and one who is waiting

Sad and foolish, sad and foolish: even those of us who stop to think -- especially us, maybe -- are prone to flukes and spurts of stupid ignorance. But in the mass, it's terrifying: to the historian, counting off genocides on his fingers, it has gone beyond that, to a principle.

O long-awaited, are you nearly here?
Is that your shadow I see from the window,
beginning to cross the field?

I have not labored, I have idled. Oh, I have read, and read, and read: empires and parliaments, poets and explorers, bitter artists and puzzled scientists have been swept into the mulch bag of my sprawling, undisciplined mind. I have more riches in any odd corner of my brain than most yahoos will ever collect in a long gaping life: but what have I done with it all? Even to think of presenting my true account, on His return, is to burn with shame.

Everywhere I look, there are emblems
from years of laboring: nettles
that stung my hands, fronds of palm

 But. It is yet another temptation of idleness, to brood on lost opportunity and the neglect of my Genius. The point is to work here, right here right now, with the tools I have. Because I have wormed my way up to a point of vantage, in spite of all that waste. And there is love to spend still.

.     .     .     I read tonight
that certain moths drink the tears

of sleeping birds, turning sorrow
into sustenance. O long awaited,
I have never left, I am still here.

I am still here, improbable, improbable though that is. I am still here, and my grip is the hand-grip of thirty thanes. I am walking now on that dusky road, with the sudden conviction that even now -- even now -- someone is waiting.

*these verses are from Luisa Igloria's "Wanderer," from Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser.

The Color of Shells

A cold white morning. Even the crows were silent: when I walked down the drive, they glided overhead towards their morning gathering without a word.

My life is very quiet right now in all its externals, but my mind is a boiling hive. All of my past is vivid to me. There is no long ago, no blue distance. Everything is here, now, urgent. I feel I have never settled anything, never closed any account. Anything might break open again.

I lay my hand on your chest, and roll your cheek into the crook of my elbow; the other hand makes one long stroke over the collarbone, the throat, the face. I end with my fingers tangled in the hair of your scalp, gently pulling your hair. Coda.

… So here is the fisherman
who never caught a thing, having moonlit
conversation in the reeds. She
is covered with scales and sinuous as
brocade. She listens
but will not grant
a mansion for his wife…

-- “Parable of the Fish”, Luisa Igloria, The Saints of Streets

This poem goes walking with me, up the strange little bluff with its terraced, impossibly-named streets (Billingher Drive, Beyrl Terrace). It follows me from the hondonada of 82nd Avenue to the little upland where Dale and Martha are making their last stand.

His hair is fading to the color of shells: so it is, too.

A Christmas Carol

The ghosts do come crowding, at this time of year.
It must be the dim and panicked backspin of the sun,
unable to find its footing, or maybe the long chain of money –
never long enough – jerking to its end,
punching the trachea. Last night your phantom
loaded me with gifts in gentle forgiveness,
and I woke up tearing the sheets with screams.


A response to a morning porch response.

Ruins

There are always ruins, she said. I used to think, but not here: not in this raw country. The Indians left no real trace, and our traces, the wounds we've inflicted on the forest, are still open and bleeding. There's nothing calm or elegiac about the trash fields left by clear-cutting.

But I was wrong, though I had to grow to middle age to understand why. For one thing, the Indians did leave traces, and in fact they're still here: they just didn't leave the sort of traces I knew how to see. And for another, with enough practice you can see the present wounds as ancient tumbled temples. The space of years and the paint flaking off the white bones of the statues, the impenetrability of the old carved letters, those are accidents that make it easier to see the futility of ancient hopes. With practice, you can see the stumps and snags and quick-rusting cables the same way. The ambitions are no less forlorn and distant for having moved men yesterday instead of couple thousand years ago.

I traveled in Greece when I was in my early twenties – it was I think on my 22nd birthday that I sprang up a slope spattered with massive stone blocks to the top of the hill of Mycenae – and nothing hit me so hard in the face as a Greek tour guide, in the front of a bus, announcing with pride our entrance into the Forest of Daphne. I craned my neck: I looked everywhere, bewildered. We were swaying through a stand of sparse shrubbery and spindly second-growth pines. It was on my lips to ask, “where is the forest?” when I understood. This was the forest. And yet Greece had forests, real forests, once. And then almost at once we were on the other side of this wretched man's “forest,” driving on to the next wonder.

