On Repeat

 

(I sat down and wrote
The best words I could write
Turn, turn, turn again
Explaining to the judge
I’d be there on Wednesday night
Turn, turn to the rain
And the wind)

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Driving Toward Oblivion

Here's a poem:

Biophilia

Most of us hungry at daybreak, sleepy by dark.
Some slept, one eye open, in water.
Some could trot.
Some of us lived till morning. Some did not.

Jane Hirshfield, Ledger
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Trump Flanked by Dante, a Vortex

The Map of Hell from Dante's Divine Comedy,
illustrated by Sandro Botticelli,  1485

Non avere paura; il nostro destino non può essere tolto da noi; è un regalo.

Dante

I nove gironi dell'inferno sei
limbo
lussuria
golosità
avidità
ira
eresia
violenza
frode
è
tradimento

Because your question searches for deep meaning, I shall explain in simple words. (Dante)

The Nine Circles of Hell are 
limbo
lust
gluttony
greed
wrath
heresy
violence
fraud
and
treachery.

And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleansing? (Trump)

The Levels of American Stupidity are
the followers
the marketers and admen who must jump in to clarify for the followers (Don't drink bleach - Burger King tweet)
the lawyers who must be consulted
the people in Power who support dear Leader
dear Leader

I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you, just to see what would happen. (Trump)

Do not be afraid; our fate cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.

Dante

50,000 people have died in the United States, most alone without loved ones.

Day Whatever

It rained for days here in southern California. Tomorrow it's Easter, the day that our POSPOTUS predicted would be a fine day for all of us to pack the churches. My aim is to not come right out and condemn/blame/call out but to note things, observe things, state the facts, ma'am. The facts include nights of very weird dreams, including one the other night with James Dickey characters, the threat of death in the back-seat of a truck, joints passed around and me smoking for the first time in thirty-five years to avoid whatever torture was coming my way and then the cab of a school-bus moving in slow-motion right into the truck with me. What the hell?

Reader, have you been cooking a lot? If so, what? Last night I made roasted chicken thighs and carrots. They were seasoned with Za'atar, lemon, salt, pepper and olive oil and when still hot dumped on a bed of greens. So, so good. I think the recipe was from the New York Times food section, something that I'm a tad obsessed with --

Reader, have you been reading? I just finished Lily King's new novel Lovers and Writers and am now reading Louise Erdrich's The Night Watchman. I also read Glennon Doyle's Untamed and will read Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Of Love and Other Demons that I think I read back in the last century, but I can't be sure. In other book news, I've started a project of cataloguing my books. My sons are horrified, but it feels to me as if it's the closest I'll ever come to being a librarian, and that's one of my main regrets (along with not learning to surf and vaccinating Sophie with five vaccines when she was two months old). The Bird Photographer made me an Excel sheet with categories: Classics, Fiction, Non-Fiction General, Poetry, Memoir, Biography, Art and Cooking. Also Location: Bedroom, Dining Room, Living Room, Hallway, Bathroom, Kitchen. I read an interview with Fran Leibovitz last night who was described as living in a NYC apartment with 11,000 books. This thrilled me.  I've also been slowly catching up on articles in "The New Yorker" and highly recommend the issue about the pandemic, especially a strangely comforting one written by a guy who was quarantined with his family in China during theirs. I'm finished with spring break this weekend and begin teaching online again next week. I am so grateful to have a job right now. So, so grateful.

It's a weird, weird time, and I find myself only able to watch two episodes of any given series on the TV in any given day. I did watch all of "Unorthodox" which, of course, reminded me of my days teaching at the religious school. I feel rising bile in my throat at all organized religion, though, and I have to calm myself down even when I see it/god invoked for people dying. Prayer works, they say, or I will pray for you, him, her, and here comes the acid. I am old enough to know I must observe this impulse toward hatred/disgust/contempt as being more about me. Why does any mention of religion right now bother me so much, make me feel so angry? I think I have enough Catholic in me -- however shredded -- to feel guilt and even shame that I just don't believe and then there's just plain, old-fashioned longing.




