water from stone

Milosz:

2010-12-25T10:50:00.002-06:00

...

Perhaps we should have represented him otherwise
Than in the form of a dove. As fire, yes, but that is beyond us.
For even when it consumes logs on a hearth
We search in it for eyes and hands. Let him then be green,
All blades of calamus, running on footbridges
Over meadows, with a thump of his bare feet. Or in the air
Blowing a birchbark trumpet so strongly that farther down
There tumbles from its blast a crowd of petty officials,
Their uniforms unbuttoned and their women's combs
Flying like chips when the ax strikes.

from "Sentences," Selected Poems, ed. Hass.

Agostinho Neto:

2010-08-09T12:31:00.002-05:00

two years away

Greetings--you say in yesterday's letter
when shall we see each other
soon or later
tell me love?

In the silence
are the talks we did not have
the kisses not exchanged
and the words we do not say
in censored letters

Against the dilemma of today
of being submissive or persecuted
are our days of sacrifice
and audacity
for the right
to live thinking to live acting
freely humanly

Between dreams and desire
when shall we see each other
late or early
tell me love!
more justly even grows
the longing to be
with our peoples
today always and ever more
free free free

PIDE Prison in Oporto, Angola, February 1957
from Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing, ed. Jack Mapanje

Neruda:

2010-07-18T10:46:00.002-05:00

From so many rough hands
descended the tool,
the wineglass,
even the famous curve
of the hip that then pursued
the whole woman with its design!

The hand that forms
the wineglass of the form,
it conveys the pregnancy of the barrel
and the lunar line of the bell.

I ask some mighty hands
to help me
change the profile of the planets:
triangular stars
the traveler needs:
constellations like cold dice
of square clarity:
those hands that extract
secret rivers for Antofagasta
until the water rectifies
its avarice lost in the desert.

I want all the hands of men
to knead mountains
of bread and to gather
all the fish from the sea,
all the olives
from the olive tree,
all the love not yet wakened
and to leave a gift
in each of the hands
of the day.

Starbucks

2010-04-15T09:19:00.000-05:00

In the buff-bright sunlight
He is talking about his technologically-incompetent
wife, telling all
To the lipsticked girl in the well-cut blazer and her
open-mouthed Prada bag, while
She tells him about her crazy Jeff and their beautiful
brand-new condo

At the public confessional
They talk in tones of stainless-steel
all is well, oh, more than well
He she it they and I have a little of what you want:
exchange cards quickly, for
Breaktime’s over, business is waiting,
and so is, somewhere, Jeff

Rachel Wetzsteon:

2010-01-16T11:41:00.003-06:00

i.

Deepen,
leaves, not with what
has made us sorry but
with what was profound about that
sorrow.

ii.

Make me
spontaneous,
gathering winds, but don’t
blow so giddily I teeter
too much.

iii.

Songs I
listened to all
summer long, accept my
thanks: to regress is not to move
backward.

iv.

Splash of
patchouli on
my wrist, remind me that
in this cauldron there is a world
elsewhere.

v.

Smile! Those
days of humid
agony have earned you
the right to a hundred purple
sunsets.

vi.

Come, fall,
I can feel you
stirring, I can hardly
wait for the things that will happen
come fall.

in memorium

G. K. Chesterton:

2010-01-16T10:23:00.002-06:00

The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.

--from Orthodoxy.

Milosz again, and a reminder:

2010-01-14T12:51:00.002-06:00

To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. Not to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness.

(Berkeley--Paris--Cambridge, 1981-1983).

A sharp reminder from a friend today that I need to first consider myself a writer, a writer learning-to-be-a-writer, and make any other work the work that exists to fund my writing: a welcome reminder.

Victory

2009-08-14T13:51:00.001-05:00

David hears the words and
doesn’t hear them. Absalom
is dead. He looks at the herald,
tinted with battle-grime, flush
with delight over war, over victory
won at no cost to himself.
How is it with my son, how is it
with Absalom? he asks and knows
before he asks but still
the room dissolves. All worlds
are stilled inside his mind, all suns
extinguished, but for one.
Outside no wind is sounding
on the porch; the trees are silent,
people, silent, streets, lights,
silent, silent. Victory is
the ringing of a silent bell,
a swinging pendulum
inside an empty glass, a smile
without a place to rest,
a face without a curve
to break the emptiness.

The Lotus Lantern: part 4: "Go Now!"

2009-08-08T13:19:00.002-05:00

I’d sometimes thought, hidden away in the magic forest, that it would be nice to have company. Some nights, when the wind was high in the dark trees and the strange spirits were picking fights with my servants, and it took three thousand calming breaths to still my mind to concentration—at times like those I sometimes felt lonely for human voices.

The night Lingzhi brought Chenxiang to me was such a night. The wraiths had been troubling the dogs and the dogs had been worrying the white fairies and the white fairies had been flitting through my study doors, interrupting my meditation, spoiling my calligraphy. And suddenly a keening wail had sounded through the blinds, a sharp wail that sent the spirits scattering.

I got to my feet in haste and found a distracted woman at the door, bearing a weeping burden. -Holy Firebolt Immortal, I have come bearing the human son of Goddess San Shengmu, whose brother has trapped her beneath the mountain.

I stepped aside and gave them hospitality. The winds had been telling me of the sorrow of San Shengmu; the storms had been delivering messages of wrath from the Heavenly Hall. And I’d had a dream about a boy with black eyes and a heart that beat like the heroes’ hearts of old.

-Chenxiang, I said, taking the burden into my arms. My eyes met the eyes of the child and he ceased his crying. -I will teach you magic and power and strength, Chenxiang. I will teach you how to be a hero.

Lingzhi was bent over with grief and weariness. Her mouth trembled when she spoke. -Help me raise this child and send him out, when he is of age, to rescue his mother, and I will go with him then, and we will leave you again in peace. I do not know what else to do.

And I laughed until the empty house rang harshly with the sound, and the moss on the roof stirred nervously, and the animals hid themselves. I led Lingzhi into the kitchen and boiled the tea.

-I have been waiting for you two for longer than I can remember. Don’t threaten to leave me in peace. Not yet.

*

Years drop away like the petals on the lotus flower. I taught Chenxiang how to be a hero. But one night I woke with a cold truth settled in my stomach: with his quick-learning fingers Chenxiang had spun time into quicksilver and it had all but slipped away. He was fifteen now: a man. I would have to say goodbye.

And when I lifted my head from the pallet I saw him standing in the doorway, his mobile young face pale with dreams. -Firebolt Immortal, Chenxiang said, and waited for my permission to speak before continuing. -I have had a dream: a beautiful woman calling herself Mother was trapped beneath a mountain, begging for my help. And a giant calling himself Uncle came and stood in front of her. And before I could help her he’d swept her away. What was this dream?

I gestured for Chenxiang to sit before me, and motioned with my hand for a light to encircle us. -Your dream is true, Chenxiang. Long ago your mother, the Goddess San Shengmu, fell in love with your father, a mortal. And for this sin, and the sin of bearing you, your Uncle, the Divine Erlang, trapped her beneath a mountain.

Chenxiang’s uncanny dark eyes were fixed on mine. -I will rescue her, he said finally. -But how can I open the mountain with my hands? They are not strong enough.

I smiled at the boy. -You have wisdom and courage and the heart of the heroes of old, Chenxiang. These are weapons. Other tools will fall into your hands when you need them. But the power is in you.

Chenxiang rose; standing before me he seemed as tall as a mountain, and his eyes were luminous. -When shall I go, Master?

I knew in my heart that the time had come to bless him and send him out. I surged to my feet and threw up my arms, a wild laugh and a tide of grief rushing up from the depths of my house and through my aged frame like a mighty wind.

-Go now, son. Go now!

And Chenxiang went.

Oh, Canada.

2009-08-02T19:01:00.001-05:00

Sometimes you are impossible.
Look what you’ve done, or not done,
to your reputation—trailed it in fading shreds
over embassy rooftops, loaded it with a lack
of significance, hemmed and hawed and
bashfully pawed at the back of the Queen’s lace skirt.
You don’t even know what you’re worth:
you are the one to sit, self-effacing, tapping
your fingers on the smooth tabletop
while the others gossip around you,
or lurk at the back of the party, the only one
pushed by Mum to come, in hopes
you’d turn out alright. You don’t see
your own clear-eyed beauty, your swift
logic, quick love, your smile
which shivers out of you at every motion:
you don’t know what you have, that
your darkness is true black, your lights
are great flashes of green on an innocent sky.
Since you don’t know yourself, you haven’t
taught the rest to fear you, taught them
to lurk in your shadow, or held
the attention of a room. But soon,
soon.

Growing kind

2009-07-31T11:21:00.001-05:00

Every time you plant a leaf
your heart grows bigger. Spin the blind,
see how the light cuts vectors through
the shadows on the sill
where things are growing
upwards with a green-tipped will.
Your heart will grow and grow
beyond its own height
in the soil, a sheltered hope
in something new, a scent or memory,
an infinitely tender shoot.
And it will dye the colour
of the air a gentler tone,
will strike a balance between known,
unknown, a metaphor for death
delayed, a proud green tower
in your mind, grown kind.

A room

2009-06-26T18:57:00.001-05:00

I took a hundred pictures of the room
from different angles, trying to catch
the way the sun crept on the floor, the fringe
of each scarf on the wall, the fall
of shadow on the carpet, books
in quiet celebration on the shelf—I held
my hand against the window, memorized
the edge of all my fingers on the pane,
the cars lining the lane, the colours
of the tree behind the glass.
I tried to stop time in my eyes, so that
the room would be there when I left,
so that my life would stop, revolve
inside a peaceful shell, so that I’d keep
a kind of refuge in my mind, preserve
a box of joy I could not rearrange.
But still the picture’s changed.
The minute that I handed back the keys
and gave away the room, I lost my right
to life inside. I could not freeze time
and should I have tried? Pictures do shift.
The glimpse of light inside them is a gift.

Solomon

2009-06-11T05:30:00.001-05:00

Solomon, how many miles will she travel
before she arrives at your gate?
She won’t miss it, that’s certain—
it’s the only one blindingly bright
with gilt and stones, and inside
the city is going mad with knowledge,
and everyone carries their paperback copies
of your collected works,
and eats up words mashed into jam
on bread studded with statements, seeds
divided into diagrams.
When at last her carriage pulls up
at your house, built in your signature
architectural style,
slathered with gew-gaws, public art
covered in scales and owls and silhouettes
of your powerful visage, she’ll stop
and gather all her courage,
shout at the slave boy dropping her train
in order to pick his nose,
and sweep inside. The Queen of Sheba
knows herself to be a stunner,
knows her questions to be strong,
and has her chequebook ready: she will buy
it all: encyclopaedias, poems, psalms, and even
the dictums, provided your answers impress.
“What must I do, what must I do,” she stammers,
broken at the sight of you,
your massive throne, the wisdom
emanating from your ears—
“what must I do to inherit eternal life?
Sometimes my riches burden me. The smell
of saffron in the air just makes me want
to buy things. But surely you know God on earth:
show me how you found your joy.”
And when she drops her brilliant eyes
will you be kind? You will.
You know your time is running out. The binding
on the books is new
but it will fail. You look at this small Queen
and at her slave boy, at the way she bows
to you as to a god, and then you sigh
the earth’s own sigh, and then you lead her off
and show her all your wealth,
and when her vacation ends, she goes:
but what you answered her, no-one knows.

Seeing is believing

2009-05-23T08:50:00.000-05:00

Don’t allow yourself to suffer much.
The tree outside your window is a sign
that something stands outside your life,

unknowing of your inner strife,
a lack of memory strong against your fear
that pain recalled must be preserved,

or worse, perpetually deserved.
This naked tree outside your window
stirs her branches and a rush

of new green hides the woody blush,
shuts out the fiercest aspect of the sky,
deflects the spectrum’s restless parts—

so you must let your heart
burst out in green; so you must sink
the wound beyond its power to be seen.

Excerpt from The Book of Merlyn:

2009-05-21T07:53:00.003-05:00

"I hope you are not being stupid about children," asked Merlyn, looking vaguely about him. "We have high authority for being born again, like little ones. Grown-ups have developed an unpleasant habit lately, I notice, of comforting themselves for their degredation by pretending that children are childish. I trust we are free from this?"

"Everybody knows that children are more intelligent than their parents," [said Arthur].

"You and I know it, but the people who are going to read this book do not."

"Our readers of that time," continued the necromancer in a grim voice, "have exactly three ideas in their magnificent noodles. The first is that the human species is superior to others. The second, that the twentieth century is superior to other centuries. And the third, that human adults of the twentieth century are superior to their young. The whole illusion may be labelled Progress, and anybody who questions it is called puerile, reactionary, or an escapist. The March of Mind, God help them."

He considered these facts for some time, then added: "And a fourth piece of scientific clap-trap which they are to have, rejoices in the name of anthropomorphism. Even their children are supposed to be so superior to the animals that you must never mention the two creatures in the same breath. If you begin considering men as animals, they put it the other way round and say that you are considering animals as men, a sin which they hold to be worse than bigamy. Imagine a scientist being merely an animal, they say! Tut-tut, and Tilly-fol-de-rido!"

"Who are these readers?"

"The readers of the book."

"What book?"

"The book we are in."

"Are we in a book?"

"We had better attend to the job," said Merlyn hastily.

-T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn, from The Once and Future King. London: Voyager, 1977. pp. 710-11.

Directive for restlessness

2009-05-20T06:20:00.003-05:00

Walk up on the bridges:
stand where you can see the arc
of low-flying seagulls on the water.

Think of places you have been
and places you have yet to see—
know your life to be a spark

of white on something
fast and dark and rippling.
Even now your feet are aching

to be gone from where they stand
precarious over the water,
erect against the ancient air.

Under where your hand
is clenched around the bar, mark
how the seagulls dance against the dark.

Neruda:

2009-05-19T05:08:00.003-05:00

So many things fall from the pine--
green mustaches,
music,
cones like craggy stones
or armadillos--
like a book about to lose its leaves.

It too fell in my face,
the subtle petal
bearing a black seed:
it was a hymenopteran wing
of the pine tree,
a transmigration
of smoothnesses
in which flight unites
with the roots.

They fall,
drops of the tree:
punctuation,
vowels, consonants,
violins,
falling rain,
silence,
everything falls from the pine,
from the vertical air:
the fragrance falls,
the shadow riddled
by the daylight,
the night clear
as milk of moon,
the night black
as that absence.

Dawn breaks.

And a new day
falls
from the top of the pine,
falls with its clock,
with its needles
and its holes,
and in the dusk
the pine needles sew
another night to the light,
another day to the night.

Pablo Neruda, "House of Manteras in Punta del Este," (1968) from The Hands of Day, tr. William O'Daly. Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2008.

Bright end

2009-05-16T06:26:00.003-05:00

I think you know because I told you
I see our fate, I see our past
Seconds from the aftermath
A heart that’s full up like a landfill

Throwing candy out to the crowd, dragging down the main
And we stare at the sun
Wanderers this morning came by
When are you gonna come down

Lookin back on my life
This car turned over without a key or gasoline tonight

In the sky the birds are pulling rain
Gold teeth and a curse for this town were all in my mouth
Something’s happening, don’t speak too soon
You say what’s mine is mine
We’re at two feet down
Sjáum yfir rá

Something in me was dying
I was getting ready to be a threat
I heard that now you’re calling
Suppose I said
Here’s the bright end of nowhere

Some of this sound familiar? It should... here's the trick: pull the first line from 21 songs in a row on shuffle and voila: a sometimes surprisingly cohesive poem, and 21 violations of copyright! Ready, set, anarchy!

Lobotomy

2009-05-11T10:04:00.001-05:00

What you need is silence, more than
broken clocks can offer, more than
lack of motion can ensure. What I mean is
more along the lines
of the bodily removal of your brain
which won’t shut up when you are writing,
which changes every practice line
into a public fair
and decorates all new ideas
with a glittery litany of clichés. I must insist.
Remove your brain. Be careful
as you lift it out, so that the spark plugs
don’t connect with water.
Don’t count on anything
being fixed if you mistakenly
cross the blue and black wires
or dip your nerves in buzzing blood. But
if the worst occurs, remember
that all casualties’ names are listed
on a mounted plaque, the edge of which
is lined with gold. Nothing can match
the triumph of a brain-evicted verse.
Understand your probable death
to be a necessary evil. We believe
that one good poem is a prize
enough to merit your (sad) sacrifice.

The verandah

2009-04-24T03:58:00.003-05:00

This is where you sit
to hear the crickets
zipping up their jackets,
while the heavy satin
feathers of the owl unravel
overhead,within
the darkened polished halls
of ash and pine and poplar,
where you wait
to hear the water sip
the marble smoothness of the boat
in rhythm, and the
water creatures come
to worship at the shrine
of tangled roots
and leave their mark
along the steady purity of bark.
This is where you sit
to hear the loon
raise up her song
and if there is a moon
to dream, to let your thought break
on the silent surface of the lake.

