Every appointment has been moved to last week

Listened to: Audio book of The Dogs of Riga, a Henning Mankell book
Read: More Proust

Saw: Gladiators battle, or at least some serious guys dressed as gladiators
Watched: Thebans, an opera by Julian Anderson

Laughed: Fakely
Cursed: Genuinely

Nay: Homesick
Yeah: Poem accepted at One Sentence Poems

Acquired: Labello. I blow through a lot of money but don’t seem to acquire much.
Discarded: A German guide to bike tours in Ireland

Visited: Roman-Germanic museum, Cologne
Learned: Oedipus had four children, two of whom killed each other. Kind of a bad family situation there all around. 

Ate: Cinnamon buns
Drank: Starbucks products 

Inside: Yoga, a little too close to the guy in front of me’s feet
Outside: Pushed a shopping cart full of beer across a lawn along the Main River, accompanied by a colleague holding an umbrella over my head

Word of the week: Wafer (if the wafer of light offends me - charles wright)

Pithiness: "It’s easier to help the hungry than the overfed." - Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach


Thanks to Valerie Roybal for permission to use the image

Pebble arrangement

Read: Heat Wave by Penelope Lively. #excellent

Watched: Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon). #great

Discarded: A blouse I loved but didn’t suit me. I would have continued to let it hang in the closet as if I might someday wear it, but apparently I wore it enough to get a stain on it. Saved the buttons and threw it away. 

Received: A letter from Sardegna with a small seashell from my Italian daughter. 

Bought: Painterly pillowcase.

Did without: Went to IKEA to get a new rug for under the dining room table, and decided I didn’t need a rug under the dining room table. 

Dreamed: I was 20 and decided to abandon Europe to go to college in Tennessee.

Visited: Took a walk through Frankfurt Cemetery in the pouring rain in honor of the birthday of Arthur Schopenhauer, who’s buried there. 

Failed: Stress galore. 

Triumphed: Moths ate my husband’s sweaters. 5 points for window screen advocates. 

Ate: Raspberries, chicken soup, fontina, toast, chocolate-covered almonds.

Drank: Spinach & cabbage juice.

Word of the week: Mosaic. That's what I wanted to tell the tour guide who talked about "the interesting pebble arrangement." But I didn't. 

Pithiness of the week: The art of not reading is extremely important. It consists in our not taking up whatever happens to be occupying the larger public at the time. - Schopenhauer

Miniature City

Waiting is a weed that promises blossoms. It endures the worst conditions, growing even near the end of the road.

*

In the bookstore, there’s one customer who regularly reads the last page before deciding on a book, then finds the experience spoiled: The vines are thwacked. The step-mother dies. Making his rounds, the hunter comes. Or doesn’t. 

But life’s not a peephole.

*

Most of the time you are the little man hunched in the snowglobe waiting for a shake. 

Here goes nothing, you say, angling into an anticipated wind.

*

Outside the warehouse, the bus stop bench sits in a tangle of mayweed. You lean back. If not for the search lights, these clouds wouldn’t be lit like this, from underneath.

*

The fields fill, and the trees and the housetops, and the chimneys choke. And the bricks turn red and there’s a heady scent of something that is not smoke.

*

It’s the slow city you built in a bottle that makes these blossoms possible.

*

Roll up, or the week that was

Ate: Ossobuco

Drank: German red wine

Reading: The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst

Listened to: The Magical Mystery Tour

Watched: Tootsie, for the umpteenth time

Saw: A thin spot on my husband’s head of rich dark hair 

Discarded: Underwear neither my daughter nor I could claim with confidence

Acquired: New wine glasses, which I did not need

Failed: Draft #17

Triumphed: The dog, hopelessly lugged along on a visit, made friends with our friends’ cat, Madame Curie, then wolfed down all her food

Found: A gorgeous stick stripped of its bark

Received: Half a bar of soap from Ursula (mistress of Madame Curie)

Visited: Arithmeum museum of calculating machines, Bonn

Observed: I really need a driver’s license if I expect to go anywhere. 

Word of the week: Resplendent (“Sitting outside at the End of Autumn,” Charles Wright) 

Pithiness of the week: “The US dumbing-down that is seizing Germany more and more is one of the gravest consequences of the war.” - Albert Schweizer (seen on the wall of one of my husband’s Italian students, an 80-year old former nun who lives in the woods)

The only order the day had was chronological order

In the afternoon, the hour of five falls like quintuplets from the clock.

To live in the moment is a frightful thing. In all the past I never lived in the moment. I was saving those moments for now.

