When I'm Not Sure How To Answer

My son and I discuss our favorite
Flannery story and find that we think
more alike than we know how to acknowledge,
at least immediately. He asks me about
underlying themes, why her stories
are always so sad, why nothing good
ever comes until it's too late. I want to tell
him that I know why, that I've read enough
and thought enough and lived enough
to know, but I just make one of those screwed-
up eyebrow faces and say, What do you think?
And he, who has grown accustomed to a mother
who either knows some things or fakes it well
enough to play a trump and be convincing now
and then, shrugs his shoulders and lifts those black
eyebrows at me and says he isn't sure but maybe
he thinks it's a southern thing, writing about decay,
about losing what you thought mattered, about an entire
way of life shifting abruptly and loosening the foundations
from the red earth keeping them part of the whole.
I shrug my tired shoulders and nod and think
how my heart aches for him already, that he should
know these things and want to know more, want
to digest and invest in a life of books and characters,
a life lived through the eyes and words of a woman
who gave me Macon and Greenleaf, a deaf girl abandoned,
a young man blinding himself in search of truth,
a woman with a fancy hat on a bus in a city unkind,
whose real life took her to Fire Island and The Hamptons,
who could never escape, nor would if she could, the bold
untamed places in the heart many fear to visit, the place
the lonely and disquieted spirits come to again and again.

Forsythia

I just love that word. And I love the way
I feel when I see one blooming...like there is hope after all
and that it comes in the shape of this scraggly, orphaned
looking plant all year until late March or early April when it becomes the star
of the neighborhood or the beacon on the craggy outcrops
I pass as I drive along the parkway to work.

When I had Molly outside yesterday, I came across dozens
of them in my backyard just beginning to blossom. I don't know
why I've never noticed them back there before.
But I'm glad I did yesterday. I'm going to cut some and put them
in a large cut-glass vase on the dining room table.
They make me smile. They make me know what so what means.
And I know my friend knows, too. Poetry is just not her thing.
It' s not for everybody.


I asked her if she wanted to take a road
trip with me this fall and go to Dodge. She's thinking about it,
but she told me she would not go to the festival but would
go to NYC to visit some friends. That's cool with me. It would
be great to have her along on the road trip. Been saving all my
loose change with the hope I'll have enough saved by then to
go. I don't want to miss it.

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Really sore today from the priming we did yesterday.
We got all of that done and will start painting this afternoon
after we all get home from lunch.
Grandma wants to take us all out to eat.

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Here's one of the Collins' poems I chose for the meeting:


Splitting Wood (from Picnic, Lightning, 1998)

Frost covered this decades ago,
and frost will cover it again tonight,
the leafy disarray of this woodland

now thinned down to half its trees,
but this morning I stand here
sweating in a thin shirt

as I split a stack of ash logs
into firewood
with two wedges, an ax, and a blue-headed maul.

The pleasures here are well known:
the feet planted wide,
the silent unstoppable flow of the downswing,

the coordination that is called hand-eye,
because the hand achieves
whatever the concupiscent eye desires

when it longs for a certain spot,
which, in this case, is the slightest fissure
visible at one end of the log

when the thin, insinuating edge
of the blade can gain entry,
where the shape of its will can be done.

I want to say there is nothing
like the sudden opening of wood,
but it is like so many other things—

the stroke of the ax like lightning,
the bisection so perfect
the halves fall away from each other

as in a mirror,
and hit the soft ground
like twins shot through the heart.

And rarely, if the wood
accepts the blade without conditions,
the two pieces keep their balance

in spite of the blow,
remain stunned on the block
as if they cannot believe their division,

their sudden separateness.
Still upright, still together,
they wobble slightly

as two lovers, once secretly bound,
might stand revealed,
more naked than ever,

the darkness inside the tree they shared
now instantly exposed to the blunt
light of this clear November day,

all the inner twisting of the grain
that held them blindly
in their augmentation and contortion

now rushed into this brightness
as if by a shutter
that, once opened, can never be closed.

