New Poems

Or old poems with new homes. Find them here: http://www.tryst3.com/issue17/hefner.html.

Any Old Bird

Today's News:

1) The man who looks like Jesus and is always on crutches is passing my window now.

2) Thorn's closest friend had a massive heart attack.

3) I received an email entitled "The Small Musculature of Birds."

4) My little sister, Madeline, emailed as well. She will be ten on Saturday. She has been dabbling in trapeze. I was very impressed with her syntactical structure.

5) I played Miles Davis for my students. Kerri wrote about clouds changing shapes; Nakeea wrote about her mom getting her hair done on Fridays.

It's all got me thinking...

And when you think, you start to hear your heart, and when you start to hear your heart, it's almost all you can hear, and just when you start to believe it's out of control--that it's beating and beating and beating itself blue--you realize it's only the flapping of the bird's wings, but it's not any old bird, it's the bird that was born out of the robin egg that you found as a child, the one you wanted to put in your sweatshirt pocket and carry down the dusty road to the store, the one you wanted to place in a nest made out of a Mountain Dew bottle and seventy-two straw wrappers, the one you wanted to keep your secret because you knew one day a bird would fly out, and it would be all yours, and you could name it, and it would sing you to sleep and sing you to wake and sing you into those crazy dreams. Birds, you'd say and point out the window. Your mother would nod; your husband would smile; your father would play a little bird song.

I have been teaching again. Chris who is nine and has autism flaps his arms when he sees me. Poetry, he says. We fly. Airplane. Bird. It's our warm-up exercise--flying, shaking, slithering like snakes, hopping like bunnies. I'm thrilled, of course, that it is the flying he holds on to. For years, (and I've written this before but I have to say it again because I don't know that I've ever gotten it really right), for years, teaching students with autism made me feel like a giant bird. I'd flap and flap and flap. The only thing I could think to compare the students with was a man I loved in college, one who was far way, one who seemed impervious to all the flapping in the world, who drove a Saab and wore sunglasses and played a too kind hand of Gin Rummy.

Now, though, I just sit. I put my hands on the desk, and I make the students breathe. We inhale, exhale, inhale again. It is peaceful, and they are with me (a feat I never thought I'd accomplish), but I love that there is still a bit of the bird in me, that Chris points to me and says, Fly.

This was the first blog entry I ever read: (It's a beauty.)

http://marajebsen.blogspot.com/search?q=birds+teaching

Vote for Maaza!!!!

Now, please...

http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/2007/32395/index1.html

Memorial Day: A Story about a Ukulele

Inspired by my father's relationship with his brother, I wanted to share this short-short that I wrote some time last year.

So Much for the Promise Land

Earlier this week, scientists confirmed that in the winter of 2001 a hammerhead shark in an Omaha zoo gave birth to another shark with no sign of a male parent. While the process known as parthenogenesis may at first be seen as a sort of biological miracle (or, for the believer as a modern-day virgin birth), it is noted that these "miracles" occur only when a species is under threat and being held in captivity. More on that here:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/05/23/MNGABPVLB31.DTL

As for Nebraska, I had a student from there once, and I wanted to love her for that reason alone. Sadly, New York grabbed her up by the skin of her neck and made her its own before I really got a chance to know her.

The only other thing I can say about the Cornhusker state is that when my mom and I lived on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota we used to drive over to Nebraska for milk shakes and bowling: it seemed a sort of Promise Land--all big sky, shiny lanes and cold, creamy treats. I haven't been back in over twenty years.

Poor Ole Mockingbird

She couldn't even carry a note.

Why Not to be a Good Citizen

So, I'm sitting in the parking lot at the Flatbush Avenue P.C. Richard's waiting for Cody, and I see this white Jag trying to pull out of a space. Crank the wheel to the right, I'm yelling, but he can't hear me so he backs into a parked navy minivan. He pulls forward then does it again. Twice. The minivan is actually being hoisted into the air. Hey Jerk-o, I yell--this time out the window. You can't do that. Finally he gets out of the space, puts his car in park, gets out, examines the damage he's done to his own car, and goes to get back in. Stop, I yell and slam my door, walk towards him. You need to leave a note on that minivan. You can't just leave.

He stares at me blankly. The passenger door to his Jag opens, a very large wild-haired woman steps out. What you say? she says. I repeat myself but with far less conviction. Watch us, she says.

I got your license plate number, I yell into the sky. In my memory I'm actually shaking my fists in the air, but surely I wasn't that animated. Suddenly, it occurs to me that they may have a gun so I run sheepishly back to my car, roll up the windows and listen to the radio, really thankful--for the first time all day--to be alive.

