Cornrows

Cornrows, braids,
close-written texts rising from the scalp;

cuneiform hair gleaming on the wet clay
of a Sumerian morning:

weeping, weeping, long ago.
Did you ask, were you told,

why your fathers took spear and shield
and walked away with the dust between their toes,

and their soles already cracking?
It was the long tallies in clay,

bushels of grain owed and not delivered,
and now woven into your hair as the debt

of your skin and your people:
justice must be served, they say.

The counting of coup will never end,
and the doves are shot with the olive in their mouths.

Quilt

Spin backwards till the whine of the centrifuge
rises to a shriek, then cut the fuel line. Down
fly the red and white streamers: down
fly the tinged drops. Above 
you see what you want to see.
Down here, it's all the glass and the quick poison.

Look, just because it's one thing doesn't mean it's not another.
The day sank in smoke and a sweet sour smell
like a wound gone bad. The stars missed their footing:
Someone cranked the wheel
and shook them down the shabby front of heaven.

Look, even now some one is lying
as they lay out the big squares: orange,
the night-dark of eggplant or avocado,
a deep-stirred red to call for justice.
In the end 

a quilt lasts because the woman who sewed the backing
knew or didn't know what she was doing: some quiet lady
in a small Midwestern town,
willing to meet any power of the Kingdom of Hell
armed only with her sewing machine and the right color of thread.

You laugh, but the devil doesn't. He has not 
had a good night's sleep since the last time 
she threaded in the bobbin. Who'd be the Lord of Darkness?
All work and no play. With the rise of Arcturus, and a hint 
of the Borealis, the ground will shake,
and every bridge will fall into its river.

Tidal Flats

I'm dimly aware of not being my own master, that the words I'm saying are funneled through me. Echolalia. Not just the words; the thoughts as well. The longing for freedom as well as the longing for self: it's so deceptive. Neither is what I want: what I want is other people in subjection. Which would be all very well, were it not that holding people in subjection was my final answer, in the game of "let's define evil!" Which might still be very well, if a feeble and scatterbrained old man had any chance of subjecting anyone. As it is, I get to watch everything I've built and heaved up out of the wrack sliding down into the sand again. Wrong again.

And so I try to put the pieces together another way. Suppose I had been building out of love, rather than out of the desire for domination? Well, one is surely a distorted image of the other -- but which of which? And how would I know? And who has time to find out? Because we're far out on the flats, and the tide is coming in.

This absolute conviction that I am wrong is one of the few constants of my life. It is a psychological phenomenon, not a philosophical one. Of course I am convinced of my wrongness: I always have been, and presumably I always will be. Gnawing on that is not going to yield any marrow.

No, I have to turn, and breathe deep, and open my hands. This is the shadow of a day of idleness, that's all. It means nothing. It is sending me no message.

Turn seawards. Let the tide come. Since when have I been afraid of the sea? Not my worst enemy could accuse me of that.

Milk Witch

"TaraxacumOfficinaleSeed" by Greg Hume - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TaraxacumOfficinaleSeed.JPG#/media/File:TaraxacumOfficinaleSeed.JPG

Blowball, cankerwort, doon-head-clock;
I always took dandelions the wrong way.
They were beautiful, I thought. Fierce.
Tougher than the tame grass;
more extravagant. Splinter-headed suns
drooping one day, and the next
(witch's gowan, milk witch)
lifting perfect spheres of white aeronauts,
ready to take to the reckless breeze.
Weeds: they grow where they're not wanted.
Yellow-gowan, Irish daisy, monks-head, puff-ball.
Well, so did I, and I plan to go on
wrecking the lawns of my betters, scattering my seed
wide as the wind will take it.

Five Tips: What To Do If You're A Person Who Can't Save Money

Well, you're not a person who can't save money. But leave that aside for now. For the moment let's think about the problem this way: there are two people wearing your body and living your life and making your decisions. One of them wants to save money and one of them doesn't.

