kick start your rock & roll heart

Seth & I were kids together at school in Japan; he played the trombone his cheeks were always ruddy pink. And even though it's been almost a decade since I last saw him, I've followed the swell of his musical talent over the years.

Finally! Tonight! he & his band Anathallo are playing at the Rock & Roll hotel -- mere steps away from where most of you live. Anathallo makes dreamy, beautiful music that sounds a little bit how you might expect a childhood in Japan to sound. A good way to spend a Thursday night for sure.

See you there, perhaps?

Daisies

It is possible, I suppose that sometime
we will learn everything
there is to learn: what the world is, for example,
and what it means. I think this as I am crossing
from one field to another, in summer, and the
mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either
knows enough already or knows enough to be
perfectly content not knowing. Song being born
of quest he knows this: he must turn silent
were he suddenly assaulted with answers. Instead
oh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselessly
unanswered. At my feet the white-petalled daisies display
the small suns of their center piece, their - if you don't
mind my saying so - their hearts. Of course
I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and
narrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know?
But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly;
for example - I think this
as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch -
the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the
daisies for the field.

Mary Oliver

le subjonctif

If you come over we will sit on the floor. I will be a little shy until you tell me a story about kissing a girl a foot taller at summer camp and how your glasses fell off on Space Mountain in 8th grade and you spent the rest of the day wandering around the Magic Kingdom blind as a bat. Or something like that. You know how to make me laugh, real laughter. When the kettle whistles we settle on mint tea because half way into the process, after I've found two mugs clean & handles intact, you open the fridge and discover the milk that isn't there. So mint it is. And oatmeal cookies soft & with just enough chocolate chips. We will talk for hours, sitting on the floor, maybe stretching out to lay on our stomachs, maybe reading quietly to ourselves, looking up & over from time to time to smile shyly or share a sentence. For awhile Rachmaninoff will play in the background but when I switch over to Beirut's first album you will whisper how much you love accordion music & gypsies. You will understand when I'm able only to nod in agreement, so overcome by the music & by you; how lovely & surprising you are, the longing trumpets carry in their thin high notes.

If you come over we will sit on the floor.

life, homonymically

WE are paired first by our eyes.

Buy me a pear, say aye.

You say bye and I am pared.

sometimes we learn our lessons

1st period - Geography

Beirut
Paris
Buenos Aires
Reykjavik
Havanna
Denver

2nd period - Mathematics

1/2 divided by 1/2 = 1

(How can broken parts end up whole?)

3rd period - English

"Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still"
- from "Ash Wednesday" by TS Eliot

4th period - Science

Newton's first law of motion:
An object at rest tends to stay at rest
and an object in motion tends to stay in motion
with the same speed and in the same direction
unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

5th period - History

History repeats itself.
We have been here before. We will come here again.

6th period - P.E.

Keep your eye on the ball. And then, if it helps, pretend the ball is his head.

cry cry cry

Sure, she cries easily, but not about real life, her life. Never about things that can be helped, the spilt milk at work or her own puddling relationships. It's the imaginary, the assumed and supposed, that sets Ruby off. And who can blame her? What unwieldy parcels humanity seems to carry! Deep love, bitter loss, no money for bread and cells that multiply when they shouldn't. Ruby watches sparrows flap their wings in clouds of dust and her lip quivers. She sees children with bruised knees and fathers walking in their brown ragged coats and the tears well up in her wide eyes. Like left for right, she mistakes beauty for tragedy, pain for beauty, life for pain, tragedy for passing time. Under the unbearably blue spring sky these great themes package themselves into moments for Ruby to stumble and cry over. Just a tear or two for these strangers and neighbors, though. She sleeps well enough at night and her friends? Well, they make her laugh. They are young. And it's spring, after all.

July, though. With July comes a crime spree -- all manslaughter and fraud and rumbles on every corner. The rain falls in thick curtains every afternoon and when clouds part, it is only to make way for grey rainbows and murderous crows. Ruby is waterlogged. She can not see the rain for all the tears. One night as she walks from the park, Ruby sees a girl fighting with a man on the front steps of a house. The girl has hair like Ruby, dark and short, and when the man yells at the girl I can't even stand to look at you Ruby almost believes he is yelling at her through the black air. He slams the door and the girl picks up a flowerpot and hurls it at his absence. The terracotta hits the wall; the girl's face shatters into a million pieces; Ruby feels her own face beginning to crack. So, it's true. I really am made of glass, she thinks even as the girl, the other girl, looks over at Ruby and says Why the hell are you crying?

Why the hell are you crying? This is a question Ruby can not answer. Not when the spokes of her bicycle ask, not when the hinge on the gate wants to know, not when the robins inquire, or when she poses it to herself in the middle of the night. It was not her flowerpot, her heart, her life, her man shutting the solid door in her face. It is never her skinned knee, her bruised heart, her romatic sunset that she cries over. So why then? Why? Ruby hates waste and she can not stand carelessness. So why shed tears that only spillover into a river, already overflowing with sadness, that goes nowhere? Ruby resolves to toughen up.

And she does. She stops looking through the windows of other peoples lives and starts looking over her own shoulder. When a bird flies over head, Ruby no longer thinks of the beauty of its frail, hollow bones. Instead she curses the mess it makes on the windshield of her car. She puts on headphones to block the noise and walks miles with her head down instead of riding the bus. Why cry, she thinks. Don't you dare cry. And since she doesn't have an answer, she doesn't.

It is many months later and the moon is very full on the night that Ruby meets John for the first time. Fall has arrived with usual languorous reds and oranges and Ruby resists being enamored by the changing leaves. They sit, John and Ruby, at a table under the skeletal arms of trees and drink read wine in their scarves. John is smart but his attention annoys Ruby, his attentiveness to details and the way he points out two squirrels chasing each other, weaving their around the trunk of a tree. She starts to fidget first and then chafe against the tenderness, the sentimentality he seems to seep for everything with cells and atoms. Get a grip Ruby shout in her head Live in the real world, buddy. She tries to smile though, and thinks that she is convincing until John stops his story about a boy with a kite in the middle of sentence. He looks at Ruby and then touches her hand, which is twirling her glass of wine around and around by stem. Hey he says and Ruby stops to look up at him for first time. Hey. Ruby. Don't write me off just yet. And that is all it takes. With that, Ruby starts to cry and cry and cry because she realizes that she is still transparent. The only thing that has changed is that she has become a more brittle kind of glass.

clean

On Saturday I cleaned my room from top to bottom, scoured it. I lined my books up along the shelves, ordering them by genre, theme, color, size, by their place in my heart. I hung up the pink dress I wore on the date with the airline pilot last week and folded the black shirt I've been sleeping in all summer. Bank statements, post cards, love letters, scraps of paper scribbled with phone numbers, directions, ideas - these I read & reread, shredded, filed, pitched. By the end of the day the 3 windows sparkled in their clean sills, the crisp orange sheets on my bed folded into hospital corners.

And now I am wondering if it is possible to do such a thorough cleaning of the rest of my messes -- to rout out these bad habits cluttering my life and stack them in a neat little (big) pile: chewing on my fingers; leaving wet towels on the floor; preferring books to people; my caginess & snobbery; the way I leave good friends & refuse to to let go of the bad ones; losing things; biting people; procrastinating; crying & swearing; my reckless driving.

I will sweep them up and set them on the curb, contained and waiting to be hauled off in a big truck to a place I never have to see. Then I will sit very quiet and still in my clean room with my clean fingernails and my pristine heart, not moving a muscle for fear of making a mess that I can't undo, that won't go away with any amount of scrubbing.