buttondown

The voice of reason dropped by.
I wasn’t glad to see him.

the night of the shirts

So, as you probably know, W.S. Merwin is the new poet laureate. I’m not surprised. He’s won everything else but the Nobel Prize (which he should also win, as soon as possible). Making him poet laureate seems kind of superfluous. The first thing that came to my mind was that scene in "The Shining," where Jack Nicholson is told he’s always been the caretaker. In my mind, W.S. Merwin, too, has always been the caretaker. I'm a big Merwin admirer. He is a very serious man and a beautiful poet. (Jack Nicholson, on the other hand....)

Inside the Little Picture

In the kitchen, I’m fishing pieces of cork rot from the bottle’s throat
as if a little care and precision could cure the world of its decreptitude.

When the temperature hits 80, I switch to white because
while I have two rivers running in me, in summer I need three.

The third flows, as da Vinci says, like hair. Mine plaits, glacial,
blonde as Sauvignon, braid traipsing into whisker, turning drip to lurk.

White alleviates the heat, strikes a fire the size of a pearl,
summons slumber sweet as an infant’s arm, and that long.

Summer demands drastic measures.Heat on, I switch to diminish,
maneuvering a sieve to excavate the last cork bits, my rivers dwindling.

The bigger bits of world crumble outside without me, ice caps I can’t trap
in glass, in retreat beneath a ceiling fan invoking scope scope scope.

Vialence

I put on Shalimar this morning.
It takes a lot of nerve to put on Shalimar before going to work.
In the morning!
But I did. A drop here, a drop there. Ping, ping.
As far as I'm concerned there's nothing more I have to do.

bundle up

Last week of school!
Is this good? I think it’s good. It means no more schoolwork, i.e. a six-week respite from striving, nagging, reminding and helping kids study for tests with generally little payoff. No more going upstairs to wake everybody up, then waking them up again, making them coffee and/or cereal and looking for their books, jeans, notebooks, plastic jesus, shoes, keys, etc. No more needling them to brush their teeth and having to police that action. No more 2 euros for this, 4 euros for that, 12 euros for the class trip to whatever, and writing “please excuse” notes for whoever was poorly or late or forgetful. No more strict bedtimes complete with nagging about brushing their teeth, preparing their backpacks, getting off the horn, brushing their teeth, putting rubber bands on their braces, getting in bed n-o-w. Did I mention toothbrushing? IT IS THE LIFELONG MOST IMPORTANT THING!

Plato's

Try to understand me.
It’s because I just gave up smoking.
I suffer from blackouts.
It was the booze talking.
I was prescribed the wrong meds.
I was abused by my mother/priest/other children.
I was raised by celebrities.

the gradual nap

On the couch I embarked on a gradual nap.
It began with the typical resistance of struggling to reopen the eyes.
The book I was reading was interesting, but not unsleepably interesting.
So I decided to go ahead and comply.
The eyes get tired you know, doing that reality check all day.
But first I put the bookmark in and put down the book.
I felt good, but soon got more serious.
I pulled the throw blanket over me and tucked it in, thinking,
as I always do at such moments, of that scene in The Naked and The Dead
where a soldier with bad kidneys has to sleep on the cold ground.
(This makes me thankful for the blanket.)
Then I moved the pillows from behind to the side of me,
being careful not to wake myself up as I keeled over.

The river was getting ahead of itself

The new Prick of the Spindle is up and includes four of my poems: Clothespin, Dance Machine, For a Woman Who Hates the Word 'Moist' and Chowder.

Kathleen Kirk also reviews my chapbook in this issue! Click here and scroll down. I was very relieved that she liked it. She asks me some questions about the poems, too, over at her blog. Thanks, Kathleen.

Prick of the Spindle has a bunch of books available for review, mostly poetry. They’ll mail a copy to you – check out their list.

Elsewhere, Bateau has accepted my poem Dictionary Illustrations, a topic I’ve blogged about. And I have received rejections recently from 32 Poems, Front Porch and Cerise! Back to the drawing board.

I've failed at triumph

I thought The Diary of a Country Priest was one of those books that comes with a “guarantee.” But of course no book comes with a blanket guarantee. Still, I’d read only glowing reviews and boy was I ready for a “triumphant experience.” But on p. 26 I couldn’t make heads or tails of what I was really reading about. On p. 54 the voice of the innocent and well-meaning young priest began to irk the shit out of me. On p. 55 I skipped ahead to see if anything would ever actually happen to dilute all the fluffy introspection and it didn’t look promising. On p. 64 I took the kitty to the well and drowned it.