Billy Collins:

2009-04-23T02:35:00.002-05:00

On Turning Ten

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

-from Sailing Alone Around the Room. New York: Random House, 2001.

Cracks

2009-04-17T05:55:00.000-05:00

Walk some way into the terrain of the morning
and you’ve already discovered the cracks,
the wedges in the perfect establishment of stone
you’d built up with confessional prayers.

Is it that God is not strong enough
or that your drive to sin wipes out your cleanliness?
You brandished your faith without hesitation,
and with it you damaged the road,

and soon you’ll abandon that path altogether.
What is it in His grace that saves you
when you pass it in your haste to leave?
To you it’s a road-sign, read and forgotten.

Is it that God is not strong enough
or that He turns over your wish for ease
and breaks up the path with His fingers,
and waits for you to fall? –If He is there at all.

You may have constructed this path yourself
with your richly imagined creed,
and your ripened piety is the key for your entry,
and His mercy the reason you never succeed.

The Lotus Lantern: part 3: "A Righteous Anger"

2009-04-13T15:29:00.002-05:00

I have never understood the attraction some gods and goddesses find to mortals. Mortals, with their small minds and their faulty devotion, their weaknesses. Long have I been of the opinion that humans and the Divine must not mix, lest our holiness become weakened too, the wine of our blood thinned by the water of theirs. But I am a kind god: mortals have nothing to fear from me. I send rain, I send crops, I empower earthly armies with might when they are setting out on missions I approve. I am good.

My anger, when they told me of my sister San Shengmu’s marriage to a mortal, of the birth of her mortal child, was good, too: a holy, clean, righteous anger.

I shouted my attendants away and then spoke to my silver servant Dog, letting the might in my voice frighten him into absolute stillness at my feet.

–She is bringing dishonour on our holiness! She has no business living with a mortal, much less bearing his weak children!

And then I rushed out from the Heavenly Hall where I had been reclining, flooded out on a cloud, making it boil and rumble under me, red with my displeasure. I halted my anger outside San Shengmu’s Temple and let my voice break the stillness with a blast.

- Goddess San Shengmu! You have dishonoured us, dishonoured me! Leave your Temple and give me the child and return to the Heavenly Hall!

My voice crackled in the air and hot angry tears exploded from the cloud beneath me; I sent a mighty wind sweeping through the entrance of San Shengmu’s Temple, blowing the terrified pilgrims out of it and off the mountain.

And then she was there, Goddess San Shengmu, bright as lightning, the Lotus Lantern high in her hand, a small white bundle in the other.

-Come to rest! she ordered the people flying off in the wind, and they came softly, befuddled, to rest on the mountainside.

-Divine Erlang, I have chosen what I have chosen, and it is no business of yours, she said to me, the Lantern sparkling dangerously.

I summoned the force of my Will, and it became soldiers, iron-clad marching soldiers, a thousand iron-clad marching soldiers in the whirlwind behind me. –Fetch the Lantern; fetch the child, I said to them, and my Will struck against the Will of Goddess San Shengmu with a mighty clash.

But then the Lotus Lantern exploded into brightness, and the brightness melted my soldiers into rain that poured down on the mountain, an iron-gray sluicing rain. I marshalled my breath again, and gathered my Will a second time, but the light from the Lotus Lantern invaded my lungs and drained me of energy.

And then the Goddess raised her Lotus Lantern still higher and I fell backwards, away from the Temple, off the mountain, my eyes fixed powerlessly on my sister’s white face, and the little bundle in her arms.

-Goddess San Shengmu! I roared as I fell, in an agony of rage. –You do not understand what humans are made of, how weak they are! You do not understand!

-And you have never understood your own weakness, my brother, she replied, and turned her face away from me to look into the face of the baby in her arms. But I continued to fall and fall away until I was sitting again in my throne in the Heavenly Hall, feverish with anger, my silver Dog quivering at my feet.

-Dog! I roared, and the Dog became like a dead dog, absolutely motionless, its breath suspended in its throat, waiting for me to speak.

-Wait until the moon is only a sliver, two nights from now, and when the night is at its darkest, be Silence itself and enter the Temple and steal the Lotus Lantern and bring it to me! And if you do not succeed, do not return or I will kill you.

And the Dog knew that what I said was good and bowed its head. And it did my bidding.

The next time it came into my presence, the Lotus Lantern, cold and blank, was clenched between its jaws. I seized the lamp with both my hands and felt its power hiding under the surface of the glass.

-Now nothing can stop the might of the Divine Erlang, I said. Now the Goddess will know the error of her choice.

And I thundered down from the Heavenly Hall and burst into the Temple of Goddess San Shengmu, and sent my Will in scampering beasts before me to chase out the angels and servants and helpers of the Goddess, until it was she alone standing before me between the pillars of her Temple, wearing a simple white sheath, her arms empty. But before I could ask what she’d done with the child, she raised both hands in the air and cried out.

-My son is dead. And my husband is gone to the Imperial City. And you have stolen my Lotus Lantern and disrupted the peace of my Temple. What more can you take from me, my brother? What have you come to do?

But there was no fear in the Goddess’ eyes, only defiance. And because of the defiance I took her out of her holy Temple, leaving its halls desolate and empty, and locked her beneath the weight of the mountain.

And when my sister’s tears reached me where I sat on my throne, I reminded myself,

You are good.

The Lotus Lantern: part 2: "The Compassionate One"

2009-04-05T06:11:00.001-05:00

They don’t realize how difficult it sometimes is to ceaselessly respond to everyone’s prayers, to always be the beneficent one, the gracious one, to always be beautiful. I’d been off in the country restraining, once and for all, the dreadful cancer sweeping through peasant houses, when Yanchang visited my house and found me absent. I’d been wielding my lotus lantern, releasing the blade of light to slice through the sickly darkness in the mountain towns, when he scrawled his frustrated message on my polished Temple floor. I’d been busy. His insolence made me boil over with Rage.

-Let it rain on Yanchang, I commanded the heavens. Let it storm on his stupid head. Let the lightning frighten him and the mud swallow his feet; let the damp seep into his stubborn bones; let his impatient ambition be slowed by sickness.

Then I sat down to eat and drink and watch the heavy mountain wind stir the trees, sending pink blossoms spiralling out of the darkness to litter across the Temple floor, fall limpid at my feet like blessings.

But in the bottom of my silver cup I saw Yanchang’s determined face set against the storm, his feet push on through the surge of mud. I threw it onto the floor and the wine scattered.

I lifted my silver bowl but in the swirl of soup I saw Yanchang’s tired arms drop the satchel he was holding as his tired legs gave out and his body dropped into the road. I threw the bowl away and the strength of my arm sent it out across the mountain.

I stormed out of my Temple, my maidservant Lingzhi dogging my heels, and stood beside my sacred fountain, watching the spray leap up in worship and golden fish dart in the water. But in the troubled surface I saw Yanchang’s body wracked with fever, alone in the flooded road. And I could no longer stop my own Compassion as it welled up in my soul.

-Rain, wind, lightning, cease, I roared, and it ceased.

-Lingzhi, be my old peasant mother, I said, sweeping my arm and making it so.

-San Shengmu, be her daughter, I said, and I was.

And down the mountain we swept with urgency and found the crumpled body of Yanchang. My eyes filled with tears as I lifted him from the mud. How could I have forgotten my compassion? I asked myself. He wanted to know the meaning of all Life, and that is worthy.

-Be there a cottage, I commanded silently, and there was, with a fire burning and a soup over the fire and a warm bed for Yanchang.

And we put him there. While Lingzhi tended the fire I sat by Yanchang’s side, my lotus lantern in my hand above his head, its beam encircling Yanchang’s sickness, driving it away.

-Be well, Yanchang, I said, and tried, with all my heart, to make it so.

Long I waited and long the lotus lantern released its light into the room, into Yanchang’s body, struggling to stride back into life. When his eyes opened at last Yanchang looked at me with gratitude, and I laughed and laughed with relief, the sound bell-like, belying my simple appearance. Yanchang frowned.

-Why are you laughing?

-You are grateful to me, but it is I who should be grateful to you, for teaching the Compassionate One to be compassionate, I said, and my cheeks went fire-rose despite my holy and eternal Calm.

Then Yanchang sat up, his sickness gone. –Goddess San Shengmu, he said, his eyes quite gentle. And when his hand grasped my wrist the lantern dropped away unnoticed.

Billy Collins:

2009-04-05T04:45:00.000-05:00

Every day the body works in the fields of the world
mending a stone wall
or swinging a sickle through the tall grass--
the grass of civics, the grass of money--
and every night the body curls around itself
and listens for the soft bells of sleep.

But the heart is restless and rises
from the body in the middle of the night,
leaves the trapezoidal bedroom
with its thick, pictureless walls
to sit by herself at the kitchen table
and heat some milk in a pan.

And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe
and goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,
and opens a book on engineering.
Even the conscience awakens
and roams from room to room in the dark,
darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.

And the soul is up on the roof
in her nightdress, straddling the ridge,
singing a song about the wildness of the sea
until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.
Then, they all will return to the sleeping body
the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,

resuming their daily colloquy,
talking to each other or themselves
even through the heat of the long afternoons.
Which is why the body--that house of voices--
sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen
to stare into the distance,

to listen to all its names being called
before bending again to its labour.

"The Night House," from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems. New York: Random House, 2001.

The Lotus Lantern: part 1: "The Meaning of Life"

2009-03-27T17:33:00.002-05:00

It took a long time to climb the mountain; my legs, unused to exercise, ached, and the leather satchel containing my books and inks weighed like rocks on my back. Worse, as I toiled up the path I kept seeing people descending, their faces enlivened by the Temple’s warming light, the goddess San Shengmu’s heavenly blessing shining in their eyes. They’d all forgotten the arduous journey upwards, and their happiness looked, to me, an awful lot like gloating.

There were sweet blossoms along the path, at least, and sometimes the stream flowed near the road, so I could stop and dip my hands into the water, or cool my feet, and rest my back. Sometimes I thought with irritation about what my father had said to me before I left on my journey:

-Yanchang, you are an old man already. How are you so old and still so young at the same time? You’re older than me.

He’d stamped his crooked feet and crackled with laughter as he left the kitchen, shaking his hands. I was not sure whether he meant his hands to shake so much, or if they’d begun shaking after he’d pulled the thousandth turnip out of his small square of stony earth. He claimed that he’d been fighting garden dragons and they’d pinched his nerves.

-The only dragon pinching you is in your brain, Father, I said under my breath to his departing back.

My father outwardly approved of my decision to study for the Imperial Examination, but inwardly I’d always thought he wished I’d be a farmer too. Bah! There were enough farmers in the world, and enough turnips. I wanted to study and figure out the meaning of life and then announce it to the farmers, thereby improving their quality of life. Looking up toward the peak of Hua mountain, soft in the evening light, pink and gold with blossoms, my eyes softened too.

-The goddess will understand.

When I reached the Temple it was nearly dark and I was cross with exertion, tired, and hungry, even for a wretched turnip. But the Temple took my breath: it was even more beautiful than the legends claimed; its roof was a towering mass of tiles patterned with impossible heavenly designs. Under the wide pillars and screens, it seemed as though there must be slender dragons dancing. But when I looked directly, nothing was there but mist. I shivered, feeling the presence of spirits.

I entered the Temple alone; the other straggling pilgrims had all gone. My footsteps were clumsy, but they sounded like bells on the cool stone.

-Goddess San Shengmu, I whispered. The air around me was still; lingering incense wove through the creeping mist. I walked for a mile on the stone floor, hearing each footstep like a bell; and at last I reached for the incense stick and touched its tip to flame. As it burned I prayed: and when it had burned right down I drew a bamboo qian, fingering the smooth, flat wood.

-Goddess, I am taking an examination; will you help me succeed? I whispered, knowing my request was at the very heart of the world, was the central question of the heavens. I was alone in the Temple; how could compassionate San Shengmu ignore me? She would write flowing script on my qian. I looked down at the slender bamboo in my hand, eyes limpid with worship.

It was blank.

The Temple suddenly seemed to be flush with a kind of mocking wind: out of the pillars flowed snakes of titillation, and the scent of cherry blossoms soured in my nose. So the goddess was conspiring with my father to make a fool of me, I thought, incredulous with rage. She was not kind after all.

I threw my bag to the stone floor and stamped my feet, angered still further by the ringing-bell sound. I stamped my feet harder. Bells. Still harder: bells. In a burst of righteous anger I wrenched the incense stick, melted to a cinder, out of its holder, and drew it across the floor, writing in bold letters a message for the goddess:

I am writing with your own incense, goddess,
saving my own precious ink whilst also leaving
a big mess for your fairies to clean up
with their lily-white fingers. A fine goddess you
are, lapping up everyone’s worship and refusing
to condescend to answer. Well I won’t have it

and I would have gone on, but by then the stick was only a blackened nubbin on my fingers and my anger was mostly spent. I wiped my fingertips on my trousers and stumped out of the Temple, now eerily silent but for my bell-like tread, and descended down the mountain. Somewhere on the road to the Imperial City the clear night skies cracked open and floods of rain drenched me to the skin.

-Chin up, Liu Yanchang, I told myself, as my hat sank lower on my forehead and my feet squelched deep in six inches of muddy water. You don’t need the goddess to figure out the meaning of life.

The mad poets

2009-03-21T08:07:00.004-05:00

Poets, I learned this week, actually DO have a higher rate of mental instability than people of other professions. "The evidence that poets belong to the most mentally unstable of professions is now statistical as well as anecdotal," the essay said to me, each word and each letter in each word pounding a nail into a coffin wherein rests my hope for a quiet, stable, peaceful future life. Even if I'm only a pretend-poet, even pretend-poets have the standard poet's disposition.

Why is it that even the Van Goghs of the world do not find peace in their work? Vincent, we are told, cut off his own ear. (Did he really cut off his own ear? That must be one of those anecdotes that isn't true. Wrestlers dispense with ears, not brilliant painters, surely...?)

Poets are sometimes tugged toward their own destruction.

This week I submitted myself to sadness in the shape of Evgenia Ginzburg's memoirs. Evgenia Ginzburg, an intellectual, teacher and writer, spent 18 years in Stalin's gulag, two of which were in solitary confinement, the rest in work camps. Her memoir is a brilliant piece of writing, sometimes heartening, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes coldly analytical and detailed in its presentation of the facts of the gulag. Necessarily so: a mother separated from her three children in their infancy, she would never see one of them again, and the others would be raised in "homes" for children of political prisoners. Ginzburg had no recourse but to force herself to be calm, to be analytical, or she would lose her sanity altogether. Even after she'd gone through "rehabilitation," I suspect; maybe all her life.

I believe that such things should be read and read again, just so that the memory of these events is kept alive, so that we come away with an increased sense of the gifts we possess (freedom! enough food! clothing! hot showers!), and are reminded to look as hard as we can at our own political systems, watching for cracks and fissures in structures of power, where abuses of power can slip in and grow.

Ginzburg's own tenacity, though, is what shines most out of her story. Imagine! A woman stripped of her womanhood, her motherhood, treated as less than a person for 18 years, and her mind stayed as sharp as a razor, her ideals and zest for life remained intact, and she didn't give in either to despair or to hatred. The latter is maybe her greatest triumph.

Ginzburg doesn't give herself credit for survival, though--in the beginning she says that it was her poets, Pushkin especially, who saved her. In solitary confinement she explored poems in her mind that she'd never realized she'd memorized, and found new depths in them. One poem, by Pasternak, was especially helpful: "Suddenly the meaning of the poem overwhelmed me. Such moments are a test of poetry, and one's heart fills with love and gratitude. How could Pasternak have known this, living in his 'melancholy Moscow flat', how could he have known that I would feel exactly this?... If only he could know how much his poem helped me to endure, and to make sense of prison, of my sentence, of the murderers with frozen-fish eyes."

Funny--strange! Pasternak swimming in his melancholy poet's disposition plunged into his art, exploring ideas, situations, he'd never known himself... and created verse that spoke directly to Evgenia Ginzburg, lonely in her solitary confinement.

I suppose there are lots of things we could say about poets and poetry--they are mad, they are melancholy. Aren't they wonderful? Praise God for those mad poets, if for the sole reason that they kept one marvelous person from going mad herself.

-"Mad poets" quote from the introduction to Don't Ask Me What I Mean: Poets In Their Own Words, ed. Clare Brown and Don Paterson. London: Picador, 2003, p. xi.
-Ginzburg, Evgenia S. Into the Whirlwind. Liverpool: Collins, 1967, p. 134.

Below the surface of the North Sea

2009-03-16T14:40:00.002-05:00

I went to a Newcastle/Bloodaxe lecture this evening where George Szirtes delivered a lecture called "Cold dark deep and absolutely clear: poetic knowledge as archaeology," which is a remarkably long-winded title. But it must have done its work, because it ultimately tempted me there--along with a bigger crowd than I've yet seen at a reading in Newcastle.

