and wayward hair and still call me beautiful.
I listened to a recording of a performance I gave five years ago--I stood on center stage backed up by an orchestra and played a concerto. I listened to it three times in a row because the first time listening through didn't go well and the second time I was hanging upside down and the blood was rushing to my face, but then the third time I was careful, and I was thankful that I did that once, and that I have proof. Because at least I can put myself in the shoes of the me who thought that was possible.
Last night I dreamed I was lost in the rain on a bike with tires losing pressure and I couldn't call for help because my cellphone had no service because a couch had been moved in the way. Which is really no crazier--or at least not much crazier--than the actuality of me, with the needing help and refusing to ask for it and the glacial cool that's actually just fear and the mercurial back and forth that makes up my evenings and nights.
I'm healing. I don't think I'll always be so sober. I mean, I think I'll learn to find the joy in it all again. We'll get there at the same time.
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