The sky is grey
the washed out grey of pavement
dead leaves and petals plaster
the sidewalks slick and brown.
The faces of buildings sink back
into themselves, their height shrinking
under the weight and threat
of the clouds. Behind a chain link fence
small children snake around
the asphalt playground in silent lines.
There is no sugar for tea and the bread is stale
Did I wake up in East Berlin this morning?
Is it April 13, 1952? I pop the collar of my
black coat and walk faster, listening
for footsteps behind me. There are spies
everywhere and I have secrets.
13 April 2007
11 April 2007
minor setbacks
Over the weekend I dropped my phone in a cup of coffee so now it shuts off when someone tries to call. This is fine because I get nervous and say idiotic things to everyone besides Charles & my mother. If there's something you need to tell me -- if you're getting married, if you want your sweater back or would like to know if I'll go throw rocks in the river with you, you'll have to send word by peregrine falcon. I'll be watching the western sky.
---
The optometrist is awfully young & cool. I want desperately to impress her by reading the tiny bottom row correctly, but she doesn't sound impressed when she tells me that I have the beginning of a corneal ulcer. It should be okay if you wear your glasses for awhile she says. Now my vanity is forcing me to choose between how I see and how I look, because I look monumentally dweeby with them and walk into walls without them. Clementine believes that there is no one so hideous that the perfect pair of glasses won't smarten them right up; she has predicated her yes to many a suitor based on this theory. I like brainy-looking boys as much as the next girl and Squirrel looks downright fetching when she wears her glasses. There is a good, thick line between brainy and dweeby, however, and anyone without a corneal ulcer can clearly see that I am on the unfortunate side.
---
When I woke up 3 hours before my alarm this morning, this is what I should've done:
1. Bake bread
2. Run 4 miles
3. Fold laundry or at least iron clothes for today
4. Write good poem about change, loss, contentment, hope, apples, etc.
5. Pray for my enemies
6. Change lightbulb in closet
Instead.............I read a book that I already know by heart. Right up until the very last minute. Which is why I was rooting around in the dark closet for shoes when it was time to catch the bus. Which is why I grabbed one shoe of Squirrel's and one shoe of mine.
Both black, high heels. Same size. One with a 2.5" heel, one with a 3" heel
Which is why I'm barefoot under my desk.
sister
a.
If I could write about you I would
believe me.
I'm troubled not
by lack of images
of you -- you monochrome delight
covered in untold rashes
swaying your hips to the
music of young and beautiful --
that is you.
Oh no. I have thoughts enough to
fill volumes full of senseless rhyme.
And no words.
b.
How do you call a chrysalis
poised to burst forth and send
a butterfly into this unforgiving world?
I have watched you these months,
half-sick
by your innocent dealings and
terrified of the minx
crouching in the shrewd corners
of your narrowed eyes.
You are these things:
my anomaly
my caterpillar
my charge
my unprepared
my crafty.
How can this be?
c.
June is your birthday and
you still revel in the fuss.
Oh my stubborn egg. How soon
the womb will expel you
will render you
ready and toss you
out to a life ripe
and brimming with girls
like me.
Should I fear for them
or for you?
d.
Tonight you said you hate me.
I do not worry for you tonight.
Please learn that life
is not people squaring off around
a table. My negotiator. My snippet.
You will read these sentences
and hit me for calling you a
caterpillar
or an egg.
You will bound head-first
into a specious pool of
offense and anger
from this rickety platform
of my lines.
See that I have only words and love now.
See now that they are the same.
If I could write about you I would
believe me.
I'm troubled not
by lack of images
of you -- you monochrome delight
covered in untold rashes
swaying your hips to the
music of young and beautiful --
that is you.
Oh no. I have thoughts enough to
fill volumes full of senseless rhyme.
And no words.
b.
How do you call a chrysalis
poised to burst forth and send
a butterfly into this unforgiving world?
I have watched you these months,
half-sick
by your innocent dealings and
terrified of the minx
crouching in the shrewd corners
of your narrowed eyes.
You are these things:
my anomaly
my caterpillar
my charge
my unprepared
my crafty.
How can this be?
c.
June is your birthday and
you still revel in the fuss.