The future is no better place. The future is coming with the sole purpose that I might regret it.

I once loved someone who said things like, “when we’re older and you write my biography…” What a presumptuous jerk. But more pathetic was how I adored him, and how he still crosses my mind every day, at least the person he was, not our failure.

Nothing nourishes suffering like nostalgia.

At dusk, while the stars sort out their sleep patterns,

I don’t pretend to know anything, including the French word for hell. I don’t even know if the English word for hell is quite correct.

After feasting, mint restores coherence.

Although anyone who looks can see it, and even explain it, the daytime moon always seems something secret and subversive.

It is good to put an hour aside for thinking. Slow down. Behold your horses.

Weltschmerz. I wash mine down with coffee.

All week ignominy

Reading: Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte

Listened to: God Must Be a Boogie Man 

Watched: ‘Team America’ videos, incl. ‘Aids’

Saw: The new Planet of the Apes

Discarded: Odd socks

Acquired: Hiking shoes

Failed: draft #15 

Triumphed: After 20 years of complaining, I finally hung a screen in my window to keep the goddamned bugs out.

Forgot: Which continents horses are native to. 

Learned: Horses became extinct in N. America thousands of years ago. They were reintroduced to the continent in the 1500s by Spanish Conquistadors. 

Visited: Frankfurt’s cemetery

Decided, sort of: It is not such an ignominy not to have read The Iliad.

Ate: Meatballs & tomato sauce

Drank: Tonic water with lime

Realized: So many areas hit by war - Ukraine, Iraq, Israel - I will stop cursing the too-frequent sound of construction in the city. 

Dreamed: I was watching a housetop swell and glow green and explode itself of its whirling shingles, only to grow them back and start again, and again.

Word of the week: “Dinnertime,” a word like a small bell tingling. 

Pithiness of the week: 'A lot of people are afraid to say what they want. That's why they don' t get what they want.' - Madonna

Junghans

After surveying my younger (than me) colleagues, I acknowledge that - as suspected - half of them do not wear wristwatches. No, they rely on their cell phones to tell the time. Nor do they use alarm clocks, instead keeping their phones on the nightstand, set for 7 with their favorite ringtone, which changes capriciously. They don’t know what their favorite ringtone is. They don’t worry about batteries running out, or contracts expiring. Their minds are free.

I, on the other hand, am attached to my wristwatch. Sometimes I sleep with it on because it is so handsome. It’s not even self-winding - I must remember to jig the little knob back and forth to wind it. It doesn’t contain any apps; it doesn’t measure the temperature; it doesn’t store phone numbers, or know where the nearest Chinese restaurant is. It doesn’t do anything but tell time. I lash it to my wrist every morning like a sail to a boat, and no wind, no tidal wave, no change of fashion will remove it.

The Week

Watched: American Hustle, & pleasantly surprised

Saw: An old man with head wounds being cared for by five people (ambulance soon arrived)

Received: New passport, in which I will look like I just woke up pissed off and unwashed for the next 10 years

Gave: Pen to a pen-less colleague. Really, gave. Did not lend. A big deal, pen-wise. 

Liked: The sunshine

Disliked: The sunshine

Read: All Quiet on the Western Front

Listened to: Soprano singing Donald Rumsfeld found poetry

Started: Planning a visit to friends in Switzerland

Stopped: Following a negative train of thought, at least temporarily 

Ate: Warm goat cheese with thyme and honey

Drank: Rioja

Learned: Emil Nolde was a nazi

Bought: New towels

Remembered: Abscam

Resolved: to tidy my desk (done!) 

March

In like a bookmark, out like a lamb. 

In like a warhorse, out like a thaw. 

In like a hoof print, out like a flame.

In like a slinky, out like a shout.

In like a lion, out like a light.

Threshing song

The past was a hectic time. It was full of kings and beheadings, word coinage, and tunneling out of prison. Dynasties fell. It is believed the ball came before the wheel, the egg before the deviling. There were wars that went on for years and more years; there was a lot of sex, food left uneaten, bookburnings, and tribal and disco dancing. Rules were made up, then changed (read: broken). People got born by the billions.

The invention of the telephone was followed by a lot of senseless and overlapping jabbering. Statistics established average intelligence. Wires crossed, and obesity rode the airwaves. Many flea markets ended with more junk unsold than sold. Dump trucks lugged some surplus to the ocean, which solved one problem while fathering another. 

The past keeps adding up. Some days when I’m struggling with what on earth to make for dinner, I’m glad when it's behind me.

