A Hiatus of Sorts

Occasionally I have the good sense to leap off the merry-go-round that is my current life.  Having finished the semester, final and all, I decided to do as little as my Calvinist conscience will allow.  That, and eat every cookie, candy and cake that mysteriously landed on my plate.  I've succeeded spectacularly; at least by my terms.  In the meantime I whittled down a mound of paperwork (only to make room for more), sent out a few holiday cards, slept without an alarm, co-babysat Most Beloved Niece No. 1, and made progress in the Can-This-Marriage-Be-Saved? Sweepstakes.  While I don't do Top 10 lists I will take a few minutes for highlights (and their opposites):

1.  wrote a libretto, "The Diamond Necklace" (based of the Guy de Maupassant story) that became the full-length opera, "Thus the Whirligig of Time Brings in its Revenges"
2.  celebrated with Fred Ho who overcame late stage colon cancer and wrote the book about it, "Diary of a Cancer Warrior"
3.  worked my way to an A in Calculus I
4. worked with a great team to launch the Congo in Harlem III film festival
5.  attended Daughter No. 1's wedding
6.  paid off the mortgage and other outstanding debts
7.  had a not-to-be-missed vacation in Ireland with my family

I am more grateful than you know for all the above and more.  The glue to anything that I consider a success is the loving support of my best friends, and there are many, who not only endured cauliflower ear when I bitched, but cheered me on unceasingly when I doubted.

On the other hand there seems to have been more than the usual amount of serious physical illness, depression and heartbreak, financial catastrophe and trouble with the law with far too many people I love and care about.  Were I Empress of the Known Universe I would wave my magic wand and banish that pain.  It comes as no surprise that I'm not, and that there isn't one, so I will do what a person can do which is to listen with hope, advise without expectation, and provide what help I can.

It's the end of the week.  It's the end of the year.  To our collective future in whatever form it appears.

I Was Gonna Write You a Letter But I Wanted To Be More Clever

Holidays and funerals.  That's when middle age hits me.  All the empty seats at the table.

If we're lucky each of us has a twin to get us through this one and only life.  Sometimes it is the great love of your life, your soulmate; sometimes it's someone who has known you as long as you've known yourself, a sibling.  Mine is my older brother, Nick, who among other things is a savant of American music.  What I know of John Lee Hooker, Yusuf Lateef, McCoy, DeeDee Bridgewater, Gary Bartz I first learned from him.  So when, on a beautiful springlike Friday, I had my office door open and I caught a whiff of a song I thought I knew, but if I didn't damn sure wish I did, I ran upstairs and borrowed my niece's keyboard and with what is left of my years of piano lessons plucked out the first few bars of the chorus and before my voice could get too flat (talk about not being able to carry a tune if someone put it in a bag for me) I called Nick and sang the notes to him.  In seconds he says:  Tevin Campbell.  Can We Talk?

Now, let me go, he says, you interrupted my Hawkeyes game. You owe me one. I do, indeed.

Hope your Thanksgiving was as wonderful as ours.  Cheers to the NY Misfits, Jing Ma and Li Xiaxi, Hill, Helene and Baby James.

Saturday Poetry: The Circumcision (excerpt)

Yes, it has been a while since I've written.  I've been carried away by the beauty of sentence such as the following:  f'(x) = the limit as h goes to 0 of f(x +h) minus f(x) all over h.  See what I mean?  Sheer poetry, eh?

If not.  Here is some:

  

At each day's end we convened

to pack our mouths with food.

Daily we came to be replenished.

Daily we came to wound.

Mother's anger subsumed our spite

as the language we hurled

made the food that was served,

bile.

My brother,

blessed with firstborn's love,

free as any boy who

comes in late

and knows he's safe,

he jumped the cat but missed the tread.

(The precious carpet fibers slicked.)

He fell.  She laughed.

He smacked the floor.

She laughed again.

He knocked her beer off the baluster

sullen, ready for war.

There's dinner, she said

you're late.

Who put that fuckin' thing there?

It's always in the way!

Who needs this fuckin' beer?

She looked at him.

He, at her.

I looked for shelter in my plate.

The baby chewed her corn.

There were no words for what

my father did not say.

She jerked the hose

and sucked her teeth.

Clean it up, she said.

My brother snorted when

Mother stepped down.

Clean it up.  Now.

Without Irony: Somebody Think of the Children

In our age of moral ambiguity (which age hasn't been an age of ambiguity?) we welcome an event, even a tragic one, that presents a bright, clear demarcation of Right vs. Wrong.  We can express our outrage without looking over our shoulder fearing that we've offended someone else's balkanized state of mind.  We can be sure; be right.

For a time the soul-searching aftermath of September 11th provided that moral relief.  Now it is the Penn State rape (not sex abuse, for chrissakes) scandal.  I cannot, and I'm not alone in this by any means, stop reading about it.  Sportswriters, clergy, common people young and old, mental health professionals, fathers and mothers, athletes pro and amateur, all speak to it.  I've read commentary from atheists who long, just for once, to believe in hell; and from the doubting faithful who are one step closer to letting go of God.

