Blog Anniversary: 10 Years Later

Ten years ago,
I slipped inside
a backyard rocket
and launched myself
to the moon

Strange thing is—
I live here now.

Not quite as bouncy
as I was back then

Not nearly as beholden
to the eyes of men

And yet—

You should see the Earth
from my perspective

Blue and beautiful

   if full of Martians

and thick with treasure
I long to explore

One Year Ago

How to mark a year like this?

Has it, in fact, been a year? Time seems as slippery as everything else.

A year ago, I woke up to the knowledge that we were about to elect Hillary Clinton president of the United States. I was happy for the historical significance of the milestone, though I was not as excited as I was in 2008, when Barack Obama ascended to that office. The campaign had been too ugly, the divide in the country too troubling, and for as much as I hated Donald Trump, I did not love Hillary. I did, however, believe she'd make a good president, though I doubted she'd be given the chance to succeed by the opposition party in power. Still, when placed next to her competitor, I didn't see how a rational person wouldn't prefer her by a hundred million squintillion to one.

But anyway, that morning I was high on anticipation, filled with the sweet, near-relief of it all being done. In 24 hours, I would never have to think about that man ever again: or not as an existential threat, at any rate. Early in the morning, I went out to fill the bird feeder at the top of our hill which faces a steep, wooded ravine behind our backyard. As I approached the feeder, I stopped short.

There was a stag standing beyond the chainlink fence.

He looked at me. I returned the gaze. In the space between breaths, I counted ten or twelve points on his rack. He was imperious. Imposing. Magnificently wild. I'd never seen a buck so near before. They're notorious loners: people-shy.

In the film of my memory, he snorts and stamps his hoof a little. In reality, I think he simply walked on, crunching the fall leaves as he went.

A little thrilled, I chose to see this encounter as a sign. I'd never seen a stag so close! Our country had never elected a female President! It was meant to be, wasn't it.

That night, as it began to dawn on us that the impossible was fast becoming the nightmarishly probable, I fell off a cliff, like so many of us did.

Today, I'm still down here, struggling. Horrified. Disgusted. Mourning what we've lost and almost despairing of what's to come.

I still don't feel like I understand what happened. Nor do I know how we reclaim our footing and place in the world.*

I know this, though: I've stopped believing in signs.


------

*I wrote this before the Tuesday elections, and the subsequent wave of Democratic victories in Virginia, New Jersey, Maine and elsewhere. Citizens came out in high numbers for an off-year election and rejected Trumpism full-throatedly. A startlingly high percentage of the new Virginia officeholders are women—including the first transgender person ever elected to a state legislature—spurred to action by their love of country and hatred for what Trump and the Trump-enabling GOP have wrought. 

I am buoyed by these results. I am heartened. They are a chink in the side of that cliff. Now let's all grab hold and climb. 

January 20, 2017

Ever since then,
it goes like this.

We eat. We sleep.
Sometimes we dream
before getting up
and losing the thread.

We walk the same steps
to the bathroom,
the sink.
We sit down
We rise.
The floorboards creak.

We reach for our phones,
inevitably.

Click—
and free fall down holes without any roots.
Ghost walk through mirrors which enlarge and distort.
On rooftops patroled by wolves in wolf clothing,
we sit on adrenaline and wait. some. more.

Click.

Why this grief we've invited
that's just within reach?

Trump. Puerto Rico. Mass shooters and "balance."
Nuclear war. The first amendment. Environmental armageddon.

Ire comes early. Shock, then despair.
Because—none of it's as shocking as it was last year.

We put the stone in our pocket,
get ourselves off to work.

Back home, tucked in bed, we dread
what's in store for our children's kids.
Wonder at the blitheness
with which we gifted them life.
Would we change it?
No. But it's a thought.

And yet
the most of us—
we do keep our heads.
We've adjusted—roughly—to
the nightmare we live,
ears barely ringing from the blanket alarms,
eyes blindly scanning for the next savior
or devil.

Denial—oh yeah. But only in spurts.

Hope?

Oh, Obama. Hope is changed.

For fear's made us children
in our abuser's house
and hope is most dangerous
when the tyrant is scared.

And yet, what I want
on this crisp, Sunday morning
that seems, by all appearance, so ordinary
is for someone to cover
my screen with their hands
and to say:

"I don't know, either,
baby bird, little lamb.

But it's autumn outside.
Look.
All the things—they're changing again.

Point your finger out there,
to the ones you can touch.

Take the roof off the sky—
see how high we can jump."

Deleted

Green heron

I'm not as sold
on you
as I am
on your cousin

You have little
in the way
of her arabesque
angles

and know nothing
of the slow, melodious way
she takes umbrage,
packing up the long legs,
concert hall wings
crook neck 

into an island
she heaves out
and then skyward

raising the calm
of her own private ocean

feet far behind
like a lover's old token

until dropping anchor,
en pointe and alone.


Lucky,
you don't seem to mind
the comparison,
too busy listening
to the indiscreet
secrets
of minnows

feet tucked in slime
eyes grim and primordial

on the shoal of a river

the blue guy
let slide.

41

I cried to find there was poetry left. 

"Come home," she said. 

I did. 

