January 28th, 2014
Old Piano, Frou Frou, 2002
I want to gather all their words
and present them to you in a bouquet
stare at their faces - if you don't blink
and let your eyes dry
you can see their bones on the page
and how every bone looks the same
I have made it to a corner room with windows
We can see the hilton through the slats
Are you a miss or mrs the new student says
in what is almost but is not a southern drawl
What would I even write about if I did not teach?
What goes on in the world outside of classrooms?
Suddenly it is easy to see how sunlight could press
down on a person in a chair on a porch until dust
gathered around everything and eventually what
gathered dust became it.
It isn't that hard to lose your life. I have lost whole
years, and more recently, a day or two, and certainly
many hours to this thing they calling "living"
which is really just the toenail clippings of life.
I have been a mother many times
but never through my body.
Last night I fell asleep on the floor
murmuring protests against my body
and this morning I had to pick up all the
things I lost while the fire flickered
behind my head the carpet bit into my skin
leaving tiny cuts along my back.
Everything has a cost.
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Thursday, January 22, 2015
January 22nd, 2015
Daniel's Jojk, Jon Henrik, 2014
"The reference to the object of a yoik [jojk] is not something which someone may add to or leave out from the melody…[t]he melody is closely connected to the referential object in an indissoluble relationship. Linguistically this is expressed through the fact that one does not yoik about somebody or something, there is a direct connection; one yoiks something or someone."
- Harald Gaski
For a long time you were very still,
listening for a song you could not quite hear.
You followed a path that wrapped
itself around a mountain.
You were dizzy with desire and the view.
You walked your feet raw and your knees
busted through your skin, their white caps
gleaming in the light pollution from the valley.
When you finally stopped, when you finally
rested against the tree, you heard a humming
that at first you mistook for the wind.
But it was something other.
This went on for years, the listening,
the chasing, the gentle pulse of your
desire to join the melody.
And, then, once in the night, you woke
and heard it. Your body, still
asleep, lay frozen. It was louder now,
louder and closer.
From beneath your breath it came.
The song is not something you can
find and belong to.
You are the song.
It belongs to you.
Daniel's Jojk, Jon Henrik, 2014
"The reference to the object of a yoik [jojk] is not something which someone may add to or leave out from the melody…[t]he melody is closely connected to the referential object in an indissoluble relationship. Linguistically this is expressed through the fact that one does not yoik about somebody or something, there is a direct connection; one yoiks something or someone."
- Harald Gaski
For a long time you were very still,
listening for a song you could not quite hear.
You followed a path that wrapped
itself around a mountain.
You were dizzy with desire and the view.
You walked your feet raw and your knees
busted through your skin, their white caps
gleaming in the light pollution from the valley.
When you finally stopped, when you finally
rested against the tree, you heard a humming
that at first you mistook for the wind.
But it was something other.
This went on for years, the listening,
the chasing, the gentle pulse of your
desire to join the melody.
And, then, once in the night, you woke
and heard it. Your body, still
asleep, lay frozen. It was louder now,
louder and closer.
From beneath your breath it came.
The song is not something you can
find and belong to.
You are the song.
It belongs to you.
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
January 21st, 2015
Guess Again (4:39) , Thom Yorke, 2014
skin over bone
fingers in the eyes of the enemy
But still, it was not nothing I felt when i saw
the way the falling night rested in layers on the hills.
gradient blue.
The texture of wood siding.
All of my nightmares are in the garden.
And in locker room bathrooms that go on for miles
and every single toilet dirty - a dove with no branch
on which to land
My mother never knew how much I hated the
thick blue black of night sky - how it stuck in my throat
in pieces, like the voices in my head which would repeat
always only the beginning of a sentence slowly,
from very far off, as if talking through sleep.
I want to go home and curl up on the foot of my mother's bed
even if she's only watching the evening news
and folding laundry.
My mother is the smell of baby powder
and clean, gently worn, flannel.
Suddenly I am crying in Starbucks.
Perhaps it is for the stranger who smiled at me
four weeks ago and died today. We looked into each other's
eyes and neither of us knew she was dying.
The wild stallions of my heart make a mess of my
chest - a muddy, bloody beat, just beneath
the knot in my left breast where the stress
settles in like a cat, like the fog, like the blue
night resting on the hills.
Skin over bone, mattress against skin: this is how
we break through ourselves.