Where We Come From

Present Day, Henry River

I've been thinking about what it means to be from a place that no longer exists, and all I can think is that maybe Hickory, my own birth town, isn't so different from Henry River. All of us--but a handful of cousins, and Anne, of course, who doesn't even leave the house and so has abandoned the town in her own way--has left.

The last time I was there, I got sub sandwiches with April and went to hear music down by Green's Grocery. These days, she warned me, it's the dangerous part of town. The street that lead from Mama Heaton's house down to Green's did look different--maybe not dangerous, but it certainly didn't seem the same sidewalk I used to run up, the one I once saw the rain travel on, the one where we'd play Mother-May-I and pretend we were famous. It was dusty, in a sort of exhausted way.

Once we were at the club I sipped a weak drink and counted teeth. Meth has hit Hickory hard. You've got to really keep your eyes peeled to see a full set. Rough skin and hair--all the signs of hard-using. Halfway through the night, I needed a sweater and some air and wanted to walk out to the car alone. They wouldn't let me go.

I live in Brooklyn, I told them, and still they wouldn't let me walk the twenty or so yards to my car. I was, I will admit, more nervous there than I ever am in Brooklyn. There was a rumor of a serial killer who was arranging his victims in cars at the junkyard, then with the drugs and the racial unrest; it was quite unsettling.

But what unsettled me most was how unfamiliar it all seemed.

It's not just the place that I miss. The world that I was born into--with its coffee cans and night shifts, its apartment evictions and praise songs--seems so far away from the world I live in now that I can hardly even make up stories about it. Today, I'm a little sad about that, a little sad about having abandoned the first things I ever knew and not even recognizing what they've become.

Health & Fitness Tips #8 thru #11

When trying to attain a "buff bride" body, steer clear of any cardio classes which contain the words "blast," "boot" or "suicide." If you do take such a class, do not opt for a burrito while limping home from the gym. If you must get the burrito, do not ask for extra sour cream. If all else fails, make sure you put the burrito on beautiful China and eat it with a knife and fork. Candles are, of course, optional.

Syntactical Freedom!!

For years, I told my students that a writer is granted only one--maybe two!--exclamation marks in her life. I highly doubt, I'd tell them, that you want to use that single mark in your freshman year of college. Save it! I yelled. Save yourself!

But why was I so afraid of the exclamation mark? I must admit: I'm an exclaimer. If I were transcribed over the course of the day, the transcript would be filled with exclamation marks. Cody, breakfast! Cody! Or perhaps with the interrobang:

Cody?! Still though, for years, I was afraid. Maybe it was college? The blase college student shan't use such wild modes of expression. (But then the inevitible shift!) In the past year or so, I can't get enough of them. I use them, use them, use them! That staunch vertical! That emphatic dot! Perhaps putting all of my markings in a single syntactical basket is getting me nowhere. I'm feeling, today, a bit trapped. Sure, four exclamation marks might make a window, but a whole line of them, and you've got a jail. Maybe...I need to stop transcribing in my head. I need to let the way the sun is shining through my blinds right now (!!!!!!!) just be the sun shining through my blinds.

Things You Can Take

a photograph

(on a beach, from above)

Spanish lessons

(Hola, Mr. Vaca.)

antibiotics

vows

your temperature

(but you're not even warm)

your child's temperature

(but she's not even born)

hot baths

a train headed south

your own sweet time

(if you wish;

I wish.)

anything, really

you can take anything, really

(but it might hurt)

oh, it'll hurt--you can bet your big ole heart that it'll hurt--but hurt goes away,

or doesn't go away, turns into something else entirely:

the music downstairs, a half-remembered dream,

a hand that finally unfolds, opens, reaches to find what it might take next.

For Old's Sake Sake

"Ah, what is the life of a human being--a drop of dew, a flash of lightning? This is so sad, so sad. What can I say?" --Akutagawa (translated from the Japanese)

On this day last year, I boarded a non-stop Tokyo to Newark flight. Halfway through the flight I woke up having dreamed I kept stepping into temples with the wrong foot first. After going to brush my teeth in the tiny airplane bathroom, I read the book I had found at the airport--an English translation of a Japanese writer--and then slept again, dreamlessly.

This is what I love about keeping notebooks--the tedium, the chicken feet, the Yeats, all scribbled and starred and squared. I am between notebooks right now. This afternoon, going to buy non-monied paper at Kate's Paperie, I tried to purchase a new one, but they were out. [To the effect of tedium I'll jot down what struck me today: the bricklayers next door, the holes in my walls, the song the homeless man whistles outside my window at this very moment, the way my students looked at me blankly when I asked what poetry is.]