Oh my stubborn egg. How soon
the womb will expel you
will render you
ready and toss you
out to a life ripe
and brimming with girls
like me.
Should I fear for them
or for you?
d.
Tonight you said you hate me.
I do not worry for you tonight.
Please learn that life
is not people squaring off around
a table. My negotiator. My snippet.
You will read these sentences
and hit me for calling you a
caterpillar
or an egg.
You will bound head-first
into a specious pool of
offense and anger
from this rickety platform
of my lines.
See that I have only words and love now.
See now that they are the same.
09 April 2007
message in a bottle
My grandmother told me that men like girls who look like girls and use their feminine wiles. This is unsolicited and I don't really know what it means, but I tell her I'll do my best. So, while she tries on gold shoes and green shoes and shoes for wearing to town, I skulk around the perfume counters and try to find some wile in a bottle. Men in books always fall for women who smell good. I think. Yes, that sounds right... 50 years later, after the children she had with another man are grown and married, he still sits there dreaming of the smell of spring rain rising off the back of her neck. His buddy pokes him with a bony finger to get him to take his turn at checkers.
I uncork the first bottle but it doesn't smell like the path to undying love. It smells like the jungle and says I will pounce on you like a tiger; I am ferocious and will subdue you with my scent. You will obey. I skip the second bottle entirely because the girl on the poster is blonde (which I will never be) and lying in the sand (which I rarely do) so why even bother. The next smells a little overdone with all its black and white notes of let's kiss passionately under the Eiffel Tower since it is raining and we are wearing matching trenchcoats. Maybe in 7th grade when obvious was the lingua franca. A few feet down the smooth white counter, a shopgirl with hot pink eye makeup sprays something on the slender wrist of an elegant old woman. It seems promising until I get closer and realize there are diamonds on the bottle and I AM BEING SEDUCED BY THE SMELL OF MONEY! I try 2 more bottles because they seem to be giving off a certain savoir faire -- sort of take me to the party at the embassy and I'm an ace at post-communist eastern European politics -- but in the end the nose knows and it's pretty obvious that really it's just a lot of black eyeliner and champagne which I always regret the next morning. The last bottle says Come here so I can feed you sugar cookies and stone you to death with vanilla beans... My grandmother shows up with her arms full of shopping bags and few more helpful suggestions for me to try on. Nothing fits rights, though.
For awhile in college I was a chemistry major and I'm starting to regret switching, although white lab coats and goggles are at the bottom of the of chart of Catalysts for True Love at Room Temperature (solid and liquid states only). Dr. Olmstead liked to listen to the soundtrack for The Last of the Mohicans while going over lab reports in his tiny office. He never remembered my name even though I was his only advisee, but I think he might have taught me how to concoct my very own bottle of wiles. The first whiff would say I'll do my best not to spill coffee on you or talk too much followed by Tell me your stories all night and I'll hold your secrets in my hand like seeds to plant. Chemistry blurs into alchemy so we can stuff everything we need to say in the bottle: I will write you notes on my green typewriter and read our children poems about tall ships. Old people eating alone at McDonalds make me sad so let's never be old or alone.
I uncork the first bottle but it doesn't smell like the path to undying love. It smells like the jungle and says I will pounce on you like a tiger; I am ferocious and will subdue you with my scent. You will obey. I skip the second bottle entirely because the girl on the poster is blonde (which I will never be) and lying in the sand (which I rarely do) so why even bother. The next smells a little overdone with all its black and white notes of let's kiss passionately under the Eiffel Tower since it is raining and we are wearing matching trenchcoats. Maybe in 7th grade when obvious was the lingua franca. A few feet down the smooth white counter, a shopgirl with hot pink eye makeup sprays something on the slender wrist of an elegant old woman. It seems promising until I get closer and realize there are diamonds on the bottle and I AM BEING SEDUCED BY THE SMELL OF MONEY! I try 2 more bottles because they seem to be giving off a certain savoir faire -- sort of take me to the party at the embassy and I'm an ace at post-communist eastern European politics -- but in the end the nose knows and it's pretty obvious that really it's just a lot of black eyeliner and champagne which I always regret the next morning. The last bottle says Come here so I can feed you sugar cookies and stone you to death with vanilla beans... My grandmother shows up with her arms full of shopping bags and few more helpful suggestions for me to try on. Nothing fits rights, though.
