March 7, 1924 - February 19, 2012

my mother read this poem at my grandmother's funeral today:

The Peace of Wild Things
By Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.



There were no nails in my grandmother's coffin. The pine box was put together with pegs, perhaps yesterday, sawdust still lit on the edges. There was no service. We stood in the first few pews of the funeral home, just immediate family, talked quietly, looked at some pictures.

I was on the phone with my mother when she got the call on Sunday, had called her after a week or two of not being in touch. There was no better way for her or I to get the news.

When I first thought about the funeral, I didn't think about the actual act of putting the loved into the ground, didn't think of it at all until my dad mentioned that I should bring a coat to Pittsburgh. We buried my grandmother, truly, at least half of the coffin, my family and I. It's Jewish custom. All of us shoveled. At first hesitant scoops, trading off the shovels, then with greater muscle, acceptance, a job to do, digging into the cold dirt with force, pushing our feet onto the shovel's head so that it broke more earth for us to heave into the coffin. It became something more communal than standing beside the grave. I don't think any of us knew we'd be burying her like that. In funerals on TV, at other funerals I've been to, sometimes there is a handful of dirt cast down, a flower thrown in. This was shared grief in action, as we literally buried our dead. A blessing to take part in that type of closure.

TO SPEAK IS TO RISK

Who says what and how and whose business is it anyway?

Is this especially true in my little corner of the internet? Yes, it damn well is. If I am not writing violent things along the lines of "I'm going to blow up XYZ with (insert explosive thing here) at X time, for sure," then at worst, my words should only be a danger to a reader's worldview or comfy perception of How Things Are.

As far as I am concerned, I can say anything I want. So can you. And so can that other guy. So can JSA Lowe, who is a poet and a PhD candidate here at the University of Houston. This is her blog, lycanthropia. and, to my complete surprise, THIS is what she wrote on HTMLGIANT after someone in her workshop at school read her blog, expressed concern to a workshop leader, and the workshop leader (I don't know who) confronted her saying something like this:

…people have come to me who are concerned…other students in the program… upset… distressed…compromising their experience of the program… haven’t read it myself, that would break boundaries for me…affects their perception of you…their sense of you as a professional…writing about very intimate matters… damage your standing with your colleagues…makes people uncomfortable…took it to the department chair [and here my brain made an almost audible shorting-out sound] and he agrees with me…run the risk of this having a real effect on your career…future employment…could jeopardize your standing in the program….really best that you not.. writing about such personal things so publicly…consider…think about the wisdom of… importance of being collegial…for your own sake….

Lowe continues:

"It’s still Monday morning. I’m sitting frozen in a strange office trying to scramble my resources for some sort of a response. And I’m pretty sure I have The Wrong Look on my face. I’m supposed to be—what, grateful for this intelligence? Contrite? I don’t know. Probably warring on my features instead: incredulity, disbelief, the deepest shame and anger. Of course I am ashamed. I was born ashamed. The blog is part of my attempt to counter some of that—

(Went to the department chair? Students are upset? Who? Why didn’t they approach me like grown-ass people? Why did they go to one of my professors, why this professor? What the fuck did I write that was so awful? If my blog is so distressing to them, why don’t they just not read it?)

(And is there any irony in the fact that my creative writing program apparently wants me to put a sock in my creative writing?)"


You can read the rest of the essay yourselves, if you are a blogger, or a writer or a parent or loved one of anyone who writes. Lowe is bringing up important issues with a lot of investigative clarity in a tone not quite as pissed off as mine. I am livid about the whole thing. I don't write much in this blog that is terrifically personal, but I have in the past. If you read the whole thing you could probably surmise some not terribly pretty things about me, but you might come to the same conclusions about me if you read my poetry. I work in a high school, teaching 14 year olds about poetry. If they're writing dark stuff, I don't tell them not to write it, I don't contact their parents, I talk to them. I use my judgement. I treat them like young adults. I use my judgement about what's a threat, what's a behavioral problem, and what's metaphor, what's creative expression, what's the sight of them processing a tough experience. For me to shut any of that down without talking directly to them would just be disrespectful.

Jennifer, yes, I "still cloak a lot of what (I) write in lyric incomprehensibility, just to be on the safe side, but also because that’s how (my) brain works," but if you don't want to, if the larger You doesn't want to, you shouldn't have to, and anyone who tells you otherwise can go marinate in their fear cave.

and i asked myself, don't you just love it? then, why don't you just love it?