Ach! If only I lived near a (English) library I’d run so much less risk of wasting money on books. The back cover says $15.95! I checked my order though, and thanks to Amazon, I paid “just” $11.48 for The Diary of a Country Priest, so I feel a few dollars better already. Plus I ordered it along with The Shadow of Sirius and Blood Meridian, both of which paid off. Sirius cost $10.88 but was really worth about $17.89, and Blood Meridian cost $10.20 but was easily worth $13.86. So actually I only lost 81 cents in this deal, which I guess I could toss in without regret for shipping and handling, making this personal failure easier to swallow.

I’m returning to this century now. Nice to see you.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water

I am stumped by Rep. Barton's statement yesterday in which he apologized to BP:

“I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown — in this case a $20 billion shakedown.”

I know I've been away a long time. I'm practically Rip Van Winkle, but what is "the first proportion?" Is there also a last proportion?

I had another "whaaa?" moment today reading a CNN opinion piece:

"Just when you thought Arizona lawmakers couldn't stoop any lower, these cowardly and shameful politicians grab a shovel and put in a basement."

Okay. They get a shovel and put it in the basement.

Are they stooping while they do this?

ye rosebuds

My poem In Frankfurt Cemetery is up at Opium. I love cemeteries, and Frankfurt's is a beauty. Best park in town, really, and no annoying frisbee chuckers. The bad thing about this cemetery, however, is you basically "rent" your plot. That means that 10 years or so after you've been buried, you need to renew your lease. But of course you are dead! They smack these awful "expiry" stickers on the gravestone saying you should visit the admistration. But of course you have already expired! I do suppose there is an eternal deal available, but probably only for the very rich.

Although I didn't submit it that way, somehow my middle name slipped in whole alongside the poem. I kind of like it like that.

My Cup Runneth Over

I am not a sports buff but I do enjoy the World Cup because it takes my husband and kids off my hands. In fact it takes the whole world off my hands. Despite being a news agency, for example, my office has made arrangements so folks can watch during work hours if it’s an important game (read: Germany is playing).

There was another payoff this morning with a linguistic controversy. Following a goal by Miroslav Klose for the German team, a tv commentator said that for Klose the goal must be an “innere Reichsparteitag.” I thought, “Reichsparteitag? As in huge Nazi gathering in Nuremberg with hyperexcitement and populist adrenaline?”

Yup, the very one. It turns out that an inner Reichsparteitag is when this event seems to take place inside you. It’s a euphoric feeling, a good thing – as long as you don’t say so in public. Because any reference to anything Nazi is a no-no, especially in a way that could be construed as positive. Ok, I get it, but I do enjoy the image of having a crowd whoop it up inside you.

The unfortunate choice of expression was all over the papers and web this morning. I talked to a few colleagues about it, two of whom were shocked to hear it used on tv, another who herself wasn’t sure what it meant. I thought it was both funny ha-ha and funny peculiar, because of that image, and the phrase’s origin and construction.

But it doesn’t matter what I think. What did the Central Council of German Jews have to say? Although they said such expressions rightfully beg examination, they also advised those who were offended “against over-exaggeration and hysteria,” and suggested instead enjoying the German team’s win.

lunar rover

My prose poem "Can't we put them all there" is up today at Leveler. This site publishes a new poem every Sunday along with a short explication/appreciation of the poem called "levelheaded."

"Can't we put them all there" actually came about one day when I realized how many ladders I'd recently seen serving no obvious purpose. No wall being painted. No painting being hung. The climber, I supposed, might just be visiting the ceiling.

Welcome you enjoy.

Maple

Two nights ago we had a big thunderstorm. The whole night it seemed the sky was more often lit up with lightning than dark with night time. But most impressive was the thunder, the loudest I’ve ever heard. Like giant bones breaking. Like boulders hurled at concrete. But the next morning, all along the sparkling sidewalks, there was no real damage to speak of.

Last night we had another storm of strong wind and rain. It sounded like we were swooshing around in a washing machine. Not much thunder or lightning, and yet this morning when I took the dog out, fat branches were downed all over the park, and even trees. One that the dog and I visit often was wrenched out of the ground, its roots severed, leaving a soupy black grave. It was sad, I told the dog, and so improbable. I’m going to miss that tree.

song of the day: As

Barrel Vaulted Room

Most serious readers are likely familiar with the great list of books put out by NYRB – the New York Review of Books. Not only do they have an amazing selection, but their cover design is invariably gorgeous, practically a reason in itself to buy some of their titles. I loved the cover of Stoner and The Pilgrim Hawk and Novels in Three Lines, but the stark beauty of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams tops them all.

