to sleep, perchance to dream...

I've started charting my dreams. For the sake of curiosity, and also, who knows--maybe they hold the cosmic key to my destiny. My poor submerged iceberg has certainly been sweating it out, working overtime. I mean, Baz Lurhmann would be jealous of these productions. I haven't reached any epiphanies just yet, but I have been mightily entertained. Here's a sampling:

A mountainous tidal wave of the clearest crystal water (ug, I can still see it!) is about to slam me to smithereens before the dream jump cuts to me in a bar on the beach, where a man whispers instructions for a secret mission to break into the principal's office.
(I should drink more beer to avoid problems and find my purpose. Um, thanks subconscious, I think that's called alcoholism.)

I'm supposed to rent out a house, but the rooms keep expanding and rotting as I show potential buyers. Just as I get really discouraged, Sufjan Stevens organizes a private concert in the back room and offers artistic advice to all who attend.
(I should focus on my art and on swarthy, artsy men, and not on my secret desire to become a real estate agent.)

A Bomb! This one takes place at Point Loma's library, where I'm warned, by a guy who once asked for my number but didn't call, that bombers are flying in, and that I need to get to the underground shelter S.T.A.T.. I think to myself, well, he's saved my life, I guess that's worth more than a silly lunch date. When I get inside, I'm herded through door #8 by my elementary camp counselor, downstairs and into a bomb shelter where we all dance to some bumpin' trance music.
(Perhaps I should not be so quick to write this guy off--perhaps he will save my life...or at least clue me into the hottest underground discoteche in L.A.)

It's a Sunday morning and I'm writing. I find a new coffee shop that looks like the Ikea cafeteria. The extremely flamboyant barista offers me the best Chai I've ever had. Behind the bar, willowy African women weave floral bouquets. After chatting with my high school choreographer for a while, who is also loving this new hot-spot, I ask the barista if it will cost money for a refill. He gets flustered, walks away, and comes back to inform me huffily that this coffee shop, in several studies, has been linked to many Pulitzer prize winners. I am extremely impressed.
(I've got nothing. Um...find that coffee shop and write there all. the. time.)

Also, at one point I murder someone, at another I poison someone...I have a child that I only see for an hour a week, I play a "game" of volleyball where the ball appears magnetically attracted to my face, I am car-jacked by Rita Dove and forced to walk 40 blocks with my arms full of books, a poem of mine is accepted for publication but then accidentally misprinted into a roll of golden coins with kitschy mountain scenes stamped on the front.


But my favorite was last night!

I am working in the White House as the 'coffee girl' (it's an official title). My duties extend to sitting in on every meeting Obama holds. Nancy Pelosi and I are totally besties, and we gab through most of the meetings--I don't hear a word Obama says. Later, back at the coffee station, she tells me that a female spy will be coming in and will need the Toddy coffee and NOT the iced Americano, and it is up to me, and only me, to make sure she receives the correct cup. Both are already in the fridge, unmarked.

Again, I don't know what any of this really means, but I do know that I'm enjoying it all. Perhaps my budding career in coffee will lead to Pulitzers and politics. Yeah. That's it.

the best.

Source: hooraytinyanimals.tumblr.com via Krist on Pinterest

BABY OTTER!

One side of It

to stand as witness and be swallowed
in the returning wonder walls of sea
one side to be blinded
by the stinging tail of the miracle
drowned in the froth of its slamming shut
stuck in its sliding door still
unsure of the force you’ve followed

but here all our sons have died
strangled by angels
and the blood has dried
on the gaping doorframes
now the whole place reeks of a mystery
stronger than the heart can separate
or part back into two waves

fragments

I'm reading Anne Carson's Sappho translation If Not, Winter, and thinking about lost things. I'm thinking about my favorite swimsuit in 8th grade (my first two-piece), my first CD collection, the pictures on my memory card when I doused my old camera with coffee, my green wallet, and one stack of 4th period's character analysis essays (I know, I'm awful). None of these things would be on my mind if I still had access to them. They all shimmer with unique beauty because they have entered the realm of the never-to-be-recovered. For an absentminded type like me, that's a large realm.

