Poetry of the Week: Music as heartbeat

I've been blessed lately with a number of good friends who care passionately about music, and share that love and passion with the people around them. Many of them make music, some of them have studied it, but all feel in some way that music is life and magic, and listening to them talk about it and talk to each other about it has been a source of delight and comfort for me this year.

Music has always been important to my family and the people I love, but it's less intrinsic to me. I can't talk about it in quite the same way, but I'd like to give back some of my passion in return. So I set out looking for poems that felt similar to me. All different. Not all happy, not all hopeful, but all capturing moments of transcendence in that way that both poetry and music can. I'm fairly certain I could fill the month with poetry that meets that requirement, and I very well may, but for this week, at least, these are my offerings:


Latin & Soul - Victor Hernández Cruz

I Am In Need Of Music - Elizabeth Bishop

Trickster III - Kwame Dawes

Record - Katrina Vandenberg

Poetry of the Week: Philip Levine

Restarting our Wednesday tradition, I looked for a a poem suitable for either how difficult work has been lately, or how much I'm looking forward to this short vacation home to be with my family. What I found was Philip Levine, yet another poet I wish that I'd encountered years ago.

What Work Is
We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to 
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no, 
just because you don’t know what work is.


Alone 
Sunset, and the olive grove flames
on the far hill. We descend
into the lunging shadows
of goat grass, and the air

deepens like smoke.
You were behind me, but when I turned
there was the wrangling of crows
and the long grass rising in the wind

and the swelling tips of grain
turning to water under a black sky.
All around me the thousand
small denials of the day

rose like insects to the flaming
of an old truth, someone alone
following a broken trail of stones
toward the deep and starless river.


Smoke
Can you imagine the air filled with smoke?
It was. The city was vanishing before noon
or was it earlier than that? I can't say because
the light came from nowhere and went nowhere.

This was years ago, before you were born, before
your parents met in a bus station downtown.
She'd come on Friday after work all the way
from Toledo, and he'd dressed in his only suit.

Back then we called this a date, some times
a blind date, though they'd written back and forth
for weeks. What actually took place is now lost.
It's become part of the mythology of a family,

the stories told by children around the dinner table.
No, they aren't dead, they're just treated that way,
as objects turned one way and then another
to catch the light, the light overflowing with smoke.

Go back to the beginning, you insist. Why
is the air filled with smoke? Simple. We had work.
Work was something that thrived on fire, that without
fire couldn't catch its breath or hang on for life.

We came out into the morning air, Bernie, Stash,
Williams, and I, it was late March, a new war
was starting up in Asia or closer to home,
one that meant to kill us, but for a moment

the air held still in the gray poplars and elms
undoing their branches. I understood the moon
for the very first time, why it came and went, why
it wasn't there that day to greet the four of us.

Before the bus came a small black bird settled
on the curb, fearless or hurt, and turned its beak up
as though questioning the day. "A baby crow,"
someone said. Your father knelt down on the wet cement,

his lunchbox balanced on one knee and stared quietly
for a long time. "A grackle far from home," he said.
One of the four of us mentioned tenderness,
a word I wasn't used to, so it wasn't me.

The bus must have arrived. I'm not there today.
The windows were soiled. We swayed this way and that
over the railroad tracks, across Woodward Avenue,
heading west, just like the sun, hidden in smoke.


Burial Rites 
Everyone comes back here to die
as I will soon. The place feels right
since it’s half dead to begin with.
Even on a rare morning of rain,
like this morning, with the low sky
hoarding its riches except for
a few mock tears, the hard ground
accepts nothing. Six years ago
I buried my mother’s ashes
beside a young lilac that’s now
taller than I, and stuck the stub
of a rosebush into her dirt,
where like everything else not
human it thrives. The small blossoms
never unfurl; whatever they know
they keep to themselves until
a morning rain or a night wind
pares the petals down to nothing.
Even the neighbor cat who shits
daily on the paths and then hides
deep in the jungle of the weeds
refuses to purr. Whatever’s here
is just here, and nowhere else,
so it’s right to end up beside
the woman who bore me, to shovel
into the dirt whatever’s left
and leave only a name for some-
one who wants it. Think of it,
my name, no longer a portion
of me, no longer inflated
or bruised, no longer stewing
in a rich compost of memory
or the simpler one of bone shards,
dirt, kitty litter, wood ashes,
the roots of the eucalyptus
I planted in ’73,
a tiny me taking nothing,
giving nothing, and free at last.