Mostly grey heads in the audience, and a few young ones, but as always age was relative and we must have all listened with similar expressions on our faces.

The lecture, which was intense, rigorous and remarkable, aside, I found myself enraptured as I always am when a poet is speaking. There was something loving about the way Szirtes wrapped his voice around his subject, the way he verbally plunged his hand, again and again, into "the cold dark deep and absolutely clear" sea of knowledge at his disposal. Apparantly, countless poets have compared knowledge to a sea, a massive frightening bulk, seemingly endless, threatening to overwhelm or annihilate more than comfort. (The North Sea most certainly isn't a comforting entity, that I know.)

But Szirtes used the same sort of words to describe the way he feels when he hears or reads a poem that touches a "core" of meaning, hits a vein of truth--a chill, he says: he shivers as if he'd plunged his hand into freezing water.

I located Szirtes' blog after the lecture and followed links to some of his poetry, which I'd never read before, and looked through a few of them before my eyes hit on "Song," and I had the same instinctive reaction. But I can honestly say that I have never felt a "chill" when reading a poem that hits my own core, seems to thrum with some sort of unity that pulls it above the level of ordinary poetry; instead I feel a warmth: a light flicks on inside me, a little window opens in my mind (not at all like the "window in your head" that Wendell Berry warns of), and the backs of my eyes sting.

Magic.

The thing about poetry is that it should reach you at an instinctive level. If there were intellectuals at Szirtes' lecture on "poetic knowledge as archeology," tonight, they must have been happy indeed taking mental notes. But I'm willing to bet that most of the poets present lost the thread of the argument, in listening attentively to the poetry, and imagining their fingers dipping below the surface of the North Sea.

George Szirtes:

2009-03-16T14:14:00.003-05:00

Song (from the Black Sea sonnets)

Inside every other is a you, and this you
is what I would sing, if I had a voice to sing it,
because the song would be poignant, pointed,
unmistakeable, rejoicing, eternal and blue,
the way a horn tails off into silence or an unlit
room. And I'd hear the Black Sea as it shunted
slowly to and fro, its joy made of desire,
of loss, and sheer astonishment. Perhaps
at its core, in its dying deep bed, it moans
and hums in a voice we can't hear, that laps
at the place where our hands were, where a silver wire
of foam creeps beneath the skin into the bones
and goes on living there, I don't know how,
but it's as if I heard that singing now.

Found here: http://www.openspaceindia.org/George01.htm
See Szirtes' blog here: http://georgeszirtes.blogspot.com/

Wendell Berry:

2009-03-13T09:04:00.003-05:00

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbours and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophecy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion--put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful,
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest in your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Kathleen Jamie:

2009-03-10T16:02:00.004-05:00

When we walk at the coast
and notice, above the sea,
a single ragged swallow
veering towards the earth-
and blossom-scented breeze,
can we allow ourselves to fail

"Landfall"

Smells from 'down there'

2009-02-27T07:56:00.001-06:00

haunt me still; the wind returns
things that I thought were lost.
Beneath the littered street
I find a bone; beneath
the spring I find a frost.

If peace had come two years
before the sound of closing locks
surrounded all my life, I’d never
have known the need to speak
of things better forgot

but it did not. I know my fate
is ordered by the prison gate,
and smells from ‘down there’
haunt me still and something
tells me always will.

“Of my two years of life outside the law I have not forgotten a single thing. Without any deliberate effort, memory continues to restore to me events, faces, words, sensations, as if at that time my mind had gone through a period of exalted receptivity, during which not a detail was lost... Smells from ‘down there’ startle me even now...” Primo Levi

Cannot be defeated: a legend

2009-02-13T10:14:00.000-06:00

George hates the smell of sulphur, but it pervades every corner, crevice and corridor of his life. It always has. For some people, an affliction like this remains unrecognized—how are you supposed to know the smell of reality if it has always smelled, for you, like sulphur? But George has always known the smell of sulphur to be the wrong smell for the world.

Most of the time George puts it behind him like a devil he chooses to ignore. But as the years pass George begins to worry that the meaning of the smell is approaching, that he can’t avoid it much longer, that it will soon overtake him.

At the office, George works very hard indeed; he is in accounting. He sees rows of numbers as layers of an onion; each day, he strips them away one by one until there is nothing left to compute, no more work to do, and then he goes home. Inside his briefcase the motto is stitched: “Cannot be defeated.” It is a phrase his mother breathed to him before she died. George believes it means that he will always find a way to finish the work on time.

At home, George works equally hard: he is compiling research on the history of the Crusades, and one day he hopes to write a book about it all. When he has spare time he eats great quantities of peanut butter and watches reruns, trying to fill his mind with things that will keep the smell of sulphur at bay, that will keep the dreams away.

The dreams are the only thing George fears: in them he is a dragon, a great, fierce dragon, a dragon with a whipping, dangerous, green scaly tail and long white teeth like sharpened ivory knives. In the dream George the dragon breathes fire and scorches things indiscriminately, and he wakes to the disorder of his usually-organized room, as though he has been rushing about in the night, running from the beast, or worse—behaving like the beast, becoming the beast.

The dreams make George work all the harder. He decimates rows of numbers by day and in the evening he researches and reads and watches and eats jar after jar of peanut butter.

One day George wakes to the smell of sulphur grown to unbearable proportions. His eyes fly open and the lids cringe with the painful invasion; he opens his mouth and his tongue burns. When he stumbles into the hallway he sees his precious research burning on the table. His briefcase, too, is burning, and George sees the motto illuminated in bright white letters before it is incinerated: Cannot be defeated.

“Cannot be defeated,” he says aloud, and his breath is ablaze.

George looks at his skin and it, too, is burning, but softly, glowingly, because the fire is coming from it, from his skin. In a flash of understanding he realizes the smell of sulphur to be his own smell.

George runs from the apartment and into the street, and around him people scream: “A dragon, a dragon!” and he knows that they are afraid of him, and he keeps running, afraid himself, of himself, of what he has become: the living embodiment of his own nightmare.

Under the midmorning sun George wilts with the unbearable heat, and finds a park where he can lie on the cool grass, but when he heaves his body to the ground, the vegetation withers instantly. Into the hot dark burning earth George sinks his elbows. Chin on scaly paws, George assesses his life.

I have worked hard always, George thinks sadly. I have always poured myself into the work. I cannot be defeated. I cannot be defeated. I have always worked to keep the sulphur at bay. But it was in my skin all along.

The earth is hot, hot. Even as a dragon George finds the heat to be alien; he feels as though he is being tormented, tortured, that he is revolving on a wheel of knives. He is overcome with burdensome sorrow; he leaks dark burning dragon-tears into the soil.

George looks up, and the townsfolk are around him, screaming, brandishing weapons, pelting him with things. Tired, George breathes something soothing, assuring them of his harmlessness, but the words send a wave of heat forward, a fireball that incinerates the front row of people in seconds. The others, speechless, back away, struck by George’s indiscriminately violent behaviour.

He gets up and begins to run, away from the people, the burned grass, his own smell of sulphur. In moments he has circumnavigated the globe, cut a swollen red path across the surface of the earth, blazed a trail through forests with his devastating speed. But the smell of sulphur grows and grows in his nostrils until he cannot bear it.

Worst of all, George feels the impulse to burn things growing in his soul. The accountant is gone, the Crusades a thing of the past; the peanut butter has failed entirely to save him from his nightmare.

“Cannot be defeated,” George roars, and the people tremble and quake. The very words are on fire, set cities ablaze, and George weeps with grief about the destruction even as he roars.

But just before the dragon overwhelms him, hardworking George hears his mother’s voice whispering deep inside his scaly skin: Cannot be defeated.

And the true meaning of the words hurtles through his still-human heart—You cannot be defeated by the dragon, George, or all is lost. Throw the dragon off; you must not be defeated. His mother’s voice quivers with love. George’s sulphur-sadness disappears under a flood of returning joy and George, with all the courage he possesses, lances the dragon in the heart.

Ice/Eyes: A Short Story With Two Angles

2009-02-05T14:42:00.001-06:00

Antarctic darkness is different from other darkness. It spreads the world out, stretches things, concentrates them like taut threads. Behind me is the research station, a low bright mass, and its windows send light like tangible lines of radius over the snow for miles, breaking the ice piece into piece; far away I can see low-slung icebergs moving like tankers, a subtle heavy energy in the distance.

I turn and go inside. Williams is there, her light blonde ponytail bobbing aggressively at the back of her head. She is bent over specimen Tank A, peering at the diseased penguin with her uncanny grey eyes.

“Hasn’t moved for an hour,” she says, words edited down to the bare essentials. Why waste breath in this freezing place? Better to keep the heat inside.

I can’t feign interest I don’t feel, move to the back of the lab, switch off the Bunsen burner she’s left turned on again.

“Jen,” I begin in irritation—

A small explosion three feet away by Tank B; something’s been overheated, I think, and I should never have left that cushy engineering job for this godforsaken—

Jen screams; there is blood on my face, I can feel it, and on the floor, where the seal in Tank B has been lacerated by exploding glass. I turn vaguely to look at Jen. She is running toward me and the air crackles.

“Jerry, get away from there!” she shrieks, her ponytail a brilliant scarf curling in the air around her head, and, “Jerry, move faster!” But it’s too late already, I know, and the only thing I can think is

It’s your fault Jen, you’re so damn careless, you need to remember to turn the equipment off—

and all is brilliance, bright white, condensed darkness, icebergs moving slowly, slowly in the distance, and a wide expanse of empty snow.

...

I look up as Jerry slams the door and goes outside. The glass of the tank quivers under my hands. He’s always doing that, gazing morosely at the empty landscape when there is work to be doing. He doesn’t even care about the wildlife we’re here to study. It’s always me, doing everything.

I bend over the tank and blink at the penguin in Tank A. Something about his inertness makes me feel desperate; there is no reason he should be lying this still, so unnaturally quiet, and I can’t even see what has gone wrong—nothing comes up in the tests.

Jerry comes back in, and with him an icy draught.

“Hasn’t moved for an hour,” I say, my voice short with irritation. But I know he doesn’t care.

Not even a word; Jerry moves to the back of the lab, where the equipment he’d switched on hours before lies waiting for him. Probably he’s left the Bunsen burner on again, I think.

And look up. Something is burning, something smells like sulphur—the chemicals in the centrifuge are too close to the broken Bunsen burner—

“Jen—” I hear him say, but I am looking into the eyes of the pregnant seal in Tank B beside him, and then the tank explodes and her blood is everywhere and Jerry turns to face me, the seal’s blood on his clothes, and a yellow pain spins out of my heart.

I run toward the seal and Jerry is standing holding the Bunsen burner’s frayed cord so close, too close to the centrifuge.

“Jerry, get away from there!” He begins to move, slowly, sluggish with shock.

“Jerry, move faster!” I scream, but he stops dead, and around me I sense the eyes of the animals, and then everything lights up, or goes dark, condenses into patterns of melted ice, and the fading blue eyes of the watching stars.

Abdulaziz: I Shall Not Complain

2009-02-01T09:33:00.000-06:00

I shall not complain to anyone or expect grace from anyone
other than God, so help me God.

O Lord, my heart is plagued with troubles.

I shall not complain to anyone other than You, even if the seas
complain of dryness.

My spirit is free in the heavens, while my body is overpowered
by chains.

Praise God, who has granted me patience in times of adversity
and gratitude in times of gladness.

Praise God, who placed a garden and an orchard in my bosom,
so they will be with me always.

Praise God, who has granted me faith and made me a Muslim.

Praise God, Lord of the world.

From Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak, ed. Marc Falkoff, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City: 2008.

Abdulaziz: O Prison Darkness

2009-02-01T08:52:00.001-06:00

O prison darkness, pitch your tent.
We love the darkness.

For after the dark hours of the night,
Pride's dawn will rise.

Let the world, with all its bliss, fade away--
So long as we find favour with God.

A boy may despair in the face of a problem,
But we know God has a design.

Even though the bands tighten and seem unbreakable,
They will shatter.

Those who persist will attain their goal;
Those who keep knocking shall gain entry.

O crisis, intensify!
The morning is about to break forth.

"Abdulaziz, who wishes not to reveal his last name, had just graduated from university in his native Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, when U.S. forces launched their attack on Afghanistan. He traveled to the region to find his brother and bring him home safely. Soon after Abdulaziz found him, both men were picked up by Northern Alliance forces. After being tortured in an Afghan prison, he was turned over to the U.S. military in early 2002 and eventually sent to Guantanamo along with his brother. Both were classified as enemy combatants. His brother was subsequently released, but Abdulaziz remains in detention."

From Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak, ed. Marc Falcoff. University of Iowa Press: Iowa City, 2008.

Abdulla Majid al Noaimi:

2009-02-01T08:34:00.002-06:00

"I set out to write, but I could not concentrate on the poem. I put poetry writing aside and turned to memorizing the Qur'an. But then I could not concentrate on the Qur'an, because my mind was occupied with the poem. With my mind divided, time began to pass. And then I was inspired."

From Poems From Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak, ed. Marc Falkoff. University of Iowa Press: Iowa City, 2008.

Peter

2009-01-27T06:27:00.001-06:00

We cast our nets again and again
into the grey-black early morning sea.
My hands, rubbed red against the cold
of sea-salt, cutting ropes, held fast
in failure. Only days ago, just days,
repeating in my mind, just days,
just days ago denied my Lord I
did deny my Lord. And what of rising,
asked the cold, and what of lifting
one bright hand out to the morning?
If he has risen I am dead: just days,
just days ago denied my Lord I
did deny my Lord.

And what of voices from the shore?
My hands, rubbed red against the cold
of sea-salt, cutting ropes, held fast
in failure, even when the nets were
filled, just days ago denied my Lord I
did deny my Lord. And then they cried It is
the Lord, and my hands dropped
the filling nets, the strange new nets,
the cold and some wild love filled up
my heart and flung I all my failed self
out toward the shore, carved up the sea.
If he has risen I have risen oh I
have risen too.

Sanded down

2009-01-17T15:02:00.005-06:00

All we know of Barcelona is that Queen sings a song about it, about how it was the first time that they met, and it's glorious.

When we meet Barcelona for the first time it looks like a bit of rubble by the ocean, a pile of broken shells, glinting in the sun under the airplane, reflected in the snow on the mountain behind it. When we come in to land the plane swoops close over the surface of the sea, and it seems as though we're going to slide right into it, under the ships making wide circles, finely-drawn wakes, right into the blue. But we land instead, on a strip of tarmac kissing the beach.

Outside the plane the air is pungent with salt and swept clean with sun and a breeze that the Spanish find wintery, and which, after England's pearly greyness, its graceful withdrawal of warmth, feels like bliss to us, feels like the month of May.

We are cheap tourists in Barcelona, guidebook-wielding hosteling backpackers, knowing very little about the city beside its reputation for sangria. We have nothing to offer but a devalued pound sterling and faces starved for sun. We are tired.

But Barcelona welcomes us as though we were royalty.

At night in Barcelona I dream the old year and wake up tired, but when my eyes open the city is already singing: motorcycles in the street, Spanish through the walls, a humming vacuum, road works. On the balcony the morning rushes to meet me. People are moving in the streets, and my sun-washed holiday-morning eyes interpret them to be leisurely people, people who treat Monday morning like a gift, turning it over and taking time to look at it.

During the day in Barcelona we find the city has lain paths for us, trails leading to mosaic-lighted buildings, pillars, fountains, stone, water.

How to pull water from stone? We pull stones from the water, shells, ancient things washed up on the beach, carvings from another world. They are as detailed and fragile as Picasso's paintings. I stand in the shallows and the sea rushes forward and pulls back with an offbeat rhythm, tugging my feet, my legs, and any remaining shreds of dreams break up and disappear, foam on the surface with the bottom washed clean, changed, sanded down, made new.

Springs

2009-01-09T13:01:00.000-06:00

I go walking every day
around the bases of buildings,
feeling the strange bursting updrafts
and smelling their refuse or sweetness,
the coffee shop on the corner and the
flower stalls. The city is a forest
and we wander in it, looking for
the springs the buildings promise.

One day we will find them.

Grief

2009-01-08T05:32:00.001-06:00

No-one can tell you what you feel.
Your thoughts, half-real, half false
Are dice on a board that gives nothing away.
If they say you should collect yourself,
shelve despair and smile as though
the riverflow of grief had petered out,
the shout and clamour of your hurt
had gone inert, had drifted to their ‘light’
that sight has rarely shown you, if they
remain to lay their heavy awkward hands,
dark grieving bands, upon your heart,
you can refuse them and depart. You must believe
your grief belongs to you. No-one can tell
its ceaseless swell to stop; it is for you
to wander through, and one day slip away
into a complicated world, made new.