My curiousity about Sappho was peaked when I studied e.e. cummings. In college, cummings was greatly influenced by the fragments and shaken syntax of Sappho. Here's a poem of hers:

]heart
]absolutely
]I can
]
]would be for me
]to shine in answer
]face
]
]having been stained
]

The open brackets indicate torn or rubbed away fragments of papyrus. Anne Carson, in this version, has taken what is legible and morphed that into a poem, of sorts.


Now here's one of cummings:

(but

true

to the incomparable

couch of death thy

rhythmic

lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

The way he forces whole thoughts into fragmentation is homage to her fragmented thoughts. This fragmentation is arguably what made him such a popular poet.

While it was a clear choice for Cummings, Sappho never meant for her writing to be broken apart. Yet it's taken on a life its own because of this loss. For example, this one:

]
]
]Atthis for you
]
]

That's all of it. There's nothing particularly magical about those words. It's the emptiness surrounding them that sings.

There is something really powerful in silence. The situations that still haunt you, in all probability, are the ones for which you still don't have clear answers.



What I leave out

the whole pieces

of nights when maybe it rained

I trained

memories to flake away

like cheap gilding

like that was all you weighed

so truth patches

beneath other things

even for me

what I want

is to find the scroll

where you keep me

in scratches and [

there is no reason

except

things erased

still

factor

first crush

I’ve fallen in love with a house. An old, rundown, oddly shaped house. It’s gone through many tenants, and I toured it once, when it was up for rent. It was perfect.

How do I know for sure it’s a full-blown crush? I’m rationalizing. I'm dusting away the quirks away with creative logic. That's love--the ability to see potential where others raise eyebrows.

For example, the yard is terrifying. A giant side-yard, overrun with shoulder-high weeds, a grove of unruly, snarled trees, and most likely a few woodland creatures. Instead of admitting that this would be a pain in the ass, I think to myself: what stress-relief weeding would become. I imagine myself, well-clothed to protect from spiders and sharp teeth of smallish animals, trekking into the heart of it all with a scythe.

Or, take the extremely long, narrow hallway that joins the kitchen to the rest of the house—I've decided there’s just enough room for a book-nook. Maybe squeeze a window-seat into the dormer. Cozy-chic.

Once I talked a walking buddy into trespassing (the house was still for sale, so we figured we could just say we were checking the place out.) We picked oranges in the backyard. If I’d had my way, would have spent the evening sitting on the crooked brick patio until somebody kicked us out.

My housecrush has recently blossomed to a fever, fanned by the flames of impossibility. Someone bought the house. Someone is fixing it up—he’s venting his aggression on the side-jungle. He’s taking out his long days rooting up the sagging front fence and putting in a (rather kitschy, if you ask me) white-picket number.

Once, while on a run, I saw him industriously rooting up old fence posts.

I opened my mouth and choked out, “I love this house,” and then, “and you’re making it look so good.”

“Well, thank you,” he returned, taking a step away from me. “Thanks a lot. My partner and I certainly enjoy the challenge.”

“You’re doing great,” I gulped, and jogged on, seething with jealousy, but also a little awed—this is the guy who can light the outdoor fireplace any time he wants. He (and his partner) are free to pick the oranges without a twinge of guilt. Perhaps they even see the nook-potential of the dormer window.

I like to pretend that I don’t have many real fixed dreams, that I’m content letting the current of life take me to what is next, and doing my best there. Outright expectations make me nervous. To outright try is to potentially outright fail.

But somewhere in the brick patio and beveled glass doors that lead to the kitchenette, I love this little white house enough to risk embarrassment and say, outright— I want this.

For now, I’ll try and keep content walking by (and perhaps staring in the window a split second longer than appropriate.) But someday, something stronger might develop. A girl can dream.

