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.

Saturday Poetry: Oceanid

I've decided to post a poem on Saturdays.  This first one is from my unpublished manuscript, "Turn Left at the Dead Dog".

I moved to New York in the early 90's and temped to make a living.  One of my most memorable gigs was working at a Brooklyn shipyard in Red Hook as a secretary.  I'd take the G to it's last stop, Smith Street, and walk by the Red Hook projects to get to work.  The shipyard's lifeblood, Navy contracts, was drying up, and these old-timers, many of the men were in there 60's, knew that their life's work -- engineering, welding, painting, and so on -- was coming to an end.  (The shipyard was where Brooklyn Ikea is now.  My, how times have changed.)  I wanted to memorialize and honor a beloved world.

This poem came from imagining the kids swimming at the city pool near the projects, one of the great rituals of a New York summer:

Oceanid

 

I just love it in the summer

she says to me.

To get off work, while it’s still light?

You walk by the pool.

The kids are playing.

Brown kids black kids.

A few of them are white.

They glisten like baby seals

in bathing suits.

Screaming Spanish, English

It doesn’t matter

You see them running

boy after boy

boy after girl.

And the girls

they’re getting so bold now

not like when I was that age

we couldn’t go to the pool you know.

Our mothers didn’t want us getting too dark

and besides it would ruin our hair.

Lazy Mira got the beating of her life back then

and she was almost grown.

Mama had paid to have her hair done nice for a wedding

beautifully straightened, you’d a thought she was white.

Mira was that light, but as soon as Mama left

she flew to the pool where Mama saw her,

right here where we’re standing now,

arms full of A&P.

Fast Mira, a pink bikini

running around the edge

pretending to be afraid of Danny B,

who she loved, I don’t have to tell you.

And some little shit of a kid, pulling himself up out of the water

butted his bald head into my sister while she was dancing backwards

and she flipped a horseshoe right into the deep end.

Mira could swim, but it didn’t matter.

She knew she was dead.

Required Reading for a Rainy Day

If it weren't for the ability to link to great writing I'd had no ability to write at all.  Ta-Nehisi Coates' reflection on Trump-birtherism-Obama.  (His father is Paul Coates, publisher of Black Classic Press).  Here it is, The Longest War.

No, I'm Trig's Mother

I know it's been a long time.  Don't ask.

Just by accident I heard/read that the White House released Obama's birth certificate.  If ever there was a need to use the phrase WTF???!?!?!?!  this is it.

But I know and you know that in this demographic sea-change in American culture and in this conglomerated media age competing for ever smaller audiences and harder-to-come-by revenue, that if Barack Obama's father had not been a black African this rumor would have been strangled in its crib.

 

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.