Enero 2009 Archives

Bird in a buckeye tree

The dreams I have lately upset me so
Like gale force wind or news of a death
Like the image of a dead bird body among the leaves, fallen and moist, already in rigor
obviously gone on beyond the canopy of the old growth shadows.
Or the crack of one twig breaking in the quiet of the night.
I worry over snowflakes, and frozen streets,
rubbing the buckeye you wore
raw against your thumb before you passed it on to me, i look down at
a blistering thumb distracted from the fiery friction of your hand on my heart.

The sound of my minor chord shakes tears free from the place in my throat, in my chest,
So near the surface, where shallow breath rises
in strangled, wrangled puffs caught and thick behind my breastplate.

you insist there are soft parts
and you have found them
but I just can't imagine what that must mean to you, what you will do with those tender parts now that you have seen them once, twice, again and again.
And I hated you for saying, the way you would say anything simple and true,
That you held on to them.
It felt and still feels like the sting and stench of second hand smoke
Familiar and full of holes
Like a cage
And I, like a bird
With nothing but a beak to bite mildly and sing sadly against it
Inside this little space you built to keep me safe
but it will not protect me from myself.

John Updike passed away.
and it makes me feel ready to apologize profusely.

i am pretty smart
except when it comes to
being afraid of what you must think of me.
For a while I was trying to pretend that I can't guess what you are thinking and it was a good experiment but I stopped
now I think I will begin the experiment again because whenever I think I know what you are thinking I think you are thinking bad things about me. And that is what I am sorry for, for quitting when the wondering-instead-of-guessing experiment had only begun to work, for thinking you hate me.

sure have been good to me.

there are those of you who refrain from commenting;
and there are those of you who just avoid reading the comments.
both options are fine; if there is something you need to know i will call attention to it... which is exactly why i want you to keep reading:

in response to the comment from (my new friend, if its ok to call you that) "north carolina"
i'm not sure exactly who you are, you north carolinian wonder, but it is okay if you go ahead and speak for the whole damn state because
and i may be just flattering myself here,
but you sure do know a few greats.
here is where i went for the audio of Tony Hoagland
http://poetryfoundation.org/journal/audioitem.html?id=377
and i really really liked that.
read: if you are having a bad day go listen to mr hoagland and you will probably feel better.

and as far as victor lavalle is concerned, i'll just go ahead and recommend him around generously, generally because my sister graduated from mills college, where he teaches and also, very importantly:
on his wikipedia page (iknow, i'm cringing too) but if you do ever accidentally go to wikipedia at least you can find an article with a link that reads
"Personal essay about LaValle's sexual adventures as an obese man."

and now i'll leave you to your thoughts and research...

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. ... Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

~ Martin Luther King, Jr. Where Do We Go from Here : Chaos or Community? (1967)

i bought a new computer. i am still wondering what it would mean if i wrote that i had to...
did i really have to?
i feel very nervous about it; i think one day i might live in a third world country where a new computer would be less important, and so i wouldn't even want to buy one. then i wouldn't have to deal with the guilt over having bought one.

so i make sacrifices, sort of reverse bargaining with myself. i say, you just bought that computer, you can't have that chocolate croissant. or i tell myself it will be a while until i can buy the boots i want.

and i keep wondering how i can earn my computer, even though (and this is very american i am sure) i already have it in my possession.

which is probably why i am finally writing.
today is the anniversary, two years, i have had my job as the children and family minister.
and also, i am discovering my worth in general, what makes me worth something and to whom i might be worth more than i thought.

to whom i might mean more than i thought.

and also, the man i love has commissioned a little poem, on the occasion of my needing and loving him, in the messy, drowning in it way that i do.

here is the poem i am writing down for him because i wrote it and never actually wrote it down and wasn't going to until he said he wanted me to... and he asked twice, so i know he really means it.

us, molluscs

the broken mirror of our being from the same family but not the same
shows more than it used to: you reflect on me, in the shards, that you hope
i am disconnected from my worst parts, only for a moment,
that i will always be myself but you are
willing to pick gingerly through the confused scraps for the fragment that reflects
the part of me that says
it is good to see you, in the silence
i love you

and i bought this hokey little card that has a picture drawn on it
of a man kneeling and he seems to be proposing to the knees of a girl but in his hand
there is no jewelry box
there is only a lovely little lobster
and it says something terrible about how they sat by the sea and promised all of their days of forever together.

so while i'm not a big proponent of forever, i never really intended to live even this long,
i am realizing i have all this extra time coming soon (everything after my 30th birthday i'm counting as freebie),
and since this is all turning out to be much more than i bargained for
i think i will give forever a second thought and get back to you, in bits, perhaps, but to you for sure.

there is a band called idlewild, i like that band.

but the name reminds me of how things are going around here.
vacation is a break from the routine; some of us don't exactly thrive without a routine.

we are a little wonky, a little trying to hold still with wild fervor, or to idle in the wilderness between terms. it is shocking really.
people ask how Christmas was, what it was like to be home.
i realized two things on our recent trip to california.

first: people wanted me to talk about myself, in a way they could quickly and easily process, but it seemed to make every conversation awkwardly one-sided, in a terrifying sort of way. but they were really just trying to figure some things out--i wish it hadn't been so difficult for me.
second: you can do all the changing and growing and maturing you want but when you step out into the landscape you used to call home--the air, the hills, the insects and rotten wood, the concrete and clouds--your growth, your self, is suddenly accosted by the invisible forces that made you the way you were and all this atmosphere calls to the old ways, attracts them, they rise to the surface of your coping skill soup like fat separating from the broth. and they sit there, on the surface.
and then, rather than pop like bubbles in a soda, they cool and congeal and condense.

i was wearing all these around, like little weak spots in the surface of myself for a good eight days. at one point i called nathan and asked why all this bothers me so much and he said that i'm going to have to grieve the fact that those old skills don't serve me anymore, that i will grieve the friendships that used to buoy me and those i love. i began to cry and asked, how can this be? i tried so hard, i worked so hard for these relationships and they just disappeared. i accidentally changed, or maybe changed on purpose and now everything else is different and it would be bad enough if things were different because i hate change, but it is especially bad because i feel so lost and confused because faces, places, smells and tastes that used to comfort me have lost their effect.
he said i'm going to have to grieve but for now i should just go have a beer and get through it.
* * * *

the extended entry is a copy of a recent post on nathan's blog, he took it down but i think it is really important.

even though we are sleeping in our own beds, we are no longer their guests, just talking to folks from the places we grew up has become even more dangerous now that we are even more aware of ourselves and our pain.