These dreams are like demons
Where ice breeds fibrous
Before you were born
You were an ocean.
Here, everyone is moving
Their apologies like smoke
Still under the new road
An older one flows.
_
These dreams are like demons
Where ice breeds fibrous
Before you were born
You were an ocean.
Here, everyone is moving
Their apologies like smoke
Still under the new road
An older one flows.
_
This street reaches
all the way to the sun
These neighborhoods
are always memories
These doors half open
are half done grins
Blind, your own fool
and so ready for life
_
The quad is slippery with yesterday’s snow
His gaze is slippery with diffidence
Do I remember him?
I do! Mike! One of the best students in his class
But it’s another semester
And there’s another Mike in another class
Almost as good, just as loved.
Why do I love them anyway?
These Caitlins (F), Mikes (M), Alexes (F/M)
Love while it lasts, a semester’s worth
I mark them, meaning to mark their minds
_
Last spring, I taught Transnational Feminisms. Which was *wonderful*--but you know, they were the choir, there was absolutely no need to preach.
This year, I begged to be assigned the introductory Women’s Studies course with some romantic activist notion of grooming forty feminists out of a cohort of “my advisor says I have to take this course to graduate.”
Yeah. You know how this is going already. There were so many assertions of post-feminism and accusations of “reading too much into things.”
Until this: http://twitter.com/rulesforgirls
_
My high school FB group posted a newspaper article about our old P.E. teacher. And although I used to be terrified of her (mostly because of her somewhat bossy habit of checking if we were indeed wearing regulation bloomers under our Catholic school uniforms), it made me really nostalgic for days when my main fear was about getting picked to shoot hoops.
And on the same FB group page, an appeal for funds for another teacher whose husband has dementia. The end of Goodbye Mr. Chips always made me cry, and this does too.
_
A clue that maybe listening to a lot of classical music
can make you a little too laidback:
"There will be snow tomorrow, mostly between the hours of 2 a.m. and 11 p.m."
Dude. Kind of unhelpful, you know.
Anyway. I’ve always wanted to ice-skate—
and today, I did.
A beautiful, curlicue “q”.
On the way to school/preschool/work,
in our sweet-silly, snub-nosed car.
Baby A squealed;
Li’l A gasped;
I trembled.
Fair to say we were all really surprised
and delighted/ excited /
outright panicked.
_
Tell me if we’re bringing you down
Taking back the beautiful invitation
To drop in upon those nations
Class = common noun
_
Falling into holes
to keep on dancing
yes, keep on dancing
this common bird
sees love beyond
your ability to love
_
Is to dream
of one blade of sea
on the far
side of a sandbox
Is to think skin
is no boundary
to waves
volatile as time
Is to plant
footprints and undress
prophecies too
delicate to translate
Big A: I was going to look at Haitian protest posters to design an introductory diagnostic for the postcolonial course.
Me: Ohh… (wishing I had thought of it first)
And I got my wish, because Big A seems to have some awesome pedagogical ideas--but only in *my* dreams :).
_
Gift:
your reaction that continues mine
Sign:
the welcome of vulnerable circles
this shushing of feet
through memories
then letting them go
to land unplanned
Letting it all go.
So. I lean forward listening
--alone like a colony--
and I know exactly who you are.
_
Big A and I fell in love in New York. And though we’ve hung out with the kids heaps in the city since those early days, there is some lingering sense of surreality about revisiting places which were all about our passionate freefall with two kids, and as more responsible adults. Because, I guess, the “we” that we are in Yellow Springs is irrevocably tied to our personae as parents, but the “we” that started in New York is all us. In my head--at least--the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park, Clinton Street Bakery, MOMA, Anthology Film Archives, KGB Room, Penn Station… exist merely as picturesque backdrops and bit players in some grand narrative about us and our self-centered fascination for each other. Barf :).
We drew up a complicated and ambitious list of where we wanted to eat that was typically Balthazar for breakfast, Saravanaa Bhavan for lunch, and Motorino’s for dinner. We skipped Balthazar, but I guess two out of three isn’t at all bad. And the night before that we got a corner booth at the fancy steak place, which meant that the kids could play pirates to their heart’s content and I could get tipsy off of beachy drinks (I didn’t realize until I typed that out that there was an ongoing ocean theme there!). At Saravanaa's my people were talking really loud and at Motorino’s the NYU kids were worse behaved than my own, so we made out ok.
2011: More New York!