Same old busyness

The war is scheduled for next week.
It will be a short war, possibly bloodless.
And on the weekend
there will be dancing.

summertime

The school summer vacation ends next week. In Germany, summer break time is kinder than in the US, clocking in at just six weeks, a manageable amount of leisure. The 12 weeks I had as kid in NJ wasn’t only enough for my parents, but also for me, pining away for my friends and frenemies at the end of August.

Just before school resumed I always went back-to-school shopping with my mother. What I wanted most was sweaters and a pair of corduroys, even though September was still too hot for them, even though you could still go sleeveless. 

I mentioned this annual event to my mother the other day, who revealed she’d disliked it. She put an advance cap on spending, a good move. I never do that with my kids - I just expect reason to kick in. But then again we don’t really go back-to-school shopping, summer being rather short, not long enough to grow out of your clothes.

A stranger to oneself

A woman came up to me on the street today, an apparently sane woman, and asked, “What color is your hair? Is it brunette?” She then asked, “What is brunette? Is your hair ash blonde?” It occurred to me that I could not answer these questions. First off, what color is my hair, and then, what brunette precisely means.

It occurred to me that I should ask her what color she thinks my hair is. She was looking at it. I don’t give it much thought, except for the grey wiry bits that jump out in fluorescent light, which I enjoy for their bold acrobatics and clear identity. 

It’s like the other day when the doctor asked me how much I weigh and how tall I am. I was unable to say. “Tell me in English,” she said, but language was not the problem. Surely these numbers were in my file? 

Along with my wrist-slash burn mark, I grow concerned that there’s an undertaker somewhere taking my measurements. It really is time to shred those old journals that give me so much concern.

Unavailable in stores

I have this great burn on my wrist. I got it on the weekend, and, as often happens, when my wrist touched the hot grill, I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t realize at first the damage I’d done. Too late I went to the sink to run cold water over it.

The burn festered overnight Sunday into a glorious slash-like mark, and because I didn’t bandage it, the wound has since then been functioning as a kind of second wristwatch. On the right arm, the red gash, on the left, the watch. Throughout the day, I look at both of them. They tell two different kinds of time.

As you can see, the burn saved my outfit today. I went to work all in black, which I regretted on the way to the train, also because it’s warm. But when I turned up my cuffs, I had this colorful, hard-won accessory.

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.

Altitudes

Some elevators assign the underground floors an identifying letter. Some designate those floors with negative numbers, as if going underground were a kind of subtraction.

Yet elevators do more than elevate. 

In my dreams the elevator also travels horizontally, taking me not only to the floor I want but also to the right area of the building. 

In the car, the most confusing buttons are those meant to show ‘door open’ and ‘door close.’ These glyphs require focus, and it’s a trick figuring them out in time. 

And yet don’t you hate those people who saunter to the elevator, texting or scanning their phones, while you’re holding the door for them, as if their priorities took precedence over all others? 

Even if time is not money, it is like money. After investing more than a minute waiting for the elevator, it’s like throwing it away to opt for the stairs.

People stopped complaining about elevator music when it morphed into elevator advertising. 

This person: he rushes to the elevator as the doors are closing, then holds them open so his straggler friends can wander in. 

The walls of my office’s elevator car are mirrored, and the lighting reveals every wiry grey hair, every facial hair, every wrinkle, dry patch and blemish. It makes for an interesting trip. 

Some decades ago as the world began to go gaga for sensor technology, elevators were summoned with buttons activated by the warmth of the finger. This proved a disaster when a fire broke out, and the heat of the flames delivered the elevator passengers right to the danger. 

In case of fire, fire rides the elevator. 

This person: the physically fit young man who takes the elevator from the lobby up one floor. 

In Germany, it is proper etiquette to say goodbye to the other passengers when you exit the elevator, and to reply in kind to their goodbyes if they exit first. 

When the elevator arrives with no one inside, it’s like a gift.

Satellite Plunges To Earth

A satellite has plunged to earth, but in Germany we are not concerned because the Pope is here. That’s right, Benedikt is touring the Vaterland. He spoke before Parliament the other day and got only positive press. Even the godless Greens are reportedly smitten with him. But not my daughter, who is in permanent protest mode. Good for her, though she could tone it down sometimes.

My chapbook has also plunged to earth, to the German earth, having finally arrived in the post yesterday. I am happy. I thought I might have made the wrong choices, but I am relieved. If anyone is interested in reviewing it, send me an email and I’ll send you a copy. While “supplies” last, of course.