All the boulders are rising to stretch
their stony backs. Tiny bits of moss
and dust drip from them.
They crouch again when my head lights
tumble around the corner.
The field is iced over and looks like a lake.
The lights are seven times their size in this grass
ocean; the jagged shadows bite my lip
these days I live just down the road from plans I've made
and abandoned.
Guess Again (4:39) , Thom Yorke, 2014
skin over bone
fingers in the eyes of the enemy
But still, it was not nothing I felt when i saw
the way the falling night rested in layers on the hills.
gradient blue.
The texture of wood siding.
All of my nightmares are in the garden.
And in locker room bathrooms that go on for miles
and every single toilet dirty - a dove with no branch
on which to land
My mother never knew how much I hated the
thick blue black of night sky - how it stuck in my throat
in pieces, like the voices in my head which would repeat
always only the beginning of a sentence slowly,
from very far off, as if talking through sleep.
I want to go home and curl up on the foot of my mother's bed
even if she's only watching the evening news
and folding laundry.
My mother is the smell of baby powder
and clean, gently worn, flannel.
Suddenly I am crying in Starbucks.
Perhaps it is for the stranger who smiled at me
four weeks ago and died today. We looked into each other's
eyes and neither of us knew she was dying.
The wild stallions of my heart make a mess of my
chest - a muddy, bloody beat, just beneath
the knot in my left breast where the stress
settles in like a cat, like the fog, like the blue
night resting on the hills.
Skin over bone, mattress against skin: this is how
we break through ourselves.
All the boulders are rising to stretch
their stony backs. Tiny bits of moss
and dust drip from them.
They crouch again when my head lights
tumble around the corner.
The field is iced over and looks like a lake.
The lights are seven times their size in this grass
ocean; the jagged shadows bite my lip
these days I live just down the road from plans I've made
and abandoned.
Monday, January 19, 2015
January 19th, 2015
Interference, Thom Yorke, 2014
In the future we will change our numbers
and lose contact.
My muscles itch and my fingers are going too fast
and this is not mania, it's fear and stress, but the smell
of my own body alarms me.
There are accountants counting the perforated lines
in the paper
all the paper
I have gotten paper cuts worse than this,
though
I will survive without sutures
my best bet is gut wrenching
an addict is always an addict,
even if he has never been one
not for nothing, but latent isn't nothing
latent is your lips before they meet mine
and I don't even want to go there,
to that moment after contact,
with fear still rattling around in
the back of my throat, where hope
should be, once you've parted my will
with your tongue.
Leave it be. It doesn't even belong to me.
This, and everything, is more
complicated than what the tiny spider
is weaving beneath the window
I used to tell stories, but all I see
now is a blond wood bar
and the sticky beer print of glass
after glass
and all the lies that came tumbling
from my lips in smiles.
I'm sorry to any man I've ever hurt.
I'm sorry to any man I've ever pleased.
None of it was true.
I don't have the right to interfere, to interfere.
Interference, Thom Yorke, 2014
In the future we will change our numbers
and lose contact.
My muscles itch and my fingers are going too fast
and this is not mania, it's fear and stress, but the smell
of my own body alarms me.
There are accountants counting the perforated lines
in the paper
all the paper
I have gotten paper cuts worse than this,
though
I will survive without sutures
my best bet is gut wrenching
an addict is always an addict,
even if he has never been one
not for nothing, but latent isn't nothing
latent is your lips before they meet mine
and I don't even want to go there,
to that moment after contact,
with fear still rattling around in
the back of my throat, where hope
should be, once you've parted my will
with your tongue.
Leave it be. It doesn't even belong to me.
This, and everything, is more
complicated than what the tiny spider
is weaving beneath the window
I used to tell stories, but all I see
now is a blond wood bar
and the sticky beer print of glass
after glass
and all the lies that came tumbling
from my lips in smiles.
I'm sorry to any man I've ever hurt.
I'm sorry to any man I've ever pleased.
None of it was true.
I don't have the right to interfere, to interfere.
Sunday, January 18, 2015
January 18th, 2015
Lotus Flower, Radiohead, 2011
It is still so poetic to clean lint from the lint trap
And now I'm lying back in the tub reading someone
else's poetry and the air is colder by the second and
the water is tickling me and gradually revealing my
skin and I realize the drain was open the whole time
but we have a clog, so it drifted down, the water, slowly, the
way Brett's smoke was drifting up just outside the front
door earlier. And now I'm exposed, a sand bar of flesh.