Tip #1: Treat both of these people as fully rational and intelligent. Because they are. There are lots of excellent reasons for spending money. There are good reasons (though fewer) for spending money you don't have. Your spendy self is not a willful unteachable brat. She's a human being with deep and important reasons for doing everything she does. Find out what they are. Find out why she thinks these things are more important than saving money. Honor her intentions. She's not going anywhere. Your solution is going to involve either enlisting her, or tricking her. Enlist her if you possibly can, because it's not as easy to trick her as you might think.

Tip #2: Trick your spendy self if you can. If you have an employer with a savings plan, which lets you save your money before you ever see it, and makes it hard to take the money back out once it's in, then do that.

Tip #3: If you're self-employed, or in debt, that won't work. You're going to have to enlist your spendy self. Get her on your side. Find the moments when she spends too much, and interrogate her about them. Why does this expenditure seem so imperative? What's at stake? Don't treat her like a naughty child. Treat her like an adult. She might be right, after all. But it's likely that you can persuade her that whatever end she's trying to achieve by spending this money -- generally, making somebody happy -- can actually be better served by NOT spending it. Saving that money rather than buying a treat -- that is the treat. You're buying them, and not just yourself, financial room to maneuver. You're buying freedom. You're buying treats to enjoy later.

Tip #4: Realize that they're out to get you. I don't ordinarily encourage this frame of mind, but in this case it's totally appropriate. They are out to get you. The marketers and credit card companies and banks, the media, often even your friends, are all trying to manipulate you into spending money. If you feel like the target of a plot, its because you are. Cultivate paranoia and even a little hatred. This economy is, by design and with full intent, a machine to manipulate you into spending so hard that you have to work ever harder just to keep up, so that you never have time to pause, never have time to think it over, never have room in your life for art or God or love or contemplation. Push back. They'll nickle-and-dime you into submission, if they possibly can. Screw them. That's not what life is for.

Tip #5: Remember, when you're scrimping: you are already this poor. You are not pretending to be poor in order to be rich later. You really are this poor, and by saving twenty percent of what you make -- the bare minimum, for most people, to set up a comfortable retirement -- you are simply facing the facts of your poverty. Face them boldly and fiercely. Be proud of being a person who understands reality and is willing to be real. Do it for yourself, and do it for the people you love. They need your example.

A Facebook Translation

Enorme tronco que arrastró la ola,
yace el caimán varado en la ribera;
espinazo de abrupta cordillera,
fauces de abismo y formidable cola.

El sol lo envuelve en fúlgida aureola;
y parece lucir cota y cimera,
cual monstruo de metal que reverbera
y que al reverberar se tornasola.

Inmóvil como un ídolo sagrado,
ceñido en mallas de compacto acero,
está ante el agua estático y sombrío,

a manera de un príncipe encantado
que vive eternamente prisionero
en el palacio de cristal de un río.

------Jose Santos Chocano, EL SUEÑO DEL CAIMÁN



Dream of the Caiman

Enormous log dragged by the wave—
caiman beached on the river shore:
backbone a broken cordillera,
formidable tail, jaws an abyss.

The sun wraps him in a dazzling aureole—
a seeming mail-coat and heraldry,
a metal monster who shimmers
and whose shimmering lays a sheen.

Unmoving as a sacred idol
girt in a mesh of compact steel,
he lies against the still, dark water

like an enchanted prince
who lives an eternal prisoner
of the river’s palace of glass.


See four other translations, with a wonderful introduction, at Via Negativa.

Asking To Be Born

I did not ask to be born, she said.

But then I thought, that might be expecting too much
even of God. How can He know? Maybe more like

a confirmation when you reach the age of reason.

What age is that?

Well, I guess that's the trouble, she said.
As far as God's concerned, I'm not sure
we ever reach it.

She kissed my arm: her wrist so thin
my thumb met my fingers
at the radial pulse.

Man is born to trouble, she said,
as the sparks fly upward.

On Meeting A Lady

The old courtesy rises like a ghost,
and—though nobility comes first
from the swagger of slaveholders,
and so, by easy stages, to the cast
of landed votes—
yet a lady evokes a gentleman,
and the glamour of the lake;
my hand looks for the pommel of a sword.