It's weird how when you're wearing a mask and smile at someone walking toward you, you don't know if they know you're smiling, but Oliver and I experimented and realized that our eyes smiled and that we could just tell.





Speaking of The Bird Photographer (earlier), I want to tell you a little story that he told me the other day. He was walking down in Santa Ana at a beautiful point that overlooks the Pacific, a place where falcons nest and fox kits frolic (I'm not kidding), and everyone at this point is wearing masks and social distancing and so on, but as he was walking, a woman walked by him yakking on her phone, and she said, Well, it's because The Blacks don't ever go to the doctor, and he said that he couldn't believe he'd just heard that but he knew he wouldn't/couldn't say anything because it wouldn't have been good. A black man can't berate a white woman. I said, If I'd been there, I would have picked up the closest rock and sharpened my tongue and then just lit into her. 

Also, read this.

Here's a poem:

Miracle Fish

I used to pretend to believe in God. Mainly, I liked so much to talk to someone in the dark. Think of how far a voice must have to travel to go beyond the universe. How powerful that voice must be to get there. Once in a small chapel in Chimayo, New Mexico, I knelt in the dirt because I thought that’s what you were supposed to do. That was before I learned to harness that upward motion inside me, before I nested my head in the blood of my body. There was a sign and it said, This earth is blessed. Do not play in it. But I swear I will play on this blessed earth until I die. I relied on a Miracle Fish, once, in New York City, to tell me my fortune. That was before I knew it was my body’s water that moved it, that the massive ocean inside me was what made the fish swim.

Ada Limón (2015)

I'm Sick of the Title So No More We Can Do Hard Things: Palm Sunday

found on the Internets

So, today's Palm Sunday. I marked the occasion by listening to a Fresh Air podcast -- an interview with Professor of Religious Studies Bart Ehrman who says that our ideas of heaven and hell -- or eternal reward or punishment -- are not found in either the Old Testament or the teachings of Jesus. I've always been fascinated by religious studies, even thought about getting an advanced degree in it, and since Ehrman hails from my alma mater, I really perked up this morning when I read a bit about him. He's a former Catholic and then evangelical Christian -- someone who bought the whole kit and caboodle, as they say. I vaguely remember reading something or other that he wrote about Jesus, and I admit that I'm always, always interested in reading anything that debunks what the evangelicals or the Catholics so righteously and smugly espouse, but today's interview struck me particularly hard because it was not only fascinating but intensely compassionate -- toward those very people who kind of, sort of, drive me insane. I know I can use some lessons in compassion, and I really dug the part when he says that letting people have faith in heaven is fine, but it's harmful to teach people that there's a hell.

And so I will never try to talk somebody out of a belief in heaven, but I certainly will try to talk people out of a belief in hell because it's simply wrong, and it's harmful. It does psychological damage. And when people raise their children on this stuff, it can scar them for life. And so I think that hell is something we need to fight against; heaven, I'm all for.

Here's the link to the episode: Heaven and Hell Are Not What Jesus Preached, Religion Scholar Says.

















Last night I was in a funk, but the reasons why are too embarrassing to repeat, so today I've cleaned bathrooms, made bread and am thinking about cataloguing all my books, my mood strangely light and resigned and buoyed by cracks of light through dark clouds, the roses sitting in an Italian vase on my dining room table, Sophie's plum-colored pants with the baby blue, pink and red stripes down the side, a flip through an old photo album and the blessed relief that I'll never have to sit through a Palm Sunday mass again.

Here's a poem*:

Goodtime Jesus

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

James Tate (1979)














This poem was brought to my attention by this very cool newsletter that I receive. It's called Pome by Matthew Ogle. 