After the teaser, Kathleen Kirk’s review is up at Prick of the Spindle. I also have four poems in the issue: The Russians Go With Everything, which is about big Russian books; Clue, which is about figuring out whodunit and why: Iron, a home totem poem; and Turning the Clocks Forward, about having to change the goddamned time to accommodate the seasons.

Bitte schön!

late bloom

So it’s the end of July and I finally put a 2011 calendar up in my room. It’s been a big help already. You can see the month hanging there like a mouth gone slack. Gack!, it says, what day is it? It took you this long? Or maybe that wide-openness is an enormous yawn. In Wednesday’s box I wrote “overslept,” so you decide.

My room is so small and stuffed with books and furniture I had to put the calendar behind the door, so most of the time you can’t see it anyway. Still, I know it’s there, ticking like a square clock, spinning around when I’m not looking like Linda Blair’s head.

But really, what a great invention. The calendar is so tidy, each day allotted its own little box, all separated by thin black lines. I never stay up past midnight anymore, so I don’t know if these lines actually exist. Lord knows I want to believe.

bewitching hour

Friday is here, but you were expecting that since Friday is inseparable from Thursday. They are like Siamese twins, Thursday being the workaholic and Friday the devil-may-care. In Europe we change the clocks this weekend, so I’m looking forward to recouping that hour. And on top of that it's Halloween, a kind-of-yes/kind-of-no holiday here. Some people are into it, and there are all kinds of Halloween-themed storefronts and events, but honestly about 68% of the population doesn't know what Halloween is. Not that they should, I just hate having to reckon how much candy to buy, if any, and having to correct the kids who come on the damned wrong day. Without a costume. Twice. Maybe I should turn off the lights and hide in the house, as my great-grandparents used to do.

Elsewhere in the world, I read a couple really good poetry books lately, which made up for some of the incomprehensible poetry I’ve read in the past months. I’ve had a couple buyer’s-remorse moments, something difficult to avoid since I don’t have access to an English language library. (That was one of the interesting things about visiting my mom this month: for the first time in a long time I went to a library and they had loads of interesting stuff you could borrow without having to buy it. Wow. Plus: DVDs!)

Anyway, the last two poetry books I read and loved are Salvinia Molesta by Victoria Chang and Stupid Hope by Jason Schinder.

I’d never heard of Schinder until earlier this year when I ran across his poem "How I Am" some place by chance. I loved this book. Schinder, with the help of his dying mom, managed to break my heart on pretty much every other page. In the book he writes about his mother’s death as well his own impending demise. He has a very endearing voice. I wouldn’t trade this book for anything. My favorite poems in the book were probably “The Good Son” and “How I Am.”

The second was Salvinia Molesta by Victoria Chang. Among the themes are power, love, greed, history, and corruption, and the topics include China’s Cultural Revolution, Enron, infidelity, and suicide, as well as salvinia molesta, the fastest-growing weed in the world.

My favorite section was the first, which confronts modern Chinese history, including Mao and his widow, Taiwan, and the Nanking massacre. These poems were fascinating. The section starts with the poem “Hanging Mao Posters,”and ends with “After Hanging Mao Posters,” which you can read here. In this section I espcially liked “Jiang Qing” (Mao’s widow), and “Proof -”

"...One day he knelt in the street,
sign around his neck

that said: Traitor. Little Red Book spread like wax
on his back..."

The second section was good, too, although I preferred the first (and third). It consists of love poems and love/power poems, dominated by one about a professor having an affair with a student. My favorite poem in this section was “Mulberry Tree,” which takes Van Gogh as its subject. At the poet’s website, click on Poems and you can read “Ars Poetica with Birdfeeder and Hummingbird,” which appears in this section.

The third section is about money and power, and includes a few very interesting poems about Clifford Baxter, an Enron executive who committed suicide. Sounds odd, huh? But it works.

jet lard

Hello, my name is S. and I’m a jet lagger. It’s been a couple weeks since I last fell off the wagon, but it wasn’t serious; I was right back on until a day ago. Due to the predictable issues, this is the first meeting I’ve been able to make. I was up in time to catch the one at 3.32 a.m. but after I’d showered and shaved, I noticed the moon going in slow motion, so I put my pants on backwards and hit my head on the bathtub. If you’ve tried to contact me and I didn’t respond, it’s because jet lag is a kind of brain damage, reversible only in small doses. I’m not yet all there. Some of me is still aloft, bobbing for my wristwatch deep in the temporal lobe. But I’m trying to get clockwise, and working on my commitment to Central European. I go back and forth. Excuse my slur - it’s been an ungodly hour since the moment I woke up.

song of the day: reptile