I slip my fingers through my fingers and squeeze to feel
the bone
The other night I went downstairs to put the water on for tea
and found it on already and forgotten. Brett was outside
smoking. The water beat angrily against the tin pot. I poured a
cup and clicked the gas stove off. I drew comfort from the fact
that I am not the only absentminded person here - not the only
one who wants to burn it all to the ground.
When I leave the bedroom just after midnight, every light in the
house has been shut off. The dark resonates.
On the way to the Jewish deli leaning on the car door
I imagined it opening, the highway rushing as a river
beneath. I said to myself "Death is just a door
to something more we're not allowed to open"
and I knew mostly that this was true, but it made my
stomach twist. At the Jewish deli I ordered a dirty
martini to wash my mouth of vomit.
But none of this is what we should be talking about.
Alex says over dinner: In Pakistan there are children
who are afraid of the sky and only play on cloudy days.
Their sky is full of dead things bringing with them death.
These are our plagues.
but. oh. if you could taste the complexity of this apple
you would not question the songs I sing.
Lotus Flower, Radiohead, 2011
It is still so poetic to clean lint from the lint trap
And now I'm lying back in the tub reading someone
else's poetry and the air is colder by the second and
the water is tickling me and gradually revealing my
skin and I realize the drain was open the whole time
but we have a clog, so it drifted down, the water, slowly, the
way Brett's smoke was drifting up just outside the front
door earlier. And now I'm exposed, a sand bar of flesh.
I slip my fingers through my fingers and squeeze to feel
the bone
The other night I went downstairs to put the water on for tea
and found it on already and forgotten. Brett was outside
smoking. The water beat angrily against the tin pot. I poured a
cup and clicked the gas stove off. I drew comfort from the fact
that I am not the only absentminded person here - not the only
one who wants to burn it all to the ground.
When I leave the bedroom just after midnight, every light in the
house has been shut off. The dark resonates.
On the way to the Jewish deli leaning on the car door
I imagined it opening, the highway rushing as a river
beneath. I said to myself "Death is just a door
to something more we're not allowed to open"
and I knew mostly that this was true, but it made my
stomach twist. At the Jewish deli I ordered a dirty
martini to wash my mouth of vomit.
But none of this is what we should be talking about.
Alex says over dinner: In Pakistan there are children
who are afraid of the sky and only play on cloudy days.
Their sky is full of dead things bringing with them death.
These are our plagues.
but. oh. if you could taste the complexity of this apple
you would not question the songs I sing.
Friday, January 16, 2015
January 16th, 2015
House of Cards , Radiohead, 2007
The pillow has done violence to my face
like a cloud crossing the moon.
Loneliness is a powerful thing
Gee wiz, Kafka.
Kafka follows me through all
the corridors of my memory
through all the blue rooms
of his blue book
his ears catch the sunlight
and shine orange, bloodlit
veins like eyelids -
the inside -
like swallowing
a flashlight
his ears are lanterns
and his eyes are caves
his tongue is a candle
when there are rocks he goes
before me
and when there is silence
he opens his mouth
and his tongue flickers
over words I hadn't yet thought to say.
I think it might be true that we
choose the color we are,
Kafka. We choose the grey.
We collect things, and then we
dismantle them until arms
and legs are everywhere.
One day Kafka and I are sitting
on a stone wall we've found in the
woods and I am saying, over and
over, because he can't quite hear
me through the years, I had wanted
bone broth, but I really didn't
mean to use their bones to do it.
He smiles and his sharp face
almost cuts me.
We get lost in the folds
of my pillow and he chokes
on the down.
It is a mercy he is already dead.
House of Cards , Radiohead, 2007
The pillow has done violence to my face
like a cloud crossing the moon.
Loneliness is a powerful thing
Gee wiz, Kafka.
Kafka follows me through all
the corridors of my memory
through all the blue rooms
of his blue book
his ears catch the sunlight
and shine orange, bloodlit
veins like eyelids -
the inside -
like swallowing
a flashlight
his ears are lanterns
and his eyes are caves
his tongue is a candle
when there are rocks he goes
before me
and when there is silence
he opens his mouth
and his tongue flickers
over words I hadn't yet thought to say.
I think it might be true that we
choose the color we are,
Kafka. We choose the grey.
