I Can't Expect to Avoid Anger & Brooding

Training

I’m thinking of living forever.
I think that way I might finally
get my gig straight and solve the crosswords.
I’m considering outlasting everyone
although I know I’d have a hard time
explaining not having read Ulysses
past the first chapter.
I don’t care if death smells like nutmeg.
I don’t buy the plotline on eternal rest.
By staying alive someday
I might manage to hail a taxi,
and fulfill my father’s wish
of reaching town without a red light.
I couldn’t expect to avoid anger or brooding
or to make the journey with my beasts appeased.
But I might walk vast expanses
of earth and always be beginning
and I love beginning
or could learn 

to love it.

Goldfish Sitter

I’ve been remiss! I had a rich October doing the Stephen King found poetry project. I had more energy than I expected, turning each daily poem into a little creature with various kinds of collage and drawing, which motivated me. I ended up submitting lots of poems in November, without much payoff so far - a few rejections, a stray acceptance.

I also visited the states last month to help my mother prepare to move and to enjoy a rare Thanksgiving, a holiday I always loved because of the food (and family). The family has scattered I’m afraid, and my mother, our last New Jersey stalwart, picks up stakes in January, too.

I did have one poem published last month, Goldfish Sitter, in the National Poetry Review. It’s a poem I wrote after Christmas last year, when I was indeed assigned to babysit a neighbor’s goldfish over the holidays.

gone electric

Happy International Typewriter Day. I bought my little red beauty at a flea market on the Rhine for less than 10 euros. I remember seeing it almost as soon as we got to the market. I snapped it up immediately and as we browsed it quickly grew heavy. It is a portable, though, with a handle and a case that snaps shut. The maker, Triumph-Adler of Nuremberg, first made bicycles, then branched into typewriters.

I love typewriters because they’re beautiful and the writer’s totem. When I was a child, my father, a reporter, had a small study upstairs and you could hear the typewriter clacking away, busy and productive, a positive presence. Sometimes he let me sit on his lap and peck at the keys. It was our piano. I also went to high school at a time when typing was an elective class. My European colleagues have always found this funny, but in a good way, as a sign of how practical Americans are. Indeed, it’s a great skill to have. 

One of my favourite typewriter scenes in movies is the opening of Atonement, where the sound of typing soon mixes in with a piano. This is a book I wish I had read before seeing the movie, since knowing the twist takes the air out of it. It's a good twist, though. 

Stalks

The wind is torn.

In the field behind my house, flowers not on stems but stalks.

As a child driving at night with my parents and uncle, so foggy my uncle threatened to get out and walk, and threw the door open on the highway.

Why has ‘debauch’ been usurped by ‘debauchery?’ ‘Debauch’ being one instance?

Most people have to invent their own pain, but I lived not far from the factory.

Some cut flowers can be revived by submerging in cool water. Warm makes the wilt worse.

As a child I was a fervent devotee of prayer. I had a looming divorce to pray against, and dreaded going to bed, knowing how long it was going to take to bless everyone I loved, or who deserved my love.

A horse is prized for beauty and strength, and to hell with its inner qualities.

“Children go through divorce in single file,” said Judith Wallerstein. It doesn’t matter if their friends got there first.

A gentleman is not an implement, Confucius said.

And the flophouse is no place for a lady.

Jewels and Binoculars (week 21)

Listened to: I’ll Keep It With Mine, one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs, in honor of his birthday

Watched: This spoof on women fending off compliments

Inside: Dog hair city
Outside: That time of year when the wisteria rhymes with hysteria

Read: Wislawa Szymborska’s “The Kindness of the Blind”
Wrote: Lots of “(noun) of (noun)” phrases

Ate: Rucola with feta, pine nuts and potatoes
Drank: Italian red 

Yeah: Galleys for upcoming poem in Bird’s Thumb 

Nay: sports fandom and “patriotism” that depends on war glory

Discussed: Handwriting. Writing a letter by hand nowadays is like walking instead of driving a car. Everyone looks at you like you’re weird, or at least that’s how you feel.
Decided: I should get a full-length manuscript together, just lazy and insecure.