The cover is a photograph by James Casebere called "A Barrel Vaulted Room." I’m afraid you can’t appreciate it fully here but the tone is a chalky greenish grey, cool and institutionally atmospheric. It’s bare, monochromatic and somehow sumptuous in its austerity. Even the cot may be made of stone. It looks more like a painting than a photograph, not least because of its simplicity. And weirdly enough, the photograph looks even better with the black NYRB title square plunk in the middle, pulling the shadows in the photograph to the forefront.

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams itself is a memoir of Peter Handke’s mother, which he wrote after her she killed herself at the age of 51. For me, what the cover does in relation to the story is emphasize the solitude and loneliness each of us lives with, how permanent it is. Really a wonderful pairing.

there's so much sunday

I've got three poems in the new issue of Avatar Review:

On Waking I Think Of Winter
Aunt Bobbie's Almanac
There's So Much Sunday

Avatar, which existed well before the popular film that I've never seen, is an annual, an unusual thing for an online zine. But it is very FULL, so that you could break it up and spend the whole year reading it.

Which I suggest.

I also got word yesterday that Opium online took my poem In Frankfurt Cemetery, one of my favorites. Because I love the Frankfurt Cemetery. It also did a cameo in my poem Despair, sort of, being the eternal resting place of Mr. Schopenhauer.

Miles

My dear son turns 12 today. He was born in the morning, by wonderful c-section, like a real king. Due to doctorly screw-up I was completely knocked out, and when I woke up and they finally brought me this fat baby, I said he looked 'kind of blue.' Just another reason to name him Miles.

Miles loves dogs and skateboards and meat and potatoes. He can play piano. He is reading Rick Riordan's trilogy about Percy Jackson and the Greek gods. I'm very happy about that because I spent years trying to get him to WANT to read, including brute force. He falls asleep quickly. He likes to draw. He's into hoodies and watching bugs do their thing. He has just learned to swallow aspirin! I hope he will not have to do this too often in life.

photo compliments of Uncle Thatch

Outlook Tool

Dear Sir or Madam,
Thank you for contacting me. I am currently having a out-of-office experience. I am floating in a depersonalized state around the office ceiling, soaking up the upward glow of the rows of fluorescent lights. From here I have been able to observe details previously unknown to me: 1) the ficus in reception needs water, 2) there’s a bald spot without pity growing atop M.’s big head, 3) behind the filing cabinet in Dept. 3K lies the innocence I'd assumed I’d lost forever. If I thought of it at all, I thought the office was an empty shell when I was not there, but here it is humming right along. There's a strong gravitational pull near my work station, but today it turns out I’m weightless. Thank you for contacting me. Rest assured that on Monday, fully clothed and back in my physical body, I will arrive punctually at my desk.
*

song of the day: baby, you're a rich man

seaicide

So it's June and I learned a new word: submersible.

At first I read it as "submersile," which sounds like a weapon.
Then it looked like "summersible," something that weathers summer well.

Breaking it down, I thought I would never use submerse; I would use submerge. That's why I don't like submersible.

The word submersible came up in an article about BP's latest attempt to stop the oil spill with robots. If a robot functions underwater, it is submersible.

I really hate to think too long about what a catastrophe this is, and distract myself with words.

Can something be submergible, alternatively? I'd like that.
And immersible? Must be.

If you take a full-immersion language course, you are that which is immersible.

on the occasion of miss lulu's 14th birthday

For Luisa, Waiting to be Fetched

Darkness, too, has no mother
unless it’s silence.
In the lot where you kick
a stone across the asphalt,
the dark loses form like a leper.

POOF

heavy metal

One of the charms of my neighborhood is the church bells. They’re real. Every evening at quarter to six off they go. It’s interesting how I use the ringing to orient myself in time, sometimes subliminally, thinking I should start dinner, or find out whose house the kids are at, or realize more than half my life is over.

I'm sure I'm not alone in this focusing moment, although no one talks about it.

I lived in Kansas for awhile and there was a church on every second corner. Many rang “bells,” but they weren’t real. I don’t know what they were. Electronic? Recordings? Styrofoam? There’d be more beauty in someone coming out and ringing a dinner bell on the church steps.

I hope all the church-goers out there are asking god to stop that oil this morning.