It's that time of the year when I start to feel, well, terrible.

This year is different. There are Big Life Transitions that I'm not going to detail on the internet. I still feel terrible, but terrible in a way that pulses with placelessness, & possibilities, & love, & an odd overflow of hope / hopelessness which is somehow feeling like the same thing.

I have a big crush on dancing girl press & studio. How do people manage to keep things like this running? Are they independently wealthy? I would love to do something like this. Also, I would love to be independently wealthy. Also, I would love to own a little white llama and a patch of forest where he could live. All of the above is equally unlikely, so I will just keep my crush.

Back to Pittsburgh on Wednesday for Thanksgiving. Very excited, though I have to leave little cat for a few days. The Glee Adele mash-up is in my head on repeat. Was that scene devastating or was it just me?

Hop along, chickadees.

you were there, and you, and you

CODA

And now I know what most deeply connects us

after that summer so many years ago,
and it isn’t poetry, although it is poetry,

and it isn’t illness, although we have that in common,

and it isn’t gratitude for every moment,
even the terrifying ones, even the physical pain,

though we are grateful, and it isn’t even death,

though we are halfway through
it, or even the way you describe the magnificence

of being alive, catching a glimpse,

in the store window, of your blowing hair and chapped lips,
though it is beautiful, it is; but it is

that you’re my friend out here on the far reaches

of what humans can find out about each other.

—Jason Shinder




go home go home go on get gone

thanksgiving's coming soon, thank god

next semester, if everything works out, I get to take a class with edward albee and go to the ocean as much as i want.

a friend sent me his new manuscript. it reminded me to pay attention; he'd somewhat fallen into victimhood. being a victim is easy. owning your stuff, your garbage, baggage, baloney - that's hard. owning the places you've really fucked up. cleaning up. packing up, unpacking. i understand that you can write a book about a garden without writing about the sweat it took to plant it, without the times you cursed the ground, but why would you? why write the real dark as something imagined? maybe it means you could write your way out of there, temporarily, while the lights flash and you sign your book, do interviews talking about your book; i understood that the phrase to re-write history, implied avoidance, choices. I think it means something much darker now.

i should be fair. be fare, be fine, be-yond. last month, in the back of my notebook, he wrote a note that made me cry, that i needed to press to my chest for awhile, to soothe what felt torn there. and then one day, i didn't need to. i walked into the present tense. the air was just cold enough, and the sun was out -- it is fall in texas and the monarchs are coming through on slow loping wings on their way to the gulf. today i'm writing a paper, going to workshop, tomorrow waking up at 3 a.m. to go to the ocean with zach and eric.

good morning, chickadees, get up. let's go.

Try, Try Again

The Divine Image - by William Blake

Cruelty has a human heart
And jealousy a human face,
Terror the human form divine,
And secrecy the human dress.

The human dress is forged iron,
The human form a fiery forge,
The human face a furnace seal'd,
The human heart its hungry gorge.




Sometimes we forget that fear makes us cruel. A friend told me a year or so ago that I could be mean. I was taken aback; I never think of myself as a mean person. You're mean when you don't get what you want, he said. We'd been a 'thing,' a romantic-ish but never-quite-official thing. When my friend said want, he meant capital W want, want that is the thin shell of the fear that we'll never be fully loved, fully chosen. Humans hold a hundred forms of fear. When it comes to other people, that fear comes out in unexpected ways - some never directly expressed, some unbelievably violent. Fear surprises us. Our impulses go sideways. Most people act by self-propulsion, and the fuel is fear. We all think we're fakes, or we're not fakes, but we're ashamed of something we've done. We're afraid of being seen, so we're too loud or don't go to the party at all. I try to live in the middle, within reason, but I fail all the time.