For awhile in college I was a chemistry major and I'm starting to regret switching, although white lab coats and goggles are at the bottom of the of chart of Catalysts for True Love at Room Temperature (solid and liquid states only). Dr. Olmstead liked to listen to the soundtrack for The Last of the Mohicans while going over lab reports in his tiny office. He never remembered my name even though I was his only advisee, but I think he might have taught me how to concoct my very own bottle of wiles. The first whiff would say I'll do my best not to spill coffee on you or talk too much followed by Tell me your stories all night and I'll hold your secrets in my hand like seeds to plant. Chemistry blurs into alchemy so we can stuff everything we need to say in the bottle: I will write you notes on my green typewriter and read our children poems about tall ships. Old people eating alone at McDonalds make me sad so let's never be old or alone.
Our Flowers
by Barbara Ras
After the storm white and black clouds hung
in the sky like dogs and cats drinking
out of the same blue bowl.
It has been so long since we danced,
not counting the slow shuffle at the Zoo Ball,
you in the black tie the valet knotted in the parking lot
after the Internet instructions failed.
"Failure" is such a beautiful word for something
lousy, the lure of it not at all like rain,
the drenching rain after the long hot drought that ended today.
When you said you loved substations, I thought of long
sandwiches until across the street I saw
the electricity-making equipment you'd already started
naming the parts of. I wanted to name the clouds-
dogwood, tiger lily, lilac, the lost flowers
of my girlhood, and of course the thousands of blossoms of phlox
in the rock garden my impossibly young grandmother sat in
for the photograph with three stone ducks.
What if we went back,
as children, to where no one asks how long the blooms
will bloom, to sleep with our grandmothers
in the feather bed carried from the old country,
all of us dreaming our own painful music, the songs
that will wake us in time for the next storm,
and even if it brings down limbs and live wires
dancing in wild arcs, we'll watch
the wind rouse the trees while the petals
of where we belong blow down
to rain on the unkissably muddy ground
After the storm white and black clouds hung
in the sky like dogs and cats drinking
out of the same blue bowl.
It has been so long since we danced,
not counting the slow shuffle at the Zoo Ball,
you in the black tie the valet knotted in the parking lot
after the Internet instructions failed.
"Failure" is such a beautiful word for something
lousy, the lure of it not at all like rain,
the drenching rain after the long hot drought that ended today.
When you said you loved substations, I thought of long
sandwiches until across the street I saw
the electricity-making equipment you'd already started
naming the parts of. I wanted to name the clouds-
dogwood, tiger lily, lilac, the lost flowers
of my girlhood, and of course the thousands of blossoms of phlox
in the rock garden my impossibly young grandmother sat in
for the photograph with three stone ducks.
What if we went back,
as children, to where no one asks how long the blooms
will bloom, to sleep with our grandmothers
in the feather bed carried from the old country,
all of us dreaming our own painful music, the songs
that will wake us in time for the next storm,
and even if it brings down limbs and live wires
dancing in wild arcs, we'll watch
the wind rouse the trees while the petals
of where we belong blow down
to rain on the unkissably muddy ground
05 April 2007
It's Friday I'm in Love
I've spurned Silence and his awkward embraces and returned to my first and true love - Language. And now that I've groveled and begged for his forgiveness, my lover is showering me with gorgeous wordy gifts -- displaying the roomy generosity of his heart and reminding me that I should never try to survive in the world without him.
Look! there are so many ways to suggest how we move from here to there.
This is how I get through the week:
Monday I stumble
Tuesday I shuffle
Wednesday I stomp
Thursday I stalk
Friday I strut
Saturday I skip
Sunday I saunter
And those are just the S words. What about prance and wander? Tramp, tiptoe and trudge? Perambulate?
Language baby, you've got it in spades over Silence! He'll never match you in subtlety, nuance, and sophistication.
My cup runneth over.