What I will add is that I am grateful that I am part of a culture that is still horrified by adults who have sex (whether by violent force or seductive coercion) with children.  I've been to or know of places where that is not so.

And, too:  I predict Joe Paterno will be dead within a year.

A supplementary commentary by Claire Potter, on her blog Tenured Radical.

And this, by ESPN.com's Howard Bryant, Penn State's failure of power.

 

Marriage Is Not for the Faint-Hearted

This will be brief:  No pretty pictures.  No videos.  No links.  No poetry.

I am in the throes of the derivatives of inverse functions and logarithms.  I liken it to my old brain being shoved through some space-time membrane into the future only to wind up in the 17th century.  Or, Where the Hell Am I Going and Haven't I Been Here Before?  It hurts.  It really hurts.  Brain cells are committing suicide.  Thoughts come to the door and don't ring the bell.

This morning (not for the first time) I realized that I am my mother.  And that I have often treated Husband No. 1 like my mother treated me.  I owe him and this marriage an apology.

And with no further commercial interruption we return to our regularly scheduled farce, "Taking Calculus I at 57 Years of Age:  An Effing Disaster."

Ciao, bella.

Home and Hearth, Kith and Kin

This is where my husband's family lives.  Around this oven -- an Aga cooker.  My beloved mother-in-law bakes scones and soda bread in it.  Everyone makes tea.  The rashers, black pudding and eggs are kept warm there.  The family gathers around it and they talk and eat and eat and talk.  Alongside the Aga is a television where Husband No. 1's father watches the occasional rugby game.  His mother now boots up her laptop in this room after a breakfast or a lunch or a tea or a dinner, and offers it to us to check our e-mail or she herself updates her Facebook status or confirms the flight to Tenerife.  The children run in an out like kids do when the outdoors is as safe as the indoors.  And when they fight or fall; they come to this room dominated by the cooker to get hugs, sweets and adjudication.

This is where we are much of the time when we go home.  Everybody talks what with a table of 7 or 8 adults with decades of life, several marriages, 2 continents and a small busful of children between them.  Mostly I listen.  Because when you are dialectially outnumbered (forgive me that awful pun) you can't keep up.  I'm lucky if I can understand every fifth word.  Doesn't matter, it leaves me time to read bodies and to imagine what it is to be Irish.

Or, in particular, to be this Irish family which has owned land and a farmstead in County Longford for hundreds of years.  Being Catholic they have also been deprived of some of that land and if you drive a few minutes up the road my brother-in-law can tell you how the Protestants were deeded this acreage or that as reward for preserving English dominion.  Oh, how I got it, how easy it is to understand the legacy of reflexive animus that remains even though Ireland became wildly prosperous on its own terms, and despite the financial debacle, will never be either as poor or as oppressed as it had been before the early 1970's.

In our country, the stranglehold of inequitable land distribution and therefore the inability to prosper en masse, forced the greatest internal migration this nation's ever seen, African-Americans heading to the industrialized, urban north.  The Irish didn't have that as an out; it took the Famine to drive them here.

And what do you get when you have two disenfranchised peoples -- African-Americans and the American Irish -- competing for power and place?    The Draft Riots of the 1860's, Boston's social convulsions over busing in the 1970's, the affirmative action battles in urban fire and police departments and the building trades, and the slow and interrupted increase of dynastic African-American mayors in Northern cities.


In other words, fraternal enemies.

Saturday Poetry: Beverly and Omar

from Turn Left at the Dead Dog:

On the checkerboard of their desire

Beverly and Omar watched their steps

They have loved one another one day more than forever.

Omar, Jamaican

came to the shipyard and found work as a welder.

He is black, burned by the years of kindred propane

and a bitter wife.

Beverly is the American Venus.

She washes her hands, even between meals.

The moment she hears Omar coming upstairs,

the phone call’s over.

He walks by the boss’s office

where Beverly rules.

He won’t even look at her

while she keeps her fingers poised over the keyboard.

For a moment forgetting

what the invoice says.

Dinner at the Mouth of the Ratty

Husband No. 1 on his never-ending quest for enlightenment came across a phrase "pedigree collapse" that will be our Word-O'-the-Day until Niece No. 1 wakes up and starts with the calvacade of butt jokes that she's so partial to (for now).  At first I thought it had something to do with the modern Republican Party, the meanest bunch of antediluvian, opportunistic Know Nothings I've ever seen in this country and believe me, growing up in Iowa, I've seen plenty.  (And godknows there are stupider groups in this country, but for sheer cake-taking for being as mean as you are unctuous, the modern GOP and its trademarked subsidiary, the Tea Party, takes the win.)  But, I digress.

It turns out that "pedigree collapse" doesn't mean the above, nor does it mean that there's been so much inbreeding that your line is rendered sterile (or am I being redundant?) it simply means that if one goes back far enough genealogically, you will find a relation.  Yeah, yeah we are all descendants of Eve.  Or, closer to home, there is the distinct possibility that I am related to a Beirne from County Kerry and don't know it.