Most often, when I act out, I misuse the gift of being a writer. It happened recently, this morning. The thought having hurt someone, having deliberately hurt someone, is so bewildering. I don't know myself, when I am sharp and thoughtless like that, sending that poem I knew was cruel. Not mean, but cruel - pushed buttons, hit nerves I knew it would hit. It's not my sober self, it's the addict self, who wants and lashes out when want isn't met. It pushes me from people. It's the real darkness in me, the faithless place. You might think the darkness was something else, something less to do with people, more interior, less nameable. But this is the real root of it, I've come to realize, because I have so many people who love me, who have stuck with me through hard time. Fear, fear, a hundred forms of fear. All I can really do is own it. To claim my side of the street. To pray to whatever is there or not. Try again.

the center of the earth is the end of the world

turns out, that really, I am actually a Green Day fan. Who knew?



this is a lyrics fan-made video & sloppy but I sort of like it. There's pretty great narrative music video that won't be embedded here

Sometimes I forget that I was a teenager in the 90's. We listened to Weezer, to Rusted Root, to Ani DiFranco, to No Doubt, to Ben Folds Five, to house music, to Joni Mitchell. Apparently we listened to Green Day. We didn't have a clue what was happening in the world. We quoted "Clueless." We watched My So-Called Life. We bought clothes from thrift shops - old man sweaters and ugly boots we markered up and babydoll dresses and bell-bottom jeans we ripped to shreds. We were sheltered by money. I rode the bus downtown alone three days a week afterschool to dance. We read Beowulf and The Scarlet Letter and Bartelby the Scribner. When Annie died, Dorothy had me sit down before she told me. There was a point at which Madeleine and I started to sneak out during the school day to smoke on the fire escape of the white house where no one seemed to live. I hardly remember senior year; I remember a trash can fire in the sun in someone's backyard, a day I threw up in the bathroom near the theater. There are pictures of the rest, but I can't remember it. We drank beer in Sparky's kitchen, ate bagel bites, rifled through her mom's purse. We so often slept at one another's houses. There were a lot of dusks we ran through other people's yards - how was it we could be carefree? Girls with ripped jeans playing children's games. There were a lot of long walks. There was a lot of rain.

Very happy that yes, The Rumpus did publish my little essay on Gregory Orr. You can read it here.

Dreamy Sunday; after swimming, late lunch in a dimly lit Thai place with one of my oldest friends. I remember when he came out to me. We were 14 or 15, and he took me slowly by the wrist out of our friend's old mansion to stand in the dusk on the gravel driveway. I'd already known, of course, so it wasn't the information was the revelation, it was how much he trusted me.

Went to see Tree of Life last night. This is the summer of movies alone. Very needed. Writing a lot about movies these days. Tonight I'm watching A Prophet, directed by Jacques Audiard. Audiard has directed two beautiful movies in the past ten years, Read My Lips, and The Beat That My Heart Skipped -- I think I'm going to see the latter again soon, as I saw it in the theatre in Boston when it came out in 2005. I think Audiard is fascinated by brutality and beauty, how they can live so tightly knit together. He's a terrifically sensitive director.

Here are 9 poems Terrance Hayes thinks you should read, and he's right.

My fortune cookie today said "Necessity is the mother of risk."

is love // love more

Writing about a Gregory Orr poem I love, hoping that maybe The Rumpus will publish it.



Chickadees, there's this thing about love.

I have a friend who called crying one day from California. She said that she was tired of people saying that it'd be okay, that the last guy just wasn't the right guy, that one day she'd meet someone. She said she was tired of that shit, that she wanted to hear instead how to start to accept being alone. I don't know what I said in reply. I'd like to think I took the middle road, said maybe, maybe. Said something like, I'm sure you'd be fine alone, I'm sure you might meet someone. Soon after, she called, said she was dating an actor, or maybe it was a fellow artist. A few phone calls later, there was an additional guy, someone she'd gone out with a few times. She was excited, seemed relaxed. And soon after that, she said she was alone again, and she seemed fine about it, focusing on her art. She said she'd started running really fast, that it felt great. Working hard, you mean? I asked. No, she said, running, literally running. I started to think that for some people, no matter what walls we put up to life, desire always crept in, heat, and need, and that made us lucky, because if we didn't have someone else to pour ourselves towards, we poured towards art. We poured towards art anyway, and in the end, wasn't that most important? Wasn't that connection the thing that would never break?



And in the next breath, how could one say there was anything more important than love. I understand this as much as I understand a sneeze, or hiccups, or laughing at a time when one shouldn't laugh, being unable to stop laughing. As many walls as one tosses up, it seems there's always someone who gets in, someone who we're pulled to, kicking and screaming, with all the knowledge of the past and all that pain. When it's inconvenient. When it's not moral. When we promised ourselves otherwise, again. I'm baffled, chickadees, I give up.


