Petals fell like snow into the year of the monkey

Good Wife of Hunan

You knew I’d been up all night startling the wok 

and I’d been up for ages grooming the dog star
of ticks, throwing a tarp over all that barking
for the sake of the neighbors and cosmic harmony.
Clearly I’d been up with my measuring stick
by the river, which chilled my toe bones and triggered
that crying-jag phone call to my mother two monasteries
west of here, my mother who was glad to have girls.
Spring petals fell like snow into the year of the monkey.
Snow fell like snow into the year of the cat.
And it seemed I’d be up startling the wok
for generations and it seemed I was going to live
to see 10,000 or at least the day you dropped dead
drunk from the jug of plum wine and I’d shown 

the barking star who’s master.

Song of the day: Year of the Cat

Dew settles on the hood of my car

Hey! I have a poem in the new issue of Tinderbox. It’s called “Poem Written After Reading a Poem With a Boat in It.” This is a poem that started with the title, and is kind of a poke at myself for liking poems with long titles. It’s also a homage to the Chinese. And an ode to motherhood, and an observation about a statue, and a nod to Weltschmerz. It’s anything you want.

Lots of poets I admire are in this issue, including Sally Rosen Kindred, Martha Silano, Donna Voreyer and Carol Berg. Carol has a poem with a title even longer than mine: “Belly-Ache Bush With Giant Sphinx Moth: Plate #15 by Maria Sibylla Merian.” As they say in Germany, ‘Respekt.’ 

Please you go read.
*

This song on my iPod helped me navigate home today. 

From the tip of an island since pulled away

I have a few poems out this week. 

“Stamp Album of the Suicides” is at Dialogist. The inspirations were 1) stamps & stamp albums, which I learned to love in China; 2) respect for suicides, often disparaged for being weak and selfish; and 3) a plain old love of order. Check out the art in this issue - very good. 

A newer ezine, Bitterzoet, has three other poems: “A Hawaii Postcard Arrives in Winter 12 Years Late,” “Breaking News” and “Standing in Line Alone.” They also have a print issue, for which they took two other poems. 

Lodgings to remember

A tidy room in the soot and collapsing labyrinth of Naples where I sang “On the Street Where You Live” in the marble bathroom because I was infatuated.

A powdery flowery hotel room in Paris with two double beds and a TV on the bureau where my friend Carle and I watched Saddam Hussein crawl out of his hole.

The Silver Saddle motel in Santa Fe where I stayed twice - first on my maiden voyage to NM where I met a rancher from Telluride who asked to come in, and second with my friend Amy on a road trip from eastern Kansas to Taos.

The Hotel Manin in Milan where I lived with my husband and two toddlers for six weeks in utter misery while we looked for permanent quarters.

Stranded in Japan in the smallest room imaginable where you could touch the opposite walls with your arms outstretched and the only place to keep your suitcase was with you on the bed.

In Vienna in an attic room of the Hotel Regina, a dim room like a maid’s quarters with a slanted roof but very pleasant in the grey rain all quilted and muffled and far away.

The beautiful Hotel Bad Schachen on Lake Constance where I was for work, unfortunately. I attempted writing a poem, which failed, and didn’t try again for more than 10 years. 

The Beijing dormitory I had to walk 3-4 miles to get to in the bitter cold in shoes too small in a relationship of unreciprocated love which my superhuman efforts failed to change. 

The Presidential Suite of the Watergate Hotel where due to a hotel flub we were upgraded to expansive living quarters and a panoramic view and what struck me most at the time (I was 11 or 12) was the phone installed next to the toilet. 

A motel on the Canadian border on the way to Montreal where I stayed with a boyfriend I didn’t love anymore and indeed he too appeared very weary.

Long stretches, and short

Study links cat litter box to increased suicide risk
Study links dust to glacial melting

Study links low IQ to racism, right-wing beliefs
Study links juvenile arthritis to pet store dogs

Study links motivation to finger length
Study links Hitler's genocidal tendencies to playing violent board games

Study links owning a dog to feminine appeal
Study links narcissism and Facebook activity

Study links bestiality to penile cancer
Study links flowers to increased productivity

Study links night shift to breast cancer risk
Study links flaming water to fracking

Study links masturbation to prostrate cancer
Study links rural suicides in China to stress

Study links hair relaxer to early puberty in girls
Study links smoking to hot flashes

Set your monkey free

1. I always sleep alphabetically but last night God forgot and removed the W. I was sent back to sleep twice through the V.

2. In some parts of the world, the clocks are set back an hour at three in the afternoon rather than three in the morning. People sit back down to tea, and all the children who finished school at 2.30 are required to come back.

3. It’s an old story. I was in love but found the object of my desire terribly fickle – one hour cool, one hour on fire. Only at the bullring did it become clear that the matador with the floppy bangs had a twin brother.

