Saturday Poetry: The Box Step

Having spent years with her body

(loved more than my own)

my beautiful daughter is a thing I know.

A daughter soon to be my height.

Gone beyond my cervix

(that tough and ugly organ

who almost stopped her flight).

My hands read her tender soles.

She is limbs elongated

poised for womanhood.

Buttocks unselfconscious

beckon man and beast alike.

I walk her ribs at night.

My solicitous fingers find the nipples

grown last summer

protrusions that foreshadow blood,

the fights.

I'm in her way now.

But not for long.

Still my little girl, this night.

The one who tells me

that next year is the prom.

A prom?  I think of her beauty so new.

Of its rocks and shoals of attraction.

I turn off the iron, collapse the board.

The turntable offers La Divine.

My sturdy left hand cups the small

of her swayback.

Come, and she follows my right

as it wafts upward.

Her butterflied fingers alight my shoulder.

I kiss her forehead and take the lead.

She looks down at our feet.

We don't breathe.

Somehow knowing, she steps back on her right.

Together, I whisper.

Step?

Yes.  Then close.

Together.  We sigh.

Step.  Close.

She nods understanding

her hand on my shoulder, squeezing

in answer to commanding feet.

I kiss her cheek.

We box step

suffused with longing.

Pretend, I tell her, that I am the Boy.

The first with undulating voice.

He gives you a kiss

and betrays your symmetry.

He will.  I know this.

She looks at me and sees that

we have made boxes.

Two small boxes.

We step together

at this moment

in a way we

will never

again.

Step close.

A Saturday Morning

With the onset of early middle age, certain of my senses have improved.  I see better than ever before (even as the glasses I buy are more expensive than ever before).  I smell things that I couldn't in years past:  that tangy, bitter aroma of our garden's tomato plants as they struggle to make fruit, the odors of a neglected bathroom that doubles as a slopsink and washing station, the burnt butter in the iron skillet that my husband uses to make his version of home fries.  It's all revelatory for me.  Between bouts of digital neuropathy, chronic poor vision, tinnitus-compromised hearing, impaired olfactory sensors and indifferent taste buds it's rare to have my all my senses working adequately all at the same time.  There have been exceptions.  To this day I am attuned to a baby's wail, or any house sound that resembles or is a person coming through a door or window.  Otherwise, each and every one of my senses has presented me moments of gobsmacking bewilderment as they fade in and out of utility.

So, it's Saturday morning.  I have been home alone for 3 days.  Virtually the only calls I get are from a collector for a bill I have absolutely no intention of paying.  I do my chores, I read one of my favorite writers, Richard Price, (which makes me think of reading Richard Ford again, or Reynolds Price), I have seizures of mucus-snorting, spit-flecked glee as I consume TBogg and his brilliant commenters riffing on Paul Ryan with the help of T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Dr. Seuss, Shakespeare and Walt Whitman!  (Oh.  My.  Stars.).  I work.  Always rushed but seldom interrupted.  I look at my house in ways that one can't when there are others living there.  I even cooked because even I, as much as I don't want to cook, don't like to cook, can't see why one would spend so much time making something that hours later is going to excreted as waste from one's body -- even I am not going to make dinner from crap I could buy at the nearest corner store.  (I have some pride, people.)

It is lightly raining.  This is Irish weather -- cool, grey, wet.  (The husband's down in Brooklyn having flashbacks.)  As far as I'm concerned it is perfect.  For years summer was always a season I had to endure.  It's hot, it stinks, my bathing suit's always too smalI.  (For some reason I'm acutely aware of the alcoholics on the Green during the summer.  As I wait for a bus home I watch.  In no time comes the face, sometimes young, sometimes old, or made old, that is lividly red, tight, puffy so much so that even the lips are permanently engorged as if if they carry a collagen chapstick.  The face of someone who is drinking themselves towards cirrhosis.)  I live for the fall.  Each night progressively cooler than the one before.  The leaves turning, the humidity receding.  The ritual of children (and adults) heading towards school.  I love it all.

On Lisa Molomot's "The Hill"

New Haven is my adopted home.  I wasn't born here, I didn't grow up here.  I have no clan who traveled from the south 3 generations ago and settled in Dixwell or Dwight to take advantage of wartime jobs.  I didn't attend Yale nor do I work there.  I no longer have any formal role in the the city's Democratic Party hierarchy.  I just live here.

Here, in a city that is situated downstream from the catastrophic economic changes of the last few decades.  A company town with an entrenched full-time mayor and his political machine, and a part-time legislative body.  A segregated town where a segment of the promising middle class cycles out after obtaining a degree and another segment goes house shopping in Hamden or Guilford when the first kid turns 4.

When we first arrived, we would drive around town.  Soon I was playing a game, "Where's PS Waldo?" as we would encounter one after another of the city's breathtakingly beautiful school buildings.  (And yes, there are some spectacular duds.)  What kind of city is this I wondered, having spent years doing education activism in New York, that builds such beautiful schools?

I found out, yes I did.  It's a city that believes in top-down, ham-fisted educational reform based on old liberal pieties.  Convention wisdom has it that the Board of Education is a known depository for the politically connected, the mediocre loyalist and the status-seeking small-town careerist of middling abilities.  It's a city that is re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic as its neighborhoods become more racially and economically segregated, and where job creation is thought of as an act of noblesse oblige or chum on political waters.

