Weirdo turned pro.
The routine that so shakes the world.
Meat and mouths on sticks that slap and bend and clutch then roll apart.
Ridiculous to watch, ridiculous that we empathize or yearn as we watch and cannot help it.
But the difference is the people inside
The people inside.
The people inside.
Darting through the sky dragging trails of coal black smoke.
Sometimes with letters, most often circles.
At times the trail is blinding magnesium crackling and sizzling with an odor that makes the teeth hurt.
Then I land, dismount the broom. Look to the skies and see other letters, other circles.
Higher in elevation from where I patrolled, less fresh.
I used to fly lower altitude, more often I tilt upwards to try the cooler air and better view.
Walking on, I see other circles, faded but over my station. For my notice?
Some a pungent bilious green, hopefully dispersed before they catch the breeze on earth. Birds and bugs dropping unconscious before then. Take shelter under a tree.
How many heartbeats do we have? Is it vain to take to the skies? Vain to scan upwards for messages and deeds? Tough to take direction (or evasion) when there are errands to do.
Beasts of the field spend all their heartbeats doing their duty, consuming, sleeping, excreting.
Beasts of the field do not look to the skies, or take to the skies, from compulsion.
In ancient Rome during middle February they feasted quite deeply during pagan Lupercalia. To slit the throats of a dog and a goat then eat them would cure what ailed ya.
Then ladies’d stand naked in line, and while blitzed on wine the fellas all’d hit them.
Later on ladies’ names were drawn by men in a game to determine who later would schtup ’em.
Couples might bond, other times not gel, in either case they’d end up sticky.
While rollicking and violent, horrid and wrong, somehow that all ended as this edible Mickey.
The Valentine’s cookie was sweet, decorated neat, and blended to smooth consistency.
Eating it made me sluggish and slow, hardly rarin’ to go, and in the wild my rivals would pass me.
Would I end up behind down the Lupercalian line slapping laggard asses that didn’t quite suit me?
I’d probably stay back, plan a selective attack based on hair, guessed-at smarts, self-esteem.
Or would I have thought “Sod it all. Ave, Venus!” and hope my card would lead to love at first sight?
All this mulling now and then while with a ravenous grin I chomped down on this corporate copyright.
“Under Ben Bulben” doesn’t quite work. Yeats tried to make it a culminating poem, even writing his eventual epitaph in the closing lines. I cracked it open tonight and rediscovered these three stanzas:
II
Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-digger’s toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.
III
You that Mitchel’s prayer have heard,
“Send war in our time, O Lord!”
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.
VI
Under bare Ben Bulben’s head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago; a church stands near,
By the road an ancient Cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase,
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
How doth the proud plump peacock
lift its belly from the ground?
Stretching ornate plumes and hopes
when a wind assist is found.
Thanks to Fanny C. for recommending a book of poetry: Rebel Angels, 25 Poets of the New Formalism. I’ve been making slow progress, but have stopped and lurched backward to re-read this poem several times. It’s not sophisticated, but it’s stuck.
Julia AlvarezWoman’s Work
by Julia Alvarez
Who says a woman’s work isn’t high art?
She’d challenge as she scrubbed the bathroom tiles.
Keep house as if the address were your heart.
We’d clean the whole upstairs before we’d start
downstairs. I’d sigh, hearing my friends outside.
Doing her woman’s work was a hard art
to practice when the summer sun would bar
the floor I swept till she was satisfied.
She kept me prisoner in her housebound heart.
She’d shine the tines of forks, the wheels of carts,
cut lacy lattices for all her pies.
Her woman’s work was nothing less than art.
And I, her masterpiece since I was smart,
was primed, praised, polished, scolded and advised
to keep a house much better than my heart.
I did not want to be her counterpart!
I struck out. . .but became my mother’s child:
a woman working at home on her art,
housekeeping paper as if it were her heart.
For my part, didn’t grow up with a Mom who was so fastidious, or LIVED so much through housework. My parents (split home-ish-ness, but consolidating everyone for simplicity’s sake) put an emphasis on us kids doing chores and housekeeping so we would not be totally useless when we left the nest. Seems obvious and common, but how many people/roommates have we known who moved away from home with little or no household skills?
The poem is a manifesto, but my place in life is not summed up in the last stanza, though in time it may be. While sputtering in my writing projects, I see my 8 y/o daughter taking an interest in writing story ideas or phrases in a journal she has, she’s made several observations over the years about seeing me write, and both kids sometimes ask about the state of my writing projects.
I wonder if I’m role modeling for her. If she’ll see my taking spare moments to write as an acceptable norm, a habit for her to build on. If my life is an intermediary step for any greater successes she may have. That’s fine with me. I’d be proud to see it.
