OCTOBER 9/29/06

She’s just been to see the new doctor
(the one who’s suddenly worried about her)
But you can tell that she hasn’t begun
To take it seriously, you can tell.
By the way she clutches the scripts
That dictate sequences of exams.
Those sheets haven’t even
Penetrated her satchel
The news certainly hasn’t
Sunk into her brain.

So she’s off to see her doctor
(the one whose name
She frequently couples with
non medical mentions of her heart)
half skipping and all smiling
And re-noticing with fresh surprise
That the manhole covers
Outside NYU’s med center
are stamped “Made in India.”
Impish on auto and determined
To tease him for being reminded
Of her by manhole covers everyday.

Inside the Emergency Room
Where people are getting oxygen
And shots and IVs
She’s the lucky one
Who gets a kiss on the forehead.
She tosses her head
In feigned impatience
She swears to him
That she’s alright.
She asks for and receives
Another chaste kiss;
Becomes aware
Of their audience.
Says goodbye,
Says she’ll see him at home.

She gets chocolate truffles.
Reads the rest of a Clinton story
Takes the train home.
Walks upstairs. Checks e-mail.
Starts a poem. Also a book.
Collects the mail.
Jokes with the UPS man.
Plays with the neighbor’s bull mastiff
Says he’s grown to seven times
The size he was last month
And then still standing on the sidewalk,
In that hour when no matter
What she’s been doing
She always begins
To unconsciously wait.

Waiting
For her men
(interchangeably
Child-man
and Man-child)
to return home.
Waiting,
It strikes her that thoughts of
leaving them sad and without her,
Are the same as those past fears
Of being sad and without them.
Only then, the tears come
And she couldn’t be
more surprised
By this strange phenomenon
Of raspy cries and wet eyes
If she were just newly born.




____________

Random thoughts on snippets from my old university e-mail account:

The prof who wrote about poetry in rock n' roll and wrote to me:
You shouldn’t worry, we'll sort it out.
Is dead.
He was 36.
It was lung cancer.
His daughter is the same age as Li’l A.

The prof who wrote: I was delighted to catch a glimpse of you by the elevator. You look more beautiful than ever. How is your work coming along. I must tell you that I read "The God of Small Things" over the summer and it took my breath away. What a powerful novel! I look forward to talking with you.
Became a good friend and mentor, she wrote one of the rec letters that got me into Oxford. I think I liked the fact that she loved "The God of Small Things" more than anything else.


The prof who wrote: I'm glad lil’ A now has a doll. I hope it's not "Barbie!"
I’ve lost touch with.


The prof who had this at the end of a story he wrote about me:
She had said little, but had then made her statement, a devastating, powerful, unanswerable response. Refusing the gift, she skillfully took herself outside the realm of any possibility of a bond between them, emotional or physical, blocking any narrative of exchange for the future. She owed him nothing. The circuits of reciprocity, of continuity, of intimacy, were blocked, cut off. She had left him standing, alone, and detached herself from him, slipping back to her world where she would remain entirely free.
Had it right.
But he is brilliant and I miss talking to him.
And my mother still remembers him fondly--after all who could resist loving her daughter :).


The colleague who watched Li’l A and then wrote:
You are most welcome. A and I had a great time and, except for about 2
tears at the very end (he was ready to see you!), it was quite peaceful
and comfortable. I had fun!! And I'm glad that your presentation went well
too!
I hope she has babies now.
She always wanted some.


The prof who wrote:
I loved having you and A in my home.
Is one of the nicest people I still know.
Also wrote a rec letter for me.
So far, none of my rec letters have been written by male profs somehow.


The prof who wrote:
What else is there to do on your article? You should send it and let the
editors tell you if they want revisions.
I’ve lost touch with.
(And I never believed in that article and never sent it off.)

The Prof who wrote:
I am writing to do two things:
1. To let you know that I am quite confident that you would do a
splendid job and to assure you that I will give you all the help you
need.
2. To encourage you to do it if you are asked.
I’ve lost touch with, but thinks of me warmly--he said so to a mutual colleague recently.
He had a voice that would put James Earl Jones to shame.
Plus he was a poet.
I'll probably write to him next week.


The student who wrote:
Dear Professor ***,
I just received my final grade and I am not very satisfied with it. I think my hard work reflected a better grade than a C+. The grade was much lower than the A+ I expected. Will you please double check just to make sure because that C+ looks so ugly.
Thanks,
Al
Totally deserved that 'C'.
(I think--the e-mail is rather free of errors.)
Also, he talked to me exactly once all semester--to ask me to call him “Big Al.”


The Prof who wrote:
…As they say here, "I got your back"
which is quite different from "I got you back".
Was smart and funny, but I’ve, sadly, lost touch with him.


The student who wrote:
I don't think I can wait until May 15th to find out my grade, will you
Please please tell me my grade.
Thank You,
Jessica S**
Was a pre-med student.
She got an A.
And i did e-mail her grade to her.
Not being a monster, i couldn’t resist the second, ungrammatical, "please" :).
I wrote her rec letters later that year. I hope she made it.




________________

INHALE EINSTEIN

Sweet box
slimmest
of boxes
thoughts
tots
toys
books on floor
music behind
dark outside
criticism
critics
cities
signs of life
elsewhere


_____

Bonding (courtesy of The Home Depot)

It was like of those games of stichomythic conversations/questions:

Do you have a staple gun big enough for deadboard?
What do you need the deadboard for?
Doesn’t deadboard block out sound?
What sound do you need to block out?