An excuse

2009-01-04T14:53:00.001-06:00

I wanted to explore
the back lanes, the red
bricks behind the high street,
the foot bridges over
dark tunnels of highways
at night when leviathan was hiding
just under the lip of the cave.

I wanted to capture shots
of slain vehicles, rotting
behind brooding tenement blocks,
and pots
cracked round the edges
empty of flowers,
stacked in shaky pires
barely visible through the fence.

I wanted to walk and walk
until I found the corner of the city
where its heart must still be beating,
lounging in an open cage, mangy,
resisting kindness
out of ingrained habit,
and settling into rust.

I wanted to go but I wondered
what I would do if I found it,
not knowing its real name,
and fumbling for the truth
with my lens—
and did I really want to know?
In the end, I didn’t go.

Untitled

2008-12-10T09:59:00.001-06:00

Welcome to your morning. Welcome
to the creak of stairs outside your room,
the kitchen rhythm, steaming cup,
the moving sidewalk, lightened sky,

the pigeons bobbing, crack of heels
contacting stone, the whipping
sound of wings around
the statue in the square.

This is your beginning, now,
the dawn of man, the new space age,
the cracking egg, the start-again,
the seismic shift, the opened eye.

Mary Oliver:

2008-11-27T17:53:00.002-06:00

All day
the alligators
lumbered into and out of
the water, herons

stood in the trees
combing their white shoulders,
vultures
floating just under the clouds

were in no hurry--
sooner or later
the mysterious circles
always closed.

I had dreamed of such a place,
but this was my first visit
to the thick parks and the state of mind
called Florida. Streams

wandered everywhere
among the dense mangroves.
At one I paused
to drink, and inside me

the water whispered: And now, like us,
you are a million years old.
But at the same time
the enormous and waxy flowers

of the shrubs around me, whose names
I did not know,
were nodding in the wind and sighing:
Be born! And I knew

whatever my place in this garden
it was not to be what I had always been--
the gardener.
Everywhere the reptiles thrashed

while birds exploded into heavenly
hymns of rough song and the vultures
drifted like black angels and clearly nothing
needed to be saved.

"At Loxahatchie," from Dream Work, Antlantic Monthly Press, 1986.

Parallel

2008-11-26T14:05:00.000-06:00

Stared out of a
train window
and watched the black out
switch places with bright,
a parallel train
pushed up next to ours,
locked into the course
and skimming on air
and a parallel me
inside it

And then both trains
rose up off the tracks
and the far off
parallel universe sky
lit up the houses
right next to the glass
with layers of lights
from a parallel town
like gems in the bed
or the top of a lake

and they wavered with
parallel
uncertain logic
like reflections
of buildings
in buildings

While two pairs of eyes
stared fixedly off
into an alien land:
the parallel other
that might not exist,
depending on
data at hand

Thanksgiving walk

2008-11-18T09:33:00.001-06:00

We wandered through the
brush and crisply cut-out wood
and watched the autumn ringing
‘round the stalks
of trees, in stacks of tarnished
golden leaves

Past grandma’s house, the brown
and ordered gently sunk-in logs
that grandpa built himself
and planted fast
between her rows
of purple blooms

And over in the meadow, where
the horses picked their sturdy hooves
through clipped short herbs and
jutting rocks
and churned the pond to
velvet brown

We lost ourselves within the
voice of autumn, speaking loud
about the trees and death and life
within the folds
of sky like glass
and all the brilliant flowers
in the grass

Control

2008-10-31T08:51:00.004-05:00

The general look of hair temples varies from place to place, but in this they remain the same: the mirrors. Every hair temple around the world possesses floor to ceiling mirrors before which the priestesses force you to sit, staring at your sad, overgrown, split-ended mop. Sometimes they leave you there, staring, until you are overcome with repentence at waiting this long to return to the Scissors.

The principle of dentists and hair priestesses is the same: they have the right, once you are seated helplessly in their thrones, glasses off, to do whatever they like to your head. The first operates in the name of health, the second of style, but their methods are roughly the same, involving sharp, shiny tools, too much water, and noxious chemicals.

Back in my home city, I rarely changed hair temples, and when I did it was due to a subtle falling-out between my hair priestess and I, usually over the matter of cost, although sometimes over the matter of style.

My first steady hair priestess was a middle-aged woman named Lucy with hair that was sea-changed every time I visited--it flowed from black to brown to blonde to short to long, from straight to curly.

Lucy and I developed a friendly relationship, although my fear of her powers, exacerbated by my then-timid nature, never quite diminished. As she sawed off chunks of brown hair Lucy always made conversation, asking me questions about my life plans, and I, nervously watching the silver scissors flash fuzzily in the mirror, asked her questions about Texas, and avoided my own haunted reflection.

When I finally, after a number of years, left Lucy without explanation (when is reckless abandonment of one's hair temple ever okay?), I scouted out prices and made a single visit to a rather cheaper hair temple. There, I found Mary, and found Mary to be prone to avoiding the mess of washing her customers' hair before a cut, using a little spray bottle instead to fix the hair to the head in a flat paste, making it easier for her to lop it off in a straight line. Mary shaped my hair into a memorable middle-aged mullet with a delicate fringe at both ends.

Next I visited Theresa's swivel chair, but by then I'd adopted a deliberately modified attitude: one of purposefulness, confidence. After all, one must learn to take charge of one's own haircut, musn't one? Mullets are never okay.

But in Theresa's domain it was even harder to take control. She would march me directly across the floor when I arrived at the hair temple, thrusting my head under the chemical wash before even glancing at the state of my locks. After returning me to the swivel chair, she'd look with a mixture of irritation and confusion at my wet head, ask a cursory question or two, and then aggressively finish my hair off in a quick, messy altercation.

As Theresa lopped off my fuzzed ends she never tried to make conversation, a fact I was glad of. But the problem still remained of what expression to wear while in the chair: how can one look confident and pleased at the same time, while totally unable, what with extreme myopia, to see one's face in the mirror, and equally unable to hide one's occasionally dramatic alarm? The haircuts at Theresa's were never the same twice, but Theresa once said of my hair: "it's great hair." I believe, in retrospect, that this means my hair is easy to cut. Lucky me.

I left Theresa to come to England, where I put off getting a hair cut as long as seemed justifiable, and trimmed my fringe myself. But the back grew out, as all hair inevitably does, until I was in danger of creating my own mullet. Hence: Carla.

Carla sat me down to wait for ten minutes before the floor-to-ceiling mirror, freshly drenched by a morning downpour on my way to the hair temple, and I was forced to stare bleakely at my rain-frizzled head in the glittering wall of humility. Upon her return Carla was bearing a grim-looking checklist on a clipboard, and an expression of pitying judgment.

"Now I'm just gona go through a few things wi' ye then? As' you some questions? Wha' state is your hair in today?" She looked at me, concern filling her eyes, asking me silently to be honest.

"Um it needs a cut... it's long..." said I.

"Okay. I'm just gona cu' i' shor'er in the back then, and leave it a bit longer by the face?" She put her hands out to pull at my hair.

"Well okay, I was hoping you could cut it short all over though," I said, taking control.

Carla's face registered both patience and concern. "Okay, bu' it really should be shor'er up in the back here, you see? And a bi' longer by the face, okay?" She pulled at my hair again.

"Alright, but I was hoping you could cut it into a sort of pixie?" I fought to remain calm. Take control.

"Well the pixie isn't qui' righ' then, it should be a bi' shor'er in the back, yah, and I'll take off somutha weight, bu' a pixie is too shor', it will be too short, you see? Is tha' all righ' then?" She continued talking, her voice descending into the labyrinth of the local dialect, and I mentally conceded defeat.

"Do whatever you want," I said.

Every hair temple around the world operates on the same assumptions: that the customer requires its expert aid, that penitence about one's neglected locks is the only productive attitude, and that great good can be done, provided the customers cooperate fully. In the shiny little temples packed with colours, smells, mirrors, slim, black-clad hair priestesses or ninjas belted with throngs of glittering weapons, and always the floor-to-ceiling mirrors, you are better off not to ask questions, to simply submit.

You are not in control.

"The destiny of art in our time

2008-10-25T14:30:00.004-05:00

...is to transmit from the realm of reason to the realm of feeling the truth that well-being for men consists in their being united together, and to set up, in place of the existing reign of force, that kingdom of God--that is, of love--which we all recognize to be the highest aim of human life."

Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? 1898(trans.) Oxford University Press, 1994.

Game night

2008-10-21T03:07:00.003-05:00

Inside is the small and careful, the tedious and disciplined, the conscientious and dutiful, the dull. Inside is thoughts and books and work and trying to work and failing to work. Tonight, inside is oppressive silence.

After class, we escape. We leave the house and wander to China Town in search of roast duck (for her) and chicken and cashews (for me), seeing visions, in the cold, of endless cups of hot green tea. It must be a game night: the cars are parked end-to-end on every sidewalk within a mile of the stadium, leaving little room to walk. The closer we get to the stadium, the more alive the streets seem.

On game nights, the city takes on an added vigour--even if you aren't personally attending the match, everyone in the city perforce is listening to it, surrounded by it, every minute until it is over, and even afterward. We battle through crowds of jersey-clad people streaming through the streets toward the stadium, shouting as they march. But when we escape into the restaurant, we find a seat by the window. A little distance away, the lights of the stadium burn the sky white, and arrest my attention, pull it from the meal. What is happening? Who is winning?

When we emerge it is to empty streets, but the air is talking about the game, buzzing with electrons and leaping with energy every time the entire stadium gives a collective yell. I can feel my body twisting toward the sound. What is happening? Who is winning? Suddenly the question is important, very important.

Passing pubs lining the darkened street, we startle to notice that every face in each pub seems to be staring straight at us--but no, the TVs are sometimes situated over the windows. They look, to my bemused eye, like people under a spell: their faces are nearly motionless, or moving all at once. They yell at the same time, and sometimes they punch the air. I wish, as we walk on, that I were inside with them-- What is happening? Who is winning?

Away from the stadium the streets grow quiet again. We find our door and unlock it and step inside, say goodnight. But my four pale-green walls are suddenly energetic, friendly, encouraging, and I leap across the room to my computer to find the results--

We didn't lose. But we couldn't have lost: not with that much energy alive in the air, busting up preconceived notions of the "quiet of the evening," changing the character of the streets, which would have themselves picked up out of the soil and streamed to the match, if the laws of gravity had been reversed, just for one night.

Pablo Neruda:

2008-10-11T04:29:00.005-05:00

Never an illness, nor the absence
of grandeur, no,
nothing is able to kill the best in us,
that kindness, dear sir, we are afflicted with:
beautiful is the flower of man, his conduct,
and every door opens on the beautiful truth
and never hides treacherous whispers.

I always gained something from making myself better,
better than I am, better than I was,
that most subtle citation:
to recover some lost petal
of the sadness I inherited:
to search once more for the light that sings
inside of me, the unwavering light.

--Untitled, from The Sea and the Bells, trans. William O'Daly, Copper Canyon, 2002.

On living in England

2008-10-07T09:05:00.002-05:00

It is and it isn't that different. The cars are suddenly and quixotically unpredictable, when one has been used to them behaving the same way all one's life; people walk in and push through crowds rather than loitering along by themselves; the air smells different; the prices are only deceptively low, never as low as they seem. But people speak the same language. Litter looks the same on the ground. Pavement is the same colour, and so is the sky. Everyone rejoices on Friday and goes out in celebration. Everyone returns to work on Monday with grim faces.

Worse than the recognition of cultural or environmental differences is the inevitable realization that you are absolutely an outsider, when you've been a relative insider in your home country your whole life. When you are walking down the street you imagine that you appear slightly off to the people passing you, like a new smudge or flaw, or simply a difference, in a painting that's been hung on the dining-room wall as long as any of them can remember.

At first, when I arrived, the buildings looked as though God had reached down and mashed them together with his oversized hands, to create more room for more buildings, leaving them all looking tall and thin and uncomfortable, like a row of unadjusted teeth crowded together in an old person's face. (Old, old, old, everything here is old--even the new buildings appear either slightly weathered around the edges, or tawdrily newfangled, sure to be shortlived and replaced). But now the houses seem quite comfortable. I'm getting used to them. The glimmers of individuality in each building's windows distinguish it properly from the rest. Even the long rows of houses in blue-collar districts, where each is like a carbon copy of its neighbour and as a consequence the dreary whole appears almost surreal, and surreally ugly, there is room for difference after all. Look closely: the curtains in the windows are not the same, from house to house; the laundry on the line is different as you move along; the houses emit different smoke, different smells, different feels, like houses everywhere. "Crowded" is a relative concept.

If travel changes you over time, I wonder how great the change can be? You carry the same work habits, the same interests, the same flaws with you wherever you go. Wherever you go you lug the same intertwined body-and-soul mess with you. If you travel to escape yourself, I'm sorry to say it will never work: you'll always be dragging your old self along, like tin cans tied to the tail of a running cat.

What might happen instead is that you meet new aspects of yourself around corners (to borrow imagery from a friend), new ways of seeing, and new friends who make the world a little more enlightened.

Colette Bryce: (The Hopes)

2008-10-02T10:07:00.002-05:00

They extend above the houses
like mechanical giraffes.

Dignified,
they are there for a reason.

Cables hang
from their heads like harnesses.

Behind them, the sky is unusually
blue and clear

for a month so late
in the year. Don't give up.

from Self-Portrait in the Dark, Picador, 2008.

Obeisance

2008-09-25T03:43:00.001-05:00

It was Aaron’s idea
to build the golden calf—
certainly not mine.
I’d only begun to imagine
what our New Israel
would be like
without Moses—I’d not
gone so far from the Truth
as to believe
that it rested on
a piece of gold. Not me.

It hurt me to put
my family’s last golden ring
in the pot with the rest;
but the others were dancing.
I watched the ring
melt into the pot
and then got up and left.

It was my husband who started
to sing praises to Baal—
certainly not I.
I’d only begun to consider
what a noble ruler Aaron would make
now that he’d lost his filthy pride—I’d not
lost mine
so much as to pay obeisance
to a piece of gold. Not I.

But when I remembered
my mother’s nose ring
fused fast to that golden Cattle’s rear
I sat down in the dust
and I cried

Michal

2008-08-27T21:37:00.001-05:00

I learned just where to hide
so I could see him:
slipped behind the ivory pillar
and the hanging vines
where the smooth night breeze
smelled of jasmine

and he would stride in
from the wild outside
tracking dirt across the stones,
harp slung across his shoulders
or a quivering sword in a sheath

and I would shiver too.

One hundred proofs of death
my father asked for me
but David purchased me for two

and one day I learned
what jasmine always hides
below her sultry scent:
that every perfect man
hides a flawed, old heart

and that two hundred proofs of death
was not enough

to buy my love

Saul

2008-08-22T00:30:00.000-05:00

The donkeys were lost
and so we went to look for them,
and couldn’t find them, after days.
I stomped the earth that hid them, earth
malevolent and strong,
and tied my honour lightly to their hides.

But when the ancient man of God
near-pushed me up the holy hill
and seated me in royal state
within the house,
and fearsome crowds of careful eyes
fixed me to chair and plate,
the hapless donkeys faded from my mind.

The headiness of wine made faces kind.

When sunlight reached my red-flushed cheeks
the man of God soothed them with oil
he poured, cold, briskly, on my head,
along with words of destiny,
and I bowed low with face to ground.

As for the donkeys, they were found.

What the Dickens!

2008-08-08T21:18:00.002-05:00

My dear Max,

I have examined the evidence, and come to the conclusion that it was most certainly Dickens who did it. I know you will laugh--I would too if I were you--it's so hopelessly cliched and ridiculous, and he's always been on the top of everyone's lists. But he didn't reach the top of mine until I'd gone through all the rest--you know, angry old Emily Bronte, the angsty goths, ruminating sick old poets like Rumi and Rilke, etc. etc. Sly old Charles never even entered my mind, not until I'd questioned absolutely everyone else who was there.

The poets were all sitting, tightly packed together, in the English garden, when I got there, sipping green cocktails or black coffee respectively, and anxiously plucking at the floral displays. I questioned them one by one, and then all together as per their preference, and none of them seemed to be able to, or even slightly desire to, follow what I was saying beyond a few sentences. I threw up my hands and left them when Frost and Dickenson started eyeing each other up in jealous suspicion, Rumi went off on a vision, and Rilke begged me to rephrase everything in metaphors. It was clear that none of them were even capable of committing the deed.

And I met the usual gang of Americans lurking by the bar. Smith was lounging on a bar stool next to Woolfe, both of them passionately discoursing on the importance of great food to the female writer's palatte. Henry James was sitting very uprightly next to a hunched Twain nearby, close enough to listen in but not appear to be doing so. None of them seemed able to hide their feelings, and none of their feelings came close to guilt. Things got a little exasperating when they demanded a vote be taken as to the identity of the guilty party, so I left them after barely five minutes of rapid-fire questions, American-style.