There are always ruins. When we were moving out of the old house, I drove to the Powell's warehouse, where they buy books in bulk, and brought in box after box of decaying books: yellowed paper, cracking spines. They bought a tenth of them, for a tenth of what I paid for them. The rest, a person could dump into a bin to be sent to hungry libraries in the third world. I dumped them there. All those books. I'm not one of those people who buys books and doesn't read them: I had read all of these, at least once, at some point in the long backward of days. They were supposed to make me wise, or at least knowledgeable. Ha.

After a month of dislocation, a month in which I've ridden my bike maybe twice, my own body is a ruin: I haul myself out of bed with an effort; I use my arms to help heave myself up from a cafe booth. It all goes to wrack so quickly.

Chopin

Suddenly, Chopin is the theme of my life. On Friday, my massage downtown was done to his music – I have no idea which pieces, I don't know one from another, but I always recognize him, ignorant as I am: I had an album of his piano music, which was the only classical music I ever played back when it was usually Crosby Stills & Nash, or Simon & Garfunkle, on the record player. (Not the stereo: stereo was beyond my means, back then.) I loved the way the piano wandered, seemingly without direction. I've never been able to view the over-organized authoritarian march of symphonies as real music, however grand it may be: music that knows where it's going before it gets there leaves me cold.

So I stroked the chest of my poor South American exile, who longs for warmth, and thought of Schnackenberg's “Kremlin of Smoke,” about Chopin in exile in Paris, Warsaw falling to the Russians, and Chopin, having no more sense than any other musician, but having the extraordinary sense to simply follow the notes. That's all the sense we need. The only discipline we need. As if that weren't to say: all you have to do is the hardest thing in the world.

And then today, Luisa's poem about the ghost of Chopin rising from a Japanese bed:

However his name is said, its syllables
linger a little: sostenuto, the way water-
drops slide down the glass panes, the way

each prismed surface looks sheathed in another
skin; the way each bud in the garden might be
a heart embalmed, floating in a globe of fluid.

Sunday at Tom's. Coffee. Over there, a glossy girl of Japanese descent is sitting with a Caucasian couple – kindly, dowdy, gray, and stout. She is sparkling and making jokes, and wagging her index finger at both of them: they are rolling their eyes, but glowing with her warmth. They heave themselves at length out of the booth, and she lifts, hummingbird-like, without effort, to accompany them. Sage is right about how all these things converge to a message:

When I nearly knocked myself out in the garage as my brother and I were digging around in the bikes, I found myself on the floor with a pile of toddler toys on top of me. Was this The Universe playing a knock-knock joke where the punch line was my lack of playfulness? I don’t know; but it’s fun to guess.

Luisa Has Accomplished Fifty Today

In the east there's a glowing patch
of fawn-colored sky with soft gray kerchiefs
drifting across it. Dawn.

Luisa has accomplished fifty today:
the age at which, my old professor said,
you don't take shit offa nobody.

Not grandmothers, who have
gone to their various rewards;
not husbands sifted

to fruit and chaff
in their right proportions;
not puppyish admirers,

blond or gray, who want
to scribble in your margins.
(Fair enough: but

it belongs to them, not you.)
And should anyone ask
the secret of being beautiful at fifty

you don't even have to say
the obvious – “Attend to beauty,
and it will attend to you” –

You can make the faintest
acknowledging or deprecating moue,
an impatient shake of the head,

and go directly to the next task,
as you have as long as you can remember:
cooking, cleaning, worrying –

and doing your daily obeisance
to how the tunic rubs its velvet raw;
to Annie Oakley's interval of thought.

---

velvet tunic: Occasional

Annie Oakley: Dear Annie Oakley

Sliver-Tongue

Ruby throat rising like the sun:
beat, beat, beat, darling one!

Sliver-tongue, sliver-tongue, sliver-tongue,
tremble your way to the flower cup,

into the sheath of sweetness,
into the shell where the syrup runs.

Sweet tongue, lithe tongue, flickering wish:
Still as drumsticks, quick as fish.


Crow family groups often include a yearling, a sort of apprentice nest builder, who brings all kinds of stuff. The nesting pair pick out what's useful and show the yearling what to do with it. Every once in a while I still dash off a poem in response to the Morning Porch: I'm always so chuffed when Luisa re-uses some of the materials I've brought.

Gift or Curse

Mother, every day is still / a gift or curse. (Igloria, "The Clear Bones")

I drizzle a little fine pale sand into the paint for the stair treads. It sinks and disperses in the creamy red of the paint, drowning silently. Feels wrong to deliberately put grit into paint. But the idea is that the steps will be less slippery for the folks who live here after us.