For those of you who haven't seen it, the documentary, "The Hill", tells the story of an eminent domain battle between New Haven and residents of an area called the Upper Hill.  Goaded by state dollars that paid more for new construction than renovation, hubris, political calculation and vanity, the city set out to build a school.  The Upper Hill was and is a low-income area of homeowners and tenants.  The city's rationale was that since 2 other schools nearby were in terrible condition, and another school, Mauro, near the contested land could not accommodate the influx of more students another building was required.  To build would require removal of many households.  Some people were glad to go.  Others not, so they suggested that the city build on unused city-owned land nearby.  Those who wanted to stay (and their allies) raised hell and fought the city all the way to federal court to be able to keep their homes.  On a fine legal point (the doctrine of laches) they lost their case, although their moral argument won the day.

The homes were razed, the neighbors dispersed often incurring significant debt to rent or buy elsewhere, and the school was built.  In what I can only imagine was a final gesture worthy of Marie Antoinette, the school was named after the city's sole African-American mayor as if losing one's home and community is a small price to pay to honor a black man who led the city for 4 years.

And the 2 schools that were in terrible shape?  They exist today, more than a decade after this battle, as 1) a charter school and 2) a medical offices building.  And Mauro?  It's closed.  Not enough students.  The vacant land?  Sold to Yale New Haven Hospital and converted into a parking lot.  And the neighborhood?  Go see for yourself.  

And, too:  I can't seem to upload the trailer, so click the link.

My House is a Very Very Very Fine House

Husband No. 1 read my previous post about Rules for Living.  He felt empowered to make up one of his own.  I am now officially forbidden to write about what he does when he is in the basement.  So, I won't.  My lips are sealed.  (Cheshire grin ensues....)  For all I know he is saving mankind, which would be fine by me since we can no longer leave it to the Republican Party.  (Have they ever met a tax loophole they didn't want to drive through?)  So, fine, no basement stories but he hasn't forbade me writing about anything else in this comedy we call our life together.  At least not yet.  This is where fiction comes in.  Change the names, let others call it a roman a clef and you're off the hook!  Memoir, memoir?  We don't need no stinkin' memoir!

About that fire.

After I left Brooklyn in 2008, His Wonderfulness (HW) did an entire gut rehab of our house.  Architects and designers will tell you that there are many kinds of renovations.  For instance, there is 1) renovation by acquisition:  I just got the Eames couch of my dreams but it doesn't fit through the door so we'll just widen the opening and put in a new front door and while we're at it move the south wall out 3 inches so that the room is balanced and ...  There is 2) renovation due to aging or disablement:  now that we're middle-aged let's move the master bedroom downstairs and raise the dishwasher, and while we're at it, make sure the doors are big enough for a wheelchair or a coffin ...  There is 3) renovation by fire (which I recommend you only do once):  Step 1.  Burn the house down.  Step 2.  Rebuild from the basement up fighting with the insurance company every contractor's bill along the way.  Guess which one we did in Brooklyn?


Fast forward to 2012.  We are here in New Haven on our own (which I've written about previously).  We are old -- our knees point in opposite directions and our backs bark.  What do we do?  We start with the smallest room in a small house.  The one once occupied by the Beloved Niece.  Proud of myself that the wall paint for the room was stashed in the closet, I blithely started patching holes and cracks.  Couple of days at the most, I told myself, a few patches and I'll touch up.  Install new curtains, wash floor, et voila!  One down, 4 rooms to go.  On day 2 I picked up the gallon paint can which felt as light as cotton candy.  And mutual perversion set in.  What's that expression?  In for a penny, in for a pound.  We have now plastered that room within an inch of the original sheet rock almost to the point where you can scarcely see the original paint.  Another expensive gallon of bitter lemon (indeed!) sits downstairs waiting to be applied to newly skimmed walls and you know that when the walls are done we'll look at the floor which we've virtually destroyed with dollops of joint compound and before you know it we'll be sanding and polyurethaning.  And the original door?  Oh my, it's got paint on it!  Don't we want to strip it to release the oakiness of the oak?


After the last time, in 2009, where my sister and I spent Our Summer Vacation rigging ladders and scraping 50 year old nicotined-stained wallpaper off walls, I swore I would not be caught dead painting sanding scraping finishing a house again.  And here I am.  You'd say I need to have my head examined but I'm already having my head examined and still I do this.

Life ends, renovation don't.

Saturday Poetry: Red Hook Houses

I know, I know, it's Sunday.

(from "Turn Left At the Dead Dog")

After the plant closed

and he lost his last job

after that boy got shot

and the school turned black

she stopped going out at night.

To get from the train to the house

there was no bus to take.

After all that

she swore she’d get out.

Now it’s too late.

Rules for Living

Now that my banded neck is growing those intersecting strings from the juncture of the chin it's time for me to share my Rules for Living(tm).  Time and what to do with it changes when you get older.  It's one thing when you've still got a waist and your breasts are generally perpendicular to your collarbone and you think you have all the time in the world to become, and quite another when you buy clothes to fit a Teletubbie.

All of which to say, I have to daily remind myself to quit effing around.  So, here's the first:

No. 1 -  If you have a Facebook account don't, I repeat, do not get into a flame war.  Le Facebook is many things but it is not a bar with stools that can be ripped off their screws for throwing, nor is it a phone.  So, if someone writes something daft, bigoted, stupid or simply untrue, let it go.