Any excuse will do to find myself in Ireland one day in August at a Bunratty Castle, a 13th century fortress that's now a tourist attraction instead of a Viking or a Norman target.  (I can hear some of my American brethren:  "Doris, is it safe to go inside?  How do we know there aren't terrorists there?)  We, my in-laws, my husband and I bought tickets not only for a tour but also for that evening's meal compleat with mead ( a honey alcohol brew), the ubiquitous brown bread, soup and slabs of ribs.  It's all in fun, what I imagine they do in places like Disneyland or on a cruise.  You're packed in a banquet hall pretending that the young girl dressed in a low-cut, empire-waisted dress serving you is really a lady-in-waiting instead of the tight jeaned, bespectacled working girl smoking a filterless cigarette texting whoever as she passed you hours earlier on her way to work.  The singers sing.  The dancers dance.  The master of ceremony cajoles us and invites us in on the game.  (I am not one for sales pitches or organized groups.  The minute I sense that a live being is trying to manipulate my feelings in service to The Cause my arms cross my chest either literally or metaphorically.  A corollary:  I hate the social convention of "give yourself a hand".  Why should I clap?  I didn't do nothin' but pay for the ticket and keep my eyes open for a performance. )  Once he's deduced that we are his, and not until then because he wants you to want to play, he appoints a King and Queen.  With the typical Irish feck ya twist that night's anointed couple were English.  And not top-drawer English either.

So we're eating.  The only utensil you're given is a knife to spear the meat; everything else you eat with your hands.  You can have as much mead poured in your chalice as you want.  Puts you in the mood for the evening's business which is to catch a transgressor and have the royalty decide his fate.  That night's sacrificial schlub was a newlywed.  I don't know if being newly married mattered, but it certainly helps to have an inmate who's already poised for humiliation.  I don't even remember what the jacked up offense was; what I do remember was his growing doubt about the wisdom of having consented to role playing, not knowing what was coming.  Finally, the MC asks us, the lords and ladies of Bunratty to advise the King and Queen as to his fate -- the dungeon or death?  Torture or mercy?

And without hesitation the crowd roars for his death.  Husband No. 1 and I looked at each other with one raised eyebrow each as if to say:  Didja see that?

You Foodies Get on my Last Nerve

Anybody who's known me for more than a minute knows that 1) I don't like to cook and 2) I can't cook.  (I wrote last year about what happens in my family when I just suggest that I might want to make dinner.)  I won't go into my every-dysfunctional-family-is-dysfunctional-in-its-own-way creation myth.  After all these years, I'm not sure it's relevant and I'm always one for giving friends and family the unsolicited advice that they can overcome this and overcome that.  Obviously, cooking will forever be in the "why bother?" column for me and it's high time I admit it.

Yet, I can't quite get over the knawing (to use a masticatory word) feeling that not wanting to or liking to cook is a moral failing.  And like any culinary doubter, I go back and forth about the existence of a benevolent Home Chef.  Godknows I've had bursts of energy where I think I'm finally going to have 2 skillets going at 6 o'clock 5 days a week.  But then I go back to watching potatoes sprout, fresh basil go to seed, and ground turkey turn green.

So, when I tell you that Husband No. 1 who, as you may remember, loves to cook, does it extraordinarily well and never finishes a meal without saying to no one in particular, "Damn, that's good!" to which he gets a chorus of amens and splayed mashed potatoes, when I tell you that he went out and bought 4 fish from the fish market and cooked 3 -- what would Jesus do? -- and there was one fish left in the refrigerator and my better angels got to me and told me to do something with it before the whole house caved in from the smell, you know this will be a story without a happy ending.

Some context:  I am back in school a mere 30 years since I got my one and only degree.  I am taking Calculus.  As with too many momentous decisions in my life I did not think this through.  This summer when I was digging flower beds, sharpening knives, quaffing Jameson's and bitching about my legs turning into tree trunks, I should have been reviewing pre-Calculus and trig and throw in some algebra while yer at it.  For the one class that I'm taking now is truly and unremittingly kicking my ass.  I mean, I had to purchase a graphing calculator that's got a 400 page manual fer chrissakes.  Mercy.


Ye Olde Student is now always in a panicked hurry.  The other day I was home alone, and for those who enjoy that kind of thing, you know that you get into The Zone.  Floating through your own space multi-tasking, focussed, efficient.  I decided to cook the last fish thinking, I'll surprise everyone!  They'll get home today and instead of seeing empty potato chip bags strewn all over the kitchen they'll see demurely crossed cutlery and a plate cleaned of everything but fish tail sitting on the kitchen table, the remnants of a Healthy Home-Cooked Meal.  Oh my, they'll say, that woman can do anything!  So, I glide through the kitchen, pre-heat the oven, spray the pyrex, salt the dish, chop some onions, add a dollop of oil and juice while opening my mail and starting a fresh pot of decaf -- Oh Julia, I said to myself, you are too much!