We collect things, and then we
dismantle them until arms
and legs are everywhere.
One day Kafka and I are sitting
on a stone wall we've found in the
woods and I am saying, over and
over, because he can't quite hear
me through the years, I had wanted
bone broth, but I really didn't
mean to use their bones to do it.
He smiles and his sharp face
almost cuts me.
We get lost in the folds
of my pillow and he chokes
on the down.
It is a mercy he is already dead.
January 15th, 2015
Faust Arp, Radiohead, 2007
All the cups are collecting and all the Kombucha bottles
too and there is a colony of air inside these glass houses.
I have been lying here for as long as I can remember.
I have been thinking about what to think about.
What I mean is I went to the gym, but mostly I looked
in the mirror and watched my lips as I moved.
It was erotic and strange and everyone was uncomfortable.
The room is thin now that we've turned down the heat.
My fingers are cold when they wander from under the covers.
I wake up at 3:30 to remember to drink water and sometimes
it is just when the crescent moon is peering in my window.
I have the feeling of being watched. The strange light falls
on the dead flowers on the desk I use only to store envelope
after envelope of words that won't matter when I'm dead.
I have curled myself sideways in the bathtub of tepid water
and have bruised my knees.
I have built tiny igloos of light in backyards of my memory,
the nylon and cotton of my snowsuit a second skin.
I brush my hair for the first time in 100 years
and it crackles with every stroke.
The night is almost long enough to touch every small animal.
Faust Arp, Radiohead, 2007
All the cups are collecting and all the Kombucha bottles
too and there is a colony of air inside these glass houses.
I have been lying here for as long as I can remember.
I have been thinking about what to think about.
What I mean is I went to the gym, but mostly I looked
in the mirror and watched my lips as I moved.
It was erotic and strange and everyone was uncomfortable.
The room is thin now that we've turned down the heat.
My fingers are cold when they wander from under the covers.
I wake up at 3:30 to remember to drink water and sometimes
it is just when the crescent moon is peering in my window.
I have the feeling of being watched. The strange light falls
on the dead flowers on the desk I use only to store envelope
after envelope of words that won't matter when I'm dead.
I have curled myself sideways in the bathtub of tepid water
and have bruised my knees.
I have built tiny igloos of light in backyards of my memory,
the nylon and cotton of my snowsuit a second skin.
I brush my hair for the first time in 100 years
and it crackles with every stroke.
The night is almost long enough to touch every small animal.
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
January 14th, 2015
Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks , The National, 2010
Alex mentions how he has read my entire incomplete
collection of 2014 poems. I do not believe him.
Glasses clink and laughter rushes around the restaurant
around us, and I smile and shake my head and insist he is lying.
I really did. He says. All of it. The whole thing. You're
lying I say again. Hearts on a string he says.
And now I know he has read at least as far back as he would
have had to to find traces of himself. And he is there, and he
knows it.
I am very quiet now. I have never had to confront this kind
of intimacy. Up until now I have written in code.
I didn't even understand the codes when I wrote them.
David did, and he said "I think you don't want to marry me"
but he was already so far from me that I couldn't hear him,
so I took that line too and made a poem of it.
Anyway, it's one thing to write in code, but to write for real
and know that real people are reading for real, real people
who are smart enough to read fully
shakes me. I fiddle with the straw in my empty
water glass. I knock ice around and when that grows old,
I consider my nails.
___________________________________________
January 13th, 2015
Porno, Arcade Fire, 2013
My razor is very dull
and it barely does the job
You are not allowed to hate your body
I say to myself while I stand in the shower
hating my body.
It is hard to purify something you hate.
It is hard to care for it.
The shower rushes in waterfalls
over the edge of my breasts.
There is misogyny even here,
in this intimacy, in my bar of soap
in the razor that can't possibly
reach the root of the problem.
The pool of my belly button is
nearly serene as I lie on the floor
of the tub under the heat
making promises to myself
that I know I won't keep.
I lived for ten years alongside those
images in his head.
I heard it in a dream.
I felt it in his hands when he touched me.
An honest witness saves lives.
I should have spoken. My lips are
full and my tongue is sharp.
You are not allowed to hate your body
because there are many eyes on you,
many girls seeking hope in the lines
of your hip, in the sureness of your step.