The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers’ song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.
Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the star-lit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.
At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.
Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood,
Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
– Byzantium, by William Butler Yeats
This is the follow-up poem by Yeats to his Sailing to Byzantium, one of my favorites in my 20s. This poem, written only three years later, is a call-back where the narrator explores the city of legend he aspired to reach in the earlier poem. It makes me realize the aspiration to be a crafted mechanical bird, immortal, singing to lords and ladies of the past, present, or things to come is a way out of the trappings of age and a way into existence of art into posterity, but does not convey the mire, the nature and swamp and meat of life that gives beauty. The poem above seems more sage, an initiate regarding new arrivals. Art as a process of burning and refining. Sensible. Suits an accomplished genius like Yeats. Feels like the only things I have to share are laden messes, to convey the muck and the ooze of it all. I’ve not gained the knack for refinement yet.
While typing this, the itching from a new haircut trickles down my neck through the collar of my t-shirt and sweatshirt. Seeing the amount of silver compared to brown (once natural blonde!) that falls in clumps over the haircut cape while sitting in the chair continues to amuse. The buzzing and tugging and trimming that comes from a woman cutting my hair always feels more intimate than it should be. If there’s not much chit-chat, I tend to tip higher, but I still tip pretty high because in a small way grooming by someone’s hands feels like a moment. The race between my hair turning to silver, and whether I have hair left at all, tends to not amuse. As my hair has waned over the last two decades, I determined to improve my personality to compensate. But, as in so many such resolutions, I’ve let up on THAT a bit. The curmudgeon will out.
As I get to the tasty sludge of a dark hot cocoa at a high end, but not quite aristocratic, chocolateria, three Asian women are having a spirited conversation in a language that is not Japanese nor Chinese. Their pace is quick. Their voices complement each other, and it’s a relief to NOT know enough of their words to eavesdrop. Mild melodic background. Light laughter. I’m tempted to place my smartphone on the small coffee table between them and record their voices for future background noise.
And, like that, I’ve resolved I like Sailing to Byzantium better. The narrator laments, aspires, but is not accomplished enough, it has not yet reached the holy city. November is National Novel Writing Month, and I need to get ramped up on my project.
Driving home from attending a college football game, I traveled with my kids, who had spent the day with a set of grandparents, back to our home city. My daughter was asleep in the backseat, iPod touch probably still playing. My son was playing a word game on his Nintendo DSi XL. I had finished with listening to the football post-game show on the radio, and had switched to an iPod playlist of authors reading their own work. To the sound of Anne Sexton reading poems on the car stereo, my son asked me questions about his game.
Had there been a transcript of one particular point, it would have read like this:
Oh, darling! Born in that sweet birthday suit
and having owned it and known it for so long,
now you must watch high noon enter–
[Son: “Papa, what’s a word for a food that needs sauce?” Me: “Barbecue, maybe?”]
noon, that ghost hour.
Oh, funny little girl–this one under a blueberry sky,
[Son: “It doesn’t work.” Me: “How about spaghetti?” Son: “How do you spell ‘spaghetti’?” Me: “S-p-a-g-h-e-t-t-i.” Son: “That works!”]
this one! How can I say that I’ve known
just what you know and just where you are?
It’s not a strange place, this odd home
[Son: “Papa, how do you spell ‘weight’?” Me: “Like in, heavy?” Son: “Yes.” Me: “W-e-i-g-h-t.”]
where your face sits in my hand
so full of distance,
so full of its immediate fever.
Pen to paper. Fingertips to keyboard.
Like thousands, millions, billions high primates before.
A boon, a propitiation to no one around.
I choose not to go numb, though stumbling clumsy and thick.
And frowning at what has been scrawled or tapped more often than smiling.
But I choose to try. To last.
We’ve all had moments where the conversation starts: “Hey, do you remember so-and-so?”
Answer: “Oh, sure!” Cue mental memory of last interaction with that person. What the person was like, what you were like. If fond memories (almost always), a sweet haze surrounds the evocation.
“So-and-so is dead.”
Cue giant scythe swooshing down and cleanly slicing the reverie, slicing the moment to something horrible and abruptly sad.
That didn’t happen today. But I got word someone I once kissed died after a protracted fight with cancer. Same age, endured through her birthday last week and then surrendered following a visit from long-time friends and surrounded by family.
When someone we know dies, we become the sole caretakers of those moments. That person can no longer speak up with a smile or a head shake and say “Oh, yeah! I was there with you.” Even minor moments. A stark experience.