Missed: My parents
Acquired: Birthday presents for the kids

Cursed: Housework
Learned: There’s a swath of grey hair under the top layer of my hair. I found it at the hairdresser's. I thought it was (undissolved) mousse. 

Word of the week: Ampule, which sound electric but is filled with liquid

Pithiness: If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough. ― Meister Eckhart

Whose paradise

We leave for vacation tomorrow - a week in Sardegna with our son and one of his friends. I hope it won’t be boring for them. God knows after a week I’m bored as can be, which is why I don’t like going for two weeks. I like the sea and all, but get stir-crazy with nothing else to do. Of course I bring books and write, but I still feel so stranded.

To reveal another negative-energy thing about myself: the vacation starts tomorrow but for me it began Saturday when we took the dog to friends. Like the sea, the dog is nice and all, but I can’t pretend I love coming home after 10 hours of work to cook dinner, clean up and walk the dog. It is just a time-suck, and I feel so obligated.

For a few frantic hours I considered buying an iPad to take on vacation, but was unsure whether I could store documents on it. I want it more for that than the Internet. Although the Apple guy said I could keep documents directly on it with Pages, I was skeptical because my iPad-carrying colleagues said they don’t know how to. With vacation threatening I felt like I was going to buy on impulse without really being informed. 

Then on the phone my mother told me how she was going to save $100 a year by not having caller ID on her phone, and that was what the iPad sleeve alone was going to cost me and suddenly I felt so spoiled and wasteful. 

So here’s some of what I’m taking on my scenic, calm, non-technological vacation:

Unless by Carol Shields

Villette by Charlotte Bronte

The Captain Lands in Paradise by Sarah Manguso 

History puts a saint in every dream

My grandfather had a tavern in Scranton, PA, aptly named Sloat’s Tavern. He quit the business and retired on his stock exchange winnings, now evaporated, before I was born, but the tavern is part of the family lore. My father has told many stories about sweeping up there after school.

I remember at the bar at his own home my grandfather had these tall aluminum tumblers in metallic colors like purple and teal, and whatever you drank out of those tasted tall and metallic and cold whether it was cold or not. He kept a gold one in the bathroom for rinsing your mouth.

My grandfather was a Highball man who used shakers and crushed ice and was never in a bad mood. His bar was outfitted with stools, stirrers, a mounted bottle opener and packets of powdered Whiskey Sour mix. My sister Lisa and I used to play ‘bar’ there, you know, it was a like playing ‘house.’

Song of the day: Time 

Muttertag

I’ll be off yodeling in Switzerland this weekend, the land I hate to love. I complain often about the country that separates us from Italy with its overpriced everything and inconvenient currency. But whenever I arrive it’s so amazingly gorgeous that I chide myself for being petty. Anyway,

Not to miss Mother’s Day! Here’s a photo from 1996 that says motherhood is not an endless feast of cuteness and bubbling good moods. It is also isolation, doubt and enormous, eternal inconvenience. Rather like Switzerland. (That baby is also gorgeous.)

Escape into Life was kind enough to include one of my poems, Dear Scum, in a poetry feature this month on motherhood. The poem was a reaction to a pornographic letter and drawings a disgruntled schoolmate of my then 8- or 9-year old daughter left on our doorstep. Certainly exercised my motherly outrage that day, week, month and pretty much year. There! I broke the “don’t-explain-your-work rule.” You'll live.

One terrible thing

In a story I was reading today came the question: What is the most terrifying thing that ever happened to you?

This is hard because you really have to mine your memory. As always I am afraid I will give the wrong answer and that once I give an answer that I won’t be able to change it, as if there were some superpower somewhere keeping track. Of course this is counter-productive and neurotic and prevents the person questioned (me) from even approaching the question, being so preoccupied about the conditions. I had the same problem last month when a friend asked me to name my three favorite Elvis Costello songs were. (WAS NOT ABLE.)

