In which I give thanks and remember

For basil plants growing on my windowsills despite the cold outside;
for a well-stocked and orderly bookshelf;
for the amarillys on my counter, with four glorious red blossoms open:

I give thanks.

For summer at Berkeley four years ago,
sleeping on my friend K.'s tile floor and baking peach & plum pie;
for a midnight walk and a young stag that bounded across the sidewalk and the street,
into another garden--

For the Linguistics Institute, three weeks of glutting myself on ideas;
for dozens of papers read and learned from,
for classrooms full of linguists (students and professors)
from all over the country, gathered in one place--

For naps on the lush green lawn in the golden sun, between classes:

I give thanks.

That I can remember so clearly, that I can remember at all--

I give thanks.

For pumpkin pie and knowing how to make it, confidently;
for my mother's expertise in the kitchen
and her persistence in passing it on to me:

I give thanks.

For my own kitchen, and a house to myself,
shared with O. and the bunnies and no one else;
for O.,
for rabbits--

For friends we shared the house with
and for friendship surviving ten weeks of sharing
one bathroom and one refrigerator--

For a marriage that is so much easier and happier this Thanksgiving
than it was a year ago:

I give thanks.

For two casserole dishes of borscht in the refrigerator, and a huge pot of turkey juk,
so that I won't have to cook for days;

For Pastor T. who invited us to his Thanksgiving,
and for all the church friends there (especially the vibrant single people),
and for the scrumptious turkey and potatoes and carrots and even parsnip we ate;
for the turkey skin and bones and scraps of meat that T. did not want,
which I brought home and boiled into juk;

For the telephone that let me call my father and mother to ask for the juk recipe;
for my mother, for my father:

I give thanks.

* * *

I feel the abundance in my life today, and felt it yesterday, and will feel it tomorrow. The season is turning. It will be a strange season, but it is familiar this year. I remember the leaves changing last year, I remember the furnace we struggled to ignite. I remember learning to sleep in the same bed as O., how to regulate my body temperature so I wouldn't wake up drenched in sweat as I first did when I wore the warm pajamas I depended on during all the winters before. I remember Thanksgiving on the east coast, far from my old friends and the places I called home. Now I call this place home, too, though in my dreams I am always in California.

I remember, not so long ago, when I organized my own life without consulting anyone about my schedule. I remember feeling my life was my own. I remember watching my money carefully because there wasn't any coming in. That season has come back. Wednesday was O.'s last day of work and now we are living off of savings and my small income. Suddenly the money I bring in babysitting and working for the church really counts, and suddenly I feel so much more confident of my place in the household economy, more entitled to my opinion and my decisions. The season of confidence and independence is returning, and I am grateful (though I know something is off in my emotional logic).

Also I remember, not long ago at all, writing essays, emailing professors, impressing people. I remember understanding, teaching, explaining, leading. That season is coming back, too. I am writing my statement of purpose and remembering I've done lots of awesome things and I really am qualified, and I'm scanning and uploading my transcript and noticing with pleasure how monotonously perfect the grades are (marred only by one A-, the semester I started dating O.). I'm corresponding with my favorite professors and feeling their love. This is strange and it is familiar, and it is a promise of things to come. I do want to go to grad school. Learning is what I was made for.

The leaves have changed and they are beautiful. Soon they will fall, but when they do, I will be grateful for that beauty, too, and I will remember that the season will change again, and spring will come. It is already on its way.

Ginger Gold

Suddenly the pear-like flavor of the apple strikes me. Yellow skin, brown freckles, the scar-star of brown bursting from around a long, slender stem--have disappeared down my throat. My teeth and thirsty tongue subtract apple from apple. A sculpture remains, yellows in the swarm of air. I remember--its name.

Poetry and Intuition

I was surprised to discover this week that I actually like Gertrude Stein, the modern poet/essayist notorious for throwing off conventions of narrative and grammar. I remember sitting with my mother long ago, trying to read a Stein essay, and being unable to extract any meaning from it. My mother told me Stein practiced writing in stream-of-consciousness. Neither of us was impressed.