On another topic (but not), I'm home for the summer. This means the large wooden desk, the lace curtains, nights with a nervous energy, the old house, and rivers, rivers, rivers. I'm trying to photograph more - the above picture is a reminder. A friend who can't sleep without the radio on. I'd begun taking portraits of friends awhile ago - this was one of the pictures that got me into CalArts, where I slightly regret not going. I haven't really taken pictures since I decided not to follow the multi-media art path. But just because I'm not in school for it doesn't mean I can't follow it. So, here goes.

By the way, it's Father's Day. Happy Father's Day. I'm making enchiladas for my dad and the family. Here's something I wrote about family & poetry awhile ago, partially about my dad's early influence on my creativity. Sometimes it's very easy to forget that my dad is an accomplished psychologist, really ground-breaking in his field. There's a Wikipedia article about him for pete's sake. I never realized what a big deal he was until this Festscrift that CMU had for him a couple years ago. It became evident that the name "Klahr" in the world of developmental psychology garnered an "oh, yes of course, his research blah blah blah." I'd always just used his office as a place where I could draw monsters on a white board. That's an exaggeration of course, but until the festscrift, I didn't understand where my slightly insane and stubborn ambitiousness came from, where my willingness for experimentation came from. Thanks, dad.


Go thank your fathers, whether they're alive or not.

Carry on, chickadees.

go ahead

via the lovely becca.





netflix is bringing me jules et jim tomorrow.

Oh Absence & a poem by Jean Valentine

Absence in the shape of faith. I stopped trusting what looked stable, what called itself stable, and started to trust those people that owned their failings, that said those failings were inherent, that joked at the idea of their own perfection, their own completion. This tack seemed more real than anyone who said things like "I'm living the dream," or "I've been rocketed into the fourth dimension." This seemed more real than anyone who said, "this is a simple program for complicated people." The thing was - the idea of completion began to seem so entirely false that I started to let myself hang on the edge of things. The air was clearer there, because fewer people were willing to stand straddled between two lives, which was different than the illusion of balance, for this place acknowledged the continual potential a crash. The air was clearer, the sky was wider, the fields looked like I thought Texas would look - desolate, unexpected, small towns rising and disappearing as quickly into the land. Dry fields of machinery, a path of cacti and fossils, a creek bed and beetles, the living wind.


This following poem by Jean Valentine made me cry, albeit very quietly and shortly, in my poetic forms class:


X

I have decorated this banner to honor my brother. Our parents did not want his name used publicly. --from an unnamed child's banner in the AIDS Memorial Quilt


The boatpond, broken off, looks back at the sky.
I remember looking at you, X, this way,
taking in your red hair, your eyes' light, and I miss you
so. I know,
you are you, and real, standing there in the doorway,
whether dead or whether living, real. --Then Y
said, "Who will remember me three years after I die?
What is there for my eye
to read then?"
The lamb should not have given
his wool.
He was so small. At the end, X, you were so small.
Playing with a stone
on your bedspread at the edge of the ocean.

so it goes

The new issue of Matchbook, in which I have a tiny Batman poem, is now available for purchase.


I have a new post up at the Gulf Coast blog, entitled When We Were Very Young. This may be the most purely sweet piece of prose I have written in years.



Last night I was sitting on a curb with my transgender friend E., bemoaning some of what's going on in my life. E. said that he is broke, so he can't complete the transition yet from F to M, which he's been wanting to do for years. I think I'll make a funny-looking guy, he says, I'm so short. I have to look at him like he's crazy, because he'll be attractive no matter what. It's his spirit that's attractive, his faith. I talk a little more about my issues & start to cry out of frustration, even though I'm also somehow calmed by the warm night, the little dot of the moon. E. asks me if I want to trade problems. I don't even think about saying Yes. We hug and say goodnight. He gets on his little yellow scooter and zips off. I get in my silver car and count my blessings. As tangled as they may be.

I have been living inside this poem by Robert Duncan for a year

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow


as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down

whose secret we see in a children's game
of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.



(I have been sick on & off for two weeks. IV antibiotics, fearful nights, hundreds of dollars. I am sitting in my apartment again, feeling sick. I was sick at this time last year, for what felt like months. I don't say this to ask for well wishes. I think I need a medicine man. I need a spirit journey to search into the cause of my continual sickness, why my body so easily breaks down. I need to go into the desert and howl.