The light spills,
unruly, from your eyes; the world leans.
Peasants born of peasants, no share really
in gallantry; our part was the harvest and the whip.
Still, I take your hand, square my shoulders,
long for ancestry and colonnaded walks.
Oh, I would take slaves for this!
That's the sad truth, I think:
history writ small.

Soon Now

I have not wanted to walk in the way of accumulation. But it is the way I fall into, being by nature wary and deliberate. I begin most days conscientiously studying whatever language I have in hand, reviewing flashcards -- thousands of flashcards, now -- and doggedly reading my twenty pages. And I set thresholds for buying and selling stocks, and watch the rise and fall of prices. I track my exercise and my domestic tasks. I am like those ants you see, carrying grains of sand to excavate tunnels and build hills. Any casual passer-by might demolish a life's work.

Venus and Jupiter hang a while in the west, these evenings, while the moon falls behind them. They shine over the garage roof. When we're all asleep, the raccoons step cautiously there, and pause a while to consider. They are as convinced as we are that the place belongs to them: the fact that the ground-apes nest in their basement doesn't trouble them. It's a good place to watch the stars, and a staging area for raiding nests or collecting the neighbor's chickenfeed. They gaze a while at Venus, through the tall bamboo, while raccoon-ambitions run through their minds. Soon they will achieve their hearts' desire. Soon life will be right. Soon they will be content.

I wash an apple, my thumbs skidding over the smooth skin. I think a lot about food, these days. The Fat Nutritionist put me on to Ellyn Satter. She has a little set-piece about normal eating, and it actually made me tear up, the other day. It sounded so lovely, so impossible. To feed oneself faithfully. It sounded like a fairy tale to me. 

I will find out where she has gone
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Such things, of course, are not for you and me. We were born for irritation and discontent; for fiddling with latches and broken zippers; for hearing dance music in the distance; for waking up to find ourselves old.

I lift the apple and breathe the faint scent of its skin. Soon. Soon now.

Soon, but what? That, they don't tell me.

Interlude: The Moon And Venus

How fast it can all crumble! And I realize there was never much there, after all. But I'm lost on a bare plateau, in the gray wind, trying to assemble myself and failing. But I can't go on putting off the reckoning. This is silly: it's always been silly. I have the advantage now, anyway, of being able to put aside the pretense that I'm in control or know what I'm doing. That, at least, is one hag that's no longer riding.

First of all I'm going to need to get some sleep, some real sleep. For weeks now I've been waking after four or five hours, and walking my mind in circles about whatever most frets me at the moment. I need to stop that somehow. Everything collapses, without sleep: ordinary intelligence and prudence disappear, and what remains is a paper thing, like a huge wasp's nest, dropping shreds of itself as it stumbles from wanting to fearing and back again. I shamble on, against the gray wind or with it, but I might as well be still. There is no chance, none whatever, of arriving anywhere I want to be, by this means.

Eight fingers and two thumbs: adding carefully, I come up with ten. That still seems to work. And the person I was before has left inscriptions. Not all of them legible, but I do have some guidance. At this point one is supposed to call upon gods or friends for help, I suppose: but I've had enough of the agendas of others. I'll work this out for myself. So a nice deep breath, here. Not too much longer, now. This is an inherently unstable state: it won't last.

And last night the slender Moon and Venus were a blessed relief: still there, still beautiful, lingering after sunset in the West. I had almost thought the sky would be blank, a vapid darkening screen. But it wasn't. It never is. We will do fine.

Day Unwrapped

If the whole day 
lay unwrapped
unpromised
trifled by the breeze 
and free to kiss

if one deep breath 
found ribs 
at ease to fan themselves 
like brand new playing cards
and flowered from the spine

then my hands 
would settle to your hips
like curious birds
my lips would find
three places 

where your throat demands
three murmured passwords.
They would unlock
a box of iron, one of silver,
and then a box of red shot-laced with gold.