And Max, you won't believe how frustrating it was to talk to the playwrights. Not because of their answers, but because of the smoke. They were all crammed into the smoking-room, shouting to each other over the din on the radio. I couldn't stop coughing, sitting next to the French ones and Miller. It wasn't worth it to me to question them. And when I got to Shakespeare, smiling slightly under that damned devilish goatee, his eyes looking tiny in that massive egg-shaped head, I couldn't get a thing out of him but sonnets. Not a thing. And I don't know about you, but I side with the critics who don't read between the lines.

So when I left the smoking-room I was at a loss as to the identity of the culprit--that is, until I remembered Dickens. When I'd arrived I'd seen him rushing out the back entrance. I'd assumed he'd been in pursuit of a story. But I thought differently when I caught him hiding behind the delphiniums in the front garden. A few questions from me and that illustrious personage was sweating like a Canadian in Morocco, and I knew I'd found my man.

Needless to say, Max, he'll think differently next time he tries to drug the poets, goad the Americans, asphyxiate the playwrights, and hypnotize Shakespeare.

I'll pick up my medal from you next time I'm in town.

The Examiner.

A question

2008-07-30T23:57:00.002-05:00

Why has it taken me so long to learn that life is tough? What sort of small world have I been cushioned in, cocooned into, with the edges all blunted, so that I could see only the glimmers of light at the cracks, and never a hard reality?

Maybe that tired old metaphor about peoples' lives moving through seasons is actually not so cliched--maybe it's true. Maybe the soul moves through seasons that aren't organized or logical, through winters and then weak summers and then scrambled springtimes and then winters again, before reaching summer at last. Maybe it's like this for everyone.

I write so much in metaphors, to protect people, to mask the reasons for my feelings, and to keep layers between my writing persona and my actual identity, so that living people and real events are never clearly defined and can only be guessed at.

I'm tired of metaphors. Are you?

David

2008-07-22T23:57:00.001-05:00

I somehow didn’t feel
like a cheese-bearer,
as I approached the field.
I heard a strange rumble
at my feet, a portent
of battles to come, the sound
of feverish horses stamping.
And I heard harsh war-cries
muttered in undertones by the men,
frustrated with sitting around for days,
tired to hell of hearing
the Philistine’s taunts,
hungry, bored,
watching each other,
and eyes, like hawks, on the hills.
I dropped my parcels at their feet.
I smelled the rank smell of impotence,
of fear
and I saw victory
laid out like a feast for the King,
thundering down the hills.
I heard my blood singing
Glory!
And I brushed past my brothers
munching cheese
and went to battle.

Easter came so late this year

2008-07-12T00:08:00.000-05:00

Easter came so late this year.
Month after wintry month slipped by
And, almost, we began to fear
That when the earth closed on our Lord
It closed on Easter with a cry
And heavy dust and sticky blood
While Lent stretched on and on.

The bulbs quite failed to show their heads.
We pulled the weeds and cleared the stones
And poured fresh water on the beds,
But Christ’s bright heralds hid their leaves
And sank their brittle flower-bones
Beneath the reach of our belief
That they would still, yet come.

We faltered when they laughed at us.
What form of rising can this be
When nothing rises but the dust?
Our skin was pierced with shards of pain,
A dearth of faith, a void of trust
That what was dead would rise again
And what was done could be undone.

But Easter comes, is coming—now.
The cold soil breaks like fragrant bread
(Though we do not remember how
To welcome this a-rising Christ,
To put our backs to what was dead,
And break the bond of faithless ice):
Easter was coming, and is come.

Afterwards,

2008-07-10T00:32:00.000-05:00

everything went on
as it had before. The rain
that didn’t fall outside
fell inside the house instead
and smeared my wall art, left blue blurs
a painting-length below the painting
down the wall.
I shut the door on half a dozen demons
scrambling from the corner
of the yard, anxious to get inside the kitchen
where I poured myself
a drink.
I smoked a cigarette
defiantly
right to the nub
and left the smoking end in the garden
wafting scent on a breeze I sent to you,
and the breeze was a lion who roared at me
and stole my breath, an angry kiss, right from my lips—
I sat. I sat and read or didn’t read about a tenth
of all the books I’d meant to read before,
and things were unremarkable
and I didn’t give in
to despair
more than three times

An apology

2008-07-03T22:54:00.000-05:00

Neruda,
whose verse is an ocean,
whose bell merges with the sound
of other waves,
making the waves stronger,
leap higher:
Neruda,
forgive one small poet
a breach of your great hospitality,
the rude rejection she once made
of your works
without acknowledging
their great shining depth
or seeing the sweet passion,
(now tainted only by
your human-ness,
now honest as the sky)
spreading in bright waves
from your pen.
Let me sit at your feet
a little while,
Neruda.

Gold

2008-07-03T00:14:00.002-05:00

We stood by while you were placed
so carefully
beside the open hole;
we pulled in our breath and we
let it go and watched it fly up, up
into the humid air, clouded
more with heat and smoke than clouds.
It wasn't you, we knew:
only a place to shift our eyes
when we felt your presence.
He talked about
immortal things, I believe,
although I didn’t hear much
but the grief knocking against ribs
in the people around me,
and my own ache.
And then they placed you
in the warm ground, wrapped up
in a pink porcelain shroud,
small as a baby,
while we sang.
After, I chose to throw into the earth
a rose that we might have admired
together,
and stepped back into the shade
and remembrance was waiting,
dressed in gold

e.e. cummings:

2008-07-01T01:37:00.003-05:00

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

A philosophy of leaving

2008-06-27T17:29:00.003-05:00

I speed down the summer highway in my small green car.

A little girl waves out the passenger window of the car in front of me, her hand lingering in the air: swoop, swoop, she mimicks the Queen's elegant salute. Out the driver's side pokes the head of a full-grown adult panda, laughing. The girl's hand and the panda's head withdraw into the carriage of the Honda and then we all carry on.

Cathunk, cathunk, go the wheels of my car as I pass over the railway tracks. My stereo makes its soaring sounds and I pound, pound the steering wheel in time to its soft beat; my feet tap, tap the floor. The window is down and I put my hand out of it to feel the wind. Swoop, swoop: I wave like the Queen.

Traffic honks, cyclists hurry, buses roar, and my car moves along at its own pace, a green glinting rectangle from a bird's-eye view, a small fish in a large flowing stream. Stop, go: stop, go.

When I leave my door in the morning and step into my car I practice leaving. Stop, go. Go, stop. Return. In my car on the way to, from work I develop a philosophy of leaving, listening to the hum of sun and traffic and watching the creak and glitter of rubber and silver chrome, and hearing the ideal sounds pounding out a balancing rythym. The sounds seem to work together to say--

You can't leave to escape; you've got to leave to arrive. And notice, notice, as you go.

Swoop, swoop, pound, pound: I wave like the Queen, my hands play with air like silk or satin; I let the wind go, and hit the wheel like a drum. In the grass beside the highway at the lights, small elephants move to an African beat; I watch them with interest and then carry on.

Czeslaw Milosz:

2008-06-23T23:39:00.002-05:00

Under a starry sky I was taking a walk,
On a ridge overlooking neon cities,
With my companion, the spirit of desolation,
Who was running around and sermonizing,
Saying that I was not necessary, for if not I, then someone else
Would be walking here, trying to understand his age.
Had I died long ago nothing would have changed.
The same stars, cities, and countries
Would have been seen with other eyes.
The world and its labors would go on as they do.

For Christ's sake, get away from me.
You've tormented me enough, I said.
It's not up to me to judge the calling of men.
And my merits, if any, I won't know anyway.

"Temptation," from Czeslaw Milosz Selected Poems (1931-2004), ed. Hass.

Creativity flows

2008-06-10T23:47:00.002-05:00

...almost never when sought. The words sometimes fly off the screen or the page and scamper for the door, pushing and shoving in their haste to get away. But worse than not writing is the feeling that one can't write, the job is too huge, the questions are too impossible to answer, and one barely succeeds anyway at the best of times at producing the work one attempts to produce.

I've been reading Virginia Woolf. I read: you are a woman, you are Shakespeare's sister, and you must write her poetry, write it because she couldn't write it. Earn your 500 a year and create a living from your pen. Not only can you do it but you must. And achieve a peaceful state of mind, an androgynous state of mind, so that the two parts of you can balance out and you can listen, undistracted, to the story.

Then I read the critical interpretation at the front of A Room of One's Own and find a different perspective on Woolf, the story of a writer driven mad sometimes by her own demons and unable to present the balanced narrative she implored the students to produce... a woman who lived an ironic life and died too early. I read: she sighed with relief when the lecture upon which Room is based was finally over, and condemned to failure the women who attended it and sucked in her inspiring words like baby birds gobbling nourishment.

It seems that a hundred and two hundred years ago women had larger problems than the prolific and horrifically competitive nature of the publishing industry; they had a basic inability to write for a living, because of social conventions, etc. etc. Worse, women three and four hundred years ago have faded into blank margins of the anals of history, except the Great ones, and none of them wrote for a living.

Now, the problem I face is not whether I am able to write. Of course I can in theory, although economic struggle persists through every age--and for both sexes--and writers have always had a difficult time writing for a living. The problem is what to write. How can a person write who doesn't have a cause? And how can a person write who is still, herself, learning what literature means?

I don't think anyone produces the stories they intend to write, anyhow. Creativity ebbs and flows and when it flows in earnest it becomes Heathcliff and Sydney Carton and Karenina. Were these sought figures, or did they invade? Either way they didn't--and don't--give a hot damn about economically supporting the authors who summoned them. I suppose it's better that way.

Unlikely

2008-06-04T19:03:00.002-05:00

A green-striped grinning piece of rind
Stands inside an inch of tea
And bides its time.
It seems to say it knows, indeed,
That almost-emptied glasses
Of almost-lukewarm tea
Are where all good and noble watermelons
Go to die. And neither would I care
To disagree.
All melon graveyards boast a stone
That names the saintly few
Who went to Tea instead of grass
And died of sugar
Not of dew

In Magazineland

2008-05-14T19:11:00.003-05:00

We needed no directions beyond those written on the creamy handcut white square I clutched between my sweating fingers, to find the place. It was August, and hot enough to fry a cat on the sidewalk. Slow waves wafted up from the hood of the Jeep in front of our eyes, making the pristine pavement waver, and become a little less... perfect. Joe clutched the steering wheel, begrudging the lack of air conditioning every ten minutes or so as we took turns at hair-raising speeds, frantic to get inside Mary's house, which was surely cool and comfortable. Knowing Mary.

We arrived. Leaping out of the smoking vehicle, we barely had time to notice the surreal elegance of the front lawn: the sweeping walkway, the discrete hedges, the overflowing rosebeds, the glimmering emerald colour of the grass. Joe's shoes left smudges on the incredibly smooth white terrace stones as we approached the house. He didn't care, and I barely cared, so desperate were we to get inside.

We clunked the huge, brass antique door-knocker and waited. I tweaked Joe's lopsided tie, anxiously inquiring whether the heat of the seat had left wet marks on my uncomfortably close-fitting skirt, as it appeared it had on his tan pants. He was just looking to see, when the heavy white door was swept open by Mary's stick-thin figure, and she was smiling gloriously at us from between clouds of expertly arranged hair.

"Hiiiiiiiiii....." she declared, the exclamation mark implicit and somehow, still, understated, her plummy voice wrapping around the entire porch with its rich sweet tones. Her voice, I decided, was influenced by a veritable cocktail of fruits. More fruits than one would think possible. "Welcome," Mary said, the single word impressive beyond description.

Joe hurried in, and I paused to note Mary's perfect attire with a sudden and horrible wash of panic. I had never seen a whiter outfit: white, and yet not glaring under the carefully glowing lights of the front hall. Her white jean shorts, topped with a fabulously elegant white top, was accented by glistening yellow heels of Italian leather and the most now jewelery I had ever seen. She managed to look perfectly coifed, perfectly poised, and perfectly relaxed all at once. Her makeup glittered: grapefruit. I was certain she was cleaner inside and out than my grandma. I paused involuntarily to gape.

Mary took the moment to be a mark of my charming shyness. "Oh darling, DO come in, I have the most wonderful lunch prepared for you both." I stepped inside.

And caught my breath. The hall was the very picture of domestic perfection. In front of me a large, restored Victorian mirror highlighted my own regrettable face-and-hair imperfections, while consoling me with near-total obscuration of the lower half of my body by a massive vaseful of white silk begonias and perfect bunches of driftwood, casually tossed together in a huge vase. I felt a piercing stab of annoyance. Where does she find that incredibly casual-looking-but-oh-so-clean driftwood? Not on any beach I frequent, that's for damn sure...

Mary took my gaze to be one of total adoration of the arrangement. "Oh darling, DON'T you love the arrangement? I found the begonias at a flea market and the driftwood on my beach at Long Island." I blinked twice and moved on, smiling, wishing pitiously that my makeup reflected this season's grapefruit tones.

Joe was already sitting in the room off the main hall, his wet butt likely damaging forever the previously flawless light tan leather couches, and the throw pillows, sprigged out in fresh spring colours: lettuce, lemon, and raspberry. I sat gingerly on a muslin loveseat opposite, hoping desperately that my own rear wasn't as wet as his. My cheaply-clad feet moved nervously on the fabulous Persian carpet, dyed an expert baby-blue to match the colours of the season. Joe grinned at me but I had become too edgy to respond beyond a weak smile. Mary remained standing to take our drink orders.

"What will you both have? We have sangria, fresh from Emilia's expert hand--oh, Emilia is our part-time cook--and of course a range of cocktails. Joe?" Mary's voice made Joe's name sound both manly and incredibly romantic at the same time, and yet still... beneath her.

"Um." Joe paused to clear his throat. "Do you--have beer?"

Mary smiled charmingly, her mouth curving up into something more than a smile, something better than a smile. She looked like a hyper-sophisticated kid in a candy-shop. "Oh yes, of course, all imports... I'll choose one, shall I. And you dear?"

I cleared my throat. "A--martini please, gin, with olives?"

Mary's smile never flickered for a moment: she was the perfect hostess. "If that's what you'd like, darling... Of course you might want to try something a little more in season..." I opened and shut my mouth like a fish and then just nodded. Mary knows best, I said in my head. She was gone in a flash. Within seconds her husband, Greg, was approaching, with far too little warning for my taste.

As always, Greg was overwhelming. He glittered with understated accents: an incredibly casual-looking, exceedingly well-cut outfit in dark navy and grey; high-test polish on the cool shoes; a fabulous watch peeping from the edge of his sleeve. Greg's hair was glossy to the point of echoing the shoes. I had a sudden vision: Greg should be surrounded by leather and books, lots of books. I could almost see them, half-floating in the atmosphere around his elegance.

"Hi there," Greg said, knowing Greg was a god. "Joe, isn't it? And--" he frowned, but the expression was both charming and suave. I supplied my name.

Unknowingly saving Greg from Greg, Mary swept into the room effortlessly pulling a huge cart, loaded with drinks and detailed appetizers in handmade baskets. "Do try the appetizers--I whipped them up myself this afternoon. And I prepared a recipe card for each so you could make them at home." All of Mary's dimples appeared at once. I snapped my head back from the glow, struggling to regain composure. I couldn't remember any of the words I had previously decided to say to Mary, words about lamps and things, carpets and colours. I had a thought: we'll talk about something Joe and I are comfortable with!

"Have you given any thought to the international situation?" I asked with enthusiasm, catching Joe's eye. He smiled at me encouragingly.

Mary lifted her drink with panache. "Oh yes, I was hoping you would ask!" she cried fruitily. "I'm so impressed with the designs coming out of Paris this year--you can't imagine. I've already ordered all of the Pinoit prints and am having my entire upper floor repainted and papered! And I'm thinking I'll get the spring wardrobe to match. Maybe Dior! And did you hear that there is an entire line of fabrics coming from Milan to match the Pinoit?" Mary's drink was sloshing around in her glass with her excitement. Greg moved out of the danger range. "I want to re-cover all the furniture in the dining room to reflect the spring colours! I did this room just last week." Her eyes glittered; her voice reached a crescendo and then slowed and stopped at last. She waited, a huge white smile, touched with raspberry, on her beautiful face.

"Oh," I said, at a total loss for words. Joe stood beside me, equally silent, a Stella Artois in his hand, too shocked to sip from it. I elbowed him, and his arm came up jerkily and he gulped at the beer. I took a hasty sip of my sangria, coughing at the citrus. "I meant in politics, actually," I sputtered, looking hopefully at Greg and nervously at Mary, and back again. Greg was now lounging against a mahogony sideboard, looking intelligent, his hand to his chin in a thoughtful pose. I waited. He said nothing, only looked into the middle distance with an ever-more clever stare. He sipped his drink.

Mary's eyes whited out vaguely. "What do you mean?" she asked, her tones inlaid with meaning.