World Poetry Day 2018

Hello again.

I fell out of the world there, for a little while.

I'm not sure that I'm back, yet, but poetry always helps, and World Poetry Day feels like a good excuse to wake this blog up again.

So without further ado, some quiet spring poems, on this dreary, snowy day:

Things in a Spring Garden - Wang Wei
Trans. Chou Ping and Tony Barnstone

Last night's rain makes me sail in my wooden shoes.
I put on my shabby robe against the spring cold.
As I spade each open plot, white water spreads.
Red peach flowers protrude from the willow trees.
On the lawn I play chess, and by a small wood
dip out water with my pole and pail.
I could take a small deerskin table
and hide in the high grass of sunset.


In Perpetual Spring - Amy Gerstler
Gardens are also good places
to sulk. You pass beds of
spiky voodoo lilies   
and trip over the roots   
of a sweet gum tree,   
in search of medieval   
plants whose leaves,   
when they drop off   
turn into birds
if they fall on land,
and colored carp if they   
plop into water.

Suddenly the archetypal   
human desire for peace   
with every other species   
wells up in you. The lion   
and the lamb cuddling up. 
The snake and the snail, kissing.
Even the prick of the thistle,   
queen of the weeds, revives   
your secret belief
in perpetual spring,
your faith that for every hurt   
there is a leaf to cure it.


Spring Quiet - Christina Rossetti
Gone were but the Winter,
Come were but the Spring,
I would go to a covert
Where the birds sing;

Where in the whitethorn
Singeth a thrush,
And a robin sings
In the holly-bush.

Full of fresh scents
Are the budding boughs
Arching high over
A cool green house:

Full of sweet scents,
And whispering air
Which sayeth softly:
"We spread no snare;

"Here dwell in safety,
Here dwell alone,
With a clear stream
And a mossy stone.

"Here the sun shineth
Most shadily;
Here is heard an echo
Of the far sea,
Though far off it be." 

Do you have any poems that you would like to share?

Death and Life and Living

My father died a month ago.

I feel like this is all I've talked or written about since the sobbing, panicked phone call I received that night in August, and yet I haven't even scratched the surface of words and loss roiling inside my chest.

I'm not the first person to lose a parent. I'm not even the first of my friends to lose a parent suddenly and without warning. What could I say that would have any value, thrown out into the void of the internet?

I can't talk about what kind of person he was. I can't talk about what he meant to me. I'm not there yet. One day, maybe, I'll be able to look back and smile and talk about his influence, but for now the pain is too sharp, and I'm not brave enough.

But this much, at least, this much I can say: I never thought I was immortal, but I was never so paralyzed by human mortality as I am now. Sitting in the theater with dear friends, I hold my partner's hand and think about his funeral. I find myself cataloging the joys and habits my mother passed to me, wondering what will hurt me once she's gone. And in this era of hate crimes and irrational wars, I think about how few "one days" I have left. I'm mourning my father, and I'm trying and failing not to mourn everyone else I love and care about, myself included. My world hasn't ended, but it feels very much as though it has.

I can't live every day as though it's my last. If I thought this was my last night alive, I wouldn't be typing this. I wouldn't be logging on to work later tonight to finish up some tasks. I wouldn't bother exercising muscles that would go slack tomorrow. I would write, yes, but I wouldn't write stories. I would write about who I am and what I've lived through, I would write love letters to everyone who's ever cared about me. I would talk about my father, and how he told me to leave a legacy, and how there was no way I could ever leave one worthwhile enough. How I always knew I would die unfinished and unsatisfied, but that I thought I might have gotten a bit farther than I had. I would spill words onto the screen in a scarcely translated litany of "Remember me, remember me, KNOW me. Please." and it wouldn't be enough. I can't live every day as though it were my last because I'd spend every day writing my epitaph.