It all circles back: stir-sticks, thin crescents of paint printed on last week's newspapers. Yesterday at twilight I came to a stop sign in a deserted suburban neighborhood, coming home from doing a massage, and saw the thin edge of a crescent moon over the roofs, between the trees. I put my hands together and bowed my head. The thud of my pulse was suddenly loud in my ears. That poem in Qarrtsiluni about the octopus comes into my mind: a hand gesturing in the water, the light sinking like heavy oil through the sea water.

Jesse comes in, sleepy and tousled. I worry about her: I don't think she gets enough sleep. She wears silly things, sometimes. Today she's wearing a long beadwork necklace, an inch wide, like the "Indian" beadwork things we used to make on those little mail order looms -- a clumsy, slightly garish, rumpled thing. Like Luna Lovegood wearing her necklace of butterbeer tops. She's always set a little obliquely to the workaday world. Never again has she disclosed to me anything like reading Elizabeth Bishop aloud with her brother. I begin to think I imagined it.

Perhaps I floated across a river of warnings into the afterworld,
only to be returned for my desires. Everything I want is still

at arm's length, a current of blue swirling with
the hint of silver. Shackle and oar, what stains the water?

Not Looking Away

I don't know much about the Philippines. There was a time in my life when I used to take those fat old hardbacks out of the library, the histories of nations, 19th Century books, mostly, from back when nobody had any doubt about nations being the basic objects of history. History of Spain. History of Japan. It irked me, always, to have portions of the globe and no story to go with them. I'd read the books cover to cover. I don't know how much of it stuck with me: but the sheer bulk of the material must have had some effect.

But somehow no History of the Philippines ever came my way. Maybe because an obscure uneasiness tended to steer me away from places that came into the modern world as colonies – I'm still ashamed, and still have not done much about, my abysmal ignorance of Africa – and the Philippines seemed, maybe, the most colonial of all. The very name I assumed to be (rightly or wrongly? I have no idea) from Philip II of Spain, the Philip who sent the Armada against England. (It's odd how people keep these colonial names. We kept Georgia and Virginia and Maryland, even after six years of bloody brutal war to shake free of the British monarchy. I wonder why?)

Anyway – I knew the Philippines had been Spain's Asian colony, ceded to us after the Spanish-American war. I knew we'd fought a horrible war against an insurgency there – all such things of course are seen to someone of my generation through the frame of Vietnam, and I read Twain's famous essay about it, so that I always looked darkly on the monuments to those who fell fighting the Filipino insurgency that are dotted around Oregon. (Oregon has always been prime recruiting ground for dirty little wars abroad: sometimes I think, given the steady trickle of boxes coming home, that half the kids in Iraq and Afghanistan right now are from Oregon.) But I also knew that there was genuine ambivalence about America there, and that it was one of the places that resisted Japanese occupation most resolutely, during the Second World War. We must also have done some things right. But that was about the sum of my knowledge.

But the very thing that used to steer me away from it, steers me towards it now. It's precisely these palimpsest places, countries that have been half-overwritten by successive colonial powers, that seem to me, now, to be best-placed to understand what the world is becoming. The purity of nations has always been a fiction, and a particularly unfortunate one. There is no country without racial, linguistic, and religious minorities. If we can once get that fully through our thick heads, maybe we can realize that our political mission is not to to divvy the world up “fairly” into homelands of chosen peoples, but to somehow figure out how different peoples can cohabit civilly in mixed, messy, unfair impurity. That's the political mission of the 21st Century: we'll either figure it out or die. Nationalism brought us the blessings of the first two world wars: if it brings us a third blessing, it will be the last one.

It seems to me that our political duty as artists – insofar as we have one – is simply not to turn away. Not to avert our gaze from what is messy and disquieting in our histories and in our present. For me, to see the Mexicans who made my breakfast today, glimpsed momentarily through the pass bar; and to see Martha's resentment of being at a disadvantage, looking for work, because she doesn't know Spanish, in a city that had virtually no Spanish speakers when she was growing up here fifty years ago. Or to look sometimes at the strange silk map of the home islands of Japan, made by the US Air Force, that I was given by an old WW II bomber pilot. The weaving that ties us into all the crimes of the past and the future is not hard to see, not if we look.

The thing to steer by is precisely that obscure uneasiness, that impulse to look away. I take that to be the guiding principle of Juan Luna's Revolver. Juan Luna the Filipino painter who shot his wife and mother-in-law in Paris in 1892:

Juan Luna the painter was pardoned
        and ordered to pay one franc each
                to his victims' immediate relatives,

because of an obscure French law which explained
        that native people, very primitive people,
                have this tendency to run amok.

Of course one goes looking for the predecessors who reflect credit: there must have been some impulse to look away from these murders, some impulse to move along and look for some other Filipino expat artist wandering in the belly of the beast. She could have done that, and written a much more comfortable, much less important book.