Then I marched out to my office to do battle with some polynomials.  For one whole hour.


When I smugly waltzed back into the kitchen it stank like a trawler.  And when I opened the oven and took It out It was black.  (I see a red door and I want it painted black ...)  The onion had turned into something that resembled a bouillon cube and what was supposed to be baked fish looked like a cheap shoe left out in the rain.  Why bother to open all the windows, I reasoned, just fess up when they get home.

I did.  (My lame excuse was that I bake chicken for about an hour.)  And then I had to sit there while Younger Sister and Husband No. 1 popped their eyes back into their respective heads and lectured me about the difference between a few minutes and one hour.  (Will this be on the test?)  Now, of course, I will never hear the end of it and come Thanksgiving right after the obligatory, "Damn, that's good!" there will be, "Did I ever tell you the time She (thumbs jerked in my direction while I keep my head down and shovel brussels sprouts in my mouth) tried to cook fish?"


It's official:  I give up.  Just FedEx me home-cooked meals.

To Which I Say AMEN!!!!

I'm getting to the stage that in the world of social networking it's time to "sell all my possessions and move to a smaller place".  See my friend Taylor Ho Bynum's manifesto about our contemporary chains.
 

Saturday Poetry: A High School Education

Comes fall and with it

cool weather and a

pubescent flock wafting by.

The thing itself, school

We know they'll learn,

it fails them.

Today they don't care why.

They just come.

I wonder about

the boys who masquerade their eyes with Kangols

or nylon do-rags adorned with kited tails.

Except for those who wear the veil

all the girls are uniformed in

too tight jeans.

I see how they swivel

in their denim corsets

eyeballing the demi-men

through lacquered bangs.

Before the guards hustle the chicks inside

they signal to each other.

There is much to tell

in the corners where they hide.

We Ourselves

Will you believe me when I say that I've been meaning to "drop by"?  That ever since we returned from Husband No. 1's motherland on August 30th (via Boston, no less) that I've meant to "get over there" and "share my slides"?  So, may I be excused as I pick up twigs, branches and the rest of the post-Irene flotsam, detox from a steady diet of pork and potatoes, open my mail and cuss copiously because I forgot to pay the one bill that racks up a 19% interest rate not to mention a finance charge.  Well, my friend BS didn't and she called me on my BS the other day and said, "you told us you were going and now you have to tell us what happened."

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

I had a good time.  The end.

There.  Checked off The List.  It's Saturday.  At minimum I owe you a poem.  (I've got an inexhaustible supply, trust me.)  I'll post a poem next.  But, I swear I will share Eyelerland (Neice No. 1's pronounciation) stories.

I Will Soon Be on Holiday in the Emerald Isle

Some time last year Husband No. 1 and I had the bright idea to take Niece No. 1 to Ireland.  She calls her female cousins (some who have visited us in the States) her "sisters" and it was time to return the gesture.  The pricing structure of airline travel and the fact that we only see Husband No. 1's family every few years led us to book a 10 day visit, which for grown-ups who love nothing better than sitting around drinking Jameson's and telling lies is just fine.  For a 5 year old separated from the mother with whom she is joined at the hip?  Not so much.  I had my misgivings when we booked the dates; and as departure approaches I have flashes of a whining, petulant, forlorn, anxious princessa who will insist that she Wants To Go Home!!!

Now I, who has for better or worse 2 kids under my belt, can be the Tom DeLay of Mothers and am quite prepared to whine, petulate (if such a verb exists), and holler back until she accepts that she might as well go outside and milk some cows because we are not driving to Dublin just yet.  Husband No. 1 will be upset.  First he will accuse me of child abuse.  (Picture me snorting.)  Then he will try to set up Skype so that Niece No. 1 can talk to her mother any time she wants, and we will be treated to the spectacle of her bleary-eyed mother (since there's a 5 hour time difference) alternately weeping and trying to crawl back to bed.  When that doesn't work, La Princessa whose other name is She Who Will Not Be Denied will convince Husband No. 1 to book a flight for himself and her and fly her home on Friday and return to Ireland on Sunday so that we can fly out of Dublin on Tuesday.


As you can tell, in my spare time, I'm always thinking up doomsday scenarios.  Despite myself, I go to the places we are specifically instructed not to go to which is one of the reasons that even after more than 25 years writing poetry and fiction making the work is its own kind of torture for me.  I actually have notes on an opera about Richard Speck, for chrissakes.  Don't think I'll be working on that piece any time soon.