Parenthetically: this morning, driving back to the city from CC and listening to Kings of Convenience and thinking of my favorite Norwegian from Mostrehamn-in-the fjords, I was blown away anew by people who can write delicate, subtle lines in languages beyond their mother-tongue. In college, I wrote a clever little ditty in Japanese about his eyes being stars and wanting his stars (which, you see, is a play on the fact that the words for star and want are almost the same. And this fact, as you might guess, turns me a little starry-eyed). I was more than a mite pleased with myself until I realized that the only person within miles who could fully grasp the brilliance of this was my favorite Norwegian who was doing the assigned reading instead of drawing love poems in the margins of the chemistry textbook.
Look! there are so many ways to suggest how we move from here to there.
This is how I get through the week:
Monday I stumble
Tuesday I shuffle
Wednesday I stomp
Thursday I stalk
Friday I strut
Saturday I skip
Sunday I saunter
And those are just the S words. What about prance and wander? Tramp, tiptoe and trudge? Perambulate?
Language baby, you've got it in spades over Silence! He'll never match you in subtlety, nuance, and sophistication.
My cup runneth over.
Parenthetically: this morning, driving back to the city from CC and listening to Kings of Convenience and thinking of my favorite Norwegian from Mostrehamn-in-the fjords, I was blown away anew by people who can write delicate, subtle lines in languages beyond their mother-tongue. In college, I wrote a clever little ditty in Japanese about his eyes being stars and wanting his stars (which, you see, is a play on the fact that the words for star and want are almost the same. And this fact, as you might guess, turns me a little starry-eyed). I was more than a mite pleased with myself until I realized that the only person within miles who could fully grasp the brilliance of this was my favorite Norwegian who was doing the assigned reading instead of drawing love poems in the margins of the chemistry textbook.
the lady of shalott
Mitzy & Jinx are be-bopping around Belize with Devetta & George for the week so we borrowed a car last night and tried to race the sun down the county and home to bed. Gramcracker is here from Jerusalem to stay with Little Rat which means answering to Katie again, but it also means chocolate cake and explanations about the minor prophets and the best way to make sausage gravy. Little Rat gets slightly, silently unhinged when our parents leave; a twinge more melancholy & solitary than usual. His skin is clearing up, though, and Gramcracker bought him a case of Sierra Mist for his stomach which are reasons good as any to perk up for a spell.
I haven't slept well all week and I don't know why. Sleepless nights take different forms. There are nights of delicious sleeplessness -- when you're in love and dreaming awake of the promise contained in another person, when you can't put down a book, when it's dark and cool and summer rain starts to fall as Friday night slips into a lazy Saturday morning. The possibility & hope of these nights restore the soul more than REM. But then there is the another kind of sleepless night --the nights when all the decisions that aren't yours to make grind the gears of your mind or you've been cruel to someone and can't make it right or when someone has been cruel to you. These nights leave you creaky and spent the next morning, often unable to see beyond your own nose.
But last night the moon hung just so in the picture frame window, looking down as the old truck sidled up to the tree below. It was perfectly round, I think, and cast a pool of light for me to float on through the shadows, awake, toward morning. Laying there, I thought of my parents and of all the trips they've taken over the years, leaving me in charge of the crew at home. Inevitably, after they left for the airport, I'd fling myself on their bed and cry at the thought of them dying in a plane crash. I would mourn their deaths and the premature end of my childhood, my wedding without my father to give me away. Then I would pull myself together and begin rehearsing my plea before the judge to take custody of my siblings away from my well-intentioned but clueless relatives and give it to me. I'd keep us all together in a house that I bought with the insurance money and we'd live of the royalties of the book I'd write about my struggle to keep our family together. I'd send the kids to college after Lifetime made the TV movie staring Sam Waterson and Lucille Ball as my parents and Winona Ryder (ha!) as me. We'd make it somehow. I'd looked tragedy in the face and made friends with the shadowy future.
Now there is no one left to take care of besides Little Rat. Everyone else is all grown up, even though my sister still calls and asks me questions that I haven't even found answers for yet. I try to nudge Squirrel with this thought to see if she's only pretending to sleep, but she makes the soft whimper signaling that it's time to keep my thoughts to myself. Last week at lunch, Mitzy made a comment about something happening to them on their trip and Little Rat said If you die I will hunt down your killers and avenge you. We all laughed and tried to explain about accidents and no-fault deaths, but he would have none of it. After all the hard parts of adoption over the past months, I was happy for this display of simple love tinted with vengeance. Somebody'd pay; Little Rat would see to it. And then he and I would eat cereal in the living room and watch cartoons and run out of Kleenex and generally fall into complete disrepair.