In the middle of all this sickness, I saw the best movie that I've seen in a long time, Biutiful. I can't stop thinking about it.

Here I Stand, Alive Unto You

Today my father sent an email to my siblings and I titled "VITAL INFORMATION." He and my mother are going to Chile, in a few weeks. The email contains a document, the heading of which is "Vital Information Upon My Demise." All sorts of things are listed, the things that everyone lists, banks, passports, birth certificates, safe deposit boxes, cars, executors of the wills. All this tumbledown, the things we keep ourselves busy with after funerals.

On the list of items in the safe deposit box, filed under Miscellaneous: "Trick wooden box with a silver dollar in it." I repeat this to myself twice. "Trick wooden box with a silver dollar in it." It makes me weep, immediately. This small thing. I can see myself perfectly, standing in the anonymous bank, on an unknown day, in a black coat, in a gray room full of boxes, doubled over, holding this trick wooden box with a silver dollar in it.

Do you know about The Rumpus? I subscribed recently, to receive "overly personal emails from Stephen Elliot." Lately these emails have been making me cry. It's as if you've just moved to an apartment in a city you've lived in for years, and these letters start coming. They're not addressed to anyone. You've been hoping for this sort of thing, this type of intimacy. The letters are perfect. They keep coming. You keep reading. One day the writer says, "If you write back, I won't respond," so you write to him. He keeps his promise.

It's not so bad, chickadees, to be alone. But it's good, too, to be in Boston & moving so quickly it's unclear exactly who you were or where or what with whom. And that's fine for awhile. While I was in Boston for New Year's I got to spend some time around Cass McCombs and music/art mates, including the artist Albert Herter and director Aaron Brown of Focus Creeps. All sweet & talented people who I hope to cross paths with again. This song's on repeat in my head:

A More Impossible Girl

There are, in fact, certain perks to spending too much time on the computer and being impulsive. These perks include things like buying cheap books at Powells.com, and buying tickets to see a band who reminds you of a type of home, or of a time, or of, oh, maybe it was just being twenty, in Boston, loose in the world and drawn (stunned) by the theatrics of it all, the sexual tension, the narrative. It's been a long time since I've seen the Dresden Dolls - haven't listened to their music in a long time really either - Amanda Palmer's solo album has gotten a bit of play with me, but it's not as if, when I lived in Pittsburgh & she came through town on tour, I ran out to see her, jumping around & screaming rabid-fan style. Last night was closer to that. Seeing Amanda & Brian come onstage - I felt as if Mass Ave had just been painted in front of me, as if Central Square, and Harvard Square, & Anna & Becca & the Fens & Landsdowne St. & crusty eye make-up & being hungover on the T & drinking coffee & smoking cigarettes on Boylston & lady crushes & jars of martinis &,&,&,&,&, - all of it there, all at the same moment. I've been homesick in Houston. Boston's a home to me, and the Dresden Dolls not only represent a home but a whole period of time, a whole emotional landscape. Epic satisfaction last night. I loved the whole fucking thing, and thought I somewhat regret not staying (as invited ) to have a drink with the sound guy David, I was spent and perfectly contained.

Last night's opener: Girl In A Coma - this song's been in my head all day (happy to find this video, as it's the only one that does justice to how extremely sexy lead singer Nina is. I mean, JEEZ.)



and... I don't know... I'm posting a song from the Dolls that I had a crazy visceral reaction to at last night's show. So much love. I found a version of the song online from around the same time (2004-5) when I would have first seen them in Boston.


[Reminder to self: you enjoy going out to rock shows alone in hot boots & dancing like a motherfucker. This has been a promotional message from the committee in favor of living it up. ]

That's all for now, chickadees. Go dream.

say hello to my leetle friend

sometimes a monster makes everything better.

The Inconsolables

I'm about 50 pages into "Heaven's Coast," a memoir by Mark Doty. The book found me precisely when I needed it, in the middle of a season of old trauma and grief. It's an incredibly, incredibly beautiful book. I wrote Mark a note today on Facebook, but thought that I would share it here - why not? The questions I have are so gnawing, I might as well fling them into whatever space is available.