Works of Love--Love Builds Up

There is nothing, nothing at all, that cannot be done or said in such a way that it becomes upbuilding, but whatever it is, if it is upbuilding, then love is present. Thus the admonition, just where love itself admits the difficulty of giving a specific rule, says, "Do everything for upbuilding," It could just as well have said, "do everything in love," and it would have said the very same thing. One person can do exactly the opposite of what another person does, but if each one does the opposite--in love--the opposite becomes upbuilding. There is no word in the language that in itself is upbuilding, and there is no word in the language that cannot be said in an upbuilding way and become upbuilding if love is present. Thus it is so very far from being the case that the upbuilding would be something that is an excellence of a few gifted individuals, similar to brains, literary talent, beauty, and the like (alas, this is just an unloving and divisive error!) that on the contrary is the very opposite--every human being by his life, by his conduct, by his behavior in everyday affairs, by his associate with his peers, by his words, his remarks, should and could build up and would do it if love were really present in him. Kierkegaard, 212

Just earlier today, I asked myself if there were any new ways to describe sunsets. Yes, I really asked myself this question. I know, I know. Too much poetry.

So now I'm reading Christian Wiman, (who is coming to the SPU residency in March! hooray!) and I find this, which is so good, and fresh, and exactly what I could not make my little brain do while looking out my window:

I remember that. And I remember seeing,
Past Abilene, the sun come plunging down
In front of us and spatter back in the sky.
It was like no sunset we'd ever seen.
Thick light dripped and puddled on the far
Horizon, yellow smeared and flecked with red
Like a broken yolk that had begun
To grow. There was a moment when the sky,
Ground, and the air between were all one color,
My family's faces, too, glowing, fading...
Then everything was gone and we were driving
In the darkness toward whatever edge the day
Had fallen from, whtaever space it now
Was falling into. - The Long Home

some notes on music

Over The Rhine played the El Rey this Sunday! So good.

During the show, Linford gave quite a bit of background on the songs. Not just what inspired them, but exactly how they developed. It was encouraging to hear their process: certain songs took years to complete, while others came in just a few minutes.

Well, I don't know if encouraging is the right word there...I don't know the word. It's such a mystery why some songs/poems just tug at your sleeve, asking to be recorded, while others ramble around inside you for years, always too ornery to be captured with words and written down. I guess it's good to know that's a universal issue for writers; it gives a feeling of solidarity.

Anyway, this is one of my favorite Over the Rhine songs, and this one, according the Linford, "wrote itself," so to speak. Have a listen:

Latter Days (oh please don't watch the video, it's so silly. Just listen.)

P.S. Oh! Oh! The Milk Carton Kids opened the show. How to describe them...Um, if a movie was to be made about my life, I would choose them for the credits/exit music. If that does not entice you, then you should also know that their music is ALL FREE off their website, and they sound like Simon & Garfunkel, if those guys had been listening to Bon Iver while they were writing stuff. Do with that what you will...

and feel a moment's space

Aye, while your common men
Lay telegraphs, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine
And dust the faulty carpets of the world
For kings to walk on, or our president,
The poet suddenly will catch them up
With his voice like a thunder,--'This is soul,
This is life, this word is being said in heaven,
Here's God down on us! what are you about?'
How all those workers start amid their work,
Look round, look up, and feel, a moment's space
That carpet-dusting, though a pretty trade,
Is not the imperative labor after all.

E.B.B., Aurora Leigh

It's been a weird day so far, writing-wise. I'm exhausted from a long weekend: two shifts at Jones, two back-to-back princess parties. (I was Rapunzel this time, and we had some very skeptical four-year-olds...one even made an attempt to expose me as a fraud by yanking forcefully at my blond braid, and yelling, "it's a wig!" requiring me to think on me feet and remind her that the lock of brown hair she'd exposed was the piece the witch cut right before kidnapping me. I put a little scratch of sob into my voice and sighed, "oh, I don't like to talk about it." That left her awed and saddened. Or at the very least, it shut her up.)

All that to say, I slept in this morning, and now I'm trying to get going, and I got an email from a fellow student suggesting doing writing imitations. One of the poets suggested was Plath, not surprisingly. And so I decided to try reading some poems online, when I came across this comment stream. Plath didn't even write this poem, I think it's Christina Rossetti...but the two top comments made me laugh so hard.