Now I'm five or ten years older and I've read hundreds more poems than I had read when I had my first taste of Stein. Perhaps more important, thanks to O., I've been learning about intuition, which seems more and more essential to me for enjoying (not understanding, but experiencing) poems. I used to feel uneasy with a poem until I had grasped it, decoded it, analyzed it. Like the students Billy Collins complains about in this gem.

Or, well, no, it wasn't that bad. More like: I used to think I couldn't derive meaning from a poem without first understanding it, being able to speak about it. Lately I have learned to be at peace with reading a poem and only feeling it, hearing it, seeing its images: not thinking about it.

My mother and I heard Li Young Lee read some of his poems at the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing in April. We both loved it, and each bought a volume of his poetry. I devoured mine: the first time I finished an entire book of poems for the sake of the poems rather than for the sake of finishing. His poems feel like the voice of my soul, the images in them like memories dusty from disuse.

My mother started reading her book of Li Young Lee and pronounced it incomprehensible. She asked me to explain a few of the poems to her, the ones I liked best. "Sure!" I said.

But I couldn't. I love the poems, but I can't say what they mean or how they mean it. I only know that they mean. I understand them through intuition, and I don't hunger for more than that. "You'll have to find your own / pictures, whoever you are, / whatever your need," the poet writes in "A Table in the Wilderness." He shows us his pictures, though, and they speak in a language that my bones know, though not my tongue. To speak, I need my own pictures.

Li Young Lee's poems have something of the fragment about them, something otherworldly, something best understood when they are heard on the breath, spoken aloud. Still, their images are coherent and their grammar is sound. Gertrude Stein's writing doesn't offer those comforts. Reading it aloud helps, but doesn't make its assertions any more sensical. Take a look at even one line from "Tender Buttons" and you'll see what I mean. The connections between words are tenuous; my mind can't construct the relationships they stand in. Is there a structure here, or is it a haphazard pile of ideas?

The structure present is the structure of water, flowing over stones, or the shape of clouds: meaningful, determined by uncountable factors, each simple and measurable but too numerous to calculate. Chaos results, when you try to fit reality into formulas. The clouds drift away into a new configuration and the sunset changes to a new hue before you can explain the old.

Still, I see the shape, a shape nameless but meaningful. A shape I could learn to name, if I listened to it long enough. Intuition lets me touch it, and I am grateful for the unexpected gift.

Pause

There are posts I've been working on and haven't published, and there is an overdue email I've been writing to my best friend who has fallen on hard times, but let me leave those trappings aside for a moment, and write what is present:

A sky from which only moments ago the rain was falling like a curtain,
a steady summer shower that sang on the sidewalk,
a sky which is now white clouds and blue shadow,
and light pouring through.

A world which moments ago pattered and ran and dripped and rippled,
a world which is now still.
Quiescent. Resting.

Like the clouds, which a few minutes ago
were dissolving, changing, shifting, pouring
themselves onto the earth, and which now
rest so peacefully on the sky. This
is the pause in the middle.

This is the pause to breathe, this is the breath
drawn after the rain, this is the rain and the end of the rain,
this is the pause, the breath,
the air,
the rest.

#401

This is my four hundred and first blog post! Considering that I've been with this blog for just about four years now, I suppose it's only reasonable to have stacked up so many posts. Still, it feels like an accomplishment, a significant accumulation, like a pile of autumn leaves large enough to leap into.

Lately I've been thinking about the nature of this internet chronicle of mine. Some of my thoughts are finally enough in order to record and share, and this seems a good occasion. So read on, for some reflection on different sorts of blogs and which sort this one might be.

I have noticed that, when I stumble onto strangers' blogs in the tangled forest of Internet, there are two types that snag my curiosity enough to make me linger. The first type is informative, educational, thought-provoking: the idea-driven blog. In these blogs, it's not important to me who is writing, because the ideas speak for themselves, and their relevance or importance is determined in relation to the world outside, not by their relation to the blog's author(s).

Then there is the second type: the self-disclosing blogs. The story blogs, the personal blogs. The blogs where I get to see the person on the other side of the writing, not just in a snapshot or a statistical analysis, but in an on-going account of life in which I know fairly soon who the main character (the blogger) is: her key relationships, his ideological standpoint, her job, his hobbies, etc. I quickly lose interest in personal blogs that do not make clear the who behind the writing.