"Oh, you know, the disaster situations abroad..." my words slipped into vagueries, trying to help Mary respond, say something, anything. Mary looked at her raspberry manicure, and then at the cream-coloured carpet under her yellow shoes. "It's very troubling," she said at last. Greg nodded sagely.

Joe finished his beer. I finished my drink. I couldn't remember why we'd come. And when we at last managed to get out the front door, hours later, stuffed with delicacies, our ears filled to overflowing with news out of Paris, Milan, London, our minds plugged with decorating ideas, we paused, staggering, to look at the lawn. The heat was incredible. And incredibly real.

We got into the Jeep and sank into the heat and breathed a collective sigh of relief.

That's the last time we step into that magazine.

Zero expectations

2008-05-04T23:26:00.004-05:00

I imagine them half with anticipation and half with dread, the people of the future. Depending on the day, they are either charmingly friendly or rabidly critical. My imagination plays with parallel universes while I count the days:

One day they are stuffy and haughty: the men are blackly moustachioed, the women fiercely angular and sharp-shoed. They peer at me over their glasses and question me brusquely:

"You haven't read Dickens? You--you don't love Wordsworth?"

Then they consult their clipboards worriedly, their nails tapping, glittering, on the polished mahogony table, which is nine yards long. I sit at one end of it, alone, dishevelled from travel and covered in little embroidered flags of my nationality, while the twelve of them sit crowded at the other end in frumpy-chic pantsuits, staring.

"Well, what have you read?" they ask in unison, glancing at each other out of the corners of their eyes, asking each other under their breaths--should we send this one back?

"Oh, well... I'm reading a Canadian writer currently... Wayne Johnston... excellent novels. I finished--OH, just last week I re-read some E. Nesbit!... And, let me see, I'm on a Milosz kick, for poetry... Drama's been slipping lately. I'm three pages into The Cherry Orchard?" Sweat glistens on my tired brow. To the stoccato of their nails on the wood, I run through the list of titles I've consumed in the past 12 months. Will it satisfy them?

No. Need I ask? Their leader, the award-winning-writing-instructor-woman, narrows her eyes with increasing distaste. "Pleeeeebians! All plebians! Those writers are... commoners! They do not belong to the gr-r-r-eat ancient can-on of literature!!" she yells at the last pitch possible in the Dignified Register, rolling her r's terrifyingly, stabbing a number 2 pencil in the air with each emphasis.

I panic, catch my breath, look wildly around for a friendly face...

Another day, they are gentle and kind--nature-lovers. They all wear sensible shoes, and they all have bad teeth. (Charming: but bad). Random pages protrude from their notebooks, which they tote in haphazard bags, and they stagger under loads of library books, which they carry from classroom to classroom. As they walk along the footpaths they themselves seem to flutter in the breeze, pages flying out behind them like papery offspring.

"What are the Canadians writing these days..." they murmer to me as they go, sentences that are statements more than questions, and they find each answer totally satisfactory. "Want to grab a pint at the pub, tell me more about that one?" they ask. This one's a keeper, they seem to twinkle at each other out of the corners of their eyes...

And I smile, and then the dream, and dreams, all possible future universes, disintegrate into the recesses of my imagination and I find my breath in the land of zero expectations.

You say--

2008-04-28T23:00:00.003-05:00

that you don't like poetry.
"I don't understand it; it's as though
poets write for themselves, indulging
private whims, private jokes, private
ideas that they deign only to divulge
in cryptic verse. Moreover
it's stupid. I don't like it. And that's all
there is to it."
I say--

that you've forgotten what it sounded like
when the land dropped away picture-perfect
under the plane, and glued to the window you swept up your breath
in excitement, letting it whisper out again
through your teeth

and you've forgotten what it tasted like
when you drank your first adult-drink
under the stars, and you knew that at any moment
you would spring through the wall of sophistication and you smiled
with expectation at your date

and you've forgotten what the river felt like
to your bare and dirty toes underneath
the waving fishing line, and you put your head back
and heard the laughing sun put brown marks on your face and the wind
say things to your hair

and you've forgotten what it looked like
when you saw that face
moving with total abandon under the light,
catching
the light,
flinging it back with animation
and scattering your ordered world

and you must have forgotten
what you knew
when you were born:
that poetry simply can't be taught,
it is not learned by rote

but as long as you are alive
the colours of your life are poetry
and you the reluctant poet
and moreover
your heart will beat in rhythm
whether you like it
or not.

Infidelity

2008-04-23T14:41:00.000-05:00

In older days they might have written
Of heavens splitting, darkness falling
Or a dark kingdom taking hold
Amidst a white-clad people.
But really all that’s accurate is darkness,
Darkness slashing sunlight into night
Like a black pen across a page.
By quietness and not by thunder
Are the heavens split asunder.
And sin works softly like a song
Behind all dependable promises
Which wear thin with weariness,
Grow flatly familiar,
Which lie open like an age-old book
Written across with temptation

Ode to the end of term

2008-04-13T22:45:00.002-05:00

Clatter clank, clatter rattle, clatter rattle round the house; thump up, thump down, wandering the stairs; one floor, down floor, upstairs, downstairs; in the kitchen; in the hall; typing pausing waiting twiddling trying trying trying trying to focus, trying to study, trying to write cold prose.

What is this? Where am I? Where are my bleeding missing notes? Under the looming pressingdankandgloomy under the looming deadlines. Time slows; mind flows (concentration gone). Endless cups of coffee, half-drunk coffee, downstairs, upstairs, growing cold. Endless cups of coffee, growing old. Clatter clank and rattle. Open up the chips, open up the book, open up the skies and (concentration gone).

Under the blue skies somewhere under blue skies anyone see a baseball soaring high? Focus on the typing, focus on the writing, focus on the reading tiny print. Print print print print print print print. Oh, close the laptop. Yell frustration. Clatter clank and rattle right out the door. Open up the drawers open up the doors open up the mind and (concentration gone).

Glenn Gould:

2008-04-07T20:49:00.003-05:00

image courtesy of glenngould.org

The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.

Watching

2008-04-05T11:55:00.002-05:00

I met the writer when I went up to the bar, and was forced to wait behind him in line, while he ordered something tall and icy with a red straw in it, and the bartender took forever getting it to him. I knew who he was; his postered face had been plastered around town for months.

He was of medium height and hair loss, with a face sharpened by several years' accumulation of efforts to be charming, and clever eyes.

While he waited the eyes looked eagerly around the room, and came inevitably to me, waiting, arms crossed. "Are you part of this poetry reading?" he asked me, and I shook my head no, smiling. But he pushed on: "You're a writer though?" I had to answer yes. He pressed on. "With an honours degree in Creative Writing?" I had to answer no. "Going on to study writing? Where?" And I had to answer...

"I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name?" he said charmingly, and I had to give it. "And you are so-and-so," I said, and he smiled. "Yes." And when, drink in hand, he could no longer justify his continued presence in front of me in the line at the bar, he excused himself.

I had to wonder what the interchange meant. He, being a writer, considered himself licensed to ask endless intrusive questions of strange (and much younger) women at a bar, because he was locally famous, because I had recognized his locally-famous-face, and because I purported to join his profession. The profession he has already succeeded in. He is intimately acquainted with waters I have only begun to try to tread. His hungry, sharpened eyes had consumed the room and he'd stood slightly above it, and I'd been included in his gaze, an object of consumption, useful to him like the drink in his hand and the new poetry he'd come to hear.

I shivered, walking away, knowing that if something about me had caught his interest, it--I--could very well find myself trapped in one of his poems, on one of his pages, between the paper covers of one of his books.

But then I smiled. Even if he tried to reproduce me on the page it could not, would not, be me. He wouldn't remember my name tomorrow. And I'd seen something in his eyes that was perhaps a crucial weakness: a basic failure to see. To see my mind, that is; my mind, which influences my eyes, which were watching him warily as he watched me.

"You're all creeps"

2008-04-02T20:32:00.002-05:00

K. ambles in as usual, looking as though the walk to the classroom has taken him through a few fields and over a dale. He takes off the brown tweed jacket, laying it carefully on top of the brown folder on the brown lecturn, and looks over the tortoise-shell rims to see which of us is present, and which absent. Whether his favourite targets are here, or absent. If they are here, he greets them. If they are absent, he mentions it loudly. His eyes are glittering. As usual.

He announces the lecture. "The title for today's lecture is: 'What's in a name?' For those of you who don't know, this line comes from a play about two little jerks named Romeo and Juliette." He snickers. "What's the difference between Romeo and Juliette and two lab rats in a shoebox?"

When one of us laughs out loud he looks straight at the unfortunate devil: looks, looks for a moment, and then the rims slide down a bit, his moustache twitches and he smiles in a semi-crazed kind of way, and he asks a question guaranteed to put that person under a fiercely bright philosophical spotlight.

"Well, what is the difference? Do you believe in normative human nature?"

The frantic student, masking her ignorance under a casual veil of panache, sweeps her bangs to the side before she answers. "I don't know... under certain circumstances maybe."

He snickers again, and rocks back and forth on his heels, his moustache twitching and his eyes sparkling brighter and brighter. He is kind to the really ignorant; he doesn't let them know that he is making a fool of them. To the really ignorant, he says, "Don't worry. I'm not putting you on the spot here," and then moves on with the lecture. But to the clever, he is merciless. He says, "Don't worry. I'm not putting you on the spot here," and then proceeds to interrogate them until he has beaten them irrevocably into a corner, and they are flushed and wild-eyed, and uncertain as to their future success in the academy...

"So you're a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, just like the rest of these jerks." And he chuckles. "Don't worry, I'm not putting you on the spot."

When he dives into his lecture at last there are only ten minutes left for it. He looks at the clock in wonder and says, unfailingly, "Oh, we've got ten minutes left, and I haven't started my lecture yet. Oh well." He plunges into it anyway, bouncing on his heels, rubbing his hands together. To most of us the lecture is incomprehensible, even if we've done the readings.

"Descartesisahistoricaleveryoneelseiswrongcogitoergosum."

We laugh when he asks us, "I bet you haven't don't the readings. MacIntyre? Did you read Alisdaire MacIntyre? You'd know what I was talking about if you'd read MacIntyre. But I know you haven't. None of you creeps ever does the readings. You're all creeps." He's right; mostly, we haven't. But coming to class is worth it.

He tells us that his hair used to be red.

He is the only prof I know who quotes (or sings) Latin proverbs, the Bible, folk songs, Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare along with Marx, Rousseau and Taylor. He knows philosophy through and through. "Plato? He was a sharp old boy, trust me. But Rorty changes his argument with every new article. The nice thing about Rorty is that he's dead, so he can't change his views anymore." (Snicker). "The thing about postmodernists is that they have a creepy kind of quietism to 'em..."

Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning throughout the school year, philosophers long dead and buried rotate in their graves out of pure anxiety. When he says their names, the live ones stop what they are doing for a moment, and without knowing why, wriggle a bit, like worms on hooks.

When he turns his beetle-black eyes on me I know I'm in for trouble. "Now JM... you were saying the other day that Rorty is a relativist, that right?" --I feebly agree-- "Just because you don't like 'im doesn't mean you have a good argument, does it?" --I feebly argue--He charges on-- "But you've got to watch out for Rorty, he's a slippery devil, and he's pretty clever too... JM, what do you believe about normative human nature?"

I freeze; my mind blanks; I'm lost.

The thing about K. is that he cannot, he must not, be underestimated. He might be edging 80 but he is more than capable of reducing a big man, or a strong girl, into a chunk of blubbering panic. Quick as a flash, two seconds into your guarded response to one of his questions, he's figured out your life history, the entirety of your weakly-constituted views, and your chosen profession. And what you believe about normative human nature. And whether you would run a stop sign in a sparsely-populated suburb at 3:00 in the morning on a moonless night.

He is a sort of genius. He makes us smarter by making us want to resist being pushed into corners. He makes us question what we imagine we believe, right down to the roots of our thinking, and our worlds are shaken up as a matter of course when he turns the rims in our direction and asks those dreadful questions...

Today is our last class; today is his last class, because no matter how sharp he is there's some obscure rule about exit-ages that he's going to have to follow. Today is my last class, too; my last class ever at this University. I'm not sorry to leave on this note. I've long since learned to let the brief intellectual humiliation slip off my back like water off a duck. It's probably best, in fact, to leave the University knowing just how little I know. And how much I still have to learn. For instance, I still have trouble remembering what I believe about normative human nature...

At least it's been hammered into me that, in the end, "we're all creeps." I won't forget that.

You think you are alone

2008-03-30T10:37:00.002-05:00

You think you are alone.
My dear—
You slip away from knowing
That I am here—
Into a gentle forgetting,
A longing or a doubting,
Not even wishing sometimes, for fear
That I will not answer.
You think you speak your words.
Those long, long steps you took
To say it: “I believe”—
You did not make them, dear:
I pushed you there.
And your low voice called
What I had put in your mouth—
You did not speak at all:
Through the impenetrable wall
Of uncertainty,
You did not speak, but I.
You think you are alone.
My dear—
When you fell beneath the wave
All shining with your fear,
It was not a preacher put you there,
Under sun and cold and sky,
With gentle and unmoving hands
To pull you out of death, to life—
It was not a preacher, there,
But I.

You think you are alone?
If you but knew the truth—
I bend my back to form the road
Under your feet:
I AM the eucharistic joy
Inflaming the holy bread you eat.
I wait between your heartbeats, here
Before, and at the end, of time.
You think you are alone!
How could you be alone, my dear—
My child,
My friend,
My own?

The Kitchen Revolt

2008-03-26T14:03:00.001-05:00

Livid leaves of raging basil
Laid the gauntlet on the table
The night of the Kitchen Revolt:
The snow peas followed,
Wounded, hollow,
Backed by poultry
Waving bones.
Locked in a drawer,
The cutlery roared, but
Could not find the latch;
And the broom in the closet
Could not even posit
The best means of attack.
Line on line, the carrots fell
To rank and file down on the tiles.
The croissants gave a stirring call
To all the foodstuffs, great and small:
And out of freezer, fridge and board
The angry, frightened produce poured,
The night of the Kitchen Revolt.
But then the French bread raised a shout
That washed off every angry pout
And smoothed the wrinkled sauerkraut…

And when we woke that tragic day
We, unsuspecting, made our way
Down to the beaten kitchen.
Oh what horror, oh what grief!
For not a single lettuce leaf
Was left to line our hungry maws:
We looked to left, we looked to right
But not a foodstuff was in sight,
For all had fled in black of night,
Causing the Revolt’s untimely cessation
Rather than falling to re-frigeration.

The real world

2008-03-18T21:44:00.002-05:00

It was long past midnight when I realized I was not going to sleep. They must've put a real shot in that latté at Starbucks, even though I asked for decaf... But lattés weren't on my mind.

An Epiphany School was.

Oh school, enchanting school: books, books, books, studying, class, writing. My current school has almost folded its arms and told me to get out, get lost, and find a job. But I am not after a job, not just yet. It's time to find a new school, after this one is sealed up and over, and has become a certificate, a piece of paper, and a memory only, and no longer a lived reality, no matter how much I love it and will always love it.

(It is orange and faded and trying to be innovative, trying to be revolutionary, and succeeding only sometimes in actually being powerful).

For a while, I wanted to find the same sort of power in another school, except on a grander scale; I thought I wanted an international environment where I could look back on this small community with a loving kind of dismissal. You have given me a start, so thanks, is what I would say over my shoulder.

I am a slow learner in some ways. To my detriment, sometimes, I take insight and try to make it practical. I believe that in a small way we become the things we study, and for a while I'd almost deceived myself as to the person I thought I was--a driven person, a motivated, powerful, political person. I can always write, I reasoned: I can write wherever I am. I should find a real job and write during my free hours. Maintain personal security, etc. etc. Live in the real world.

But it was a deception. Just because you can do something (and even do it well) doesn't mean you should. As many of you have known or suspected for a long time, I am my blog. I am perhaps not the kind of person who heads out in a straight line to slay the dragon: rather, I stand at the side and have a look at his glittering scales, wonder why he is here at all, note the pretty things about him (the way the jewels wedged between said scales glitter when he heaves out a fresh round of fire, for instance), and have a go at trying to convince him to take a less destructive course of action.

So despite acceptances which try to sway me to the side of St. George-ing--acceptances which tell me that I can and should try to succeed in the political realm--I've peacefully and finally decided to hole up in a distant country for a while and learn to write, and write better, instead. I want to write as though I am serious about writing. My blog has finally opened its lungs and roared at me to listen. If my Epiphany School doesn't want me, I'll find one that does. The only lance I aim to sharpen, next year, is my power of observation.

I don't live in the real world; I don't want to. My place is on the sidelines.

Bacon and regret

2008-03-16T00:38:00.002-05:00

In the morning, he suddenly regretted what he'd done. He stared out the courtyard window at the sweetly singing sparrows lining up along the laundry string, and let the bacon burn in the frying pan.

It only took a second, in the end, for him to realize that it had been a mistake to poison Aunt Amanda.

