How I know it’s *definitely* time for a snack-break

When halfway through a book about pre-Elizabethan England i read
the queen “delivered the prizes…”
as
“the queen delivered the pizza.”

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Jouer: Games of Chance and Skill

Weaving her
More or less Futbol-shaped
Bump through New York streets

She assumes that
The moment which
Fathered it

Arose
Not in their nest of banked
Bedclothes and soft words

But a good ten
Or fifteen minutes
After

When summoned
To play soccer,
And sweating

In the icy breath
Of January dusk,
Her palm laid

Against the insistent bark
Of a wintering tree,
She feels rather than sees

the ball stream by
(Stealthy and silent
As an idea)

Past
Her surprised
and ineffective feet

And hears his exultant
Half laugh-half shout
Goal!

_

Beloved

Me (looking up from my reading, face shiny with iambic pentameter):
Big A, I loooooooooove Shakespeare!

Big A (who thought that sentence was going to end rather differently, making a valiant comeback):
And Shakespeare loves you, puppy!

_

I’m sorry I haven’t said anything

Each time
I started to

To say something
There is yelling

Voices bewailing their dead

Guns go off
Or cannons roar

Not cannons. Rather things
So up-to-date and fierce

I don’t even know what they’re rightly called

Sometimes I can hear
People begging for their lives

From those there to harm them
And from those that cannot hear them

I open my mouth to say something

And then I shut it again


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Surgeon Hangman

My love for Atul Gawande is fairly irrational. Sure it has something to do with his saving lives and winning a MacArthur and being brown and a Rhodes Scholar, but actually--really--it’s mostly because his name is a version of li’l A’s name…

So I was thrilled when Charles McGrath’s almost hagiographic essay about Gawande in the Times made it to the top-ten e-mailed list. Except that when I read it, the article described him playing Hangman on the patient’s surgical drapes and that made me really sad and very indignant.

Forget for a moment that the game itself reprehensibly requires a rather barbaric pictographic accompaniment. Just the fact that he would indulge in any diversionary game on the body of a patient--a patient who most likely thinks of his surgeon as a human savior, a patient who is anaesthetized and can convey neither consent nor acquiescence for the act, a patient i.e. another human being--suggests a level of disrespect for the human body that's disappointing.

Surgeons have to draw on humans and give orders for their hair to be shaved off and palpate female breasts when necessary. If they do it simply because the person in question happens to be drugged and because they can, then someone will have to explain to me how they’re ethically different from some sickening mass of frat boys.


_

A Good Wife

Someone else’s grandmother
once told me that a good wife

Is as full of loving comfort as a mother
As full of tender adoration as a daughter
As easy to playful irreverence as a sister
And as reliable and loyal as a best friend

And palli arai-yillai--in the bedroom, she said:
she is as winsome and perceptive as a courtesan.

_

It's old and faded now...

Although we always felt a little sad for her by that point in our visit when Dorakanti grandmother would lament that though she had yearned for daughters all her life, all she had been given were six sons and that was why she loved her granddaughters so much; my sister and I would remain stiff and unbending. We had heard that Dorakanti grandmother had been mean to our mother when she was a new daughter-in-law and that made her eternally unpleasant in our eyes. We wouldn’t even be there unless our father hadn’t unwrapped himself from around our little fingers, which is where he spent most of our childhood years, unfurled his parental authority and insisted that we spend some time with his mother.

We were stiff as scarecrows inside Dorakanti grandmother’s embrace, stiff and unfriendly to the children from next door summoned to play with us, and our interactions with the special snacks made for us were cursory. We paid attention when it was story time, but even then silently, and only because it was dark and no one could see our eyes stirring to the story, the punctuating “umms” that were our duty as audience, needlessly parsimonious and slow.

Dorakanti grandmother’s stories were strange in that they never began with a “once upon a time.” They all began, “in a place,” “in a village,” “in a town.” It was as if these stories where the prince fell in love with the princess after chancing upon just one filament of her preternaturally long and fragrant hair, or where the young prince battled tigers to impress his mother--as if these stupid, unnatural things had happened just a few weeks before we came to visit.

And at the end of the story when the prince married the princess or the young prince was crowned, there would be a big celebration and grandmother would launch her punch line. “That was when they presented me with this sari,” she would say, holding her sari out for us to touch, hoping we would scoot closer to her. “It’s old and faded now, but it was rich and shiny when they gave it to me.” And we’d reach for her sari politely enough, even knowing that our fingers would be snatched up and kissed, but we’d remain curled up around ourselves, my sister‘s hand in mine.

Although willing myself to fall asleep, knowing dad would take us home the next day, I would remain conscious on the periphery of my sleep, of grandmother stroking our limbs and making sure to straighten them before she left the room. Stretching each leg in the half darkness to its furthest length so that while we slept we‘d grow tall--unlike her and unlike our father.


_