We Can Do Hard Things, Thursday 4/ 2/20 WITH AN UPDATE***

Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1916). Woman in an Interior, Strandgrade 30 (detail), 1901.
Oil on canvas

8:55 am

I'm feeling very down this morning.  (I managed to crack myself up thinking the words self-care and how much I loathe them, especially the hyphen)

It took a pandemic, but I'm currently eating 2 gummies of Charlotte's Web Calm version of CBD every morning and drinking a glass of wine every night. Am I calmer? Perhaps, but I know that it takes some time for CBD to actually do its work. I'll keep you posted. As for the wine, it goes well with the meals I've made of late: 1/2 leg of lamb, rubbed all over with a paste made from butter, fresh mint and rosemary from my garden, garlic, roasted on a bed of cut-up slavered with olive oil and salt potatoes.

A friend sent this to me this morning:

Can you read that? *** It’s actually FAKE. Thank you Steve Reed. You know, the thought crossed my mind that it seemed far-fetched, but damn if it wasn’t entertaining. (And perfect for these fake news times with the clown in charge, right?

God talk depresses me. Too much God talk makes me despair.

Here's some good advice I read on the internets today.

1. Spread connection
2. Spread help
3. Spread optimism
4. Spread gratitude

Here's a poem:

Thanks by W.S. Merwin

We Can Do Hard Things, Friday 3/27/20

What's the wider world looking like, Reader? The garbage trucks are passing by as I type, and I am as fascinated by those arms that reach out to grab the bins and carry them up and over and dump their contents as my small boys were so many years ago. I feel grateful that these workers are still out there, doing their jobs, for us. Thank you, sanitation engineers. Thank you healthcare workers. Thank you. The trees have burst forth tender green, the oakleaf hydrangea has decided to flower, the air is crisp still and the sun glorious.


Still.


An old friend died on Tuesday night in New York City. Floyd Cardoz, a 59 year old chef with whom I worked alongside for a year or so at Restaurant Lespinasse. I hadn't kept in touch with Floyd in many years, other than following him on social media and feeling glad that such a nice and talented guy had "made it." And he was the nicest guy. I worked with him on the line. Before I worked in the pastry shop, I worked the garde manger or salad and appetizer station. Lespinasse was a high-end (the highest of high-end) restaurant, and the appetizers and salads were elaborate. I remember one dish had 17 garnishes, and if one was missing,  Chef Gray Kunz (our maniacal leader who also recently died but not of Covid) would notice and scream at us something like WHERE IS THE CHERVIL?and we'd be in the shits, in the weeds, poking each other and rolling our eyes and always, always, laughing up our sleeves. Floyd was incredibly talented and just a good, good man. When I read his obituary late on Wednesday night, I cried for him, for his family, for all of us. It's just so horribly sad, and I don't understand how we will bear the coming weeks.


Here's a poem:

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

Try to praise the mutilated world. 
Remember June's long days, 
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew. 
The nettles that methodically overgrow 
the abandoned homesteads of exiles. 
You must praise the mutilated world. 
You watched the stylish yachts and ships; 
one of them had a long trip ahead of it, 
while salty oblivion awaited others. 
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere, 
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully. 
You should praise the mutilated world. 
Remember the moments when we were together 
in a white room and the curtain fluttered. 
Return in thought to the concert where music flared. 
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn 
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars. 
Praise the mutilated world 
and the grey feather a thrush lost, 
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes 
and returns.

Adam Zagajewski 

We Can Do Hard Things, Saturday 3/21/20

Hey there, from sunny California! How are ya'll doing?