True, she'd been horrifically annoying at the party the night before, hovering over his shoulder, asking him again and again when she could come visit him in New York, you know, to stay in his swell apartment, tag along after him and mooch off his rich friends, and find herself a natty new husband to replace the latest reject. And it wasn't as though he could say no to her demands. She'd been his mother's (only) best friend for sixteen years. All the years before that, Aunt Florence had been his mother's (only) best friend, until he'd stolen one too many cookies from her gold-plated cookie jar and she'd lectured Mom on the merits of rigorous discipline for a full week. (How had she even known that it had been he stealing the cookies? He'd never figured it out).

He wrenched his mind from the unhappy past to the happier. The Deed had been very simple. One or two drops of concentrate Rat Poison in Aunt Amanda's rum-and-Coke and it was all over. The others put it down to her heart condition, while he slipped the poison vial in Aunt Florence's silver-coated Gucci bag when her back was turned for a moment, just in case the medical examiner got a little too close to the truth.

The acrid smell of bacon burning began to fill the room, but he ignored it, and continued to deliberate at the window. He rejoiced in his devious, clever nature with new appreciation. Indeed, he had the feeling that a great deal of wonderful things were about to happen in the world around him. What triumphs? What glory?

He simply couldn't have let Aunt Amanda come to New York. She'd have poisoned his life. But he'd nipped that in the bud. Right in the bud! It was curtains for Aunt Amanda.

Outside the glass the sun was shining, and the birds were singing. He turned away from the window, whistling a happy tune, ready now to tend to the bacon singing shrilly on the stove.

When his conscience hit him, the blow was severe indeed. It came at him with the weight of a frying pan and smelled like burnt bacon, and the vision of Regret looked rather like a triumphant, gloriously angry Aunt Florence with discipline well in hand. How did she get in? he wondered, seconds before he went unconscious.

It had definitely been a mistake to poison Aunt Amanda. Aunt Florence, after all, had eyes in the back of her head.

Six-foot long coloured pencils

2008-03-11T23:44:00.004-05:00

Like all of the greatest ideas in the history of the world, the idea came to her in the middle of the night.

One moment she was sound asleep, and then next she was awake: awake and staring at the ceiling. Cars passed in the street outside her window occasionally, and they threw a brief golden flash across the walls. Every time it happened her eyes brightened a little more.

She patented the idea and secured millions. Millions of happy hours that is. Who actually wants to buy six-foot long coloured pencils? Nobody seemed to want them but her. She could lie on her back in her bed and draw bright designs across the ceiling. Goodbye, white paint: colour was better.

Only after her death would the idea catch fire in the hearts and minds of children across the globe--like all of the greatest ideas in the history of the world.

In heaven, she made friends with Van Gogh.

Space

2008-03-09T11:03:00.002-05:00

Christopher had always hated crowds. He almost hated people, he hated crowds so much. He'd hated them when he was a tiny kid, following his mom around the mall with his hand tightly gripped in hers. He'd hated them when he was in elementary school, where the other children were always crowding around something or other, always pushing and shoving at recess in the claustrophobic playground. He'd hated them when he was a teenager in the fenced-in downtown high school, where getting beat up or hurt generally was easier because of the fence.

Christopher knew that crowds brewed trouble. He craved space, space alone, and protected as best he could a little perimeter around his person, so he could be safe in it.

It was sometime around grade ten when Christopher took to flying, to escape especially pressing crowds. He'd lift off just when it was getting unbearable--say, in the rush out of class at the 3:30 bell--and breathe out, gladly, as his feet took to the air above his classmates' heads, gliding forward and escaping out the double doors.

At first, Christopher tried to reserve his flights for emergencies, but before long he was flying all the time.

When his mother sent him to the big grocery store to stock up, Chris would fly over the screeching minivans in the parking lot, the crazy moms with their shopping carts seemingly full of kids and toilet paper; and when he'd loaded his bags with groceries, Chris would fly over everyone's heads out the front door rather than try to navigate around the bagboys and hurrying shoppers plugging up the exit aisle.

Chris would fly instead of taking the bus or subway downtown. He'd shudder from the air, gulping mouthfuls of wind, as he looked down on the city buses moving along crowded avenues, imagining how awful it would be on board: old men with their newspapers and elbows in his face, girls with dangerously swinging backpacks and oppressive perfume, big guys with blue tattoos inevitably just a few inches away at eye-level, chattering crazy old women draped in scarves with their bags cluttering the aisle; feet on feet, reaching hands, and bad breath.

Chris flew off his high school graduation platform rather than having to rush down the stairs into the black-clad crowd of graduates, and when Ashley and her friends shouted criticisms at him from below, their hyper-curled blonde hair frigid with hairspray and resisting the wind, Chris only waved and carried on to where his family was waiting by the car.

He didn't really have any friends. But he got to know the soft whipping sound of the wind off the roof as he came in for a landing; and he knew the look of high branches talking in sign-language to the birds. And Chris made friends with the birds.

By the time university rolled around, he hated even the idea of crowds, and deliberately chose Arts rather than sciences, because he knew he'd be crammed into labs in the sciences, battling daily the oppressive smell of dead things and chemicals and jostling for space at narrow black counters. He selected large, general classes, knowing they'd be held in big open rooms, and sometimes even rooms with windows.

If there were windows Chris would fly out of them after class, sensing bottlenecks from a mile away, and hankering the smell and feel of the clean air after the staleness of the room. There was nothing like the open air: empty, vacant of pressing bodies, the sound of feet walking or running, the rush and clatter of marching people. More than anything, Christopher craved the spaciousness of the air.

Until, one day, Chris met Meg. She was tall and she had a nose like bird's beak and hands that moved like branches, and a voice that was so soft as to be almost like the wind off the roof just before he came in for a landing. After Chris met Meg he didn't fly anymore--he didn't feel like it, somehow. And he didn't hate people anymore, and he wasn't afraid of crowds.

Especially when they moved out of the city. They built a house full of windows in the Northwest Territories. And when he flew, it was only for practice.

Sometimes Meg came too.

Crowns and cat food

2008-03-06T22:41:00.005-06:00

After it grew, dramatically, and then grew legs, arms and a tail, she reluctantly decided that it needed to go outside. Her mother objected (it was nice to have an extra pair of hands around the house for a change) but she felt there was nothing else to do. It was getting too large, its flippers had fallen off, and besides, it was beginning to sneak cat food when it thought nobody was looking. The cat was looking, though, and it tattled every time.

Out it went. It sat at the back door and cried for a little while, polishing its crown with shaky rubbery hands, but she turned on the vacuum to drown out the sound.

She'd forgotten, though, about the cat door, and after ten minutes it was back inside. It managed to grab a handful of cat food before she shooed it out again, and she nailed a board across the little opening, despite the protesting cat.

Her mother washed dishes and fought pity for the poor thing, which was now slinking around the back yard with drooping ears and the air of one who had been harshly rejected. But she kept her own counsel; her daughter knew it better than she did, and besides, rarely vacuumed.

When the sun went down everyone felt slightly anxious, and tried to hide it by eating dinner busily. But it was really very difficult to ignore it, leaping up and down outside the kitchen window, its face popping up every few seconds, clearly communicating abject loneliness and misery. When its crown fell off it cried even harder. They turned on the radio and put their backs to the window.

Before she went to bed, she put a little tray of food and a jar of water outside the cat flap before hastily replacing the board across the opening. Better safe than sorry.

But it would have none of the cat food. Its experiment had failed. Sighing, the sea monkey tucked his legs back up, wriggled a little, and when its scales popped back out from where he'd hid them away, leaped into the jar and decided that uniqueness was a quality cats could keep: he'd been happier eating flakes, swimming in circles, and looking at his own reflection in the glass. Besides, the humans were easier to live with when his ears were stopped up with water.

Henri Nouwen:

2008-02-25T18:11:00.003-06:00

...One day Carlos asked Don Juan how he could better live in accordance with the Indian's teaching.

'You think and talk too much, you must stop talking to yourself,' Don Juan answered. He explained that we maintain our world by our inner talk, and that we talk to ourselves until everything is as it should be, repeating our inner choices over and over, staying always on the same paths. If we would stop telling ourselves that the world is such and such, it would cease to be so!

...Don Juan is asking how we can expect something really new to happen to us if our hearts and minds are so full of our own concerns that we do not even listen to the sounds announcing

a new reality.

from Reaching Out

Angels on the roof

2008-02-25T17:02:00.004-06:00

She died. It was as though a wind had come through the room.

They heard angels on the roof, their feet moving in a swift and silver march, march. The footsteps came in quick succession but did not hurry; round and round on the roof they went, with a sound something akin to rejoicing.

They knew the angels had come upon the released soul, wrapped up in a bit of feathered shawl, round, resilient, and lovely as a polished opal, and waiting on the roof. When the footsteps faded, spinning off in organized chaos into the sky around the hospital, they knew the soul had been hoisted by the smaller angels onto the tallest angels' shoulders, and was being carried upwards, into the moon, or the nearest portal to the heavenly realms, burdened not at all by their load and rejoicing all the way.

The piano

2008-02-23T15:21:00.002-06:00

When he sat down on the scratched mahogony bench and it gave a deep and groaning creeeeak, they knew something magical would happen in a moment, and sure enough, it always did: a wash of colour seemed to flow through his balanced wrists and poised hands, and changed the very nature of the air in the apartment, and indeed the whole building, making it more beautiful.

He knew the notes and chords that translated life from a steady organized stream of "busy nothings" into patterns of sound. Sometimes in the middle of the night he'd wake up with a start, fingers already moving, and his neighbours would suffer the sounds of composition when they'd have preferred to be asleep. But they let him be; they didn't want to tamper with his genius.

Or maybe they didn't want to take issue with the piano itself. One or two of them had been over to his apartment, seen the big empty room and the bare hardwood floor, exactly the same colour of the piano, and it had seemed to them as though the piano was growing out of the wood like a funny, careful tree, with white fingers for branches and shiny brass roots. The piano could not produce a note that wasn't impressive, whether it was quietly impressive, an

e

or a wistful b flat or

an extraordinary, captivating f sharp, soft as a whisper,

or whether it was magnificently, impressively loud, a round and grand

a

or even that old standard c major chord, which sounded as perfect and complete as a life cycle, all by itself.

At night he composed; during the day he played what he knew. When he sat down to play Chopin, the young woman in apartment 3B would put on a skirt, quietly come out of her suite, and sit down in the hall, the better to hear it and let herself feel very romantic. When he played Beethoven, Brahms or Mozart the band teacher one floor up put a voice recorder to the floorboards, and brought the tapes to his struggling grade ten class so that they might be a little inspired. And when he played Debussy everyone who could hear it stopped what they were doing and listened, wondering whether Debussy knew what life was really like, and wondering if it really was a little like Claire de Lune.

Perhaps it was the piano that was magic; they didn't see anything particularly impressive about him. But they loved the music. He loved it too, and he knew they loved it, and they were all the audience he needed. He made an agreement with the piano that he'd play every day in exchange for floor space in the apartment to sleep on every now and then.

And the piano was happy with the arrangement. And it thrived.

And grew.

Slow motion

2008-02-19T14:06:00.000-06:00

Can we resign ourselves
To slow motion?
To methodical movement
(Spoon to mouth, spoon to mouth)
And the utmost of care
(Napkin down, and rise from chair)?

Or perhaps that is wrong,
The word “resign”?
If speed reduces the care in a life
(Slam the car door, put foot to floor)
And caution is lent to the breeze,
Perhaps what we need is slow motion, deep aging,
To bring us down deep on our knees.

Some days

2008-02-12T23:32:00.000-06:00

Too much studying, too many meetings, too little laughter combine to make students clutch their heads in frustration and hope, mostly, that God really is with the poets.

A bad case of the "mean reds" and a tall glass of cold water and a plane ticket: past, present, future. They waver on the surface and each one supercedes the others. Is God really with the poets?

Riddles: even poets--especially poets--need sleep to keep things in perspective. Some days, the poets wreak havoc. Maybe God is only with sleeping poets.

Thomas Merton:

2008-02-03T15:12:00.001-06:00

The future of poetry is also the future of the world. For one cannot truly believe in God if one does not believe in mankind as well: the poets will triumph. We will triumph. God is with the poets.

from Echoing Silence: on the vocation of writing.

Burnt-out cigarettes

2008-02-02T22:09:00.000-06:00

Sometimes, when the winter has entrenched itself so deeply into your bones that you instinctively stay inside, stay where it is warm and dry, and where you forget that it smells stale indoors because you have to be there, everything just gets to be too much.

Sometimes in the winter I feel like burnt-out cigarettes: the sunny, sweet smelling bits in me light up and burn up into dark little ashes; if dropped, the ice wind blows them away. Burnt-out cigarettes pollute the environment they land on; and they smell wrong. Burnt-out cigarettes are burnt out. Sometimes in the winter I feel like that.

In the winter the wind releases little bursts of cold, slowly, patiently, patiently, little bit by little bit, and waits until some mysterious moment in the middle of January, when it unleashes its full strength on the city. We never know quite how it happens--we are spending time outdoors, enjoying it even, and then one day Outdoors is the enemy. The full violence of the cold is suddenly altogether apparent, like a fantastic beast that we had slipped into believing was only a figment of our imaginations, was only mythical, until it swept through the door.

On January mornings the cold waits around corners. You dread turning because you know it is there, waiting to steal your breath. But of course you have to turn, so you do, and then the laughing, roaring wind is a tiger that's got you between its claws and there's nothing you can do but forge ahead, eyes streaming with something close to grief, feet carrying you mechanically forward.

Struggling along the street, feeling burnt-out inside and beyond icy outside, my impulse lately is simply to run, run through the cold and flee indoors. I fly down the street and the people I pass, stumping along in their own way, think I am crazy. The only benefit to running is that I get to my destination faster, but the wind lashes my face as I go and it is hard to breathe. It's almost like trying to run underwater.

I hate the cold; more and more it seems like an enemy. I remember when I could write about it with delight, send love-letters to Winter with laughter as I half-ran, half-flew to catch buses downtown. Perhaps it wasn't quite so cold on those days. But lately I've felt trapped in the weather's clutches, as though locked in some devilish Deep Freeze with the keys lost and the ice starting to crust along the edges of the world.

There is something exhilarating about winter when the sun comes out in its full radiance, and catches the admiring glance of the snow. There is something wonderful about cold that is so diamond-bright it simply leaves no room at all for compromise, and is certainly never wishy-washy. If there is one quality that winter possesses, it is genuineness; basically, you can take it or leave it. Winter is quite gloriously unconcerned about the plight of smokers tramping swiftly outdoors to light up just outside the office door, smoking half a cigarette and rushing in again, defeated. Winter cares nothing for dripping noses, or curious tongues frozen tightly to poles in playgrounds. Winter pretends nothing. Winter never pretends.

But I can't pretend about winter either. My feelings have cooled. Lately I think a lot about warmer climes, wonder what winter is like where they only get rain, wish I had enough money to fly away from winter for a while and fall in love with some form of perpetual summer. Winter's burnt me out and summer can't come soon enough. Absence makes the heart grow fonder...

When I stop

2008-01-27T00:21:00.000-06:00

When I stop
writing
Words crowd up,
Shouldering past each other
Striving to reach
The surface of me
Like bubbles
In a bottle.
Or they pass me
In the street,
Anxious that I see them,
Pretending
Not to see me,
Casting quick glances back
And wishing all the while
I’d stop them
In their tracks

The Beautiful Changes

2007-12-13T10:36:00.000-06:00

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne's Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon's turning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

By Richard Wilbur

Train of thought...

2007-12-10T15:15:00.001-06:00

...while listening to a visiting poet preach her message to--you guessed it--the very same poetry class.

...

I muse that she has presence and charisma that is, or maybe has been, helpful to her success. She is standing like an athlete and looks like one, and has a solid tense abdomen and a figure that contrasts oddly with her face--a face that is beginning to stretch itself out, or pinch together at the mouth and eyes. Does she see us as she stands there talking about poet's prizes, Atwood, Ondaatje, Carson, Michaels? As she talks about metaphor? She flits her tongue over her top lip every few sentences and the habit becomes swiftly maddening.

Does she see us? Her voice is soft and dreamy and her accent is tinged with culture and she is smiling. Does she see us?

She offers a tiny space for interaction after ten minutes of talk, but moves on, barreling past the prof's comment/question. He sits quiet, subtly chastened. Now oh you lucky lucky students you will hear my poetry: I myself will read it to you...

Is she pretentious? Oh yes, she is. But what writer isn't? She is talking now about poststructuralism, Jung, psychoanalysis, Shopier, Greece. Her accent drills softly into my mind and begins to bother me: wasn't she born in the prairies? Hasn't she always lived in the prairies? The accent is talking on and on about the poet who had an affair with her psychoanalyst that began while she was wrestling with him on the floor, how that poet also asked questions about God, about mysticism, how she was sensuous and mystical herself. The tongue across the thin upper lip: quick, flit, gone.

