Grad School Miscellany, Take 74

I jettisoned Penn because, well, I felt like it alright? I don’t care what kind of program they have, everyone I meet from Penn acts like an idiot. And then there were ten: Alabama, Oregon, Notre Dame and Illinois are all tucked into envelopes and waiting for one last rec before mailing. This leaves Michigan, Minnesota and Washington with some annoying hoop-jumping I am dragging my feet over because I feel that writing essays on self-motivation and commitment to diversity insult my intelligence and Purdue, Virginia and Wash U just because I haven’t gotten to them yet.
Despite the fact that I have somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 left to scrounge up and spend before January 2 (please don’t mention the miracle plane ticket I plan to buy for Awesome Holiday Redux at Anna and Forest’s) I am feeling pretty good about things right now.

Vapour Steals the Glow, Boduf Songs

Me and Riv

Way back in the wayback machine.

When we were teenagers, we wanted to be the sky. Now all we want to do is go to red places.

Something about driving to the airport and how I used to weep inconsolably all the way home, when home was Santa Fe.

Something about the clouds slinking through the mountains this morning. Something about that sunlight and all that piercing bright. Something about deciding in the Teahouse bathroom that I’ll have to move back here after graduate school; something about yellow-orange leaves herding across the blacktop and that sweet brown expanse. Something about the dreams I’ve been having, something about Murray’s clear green eyes, something about the stature relaxing and the natural ability to receive the world here. Something about a Thanksgiving that filtered snow over us while we bounced off each other, the heat radiating, the incredible warmth. Something about love.

Something about knowing what home feels like, that which couldn’t feel less like home just a year ago. Something about how we change. Something.

My GRE scores were so high the University of Michigan has invited me to apply…to their Master of Information Science program.

Huh.

For JSKAH!

Harvester

At work: dead on the table.
The cat’s busy heart halved,
then flattened. Taking up
a pair of instruments, I practiced
embroidery on his opened belly.

Here we are not journeying
through a dream, though the unconscious
browses as if at market.
Lying taut atop the organs are ruddy strips of muscle

And clouding over, weather systems of fat.
Here are inroads I made through them with purple thread.
Here I practice my slip stitch on the skin layer:
A blithe puppeteer’s tug at line
and two sheaves of flesh cleave.

Dreaming: while he sleeps on a cotton lozenge
next to my throbbing skull I resculpt my cat
from the clay I made of him.

Here I am, stooped over a steel tub
In which, methodical and absolute,
I push him under by the scruff. I watch
for a struggle but he makes none.

Now the dreamer enters the dream.
Look at me:
Here is the calculated gleam of a harvester,
O won’t this be a great experiment to feed his limp body
Through a die-cast hopper

And of the white meal he made, I sculpted
another of him, and even awake I can
admire what a perfect likeness it was–
what the self, tilted from guilt, can fashion
from bodies living and dead.

These chalk hills will rot my bones

Two other things I forgot to say about Dana/poetry meeting:

1) She DUG UP my Harvester poem, forcefully interred, edited the bejeesus out of it and STUCK IT BACK IN my manuscript. I was all, Really? I think it’s so rough and yucky. And she was all, I have no DOUBT. This poem is going to be great.

!!!

2) D mentioned in passing that my class and the class that came just before ours had so much excitement and creative energy and dynamism, and she hasn’t seen that since. And I was all OH HELL YES

ARGH

Have been scouring the internet for that acoustic version of “(This is) The Dream of Evan and Chan” and all I can find are those crazy DNTEL remixes!

Last night there was raclette and Kirsch and HILARIOUS dinner, my favorite kind, and this morning I woke up with one swollen tonsil, which I am treating with about a hundred glasses of emergen-c and a trip to Ten Thousand Waves tonight.

Dana and I went to Clafoutti’s for breakfast and talked about my manuscript, which she RADICALLY re-sequenced, putting all the older, narrative and emotional poems up front and burying all the weirdo experimental new stuff in the back. Her conviction: older poems are more formed, more appealing. I was shocked! Shocked, I tell you!

She also advocated for some radical revisioning of my Dear Sister poem, which I have done and (though it pains me to excise “make it sleek and winnowing at your fly-garnished hook”) it looks different. Leaner. Maybe better?

Dear Sister,

You don’t have to pay your credit card. Just try to get out of the bathtub.
Try to think of the sour mid-mouth grit
from an afternoon shower that has slicked desert dust,
a contained system in the sky, a gray beast
that lurks between territories of sun and soil.
You needn’t challenge anyone’s reign.
You can, you know, see for hundreds of miles.

Wherever you live, work in the interstitial spaces.
It is not flying but the marriage of self and air.
She does not work in grief not black grief curtain descending grief God’s silent disappointment grief
but the moment of unfurling.
A navel mouth singing heart songs in the shower’s clatter. There.
You see? Not grief at all.

Because you will be afraid of death, go to bed with your jealousy.
Really.
Lay full length against it and tongue it open,
quicken its breath, summon its night cries with your teeth and fingers.
Hone your technique, stage seductions for your poems,
find lovers around whom you’ll wind language.
There is nothing greater.
Analysts will tell you not to read in bed,
not to do anything but sleep, so as to sleep sound.
They recommend sterilization, the slow well-meaning
mauve of maturity. But ask them: where do you fuck?
What bathroom mirror affirmation ever became a poem?

Letter in November

Love, the world
Suddenly turns, turns color. The streetlight
Splits through the rat’s tail
Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning.
It is the Arctic,

This little black
Circle, with its tawn silk grasses – babies hair.
There is a green in the air,
Soft, delectable.
It cushions me lovingly.

I am flushed and warm.
I think I may be enormous,
I am so stupidly happy,
My Wellingtons
Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.

This is my property.
Two times a day
I pace it, sniffing
The barbarous holly with its viridian
Scallops, pure iron,

And the wall of the odd corpses.
I love them.
I love them like history.
The apples are golden,
Imagine it —-

My seventy trees
Holding their gold-ruddy balls
In a thick gray death-soup,
Their million
Gold leaves metal and breathless.

O love, O celibate.
Nobody but me
Walks the waist high wet.
The irreplaceable
Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.

Sylvia Plath