Here's the phenomenon--I'm just truckin' along, feeling pretty confident in my ability to compose a two-page paper, when I pause to re-read and realize I've unwittingly used the words "inspired" and "facets" about 5 times each. Ugh. Ugugugh.

digging

sometimes my shovel nudges old bone
brittle remnant, probably just
some unmourned chicken.
I dust it off,

sing a short hymn
for the long-departed, and keep digging.

we'll break through around noon,
I announce to Dad, who is planting inpatients
in the far corner of the garden,
he coughs in approval.

to keep my strength up,
I picture orchid gardens,
fresh chapattis, rainstorms.
things I know I'll find

I practice the clattering way
my grandfather slides sound
slick of his tongue
in the kitchen after dinner.
(I hardly hear words in it, to me
just a broken necklace of seed beads
bouncing off floorboards).

I've learned one line.
I try it out, tossing
tu kasa aahe?
across the garden.

but Dad's stubborn English
boomerangs back:
fine, thank you.

when I ask if should maybe
angle a little to the left, he grins,
but doesn't answer.
He walks over
snaps the brittle wishbone
with his mud-crusted thumbs,
explains again:

Los Angeles used to be ranchland.

I know all about where we are now.
that is not why I am digging.

Grace is the monarch,
bruised wings,
fallen and fluttering
in road among other leaves.


Grace when I see it
and swerve.

Grace as it wings back
behind my eyes in the evening:
struggling life, brave enough
to keep flapping.

I'm virtually pooped...

I finally signed up for Map My Run. I've been obsessive about Gmap Pedometer, so I thought I'd try keeping track of all my routes.

Not two minutes after I finished figuring out how to enter my paltry 2.5 mile Lacy Park jog, the system congratulated me on burning 500 calories. When I examined my workout map, I found not only had I lapped the park from 8-9, but I'd mysteriously been playing basketball from 5am-6am.

I like virtual me! She's a real go-getter.

okay, I was joking when I said I should buy myself a pair of "writer shoes."

but I just found these... and they are pretty cute.

The beginning of wisdom

The clock reads 2:13, but it’s been that way for several minutes. I’d say about five. I am seven. I am swinging my legs so my Keds just skim the freshly waxed floor. My long hair, wrapped in braids around my head like no other girl in the second grade, strains against the bobby pins my mom stuck in this morning.

The bobby pins prick through my epidermis, a word that Cindy taught me today during recess by shouting that mine was showing, causing me to clutch at my pant’s zipper, my t-shirt, make sure everything was covered. My epidermis, or skin, as she finally explained after I, nearly in tears, begged her to, tingles with the all-dayness of those pins. I will get to take them out in exactly, wait...exactly 27 minutes. Or perhaps never at all, because time is not moving. An eternity of metallic aching in the space around my eyeballs.

We’ve just arrived at the auditorium. I was the line leader, a position that I do, indeed, enjoy, just quite to the extent Mrs. Pasco imagines. She always bestows the title as if it is something edible, something to be pinned to the fridge. It’s just walking. But I do a good job.

More importantly, we’re still stuck in 2:13. The chairs are hard, perhaps a little harder than they were when 2:13 started. I am sitting in the front row. Because I am an A+ student and often the line leader, I glue my eyes to the stage, hold my legs rigid, and look entranced. This is an extremely safe way to daydream, because grown-ups love to feel they have entranced small children. I have friends who take a less-subtle approach to daydreaming, turning heads and fidgeting, and I’ve learned plenty from watching them. A stiff neck is a small price to pay for freedom of the mind.

I'm thinking about time and the clock. One or both have clearly broken.

When we finally, if ever, escape 2:13, we’re going to see Grandpa in Sacramento. We’ll walk to Gunther’s, the only ice-cream shop in the world where they put real gumballs, gobs of them, into their candy-pink ice-cream. Jenny and I will spit them back out in little cups so we can count them up and see who won. Then we’ll go to the Nut Tree, where they sell iced gingerbread cookies in the shape of rainbows, painted with impossibly smooth icing, the kind that cracks and crumbles when you bite it. The gift shop has rocks for sale, the quartz and the purple one I can never pronounce, and my favorite, the one that looks like a normal rock on one side but, upon being flipped over, becomes a whole universe of spikes and shining crystals.

Then it finally ticks. 2:14.

Alright then. Time is moving.

