April 29th poem

I wanted to write you to say how much I admired you, but I was too tired

I meet Jill at a bar.  She's encouraged me to go outside to see the other humans on the sidewalks and in the parking lots, after dark even, even after bedtime.  But when we lean toward one another across the booth to say some things, to check in, the acoustics are horrible, bad sound system bouncing my ear drums.  All I want to do is eat fries and commiserate.  When Jill spots a table outside, she sits up straight, then locks eyes.  "Should we?  Ok, quick!" and she's at the door, plate in hand while I'm still back at the booth goofily trying to pick up a coaster with two spare fingers.  Sometimes you can be too careful.  Other times, you can grab what you need in your own two hands and make your move while you can.  Later at home, I want to text her about how much I really admire her for all she's done-- I mean, besides spotting the table.  The life of her.  But I'm too tired to figure out what to say. 

*

All these full-souled women searching around for the next thing to do, here in the latter days of whatever the hell this is-- I see you.  How brave we've been.  How nervous.  I'll set a catalpa flower on an altar.  A prayer card showing a mother holding her child.  Rock from some quarry somewhere.  I'm tapping out signals on the network.  Is it clear across town? How's the sunrise in Joshua Tree?  How goes the scything and God?  How soon until you can stand by the water again in northern Michigan?  

April 28th Poem

How Wondrous Strange to Be in a Body 

You might as well know, my son says while looking at a transforming robot, that his legs open up.  He flips open compartments on the thighs, revealing nothing.

Later I sit on a camping chair in the backyard, after the two irises have bloomed but before the mosquitoes.  I blow bubbles for him, and he chases them with a metal spoon.  Make more villains! he cries.  I am wheezing, like the dying mother from My Life As a Dog.  Mine is only newly hatched asthma.  Pollen.  Though come to think of it, once as a teenager I complained about something to my mother, saying that I was going to die.  Yes, she said.  You are.  (Might as well know.)

*
"Who are you?  Answer without your name, your job, the things you've done, friends or passions."

this light
these leaves
happy shrieks of children carried on breeze
mourning doves calling

leaf shadows
whatever poor spirit
is trapped in the myrtle

*
On the walk to preschool I'm telling my son how some people plan their flowers for maximum blooming-- spacing out the daffodils, the irises, the rose.  He asks if we can tap trees for sap sometime.  I think he saw it on PBS.  I tell him that that happens mostly in the northeastern United States.  "New England, it's called."  I'm imagining he hasn't been there, but he was an embryo there.  In Vermont ... the woman who wanted to practice her sound balancing ... she had me lie down in the meditation hut while she tapped at tuning forks over my chakras.  She says that's something is stuck in my second chakra, a blockage ... tapping, tuning in, kneeling over my pelvis.  Then I feel a whoosh and she falls back on her heels.  After that, the implantation happened.  I noticed the spotting and put it together later.  I don't tell my son this on our walk.  He stands up from his stroller to adjust the stuffed cloth tail he's pinned to the back of his pants.  Blue with white spots.

April 27th poem

What It Is: Notes Toward Something Real

*

I wanted to write something real, but

I couldn’t remember the name of my goat

friend. The goat had had a rough birth,

leaned against my hip

in a muddy field in Vermont. 

I was newly pregnant, shiny and baffled. 

It will be ok, little goat mother,

us mothers said to each other

through our bodies. 

*

In my notes from writing group, Margaret's comment 

women’s bodies as failed performance of a cultural ideal

*

I was thinking about being pregnant in New York—

All that first trimester dizzy on the subway stairs, a descent,

uncertain destination.  Hormone fog, muddy mind.  Tadpole in mud.

 (I was really very dizzy and had no job.  I was

back together with my boyfriend.  I was

hot in the summer and had to only eat the right

amount of food, not too much and not too

little.  What am I doing. What mystery am I.) 

All through this haze, up to the quickening the glow

the metamorphosis the tearing the shit and fluids and

meeting another human so gloriously himself and

also a space and time traveler I could tell all through it,

but especially that first summer, the thought recurred: 

I would not require this of another woman, I would not

ask her to go through with this if she could not.