In high school, she was wavo/goth. By junior/senior year, pancake makeup, clove cigarettes. Usually second or third banana. Content to be in the background.
I went to college in another city for two years. Moved back into my hometown where she was by then in regular social rotation with a pocket of long-held friends.
The anthropology of dating was never my forté. I was a keen observer, but a lousy participant in picking up/acting on cues. Shy, easily daunted despite tendency toward extroversion and saying severe things very loudly to the acclaim/dismay of those within earshot.
So, in this small social circle she was initially unattached. She had also really blossomed. Dropped weight, got confident about her appearance. Went out into the sun. Got a retail job. A decent car that she painted colorful fish on. Strong sense of humor. Good listener. Fun to be around – good with a supplemental joke to follow someone else’s start. I got interested.
She had no problem dating. One of her boyfriends was a Deadhead guy who was the typical tightly-wound “It’s all good” mellow affectation, VERY PARTICULAR about the type of mellow to be, and who became highly agitated when his sensibilities were challenged. 22 years later, I wonder if he detected my circling around her and reacted to it, or if I was laying topical landmines for him to step on because I was jealous.
Eventually, I had a chance. I invited her to watch a movie with me at my parents’ house out in the country. I had just moved back and transferred to the hometown state university and hadn’t found a place yet. Can’t remember the movie we watched. She was wearing capri pants and I spent much of the movie semi-absent-mindedly stroking her lower leg, which she had rested on my lap.
I drove her back home to her apartment, dropped her off, and we kissed in the doorway. She put her hands in my pants pockets and said: “Oh, what have we here?” “Keys” I answered with a smile. She laughed. No invite in. Never kissed again.
I was still hanging around in group settings, sometimes hanging out in restaurants. I was still interested. I talked the ears off of mutual friends (thank you for your patience). They knew it wouldn’t work even if it DID happen. I kinda knew it, too. But I still liked her. Hadn’t dated for a while other than her. It was a goal.
She finally admitted to others that she wasn’t interested in me, but did like having me around for the attention. Mutual friends told her it was mean to waste my time like that. She reacted with a shrug. *GASP* was my reaction upon this report. Still I continued to hang around. Can’t recall for how long.
A sister of hers was getting married. Among her sisters, she was the only one NOT yet married or engaged. The Catholic wedding was on a Saturday, but she asked me to go as a date. Met a lot of her family, dull as I was, I was clearly a beard or being used to keep the pressure off her a bit. In advice column parlance, in this phase I had the knack of falling into the “friend” track instead of the “boyfriend” track.
During the wedding, someone had taped letters onto the soles of the groom’s shoes so when he kneeled for Communion it said “Send Help”. Really, really funny.
Later that night, I was to carpool with my brother to meet our parents for a weekend at the beach. As I drove with her to the reception, I mentioned looking forward to the beach. She got huffy and said: “Well, if you’re looking forward to the beach so much, you DON’T have to go the reception!” Then the weeks of being kept around, being a prop boyfriend/fiancé, not getting a thank you for sitting through a wedding all fell into place and I felt a bit of a spine forming. “Okay. I’ll drop you off, then.” Did just that. She slammed the door. I couldn’t wait to tell my friends. Drove to one friend’s workplace. We cracked up. Reported later that she was FURIOUS for days afterward, and they reinforced to her that I got fed up of being dragged around.
Eventually I think she moved to Seattle. Then a long while later I heard she got married.
A year ago I heard she had cancer, and that it was severe.
A few days ago mutual friends gave updates on her condition: fatal. She’s a mother and wife.
One of the friends posted a recent photo of her. The trend toward coming out of her shell continued. She looked radiant, proud, even prettier than when I knew her.
I feel for her grieving spouse and children. A horrible loss for them, and an awful burden for her, to know you will die and not get to see your children become adults. This children you love losing a parent. Your spouse burdened by your permanent absence.
My memories of her will remain true to the time. I’m still proud of my little stand, slow-coming though it was, but I’ve no illusions: that moment in no way fully reflects on the people we each were and became.
News and contemplations like this can lead to new resolve to strive for something inward, or for something outward. As it does in the plots of books and movies. Even now, though, through the sympathy and sadness I still sense myself wanting what I want, as before. Am feeling the impermanence of things more than usual. Slightly increases the resolve of “capture the day” when it comes to projects and other ambitions, but that could fluctuate based on what’s on tv or other distractions. And had the last few lines of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool” running through my head today:
We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
Goodbye, S. I regret not knowing you better, but am glad to know you became a mother with a supportive spouse and children. I wish them well, and can imagine the depth of their loss knowing an aspect of you (and being drawn to it), though I will never meet them. Life goes on. Until it doesn’t.