My own blog does not fall into either these categories. It is definitely not an idea-centric blog, since I so often write things that take their significance primarily (or entirely) in relation to my personal experience. And while I do often write about events taking place in my heart and soul, I carefully excise most of the eternal references that would root the emotions and meditations in a story. This is largely because I do not want random strangers to know my story. I feel exposed and vulnerable to a person who knows the story-shape of my life, in a way that I do not feel exposed to someone who has seen intimate snapshots of my life but has no larger picture of how those images fit together. The shape of this blog has been largely or entirely determined by what I feel like and want as a writer, with minimal consideration for what readers might want. Does this mean any stranger who stumbles across this blog will abandon it after a few sentences in favor of a more story-centric one?

I suppose those story-centric blogs are like memoirs being written in real-time. Meanwhile, my kind of blog is more like a collection of lyric poems. In reading a memoir, you learn an entire history, the story of how a person came to be. You learn a thousand things about them, though it may be (depending on the memoir) that you gain very little understanding of what it feels like to be that person. On the other hand, in reading someone's poems, you can get to know that person in a very intimate and intuitive way. But you don't know anything about their life, necessarily; what you know is the indefinable, indescribable, invisible pattern of their thoughts and emotions. You carry the imprint of their heart upon your own, and yet you wouldn't recognize the writer if you met him or her on the street.

I would be okay with having hundreds of strangers read a book of my poems. (More than okay: I would be so proud and happy.) But I would not be okay with having hundreds of strangers read a biography of me or a memoir by me (which I will never write). So I guess it only makes sense that my blog has the flavor of a collection of lyric poems, rather than the flavor of a memoir. And that's okay, because there are people out there who read Rilke, if not in the same numbers as people who read Dreams From My Father.

Thanks for reading, and here's to the next 401 posts! :)

Reading Poetry on the PATH Train

We hurtle through the earth.
Water above us. Fire beneath us.

Within us, poems
twisting                   to breath--,
                 to wind--,
                                       to air.

Lunch (a post with pretensions of being a poem)

Bell-pepper bright red,
goat cheese pure white, pesto glowing
emerald with olive oil. Brown bread
still steaming from the oven.
(Softer than usual: too much water?
Who's to say?)

Japanese mothers strive for three colors on every plate.
I throw together lentil soup, eggplant curry,
grilled cheese sandwich: nothing but brown.

But today's lunch was
fresh, bright, raw,

like this snappy autumn day of leaves still green on the trees,
of snow drifts stubborn in the sidewalk-shade,
of a sky so blue I almost believe

it's still summer, and I'm at home
in California where the clouds retire at noon,
and the joys and pains of these three months are distant
as my memory of the Atlantic, unimaginable
as this wintry cold
during that summer simmer.

For K.

Phone fragments       (135/160)

form our friendship     now
Words so freighted     a decades memories
hang from                   a bright screen
small as my palm       A pocket stone 
sings                          days gone by

Reading Poetry

The mystery is alien to you, you
dislike the veils and fog
that conceal what would
in sun or firelight
blaze like trumpets
and like tears.

Cold in the mist, you turn away
bewildered, you call
for a storm to sweep the world
clean and clear. Breath
comes easier to you
when the air is alive. I

rest in this understanding--
that silence speaks
not of stillborn meaning
but of stories so laden
with feeling
words cannot carry them.

[Thesis abstract] A Lyricist Responds to the Iliad

[Here is the 330-word abstract of why I only made one post during all of March.]

Art refers back to other art, and literature is no exception. The Iliad belongs to the body of literature that has deeply shaped English writing. A knowledge of this poem and the mythology that accompanies it enriches a reader's experience of a much greater body of literature, from the Roman masterpiece the Aeneid, to Dante's revolutionary Inferno, to modern books such as James Joyce's Ulysses. Moreover, deep engagement with this poem, as with any great piece of literature, enriches a person's life by bringing a consciousness of its lasting themes into quotidian existence.

For this project, I lived with the Iliad. In reading, I first inhabited the Iliad as poetry and story and human experience, then tried to capture my emotional and intellectual reactions as lyric poems. Some aspects of this experience were familiar and easy to accept as relevant to who I am and what I believe. Other Homeric attitudes, though, are diametrically opposed to my beliefs; dwelling within those perspectives during my reading was emotionally challenging. The mix of intuitive familiarity and utter foreignness of the Iliad was fertile ground for reflection. The fruit of this meditation was a body of close to a hundred lyric poems that respond to the Iliad.