The Interrupters

This documentary will be showing July 29 through August 7 at IFC and Maysles Cinema in NYC:

Saturday Poetry: Girls At the End of the Month

On Saturday, no less!  Were my computer a car it would have been stranded on I-95 yesterday evening with the hood up and steam blasting out of the radiator.  The PC had been on for most of the day and around 6 pm it was oh.  so.  slow.  (I almost resorted to banging my fist on the CPU, and I know better.)  Effing viruses, I started swearing, now I'm gonna have to take this thing in.  Bitch bitch bitch.  Moany moan moan ... Once I realized that the CPU's fan was turning on every few minutes while simultaneously realizing that sweat was pouring down my chest, I figured it out.  Even a PC can get overheated.  (I don't have air conditioning in my office.  Don't want it.  And, most days of the year don't need it.  So, if Husband No. 1 is reading this please wipe that smirk off your face.  Or, as any formidable no-nonsense parochial schoolteacher would say, I'll wipe it off fer ya.)

Well, that's it, I decided.  Workday's over.  Let me go fix a drink and watch a DVD.  I'm currently doing a marathon viewing of Homicide:  Life on the Street.  I didn't have television when the series ran so I knew little or nothing about it.  Having been mesmerized by The Wire, I needed to see David Simon's earlier work.  You can track, just as one would with a fiction writer, the metamorphosis of his ideas and themes, not to mention the actors who moved with him to The Wire.  No. 1 Niece had other ideas.  As any of you who live with children know, you have a Hobbesian Choice:  either make them watch what you're watching and explain why that man and that man and that man is lying on the ground with red red blood fanning out beneath them (this is Homicide, after all) or give it up and watch Coraline for the 20th time.  Too tired to explain the exigencies of street justice, I let her choose a movie.  She chose Dreamworks' Rango.

What a treat!  Dreamworks' films are like Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons.  The writers only pretend that they're writing for kids.  My favorite scene among many is when Rango, who's a chameleon, arrives in Dirt and mimics the other animals' walks.  It's a sly homage to the American western's a-stranger-comes-to-town setup with its stock characters, Gunsmoke's Chester --  Marshal Dillon!  Marshal Dillon! -- and Agnes DeMille's choreography for Copland's ballet, Rodeo.

Apropos of nothing, here's today's poem:

I love this easy work for which

I get paid on the fourth Friday

unlike the men.

Every week, they preen with their money

plans already made to spend it on a couple drinks

a carburetor a girlfriend.

On the way back to the G

I think of what I’ll do

when there she is:

So young black fat from babies

leaning on a streetlight at the corner

the heat of the day still scolding us all.

No pool for her, no cooling soda.

She is glued to the light, craning her neck.

Sweat glistening shorts

cutting into varicose thighs

Ooh, it’s hot she says to nobody at all

and pulls off her shirt.

I am attacked by whiteness

a tattered brassiere against her black

skin exposed in the street

like getting undressed for a bath.

I turn ashamed.

Slowing down, a swaybacked station wagon.

Inside a sober man

whose side locks graze an oily steering wheel

While his eyes swivel like a lighthouse beacon.

He honks the summons.

Saturday Poetry (on Sunday): Prospect Park II

Okay, I know it's Sunday but I have an excuse.  I was here in my office minding my own business yesterday evening coming to the conclusion that I couldn't blame the temperature for my Elderly-Italian-Widow-In-Support-Hose feet.  The weather's been lovely, n'est-ce pas?  No, it's drugs -- the usage of 2 new ones to control my ever spiralling blood pressure since I can't do it myself through my usual Ironclad Discipline (a joke that).  I went back and read the fine print, the "contraindications" (whatever the hell that means) and wouldn't you know that for some people these drugs cause a person's extremities to swell (check) and make the skin sensitive (check).

I'm middle-aged now so not as blithe about personal health as I once was.  Monday I will dutifully call to make an appointment with my internist.  He will tell me what I already know:  stop takin' em and go back to the other pill.  The one that costs 3 times as much.  And you know I will.

New Haven has been much in the news lately -- much of the coverage unflattering and some of it richly deserved.  But, statistics and news reporting can be "wrong" while being factually correct.  The coverage creates an impression that too many parties take a perverse pride in, i.e, that New Haven is this gun-saturated town, this 'hood that's getting off the hook.  And so you have 2 choices and 2 choices only  -- die young or move to the suburbs.  If we keep thinking this way we will keep holding "Stop the Violence" rallies that are temporarily cathartic but ultimately meaningless.  (See arguments against conducting a War on Terror.)  Gun violence is not a monolith and it's not a being.  It, in and of itself can't be stopped.  The economic, statutory, social and psychological conditions which foster this level of violence can be changed but that takes shrewd and courageous political alliance-building and cooperation, it takes targeted economic and development strategies, and it takes the tenacity of the Red Army during The Long March.

I'll end with poetry:

Prospect Park II

That afternoon trip to the Park

was an outing offered

because I berated my daughters

for being too young.

We walked through the meadow

happy to split in two.

Me to smoke and scowl in my Ray-Ban's,

They to prowl among the families,

looking for love, and complaining about

the one they hated all day.

As usual, the men were teamed for soccer.

Some young, some old,

one thin and vain with a severed arm.

He carried a comb in his only hand

and between plays ran it

through his hair which was thin,

like my cigarette.

And I asked myself was he dying, too,

or only full of regret?