Anyway, I tried to get over that and can tell you one of the first things that comes to my mind, the thing that sifts to the top early on in the memory-mining. 

For Easter I go with my husband and kids (6 and 4?) to London to visit friends. In turn we are invited to friends of theirs for dinner and we set out on the tube to a balmy, upscale suburb. On the way, we arrive at a stop and our friend remembers at the last moment that we should get out. We frantically jump out, grabbing all our stuff, which is voluminous since they have a small child and our children are also not big. We are on the platform with baby buggy, etc. and all, and suddenly she says, “NO! This is the wrong stop!” and exhorts us all to jump back on to the train. 

We do. I am a bit annoyed but to top it off as I am turning around I notice that my daughter is still on the platform and I haven’t a second to do anything but gear up to freak when she realizes herself that she must get in urgently and she takes a long-legged leap through the closing doors, the swoosh of which is burned into my brainplate, and I am so grateful and at the same time (perhaps unjustly) pissed off that I nearly left my daughter behind at an abandoned stop in a foreign city. 

But I didn’t.

House of cards

After the kids leave, I convert the second bedroom of my mother’s apartment into a bachelor pad. I deflate the air mattress Miles was sleeping on, and set the rickety card table up into a small, soft-lit paradise of books. I hold office there, taking notes on nothing, listening to the crickets. It definitely encourages nightowlness.

I finished Revolutionary Road on my trip, and now feel I never need to drink a martini. I also read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which I found on my sister's shelf. It warned me sufficiently of Swedish mosquitoes.

Unable to find Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl in either of the big used bookstores I visited, I borrowed it from my mother’s library. It’s a devastating book. You can eat all the radiation you want, but you'll have to bury your shit in your head. 

I picked up poetry books by Sappho, Tao Lin, Michael Ondaatje and Alison Titus. In the poetry aisle of a bookstore I got into a conversation with a bearded gentleman. He asked me who my favorite poets were. My first (unrehearsed, unhesitant) answer was Charles Wright. 

In Future Tense, he wrote:

All things in the end are bittersweet—
An empty gaze, a little way-station just beyond silence.

If you can’t delight in the everyday,
                                                         you have no future here.

And if you can, no future either.

And time, black dog, will sniff you out,
                                                            and lick your lean cheeks,
And lie down beside you—warm, real close—and will not move. 

If not, overweight fee

I leave for the states Friday, and am embroiled in the pre-transatlantic drama that seems to strike whenever I take such a trip: I’m a good clip through a big book that it will be a trick to finish before I leave. So,

1. Do I stop reading, and resume when I come back? Not a good idea. 

2. Do I take it with me, finish at my mother’s and leave it there? Could do, but she's read it and I promised to lend it to a colleague. 

3. Do I take it, finish it, and lug its heavy ass back in my suitcase, in a pocket better left to a likewise large but unread book? Ugh. Worst-case scenario. 

4. Do I cram the whole book in before Friday morning? Yes, or go blind trying. The book is Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, and it is an exciting read, so at least the book is cooperating. This is my best option, since today I ordered seven books to be sent to my mother’s house, all of which I’ll be lugging back, surely among others. Here they are: 

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch

Seriously Funny: Poems about Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex and Everything Else - Barbara Hamby, David Kirby, eds. 

No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July 

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho - Anne Carson, trans. 

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning 

Night of Stone: Death and Memory in 20th Century Russia by Catherine Merridale 

Sum of Every Lost Ship by Allison Titus 

Fees

I figure if I have been turned down by a journal two or three or more times, I am going to have a slender chance of winning its poetry contest. I appreciate journals get revenue from charging a fee for their contests, and that’s fine. One could also subscribe. But to enter a contest in which you have little chance of winning and lots of chance of tying up some of your best poems for months seems a waste of time and money.

Elsewhere in $poetry$ land, I have given in and subscribed to Duotrope. I stopped when they began charging, but find that it’s motivating to see which journals are answering submissions, who’s got a call out on a theme, where “people who submitted to this journal also submitted to.” Until two days ago I hadn’t submitted anything for going on 90 days. 