I haven't slept well all week and I don't know why. Sleepless nights take different forms. There are nights of delicious sleeplessness -- when you're in love and dreaming awake of the promise contained in another person, when you can't put down a book, when it's dark and cool and summer rain starts to fall as Friday night slips into a lazy Saturday morning. The possibility & hope of these nights restore the soul more than REM. But then there is the another kind of sleepless night --the nights when all the decisions that aren't yours to make grind the gears of your mind or you've been cruel to someone and can't make it right or when someone has been cruel to you. These nights leave you creaky and spent the next morning, often unable to see beyond your own nose.
But last night the moon hung just so in the picture frame window, looking down as the old truck sidled up to the tree below. It was perfectly round, I think, and cast a pool of light for me to float on through the shadows, awake, toward morning. Laying there, I thought of my parents and of all the trips they've taken over the years, leaving me in charge of the crew at home. Inevitably, after they left for the airport, I'd fling myself on their bed and cry at the thought of them dying in a plane crash. I would mourn their deaths and the premature end of my childhood, my wedding without my father to give me away. Then I would pull myself together and begin rehearsing my plea before the judge to take custody of my siblings away from my well-intentioned but clueless relatives and give it to me. I'd keep us all together in a house that I bought with the insurance money and we'd live of the royalties of the book I'd write about my struggle to keep our family together. I'd send the kids to college after Lifetime made the TV movie staring Sam Waterson and Lucille Ball as my parents and Winona Ryder (ha!) as me. We'd make it somehow. I'd looked tragedy in the face and made friends with the shadowy future.
Now there is no one left to take care of besides Little Rat. Everyone else is all grown up, even though my sister still calls and asks me questions that I haven't even found answers for yet. I try to nudge Squirrel with this thought to see if she's only pretending to sleep, but she makes the soft whimper signaling that it's time to keep my thoughts to myself. Last week at lunch, Mitzy made a comment about something happening to them on their trip and Little Rat said If you die I will hunt down your killers and avenge you. We all laughed and tried to explain about accidents and no-fault deaths, but he would have none of it. After all the hard parts of adoption over the past months, I was happy for this display of simple love tinted with vengeance. Somebody'd pay; Little Rat would see to it. And then he and I would eat cereal in the living room and watch cartoons and run out of Kleenex and generally fall into complete disrepair.
This line of thought takes me in the wrong direction and the moonlight doesn't help either, because I am a sucker for moonlight, especially when it filters through the trees. For a moment I am sad that there is no one special boy who would want to take my sleepless call (or even text message in this day & age). I think about writing a letter to a stranger but I am tired of writing equations for a future with so many unknown variable, so instead I try to recall all the times when someone was needlessly kind to me. For some reason I land on Mr. Morrow, the librarian at Marcus Whitman elementary. I think I was in fourth grade when Jinx was the principal there -- right before we moved to Japan -- and I wandered into his library one day while waiting for my dad to finish his meeting. Mr. Morrow asked me what I was looking for and I said please, do you have a copy of the Lady of Shalott? If he was startled by my request, he didn't show it. And he didn't try to hand me a copy of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie or whatever book was supposed to change young lives that year. He didn't have any Tennyson and my dad came looking for me and that was the end of it. Two days later, though, my dad brought home a pink little book from Mr. Morrow. He'd gone to the public library and found the poem, folded it into a little booklet with a line drawn cover of a beautiful lady, and laminated it just for me. I've taken that book everywhere with me since then and I used to know it all by heart, just like Anne of Green Gables. I try to remember it but I only get as far as But in her web she still delights To weave the mirror's magic sights, For often through the silent nights A funeral, with plumes and lights And music, went to Camelot; Or when the Moon was overhead, Came two young lovers lately wed. "I am half sick of shadows," said The Lady of Shalott before sleep delivers me from myself.
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