It was yesterday of last year, however, that had me digging through my notebooks: our last night in Tokyo. I was in Japan with Thorn (my ex-stepfather, dear friend & travelling partner--don't ask! I don't know how I ended up with this life!), and we were on our way to eat dinner at a Tepenyaki steak house. There, they would throw live shrimp onto the hot plate, watch them jump and sizzle, chop their heads off and then place them on our plates. But it was the getting to the restaurant that struck me most.

The impeccable halls with their impeccable lighting: the walk to the elevator was magic. Violin music poured from room 427. Truly, it poured from the room. I wanted to knock on the door, to walk in, lay my head on the clean, square pillow and fall asleep listening to those songs.

I was just from the shower and feeling far from home but feeling good and tall in heels and satisfied but hungry and suddenly filled with music I'd never heard before. In the elevator stood a girl-woman in striped knee socks, near fifty, but giggling wildly and sucking a lollipop, her teeth red with its juice. I stared too long at her, smiled, nodded. When the doors opened we were at the rooftop restaurant and shooting straight out from the center of Tokyo was a rainbow.

The trip had been long, squatting over holes in China, feeling disoriented in an almost blinding way, comforted only by nightly phone calls to Cody and poems Andrea was writing in Europe and sending to my email. But that night, one year ago last night was perfect. And it was the disembodied music I loved the most--something so right in knowing that behind the locked doors strings gave way to a bow.

Shake your Money Maker

I have spent the last one hundred minutes coloring in red hearts and folding paper into threes. No, I haven't gone back to elementary school; I'm getting married! My thumbs shine with the hope of calluses; red marker blooms on my hands.

This was the moment when I was supposed to step back, take a deep breath, put water on for tea with a sigh and write about how marriage has always reminded me of something very childlike, of how I remember "marrying" Travis Laskey on the blacktop, of how, ultimately, maybe those childish wishes are closer to what we ultimately crave than all the hullabaloo we've conjured up since then.

But, no. Looks like that ain't happening. I have stepped back, and what I have seen is quite terrifying. Let me start from some place in the middle:

This afternoon I was at Kate's Paperie--the one in Soho--they're having a huge clearance sale because they're moving over to Spring Street. I see a whole stack of paper-by-the-pound, and it's beautiful, ecru with the faintest bits of blue-green confetti! Why hasn't anyone bought all this paper? I'm thinking. So I start counting out sheets, making up stacks of twenty-five. My friend, Olivia, walks over, and I get her to count it too. You sure you want this? she asks. It's beautiful, I say, does it not match?

She tells me it matches, and I come home, print out a hundred copies of so-glad-you-might-be-able-to-join-us-blah-blah-blah, and then as I'm folding number 100 after coloring 100 hearts, I realize the paper has bits of money in it! Torn up dollar bills! Perhaps the most obnoxious paper ever to waste a tree. Suddenly the name "money paper" makes sense; I had thought it was a metaphor!

So now, much the same as when I was in third grade, I will call the ER and ask for my mother (she's a doctor); she'll tell me it's okay, that everything's going to be just fine, and I'll lay in the blue glow of the television, wishing she was here.

Health & Fitness Tip #7

When running across the Brooklyn Bridge on a perfect May morning, try to refrain from pumping your arm in the air and yelling Sweet Jesus!

The Round Table

Last night I dreamed that one of my dear friends was keeping a hanged man in her closet. We were at a party sitting around a large round table, and Come here, she said. Now? I followed her down a corridor, and she opened the closet door. At first I just saw the man's naked back; he had two small pimples to the right of his spine. Then I noticed he was dead. My friend smiled. I have one too, she said.

The day that followed was almost equally dreamlike: a jaunt to New Jersey. Sanj and I (and several other poets, including most notably weatherman Ira Joe Fisher) read poems at the West Caldwell Poetry Festival; Sanj may have made some people cry. Here she is, years ago, smiling:

In New Jersey, we, of course, got lost. Sanj's Swedish lover and his Swedish parents sat in the backseat of the Yukon while we drove in circles. I kept smiling and shrugging, and they did the same.

The whole ride home--especially when the rain started falling quite heavily as we waited in line for the Lincoln Tunnel--I tried to forget about my dream with my other friend and the man in the closet, but it kept coming to me. After she showed me the dead man, we went back to the table; everyone was laughing and clinking glasses, and I understood--sort of faintly and with a kind of shame I can't quite understand--that we all had those hanged men in our closets, that they weren't ours to understand or ridicule or even to really think about all that much. Maybe their faint knocking against the wall is the only rhythm that quells us to sleep.