Here's a short, sweet clip of bells in nearby Wiesbaden.

there will be fun

I’m still reading Blood Meridian, which might as well have been titled Blood Bath. The writing is marvellous, but the book is blood drenched, blood soaked, bloodstained, bloody with a capital B and all the other letters alongside. I hate pretty much everybody in it.

But on page 204, something fun happens. At least it’s fun for me.

“Carroll and Sanford had defected from the company and with them now rode a boy named Sloat who had been left sick to die in this place by one of the gold trains bound for the coast weeks earlier. When Glanton asked him if he were kin to the commodore of that name the boy spat quietly and said No, nor him to me.”

A colleague says this boy eventually goes apeshit. I told him to spare me – I’d find out in due time. I’m sure some wet, red death awaits crazy young Sloat.

Anyway, I now feel less left out of this story of bloodthirsty men. Let the carcassing resume.

*
&tonight: Notorious

my sweet lord

I read a poem today that’s been entered in a contest that plagiarizes another poem. The latter is a terrific short poem about a dog I read ages ago in a review of an anthology and never forgot.

The poet who does the plagiarizing lifts the short poem, which is only three lines long, and plants it smack in the middle of his poem, which is also about a dog. Oh dear, at least change the subject.

And why did I feel horrible when I discovered this, as if I were suddenly “in on” something wrong? I almost wish I hadn’t read it. I guess it’s how people feel who witness a crime, like why was I standing on the corner of 43rd and 7th when the mugger shot the little old lady. It was probably an accident! Anyway, I pointed it out to one of the judges and leave it to her. I say that but it’s clear to me the poem should be pulled from the contest. I hope it is and the guy learns his lesson.

Believe me, I think it’s easy to unknowingly plagiarize something. A line sticks in your mind and one day you can’t remember if it’s your line or if you read it somewhere. I wrote a draft once that had a great line in it and later I realized, hey, that sounds like Anne Sexton. It was Anne Sexton. Luckily the poem never ventured from my notebook.

If you want to riff off another poet, go ahead, but there are limits. Anne Sexton, for example, was a great fan of Federico Garcia Lorca, who wrote in his gorgeous “Gacela of the Dark Death” –

I want the ocean to go on without its bed.

To which Sexton replied in her “Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound” –

I’m surprised to see that the ocean is still going on.

*

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my mom arrived today bearing books and a supply of Crest toothpaste, an American wonder.

in eerier days, the rights of the accursed were protected by feral laws

It’s a warm sunny day here, the kind of weather that makes you thirsty. I went into the office kitchen to get a glass of water. Our refrigerator has an ice cube maker, so I was really looking forward to a cold drink. On the shelf of glasses there was this really big glass. Wow, I thought, that’s just the thing. I picked it up and was filling it with water when it occurred to me that actually it was a vase.

Elsewhere among mistaken identities, this past week I have misread the word “earlier” as “eerier,” “accused” as “accursed,” “federal” as “feral” and “oarsman” as “orgasm.”

This made for more interesting reading.

rechts stehen, links gehen

Some people think German gardens are populated by garden gnomes. This is wrong. I’ve not once seen a garden gnome in a German garden. I have seen them for sale, but who’s buying them and planting them among the roses I don’t know. But Germany does have a number of sacred cows.

1. The Autobahn. One of the only roads in the civilized world without a blanket speed limit, although a 130 km/h limit is advised. Drivers definitely do speed along like there’s no tomorrow. The Autobahn is an untouchable – any arguments for a speed limit are laughed off.

2. Which brings me to the Mercedes. The Mercedes is a sacred icon.

3. Dark Bread. Germans are big into bread, dark bread. “Toastbrot,” the sliced white stuff, is not that popular and is usually limited to breakfast. They’ve got wheat, sourdough, rye, wheat-rye, whole grain, multigrain, bread with sunflower seeds, poppy seeds, linseed, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, walnuts, Zopfbrot (Challah), pretzels, and hundreds of others. Many families don’t make a warm dinner, but serve “Abendbrot,” consisting of bread and cheese or cold cuts.

4. Sunday. Sunday is holy, even without church. All stores are closed. If it’s not the Church, it’s the unions hollering about how retail stores must remain shut for the sake of family and spirituality. Besides that, you are kindly required to make no noise on Sunday. No lawn mowing, for example. And if you live in an apartment or row house, no drilling or vacuuming or vibrating. Makes life tough, if you have to work, that is.

5. The Advent calendar. It is not Christmas unless you’ve done the chocolate countdown. In America I think these are considered hoity-toit, at least I thought so when I first saw one. But here it’s de rigueur from top to bottom.