When I joined my girls at the far end

they were ready to love.

We wandered until we could go no further

and chose a path that led into the trees

where my shades hastened me

an early dusk,

but not so much that I missed

the men staring at us.

We, a bitter woman and her spawn,

had trespassed their cruising ground.

The men's caroming eyes

begged us to leave.

Holding their hands

I led my daughters forward

into those woods, until winded,

I found a hole in the fence.

Safe on Flatbush I bought ice cream,

a bribe for forgetting, and talked of

all the pretty flowers in the Park,

and weren't we lucky to find

that hole in the fence

so close to the ice cream truck?

Where an incoming hunter started

when he met this chastened flock.

A ewe and her lambs escaping

as he entered to fuck.

Saturday Poetry: New Birth

My poem, "New Birth"  is an homage to Toi Derricotte and her collection, "Natural Birth". There are few enough transcendent moments in life. One was when I heard Toi read -- not read but incant -- from her first book of poetry. There are works that you write, and there are works that insist on being written. "Natural Birth" was one of those books. By the time she did the reading I attended the books had been out for a few years, the experience which forged the poems was decades old.  Yet I watched a now affluent (having married a banker), middle-aged woman be seized by the memories of giving birth when she was a young unmarried woman.

(i.)

The nurses did not

Want me to see her but I

Scream and they relent.

(ii.)

They never look like

You wish

She?, no exception

White where black was meant.

(iii.)

Baby on my tit

In bed motherhood’s a breeze

Nurse brings me my sleep.

Did I Tell You How Much I Hate the Summer?

As you can see from the last post it has been a while since I wrote anything other than a check.  No Saturday Poetry; no commentary on the game of chicken the President and the Republicans are playing; no disquisition on the Casey Anthony trial and what it means about this nation of ours that the life of one white child is of greater import than say a dozen colored children or so it seems judging from the amount of media coverage; no thoughts at all about gay marriage being legalized in New York nor what it must be like to be Yale University and to have raised a reported $4 billion (don't forget that there are probably undocumented donors) during a worldwide recession and what impact that power will have on the governance of the host city it is devouring.  Nope, I have nothing to say about all that.

Instead, I've been watching my feet and ankles swell.  Yeah, it's summer and I hate it.  Hate it.  On the other hand Husband No. 1 hates the winter.  Every time the temperature dares to go below 30 degrees Fahrenheit it's stop the presses time in our house.  Did I tell you, he bellows to no one in particular, that I hate the winter?  Oh.  Really?  The only thing he hates more than winter is south Florida so I guess he is going to have to suck it up and make peace with November through February in the far Northeast.  As for myself, I want to get a doctor's note that temperatures above 65 degrees are Hazardous To My Health and that in order to prolong my life I should be confined to 24 hour bedrest (with internet access of course) and aging eunuchs to fan my weary brow.  Why aging?  I don't want to look at anybody who has a BMI less than 35 right now.

So again I beg off thinking and writing until I can get shoes on my feet.  I'm going to stick with gardening, swearing, drinking and boycotting Woody Allen movies.

Not that my boycott matters at all, but even liberals such as myself have to draw the line somewhere and that somewhere for me came when Allen wooed and wed his own stepdaughter.  (A pause while I once again say Ewwwwww, with mouth downturned and eyes squeezed shut.)  Husband No. 1 and I don't agree on much but we do agree on the immorality of that behavior.  I will have to remember this story the next time I want to tear off his head for plucking my one last (and frayed) nerve:  Husband No. 1 used to attend New York's School of Practical Philosophy.  He liked it.  I was skeptical largely because I found it a little too precious for my tastes what with students addressing each other as lady and gentleman.  (Yo, this America, yawl!)  But, he liked being in the school for its philosophy and we were at that stage in our marriage where individuation was a highly prized trait.  (Now we're at the "Can I borrow that ink-stained shirt that you're too fat to button up?" stage.)  He told me that the Allen/Farrow breakup came up for discussion in his sex-segregated class (another reason I had no interest in the school) and the men were chortling and basically saying what's wrong with that?  Yuk yuk yuk ....  So, Husband No. 1 said to them, since we had only recently been married and at that time our family was comprised of one 42 year old bride who hadn't shown her legs since 1985 and one bee-u-ti-ful big-eyed clothes horse.  Said Husband says to his chums:  What if I left my wife to run off with 16 year old [D]aughter No. 1?  That shut them the fuck up and not another word was said about the matter.  So, I owe Husband No. 1 a big kiss.  Plus, Woody Allen hasn't been funny or particularly interesting for years.  On those counts alone I can do without him, but it's nice to have a dollop of moral outrage to reinforce shunning him.

Roman Polanski's also on my Do-Not-Watch List, and that's a harder deprivation because I'm sure his work is worth seeing.  But I'll continue my small protest against pedophiles and rapists whose actions are excused because they are famous or powerful.  It will take my mind off the heat.

Saturday Poetry: The Circumcision (excerpt)

My brother was circumcised twice.