*

I’ve been wanting to record the dream I had that Charles Bronson electrified a crowd at a protest by singing a spiritual.  He looked completely different than I remembered, tall and lanky with a lean face like the red-haired Irish priest in the show about demons.  This Charles Bronson was flamboyantly gay, but my mind is thinking buoyant.  I realize then rigid machismo will crack open and make way.  That there is much else to electrify us.  Spaces to make for one another.  

*

What is it?  What?  What?

Making tea, my mind searches around

For what is different.  Then, a click:

Oh, I’m not in the young woman’s game

anymore.  I no longer require the approval

of others.  I step toward the kettle, just

as a metal colander falls from a stack

of dishes in the drying rack.  My thought

having jostled it.  Reach out

and catch it with one hand. 

April 26th poem

Poetics of Space

I sought attics and closets as a child and could often be found under a covered table or tucked behind a door. I hid in corners, under beds, and behind recliners—anywhere dark, snug, quiet, and out of view, as if. As if forgotten places could hold off the loud fading of Adult. As if I were looking for a maximum closeness, some limit or boundary that would batten me up, put a brake on the pulling apart and scattering of self into the world. And now, in rare minutes, in a quiet room at low light, I can still find some solid calm of lonely, a steady holding-it-together in my skin.    --Amanda Emerson

You know your family life was ok if you never had to hide in a closet.  I never had to hide in a closet. There are different levels of ok, and this is one.  When I was seven, we moved from an apartment into a rented house, and I had two twin beds in my room, in case of guests.  I got new comforters-- white with small yellow and orange flowers with black at the center.  I decided then that I liked the color yellow, though in the past I'd taken it as an affront.  That year for Easter, I woke up to a basket in my room-- candy and two LPs, Mickey Mouse Disco and Donna Summer's Bad Girls, which I loved.  What I was going to say is that I set up an office for myself in the closet.  I'm not sure I had many clothes, but I didn't notice that for a couple more years.  Maria Montessori speaks of the "prepared environment," how children respond to their surroundings and benefit from being able to manipulate real, utilitarian objects in their space.  It takes so little to make a soul.  An old kitchen chair and TV tray under a bare bulb.  A bowl of popcorn and some Kool-Aid.  A secondhand manual typewriter.  Kind regard.  A library card.  The chance to sit in one's closet alone staring into the middle distance for a bit, then beginning to type.  

April 25th poem

Fragments from April Notebook


All my attempts at April Fool's were wish fulfillment.  I was jetting off to Paris!  I had a fellowship in Iceland!  Goodbye, goodbye! 

*
Called my grandmother and she said, "You look like a frail little thing, but you're strong."  

* 
My mind keeps walking the same paths.  I'm meditating on a bench by the Neckar with my mother.  My brother is a newborn.  We are supposed to see a lake in our mind's eyes.  To let the ripples come and go.  But I keep peeking to see if my brother is still in his carriage.  And anyway, we're sitting in front of an actual river.  

*

The ways of our people are subtle and various. 

*
Dream that Mick Jagger picked me up at a concert.  I thought we were going to be lovers, but he took me home and deposited me among the orphans his wife was caring for. 

*

Am I past the saving age?

*
Sign spotted along the highway: 

Best Bier
Stop Here

April 24th poem

The Artist 

You move to a cold climate and meet an artist on an online dating site.  When he contacts you, his profile is an image of his face squashed against a scanner, so you can't really see what he looks like.  Still, he seems smart and funny, and on the phone you like how his voice is a cross between a public radio announcer and a young Jack Nicholson-- soothing, affable, with an edge of danger.  You meet him at a bakery with good soup and high ceilings, and unsure of what to do with all the space, you read him a passage from the book of Lorrie Moore stories you're re-reading.  He is working as a manny when you meet, and his suite of rooms in a large house in the suburbs overlooks a lake.  Huge paintings he's done line the walls-- angry self-portraits, blurred landscapes.