6. Wurst, as in bratwurst. In the German version of the Bible, Eve tempts Adam with a bratwurst. Some suspect it was a bockwurst, but the pictures aren’t so good.

7. Order. Germany is one of the few places where you may be reprimanded by strangers for not minding the rules. Recently I was waiting to cross the tram tracks with my daughter, who’s 13. The tram pulled away and no others were coming, so we crossed even though the light was still red. The woman next to us began yelling about how she had been standing there waiting so as to be a proper model for my child. I was sorry for wasting her time.

brown bread

What could be worse than a rejection that arrives one mere day after you’ve submitted some poems?

I guess a rejection that comes 220 days after you’ve submitted to a publication that doesn’t take simultaneous submissions would be worse.

Well, thank god that didn’t happen!

like runaway suns

I’m reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. This is the third McCarthy I’ve read, following The Road and No Country for Old Men, both of which I loved.

Years ago I lived for a short time in Kansas starting up an English program for Chinese students at one of the million small colleges in the Midwest. I ran into my counterpart (rival) at a larger college once or twice and I remember him talking about McCarthy in a very haughty way, how important he was, how I’d never read anything unless I’d read McCarthy, and blah blah blah, so of course there on the spot I swore a blood oath never to read that macho McCarthy.

I’m lucky to be a disloyal kind of chump because McCarthy is sensational. Here are two gorgeous sentences from Blood Meridian...

He told how they’d taken the city of Chihuahua, an army of irregulars that fought in rags and underwear and how the cannonballs were solid copper and came loping through the grass like runaway suns and even the horses learned to sidestep or straddle them and how the dames of the city rode up into the hills in buggies and picknicked and watched the battle and how at night as they sat by the fires they could hear the moans of the dying out on the plain and see by its lantern the deadcart moving among them like a hearse from limbo.

About that fire were men whose eyes gave back the light like coals socketed hot in their skulls and men whose eyes did not, but the black man’s eyes stood as corridors for the ferrying through of naked and unrectified night from what of it lay behind to what was yet to come.

The Longest Two Minutes in the History of the World

I was waiting for the train, according to the timetable due in two minutes.

A woman yelled at her son, begging for something from the vending machine, anything, a piece of toast even! But she was whining into her cell phone I’m at the station...

Looking at my watch, it was that point in spring when half the world goes round in jackets, while the other half’s in shorts and tank tops. The earth could well come to an end abruptly, with half of us boiling, half of us in on the fire next time.

I had a book in my bag, but should I go to the trouble of pulling it out to read?
Could I concentrate for two minutes? Then abort the effort to hunt for a seat?

I was waiting for the train. Due in two minutes.

A short guy with an accordian came up the platform playing a song that brought back that restaurant I went to once in Texas, where the proprietor slept out Sunday in a hammock out back, but the policy otherwise was “all day, all you can eat.”

Confinguration

Well, 80 years of blogging here and finally I get an award. Thanks to Kathleen! Now, with the Blogdiggity Award, I can retire. Here are the rules:

"1. Thank the person who gave you the award.
2. Share 7 things about yourself.
3. Pass along the award to 15 bloggers you think are hella awesome.
4. Contact said hella awesome bloggers & let them know you think they are the blogdiggity.
5. Retire."

I've done #1 now. Here's part #2.

1. My mother finally allowed me to quit ballet lessons when I was 7 or 8 years old after I sat on the floor of the ballet studio and refused to move. I was not as lucky with flute lessons.

2. Decades ago when I was young and good-looking, I starred in a Chinese television commercial. In exchange I got to use the pool and sauna for free, which I never did because they were always being repaired.

3. On my left hand, my index finger is shorter than my ring finger. On my right hand, my index finger is longer than my ring finger. I've blogged about this before.

4. I would probably be perfectly happy not working. My husband says I’d go stircrazy, but I don’t think so. I like reading and writing and if I have time I even like housework. The footnote being I would be perfectly happy not working as long as I was still able to collect a decent income.

5. If we split the country in two, and in one half everyone had the “right to bear arms” and in the other half there was a blanket ban on guns, I would choose to live in the latter half.

6. I love the Frankfurt cemetery. It’s an easy walk from my house. You can sit there all day and cry and no one will think you’re weird or possibly insane.

7. I just spent 7 minutes and 49 seconds on the phone with my son, who’s home alone today, instructing him on how to make French fries in the oven. I will be calling him back when the estimated cooking time has elapsed to make sure everything is okay.