A couple of years ago -- or was it last? -- I read an article about the best masks to wear should the fires in California grow worse and our already full of particulate air get even worse, and I bought a box of those N95s right on Amazon. I balked at buying them because they were more than $50,  but I'm good (or bad) about impulse shopping so when they came I put them in the earthquake kit and forgot about them. My friend Heather posted on Facebook about a news conference in front of UCLA with doctors and nurses pleading for masks -- for the people who had bought and hoarded them in the last few weeks to donate them to area hospitals. I called one of my neighbors whose husband is a doctor at one of the most prestigious hospitals in LA and told her that I had a box of N95s and would he like them and she said yes! and then she walked over to my house and rang the doorbell and I reached out with them to where she stood, 6 feet from my doorway. She said that her husband would be taking them to the ER. She said that the hospital is ghostly, that all elective surgeries have been cancelled and that several people were on respirators in intensive care and everybody else is waiting.

We are all waiting.




My uncle has tested positive for The Virus. He is nearly 84 and lives in an assisted living/retirement home here in Los Angeles. He has no symptoms but is quarantined in his room.












I've always felt contempt toward the survivalist -- especially the rich ones who live behind barricades and have safe rooms or private jets or extra cars parked across bridges from Manhattan in case terror strikes again. People are making masks out of scrap fabric all across America as we speak.











I've thought it, but I've never written it: may that POS who is supposedly leading us drown in fluids filling his lungs, alone.








Cassandra
screamed
and
yelled
and
moaned
and
wailed.
imprecations
warnings
no
one
believed
her
comma
But





Here's one of my favorite poems by Jack Gilbert.

A Brief For The Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

We Can Do Hard Things, Thursday 3/19/20

Hey, Reader, how's it going today? I confess to feeling an uptick of rage. It started about an hour ago when I heard about someone I know testing positive for the virus. (How are we going to write this word? Virus? Corona Covid? Covid-19? Should we be clever or ironic or matter-of-fact and terse? Maybe the uptick started last night when I went to bed and read a few emails from our old pediatrician's office. He's a private doctor who treats a lot of very wealthy families and celebrities. I "picked" him over 23 years ago because he was willing to work with my babies' vaccination schedule given Sophie's seizure disorder and the suspicious way it started. That's another story and we sure as hell aren't going into that now. I'm telling you this so you know why I took all three of my children, through their childhood, to a ridiculously expensive pediatrician. Don't get me wrong. I love the man and his staff.  Fortunately, we made very few visits to the pediatrician, but I can honestly say that in nearly every single instance,  I spotted a familiar golden face.



You know what? Forget this story. It's about self-tests for The Virus, how they were available for $250. How as soon as the newsletter went out, first come, first serve, another newsletter arrived and all the tests were gone, accounted for, paid for, etc., as if those tests were toilet paper, frantically purchased and hoarded.

Capitalistic concierge medicine.

My uptick of rage is related to my son announcing that several Lakers have The Virus or have tested positive, and I've been reading accounts from FRIENDS that they haven't been able to get a test despite having symptoms of  The Virus. So, all I'm going to say about this is the same thing I've been harping (that's a fine word, isn't it?) about for all the years you've been reading this shit that I write and that is that we can not call ourselves a great country when the country has such a huge disparity between those that are obscenely rich and the rest of us. Where celebrities and pro athletes and rich people have access to healthcare while regular folks do not.

Let's not even get into the disabled issue.

Read this.

When all of this is over, I think I don't want to hear another word about a celebrity or a pro athlete or really anything related to vast sums of money or adulation of those who have vast sums of money.

Up
tick





d


o


w


n


ward.











I did have a good morning teaching my dear students. One made a video for his final project related to the great Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find." I practically fell on the floor in a state of shock and awe when I watched it. Honestly. This 14-year old kid got that short story and created something original, weird and incredible. I wish I could share it with you and will let you know if he makes it public on Vimeo.

I also spoke with my therapist in a telephone session, and that helped me a lot. We compared notes on coping, talked at length about how we can do hard things, how helping others helps ourselves, how caregiving is a form of meditation and damn if I'm not grateful for the people out there working so hard to ease the suffering of others.

Thank you doctors and nurses and all those who help in the healthcare world.

Here's a poem by Lynn Unger:

PANDEMIC

What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.

And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.