_
The troubled light of December, seven o’ clock
the clucking annoyance of the second hand
These are the stains that describe your breakfast
your mouths are hovering-harmonium-talk
Now that the light is so bitter and literal
we lose one battle; we win other wars
You are made of just ghee and molasses--
and pools of unhurried, inundant memoirs.
_____________
And after all that, Li'l A made off with a medal in the spelling bee today. Perhaps slow and steady does win the race :).
_
Baby A: Ok. Let's play the Ponyo game. I'll be Soskye. You be Ponyo.Sweet J: Ok. But no. YOU be Ponyo, I'll be Soskye. Ponyo is a girl.Baby A: No. Ponyo is a little fishie from the sea. So, HA!Is it horrible of me to be happy that my daughter is a bit of a brat too? Actually, I don't care. So, HA!__
Big A carries me to the couch because the floor is wet. (Yes, it doesn’t make sense.) He continues to hold me in a hug. It is a week where four of my/our friends have cancer or are undergoing treatment for cancer. It’s been a month of seeing children “removed” from their homes—some through guardian ad litem work, one of them Li’l A’s best friend. Which means that after I've been strong in front of my friends and my kids, Big A has been the one holding me through the frequent, circumlocutory, incomprehensible rampages.
He tells me:
One in five people that you know will have cancer at some point in their lives. Half of them will die from it.
And this next part was quite unnecessary, but he feels the need to tell me this every now and again:
You must know that 100% of all the people you know will ultimately die.
_
the clear virginity
of empty days
like plastic wrap
like creaky nights
And radio static
in remote patterns
like birds beginning
to stutter in song
all our days of summer
all our years of childhood
slide like released ice
--one halcyon afternoon
_
Her voice rises tiny from behind the Rodgers and Hammerstein. Her tone is imperious:
Mama!
That exclamation is summons. I kneel on the floor beside her bed. She is two; the bed is only a month old. Her old crib was about to fall to pieces from all the meaty-thighed jumping that took place in it.
She is in the new, improved, big-kid bed now, I am kneeling beside her.
What is it, Chuk-muk?
A glimmer of eyes in the growing dusk. The shine of her teeth,
I forgot.
Did you want mama to bring you another hug? Another kiss?
My arms and mouth demonstrate the words. My heart fills with happiness, and chokes my throat. Another stroke of her hair, a kiss planted directly into her palm. She holds it, falls asleep.
This child now--at this time in my life, has ways of making feel grown up, parent, knowing… in ways the first child, my companion, the brother I’d never had before, could not.
_
This morning, dropping the kids off at elementary school and preschool, I could feel my hands tightening into claws, throat swelling, voice panicking as I said goodbye.
Violence towards kids--any kid, not just mine--is my trigger for anger, for desperation, suicidal ideation, cold rage, lately—thankfully--for action, but still most frequently for fat, bawly tears. And I know exactly how stupid that sounds.
They have adequate security at both schools (locked doors/ keypad entry), but on NPR they were talking about how you really can’t stop anyone if they’re determined. So I showed up to retrieve the two-year-old hours before her dimissal time. But I’ll be teaching my class tomorrow and won’t be able to. Big A tries to point out the killings are all the way in China.
True. Kids are so small and trusting everywhere. Also true.
_
You help us all into the box.
It is shaped like a coffin.
We are to leave for Mars.
They say
That Earth will be uninhabitable.
We are to lie inside
this box,
that is like a coffin,
for three days.
It takes that long to get to Mars.
For five hours I try
to teach the children
to say,“uninhabitable.”
Their mouths fail to shape this noisy word.
I think about the
impossibility
of keeping
the two-year-old quiet
or still.
Three days.
I think of the improbability
of saving the child with Asthma.
I say,
I’ll stay
here on earth with our children.
Underneath sacrifice,
Artifice.
The anxious place
of silence
in my deep
and small space.
Drawers
hanging
off their hinges
are chicken litter
are anti
matter
Empty chairs
are time and tide
are burdens
shifting
shape
like water
_
In a dream
I took
(my husband)
(to)
your apartment
looking for
proof
of
(a different) life
all the pictures
you had
were of your brother
But you’d saved
(a colony of chittering mice
for) me
_
The body is meek
weak
The winter is deep
deeper than water
Liquid with drink
are eyes, are ayes,
are yes
_
Singing you who have lost it
tell me where you will find it
Inside his chest
the chirp of birds
inside his breath
needles of air
_
Another early morning hike. The peak was approx 2500 feet above sea level, with the last couple of turns like corkscrews. I caught sight of ...