I'm afraid I have to stop here at #3. Not because I'm self-centered, but because I've leafed back through the string of bloggers who've won this award and I'd be naming a bunch of people all over again. And the cycle of madness would go on.

wild card

The sky looks convincing this morning
I may walk out into it
and pull the wildflower card

caviar

My mom is coming to visit, which is great. I will gladly vacate my room for her. She used to sleep in the computer room in the cellar because she didn’t want to walk up two flights to the attic guest room. Plus there’s a place to smoke in the cellar, which she did/does. She can’t smoke in my room but she’ll enjoy better surroundings, including a windowful of wisteria. I’m even considering putting up wallpaper, which will freak my husband out. Ha ha!

Whenever my mother comes I make a book order at Amazon. She sent me her itinerary yesterday and despite the limp euro I made my order. I really do have a small hill of books at home I need to get to, but what the heck. Here’s my list:

The Door by Magda Szabo - This doesn't sound like something I'd usually read but I was sold on a few good reviews.

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke - I've always wanted to read him, and put this memoir of his mother's suicide on my list a long time ago. Looking forward to it. The book, I mean.

Awe by Dorothea Lasky - I've read a couple of her poems and really enjoyed them. I hope I will not be disappointed. I hate that.

Factory of Tears by Valzhyna Mort - ditto above

The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas - I probably found this in that senseless book I love to hate, "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die." But really, this book sounds like the prototype for "Lark and Termite," which was a disappointment. Except of course this one sounds like it doesn't suck.

How German It Is by Walter Abish - I asked myself if I really needed this. Probably not. Then I read the first page (on Amazon?) and decided that actually I did.

With Deer by Aase Berg - I had better be blown away, that's all I can say. But really, I'm part of a poetry group at Good Reads and this was recently reviewed, and it sounds different and new and worthwhile.

The Poetry of Surrealism by Michael Benedikt - ditto above with the blown-away clause

pepper

I was at the dermatologist today. I’m supposed to go every two years to have my moles looked at, being unable to keep track of them myself. The doctor hoped I wouldn’t be chilly with my clothes off, but being a puritanical wasp, in fact I was kind of warm with embarrassment. This is absurd since my dermatologist is also my gynecologist, and her examinations have gone beyond the surface of my skin.

At least today I was allowed to keep on my underwear. I lay down on the examining rack and was prodded left and right and flopped over onto my belly. I was reminded of playing “Hänsel” with my son, how he used to lie on the couch while I “cooked” him – smeared his back with imaginary ketchup, sprinkled him with pepper, or tenderized him with karate chops, then pretended to scoop up little chunks of him, and told him how delicious he tasted.

My doctor did none of that. But she assured me that also I have been generously sprinkled. Browsing around with her cold little nitelite microscope, the doctor exclaimed, “Frau Sloat! I have counted over 100 moles!”

song of the day: watching the detectives

Spade

I read a review the other day of The Flight of the Intellectuals, a book I must admit I’m not all that piqued to read. It’s basically an attack on intellectuals who support Islamic philosopher Tariq Ramadan. I’m out of my depth on this subject but I relished the excerpt quoting the author, Paul Berman, contrasting the words “fascist” and “totalitarian.”

. . . ”Finally, Mr. Berman believes in straight talk and insists we use words like fascist to describe some Islamic ideas rather than totalitarian. Why? ‘It is because totalitarian, being abstract, is odorless. Fascist is pungent. To hear the emphatic f-sound and those double different s’s is to flare your nostrils.’”

Try it at home.

to the fly on a crying jag in my kitchen

what's wrong
what's wrong
what's wrong

dear desire

I've been busy in my room building a new continent. It's a modest one, with a peninsula and range of shady mountains. No housing has gone up, meaning the envoys who come bringing news of far away shouldn't stick around. From my desk, there's a lovely view of a lake that spreads out like a soft ballroom. Above it, I've hung my favorite photo of Ingeborg Bachmann - a young woman, rowing a rowboat towards the shore.

airspace

Since the ash cloud cleared, letting the poor ocean have back the headlines, my package from America finally arrived. I won a book at Good Reads called Why I Hate Straws, which looks funny. I also got Columbine, a Jim Kweskin CD, and a pair of earrings. My mother slipped in a Teen Vogue for my daughter and a baking book, too.