Years later, you are still friends and living with different people in different states.  Your climate is warmer and greener for more of the year.  Your relationship went down a weird alley and never re-emerged.  Part of you feels that you are still in there, but you would never admit it to your artist friend.  He has won fellowships and had work exhibited in galleries and museums.  It's hard to keep track of all his news.  You video chat with him while he's on fellowship in Berlin.  There is something of the penitent about his space and his haircut, something vulnerable and new.  For a minute, you don't know what to do with yourself again.

You're always planning a collaborative project, but they never take off.  In one, you were to write a script for some sort of cryptic self-help video.  Another was to be a book of his drawings and your words.  The drawings he sends are barely there-- spare black lines curving against a white background.  You write something about feelings in response, but it doesn't suit.  Every few weeks, you speak on the phone, and every once in a while the artist asks if you are angry, if something has happened between you.  No.  What has happened is that you had a baby, now a small child, not yet in school full-time.  Some days you are so tired you can't remember which way to turn the light switch for "on."

You live with a musician who is preparing his exhibit for the electronic music festival.  He translates computer data into audio files, then feeds them into a keyboard.  He tells you about it at length, but your mind glances off the information.  In the background of your mind, you're busy writing, but that's hard to explain.  Your partner is capable of not hearing others when he is concentrating.  He's capable of concentrating every day after work for weeks on end.  Mostly you are tired in the evenings.  One evening, though, you shut yourself in the bedroom to write a poem.  The musician knocks on the door tentatively soon after.  You say, "What!" in the sharpest way possible.e  He needs a shirt because it's cold in his office.  You've just written your first line, and you hold your pen aloft, hovering over the paper, staring into space as he quickly walks in for his shirt and back out again, closing the door behind him.

April 23rd poem

On Angels and Other Things

Didn't I once write a poem about Wim Wenders, Wings of Desire? 

And didn't I once watch Herzog's movie about the eighteenth-
century villagers, all the parts played by hypnotized actors,

when R. was taking that seminar on the sublime?  Wasn't it
then that I walked out of his apartment on my own, around

the corner to get ice cream?  Maple walnut?  Didn't it

please me, the city, the people and their books and dogs

and basketballs, though I held myself apart, my habit?
Haven't I been all over?  I've been everywhere, man.

But what I started to tell you about was the angels, how
for a couple of years I dreaded going home for holidays, 

how I once sat alone in a wood-frame house in Lawrence,

Kansas, watching Wim Wenders' angels over Christmas. 

Maybe I made myself a meal.  Maybe I ate leftover cheese
and crackers.  Alone and inviolate is how I like to think

of myself, despite my myriad human connections, despite
all the minor molestations of this world, despite all the 

attendant angels, the one at my shoulder taking notes.  

April 22nd poem

 Afternoon in the Garden 

"Oh!" I tell Elias, who is four.  "The rhizomes want to be near the surface of the soil."  I've been reading up on thinning irises while he plays with the hose.  "See the thick brown root here?  Come look!  They're all connected with this.  It's supposed to be showing like that ..." I make him come to me.  We both look.

*
I've come out to plant the grassy things with purple flowers I bought at the pottery festival.  I've gotten a hand spade from the shed, and I go to the front to hack at at the flower bed by the porch, loosening the roots of encroaching vines, upending old bits of rubber and plastic.  Perhaps it's called a trowel, the thing I'm holding.  Nothing in the shed is mine.  Not really.  I find something that I think at first is a squashed golden ring, but it's just a gold packaging tie.  I'm a bit scared of it all.  The digging.  The finding.

*
I leave Elias to do some of the loosening of roots while I run to the back to retrieve something.  When I return to the front, he says, "Don't look," and I see that he's uncovered a pink worm and is afraid it's injured.  I reassure him, move the worm aside.  I pull out two hearty dandelion plants, continue trying to find space among the rocks and roots.  "This is what's nice about gardening," I'm thinking.  "You can be a little crazy, attacking certain things, nurturing others, red in the face, throwing yourself into a plan all your own."  Elias is backing away, holding his face carefully.  He is having a much different feeling.  "I feel bad for everything that grows," he says.

*
I get the grasses planted.  I stand to inspect things.  "All we have to do is cut the grass, maybe trim those bushes.  Later, we'll transplant some irises.  Oh, I need new begonias for my big pots.  I could have saved the begonias from last year in a bag in the shed, but I realized it too late."