Promise this world your love—
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.

We Can Do Hard Things, Tuesday 3/17/20

Good morning from locked-down Los Angeles.

Roses

Everyone now and again wonders about
those questions that have no ready
answers: first cause, God's existence,
what happens when the curtain goes
down and nothing stops it, not kissing,
not going to the mall, not the Super
Bowl.

"Wild roses," I said to them one morning.
"Do you have the answers? And if you do,
would you tell me?"

The roses laughed softly. "Forgive us,"
they said. "But as you can see, we are
just now entirely busy being roses."

Mary Oliver

New Podcast: Anat Baniel and the Unlimited Potential of the Human Brain

If you have a moment or two,  listen to Jason and I have a really cool conversation with Anat Baniel about the human brain and its unlimited potential. Check out the latest episode of Who Lives Like This?! here.

Here's another poem:

from On Living

Living is no laughing matter:
    you must live with great seriousness
        like a squirrel, for example—
   I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
        I mean living must be your whole occupation.

Nazim Hikmet (1947)
trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk

An Elegy for Elizabeth Warren and Don't Go Off Menu

We interrupt yesterday's tiny mind tidbits, apple licking and POSPOTUS supporting and bashing to bring you this excellent reading:

An Elegy for Elizabeth Warren

I was curled up in a fetal position for much of the day, mournful of Warren's exit and the looming prospect of having to vote for either Biden or Sanders, but I've put the proverbial big-girl panties on and am getting on with it, it being fighting for what's right for those most vulnerable for the country for the earth and all those who live on it.

I also encourage you to read Warren's speech to her staff. It will give you hope.

And there's this article that suggests things you can do if you don't care for either candidate running against Trump -- things you can do with your bodies, your time and your money:

Take whatever money you’d budgeted for beating Trump, and split it in down the middle. Give half of it to local candidates who catch your eye. Give the other half to an organization (or a few) that will exist past Election Day 2020. Focus on groups that work with local candidates — we humbly suggest our own group, Run for Something, of course, but any will do — or groups that engage young people and/or communities of color. Give to organizations that do deep relationship-building in states that a presidential campaign is never going to organize in because the Electoral College doesn’t incentivize it. If you can afford to, make your donation recurring and plan to let it run into 2021.

Also, this from the same article:

Whether you vote is public, but whom you vote for is private. It’s your right to cast your ballot for whomever you prefer. But especially if you’re a person with any kind of privilege, you have a responsibility to think beyond your self-interest. This election is about the most vulnerable among us who need you to be an ally. While it might be tempting to take a principled stand and not vote, the facts are what they are: The general election will be between Trump and the eventual Democratic nominee. You don’t get to go off menu. The people who will be most harmed by your failure to vote against Trump are people who are already seriously hurting — that is a responsibility to take seriously, especially if you live in one of the battleground states where the margin could be dangerously close.

Here's a poem:

The Bird Catcher

When fighting time is on, I go

With clap-net and decoy

A-fowling after goldfinches

And other birds of joy;

I lurk among the thickets of

The Heart where they are bred,

And catch the twittering beauties as

They fly into my Head

Ralph Hodgson, b. 1879, Northumberland

Warning: Profanity Ahead, Plus Poetry

Pity the Nation (After Khalil Gibran)

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerors
And acclaim the bully as a hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture
Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own
Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms be washed away
My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
2007


P.S. I listened to a group of teachers in the teachers' lounge at my school today make excuses for that POSPOTUS. I didn't know what to do so I left the room. What are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to live in love with these people?