At this point, I see three paths forward, and every day I choose a different one. The wounded animal in me wants to mourn and cry and drink and sleep and reach out to touch my loved ones to convince myself that they're still there. And some days that's all I have energy for. To live with a minimum of pain. But I have responsibilities, and they have me dragging myself up and out to take care of my job, my house, my people. I package my pain and feelings up for as long as I can and take care of the mundanities of life. I could follow this second path forever, but then on the day death surprises me I wouldn't feel any more ready for it than I do now. The third path is to forget the possibility of death, but still celebrate life, and to rearrange my life in a way that builds the legacy I desire. My panicked mortality tells me that I need to do the last. It scrabbles and scratches and insists that every day spent at work and every evening spent mourning is my final wasted chance to live a worthwhile life. Yesterday I might have survived. Today I am doomed. And then my wounded animal heart shies away from these admonishments and begs another few hours to forget.

Everyone says it will get better. And I believe them. But I don't know how long I'll have for the grief to soften and the panic to fade. I don't know if I'll be allowed to forget how fragile we all are. And so on some days, I give myself the space to rest and heal and mourn, and on some days I put one foot in front of the other and take care of the boring but necessary tasks that keep my world turning. I've yet to find the strength to spend a day on the third path, but I've been spending moments and plans, carving out time from my future while hoping I make it long enough to reach those hours.

I wanted to publish something by the time I was 35, because I wanted to make sure my father was around to see the success of that goal. I wanted him to tell me that he was proud of me, and that I'd accomplished something worthwhile. I'm turning 30 in the spring. It wasn't soon enough.

It will never be enough, but I need to make sure it's something.

Long time no see, and thoughts on monsters

First off, hello! I hadn't forgotten this blog existed, but I'm going to have to rethink how I want to use it. I'm still likely to talk about tea and poetry most of the time, but for the moment don't expect anything regular or quite so structured. I'm at a point in life where I should start thinking about longer term plans and patterns. That doesn't mean that I'm actually going to, but in as much as I can use this blog for rough drafts and direction, I'll do so.

To that end, I'd like to pin some words down on the subject of horror and monsters, a subject near and dear to me that I always struggle to explain my full connection to. Fair warning, this is likely to wander about a great deal.

As early as I can remember, I've had a paired fascination with ghost stories and nightmares. My own dreams were and have ever been filled with monsters and the end of the world, but always in fantastical scenarios. Floods and zombies and serial killers, undead personally coming to the door of five year old me to murder me. And for all that these sound horrifying, they didn't scare me in the same way that more mundane dream scenarios have. They were still frightening, and I'd wake up with that heightened paranoia that makes me watch shadows at 3 a.m. to this day, but it's a different plane of fear, and thus, in a way, comforting.

As for ghost stories, they were my introduction both to formulaic story-telling and fear as entertainment. My close friends got into the habit of asking me to tell them ghost stories on long rides or sleep-overs, and I'd string together the necessary beats and imagery as I went, fascinated that the words I was making up off the top of my head could possibly be frightening. Obviously the blood and the mirrors and the ghosts weren't real,* so how could this be affecting them? And given how much they were enjoying it, how could I make it affect me? Could I convince myself to feel afraid, or did I need darker material to start with?**

It's probably also worth mentioning that I'm not entirely neurotypical. I've never had a formal diagnosis, but I went through most of my life a half-beat off from everyone else. I am very likely on the autistic spectrum. I don't process emotions the same way as most people, I certainly don't react to them in the same way, and as I grew up, most of my efforts were spent on understanding why I seemed to living in a parallel dimension from the people around me. Mostly I figured out how to fake the expected reactions and social scripts, but they never came naturally and never made sense. This will come up again later.