Disease

I can’t remember how to 

  write

the fear and the dread 
are
swamps

not founts

the words 
I cupped
been bulldozed to

 dust

and I feel dead inside 
dead inside 
dead and-

 lost

  
I cannot - 

 right.

The Best 100 Novels Challenge

The Champ!

Nathan Bransford posted a list of his 100 favorite novels and extended an invitation for other bloggers to do the same. Intrigued by the idea (and eager to waste some time), I decided to take him up on the challenge. 

It was a fun, if exasperating, exercise. What I found most difficult was evaluating books I hadn't read in ages, but remembered having strong feelings about. It's difficult to rank the things you love, anyway, but how to rank books you last read in high school against the ones you read last year? I'm a different person now. The older books' nuances (and sometimes, entire plots) might have escaped me in the intervening years. In the end, though, I figured if the book was powerful enough to have left an emotional fingerprint, then it deserved to make the cut (though it likely ended up in the bottom part of this list). 

I did not include collections of unrelated short stories, shorter novellas or memoirs. 

So, without further ado, here's my list of the top 100 novels: 

1. Jane Eyre
2. Anna Karenina
3. A Room with a View
4. Persuasion
5. Women In Love
6. Gilead
7. The English Patient
8. The Razor's Edge
9. Emily of New Moon
10. On Chesil Beach
11. A Passage to India
12. Charlotte's Web
13. Bel Canto
14. Madame Bovary
15. Olive Kitteridge 
16. Pride and Prejudice
17. The Age of Innocence
18. Anne of Green Gables
19. The Corrections
20. Breathing Lessons
21. Silk
22. Home
23. Crime and Punishment
24. The Anthologist
25. Middlesex
26. The Book of Ruth
27. The Burgess Boys
28. The Remains of the Day
29. Middlemarch
30. Villette
31. The BFG
32. The God of Small Things
33. Freedom
34. Lila
35. My Ántonia
36. The Sorrows of Young Werther
37. A Thousand Splendid Suns
38. Mrs. Dalloway
39. Atonement
40. The Road
41. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
42. Jude the Obscure
43. Les Misérables
44. The Lowland
45. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
46. Sense and Sensibility
47. The Portrait of a Lady
48. Great Expectations
49. Mudbound
50. The Grapes of Wrath
51. Winesburg, Ohio
52. Of Love and Other Demons
53. The Art of Fielding
54. The Sense of an Ending
55. The House of Mirth
56. Little Women
57. To Kill a Mockingbird
58. Mrs. Dalloway
59. Life After Life
60. One Hundred Years of Solitude
61. Siddhartha
62. The Namesake
63. An Artist of the Floating World
64. A Map of the World
65. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
66. The Ten-Year Nap
67. And the Mountains Echoed
68. Elegies for the Brokenhearted
69. Little Children
70. And Then There Were None
71. Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret
72. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
73. Emma
74. Digging to America
75. The Vagabond
76. To the Lighthouse
77. Animal Farm
78. White Teeth
79. Amy and Isabelle
80. A Farewell to Arms
81. Things Fall Apart
82. The Scarlet Letter
83. The Song is You
84. Elective Affinities
85. Talking It Over
86. The Great Gatsby
87. The Red and the Black
88. The Westing Game
89. Station Eleven
90. Howard's End
91. Life of Pi
92. The Wings of the Dove
93. Lady Chatterley's Lover
94. Wonder Boys
95. Tess of the d'Urbervilles
96. My Name is Lucy Barton
97. Searching for Caleb
98. Norwegian Wood
99. All Quiet on the Western Front
100. Brooklyn

So there you go! No doubt I've forgotten a few. And I clearly have some big holes here. No James Joyce, no Marcel Proust, no Toni Morrison, Herman Melville, or Vladimir Nabokov—not because I haven't read their work, but because I haven't read any one book to completion. I hope to remedy that someday. I'm also not that adventurous when it comes to genre fiction, and I know I'm missing out on some wonderful mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, etc. 

If we were keeping tabs on frequency of mentions, Anne Tyler, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Strout, E.M. Forster and Marilynne Robinson would take the prize. 

One final note: Jane Eyre may or may not be the best novel of all time, but I've come to believe that the novels we read at a formative age (I was 13) are the ones that stick to our souls and won't let go. I've read that book a couple times since in the intervening years, and it's always held up. I love Jane. I love Mr. Rochester. I even love poor Bertha, raving away in that attic of hers.   

They're why I fell in love with literature. And they're at least partly responsible for why I write today.

Thanks for the fun challenge, Nathan! I hope others take it up. If you do, be sure to share your list in the comments section of Nathan's original post, and he'll link his post to your blog. 

Like the weather

when he lowers his voice

and raises his eyes 

to ask her a question

her heart skips a beat

stomach falls

and she wishes

them both

away

from it all

so the rain

could be the answer 

The Gaffer

(photo by Dennis Jarvis)

Lousy at speech,
she became a writer

marching her words out
single file 

(some missing shoes,
others tottering)

instead of enduring the
alarm bell's clamor

sentences smothered,
meaning kinked

everyone panicking,
losing their shit—

hearing that crunch of bone
on teeth.  



Now, years later,
I'm still learning

what it is
to make a story

where to shine
the point of focus

to feel the scourge  
of self-immolation

leave my body 
for the length

of a page — and

shape the fire
into glass.