She enclosed a note on Columbine:

"Dear Sarah,
I ended up using three bookmarks when reading Columbine – one regular, one for the index because there are so many names and it can’t be read in a few sessions – the last for the section entitled NOTES as to where the author got his sources. This book is the most horrific I’ve ever read.
Love, Mom"

She left the bookmarks in for me.

disaster tourism

I’m reading Every Man Dies Alone, a story set in Nazi Germany. It’s about a couple that launches a show of anonymous defiance after their son is killed in the war. I know many people who love WWII and holocaust stories. Because they’re so dramatic. Because they’re so good guy/bad guy. Because they’re so goddamned sad.

Still, my colleague F. says this book sounds depressing. Most Germans don’t like to read WWII books because they’ve had the moral lesson pounded into their brains at school. They prefer someone else’s disaster, like Vietnam, and here she tells me about the Vietnam vets who weren’t allowed to return to America because they were addicted to heroin. I said I didn’t know that, that seemed odd to me. But apparently her husband reads eagerly on this topic. So whether or not it’s true, I guess most people would rather not have to identify too closely with dishonor. Except Americans don’t avoid VN books, digrace or not, do they? The genre is lively and literary and Tim O’Brien is its King.

Germans are just weary of being the Nazi nation. They’d rather be something else now. I get that, but it doesn’t snuff the fascination. Sometimes when reading a WWII book in the UBahn I hide the cover because I feel I’m insulting everyone. And then I think, you know, you worry too much about this stuff and you’ll never have any fun.

Not that the lovely cover of Every Man Dies Alone gives away anything. When the book came out it was heralded as a literary event. Honestly, it reads more to me like a B-Movie, but not in a negative way. It’s very dramatic, and the good and bad guys are easy to identify.

As an end note, on this day in 1945, Hitler committed suicide. After all that, nothing like dying a coward.

song of the day: picnic

Not the first straw, but the last (13-15)

The first straw was probably when I noticed how she would yawn when looking at herself in the mirror. If she were putting makeup on or just gazing at herself, suddenly she’d launch this modest, puckered yawn, always the same, and somewhat disturbing, as if she were trying to freeze a portrait of herself in a certain pose.

Then there was the time she made out with my boyfriend while I was on vacation. She confessed to me later, saying it was because I was so pretty and she was so jealous of me and I knew this was bullshit but I took my mother’s advice and put the friend over the boyfriend. She was a voluptuous girl, really.

For example, once she asked me: If a man broke into your house and you were naked but had a small towel, would you cover up up top or down below? Without hesitating I answered down below. But she looked at me meaningfully, and said very slowly, I would cover up up top. As if she were a sage, or had just thought a lot –for better or worse- about what drives men wild.

Whenever we would play at being our favorite band, she was always the female singer, and I sat behind her at the imaginary keyboard. She was pushy, but also outgoing and daring, and I liked that about her.

But the last straw was this. One day we were on the phone, and it hit me that she was speaking with some kind of weird Jersey or even Brooklyn accent, her vowels gone all raunchy. I wasn’t sure if it had been a gradual acquisition, or she had just woken up one day and decided it was fetching.

In any case, it was clear to me we’d arrived at the fork in the road.

my monkey's worth

The best thing about finishing a book is starting a new book.
The best thing about finishing a book is finding out the end.
The best thing about finishing a book is finishing a book.

I detect the El Supremo from the room at the top of the stairs

The fabulous thing is I got my own room.
Desk, shelves and computer.
I hung up my Macbeth poster.
I hung up my pipe smoker and the pictures of my dad
and my favorite 9/11 photograph.
I carried the fattest dictionary and best books
into the room like brides polygamous.
I beat the blue rug.
With wisteria twisting outside my window now
in peace I can nurse a pleasant greensickness.
I’ve spent too much time enslaved to the staircase.
Ahoy, my sewing basket says goodbye gypsy days!
That pen that’s been traveling the world
behind my ear now has a place to lie down.

Underlife

Dear visitor,
Today my blog is the bus stop for the book tour of January Gill O’Neil’s Underlife. I liked many of the poems in this book, but I’m going to talk about just one, “Old Dog,” which January has permitted me to re-post.

Old Dog

Sounder! Here girl. Come . . .
He shouts to me like I’m a coon dog
chasing possums out in the fields.

The school’s back lot became a small country where
names were given but not deserved
and I took it and took it,
even laughed with everyone else
at my own black self, suffering like most of us suffered –

quietly. The laughter so loud you forgot homework,
the blue-and-white uniforms, red veils worn in church,
Jesus on a beaded noose in our pockets.

Today, on this purgatory of a cloudy day,
I stare blankly into an open meadow from my desk
as wind kicks up dust and memory;
more so, the chance to recall
a small morsel of a boy and his big mouth

and my harsh resolve to talk back,
even if it’s nothing more than this,
a romp through a few stanzas.
I am grateful for that old dog of memory –
for what it lets you keep
and what it lets you throw away.