P.P.S

kubeiko

n. a state of exhaustion inspired by an act of senseless violence, which forces you to revise your image of what can happen in this world—mending the fences of your expectations, weeding out invasive truths, cultivating the perennial good that’s buried under the surface—before propping yourself up in the middle of it like an old scarecrow, who’s bursting at the seams but powerless to do anything but stand there and watch.

via The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Notes from the Underground

to Leslie

There's an underground passageway where certain mothers or those like them go. It winds down and down and then along and perhaps up and up because the metaphor isn't always about ground and earth and dark but sky and cloud and light. (But that's later). So maybe not underground except as it is in sleep, deep. The women wear thick loose gowns, silk, thick cotton, stiff from another time, an eternal time, their arms bare their hair long and they leave their glasses on bedside tables because they see in the dark. They lie beside children and grown children who moan (from) the dark for no reason at all and they wipe the hair from their foreheads and press up back along the knobs of the spine, steps from the base to the base of the neck. They straighten an arm and roll the palm flat the body a series of reflexes the moan becomes just breath. They lie down always an outside spoon. Later. A poem appears in a lighted box. Another woman in an underground passageway in Seattle is making jam and cleaning up her husband's dying shit the fluids. The passageway is toward the present, the woman (me) sees (dark). Lying in (to) (by) the present.

Here's the poem:

Advice to Myself

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

Louise Erdrich

Beloved

The world is in this room. This here's all there is and all there needs to be.

Sethe, from Beloved 

It seems like everyone is mourning the death of Toni Morrison, and I've been tearing up off and on all day thinking of her, of her spirit, her words, her regal presence, her books, what she meant to me my entire adult life, as a reader and a writer and a human being, and then I was thinking of all the people slaughtered over the weekend, of the piles of dead children, of the human stain of racism in our country, of all that we have to do, to fix and how to be. I first saw Toni Morrison at Spelman College in the late 1980s, shortly after Beloved was published, and I sat in a huge auditorium with hundreds of people, mostly African American young women, and before She walked out onto the stage, a group of women played drums, the beat so steady and rhythmical they presaged her voice, her voice with the words, always, that she put on the page. She walked out, probably at the age I am now, and I was struck then by her presence and by the impact she had had on the women in the room. She was their voice. I read nearly every single thing she wrote. The second time I saw her was not too long ago in Los Angeles, in a theater downtown filled with the mix that is Los Angeles, yet when she walked into the room, she was so grand, so regal, her voice so rich and deep with humor and wisdom, all of us so rapt and smiling and nodding our heads that I thought then: she is all of our voices.

Rest in peace and power, Toni Morrison. Thank you.


This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.

Toni Morrison, in an interview with writer Pam Houston, Oprah Magazine,  2003

Dog Days

It's hot.

Here's a poem.

Heat

BY DENIS JOHNSON

Here in the electric dusk your naked lover

tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth.

It's beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin,

Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover,

streaming with hatred in the heat

as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin

to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones,

and such a last light—full of spheres and zones.

August,

              you're just an erotic hallucination,

just so much feverishly produced kazoo music,

are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night,

this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion,

the bogus moon of tenderness and magic

you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?

My Response to Everything Concerning Everything (that strange flower)

Sunset at Allison's
Twin Peaks, CA July 2019

is poetry, and it's not what I write but what I want to read, words floating up or by like fish in my mind. Wallace Stevens comes to mind complacencies of the peignoir.

In the span of let's say five minutes I scanned just scanned words strung together (scan, scroll, read?) Mitch McConnell Mitch Moscow his voice a drone the rap something about something and then a star not of the sky (the stars' wrapping) but of rap his radiance in Sweden who threw a guy across a street which I believe is assault (the Swedes say) but whom POSPOTUS wants out (of Swedish jail) encouraged by the Kardashian paper doll who put on clothes that her husband ordered up designed that covered her famous breasts and ass and fly waist and Cinderella feet so that she could pose with the men in orange, most recently, take a selfie and

S
T
A
N
D

U
P for justice reform and Ikea be boycotted (Ikea being Danish not Swedish but who cares but meatballs and lingonberries and soft-serve cones) and wait, who do we support here? 

remember: five minutes (maybe ten including the footage of the blue-eyed Eilish)

they ended with Meghan Markle editing British Vogue and insisting on freckles and then the photo of the boy standing in grass his thin-lipped sweetness smile shot dead at a garlic festival by another angry white man with a gun.