I wring out the washcloth, wring out my
hair, wring out this heart of self-loathing
and climb over the edge of the tub, pure
of pretense and bare.
Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks , The National, 2010
Alex mentions how he has read my entire incomplete
collection of 2014 poems. I do not believe him.
Glasses clink and laughter rushes around the restaurant
around us, and I smile and shake my head and insist he is lying.
I really did. He says. All of it. The whole thing. You're
lying I say again. Hearts on a string he says.
And now I know he has read at least as far back as he would
have had to to find traces of himself. And he is there, and he
knows it.
I am very quiet now. I have never had to confront this kind
of intimacy. Up until now I have written in code.
I didn't even understand the codes when I wrote them.
David did, and he said "I think you don't want to marry me"
but he was already so far from me that I couldn't hear him,
so I took that line too and made a poem of it.
Anyway, it's one thing to write in code, but to write for real
and know that real people are reading for real, real people
who are smart enough to read fully
shakes me. I fiddle with the straw in my empty
water glass. I knock ice around and when that grows old,
I consider my nails.
___________________________________________
January 13th, 2015
Porno, Arcade Fire, 2013
My razor is very dull
and it barely does the job
You are not allowed to hate your body
I say to myself while I stand in the shower
hating my body.
It is hard to purify something you hate.
It is hard to care for it.
The shower rushes in waterfalls
over the edge of my breasts.
There is misogyny even here,
in this intimacy, in my bar of soap
in the razor that can't possibly
reach the root of the problem.
The pool of my belly button is
nearly serene as I lie on the floor
of the tub under the heat
making promises to myself
that I know I won't keep.
I lived for ten years alongside those
images in his head.
I heard it in a dream.
I felt it in his hands when he touched me.
An honest witness saves lives.
I should have spoken. My lips are
full and my tongue is sharp.
You are not allowed to hate your body
because there are many eyes on you,
many girls seeking hope in the lines
of your hip, in the sureness of your step.
I wring out the washcloth, wring out my
hair, wring out this heart of self-loathing
and climb over the edge of the tub, pure
of pretense and bare.
Monday, January 12, 2015
January 12th, 2015
Waterfall, Torres, 2013
this thick thing, how the walls are painted with undiscovered masterpieces - what a fortune I would make if I could unfurl it and dry it and hang it
Beginning again takes many tries sometimes
When you've nowhere to go but down there are at least
things to remember
What we do in cars
private but visible
and how this changes
the space in which it happens
a parking lot full of tears
a parking space full of your skin
or his, shed in words
as ever closer you leaned
into the fiery center of each other
until you burned up
and this is not a thing
anyone can come back from
our first consumption must happen
before our first birth
I didn't think I'd be born so late
But I am always doing things late
I am always late to bed and late
to social engagements
and late to say I'm sorry
and I'm trying to change this
I'm sorry
I have painted my own face enough to recognize
its angles in the window when I turn to stretch
my neck so that there is no longer a surprise
in encountering myself for the first time.
I am here now. This is happening.
It will be a long night.
It will be a night hung with dreams
I began before
(was it earlier today or earlier in life? Was
it in the womb I dreamt I was a cabin boy
sailing a raging sea, tasting rum in secret
amid the damp wood and sloshing water
of the bilge - and someone will say 'you
wouldn't have been drinking rum in the bilge'
but I was, I swear I was - was it when I was five
that I dreamed I loved? Was it yesterday
or 10 years ago that I started writing a book
about women warriors?)
It will be cold
and I will shiver and never
really sleep,
but this half sleeping
will help me remember
the new dreams
and I will listen to this song
as many times as I have to to break
through this thick chrysalis
and when I do, I will bat my eyelashes
rapidly to dry them.
Perhaps by then my eyes will
have cleared of tears.
Goodbye my dear,
goodbye my dear.
______________________________________
January 7th, 2015
Silentinium , Arvo Part, 1998
small things slip by me.
I feel their breath.
If I set them down here,
maybe they will no longer be mine.
It was hot everywhere
the dance floor was slick with sweat
I walked through the crowd to find
the bathroom and hands - almost
disembodied - reached.
I turned a corner and he grabbed me
I looked at his hand on my wrist
and then into his face. I did not move.
He looked away, let go, and was gone.
My eyes took back their talons
when I looked in the mirror,
softening to my sleepy self in black
lace who wished only to be home.