The Man with the Lantern

Lori Witzel linked to this fabulous series of accounts of the Man in the Moon, which I knew little of. My Man with the Lantern is a recurrent image I have upon falling asleep: not quite a dream, I think, though it might have come from a dream originally. I am far underground in a system of branching tunnels, and ahead of me is a man carrying a lantern. He appears and disappears, as he goes around corners, but I'm always able to follow the lantern-light on the walls, whether I can see him or not. He half turned once and he was Dave Bonta, but I think that was a nonce avatar: he can probably take whatever form is handy. I imagine he's been Diogenes as well. He's not usually very distinct. 

He is patiently searching: stopping sometimes and scrutinizing the walls or the ceiling. I am not. I am not looking for anything in particular, and certainly not for a way out. I am just following him into the dream world.

A dark May morning, heavily overcast and thinking of rain. I am slow: I slept too long this morning, after a night of wandering from bed to couch, in various stages of half-sleep. Duermevela, you say in Spanish, sleepwake, but we seem to have no word for it in English. 

Shaking off intimations of defeat and disaster, the fret of little-mind about its own precious continuity — as if it could care about, or understand, continuities larger than itself! — and finding, at times, a rightness underneath. I have taken to worrying, lately, in an uncharacteristic, unattractive, and mostly unfruitful way. Not a habit to encourage. No. Return to the sky: bright or gloomy, dry or wet. If I spend too much time indoors I start to believe in a world little enough to understand, a world of sense, a world that can be accounted for and rendered into credits and debits. That won't do.

Hedge Duff

These wood shavings I've accumulated so carefully over a lifetime: a handful of curls, blackened with age. I used to offer them as unimaginable treasure: and I never understood why so few people were anxious to receive them.

But now I understand, vividly and completely, that I have nothing, nothing whatever to give. My poverty goes far beyond what I imagined. I've run up debts it would take lifetimes to pay.

So stop, step back a little, consider. The soap in my palms, and the warm water. The click of a dog's nails on a wooden floor, and the piping of birds in the thicket. The shadows of tree leaves falling on the leaves of the hedge; the shadows of both on the ground; and in their weaving, the small creatures escaping, or not escaping, the chickens.

And these shavings I've gathered? Well, they might serve to start a cook-fire, or they might add a little bedding for the chickens. Oh, Dale, you've listened to the voices in your head for way too long, poor soul. 

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.

So. Give up what you have gathered. Shave and wash your face. Or better yet, go back to bed and finish the sleep you've held at arm's length for decades. There are dreams there, waiting to show you things you've been unable, or unwilling, to see. Staying awake doesn't give you a magic ability to choose which dreams will come.

All this time, and all this debt you've acquired, and you still want credit for something? No. Go to sleep, dear, and meet the man with the lantern. Wander under the world's roof for a while. Listen to whatever music they have there, in the light that comes through net after net of leaves, the light that falls from lip to lip all the way down to the criss-cross tunnels. You have nothing to give. But they weren't going to receive you because of your gifts anyway. They're going to receive you because that's the way they are.

Eld Inlet

Belly of canvas over the lurching gunwale
and black sweatshirt curved round breast and head:
you sucked like a hero, three months old,
determined to thrive. The Wolf caught the wind
in its teeth and shook it. Spray rose slow
and suddenly slapped us in the face, but you
were not about to unlatch. You scowled at the weather,
red-browed, and nosed in deeper. The air scoured
us, cloud-white above and foam-white below,
ragged water in greens and grays. No memory
further than this, no landfall or departure:
only your indomitable rooting and the hammer of the waves.