"I'll remind you," he says.

*
Surveying the pollen-covered porch, I turn to Elias.

"You know what I need?" I say.

"A disguise?"

*
At bedtime, I'm telling my son's father about the irises.  I've let Elias replant the weeds in the back.  I've washed us off and cooled us down, fed us dinner.

"They're all connected with that big root," I'm saying.  "What's it called?  Rhizome, right?'

"That's what I call it," Elias says.

April 21st poem

The Artist

The punk performance artist I live with sends audio messages to one of my friends from my phone, which I only find later.  In the messages, he's shouting, "Yes!" and "no!" and "maybe!", punctuated by silence.  He wakes up and rummages around for his mask, settles for his cape, then discards it on the hallway floor when he's done.  We have a fight about that and he weeps.  He's so punk that he gives people fake names when introducing himself and takes conversations with strangers into weird and unexpected areas.  He feels things deeply.  Cries about a deflated balloon.  On a walk, we study the new spring color of leaves and stop to pick up rocks of interesting shape and possible mysterious power we can scarcely understand.  From his stroller, the artist looks high overhead and sees a barely visible object that I would have missed. Exclaims, "A daytime moon!"

April 20th poem

Rules of the Game 

When I was a young child, my mother played endless games of rummy with me because she read that card games make children smart.  She hated games, but I didn't know that at the time.  She was barely more than a child herself then, but already setting up conditions and interested in outcomes, already a social scientist with a qualitative bent.  Interested in developing my humanness.

*
Early in elementary school we played Mastermind.  One person set up a code of colored pegs, and the other person had to guess their order through a process of elimination.  I learned that if I was patient and went through every permutation in my mind, I could win.  I'm not sure I'd have the patience for it now, or the interest.

For a time in middle childhood, I was passionate about backgammon-- the counting, the focus, the satisfying slides and clicks of the pieces.  I haven't played it in years.  I couldn't tell you the rules.

*
A friend of my mom's from her hometown reports that once he and my biological father, David,  made a trip to see us when my mother was in grad school.  David was reportedly disturbed that I cheated at a board game we all played, worrying that I'd turn out to be a bad person.  I play by a pretty decent set of rules now, but as a child I could be wily.  The visitors came and went, and I retain only the dimmest memory.  I didn't know then that my father was my father.  

*
Rolling dice with Anna to see who would go first in Monopoly the first time she came to my house, we got the same number ten times in a row.  We were thirteen, and she would be my closest friend for approximately the next ten years.  Maybe more.

*
My great-grandmother Eva loved games.  She would dress up and go to someone's house to sit at a card table for hours, talking, playing, and probably drinking.  Sometimes she would even spend a few days with friends.  This was my grandmother's mother-in-law, and she is the one who tells me about it.  At that time, my grandmother worked as a clerk at a bank and left her small children with Eva, who was not an attentive babysitter, which arrangement threatened to derange the poor young mother's mind.  She still speaks of Eva's great sense of style with admiration.  But I have never known my grandmother to play games.

*
Flicking pennies into an empty jar on top of the TV with Ross in graduate school in a Philadelphia row house.  Another time he learned that I really can't catch a ball, and he had me stand in the cobbled alley and catch a football fifty times in a row.  If I missed the catch, we started over at one. (Imagine a very tall poet who had been a college athlete.  And ... me.)  For a while, I was part of the gang.  Next door, Peg lived alone despite the dementia, and we talked to her about her childhood when she wandered outside.  Was there something about the Prohibition and hiding in a coal bin?  Ross found her crying in the alley once about when her mother was coming back, and we took her back inside.  In her kitchen, everything was labeled.  Clock.  Coffeemaker.  Stove.  Her daughter came to check on her during the day, but after a while Peg no longer lived there.  This was after Mark found her out in the snow in her nightgown, at the end of the alley, waiting for someone. 

*

Over Thanksgiving, illness and looming mortality.  Playing a word association game with family, our minds slide away from the clues that speak of death and misfortune.  For now, at least, we are here around the table together, focused on the same game.