Rain and Exposure

I'm drenched: a fine old-fashioned Oregon rain caught me on the way to Powell's. But I'm too old an Oregonian to fuss about getting wet. I found what I was looking for on the shelves: Juan Luna's Revolver. I beam at people as I trot down the sidewalks, weaving under awnings when I can. And then I settle down in the Virginia Cafe, hanging my jacket to dry on a little wooden peg. And soon I'm reading about Caillebotte's painting of a rainy day in Paris, and the teardrop gleam of an earring. Rain, rain outside the Virginia Cafe, rain in the Blue Ridge mountains, and behind those, our various experiences of rain in our homelands. Luisa and I are each specialists in a particular kind of rain; we can both view the European rain with a certain ironic distance. Here, M. Caillebotte, sit down and we'll tell you about rains: downpours that render umbrellas ridiculous; rains that darken the world to twilight for months at a time!

I stop to count the characters introduced in “Minim.” The poet and her daughter. The music teacher. Modigliani and his pregnant wife. Juan Luna, of course. The two gladiators dragged off in his painting. Retana, an art critic apparently? Should I know who he is? José Garcia Villa, the dismissed poet. That makes ten, in a thirty-four line poem, and yet such is our capacity for perceiving persons, and perceiving persons perceiving persons, that there's nothing even slightly confusing about it. The poet is speaking to us: in the first frame is her daughter and (at the end) the Russian emigré music teacher. The magazine opens to the world of Modigliani and his wife. Then the poet's thought ranges to the Filipino emigrés, Juan Luna and José Garcia Villa. Retana belongs to Juan Luna and so do the gladiators in his painting. We make sense of it all effortlessly. Luisa's right: the reader's mind can hold them all without strain. It is, in fact, how we ordinarily think: through cascades of personas. We don't really think about Modernism; we think about Modgliani. And we don't really think about Filipinos looking for ground to stand on in Europe: we think about Juan Luna. And I think, not about this book, but about Luisa. If I did not know her (do I know her?) I would have to invent her.

---

Well, I told myself I had to post on my massage blog at least once a week. It's funny, after all this time in the online world – I've been blogging, after all, since 2003 – how exposed and unnerved I feel, writing on a different “platform” with a different audience. And after all, I'm only, what, four? five years old? as a massage therapist: what do I know? And there's additional complexities to blogging when your professional persona is on display. I'm mostly writing to other massage bloggers (since they're the people who will respond to me – on Facebook, mostly; it's an odd sort of three-cornered conversation that usually develops, with people reading each other's blogs but conversing about them on Facebook) – but of course I always have an eye over my shoulder for the clients and potential clients listening in. And as health care providers, not to mention as decent human beings, we're all hampered by the fact that we can't actually talk about what we do, except in generalities and heavily disguised cases.

I had high hopes, when those movies started coming out where adults swap places with kids' bodies and go back to kindergarten or high school, that someone would take the opportunity to show how much of childishness and immaturity is simply a response to living in an authoritarian world of constant surveillance. But reviews didn't make it sound like anyone did, and I don't usually have the patience to watch movies. But I often think that if I was in public school again I'd probably behave just as I did then: sulky, balky, and given to tantrums and affected “weirdnesses.” And now that I'm blogging in a slightly new world I'm having precisely the same exposure anxiety, uncertainties, and fluctuations of tone that I had when I started up here at Mole. One thinks one has matured: but what's really happened is that one has surrounded oneself with supports and comforts.

Seasons (More on Trill & Mordent)

In the Woodrat podcast, Dave put his finger on it, the thing possibly I like best about Luisa Igloria's poetry: you don't know what's going to happen next. And again, it's not because of any legerdemain, any withholding. You never think, “Oh, I see, she kept this back so it would come as a surprise at the end.” It's just that the poems keep thinking, right up to the end.

“The Four Seasons of Life,” a meditation on a series of old lithographs, has these marvelous lines: “I was eighteen. I did not know what -- or even that -- / I could become.” But it's the Middle Age section I come back to, again and again. It worries me. “I am trying to learn how to leave my body,” she says, and I don't know why. And, you know, my life work is to bring people back to their bodies.

She goes on, immediately, “Much more difficult, to manage each / return.” Well, yeah. That I could have told her. We climb in a little more painfully, each time. A little more disquietude, a little stronger sense of loss.

Then suddenly -- you never know, with Luisa, when she's suddenly going to stomp on the accelerator like this:

. . . I don't wish to desert the world,
not yet. Fear and desire, because I want to see
what face, what image, etched in reverse
on a metal plate and lowered into the acid bath,
rises to proof on paper.