"There was a kind of voice that was unlocked..." She is talking now about the voices in her, and about the artwork in her published work. "Devious: pastiche," she says.

I muse: her poetry is good. We read some of it as a class. Biting, bright, clear: distilled thoughts. One or two woke real images in me. One or two had a lot of unnecessary language. But some of it is good indeed. How does she, standing here in her too-tight red turtleneck and baubles and with her greying long hair lying about her face, now speaking some French words about chess, how does she relate to her poetry? Words, words, as she reads: they don't make sense; the accent drives me wild.

I muse: I've felt negatively about her since the second she began speaking. Why? She sips from a water bottle. She gestures. Her feet are spread and planted. Her torso is held so erect that she almost seems to be tipping backward at the shoulders.

"Make sorrow the way you once made love," she breathes.

I muse: It isn't the over-sexedness of her stance and her poetry that alienates me. Perhaps she's alienated herself from us by using this rhetoric, by standing, speaking this way. I sneak a glance around me--we hapless students are sitting or lounging against desks, chairs, some listening, some sleeping, and some taking in but giving nothing back, no response, only glaze. Did she know in advance that we wouldn't care?

"Bernard's sandwich," she says.

I've always dreaded what they might make me do, as a published writer--readings. Sometimes distance between the writer's flaws and pretention, and their work, which is distilled and pure, like written wine, the best of ourselves--sometimes distance is necessary. It is a protection, a cushion, a buffer zone. Seeing the writer herself has irrevocably changed the way I read her work.

She is losing us totally. The class shifts almost as one; chairs creak. Sighs. We are sitting--she is standing--she reads about champagne and sex, she reads her poetry, and we are not listening. She doesn't see us.

I cannot ask "what the hell do you mean?" because it would embarass the prof. And nobody asks any questions when she pauses to offer the chance. Perhaps we know the answer to the mystery of her poetry: it means

nothing, nothing at all.

Lines

2007-12-04T17:23:00.000-06:00

I underestimate it and so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. At first, I consider it an easy credit; then it becomes a frustrating one, then a baffling one.

Stones thrown in a lake. But what else is poetry? Beautiful to look at, something to do, ripples in water, undulating waves, and ultimately leaving no mark--no visible mark.

When we first conglomerated in poetry class I eyed the other students surreptitiously, wondering what kinds of poems they produced late at night on their whirring computers, if any. And the prof, I fully expected, would be a wan and spectacled character with not a whit of common sense and a head full of his own importance.

Reality: the other students (mostly female education majors) were quiet, save the brainy philosophy major and the science major/jock. The latter, it became apparent, was there for the former, and the one in between was exactly that.

And the prof was the opposite of what I'd supposed he would be--of course.

"What do you think Keats means in this stanza?"

Why are you looking at us? We have no idea. Mostly the girls are quiet. The philosophy major raises his hand again--and again--but he is not a poet and he doesn't understand. The science major/jock raises his hand--and perhaps some of the education students are impressed by his answer--but the prof is not.

In fact, it becomes evident, after a few days, weeks, that this frustrated expression on his face is permanent. Can we answer anything correctly? Does he want us to answer at all? How can he expect us to know?

Poetry is like stones thrown in a lake, like ripples or waves. It glides up and down the rocks on the beach and then leaves them alone again, laughing, disappearing; it makes them wet and in a moment they dry in the sun, and there is no sign. How do you explain the way poetry makes you feel? It is elusive: can you ever catch it?

"How does Shakespeare layer these metaphors to create meaning?"

Oh, silence, moving like ripples among the quiet education students, moving like waves through the classroom. If we are moved by the sonnet we make no sign; only the philosophy major raises his persistent hand and the prof sighs into his for a fraction of a second, schools his features into a tolerant mien, calms the irritation that lurks under his skin.

Where does he go after class? Does he go to a dim bistro, somewhere, to grade our feeble poems while sipping ruby wine out of long-stemmed glasses? Does he stop, suddenly, pulling scraps of napkins from the empty place-setting across the table, scrawling lines of his own invention on the ivory squares? Does he put his head in his hands, unpretending, remembering how we never understood what he was getting at?

Maybe. Who knows?

After class I rush away. I don't want to linger to be told innumerable Wikipedia facts about Keats from the science major/jock, and the education majors have little to talk about. We smile and disperse.

Some of us disappear at last into our own rooms, where we don't have to try and explain how Shakespeare moves us: our own spaces, where we can fill up our own ivory squares with our own lines, nonsense, ripples, waves that stretch from the beginnings of our souls to the end, and we forget about poetry class and how it taught us nothing.

Perhaps the prof forgets, too, caught up in his own lines, and forgets about grading our poetry, and sips the ruby liquid and smiles.

100th Post: Parenthetical Poem

2007-12-03T11:12:00.000-06:00

I saw a butterfly
pinned in a crowded pine-framed box;
beside a multitude of others
itself unique.
I saw its wings
like graceful chips of fallen sky
splayed open and revealing
more in rigored death
than ever it volunteered in life.
At a distance it became
a blur of blue, a benison
granted to the passing eye,
a peaceful contradiction to
its piercing pin:
a little shaft
of light

This is my 100th post. It is a parenthetical poem, written a month or two ago in between tired, aborted attempts to study, and then posted today in between tired, aborted attempts to study. This blog has not much been a refuge for me or you lately and this little poem is perhaps a poor attempt to keep it alive [lively]. But I offer no apologies. I have been writing, if not here, and even the most prolific writers must prioritize... Keep reading...

On Critical ("Attack") Journalism:

2007-10-13T16:25:00.000-05:00

I sit in the middle of mounds of readings and homework and pressing responsibilities, graduate school research, applications and scholarship paperwork, and the extra, gleaming books which promise that to read them carefully is to make me sharper, make me more relevant in the institution that I love.

And then, when I begin to read and to work I fall inside the work and wake up and remember: it is the work that I love, it is this, these, these bright nuggets of insight and intuition, theory and opinion that make me light up inside, and it's no longer work, even when it makes me tired. It's a way of life.

Shall I share?...

"American television critic Jeff Greenfield has identified a sub-species of reporters that he calls the "killer" journalist, journalists who seek to enhance their own reputations by beating up on politicians..."

And in Canada:

"By imposing unrealistic expectations on government, journalists helped to enlarge the private sector and the values that went along with it. The private sector, of course, was not subject to the same scrutiny by the press.

It can also be argued that negative reporting has created a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Many good people are discouraged from entering public life because they don't want themselves or their families exposed to the harsh, unflattering glare of the spotlight. As better people stay away, the quality of public life is diminished...

One wonders how many people would go into journalism if journalists had to endure the same intense scrutiny that they put politicians under, where their financial affairs, medical history, and sexual relationships could become public knowledge, their physical characteristics and mannerisms open to ridicule and where every mistake is likely to be pounced upon. People with a sense of dignity and need for privacy would go elsewhere."

From David Taras' "Canadian Journalists: From Servants to Power Brokers." The Newsmakers: The Media's Influence on Canadian Politics. Calgary: Nelson Canada, 1990. p. 61-63.

Reasons to run

2007-10-11T17:41:00.000-05:00

Maybe I'm nine in the open field--
the small brown scruff lining
bases of bales
brush my flipflopped feet. I laugh.
My head is filled with colour,
motion, found at the edges.
Glints of gold in the hay. Clover. Fireflies
Hinted-at, or hidden in the grass.
I put my hands out: the wind
takes a clover-flower out of them, moving it
over the grass, to disappear. Light.
From the sky come mixed emotions:
a fading sunlight, rushing cloud, a streak
of dark that could be night. I stop.
I let the silence or the wind
anchor me to the ground. Under my feet,
uncomfortable with hay
and under the field itself
lies the fixity of the land: a tether. Or
a reason to pick up and run. I run!
Over the clambering stubble and the
unplowed dirt, the lowering sky, and I
find my way out, letting the stable earth
push me away.

**Inspired by Gallagher's "Sudden Journey"

2007-09-08T01:03:00.001-05:00

Dear Madeleine,

It's funny that I've only gained the courage to write to you now, now when you can't read what I've written, won't ever read it. But I've written a letter to you every week of my life for ten years, ever since I pulled A Ring of Endless Light out of the bookshelf, randomly. Only one childish letter did I send to you, and I've regretted every week for ten years the childish thoughts I put into it. I've rewritten that letter a thousand times in my mind, Madeleine, trying on but always discarding the language, because it was never enough.

My gawky teenage self got through high school largely because of you. In your stories, then your poetry, then your prose, I found page after page of pure light; it seemed as if the little, dark world I was living in was pushed back, back by your words. Vicky Austin was lifted up in light and so was I, with her, and simply by reading those--alive!--words it was as though we were all fighting with all our might against everything that was ugly in the world. I could only think in terms of light and dark after I read that first novel. I still can only think in those terms, Madeleine.

Everyone talks about worldviews these days. Everyone has a right to their own, it seems. Well, I suppose I am not creative enough to think up my own, so I've borrowed yours. Oh dear, dear Madeleine, so many times when I've drifted by myself in a wide sea of metaphors, of breaking disasters, of loneliness, I've turned to your words, your bracing, heartening words, and found strength in them. Both as a writer and as a person, I've grown up with your firm hands guiding my steps and my words, helping me, subtly, peripherally.

Madeleine, I read your rather cross-sounding, and slightly maddening, direction to writers the other night when I couldn't sleep, that we should never cry while we are writing. If we cry while we write a moving scene, you wrote, we should invariably trash the pages, brace ourselves, and begin again. Only by writing with dry eyes can we see our characters properly, you wrote. Dear Madeleine, I'm sorry to say that it is impossible for me to write this minute without weeping.

Damn, damn this ugly, brutal, awful, horrible darkness, that lets Death in to claim people like you. You, Madeleine, should never have succumbed to Death, of all things. You know better. How many years have I cherished the fact that my greatest mentor was still here with me, separated by a bit of geography, but always here, somewhere, to keep writing, keep adding to the Canon? But you are not here any longer. You've left me alone, Madeleine. How could you?

I don't mean to rebuke. I did rebuke you when you let Joshua die, I remember. I cried and cried and felt as if everything beautiful had dried up, when he died. But you had no choice about that, I know. And you knew when writing, better than I did while reading, that He makes everything beautiful in time, and that even Joshua's death was part of the pattern...

I've been thinking about the pattern a lot lately, Madeleine. Sometimes it seems as if there are too many pointless things that happen, things that really don't make sense, and I suspect never will. Sometimes I wonder if it can really be true that there is a pattern. When I love too much. When there is more in me that is broken than whole. When I look at the world, really look at it, and see its horrors. Darfur, Madeleine, what about Darfur? And what about Rwanda? Madeleine, I know you've seen your fair share of horrors, both in your personal life and in the world around you. But you always believed, anyway, in Beauty. And in angels.

I read about your death on CNN, just now. I got home from watching a silly movie at the theatre, and then I found that link someone sent to me, and I followed it to find that some reporter dared to write about your death as if you were someone ordinary, as if you were just an old lady who used to be important, and who died. How could you die, Madeleine? How could I read about it on CNN?

I wonder how long it will take before I stop feeling your presence.

I suspect I never will.

There are too many thoughts in me, too much grief in me, and it is too difficult to write what I am trying to say. I suppose what I need to say is thank you, for everything. For being so courageous, for flinging that stone into Goliath's forehead again and again. And for affirming the pattern no matter how many times you, yourself were lost in darkness.

I believe with all my heart that you are being lifted up in light, Madeleine, like Vicky was and is, like I am sometimes. Perhaps you are right now looking at the pattern from a better vantage point, and what looks like a labyrinth of sorrow to us is really a bit of a joke to you. The paradigm has shifted for you. I suppose I've got to stop writing for a moment and figure out how things are going to work now that my paradigm has shifted too--but then again, I don't think you'd advise me to stop writing, even for a moment. By writing we can figure things out. Even death.

Dear Madeleine, I know you'd say your death is also part of the pattern. And if He makes everything beautiful in time, it doesn't take any time at all, or any stretch of the imagination, to see the beauty that filled up the world because you lived. Madeleine, I won't stop. Not ever.

Earth to earth
Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust.

The Lord bless her
and keep her,
the Lord make his face to shine upon her
and be gracious unto her,
the Lord lift up his countenance upon her,
and give her peace.

Alleluia and amen.

Love,

Julienne

And summer is over

2007-09-05T23:53:00.001-05:00

Beepbeepbeepbeepbeep.

The alarm clock sounds, aggressively, and ends with one fell swoop the dream of summer. Awake, arise, get out of bed, because the coffee and the car are waiting, and a few miles away a set of yellowed classrooms wait too, for the stomp and clatter of a thousand students.

It is morning, and summer is over, and school has begun again, and summer is over, and summer is over. Groan.

Up off the side of the bed and vertical, sort of. Stomp down the stairs. Eyes pinched shut need the pungent wedge of that blessed aroma. Toast? Who could eat toast at a time like this? Glare at the table-top, glare at the plate, glare at the world until the idea of being awake becomes less painful. Stomp back up the stairs.

Shower. Bag. Money. Phone. Books. Forgetting things. Agenda? Timetable? Summer is over. Summer is over. Out the door and into the car and we're off, finding our way through rush hour, through the noisy chaos of traffic which flattens itself against the car windows as we drive.

We walk past the beer tent and the pancake tent and the loud music in the quad, to the doors, and then inside... and the schedule is a living thing now, and our feet move to its rythym... up and down escalators, through, past doors, back and forth, through the clamour of a thousand like-moving feet. On the first day everyone is here. There is a shimmering thread of excitement that thrums through the air above our heads.

And there is a low-lying thread of dread, regret that clings to our flipflopped-feet, trying to pull us back out the door. It can't be autumn yet... summer can't be over yet. But it is. The year, the real year, has begun. After months and months I've finally learned, only just learned, what summer is all about, and how to unwind, how to let the tension in my shoulders slip away under that blissful sunshine, or under the smooth, cool surface of a lake.

But summer is over, and now I'll have to re-learn, we'll all have to learn, how to pull our minds out of the heat and heartbeat of summer, and find ourselves again in the swirl of autumn, the rushing, eclectic momentum of deadlines and discovery.

Spirits, sprites

2007-08-24T11:52:00.000-05:00

When work finished at eleven I rushed home, hands still moving as quickly as possible, turning key in lock, light on here, light off here, efficiency pulsing through me still, until twenty minutes later my system had finally started to slow down and I could sit in front of the computer, stretch out my feet.

To sit, in order to write out the frustration of the day, to spill it out in type and watch it become something hyper-real, more than real, trapped and contained in prose. And then it was dark, too dark to be awake any longer. And in the dark there are spirits, sprites...

My time zones had become confused, somehow; too many nights in a row staying up, sipping caffeine, eyes wide open until 2 am, and sleep became a trial when I tried to shut out the light.

Light on. What to read? I was still lost, in my mind, in the crackerbarrel that was work, seeing customers' faces and hearing their orders, and rushing from counter to counter, trying to exchange their currency for satisfaction. Light off--no good. On again.

In the dark there are spirits, sprites...

St. Paul--no luck. Too thick, too challenging. Creation was groaning, still groaning. Rilke? No--too much and too little there, somehow, and I knew somehow that his poetry had become dangerous in my scrambled state of mind. L'Engle, finally. For hours and hours.

I surfaced from the book. It was late, too late, far too late to be reading, too late to be swimming around in this other author's identity, hearing my own identities hammering at the back of my mind--let us in--this false customer-service identity--this writer's identity--this person who cannot sleep. Let us in.

Light off. In the dark there are spirits, sprites... Some bear nightmares to tickle our subconscious minds, some bear sweet sleep in hand, and some guard us from evil, invisible swords wielded, standing staunchly by the door.

Rainer Maria Rilke:

2007-08-20T22:45:00.000-05:00

I am praying again, Awesome One.

You hear me again, as words
from the depths of me
rush toward you in the wind.

I've been scattered in pieces,
torn by conflict,
mocked by laughter,
washed down in drink.

In alleyways I sweep myself up
out of garbage and broken glass.
With my half-mouth I stammer you,
who are eternal in your symmetry.
I lift to you my half-hands
in wordless beseeching, that I may find again
the eyes with which I once beheld you.

I am a house gutted by fire
where only the guilty sometimes sleep
before the punishment that devours them
hounds them out into the open.

I am a city by the sea
sinking into a toxic tide.
I am strange to myself, as though someone unknown
had poisoned my mother as she carried me.

It's here in all the pieces of my shame
that now I find myself again.
I yearn to belong to something, to be contained
in an all-embracing mind that sees me
as a single thing.
I yearn to be held
in the great hands of your heart--
oh let them take me now.

Into them I place these fragments, my life,
and you, God--spend them however you want.

II, 2. Book of Hours

See Psalm 31; Romans 8:1-2; Romans 9:16-17