These poems first reflect my deeply held beliefs about the subjects treated in the epic, then proceed to explore my own emotional experiences from outside my reading of the Iliad. The Iliad is a war poem, taking place within a polytheistic spiritual/religious framework. Its characters belong to a patriarchal society whose culture relies heavily upon the externalization of emotion and identity, defining a man by his reputation among his peers (and defining a woman by her value to the surrounding men). My reactions to these characteristics of the Iliad fed the themes of my responsive poems. This paper discusses my poems and their relation to the epic, approaching my experience of reading the Iliad from an analytic rather than poetic perspective.

[I now have an extremely rough but relatively coherent 23-page paper as well as 75 pages of ordered and clustered poems. Huzzah! There is a lot left to do but this feels like a major accomplishment as is.]

Sonnet-esque

Elegance/Increase

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
when timid leaves, pale green or red, do sprout
from tree-tips stretching skyward as the cold
winter withdraws—Spare elegance, I leave thee.
Grace of branches bared to the blue sky,
I leave thee. Leaves shall clothe me:
chaos of foliage, riot of increase, of life
profuse, protruding—extending, exploding—
growing greener, greater, and singing in the wind
and sun, as spring comes, comes out shyly
from the tender tree-tips. Crisp blank snow,
silent still ice, I leave thee; creeping greening
bursting beginning rustling hustling
falling flying Spring, I greet thee.

[2/12/11]

I'm taking a poetry workshop, and for this week's assignment, I ended up writing three independent poems in the process of trying to express the idea I had landed on--singleness as "that which I must leave ere long." As given away by that quotation and by my poem's first line, Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 was echoing in my head as I wrote this. And then it worked out that it has the requisite 14 lines to be a sonnet.

I didn't bring this poem in to workshop (it was draft 2 of 3), but I showed it to my professor and he called it "good exercise," which (like his lavish compliments of draft 1, not posted here) was an unexpected reaction. He says writing to the seasons is something that one should do, especially if one is a Californian living temporarily in a place with real seasons; but he seems to think that seasonal poems are not poetic/personal/ownable or something in the same way that properly lyric poems are...

Anyway, there is my spring poem, rippling along the surface of my feelings about the major life changes that are coming, as surely as the seasons.

[still more things I just don't want to lose]

"Duty is a choice." --PM, on the Aeneid.

And then I wrote this which is totally unedited but here it is anyway:

Duty is a set of strings
taut with my weight
as I dangle, my feet
just off the floor
In that empty space
so much feeling teems
But the strings shift
and I dance
to music not my own.

--thinking of Aeneas's line as he abandons Dido: Italiam non sponte sequor, "I follow Italy not of my own will."

Anger poem

Since the questions blog is asking about anger right now, here is a poem I wrote on the subject. But it's from Achilles's experience as recounted in the Iliad. This is *not* how anger feels for me. At least, I don't think so.

Like honey dripping so slowly
from the golden comb
onto my waiting tongue
extended, reaching for that sweetness
to fall – I need
just one more drop of
anger: it is so sweet.

The bees arrive
buzzing, and they zoom into my
open mouth, down
my gullet, buzzing endlessly,
and they swarm into my unguarded
ears, shooting into
my brain, where they buzz and
buzz until they recollect
every drop of sweet honey.

My sis thinks the last stanza is too much, too much. The bees go too many places, she says. What do you think?

The lines, from Lattimore's translation, that sparked the above poem:

“that gall of anger that swarms like smoke inside of a man's heart
and becomes a thing sweeter to him by far than the dripping of honey.” (18.109)

I hope you believe me that this poem happened because of the Iliad, not because of any event or feeling in my life. It's part of my thesis project.

Perspective

Sometimes I see myself through your eyes. I stand straighter; I move like a leaf or a tree, blown by the wind. My skin is smoother, softer. I smell like spring, like flowers pushing through the dirt, like the soft rain. My smile comes like the sun bursting through clouds. It dazzles.

Or my smile is the horned moon when it has slipped sideways--light through the latticed trees. And when I look away, I am an image like a painting on the wall in a museum, in a gilded frame. My face is the object of admiration, not analysis.