4. As Chuang Tzu says: ‘To wear out your brain trying to make things into one without realizing they are all the same – this is called “three in the morning.” What do I mean by “three in the morning?” When the monkey trainer was handing out acorns, he said, “You get three in the morning and four and night.” This made all the monkeys furious. “Well, then,” he said, “you get four in the morning and three at night.” The monkeys were all delighted. There was no change in the reality behind the words, and yet the monkeys responded with joy and anger. Let them, if they want to.’

5. The year I spent in China was more like three years. At first the days were all equal, but soon moved unevenly as wheelbarrows pushed by a child. Pollution and endless exertion aged me threefold. The only way to offset this effect was to sleep all day, one brushstroke at a time. But once the Tiananmen Square massacre happened, time had spun out of control. When I set off for home it was as if one year were three. But three that flew by.

weather zelig

I was in an earthquake once. I had recently moved to Germany and rented an apartment near the train station in Mainz. My bedroom window looked out on a labyrinthical courtyard of buildings, including a brothel, a laundry shack, and lots of garbage cans. In the middle of the night I woke up shaking. I half woke up, anyway, and my sleepmind tried to grasp what was happening. I realized it wasn't me but the bed shaking, or actually the room. I said to myself, 'finally it has happened: the devil has come to claim me.' And I went back to bed. I was always scared shitless of the devil, even when I stopped believing. In the morning, I'd forgotten all about it. When I got to work, our secretary asked if I had felt the earthquake, and I was at once surprised and completely relieved.

I also experienced a tornado when I lived in Kansas. I lived in a house across from the fire department. One day I was deeply engrossed in an exercise video when the sirens went off. I noticed them, but they were quickly absorbed by my subconscious. Minutes later the German professor from the college where I worked was banging at my door. He had a crush on me and often showed up at my door asking to massage my feet, but this time he hustled me into his car and down into his tornado cellar. Weather-wise it was an interesting experience - everything went dark and very quiet. Our town was spared but some terrible trailer bashing went on not too far away.

From the human disaster almanac, I was also in China when the Tiananmen massacre went down. I lived in a city on the coast east of Beijing. We'd seen some protests, and some of our students had traveled to Beijing to be part of larger demonstrations. In China at that time, the one way to get real news was from other people. There was no internet, censored or not censored. The tv was state run and so were the newspapers. The only true news -and even that was questionable- came from people who were there. My mother in NJ knew more than I did about what was happening in Beijing, and she wasn't taking it calmly. All we had was Li Peng, the premier at the time, on tv repeating the same speech over and over.

After recounting all this I suddenly feel, at least on an amateur level, like an unimportant, curiously nondescript short Jewish man with glasses who manages to show up in surprising circumstances without any particular motive. I blend in, and am defined only by what has happened to me. I do hope it is a career I've now abandoned, and I will be spared eyewitnessing Middle East uprisings and nuclear disaster.

(The poster is from Witold Sadowski, a Polish graphic artist.)

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.

eat, pray, love, an alternative

EAT: I read a cookbook review on Good Reads some months ago by a reader who complained about how the “foodie douchebags” had hijacked cooking. I thought that was a funny, wonderful expression, mostly for the /ooo/ of it. Yesterday I bought some “caffe latte almonds,” and while I was walking back to the office eating those fat beauties the expression came to me and I had the urge to say it out loud. I did, exactly at the moment someone I knew came up behind me. Should I act as if I’d said nothing, or explain I’d said something else? "Loopy duped hags?" "Pooperscoop fangs?"

PRAY: I’m no foodie, and caffe latte almonds will ever do much to shape my perception of place, but no one’s immune to flavor memories, which often begin when you’re away from home eating something you wouldn’t usually eat. My favorite comes from the town of Shanhaiguan in China, which I visited with my friend Sandy. We found a clean restaurant, where I ordered a fish soup that was little more than a fish flank floating in a bowl of broth with a few leaves of cilantro. In Chinese, cilantro is called “fragrant grass” and it’s sold in lovely bundles. In Chinese, you drink soup, you don’t eat it. In Chinese lore, cilantro was associated with immortality. In Shanhaiguan, there’s the ocean and the Great Wall and I’m surprised that also this soup is still going on.

LOVE: My step-father was always one of those people who remembered his vacations by what he’d eaten. My mother would say, ‘remember the year we stayed at the Watergate in DC,’ and he’d say, ‘oh yeah, that was where I ate the butter-crumb stuffed wild mushrooms in marsala sauce.’ There were those of us who thought he’d missed the point of the trip completely, and others who felt he’d hit the nail on the head. My step-father turns 86 next week. He was a good father to me. Although his short-term memory is shot and his overall awareness is ebbing I do hope he will again experience much deliciousness.

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.

Chengdu

Beneath a lean-to teashop,
an abacus clicks in dialect.

On bikes overloaded with parcels,
millions of black slippers spin
into markets, parks and hovels.

Add or extract a body
and the scene careens in unity.

Coal dust falls like pepper,
sticks like echoes, ink, and the talc
of butterflies considered long extinct.

Squat in a bamboo grove
sits the cottage of Du Fu,

master poet of the T’ang,
who wrote everywhere I go, I owe
money for wine.