Dispensations

Over on Facebook, in response to a post of Marly Youmans re a Washington Post article re the extinction of poetry citing the census bureau's Survey of Public Participation in the Arts:

Holy cow! We're almost as popular as jazz? That's exciting.... Interesting to read the survey: the only reliable evidence for poetry's ballyhooed death that I've seen. Still, as with all surveys, it's important to see exactly what they're measuring. What's declining in a straight line is the number of people who answer "yes" to the question, "did you read any poetry last year?" What it suggests to me is that the number of people who read poetry *as a duty* is dropping. That is, there's a dwindling number of Americans who feel that they can't count themselves as educated unless they read a bit of poetry. It is an indicator of what's happening to poetry-reading generally, but only a vague one. I suspect that if you were measuring the number of people who would answer "yes" to "do you ordinarily read poetry in the course of week"? you'd see a quite different graph.

What I really like about the poetry-reading world, as I know it, is that there is almost no one in it for the wrong reasons. People read poetry nowadays, not because there's any cachet to it, but simply because they like it. And that is probably very good for poetry, however bad it may be for poetry sales.

In the meantime, my carapace hardens, and my back curves: my delicate feelers grow ever longer and more gracefully from their pediments. As my powers of hearing and sight dwindle, my other senses become more acute: I have never been better at telling which ants are from friendly hills, and which from hostile ones. And I seem to be ramifying: as I listen to music, in the evenings, I can feel my spirit branching and dividing, opening new channels, budding into new leaf. I am subsiding, apparently, backwards, into the kingdoms from which we came. I'm content, and more than content. The moon rises enormous, fifty minutes later every night, and I can hear its breathing, which is something that ordinarily only mosses and lichens can do. These dispensations are not, of course, for my benefit. I'll be called for something.

Not Silly Enough

So I tried to read Fifty Shades of Grey, but I got bored after a dozen pages, and then the library wanted it back, because there were a zillion more holds on it. I returned it without regret. It was not so poorly written as some people said. It was just a romance, written in the predictable prose typical of the genre; what I read was unremarkable.

It was silly, of course. Most books are. Most people are. We want silly things. We want the world to be other than it is. We want there to be someone young and gorgeous, who at age twenty nine has a hundred thousand employees -- I may be getting my numbers wrong here, but you get the picture -- and who sees us, not as commonplace, but as extraordinarily attractive. We want our attraction in return to be unambiguous and uncontrollable, something that sweeps us (and our scruples) away in a grand flood. That would be marvelous.

It's the basic plot of the romance novel, from Jane Eyre on: someone from a higher, more authentic, more intense, higher-class world (however we conceive of that; the variations are endless, depending on one's taste and training) will notice that we are special, pluck us out of a tedious low-class world that is blind to our wonderfulness, and bring us into theirs. Where we will shine with the brightness that was always there, but never properly seen.

It's a good plot. It has deep roots, and it's based on a truth that we really don't want to lose hold of. We are, in fact, special and precious, we are radically undervalued, and a world that would appreciate us is possible. These things are all true, and keeping them central is worth a little silliness.

So the silliness is not the problem. The problem, really, is that it's not silly enough. It doesn't say, "what would the world that valued me really look like? What would I really have to do, so that someone -- anyone, master of empires or no -- could see what is extraordinary in me? What perception would I have to cultivate, in order to be overwhelmed by my desire for somebody -- anybody -- outside the covers of a book or the frame of an LCD screen? We need to build that world, to expose that extraordinary interior, and to cultivate that perception.

I don't know where Fifty Shades was going to go: I didn't really think it was going to go anywhere that would help me with any of those three tasks. If I were to propose an objection to it, it would only be that it wasn't silly enough to be really helpful. It proposes a world that's just a little different from ours, an exposure just a little more extensive, a perception just slightly shifted. That is not going to do it.

Now contrast my friend Larissa Brown's Beautiful Wreck: a book that understands how different the world would need to be, how sharpened and cleared one's senses would have to be, how hard one would have to work, before such a narrative could really make sense. Now there is a romance novel worth reading. 

Happily Ever After

A new morning, after a good night's sleep: a strong sense of convalescence. (A word I've never really thought about: I guess it parses to "a coming together of strength"?) Anyway, after many days of short or broken sleep, it is a blessing I know how to value. To close my eyes with no burning, and no sense of uneven relief!