At first, the days after birth

the midwife held his penis between

thumb and finger.

Tongue protruding, brow knitted she

delivered him his second knife-edged cut.

Our mother, tired after an arduous labor

watched while her firstborn throbbed in anguish.

(He had yet to know shame.)

And for solace she fed him her

generous breast.

Food for her baby,

salve for the pain.

Please Don't Make Me Eat Shit and Tell Me It's Mud Pie

I've been following the Rte. 34 East and West developments. Last night I went to a public meeting about the 34 East development, Downtown Crossing. As a member of the New Haven Urban Design League I agree that there's an opportunity for more innovative, smart planning to make the entire development an asset to the city.  Forgive me if I'm not convinced that the development is an asset to other than the developer, Carter Winstanley, and Yale New Haven Hospital.  (I don't even know if the taxable real estate will remain City property in decades to come.  One of the great selling points about the project is the tax income projections.  What prevents the city from selling the land to one of the 2 major non-profits in town and rendering it non-taxable?)

As a private citizen who lives very near the land involved I'm disheartened by the lack of thorough anthropological and sociological perspective on the project's impact.  I'm not naive: municipal development is expensive and inherently compromising; and, developers are in it for the profit. I got that. But, believe me when I tell you that while the death of the young and promising is tragic, I do not need to hear one more time about how a "medical student" or a "doctor" got killed near the hospital as the impetus for planning safer streets and calming traffic.

What I need to hear is how is the City going to deal with the possibility of a "golden ghetto" being formed between 2 working-class and poor neighborhoods?  How does a Hill resident "cross the divide" and why would they?  For a job in the knowledge-based sector?  For services and merchandise downtown? Will this development be the impetus for affordable middle-class housing nearby or will those who can buy in Hamden, Madison, Guilford as they do now?  How will Downtown Crossing contribute to neighborhood cohesion and all-around economic development for the entire city not just the research and medical sectors?

Until those questions are honestly answered -- and the answers don't have to be what I want to hear, they just have to be the truth -- I'm not buying.

Saturday Poetry: Maxim

The children of unhappy mothers
Grow up slow.
It takes them so long to do anything at all:

To eat with spoon and fork, to walk, to talk,
To potty train, read and write or
Sleep through the night.
Or spend an evening without a sitter.
To get a driver’s license or
Pay back the loan.
Or leave home.

My Friend, Guitarist Matt Nichols

For your Memorial Day weekend listening pleasure! He has 2 great CDs: CLASSICAL ELECTRIC GUITAR and GONE. Listen to more at http://matthewnichols.com/

His composition:

Make Concubinage Legal in America

In the spirit of like-I-have-this-time-to-waste, I have been reading accounts tawdry and, ehem, from the paper of record, serious, about the projectile vomit which is the Schwarzenegger-Shriver scandal.  (And I know I don't have to link to nuthin' because you have, too.)  Things have gotten so bad in the Republican Presidential field that Obama may win a second term in part because the opposing team is so damn bad.  (Remember when Republicans were all a-twitter with proposing constitutional amendments so that a certain Austrian-born naturalized citizen could be eligible to run for President?  Oh where oh where was Orly Taitz then?)

Daniels dropped out -- I sure his wife, Adultress Cheri, Repentant Cheri, has been reading about all things Newt and Callista, and all things Arnold and Maria and said, No.  Oh Hell No! to subjecting herself to that press scrutiny.  So, no Mitch Daniels to kick around any more.  (Yawn.)  And Newt?  He's been punked by the American press and hasn't copped on yet.  The longer he pretends he's running the worse it will get.  And wait until they catch his wife delivering a speech or answering a question on tape.  The 2 of them will be American mincemeat very soon.  Mark my words.  As for Romney, Pawlenty and the rest of them?  Booooooooring.  And we Americans long to be entertained.  But, I digress.

It's polygamy I'm concerned with today, the need to codify and legalize it so we can stop this Oh-Mary pearl-clutching every time some powerful, prominent, full of himself American male exercises his droit de seigneur in our meritocratic, no-royalty-on-this-side-of-the-Atlantic country.  Let Bill have his Monica, and Arnold his Gigi, his Mildred, his... and so on.  And let all the Hillarys and Marias go on about the business of getting older and jowlier.  Let them expose those swinging-like-a-hammock upper arms that are the proud badge of the female crone.  And let Wives No. 1 spend the rest of their lives doing more meaningful work than running interference for the pigs they married, resuming the careers they abandoned, or pursuing the dreams they deferred.

The kind of men they married will always "be among us".  And there will always be women who want them and will do anything to have them.  (See Sinclair, Anne as Lady Macbeth.)  But, why demean an entire life being in association with them?  They should obtain status as a First Wife.  Once achieved they are officially off the hook for their husband's behavior.  (It's more efficient than divorce.)

Saturday Poetry: Coffin

Except of course it's Sunday.  (Keeping promises as best I can):

My father was buried

at his request

in a "simple pine box"

which costs $3,000 a fact

explained to us

his legitimate children by

his old childhood friend,

the mortician, a man

dying of emphysema.