In the same way my hair must have
stood on end even under the sweat of his
hand, I feel oceans rise to my throat
when I think of waking up at the trail
head, crumpled in the front seat of my
car, my hair in my eyes, my contacts
like stones scraping my muddy irises
blackened with self-loathing,
because I had been out all night
and didn't want to worry my mother
by going home at 4.
These are hard stories to tell.
They curdle the stomach.
I have not yet thrown up enough to purge
those nights from my body, but that
isn't how it works anyway, He says.
This is not a good poem yet.
This is all just practice.
I cannot wait for the next thing.
I am a petrified log with many stories.
I have nothing more to say to you.
Have grace, she whispers, for all younger
selves.
I will try. I will try.
Waterfall, Torres, 2013
this thick thing, how the walls are painted with undiscovered masterpieces - what a fortune I would make if I could unfurl it and dry it and hang it
Beginning again takes many tries sometimes
When you've nowhere to go but down there are at least
things to remember
What we do in cars
private but visible
and how this changes
the space in which it happens
a parking lot full of tears
a parking space full of your skin
or his, shed in words
as ever closer you leaned
into the fiery center of each other
until you burned up
and this is not a thing
anyone can come back from
our first consumption must happen
before our first birth
I didn't think I'd be born so late
But I am always doing things late
I am always late to bed and late
to social engagements
and late to say I'm sorry
and I'm trying to change this
I'm sorry
I have painted my own face enough to recognize
its angles in the window when I turn to stretch
my neck so that there is no longer a surprise
in encountering myself for the first time.
I am here now. This is happening.
It will be a long night.
It will be a night hung with dreams
I began before
(was it earlier today or earlier in life? Was
it in the womb I dreamt I was a cabin boy
sailing a raging sea, tasting rum in secret
amid the damp wood and sloshing water
of the bilge - and someone will say 'you
wouldn't have been drinking rum in the bilge'
but I was, I swear I was - was it when I was five
that I dreamed I loved? Was it yesterday
or 10 years ago that I started writing a book
about women warriors?)
It will be cold
and I will shiver and never
really sleep,
but this half sleeping
will help me remember
the new dreams
and I will listen to this song
as many times as I have to to break
through this thick chrysalis
and when I do, I will bat my eyelashes
rapidly to dry them.
Perhaps by then my eyes will
have cleared of tears.
Goodbye my dear,
goodbye my dear.
______________________________________
January 7th, 2015
Silentinium , Arvo Part, 1998
small things slip by me.
I feel their breath.
If I set them down here,
maybe they will no longer be mine.
It was hot everywhere
the dance floor was slick with sweat
I walked through the crowd to find
the bathroom and hands - almost
disembodied - reached.
I turned a corner and he grabbed me
I looked at his hand on my wrist
and then into his face. I did not move.
He looked away, let go, and was gone.
My eyes took back their talons
when I looked in the mirror,
softening to my sleepy self in black
lace who wished only to be home.
In the same way my hair must have
stood on end even under the sweat of his
hand, I feel oceans rise to my throat
when I think of waking up at the trail
head, crumpled in the front seat of my
car, my hair in my eyes, my contacts
like stones scraping my muddy irises
blackened with self-loathing,
because I had been out all night
and didn't want to worry my mother
by going home at 4.
These are hard stories to tell.
They curdle the stomach.
I have not yet thrown up enough to purge
those nights from my body, but that
isn't how it works anyway, He says.
This is not a good poem yet.
This is all just practice.
I cannot wait for the next thing.
I am a petrified log with many stories.
I have nothing more to say to you.
Have grace, she whispers, for all younger
selves.
I will try. I will try.
Tuesday, January 6, 2015
January 6th, 2015
Spiegel im Spiegel, Arvo Part, 1978
It rushed in on me suddenly, while I was texting her goodnight,
that we had prayed once before in her bedroom.
She is 15 and I am 30 and when I go home to visit I sleep on a
mattress on her floor. There is no spare bedroom.
When they announced their divorce she was only 7 and I
22. I had been warned by them separately.
When she heard, she ran from the kitchen and locked herself
in her room and cried, privately, as she always did.
I knocked on the door. It took some coaxing, but she let me
in. Her face was white and wet and angry. It's not right
she kept saying. It's wrong. Tell them it's wrong. I looked
down at her, as if from a long way off. What could I say?
It is wrong Sarah, I don't think it's what is supposed to happen.