This was a very boring post. To spark up the experience, listen to my brother read about bikes in this short animation.

Easter weekend

I have spent many days alone, the family scattered north and south - Lulu in Berlin, and the boys in the boot heel of Italy visiting relatives. Even the dog spent the last week in the countryside with friends, since work kept me from walking her regularly. Lulu came back this evening, bearing souvenirs from Die Brücke museum and asking for sushi takeout. She brought me this notecard of a painting by Walter Gramatté, who died of at the age of 32 of tuberculosis.

I had a friend over last night who told me of her travails with online dating, and how the most promising of her beaus gave her a book that dealt a fatal blow to a budding relationship. He was otherwise a promising guy, but about three dates in her gave her a “relationship guidebook” for her birthday, which she was unable even to unwrap completely, so horrifying was the title. He knew she liked to read, and meant it as a nod to that, but fell very far off the map and was dismissed from the stage. 

My husband and I have many differences, being from different continents, religions and temperaments, but I cannot fault his taste in books. He did buy me a terrible book once, in ignorance, but later read it himself and admitted it was terrible. He also prefers David Copperfield to Great Expectations. Well, in moments of weakness even I prefer David Copperfield to Great Expectations.

Elsewhere, I've lived in Germany for 20 years and never knew it was forbidden to dance on Good Friday! It's interesting how atheist Europe sticks to these fossilized rules, like all retail stores being closed on Sundays, while the fundamentalist Christians in America stop at Sam's Club or whatever after church to pick up some booze. 

the year arrives like a shipwreck

Once again the year began with January, and it did even though the calendar I ordered has not yet arrived to reassure me.
For days I have suffered the nuisance of fireworks and firecrackers and the voluminous trash they abandon.
As if a shipwreck's ruins were strewn far from sea.
But the noise is tapering off so I feel we must have made some headway into the month.
Once again the year began with worrying. My daughter called with some news that I would have liked to discuss further, but I took the call on a colleague's phone and could not pursue it. Back at my desk I decided I might be making too much of it. Which may be true. Yet I was soon besieged with the worry that I wasn't worrying enough, which is a kind of meta-worrying. I put aside the problem and focused on worrying in the right proportion.
Are people who tend not to worry doing a better job at life, or worse? One is often told "don't worry, be happy," but the phrase "a lack of concern" suggests negligence.
To support me in my many doubts I got a notification today saying, "We can inform you that your calendar "Dickens' London" has been shipped. The estimated delivery date is January 7." I was glad to hear this, although I won't get a discount equivalent to 7 days of calendarlessness despite the delay. At least when I open it I will know where&when to begin.

ID

Last night I was walking the dog in the park and a man recognized her and said she's usually out with your husband, the man with the French accent. I laughed, my husband being Italian.

One of the last times I got together with my father he said my hair gets darker every time he sees me. Was I doing something to it?

We all live under an assumed name. There is no deep stamp on us.

When I called our editing desk in London recently, the person on the other line said, oh it's you, I recognized you because of your German accent.

My husband addresses me by the name nearest at hand. Our daughter's, our dog's, his best friend's wife.

In the morning I take a pair of pants out of the drawer and wonder could these be mine.

Temp

As it falters the elderly brain switches into a kind of dreamlife where scraps of memory are repurposed, elaborated and reinvented. Haunting, repressed events and experiences from the past resurface in a different guise, people are assigned new motives or confused with other people, and time springs its linear lock.

My stepfather, who turned 87 this month, increasingly engages in reminiscence, reconstructing the past and floating his versions of it. When I saw him in April he asked if I remembered the summer I temped as a receptionist at his office, and how on one day we put my desk out onto the front lawn so I could work in the sunshine. Try as I do I can't remember this, and it is unlikely it ever happened. A receptionist needs above all to answer the phone, and in those days, before the cordless and cell phone, it would have been impracticable. And yet the power of suggestion is strong and I strain to remember what he seems so sure of. Maybe we got the desk out the front door near the entrance and were happy with that? I am kidding myself.

