I Lost a Poet Once

I didn't mean to but those were my early days of promiscuously tasting what the internet had to offer and I thought surely, surely with his distinctive voice (and my impeccable spelling) I'd simply be able to Google him and find him again:  white man, in his 30's, lives in NYC, teaches for a living.  Couple of collections published.  Well, that narrows it down.

Needless to say I did not find him.  Have not.  And 3 or 4 unbacked up (who the hell backs up one's bookmarks?) hard drive crashes later, I never will.  My bad.  My very bad.

Ever since then I try not to make the mistake of assuming that information is at my fingertips and all I have to do is roll up my sleeve, stick my arm into the digital bin and bam! I pull out some writer's website.

What starts these junkets anyway is an elaborate preamble to writing.  It's Friday, do you know where your poetry is?  I look at various 'zines, walking back and forth before the storefront wondering if I should go in and if I do, will I buy?  Each time I think I'm done with "the poetry thing" another line offers itself.  (As in overhearing on Metro North the girlfriends talking about a hospice patient.)  Here are 2 to play with in honor of April being National Poetry Month:

"We're pregnant."  Maybe it's generational, maybe I'm stupid, but when, oh, when did men start having babies?  Introduce me to the man who's pushed a bowling ball through a key ring while lying on his back for, say, 5 hours and then we'll talk.  In the meantime, who can write a poem with that?

"Lonely as a Witness in Vegas."  I've always wondered (haven't you?) what it must be like to be both a Jehovah's Witness and a resident of Las Vegas.

You write a line

I'll write a line
We'll write a poem
together.
 

It's Saturday Night

As if that's an excuse for the blogger's equivalent of drunk dialing.  I've not written lately for many reasons; the most plausible excuse being that life lately has been so very personal.  So, if you want to know what I have to think about something feel free to hack into my personal e-mail accounts.  (Joke, that.)

Anyway, in addition to Happy Spring (and does anyone else feel like a fat, black bear unfurling from a long hibernation?) I want to share two of my comparative dumb-as-a-box-o'-rocks moments.  Both are tangentially related to religion.  I stopped attending church as a teenager.  A result of the cessation of my mother's enforcement regime (and my disenchantment with the congregation during the height of the Vietnam War).  For years my mother made sure we made it to Sunday School and church with my father.  (My long poem, "Beatrice's Neck" is crafted from those Sundays.)  Only now do I realize that it had less to do with inculcating religiousity than it had to do with creating some god-damn time to herself witha family of one husband and 4 rowdy kids.  (Although I do think church meant something to her; she, herself returned to church towards to end of her too short life.)  All of that to say that I do claim some home training which makes these lapses in recognition all the more mortifying.

Fast forward to the early 1980s.  I'm working in Washington, DC.  It's spring.  I'm still young enough and green enough that The City (and its comfortable denizens) were still undeniably glamourous to me.  One day I'm on say, K Street, and I see this elegant middle-aged woman walking towards me.  Looked like she graduated from Smith (back in the day), and worked for a law firm or was some high-level goverment appointee.  Well put together, like i wished I could be but never ever achieved.  I glanced at her but got stuck at her forehead.  This elegant, Ann Taylor-clad (yeah, yeah when it meant something) woman had a big black smudge on the middle of her forehead.  I wanted to wet my thumb and wipe it off.  It surprised me:  didn't you check the mirror before you left the house?  Don't you have a compact in your purse?  When was the last time you applied your Naked Librarian Coral lipstick?!?!?!  So, when I got into work I started babbling about this woman I saw who didn't realize that she had dirt on her face, can you b'leve it?

I'm sure someone, probably a co-worker who did graduate from one of the Seven Sisters, took pity on me and gently explained that that day was Ash Wednesday.  The Episcopal and Catholic observant are marked as an acknowledgement of mortality and human fallibility.  Oh.  Thanks and I hauled my lapsed Baptist ass to my desk and said not another word.

Never content to make a fool of myself once when I can do it several times years later I asked one of our Egyptian guides why so many men had a dark smudge on their foreheads.  (You know where my mind was going, don't you?)   I asked, of course, while being driven around by one such man.  Patiently and respectfully I was told that it is basically a sign of piety.  That men who pray the requisite times per day and have spent a lifetime putting head to ground acquire that bruise.

Oh.  Wash.  Rinse.  Repeat.

So, that's it.  Late and I just finished listening to a great Afropop radio documentary about Um Kulthum.  To Egypt, and elections.  To all the other Christians out there who don't believe in resurrection:  this is all we've got.  Happy spring.

Good night.

So what if April is the cruelest month?

February has got to be the dirtiest.  As feared and expected after the snow evaporated we were treated to everything that was left underneath, plus all the delightful dogshit that owners blithely left behind.

It has indeed been a long, hard winter.  I feel like a bear coming out of hibernation complete with a thick coat and added fat to keep me, eh hem, warm.  I am looking out at my backyard littered with plastic toys, construction debris, possum (I kid you not) feces, and last fall's leaves.  I am so out of shape that I can barely pick up a pencil, much less a rake or hoe.  If I were easier to embarrass I would have cleaned up this mess last fall, but I did not, and now I feel like I'll have to get physical and psycho therapy just to do something about it.  Am I feeling the insidiousness of middle age?  Or is it just the creakiness of a winter spent hunkered down?

In the fall I planted some Japanese maple saplings and burning bush.  I can see the burning bush from my window.  It was buried in the snow for weeks.  Maybe I should warm up a stethoscope and check them for signs of life.  Maybe I should do the same for myself.