It's not the ending we want, but it is the ending.
She, calm now, shook her head and said No. God does
not want our family to break. I had no words then.
We sat together, the oldest and youngest, sobbing and
praying that something would change.
Many things changed, though not the things we had
prayed for. He moved out, we moved on, slowly, awkwardly.
When he died she seemed not to cry until she read one of his
favorite verses at the memorial service, and then she shook.
The other night we prayed in whispers for our mother
until we fell asleep. The sky breathed gently over us.
Spiegel im Spiegel, Arvo Part, 1978
It rushed in on me suddenly, while I was texting her goodnight,
that we had prayed once before in her bedroom.
She is 15 and I am 30 and when I go home to visit I sleep on a
mattress on her floor. There is no spare bedroom.
When they announced their divorce she was only 7 and I
22. I had been warned by them separately.
When she heard, she ran from the kitchen and locked herself
in her room and cried, privately, as she always did.
I knocked on the door. It took some coaxing, but she let me
in. Her face was white and wet and angry. It's not right
she kept saying. It's wrong. Tell them it's wrong. I looked
down at her, as if from a long way off. What could I say?
It is wrong Sarah, I don't think it's what is supposed to happen.
It's not the ending we want, but it is the ending.
She, calm now, shook her head and said No. God does
not want our family to break. I had no words then.
We sat together, the oldest and youngest, sobbing and
praying that something would change.
Many things changed, though not the things we had
prayed for. He moved out, we moved on, slowly, awkwardly.
When he died she seemed not to cry until she read one of his
favorite verses at the memorial service, and then she shook.
The other night we prayed in whispers for our mother
until we fell asleep. The sky breathed gently over us.
January 2nd, 2015
Firebird , Igor Stravinsky, 1910
We gathered in the basement
my brother's dreams
my sister's candles
my brother, my sister, and I.
We listened to the whole thing -
47 minutes!
By the second movement
while my brother was upstairs
we turned off all the lights.
The basement must braided
into the cranberry and gardenia
of evaporating wax.
The conductor moved his
hands like birds
and his face pulsed
with every note,
twitched with every tremolo
It is like God I said
By some other movement
(for now we were lost)
we watched the flames
sharpen and elongate
at the higher pitches
and stutter at the low drums
We considered frequency
and Joshua suggested that
the flame changed only
when sounds were separate
the air is too dense when
the whole symphony is playing
We watched the flame;
His theory was sound.
1910: while everything
edged towards now,
a young, as yet invisible,
man wrote a ballet
about a bird.
Did he look at his thin face
in the mirror on opening night
and watch his muscles pulse,
his heart twitch?
Did he watch the candlelight
trace his lips?
And in my dreams I see myself on a wolf's back
Riding along a forest path
To do battle with a sorcerer-tsar
In that land where a princess sits under lock and key,
Pining behind massive walls.
There gardens surround a palace all of glass;
There Firebirds sing by night
And peck at golden fruit.
I want to hold all the hands
that have shaped our world;
I want to be burned by the heat
of their dreams.
Firebird , Igor Stravinsky, 1910
We gathered in the basement
my brother's dreams
my sister's candles
my brother, my sister, and I.
We listened to the whole thing -
47 minutes!
By the second movement
while my brother was upstairs
we turned off all the lights.
The basement must braided
into the cranberry and gardenia
of evaporating wax.
The conductor moved his
hands like birds
and his face pulsed
with every note,
twitched with every tremolo
It is like God I said
By some other movement
(for now we were lost)
we watched the flames
sharpen and elongate
at the higher pitches
and stutter at the low drums
We considered frequency
and Joshua suggested that
the flame changed only
when sounds were separate
the air is too dense when
the whole symphony is playing
We watched the flame;
His theory was sound.
1910: while everything
edged towards now,
a young, as yet invisible,
man wrote a ballet
about a bird.
Did he look at his thin face
in the mirror on opening night
and watch his muscles pulse,
his heart twitch?
Did he watch the candlelight
trace his lips?
And in my dreams I see myself on a wolf's back
Riding along a forest path
To do battle with a sorcerer-tsar
In that land where a princess sits under lock and key,
Pining behind massive walls.
There gardens surround a palace all of glass;
There Firebirds sing by night
And peck at golden fruit.
I want to hold all the hands
that have shaped our world;
I want to be burned by the heat
of their dreams.
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