I've been having an ongoing conversation with a friend about elegy, which has spread into a conversation also about consolation and catharsis. My friend's basic thought can be summarized inthat elegy "does nothing" - he finds no consolation in writing poems about the traumatic events of his life, but returns to them over & over involuntarily - this time of year, for both of us, the record skips.

The act of writing elegies for the same event or person over and over seems perhaps to be nothing more than the wild impulse of disbelief focused into page, the clearest, smallest space we can understand, a place where, as writers, we have the illusion (maybe) of manageability. My friend writes with no hope for consolation, with no hope that others might find his work cathartic (if they do, I think he's pleased, but he doesn't "aim" towards it). I haven't quite gotten there - I've an odd sense of responsibility surrounding trauma, surrounding death. I wonder, lately, if my sense of responsibility comes only from wanting the experiences to feel extremely unique - the desire to have been "chosen" almost, as some sort of voice to speak for those unable to express their traumas that are like mine. To have terrible things happen, and to not have a sense that they've happened for a reason - it leaves us with nothing almost, doesn't it? But there must be a space after reason - these things happen...and then life continues happening, and we go on, or we don't..

My friend suggests that there are some of us who are inconsolable, and I began to wonder if what's inconsolable gives us a type of terrible privilege, this sharp access to a sense of mortality, and perhaps, humanity.

I could babble about these things for awhile, as they've been a kind of film over the rest of my life lately, but perhaps as I continue to read "Heaven's Coast," I'll find more answers, or at least different lenses, which, in fact, might be as close to consolation as I'm going to get. Not so bad for a poet.

When It Don't Come Easy

Announcement: I am god-damn tired of all this slippage, all these moments of almost-gone. Once, before he disappeared Derek and I were talking about his frustrations surrounding the HIV positive community - a community he never felt quite comfortable with. Sometimes, you know, I'm just tired of all these damn gays with the HIV. He pronounced HIV like "Live," but without the L. I must have laughed, said something about being tired of all these damn drunks.

So Derek's gone now, not dead, I don't think, just done. I wrote "done" meaning "gone," but I'll keep it -- why not? "Done" is a lie though.

This month - we got word from D's family -facts- about just how crazy it seemed he's gone; my brother struggled harder, raged around, dropped out of college; J (at 27) had heart attack, a collapsed lung; R relapsed again. Again, but this time I wasn't there, this time it was two hospital trips.

All this distance, all these times I would've sat in hospitals, by beds, held the hand of someone barely there, or there, and scared. Maybe it's something in me that wants to be needed, and hearing all of this - these people I love fallen to pieces, and slow healing... you know, maybe it's that they don't need me, not like I thought they might have. Better this immersion than to live untouched, said Lynda Hull. But she died young.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

This past weekend, very suddenly, I found myself in Boston -- Chickadees, I cannot tell you how giddy I was, when I stepped out of the airport, to have that Northern chill hit me. More awake than I'd been in months. So, I went because my dear dear friend Tom Johnston curated a really great event to tie up the Boston Book Festival titled The Book Revue, a great mix of writers who rock & rockers who write - but wait, first I should tell you about the concert we went to on Friday night, where Dean & Britta opened for Belle & Sebastian. Chris Colbourn (Buffalo Tom) was so kind as to give me one of his comp tickets (THANK YOU), which happened to be in something like the 10th row, center. AND he shared his junior mints. Belle & Sebastian were fabulous, but what's in my head is this song from Dean & Britta.



By the way, if you think you don't know who Buffalo Tom is, you do, maybe you just don't know that you know:



Belle & Sebastian put on a ridiculously fun show - I never would've guessed that B&S fans are...how shall I put it... headbangers? But apparently they are. Everybody dances like crazy.

Saturday was spent zipping around, Mike's Diner in the South End for breakfast, then to the Boston Public Library where our friend Nick Flynn was on a memoir panel along with Marianne Leone, and Jerald Walker. Afternoon, again, a flurry of running, and eventually getting over to John Hancock Hall in Back Bay, to basically hang around while some of the performers - Dean Wareham, Kristen Hersh, Joe Pernice, Steve Almond - got ready. Fast forward to Au Bon Pain, split pea soup, a nice BU professor whose name I forget reciting Hopkins, Steve Almond vaguely discussing truth through a story about Steven Elliot's expression of love. Spent half of the show backstage, watching next to Nick Zinner (guitarist of YYYs) and his book friends, and half in the audience.