So I ended up telling the head honcho on the Home Depot floor about my neighbor’s anger management problem and the fact that the garage door opener is three decibels too loud for him.

All the time I’m telling him the story, Mr. Calvin (acc. to his name tag) is shaking his head and assembling a repertoire of disapproving looks.

I’m prattling on now about my plans to cut the deadboard to manageable squares so that I can single-handedly staple it in place, when he gives me the once-over and shakes his head pessimistically. You can’t do it, he says, in broad patois.

This is a first for me.

People react the other way when I tell them my home improvement projects. When I told Manny Maintenance Man that I planned to paint the whole apartment by myself, he kind of fell a little bit in love with me. When I told Naim, the other maintenance man that I was going to cut a hole in the wall to make a sort of hatch between living room and kitchen, he looked at me like I was mad, but also a genius. When Alvarez, i.e. he who recycles the recycling, saw me at the dumpster hauling a six-ft long cylinder of what used to be wall-to-wall, he unwittingly let me know that my fame had spread far and wide--I didn’t believe it, he told me, but you are very strong.

So Mr. Calvin at the Home Depot, he really shouldn’t have been shaking his head in disapproval. Or telling me that I couldn’t do it. Let your neighbor live with it, he told me. I’ve changed the garage opener twice this year--so it was briefly tempting to do just that, but there was still the little matter of it being three decibels above the noise code--and I wasn’t feeling passionate enough about my choice of garage door opener to go to jail for my principles.

The minute he heard about the law being breached, Mr. Calvin asks me for my address and home phone number--and I give it to him. Then this Jamaican grandfather of three shows up at my place after work with a friend who‘s even more ancient. They measure the garage, let li’l A work out the sum to how many sheets of insulate we’ll need, drive us to another Home Depot, and tie 12 sheets of 16 by 4 of insulate to the top of an ancient Toyota, drive us back home, and install it. The even-more-ancient friend turns out to be worth his weight in gold because he’s tall enough to drill things into the ceiling without needing a step ladder. And actually, worth his weight in platinum--he cleaned the backseat of the ancient Toyota before we got in--‘cos ai kyan no let de chiles sit in yo rubbish, mon.

About 12 hours earlier, when it had begun to dawn on me that Mr. Calvin’s disapproval was for my neighbor rather than me and that he was on the point of offering his help, I tried to broach the subject of payment. As diplomatically as possible. He wouldn’t hear of it. So at the end of the evening’s labor, I broached the subject of payment again. A lot less diplomatically. He still wouldn’t hear of it. Then i invited him and his friend to dinner--which had turned out to be especially simple: salad, Kaiser rolls, and stew. And they stayed, approved, cleaned their plates. Talked some Cricket, about my twenty thousand house plants, how to make rotis. You sleep peacefully now, one of them says; the other smiles encouragingly.

They’ll be back tomorrow to finish up. At that point I will have to let capitalism crash the pleasant cycle of kindness by somehow imposing a payment. But for now, i’m just this little immigrant that two grandfatherly immigrants have decided to rally round.

It feels awful fine.




_______________________________________________

"CAMERA,"

He says, has two syllables
cam . ra.
Sure, she says,
like "terrorist,"
tair . rist.
She probably deserves
that poke in the ribs.

Stuck
at the same light
in Chinatown
for the last half hour
they’ve already revised
their desire to live in the city

And on NPR
an old couple
is described as having been married so long
that they complete each other’s sentences.

In the car,
they test themselves:
He suspends:
When I wake up in the morning
the first thing I want to do is…
And she ends:
Call someone dickweed.

Their mirth freed;
the whoops and hand jives
they counterfeit
are almost as much fun
as the real hug and kiss
that linger like ink stains
and memory.

Turns out, the old lady on the radio
is in Lebanon
and talking about how
Israeli soldiers lent her
their cell phone to call
her grown-up son in Melbourne
because she was worried about him.

Too many things about the radio story
make her want to cry.
Coming as it does
on top of a morning spent
dragging her feet
at the Intrepid Museum

it leaves her feeling
like she doesn't belong
in the world,
and he will stumble upon her
asleep in sudden, odd places
for the rest of the day.


________

CUSTOM

Bedtimes, her father used to persistently
Tuck her willful hair away, behind her ears.
Now, if long-lost cousins, suitors, fashion editors
Replicate the fond slide of fingers in her hair,
Her face brightens because it reminds her of him
And then they’ll say,
You look much better with your hair out of the way.

Nights, she nestles in her five-year-old’s bed
Smoothing his beloved, primitive brow,
He ponders his unknown father, an unseen God.
Takes her arms, wraps them around himself
And wonders what she would have done
If he wasn’t there. Here. Her son.

I wouldn’t have any reason to be happy, she says.
He’s horrified even when he supposedly doesn’t exist
And yells: don’t say that.
Tucks her hair back
Tilts his rounded chin
Solemnly kisses her brow;
Feels like a blessing.


________

JACK A*S

Neither A is 14 years old
it’s just that they seem 14
when they gang up on me
and accuse me of being a girl.

It’s enough to make me giggle
and lash out about boys being stinky
and howl about how I have to live
with *two* of the species.

Especially if it's yesterday
and I’m trapped between them
in movie-theater darkness
trying not to watch Jackass # 2

and wondering
if that bag of popcorn
could double
as a barf bag.

But tonight, when one of them
made their 8 p.m. bedtime
after reading like an angel
and the other is working till morning

it makes me miss them so hard
that I wish there was something on TV
worth watching--preferably with
witty doctors and/or chubby-cheeked brats.




______________