hold me fast cos I'm a hopeless wanderer

Today has been odd. I wish I could articulate it better. I've remembered two things that I wish I hadn't, which is a thing for me sometimes. Out of the blue, memories bubble up almost as clearly as the day I lived them, but they feel so strange and significant and thoroughly odd out of context. One of them is from two years ago and involves somebody else, so I won't talk about it, but the other is one of my earliest memories.

I remember it was in the very middle of the hottest part of summer and I was by myself in a parking lot. I was out just with my dad and my brother was too little for me to remember, at home with my mom We were checking a minnow trap in a creek by the railroad construction site. My Dad went down to the creek, but I had to stay up by the car for some reason. It was getting to be evening but not yet cool or dusky. The place was entirely deserted. I remember sitting on the curb in my little girl shorts, dry, dead grass around me, the heat wiggling the air over the asphalt. I was playing in the dust and I found a lighter. I knew what it was, but I was acutely, almost dutifully afraid of it. Even as young and barely formed as I was, I had been taught not to play with fire.

I don't know, it's not really about the ever-present potential for fire or the being afraid that stuck with me in that particular reminiscence. It was something about the feeling of my parents being very young.

at once I knew I was not magnificent

God, you ever look at dumb, young photos of yourself from even just as soon as two springs ago and think "geez, I was so dumb and young?"

In other, better news, it smells like cedar fires outside tonight.

our thoughts compressed which makes us blessed

I feel pretty quiet this week. I started a list of things I wanted to talk about driving home from carpool but they were all mostly stupid poem things, like mist just grazing the blurry mountains, leftover black-eyed susans, and a crow staring me down from the middle of the road. Nothing real. I really like this time of year but I don't know what to make of it just now.

I spent a lot of time tonight practicing in front of a mirror for that poetry thing. I think my voice sounds entirely like somebody else's when I hear myself read. This is like the first time I've read anywhere near where I live, let alone the town I work in. I'm nervous and excited at that prospect.

precious territory

no ups and downs, my pretty

I'm giving a reading soon and so that has me thinking about poetry. That is to say also that everything else feels turned against me so that once again, like a sheepish ex-lover, I creep back to writing and expect to be taken in, mostly as a way to distract myself from whatever else it is.

I've been looking through, of all things, my old school notes from undergraduate. I threw a lot of them out after college, but a couple remained mostly by the virtue of their notebooks being incomplete, and I, ever a practical and un-wasteful girl, kept them to reuse. It's a pity that some were thrown out, too, because of everything I feel good about in myself against the difference of what I hate, I have long valued my ability as a note-taker. It's not that I ever wrote neatly or accurately, but I kept a near perfect internal commentary on whatever was going on in class, complete with the better professorial quotes, drawings, half-begun letters, notes passed, revelations, scraps of poems, doodles of dragons (yes, even then) and other assorted hodgepodge bits. They were almost more like journals.

I had a close friend ask me recently if I thought I was one of those writers who took herself too seriously, or not seriously enough. I think I said both, but tonight maybe I will seem like the indulgent former. The one notebook I looked in tonight got used and then re-used with an odd strata effect. I never wrote these two bits into real poems, they just stayed as drafty dead bits. Still, even if their quality is bad and embarrassing to me, they are perfectly juxtaposed over periods of my life and touch me now in some kind of uncomfortable, sentimental way.

The first is from the end of my senior year of college, when I was stuck in this required symposium I'd put off as a freshmen, surrounded by freshman. I remember the day I wrote this it was spring and storming.

the way the air
curls up in your palms
low clouds give you something
a hard twist of gray
I want to love you
but the leaves are turning
over and over, flashing
their white underbellies.

And the second is much more graphic and listy and rough, from the end of my grad school career two winters ago when I was teaching freshmen. I would write terrible little stream of consciousness things while my students were doing their exercises. I think I might've saved one line from this old thing, which is good, because I lost the stomach for the ending so much that I couldn't even finish re-typing it here.

thumbs of clay, tuckahoe
simmer down
scrape or gnaw it soft while
carolina parakeet such a pure clatter
cockleburr, cockleshell, mussels
pickerel, arrowroot ground in
a mash pot put it in the fire
put this to fire
better to be switched with light
or know the blood trails through
the forest we're hunting
compass less the needle
tell us the correct geography

Hullo bugs

I do like them.

examination and the qualities thereto belonging

I'm up too late and everything feels so unresolved. This was a very eventful weekend and I should talk about it or anything else but I just feel so blurry and vague. I've not been sleeping well.

 So here is the end of my favorite poem, at least my favorite poem that I always think of this time of year, which I have almost certainly posted here before. Being Pharoh, Beckian Fritz Goldberg. The reason I like this poem is because it resonates with blurry emotional nonsense. I like how quiet and understated it is and how it builds up to great heights. In the same poem, although not the portion I quote below, she says this line: "I"m an unforgivably domestic mourner" and I don't think anybody else has exactly articulated so well how it feels to be in a terrible grim mood while doing some mundane household chore as that--domestic mourning. Maybe it's time to scrub my sideboards.


It is August. One woman is so long

longing does not come out of her.
But this time I have loved you

so long I become
the boy you were. I must still

be alive for everything is changing and
incomplete. Half a tree, half

drives its shadowy web near the shutters.
August has just turned September. The ancestors

want 4,000 year old grain, hard as quartz,
in grain jars. All I have are cigarettes.

What a night this is. What a night.
I'll lie down and my pillow will thrum

like a machine. I'll go barefoot
to the window, see if any light is

still on in any house. Who else
is afraid of missing something. Who else

knows one thing God can't enter
is my memory: I, a minor

twentieth century poet, the first
of September, 4 am, finish one thing.