Hammering away at the forge. "It flows from the shoulder; there's a sort of music to it, when you do it right," says Coll. I've always wondered where Lloyd Alexander got that from; if he'd ever actually held a blacksmith's hammer. Anyway. Feeling strong and well. It's possible to feel strong and well. One forgets. 

We drove yesterday on old ragged highways in the hills beyond Corbett and Troutdale, some of it raw with logging, some of it industrial farmland, some of it pretty enough second-growth and pasture. We came across a number of old rusted out trailers and cars, VW buses rusted to earth color and covered with moss. Also church camp after church camp. It's a country suited to the ill-considered, semi-spiritual impulse to bolt and hide. 

I start to mull over retirement, in all its senses. Another ten or fifteen years, and I might be ready to live by some mossy rock, someplace where I could walk in the woods every day. Martha and I -- in what we now recognize as, if not depressive thinking, at least depression-related thinking -- had decided to live in town, rather than out in the country: because we knew we couldn't stand to love a place and then see it overrun with tree-cutters and 7-11 builders, paving everything in sight and stringing wires all over the sky. But the longer you live, the less you need to worry about what twenty years will bring. Even odds that we'll get so far, even now, and decreasing as we go. We might find a quiet corner yet, in view of a river or a mountain or two, and live happily ever after. We might.

Sclerosis

The answer came to me at about three, this morning:
nothing. There is nothing to be done. My work 
lies within these bounds: it is to be as kind
as sense and time allow; to think as hard 
and as generously as I know how; 
to meet each person's eyes 
with an honest gaze. Such commitments as I've made
to the grand world, honor them; but make no more. 
It is one of the corners of middle age (a land 
full of corners): the world is no longer mine to fix.
I am drifting out of it. I belong more and more
to the forgotten times, times that no longer bend
when I push them: they and I are setting, hardening. 
We become the past: the play of light is history 
caressing our long stone faces: the patina
already gathering, the features
already blurring.

Flaw

Sometimes, returning to a zipper, I find
I have forced its teeth to mesh above a fault
and what looks like a life is a long improvisation,
ready to split and open at a sideways thrust.

Even unzipping to the fault is a risk:
there's no way to know how bad the wound --
teeth irreparably bent, twisted, even broken? --
and how to get the runner past at all?

Still, I advertise myself as clever with my fingers,
strong when called for and deft, quick or slow
depending on the tempo of the need:
if not me, then who? So I set to work,

working the little interlocking teeth,
peering, kneading, forcing when I must,
fitting bones to sockets (that I can't really see),
guessing my way, against a rise of panic

that everything is broken, nothing fits again,
that zippers all are false, and nothing holds its form.
Then there is a shift, a smoothening, an ease, and suddenly
the runner slides, like a fish into lake.

The flaw vanishes, leaving behind
a faint kink, a hint of weakness
easily ignored; forgotten, maybe,
until the next strong, unconsidered pull.

Desmoronadizo

Morning: I left you sleeping with the daylight on your face. In the window, not-quite blue contends with not-quite white for a mastery neither seems to care much about: the day feels flaccid, unstrung. We are tired of trying, I think. We need to get out into the hills and the free air.

It is the sort of day that makes you question every decision you ever made: when the fact that you have attained the age of fifty seven without having learned to play the castanets or read Arabic is clear evidence of a wasted life. When the sun does push through the clouds, it arrives with a metallic, ominous glare that's more like summer than spring. My uneasiness increases.

My life is crumbling underneath. It was never built on stable ground -- not something to blame myself for: we all of us start building where we find ourselves -- but I do wonder what happens when it gives way entirely. Not necessarily anything bad. Something new, perhaps. I'm ready for something new.

In the meantime, the dogwood flowers magnificently, and the Spanish bluebells continue their reconquista of the lawn. The solitary crow that visits us now sits in the maple and practices her new call: a clear, ringing "tok!" like a percussionist's wood blocks. Maybe she's been listening to the flickers.

My hands are stronger than ever. I am full of love and tenderness for my clients, my friends, my family. I am deeply ignorant and impossibly young, and it's April.