Precious child.

Another one (or two) added to the piles of dead children.


I've stood in a sunflower field with my sons in Gilroy.

















There's humor in befuddlement or is it wry or rue?





Here's the poem.


Gubbinal

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed —
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

Wallace Stevens



I think we (you) suffer from an intellectual laziness, a lack of imagination.


Like Stevens' also wrote:

People are not going

To dream of baboons and periwinkles. 

On another note, I am learning about pleasure.

(and no, I am not going mad but rather writing and wrestling with words)

After the Doctor

The light in Sophie's bedroom in the late afternoon is incredible. I'll walk by and just stand there staring at it and her and wish I could walk into it, truly walk into light so that I might become light again. Because I'm near spent. Because I almost never feel light these days. I feel heavy, literally and figuratively. I am not as resilient as I once was or perhaps, if I'm kind (always kind) to myself I might attribute this heaviness to the years, the years or perhaps to upcoming transitions (Oliver leaving), those existential changes that take even the strong by surprise in their intensity. Today I went to the doctor, and I tried to explain this malaise, this lack of resiliency, this burning feeling in my throat that persists and this ache in my hips. Is something wrong? Really wrong? I think, I wonder. I have scanned the worldwide webs, have allowed the slip in -- you know how that goes, right? -- of guilt, of reckoning, because, really, how fortunate can one possibly be when one endures so much stress on an ongoing basis? I let that slip in my mind, the thought that it was all going to come home to roost, as they say, that instead of morphing into my peasant grandmother and die demented at 88, I'd get sick and who has time for that? I spoke with rue of my weight of the necessity of exercise and losing weight and the doctor agreed. You'll feel better, he said. And what about these? I showed him the starbursts of blue on the backs of my legs. They don't hurt, I said, and he said, I wouldn't worry. The blood work was fine, the blood pressure is normal and the new burn in my throat from stress, he said. Here, take this. The way these things are doled out, so casually and why would he know that I in my peculiar writerly way will note this, will note the casual shrug, the burn in the throat reduced to acronym (GERD) and take this for 8 weeks and do this (exercise) and that (lose weight) and you'll feel better but I'll know better from better and there's still that light, nearly spent.

Here's a poem by Mark Doty:

SPENT

Late August morning I go out to cut
spent and faded hydrangeas — washed
greens, russets, troubled little auras

of sky, as if these were the very silks
of Versailles, mottled by rain and ruin
then half-restored, after all this time...

When I come back with my handful
I realize I’ve accidentally locked the door,
and can’t get back into the house.

The dining room window’s easiest;
crawl through beauty bush and spirea,
push aside some errant maples, take down

the wood-framed screen, hoist myself up.
But how, exactly, to clamber across the sill
and the radiator down to the tile?

I try bending one leg in, but I don’t fold
readily; I push myself up so that my waist
rests against the sill, and lean forward,

place my hands on the floor and begin to slide
down into the room, which makes me think
this was what it was like to be born:

awkward, too big for the passageway…
Negotiate, submit?
                           When I give myself
to gravity there I am, inside, no harm,

the dazzling splotchy flowerheads
scattered around me on the floor.
Will leaving the world be the same

—uncertainty as to how to proceed,
some discomfort, and suddenly you’re
—where? I am so involved with this idea

I forget to unlock the door,
so when I go to fetch the mail, I’m locked out
again. Am I at home in this house,

would I prefer to be out here,
where I could be almost anyone?
This time it’s simpler: the window-frame,

the radiator, my descent. Born twice
in one day!
                In their silvered jug,
these bruise-blessed flowers:

how hard I had to work to bring them
into this room. When I say spent,
I don’t mean they have no further coin.

If there are lives to come, I think
they might be a littler easier than this one.