Of all the things I like about this poem, what impresses me most is the grace with which the poet handles the topic. Thirty or 40 years ago, the situation addressed here was called “getting picked on” – it wasn’t called “abuse” or “bullying,” now punishable by a jail sentence. I could launch into a tirade about how folks today should get their shit together and stop calling themselves “victims” every time the cashier shorts them 4 cents at 7-Eleven. But I’ll restrain myself, because here is a person who “took it and took it” and could have ended up lynched like Jesus in stanza 3 but instead shrugged it off, an act that these days seems to demand superhuman effort.

Those last two lines killed me. The speaker gives the occasion what she considers its due, tossing it in the garbage where it belongs, and all that without showing her claws, without loosening a sluice of expletives, without malice or really much trace of resentment at all. So while this poem is a personal triumph, it’s also an ode to reason, balance and sanity, and it’s also a great long raft of fresh air.

In her review a few days back, Donna Vorreyer said the reader would find herself in these pages. The poem went for me beyond the points I’ve mentioned because some decades ago in a parallel universe, I was the one white girl in my grade school class. I kept a very low profile and put up with my share of taunting. I remember being followed home one day by a clutch of kids who had a chant that started “Black is beautiful / white is shit / if you don’t believe….,” and I have to say I’d forgotten all about that, and maybe there’s a poem in it somewhere and please god may I emerge as gracefully as January has.

Information on previous and upcoming stops can be found here.

What the Thunder Said

The shopper up ahead has a boatload of groceries. The shopper up ahead has forgotten the Kleenex and runs sheepishly to Aisle 5 to grab them before all his items have been tallied. He has also not weighed his bananas and has to leave the line for that. The shopper has a ketchup bottle without a price and the cashier must leave the retrieve a different one. The cashier scans the ketchup twice. By accident.

Ineptitude is one thing. More annoying is the supermarket king. He’s in line behind you. The king could be a queen, no matter – what matters is knowing that the supermarket king is the most important person in the whole world. His getting out of the store is a matter of life and death. He cannot believe the hold-up, and needs to register his astonishment, which he does mostly through incomprehensible grumbling, punctuated by heavy sighs and snorts of chagrin. Unless someone hears his lament, he will morph into a frog and not be king anymore.

Do not respond to the groaning. Do everything possible to avoid eye contact. One sign of acknowledgement and the king will inflate like the Michelin Man and you will be sucked into the negativity which passeth all understanding. . .

my funny valentine

There are a lot of body words that turn people off. I’m thinking nostril, for example, or gland or scrotum. But there are also body words that people love for their beauty, maybe, or their comic charm.

Ankle
Wrist
Nape

Waist
Thumb
Pinky

Fingertip
Instep
Elbow

Pulse point
Lip
Brow

Eyelash
Eyelid
Knuckle

Calf
Palm
Tush

Derriere
Hip
Cuticle

Muscle
Navel
Cuspidor

Ivy

Somewhere in or around chapter six in the history of vegetation, some of the darker green gets tired of how the moss sits pouting among the lowest stones. It gets tired of grass and of dirt and the too careful architecture of trees. It gets bored with the dull stumpfoot bushes. When it has had enough of whining, it decides to try something wild, something sly and inextricable.
It decides to do something skyward.

my current address

S. Sloat
P. 293 Jude the Obscure
1895 Christminster
England

“Save his own soul he hath no star.” - Swinburne

Notes on Succulence

It struck me this morning in the buttery cut
roses, exo-petals tinged with the brink
of wilting, scent a carnage tucked

in weakening, mittened fists:
nothing ever gleamed like this.

At noon I felt it in the apple’s soft spot,
smelled it in a slosh of vinegar.

After work I saw it in the soap froth
caressing a row of raw necks at the barber shop.

It brims in the props of Flemish still lives.

Not to be confused with opulence
or corpulence. Not to be hoarded
in a purse lacking vinyl lining.

It stews the first drop of decay
whose fissures splay like frost,
unseen beneath the headiness,

under the vulgar, the creeping rot
for which the war was fought.

**

I ran across the photos of Justine Reyes the other day. The photograph above is from her Vanitas series, which seemed to fit well with my poem "Notes on Succulence." Thanks to Justine for letting me use this shot, called "Still Life with Fish and Orange Slices." There are some stunning photos in this series, and she has other work up, too, at her site.