From “September Is”
Memory is deeply not alive: it’s a mock-up
And this renders it hateful. Yet, it is not a fiction,
it’s truth, indeed a sad and monstrous truth.
I was assigned to you, together we were
a beautiful and melancholic picture.
This last picture is the realization
of the overwhelming moment
in which the acute eye perceives you as a now
that is over. A now that is now fixed in the swept past.
Mary Jo Bang
Excerpt from “What is so frightening”
…There was
someone like this before, she thought.
Upstanding, blank-faced, red-dressed.
Someone sitting in a box, defining herself
As one with roots. One burnished
By expandable light. One busied with examining
A nasty bruise. One who was becoming
Part of a past.
Mary Jo Bang
The Cruel Wheel Turns Twice
And tightens until language can’t bear this
Hollowing, crash cart, Please. In the silence,
A bus slithers by
A din. The aluminum morning takes on more tension
And becomes a metal rod
Straight from a tunnel, dropped into a gate groove.
Disappointment. And again The End gate
Opens and it’s, Please
Come back. Please be. Then nothing. Only end-
Less night taking off from the smooth tarmac slate.
The potpie clock, its stock of twelve numbers,
A stew for the weak and the weary.
The small war of the heart made bigger
by far in the world.
And daylight a gift.
Small cog slips into the hour
And razor thin minute slot without stop.
And daylight a gift tied with some tinsel.
Mary Jo Bang
May I have your attention, please?
Thanks.
J and I have finally decided on Sept 7-17 as Santa Fe days. Hope I can see every last one of my friends while I am there. And go to Ten Thousand Waves and go hiking and eat burritos at El Parasol and maybe go swimming if it isn’t too chilly and take a drive to Embudo Station and get some green chile and get all knackered at the Cowgirl but mostly? Mostly: Julia, River, Dana, Anna and Forest, Colin, et cetera. Please call me. I miss you desperately.
Brought to you courtesy of my headache.
Have decided, in order to remedy my anxiety, to jettison Cornell and add Penn and Notre Dame. Penn’s funding looks sketchy but it’s a 3-year program and ND’s is full and I have a fortune-telly feeling about it. So okay. Spent all day yesterday writing, but because I didn’t want to write prep for a personal essay and I am leaving my new poems alone, I journalled and wrote letters all day. If you’re expecting something from me you’re probably (finally) going to get it.
The Dallas Museum of Art finally contacted me about the Brainless Ticket Taker job I applied for about 3 weeks ago. They require I be available from 8:30am to 4pm, TOMORROW. Short notice, no? I’m sure it’s just hubris from my wildly financially successful weekend that is tempting me to ignore. That and my insane desire to stay home and nerd out 4 days a week, no matter how poor it makes me.
In related news, my car’s been broken into and the stereo stolen. It doesn’t work though; there go a couple of very unhappy crackheads. Because I don’t have the money to fix it, I am ignoring it. I’ve started referring to it as New Orleans. Too soon?
Last night after our weekly date with Mad Men we went to Billiard Bar for $2 You-Call-Its and while everyone played pool, I curled up on a big black leather couch and watched Walk Hard with captions on. It was actually pretty pleasant. Watching movies in bars, who knew?
According to the new Creative Writing MFA Rankings, every single program I am applying to is in the top 20 and half of them are in the top 10.
Is nervous.
You have got to sometimes become the medicine you want to take. You have got to, absolutely got to put your face into the gash and sniff, and lick. You have got to learn to get sick. You have got to reestablish the integrity of your emotions so that their violence can become a health and so that you can keep on becoming. There is no sacrifice. You have got to want to live. You have got to force yourself to want to.
Ariana Reines
Poem, meet wall.
How important do you imagine place to be within a poem? I like this new one okay but it lacks place. Damn Nick Flynn getting all in my head with his “YOUR POEMS ARE TOO DIDACTIC”. I mean, I dunno. I don’t imagine a place. Maybe an anatomical place? Maybe I’m really self-absorbed (HELLO!) Or maybe I’m so over hallucinatory nature poems, or maybe place is a blind alley, or maybe I’m being lazy–maybe to ignore Nick Flynn is to refuse to grow, maybe to acknowledge him is to tacitly acknowledge that I am as marginal and boring as he says….What do I do with this (conundrum, poem, angry man inside my head)? Just thinkin’ out loud.
After falling asleep listening to a Frank Bidart Reading…
Because every woman wants to be handed her own
Heart, stillborn, you handed off mine,
One red lozenge on a heap of slow
Offal and sweetbread, and asked for walking papers.
To put it another way,
Because every poet wants the classification of
poet, insisted I was not one. Were you pushing me
Toward grapes and laundry and childrearing,
I’ll never know. It was summer. We were your children.
You preened for one girl with milky skin
And a monkey’s nose. You crowed, a poet!
The first thought. The second
daughter should content herself with God.
Because I wasn’t, I rebelled. And pushed
Into that heart, sludged through
With pearly purulence, purplish red of an angry
newborn and singing. I cry to think of it.
I cry to think of your own satisfaction,
One heart without purity of intent, My own
Beautiful heart! Its breathing hole at my ear.
My heart’s panging and skittering set your skin to
A crawl. One heart the size
of my fist, which is to say
Small, one compressed chamber
with a small hole I imagine to be singed,
One misprint of an organ singing about fear
And spite. I follow it deep down into the night.
The room shuttles and pounds. One piping hole
In one stillborn heart, whistling, finally unafraid
of your approval, undesirous of it either. At night,
While neither of us sleeps, while you trace
The edges of proscribed beauty in your restless world,
I follow the sound of the sound down into my own red heart,
Sing along. Because every woman is a midwife,
It is one red interruption, my bleating heart, still alive.