Jumping into Tom's life is always wildly energizing, or, really, simply full of a crazed energy. It's so out of my hermetic, interior life, all that banging around, meeting rockers, running from venue to venue, staying up too late, eating meals in groups of eight or nine. There's more to tell, Chickadees, (about a great, great play called The Method Gun.. about how excited I am for New Year's Eve) but I have to go read some Wordsworth. More later perhaps...

Strip Malls & Sombreros

In the early dark of Saturday morning, D & I were lost, looping along the neon strip malls, somewhere between Eastwood & the Heights, between the thick heat of Star Bar & the stumbling party of Dane's house, between what's possible and desired, what's seen and remains unseen, what's historical & what we do to fill in the story's blanks. Then, two days of odd sleep, rain and stomachaches, less to do with hunger and more to do with time. A sad movie & a Mexican breakfast, stray dogs always on the street. "I love you for shattering," says Dean Young, in his poem "Commencement Address,""Someone has to."

When I am done speaking to one parent, they give a long holler to the other, on a different floor of the house, to pick up the phone. We learned the long holler, from the first floor to the third, to stand at the foot of the steps and push a long sound up, to let the vowel echo outwards in Mooooooooom(Paaaaam), in Daaaaaaad(Daaaavid), in Beeeeeen in Sooooophiiieee. My mother tells me again that her whole life has been framed by her father's early death, that she grew up with a paralyzing fear of sickness. I grew up feeling that I could do anything I wanted, for better or worse, but that I would always be sick. Now my mother & I send comic strips in the mail, speak in child-memory & babble, speak from our affinity for the tiny & strange. My father is watching the football game. They say, "You are the only child who calls us." I sit in my little wishing room & wish.

"I love you for shattering. / Someone has to."

"Don't write a poem about this," says D, "Don't, like seriously don't. Okay? Okay, cuz I'm serious. Don't write about me." I tell him that I won't, that I wouldn't and this is a lie, and of course I will and the air between us sometimes like a spring. "I won't write about this. I mean, I'll write about this," he says, "but it will be like not even here at all. Not like this, no. No, no." And so on ; my empathy makes a little boat, carries into evening.

So what? So now it's Sunday. Clean-up, have some coffee, see the white spaces arranged around text in a way that pushes meaning. Get up, go on, go.

The Stars At Night Are Big And Bright

I have lived in Houston, TX for 16 Days. My first class (French for Non-Majors) is Tuesday morning, and I'm teaching my first class (Freshman Composition) on Tuesday afternoon. I will not describe in detail the panic that the teaching orientation induced in me this week - it was quite terrible & unwieldy, a kind of hysterical embarrassment. Luckily my experienced teacherfriends calmed me down right quick, reminding me why I'm in Houston in the first place. To write write write.

Today at the washateria I started reading "Quiver of Arrows," the selected poems of Carl Phillips. I have to tell you - my brain cracked & sang in the same way it did when I first was introduced to the work of Lynda Hull; not just the brain, the blood, but not just. It was recognition, intuition,muscular, song, tremble of the faculties -oh, jesus, Carl Phillips, how has it taken me so long to come to you? To such precision: this :

Alba: Failure

If the bare trees at the glass were kings
really, I would know they bend over in grief,
mourning their lost brilliant crowns that

they can only watch, not reach as, beneath them,
they let go of all color all flash all sway,
it would be better, I wouldn't have to say no

they are not kings, they are trees, I know this,
and if they bend it is wind only, it is nature,
isn't it also indifference? Passing yesterday

the bodies that, wrapped and wrapped, lay
sprawled about the steam as it left the vents
of my city, I could only fumble for the words

(dead lamb, dead lamb) to some song to sing
parts of, I gave, but what I gave--is it
right to say it helped no one, or can I say

I brought lullaby, sealed a thin life,
awhile longer, in sleep? What is failure?
Having read how there were such things as

orchard lamps for keeping the good fruit, on
colder nights, from freezing, I was curious
for that kind of heat go the lines from

a poem I never finished. The shorter version
is: once, twice, in a difficult time, I have
failed you. No poetry corrects this. But

does it mean we don't love? In the last poem
of you waking, I am any small bird, unnoticed,
above, watching; you are the traveler who

can't know (there is fog, or no stars, a steep
dark) that the all but given up for impossible
next town is soon, soon. Come. We turn here.