It was the penultimate

joke he played on us

leaving us to calculate the portion of

our meager inheritance that

was now going to house his

cancer-silted bones.

There is no such thing as

a simple pine box he announced.

Daddy, of course, with his spendthrift’s malice,

at war with his love of money,

would have known that and yet

insist that he be buried in this way

as if he wanted God to recognize in him

an essential humility that had been

so betrayed by the many years of

voracious profligacy.

Saturday Poetry: G Train to the Last Stop

Summer in New York

I needed a job,

and took the first one I got.

She told me to ride

the G train

til you can’t go no more.

South into Red Hook

Smith Street

the last stop.

Lilli & TeTe Go for a Walk

I love my 5 year old niece, I really really do.  There's got to be a word short of pedophilia which describes the insatiable physical lust an adult can have for a particular child.  And unless one of my kids buys me some granchirren, I may not have any and Lilli will be the closest I get to having one.  Which is kind of all right because she's magnificent but even though we both agree that I'm an Old Lady she sometimes and accidentally calls me Mommy and then we get into Heather Has Two Mommies territory and it gets all effed up and that's my clue to go out to my office and let her Real Mother raise her thank you very much.

As much as the two of us love each other when her Real Mother asks me to "take her" for more than a few minutes I clutch.  Like at my age what am I gonna do with a little kid?  But, then my last better angel takes over and I say yes and such was the case today when Sister had to go somewhere (preferably without child) and instead of forcing her to drive Lilli to and pay for a baby sister (which I'm mean enough to do) while I sat around watching grass grow I was Surrogate Mother for the morning.

This morning involved delivering our neighborhood newsletter to local apartment buildings, and going over to West River Memorial Park to participate in a clean up.  We brought along one of those cool tools that you can pick up garbage with without bending over.  (God's gift to the middle-aged.)  And she used it as a crutch krunking down the sidewalk holding my hand explaining that both her right and left legs were broken.

I'd prepped her the night before that we were going to do a lot a walking so she was up to it and, as is the case with this hyperverbal honey, we never ran out of things to talk about which is one reason we stopped at the local Dunkin' Donuts so I'd get a break for a few seconds while she had pink doughnut with sprinkles in her mouth.  And I needed a break.  A ream's worth of paper is heavy; especially after my second trip with it on my back in 2 days.  Although everywhere we went this morning was only a few minutes away when your knees are a-throbbin' and your back is a-hummin' its enough to make you want to flag down a cab.  (Oh wait!  I'm in New Haven not New York!  Snap!)  I was the one who needed crutches.

We walked to the Park through one of the most asinine intersections in New Haven.  The lights are timed for drivers, impatient drivers and even with the walk signal I had us running across the street (or what passes for running with cauliflower knees).  No matter how fast you go the lights at Derby and Grasso change so fast you go from being a pedestrian to prey in no time flat.  I for one can't wait until drivers who go through red lights can get shot.  With a camera that is.

Safely on the other side we signed up, grabbed a black garbage bag and strolled along the rugby field looking for garbage.  We were not disappointed.  Sisyphus had his rock; modern Americans have their trash -- the wrappers, the bags, the papers, the cans, the plastic lids, the cigs, and so on.  Lilli was a trooper.  Because we had the trash gripper we were both entertained.  But, after a while we both realized that filling the bag would require crawling into the brambles.  (Oh, don't even mention all the gooseshit on the bottom of our shoes.) So, we worked for a few more minutes and then ran into an acquaintance.  I was ready for adult conversation but no sooner had it started than Lilli interrupted me with a must-tell recounting of the fat lady who was crying.  My acquaintance tried mightily to understand what she was saying.  I didn't.  It's like "Now you have to talk about this?  Right now?  Can someone else have my attention for 1 minute?  Please?"  So, cranky aunty that I am I just cut Lilli off.

And later when we were alone again she let me know it.  "You hurt my feelings," she told me.  And I leaned in all solicitous and asked her what I, I had done this time.  She told me about the lady and goddamn if it made less sense then than it had a few minutes ago.  The terrible thing about living with children is that you do get "it" after a while.  (I say terrible because if you've become that good at decoding their idiosyncratic language, what does that make you?  An idiot savant?)  Not always on time or right then, but you do get it.  She'd witnessed a woman freak out on the green the week before when she got separated from her husband.  The woman frantically called him on her cell phone.  I know this because Lilli's Real Mother told me the story when they got home, and Lilli was asking her if she found him.

She was still processing that when we wound up at another green expanse and that was the story she was trying in her inimitable 5 year old way to tell me, but I was too busy.  Once my sister came to pick us up the mystery got solved.  "Yes", she said, "the lady found her husband.  I saw them on the green on my way to work a few days later."  So now I know.  Now Lilli knows.  And as a bonus, she's graced me with her forgiveness, which clears the space for love.  And God knows, I need it.