And so life went on and I grew up. The usual tragedies of childhood followed, as well as tragedies that shouldn't be normal. I graduated from books of ghost stories scavenged from the library to my older sister's Fear Street books, hungry for blood and phantasms, and grew a collection that eclipsed hers. I was never deeply into movies, but bored and alone over the summer I'd catch any bizarre horror movie that crossed my path. In middle school, I fell in love with the Count of Monte Cristo for an execution scene as much for the beautifully executed revenge plot. In high school I took a summer class on vampires in myth and literature and fully codified my love for Gothic fiction.

Throughout this all, I was a clearly labeled Weird Kid. "Gifted" teacher's pet, shy, but also widely referred to (affectionately) as evil by my family and friends. Teenagers always feel like outsiders, but the struggle of understanding basic social interactions combined with the knowledge that the stories and images that most pleased me were horrifying to the general public led to my feeling a great deal like a monster in a human suit. And some days that was (is, really) something I'm proud of, and some days (less of these now) there was this vast grief that I couldn't understand or become human. I was at points afraid that enjoying tales of fear and suffering meant that I was myself a bad or dangerous person. It sounds silly now, but I avoided certain martial arts and research options because I didn't want to risk it. (Knives are pretty, but maybe I shouldn't be allowed access to them because I think that. Fire is beautiful, but perhaps I would be unsafe?)

I'm not a teenager anymore, and I know all of that last is bullshit (and when said by others, was said in jest), but it stuck with me for years, and in the same way that I spent time building an artificial system for socializing once I realized mine was unexpectedly different from those around me, I devoted time to codifying my own internal morality, so that I could be certain that even if I was weird or different, I was at least comfortable that I was a good person.  Which I was, and am, but it will always be something I watch and try to improve.

So is it any wonder that I developed sympathy for monsters? I still love a good ghost story or slasher flick, but tales of monster protagonists choosing to do the right thing out of love or wonder, or reverting back to their base natures, or trying to find a balance...these are all near and dear to my heart. What is humanity and what is human? What do you do with the knowledge that the terrifying Other in the narrative is, in fact, you?

The undergraduate thesis that I devoted woefully little time to was specifically about the exploration of the relationship between Other and Self in Gothic literature, and the texts I looked into were all about blurring that line. Possession, doppelgangers, revealing the monster within.... It's a topic I'd like to revisit now that I have some distance, because I had no idea what to focus on or what I was looking for at the time. If I were to look at it again, I'd spend more time on Othered identities in society, which is clearly the key I was looking for and never quite managed.

What I didn't fully understand growing up was that I'm not just "weird," and I'm not alone. I'm neurodivergent, which is true of many people and means there are people out there who speak and understand the world the way I do, and I'm very queer. Both mean that there are vast sections of the country that think that I'm broken or damned or better off dead. (And if you don't think that's true, you haven't been paying much attention to the news this last year.) A significant chunk of the world has already decided that I'm Other and the monster of their story, and if that's the case, the idea of being scary instead of helpless becomes a power fantasy, and monsterhood becomes wish fulfillment.

I'm also fond of flipping the script, and rightfully calling out horror behind prevailing social norms. Because horror touches on who is and has a right to be human, and the inherent monstrousness of man. But if I go too much further down that path this will become a love letter to Get Out, and that deserves to be more than a post-script in a Sunday ramble.

So there. Some thoughts about monsters and what they mean to me. That's not everything I love about horror, or even everything that appeals to me about the topics mentioned here. And I haven't even gone into my love of ghost stories as healing narratives. But...let's leave it at that for now.


* The one and only ghost story that managed to get to me is Bloody Mary. It frustrated me to no end, because I knew better and none of the other bloody and horrific stories I was consuming even in elementary school ever stuck with me. But to this day I can't sleep if my image is being reflected in a mirror.
** I eventually discovered roller coasters and violent hobbies, and yes, adrenaline is indeed great.