In lieu of a real update…
Just a quick non-update: Jessalyn interviewed me over at Whole World Reads. At least, it should.
If you are a young writer, you should READ THIS PIECE.
…There is a theory, put forward by DW Winnicott and WR Fairbairn, that creativity is a mode of play which we do not only for its enjoyment but also to explore the interface of self and world and to make restitution for the damage we do to others and ourselves by our narcissism. The youth tuning up the family car, the man weeding his garden, the woman rewriting a description five times to get it right, are all involved, psychically speaking, in the same activity.
Ted Solotaroff, “Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years”
Spring in Space: A Lecture
1. Consider the Possibilities
So much fabric has been worn away
just by wishing it.
Under your costume I’m naked and the pretty
wind for cooling
the south salts me everywhere. Your hands
find me where there is no science,
only precision. I could sleep for days
without a map.
A sample garden in a possible summer never
occurred to me before.
Why should I comprehend it now? It’s a lot.
It’s only dusk.
This planet spins so it shouldn’t be so hot.
You’ve never felt the sun
on me. And nothing will fall with the exact
weight of itself until you do.
2. Know Your Limits
Our bodies are stunted with scarce infinity;
with our bodies, we hate stars.
Anything endless begins at the end and moves toward less.
This is why stars die without us
knowing. That and the universal shortage of lifeboats,
which we unknowingly recreate,
on earth, at sea, as if it’s a mistake each time.
The message is: there is never enough,
though we celebrate the hoax of boundlessness,
Celestial bodies, like our own, perish as if they’d scrimped
on light because they had to pay for it,
and no longer could. And froze like so many little match girls.
That’s the brutal truth about the heavens.
It’s the worst Dickensian squalor at its heart.
Of which there is none. No wisdom either.
People think that to be “wise” is to be old, owlish,
unbearable, or Chinese. Wrong. No need to wait or be reborn.
To be wise is simply to be understood, even missed.
3. Use Your Imagination
Don’t be fooled. It is very easy
to feel nostalgia for the natural
world. As if the cheerily if
ambivalently named month of “May”
“feels” warmth after a sullen
period of icy withholding.
“Forgives.” Or that the very earth
“expresses” a gratitude or
tenderness in return for nothing!
Fish don’t have feelings. Clouds
are not angry. Spring buds are lucky
accidents, not faith. Spring itself is a word
that means a season, a kind of freshwater
and an aerial action. It is, in short,
and within reason, anything we want it to be.
If I had my way, spring would
revolve slowly and solely around me.
Each morning, I’m the earth’s
favorite daughter, extremely eating
a breakfast of yolky sun,
a relentless placebo I enjoy alone,
while the rest of the foolish world
suffers continual, half-dead night.
I waited for you for months.
You said, “Spring,” and I kept the bed warm,
held a candle. It’s way past that now.
Now try to find me in the dark.
Brenda Shaughnessy
They mended the nets, to get their men back to sea faster.
I have a poem brewing.
Sailor’s Valentines were very much in vogue through the 1850’s and on into Victoriana. I nursed this romantic fantasy of a sailor diving into a bay, combing the beaches of lonely, exotic ports and then piecing together these pointillist masterpieces in empty octagonal compass boxes to pass time on voyages. In fact, the industry was created by the women of Barbados. It wasn’t a mandala, it was a valentine, in the colloquial sense. Not meditation but commerce.
This is a photo of the passage around Cape Horn, which I think accurately captures the state of my life right now. Treacherous.
We Don’t Always Leave Notes
The fury in our heads is not the meek drama
we lay out on paper. We think existential thriller,
bestseller, but write this is to let you know I’m dead,
or simply, I have tried. The mind formulates
grand plans to do it like a Roman,
the hand sends a postcard from the Spanish Steps.
Being alive is traveling abroad.
And still we expect something other
than homesickness. Of ourselves, something
romantic, memorable, not another absurd hero
the shelves are too crowded to hold.
Every time we cross a bridge, we reenlist
by not jumping. We nurse that odd desire.
If the fever wins we check out, toast
in our chosen way. With Thunderbird,
champagne, one last sip from the bitter well
of the heart. We pull the plug in formal clothes,
in no clothes. Some even sweep the floor first,
secure the locks, switch off the lights. Strange
preliminaries to gassing oneself in a garage.
Each culture has a way to explain it—
every breath is a choice,
the nail that sticks up gets hammered down,
if you’ve sat through half a movie
and every second has sucked so far, walk out—
There’s a sad man in every room in the world.
He wants to live forever
yet does not know what to do
with himself on the first day of spring.
Patrick Carrington
“I hope someday you can forgive everyone,” she said. “Including yourself.”
My skin hid all the things going on beneath. But for a moment, I feared my father could see through me–that my body had the acetate page in an anatomy book–a woman in a skirt and shirt lifts to become the vascular system, skeletal system–and then finally just a shell: her uterus, lungs, intestines.
Robin Romm
Very like, but not quite.
Sparse-haired, crumbling
teeth, your old mom
droops from the heat,
the pull on her teats
of a hundred infants.
A worn-out cat,
humped half to death,
she breathes decay
so Ruth
we did it–
you wandered the house,
licked your neat nylon
stitches, your belly
shaved to velvet–
an early spinster
a young old maid
so I recalled
an operation
in a glass-walled
room at a fair:
a doped dog, carried
in on a tray,
her womb removed,
the strange V shape
help up for the crowd,
knotted with pods
that were puppies…
and dreamed of
tiny paws & nails
pink underbellies
scraped-out bodies
the scooping of
ovaries of
still-closed eyes
yet why
if that’s right
do you now
tomgirl
in boots
chase
the Toms rush
the tiger lilies
rub against us
singing singing
as though you’re not
dreaming of fuckings,
the taste of placenta,
as though you’re not
laughing at my wires
to diaphragm, diapers–
as though you’re not
questioning twenty
years of my life?
Rosemary Daniell
M-A-D is the filter through which we’re pressed to see ourselves–
if we don’t, we won’t get published, sold, or exhibited–
I blame none of us for not challenging it
except not challenging it may drive us mad. It is present
in the bravest of us. It comes out in strange shapes, escapes
like air through the tiniest hole in the strongest
woman’s self. It is a slaughterhouse waiting for the calf
or lamb-sized art, for the sausage-ready little pig poems
which never get to the supermarket: They
are lost in the shuffle, or buried as ladies’ poems have been
in bureau drawers for years. Male Approval Desire is a cog
in the Art Delivery Machine: It instructs
by quiet magic women to sing proper pliant tunes for
father, lover, piper who says he has the secret, but
wants ours; it teaches us to wear cloaks labeled
Guinevere, become damsels, objects in men’s power joustings
like her; lets us shimmer, disappear, promise to rise like a
Lady of the Lake, but we drown–real, not phantom.
Honor Moore
