You wrote I love you in the snow
11/21/12
In the dream you wrote I love you in the snow
outside my house, a house that would be mine
only as long as I stayed asleep and held tightly to
this snow globe, watching to see what you'd do
Safer, never safe
I like the open spaces here. I like them, but I don't trust them. I never feel safe, exactly. Who says the clouds won't fall? Look how heavy they look, after all. And who says there isn't someone in the brush off to the left, watching? Who says there isn't someone behind me, behind the fence and its NO TRESPASSING sign, waiting?
Still, I feel safer here than I did in the city. I have my red dog—my second red dog, what are the odds—and she stays close. You can't say that about everyone. I firmly reject the metaphor "the black dog of depression." The dogs are the only antidote to the shadows always lurking in the periphery of this thing of mine, this thing best referred to as a life, until it becomes a death. The dogs—their fur, vomit, urine, feces—I will always choose them over a clean house. I am grateful that they choose me back. This is the closest I will come to "safe."
Just a random turn-of-the-century pigeon shooting
"Who's that?" she asks.
"That's what my great-great-grandfather would have looked like. He shot live pigeons. For sport."
Certain people
There are certain people, I tell her.
It doesn't happen often but I still cry
when they walk away. If our paths cross.
I cry when it's time to say goodbye.
But there isn't a reason, not anymore.
They're imprinted on me, I'm saying.
Poetry
“What I am saying is not my true condition.
And what do I do if I am but am not?
I have my own life but it is not persuasive to me.
What she was doing, there was no way to remember it.
I can never find a color I love.
I believe I will love but get the day wrong.
I don’t do what my friends say I do.”
Divine Lorraine
Grand old dame of Philadelphia.
Considered ugly, old-fashioned,
during her prime. Imagine this
to be true.
I marvel at her phenomenal bones.
She decays magnificently.
I am sad to hear that someone
has bought her
(as if she could be bought)
to put an end to what she
might have become
on her own.
It is what it is
The key to life, I have been told, is to take nothing personally. This is a problem if you are someone who takes things personally.
If you do not take things personally, there is also a 74% chance that you are someone who says
it is what it is
without irony. If you are one of that 74%, there is then an 89% chance that you may also find yourself saying that you have
a very full plate right now
If so, congratulations. You are born robust and thick-skinned by nature. It may be time for you to get a tattoo, to celebrate this fact. If you have been searching for a reason to get inked, there is a 98% likelihood that this is it.
As indicated in Figure 14
As indicated in Figure 14, nonlonely participants showed greater activity in the ventral striatum, one of the brain's 'reward centers,' when they saw a pleasant image of a person (a smiling farmer) than when they saw an equally pleasant picture of an object (a flower arrangement). For the nonlonely, a positive image of another human being obviously meant something special—it gave them a specific emotional boost....
Lonely participants, however, when they viewed positive images of people, did not register the same boost. —Loneliness, Cacioppo & Patrick
Then I wrote that
Tomorrow I will write that other thing.
I would mix curry powder and plain yogurt in this kitchen
...at this very point on the map. Then I would pour the stained yogurt over boiled vegetables and wonder why it did not taste very good.
In case you were wondering: This is not, in fact, the way to make a curry.
I learned this the hard way in Northeast Minneapolis, in the first-floor apartment that was bone-cuttingly cold in the winter, in the kitchen beside the hall to the bedroom where I used my maternal grandmother's dresser mirror as a headboard, where I could see my breath on January mornings.
Two blocks away: Emily's Lebanese Deli, land of Middle Eastern delights. On the spring day my dog almost choked to death on a stick in a NE Minneapolis park, he and I stopped at Emily's on the way home for a quart of tabouli. We ate it on the front porch, exhausted by our battle with death (oh okay just this once fine you can keep the dog for now). My dog gobbled his tabouli from a floral Corelle bowl at my feet. I ate mine out of the container with a nicked fork I held with shaking fingers.
When I left Minneapolis for grad school in Westchester County, New York, my friends Heather and Lindsay would sometimes send me Emily's tabouli and pita. How they did this, I do not know. These were the days before mail-order and Internet and websites. Magically, the tabouli found its way to me, fresh and cold, in a cardboard box.
There are things we will never understand, in retrospect.
The thing called kindness
Without my mother three blocks
down the hill in the upstairs flat
where the grandson of the ghosts
of my own home died in 1930
I have a need to be kind, kinder
to this thing called self. So I buy
meat, bloody and leaking,
the kind that has nowhere to go
in this thing called the fridge.
With it I buy packets of fairy
spices to add to the crockpot,
the spices that will take away...
Dolls
We get by.
Chin up
...really means forget about the old boot straps. Just keep your mouth out of the water, you silly, wretched drowning thing. Chin up. You're not the first person who's ever had to doggy-paddle. Why should you get to drown, while the rest of us have to muck on in uncomfortable lives and uncomfortable boots? I won't stand for this prissiness. I won't have it, I tell you. You are no Virginia Woolf. You have to earn rocks in the coat pockets. Until then, count your blessings, kiss your children, and pay your taxes. Stop that insufferable whinging.
Tea
I am willing to have you over for tea, if you are willing to ask for an invite.
On being the flames
“How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?”
I do not live here
...but I did, once.
Remember, you're trying not to be drunk
in acting class, you learn that if you need to play drunk, you need to play trying not to be drunk for it to read effectively as drunk on stage. There seems to be a useful lesson in this, beyond acting class, but I can't quite get at it right now.