And all of this is a reflection of a reflection -- the reflection in your eyes, reflected in my words. I see myself in a dark window-pane, as I sit inside this lighted train, speeding through the night.

Every Month

I consider writing this poem every four weeks, and last month I actually figured out something to write, and this month I will actually post it, since I rather like it. But do understand, this is pretty much a first draft. Comments?

Like the smell of the grey sea when it races
up the shore, when it throws uprooted seaweed
onto the sand, when it sprays the cold boulders
and the sea gulls float on it, white birds buoyed
up and down, but not carried by the waves--

and like the smell of the damp earth
when the spade crunches into the soil
and lifts a dark mound into the sunny air
and the dirt tumbles down, black, and the worms
hide themselves futilely, as the gardener loosens the roots
of a chrysanthemum to plant it like a flame
burning against the black earth--

and like the smell of animal fat in the fire,
a sausage smoking and the grease dripping--

like salt and seaweed and decay
and like roots and earth and growth
and like fat and flame,
persistent as smoke in my hair and clothes--

Like that, crimson, the smell
of the moon's rule.

Sleeping on the red-eye flight

I am not a child
anymore
but in your arms
I am a baby still
and sleepy

When I cry out
from my dreams
I know you
will be here
to wake me

Autumn

The wind has scattered
oak leaves like hands
all across the sidewalk.
Shadows of the arching leaves
strain away from the sun
like desperate fingers.
The wind is still sighing.

Sappho

I've been reading a translation of the scattered fragments of Sappho's poetry that remain to the modern world, since my thesis mentor (who is a wonderful person) recommended Sappho to me, along with a volume of commentary on her. He said my poems reminded him of Sappho's, and that he thought I would like her. He was right, of course.

Many of the poems are striking. Some of them are particularly evocative because they are damaged. The manuscripts were burned or broken or otherwise maimed, so the translations have brackets everywhere--all along the left side, for instance, or sprinkled liberally throughout, as though the speaker were too shy to say everything out loud. Here is Guy Davenport's rendition of one fragment (§85):

heart
altogether
I can
[_______]
may be for me
throws back the light
[hand]some face
[_________]
caressed
[_______]

There is so much mystery in the ellipsis, like the mystery in a haiku. Reading these fragmented poems reminds me of trying to form an impression of person by overhearing snippets of their conversation, and by glimpsing them as they go about their day, but never sitting down with them to hear their story. Through the fragments, we see Sappho moving back and forth through life. We hear her cries, as though hearing a neighbor through the wall. We see her spinning and leaping, but only through the gaps in the fence. We can't see the pattern of her steps, and we can't ask her why she is celebrating. But we can see that she is dancing.

And then there are a few poems without any holes torn through their text (I think the introduction said we only have three complete poems of Sappho's), which are like brief, brutally honest conversations with a stranger who will tell you exactly how she is feeling right now, but doesn't trust you to actually care. Or they are like conversations with a dear friend who leaves out all the explanations and cuts to the chase, because she knows you know exactly what she is talking about.

I love them all. Some of them scare me, some of them charm me. Some of them tell stories that I don't have the courage to tell for myself. §65 from Davenport:

I.
Percussion, salt and honey,
A quivering in the thighs;
He shakes me all over again,
Eros who cannot be thrown,
Who stalks on all fours
Like a beast.

II.
Eros makes me shiver again
Strengthless in the knees,
Eros gall and honey,
Snake-sly, invincible.

How clearly she speaks! And yet her gods are not my gods, and she doesn't speak my language. She is a wild sister I can never meet.

Sometimes it gets very crowded in my mind

[I found this scribbled on the back of a page of notes from a couple weeks ago, amidst other ramblings, so I pulled it out of the scrawls and titled it.]

How It Feels to Need Solitude

The messages never stop
flying in and out,
always in my eyes
so I can never see
clearly.

Cicada Season

[I scrawled this poem on the back of a bookmark over the summer, and just rediscovered it...]

When the sunbeams fall
on the trees like a rainstorm, and

the breeze brushes
the green leaves, and

a buzz begins,
and boils up--then

under the humming maple,
I am the silent audience
for summer's symphony.