Now five months later, he continues the story and takes it further. Now the desk is not on the lawn but we've dragged it up into the sparse, hilly woods across the road. With the building on Rt. 206 near Somerville, I'm basically ensconced in the peaceful green of the Duke Estate, which was private in those days. This is an impossible and lovely story I wish were true, only better, not the story of a summer temp but a permanent position, that I could go to such a job every day, typing and answering the phone, and didn't have to leave the woods for the world.

long days

The best thing about my mother's apartment is the setting, butt-up against a small stretch of woods. The deer come to the edge with their gestures of the feminine. The crickets are so many they seem to roar. In my jetlag I'm awake before dawn. I sit at the back window and have this all to myself, this enormous throbbing that has no end-point or goal.
*
A lot of experiences find no real end.
*
As a small child my best friend was the daughter of my mother's friend Louise. We spent days together, slept in cribs and cots together, tumbled around in the backseats in the days before car seats. When her family moved to Pennsylvania I was sure she would remain my dearest friend. But I saw her only once or twice again, and she'd begun a separate life, playing sports I didn't play, making friends with strangers, and my feelings of affection for her became an onus and embarrassment I still can feel.
*
We are much more comfortable with the 'clean break,' not the ragged thread that seems to disappear only to stitch back up into the fabric somewhere far off.
*
My mother mentions the time your sister went to live with your father. When was this, I say, because she is making it up, or exaggerating. When she was about 15. I don't remember that, I say. That must have lasted all of three days. It was a long three days, my mother says.

june '74

Why is the owl & pussycat's boat pea-green? Is it made of bamboo? Has moss grown on it?

What is a bong tree? Is it in the south pacific? Is it gong-like, or hollow like a hookah? 

Why honey? With what? 

If there’s plenty of money, why offer the piggy-wig just a shilling for the ring? There seems little else to spend it on.

Why did they sail for a year and a day, or 366 days? Is it because even numbers are more harmonious?

With the delightful picture of marriage portrayed in the owl and pussycat, why did Edward Lear never marry? Is it because he entertained a number of pet peeves, including noise, gaiety, and hens? "When I go to heaven, if indeed I go -and am surrounded by thousands of polite angels- I shall say courteously, 'please leave me alone.'"

sex, death

One regret I have about not having been born a man is never being called a gentleman. 

* 

I think of menopause as the end of biological usefulness. The dizzy faltering, the ache, the everything. 

* 

Cesar Vallejo expected to die on a Thursday, as he wrote in one of his poems. But he died on a Friday, Good Friday, “aching without explanation.” 

* 

Every year when my kids’ birthdays arrive I remember the German word for placenta is “Mutterkuchen,” literally ’mother cake.’ 

* 

If I were a man, my pants would be waiting for me when I woke up. Right where I left them. Rumpled on the floor. 

Forming a church. Maybe a steeple. 

*

My mother finds it a tragedy when a man goes bald. She never fails to comment - ‘Oh him, he went bald.’ An old boyfriend of mine, a client at her firm, has not escaped this fate, she tells me. Rather, she whispers it to me, as if I were in on a joke.

it will not be a pansy heaven

I called my mom. She wasn't home. We'll survive. I sent her a book as a gift that she got in the mail a few days ago. Of course it's one I want to read, too. As for me, my daughter also got me a book, and my son, well, he was completely oblivious, which we will also survive. It worked for me, since I guilted him in taking the dog out although it was my turn. What are mothers for.

Becoming a mother changed my relationship with the whole world. My ability to empathize exploded, as did my concerns about “the future” of just about everything.

Unlike women who say motherhood gave them something to live for, for me having children gave me something to die for. Not only in that I would jump between them and a hail of bullets, but also in that if they were to die, I would want to die, too. This is clear to me every time they ride the rollercoaster. I don’t want to, but when they get on, I get on. Like I'm going to cushion the crash. Sometimes, though, in a glitch of logic, I send their father.

Here's a poem ee cummings wrote for his mother, read in a not entirely serious way and accompanied by some very low-tech effects. Enjoy.