But then I think about it: that black hole of 2:13 passed, which means every minute will keep passing, whether it is as boring as a end-of-the-day assembly or as euphoric as the first crunch of rainbow gingerbread. The whole trip will pass. All those minutes will just keep disappearing, the way the water from our hose keeps disappearing into the grass, even after Dad has forgotten about it and left it running.

The trip, then the year, and then I’ll move over to the big side of the schoolyard, the side where we’re all scared to go but where I sometimes go to wait for Jenny. And then the rest of life. It will all go about as fast, or as slow, as this very assembly, and I’ll spend much of it being line leader and sitting rigidly in hard chairs, looking like I’m interested and waiting for the clock to move me to the next minute.

There is clapping around me. I realize my teacher is digging me with her eyes, and my little hands come together, too, to thank the nice man on stage.

And when I look at the clock again, it’s 2:30, and it’s time to go.

world without end

She bought herself a rosary ring

for a dollar at the mission, planned

to learn the incantations,

let them overtake her,

slip it on to

conjure up the coolness of adobe walls,

the comfort of the circadian,

of completion.

At home, his shoulders

rolled it when she held him

or he’d twirl it

like a roulette wheel,

the scratch of

cheap metal stinging the soft

flesh folds of her fingers.

She’d laugh, and tell him

to start praying.

an experiment--I need your help!

Mark Doty (whose collection, Fire to Fire, is changing my life right now) says:

If you write a poem with the aid of a thesaurus, you will almost inevitably look like a person wearing clothing chosen by someone else. I am not sure that poet should even own one of the damn things.

I used one thesaurus aided word in the below snippet. Can you find it? I'm super curious about the conspicuousity (<-- should be a word, sounds less conspicuous than conspicuousness) of thesaurus-inspired verbiage.

Post your guess as a comment. C'mon...it'll be fun... :-)

An overdue conversation

"You shake your head. I scowl,
laugh, our voices mingle, swirl,
dizzy with proximity, relieved
to bounce around the others'
predicable tonality, to mingle
in such familiar vibrations, modulations.
Pitches pause, hitching with joy at
our squabbles, sighs, even our
silence."

ohmansogood...

STARLIGHT

My father stands in the warm evening
on the porch of my first house.
I am four years old and growing tired.
I see his head among the stars,
the glow of his cigarette, redder
than the summer moon riding
low over the old neighborhood. We
are alone, and he asks me if I am happy.
"Are you happy?'' I cannot answer.
I do not really understand the word,
and the voice, my father's voice, is not
his voice, but somehow thick and choked,
a voice I have not heard before, but
heard often since. He bends and passes
a thumb beneath each of my eyes.
The cigarette is gone, but I can smell
the tiredness than hangs on his breath.
He has found nothing, and he smiles
and holds my head with both his hands.
Then he lifts me to his shoulder,
and now I too am among the stars,
as tall as he. Are you happy? I say.
He nods in answer, Yes! oh yes! oh yes!
And in that new voice he says nothing,
holding my head tight against his head,
his eyes closed up against the starlight,
as though those tiny blinking eyes
of light might find a tall, gaunt child
holding his child against the promises
of autumn, until the boy slept
never to waken in that world again.

Philip Levine

(Okay, sir. You can go ahead and be Poet Laureate.)

it was never merely chalk or cheese...

Especially in the incandescent decade of 1900–1910, he wrote everywhere and anywhere—and about anything: “The Advantages of Having One Leg,” “A Piece of Chalk,” “What I Found in My Pocket,” “On Gargoyles,” “Cheese.” These 1,000-word bijoux he would scribble in cabs, public houses, upon shirt cuffs, the backs of play bills.

It was never merely chalk or cheese, though. In Chesterton’s hands, even the most pedestrian subject grew wings. “There is,” Chesterton assured readers at the beginning of an essay on Kipling, “no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject.” In “The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green,” an astronomer delivers a lecture on his exciting discovery of a new planet. Only gradually do we realize that this marvelous new world with all its wonders is what we’ve already seen but somehow never known: Earth. What Chesterton called the “mere excitement of existence” countermanded boredom. “It is dull as ditch-water,” you say. But think about it: “Is ditch-water dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.”

G.K. Chesteron: master of rejuvenation