You Kindly

Because I felt too weak to move
you kindly moved for me, kneeling
and turning, until you could take my breast-tip in the
socket of your lips, and my womb went down
on itself, drew sharply over and over
to its tightest shape, the way, when newborns
nurse, the fist of the uterus
with each, milk, tug, powerfully
shuts. I saw your hand, near me, your
daily hand, your thumbnail,
the quiet hairs on your fingers--to see your
hand its ordinary self, when your mouth at my
breast was drawing sweet gashes of come
up from my womb made black fork-flashes of a
celibate's lust shoot through me. And I couldn't
lift my head, and you swiveled, and came down
close to me, delicate blunt
touch of your hard penis in long
caresses down my face, species
happiness, calm which gleams
with fearless anguished desire. It found
my pouring mouth, the back of my throat,
and the bright wall which opens. It seemed to
take us hours to move the bone
creatures so their gods could be fitted to each other,
and then, at last, home, root
in the earth, wing in the air. As it finished,
it seemed my sex was a grey flower
the color of the brain, smooth and glistening,
a complex calla or iris which you
were creating with the errless digit
of your sex. But then, as it finished again,
one could not speak of a blossom, or the blossom
was stripped away, as if, until,
that moment, the cunt had been clothed, still,
in the thinnest garment, and now was bare
or more than bare, silver wet-suit of
matter itself gone, nothing
there but the paradise flay. And then
more, that cannot be told--may be,
but cannot be, things that did not
have to do with me, as if some
wires crossed, and history
or war, or the witches possessed, or the end
of life were happening in me, or I was
in a borrowed body, I knew
what I could not know, did-was-done-to
what I cannot do-be-done-to, so when
we returned, I cried, afraid for a moment
I was dead, and had got my wish to come back,
once, and sleep with you, on a summer
afternoon, in an empty house
where no one could hear us.
I lowered the salt breasts of my eyes
to your mouth, and you sucked,
then I looked at your face, at its absence of unkindness,
its giving that absence off as a matter
I cannot name, I was seeing not you
but something that lives between us, that can live
only between us. I stroked back the hair in
pond and sex rivulets
from your forehead, gently raked it back
along your scalp,
I did not think of my father's hair
in death, those oiled paths, I lay
along your length and did not think how he
did not love me, how he trained me not to be loved.

Sharon Olds
from Blood, Tin, Straw

So what

I decided we'd read and discuss a few of Billy Collins' poems at April's poetry circle meeting. I had a hard time selecting the poems for the meeting, and not for the reason I thought I would.

I've always loved reading his work, but something felt very wrong, very different as I went through my volumes trying to choose the poems. I found myself reading one and saying

So what?

and then another and saying SO WHAT

and this scene repeated itself over and over, which was disconcerting to me.

I finally decided on the following poems:

Cheers, from The Art of Drowning
Obituaries, from Nine Horses
Splitting Wood, from Picnic, Lightning
Child Development, from The Apple That Astonished Paris

I may post them here and ask for some comments.

Back to my SO WHAT feeling.

Last weekend, I visited with my friend in Lexington. I was reading some Sharon Olds and shared one of the poems with her. She read it. Then she reread it. Then she reread parts of it and handed the book back to me and shrugged her shoulders and told me what she thought. Basically, she was left with a so what feeling, and she stated she guessed she just wasn't intelligent enough to quite get poetry or that she just couldn't sink her teeth into most of what she had read and that most of it left her with this so what feeling.

She happens to be one of the most (if not the most) articulate, intelligent, well-read, intuitive, and talented people I know. I love the way her mind works and her love of literature, the arts, and science. Her vocabulary astounds me (she's not pretentious--she just loves the beauty of words and isn't afraid to use them--which makes me think she would really love poetry). She graduated from NYU with an acting degree and is now a PhD candidate in Toxicology at the UK Research Center. So, this woman knows the beauty of language and how it can move us but has never found any poetry that has affected her that way. It was an interesting discussion which merited some close observation and self-evaluation on my part. She has read some of my work and confesses to liking some of it quite a bit. But that's another discussion I don't want to get into this morning (deals with dead dad and lost people kind of things).