That's simply gorgeous poetry, no matter how you take it. There isn't poetry better than that. I don't even notice at first that my Buddhist sensibilities ought to be outraged. All about seeing the self? -- worse, a representation of the self?

I can get around it, of course, I'm a clever boy, I can get around anything. I could say, it's not necessarily her face, it's just a face, it's intelligibility itself she's talking about. But I know better. It's Luisa's face we're talking about here, it's her becoming, the becoming she didn't even know could happen. And here again the word humane is the first word that comes to my mind. A kind of humanity and tenderness toward herself, as both vessel and burden. It's beguiling, of course, but it's also right, and whatever I think that pulls me away from understanding its rightness is, necessarily, wrong.

The poem ends by suggesting, wishing, mulling over the possibility that “there might be more than this world, / stenciled by the window-frame.” And of course there is, because she's describing a picture, but the description itself is a picture and the Luisa picturing it is a picture (rising to proof) and that's the world that there might be more than. But not yet. “Lord, take away my sins, but not yet.”

Braid

Trill & Mordent, Luisa A. Igloria

I read “Braid” for the fifth time, wondering the while if there's some key to it, something quite simple that makes all its difficulty easy. I'm still sometimes too easily deterred from modern poetry. Twenty years of peremptory dismissal leave one vulnerable. “Have you ever known a schoolmaster,” asks Stephen Maturin, “who was decent company?” The habit of authority, it corrodes your heart. I've read old poems, that I understand to the bones, over and over. I expect poems to yield to me, and I get cranky when they don't.

---

I called Luisa humane, and Dave said, yes, like a renaissance humanist, interested in everything. Which was true enough, yes, but not what I meant, no. I meant she's humane as Martha is humane: she accepts that we are twined together, that we're in a social fabric that only stretches so far. The opposite of American individualism. Not a self first, but a daughter, a wife, a mother first, and only a self when time and stress permit. That's what makes her so radical and so healing. She's not from here. She's from somewhere else.

Whatever “Braid” is about, it's about togetherness, about being twined with others. It's about gravity, which is, after all, nothing more nor less than mutual attraction writ large. And about the way we lay in next to each other, not mooshed, but parallel, like the ribs of grosgrain ribbon, like the atoms she has read about “which like to sit next to each other.”

. . . the equal effects of
the heart's turning toward the same gravity, that spiralling and marvelous together.

The poem seems more and more important as I handle it and turn it back and forth -- more for what it doesn't say than what it does. She's not afraid. Nothing about all this packing in together frightens her. She is not in the slightest afraid of annihilation. I try, and fail, to think of another contemporary poet who does not twin annihilation and love. A twinning that I already know I'll never find anywhere in Luisa's work. She doesn't want to love anyone to death. She wants to cook them dinner. That's what I meant by “humane.”

---

I've been reading this book for two days. I page back and subtract the front matter: in that time I've read thirteen pages. I'll never finish within a week. So far there's been precisely one poem, “South,” that I needed to read only once. The rest of them demanded several readings. It's strange, because she's not an obscure poet, as we moderns reckon these things. She's not trying to make anything difficult. But she has a metonymic habit of mind. She lays out, say, the “accidentals” -- the trills and mordents, musical notes that “change the pitch with just the slightest touch of dissonance”-- and then the random D.C. shootings, and then an oblique move towards a love that is an impulse “to discover which room in her body / houses the accidental sound of a tuning fork / struck and echoing in the middle of her life.” She doesn't say how these things are related. She doesn't even say they are related. They're just in the same poem.

It's what the man I learned Old English poetry from, Fred Robinson, would have called an appositive style. Plunk things down next to each other, without defining their connection, and see what happens. Old Germanic poetry is full of it, and also full of interlace structures: the two seem to go together. But it doesn't make for quick reading.

There's no hurry. I'll be reading these poems the rest of my life. Thirteen pages, and I already know that.

I first met Luisa with irritation. She'd written a poem in the Morning Porch comments, fine, what hast thou to do with me? And then Dave was reposting them on Via Negativa. For a long time I didn't read them. Christ, I have enough to do, to keep up with my friends. I skipped them and went on.

But after a while, he'd been doing over and over -- and I trust his judgment so much -- I thought, you know, if Dave thinks I need to read this poetry, he's bound to be either right or interestingly wrong. So I read one, and my heart turned over. I was an instant convert. I took to reading the Morning Porch, and waiting to see what Luisa would do with this one. It was magical. It' still magical.


Others on Trill & Mordent: Kristin Berkey Abbott, Dave Bonta