So, perhaps it's just the place I'm inhabiting right now that makes me think so what when I read Billy, but it was a strange feeling. I admire his wit and his talent, but what is he really saying that matters at all, and does he have to be saying something that matters ? Is it the poet's job to be really saying something that matters, or can it just be the poet's job or mission or hope that what he/she is doing is inviting you into his/her world? Billy invites us in. I feel like pulling up a chair and having a glass of wine with him or lying outside on the lawn with him looking at the stars and offering a toast "to the first man ever to notice the outline/of a bear in the stars one quiet night long before/the wheel and shortly after fire."

Maybe I understand more what jim means when he says he just wishes Billy would come out of his backyard and play with the rest of us from time to time. Maybe it would be a good thing to see him get down and dirty--maybe talk about some menstrual blood or semen or vomit or crack houses or the way disease ravages the body.

Again, maybe it's just me. Hmmpphh...



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Son and family closed on their house yesterday. I'm getting ready to go over and help my daughter-in-law start priming the walls. We hope to get them all primed today and perhaps paint one or two this evening. They are very excited to be finally getting into their own place. I think I might have been driving them a little bonkers! Actually, we've all done well here together, and I am going to miss seeing little Isaac every morning when I get up.

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Molly has to go for her biopsy Monday morning. Hopefully, it's just a fatty cyst. I've been worried, but worrying is not going to change anything. The cyst (or whatever it is) is about the size of an egg. They noticed it when they were bathing her at the clinic last week.

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Damn brand new washing machine didn't work worth a s***. Good thing I contacted Lowe's within 7 days. They replaced it. I chose a different model this time and so far so good. Only concern now is the rising water. We've had several roads under water this week, and my basement was starting to fill up, but it didn't get to the washer/dryer/hot water heater area. I can hear the sump pump running as I type.

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Time to wash my face, put on some old clothes, load up the ladder, and go paint. I really love to paint--I just hate the prep work. That's why I never get things done in this old house...it takes forever to get the walls ready to be painted. But, I hope helping out at the new house will inspire me to get started on my hallway (i got started--just didn't get far!).

Brrr outside and going to get colder tonight, but the daffodils are lovely. And they make me feel happy. And that's enough for today.

Lucinda Williams - World Without Tears (live)

Unwilling

Shingles cover the rounded walkway
leading to the screened-in porch,
and even beyond and about--in the middle
of the sedum I didn't cut back this fall,
in front of the pansies, atop the hyacinths,
three feet from the knockout rose bush
my mom and dad planted the last year
of my father's life. It's been warm enough
to remove them, to uncover the covered,
to ship-shape the yard again so it looks
like someone who lives here cares, but the effort
has been greater than the desire, so I just
look at them from the porch windows,
from the street when I pull into the driveway,
from the rock wall when I sneak my smoke
out back in Daddy's garden, all the time
thinking I'm making some kind of point,
some mini rebellion, some statement
about who I am. But who I am has no idea
about how much she'll take, sitting here
alone, the need to hurt wearing itself
out like my old Hoover, clogged and filled
with the little sentiments neglect deposits
on all the days spent unmoved, no lover
or friend to make the willing worth doing.

Where Will Love Go?

Where will love go? When my father
died, and my love could no longer shine
on the oily drink-darkened slopes of his skin,
then my love for him lived inside me,
and lived wherever the fog they made of him
coiled like a spirit. And when I die
my love for him will live in my vapor
and live in my children, some of it
still rubbed into the grain of the desk my father left me
and the dark-red pores of the leather chair which he
sat in, in a stupor, when I was a child, and then
gave me passionately after his death--our
souls seem locked in it, together,
two alloys in a metal, and we're there
in the black and silver workings of his 40-pound
1932 Underwood,
the trapezes stilled inside it on the desk
in front of the chair. Even when the children
have died, our love will live in their children
and still be here in the arm of the chair,
locked in it, like the secret structure of matter,

but what if we ruin everything,
the earth burning like a human body,
storms of soot wreathing it
in permanent winter? Where will love go?
Will the smoke be made of animal love,
will the clouds of roasted ice, circling
the globe, be all that is left of love,
will the sphere of cold, turning ash,
seen by no one, heard by no one
hold all
our love? Then love
is powerless, and means nothing.

Sharon Olds