We're given these moments, it seems--say at a poetry reading or a dinner party--and someone exposes their own hanged man. Look, they say, and so caught off are we by their honesty that we have no choice but to do just that, to look, and then, as if in a dream, we wander back to the round table not certain of what we've seen, just remembering two faint blemishes and the bony spine of an unfamiliar back.

A Poem without a Single Bird in It

Jack Gilbert has this great poem, and in it there is not a single bird--no red-winged blackbird or cockatiel, no gray-cheek parakeet or dodo, not even the flap of a sparrow's wing.

I tell you this because it seems remarkable that this is my ninth entry and I have yet to mention my mother. And so, by way of introduction, I'll tell you a story. As a child, I rode shotgun with my mother all over the south. We'd drive and drive for days and days looking for the next place to hang our hats. If Joe was with us, maybe he got shotgun, and the three of us armed with nothing but cans of warm diet soda were ready to take the world on.

After we'd been on the road a while, mom would decide it was time to take a nap. It was our job, she told us, to tell her if there were any curves ahead or if she got to close to another car. Joe and I would yelp and plea. Mom, wake up. Please wake up. This went on for years. Even after we realized that she was closing only one eye we were still delighted and terrified every time she did it. What if we killed someone? What if we killed ourselves?

So this morning--which also happens to be the first time this year that I've seen a red robin--I told Cody I want a baby. Badly. I badly want a baby. Yes, after the wedding (!), but I want, years from now, someone to ride shotgun and tell me when the curves are coming, someone to delight and terrify, someone--when we feel like we can't make it another mile--to run into the 7-11 and grab us a couple of fresh Diet Cokes.

Cravings vs. Urges

Do you crave the flesh of the dead? If so, check out my brother's website: http://www.myspace.com/everette_hartsoe. Not only does he dabble in Vamperotica, he actually submerges himself in it. This is the brother I didn't know about until I was fifteen: the sun shined after many weeks without sun, and we went to King's Mountain to pedal boat and eat pimento cheese sandwiches; dad says, "Say hello to your brother;" "Hey," we say our breath thick with french onion dip; eventually night came (and again and again), until I woke up today to find an email from him.

But this isn't really about my brother Everette, nor am I peddling his online goods (buy away: http://www.ehartsoe.com/), it's about cravings vs. urges. Picture this: yesterday at noon I sat in the community room at the local Jewish Center. My Weight Watchers leader was Mary-Lou-Renton-ing her way up and down the aisles. We must identify the difference between a craving and an urge, she said.

I think there was an Amen, maybe even a Hallelujah. We experimented: Smelling popcorn at the movie theater and wanting it? Urge.

Hearing the girl next to you pack her Marlboro Lights loudly against the palm of her hand? Urge. Wanting to jump on the Greyhound and go wait tables in Wyoming? Pure urge.

To crave, you've gotta go deep. It's got to be insatiable--satisfied only by the very thing you are craving. For my Weight Watchers leader (she sheepishly confessed) that thing is cheesecake; for Everette, at least according to his website, it's barely-dressed women wandering bloody streets in search of flesh. And me? Hmm...I'll get back to you on that one.

What I Learned @ the BBQ

Hyeji can really put it away:

Basic Truism: The more meat the better.

And finally...

Never,

and I mean never,

turn your back on a student.

My Big, Fat Content Heart

I have to be honest here. It wasn't just my pappy who twisted my arm to get me to start a blog; there was also Alvin: Alvin of my 4:55 class, Alvin of the bizarre-o essays which often contained photographs of sushi, Alvin of the origami frogs; yes, that Alvin. Start a blog, he told me. Me? I asked. Come on, he said, and so this morning I emailed him telling him I had, indeed, started a blog and asking for advice on what to write. He told me I didn't have to mention him in the first post (Thanks Alvin!) and that I should just write until my heart's content.

And so the inevitable question: how do I know when my heart's content?

Right now, a sirloin burger, spinach salad and glass of South African red into the evening, I'm thinking, wow, my heart's content. But even as I write it I'm compelled to backspace. (And then, of course, in a ridiculously circular way, I want to backspace on that last sentence as well.)

This morning over shredded wheat I told Cody I've started this blog. We eat the big ones--no need to bite-size it--just some cinnamon and sugar, a big splash of milk (heaven!).

Are you giving health tips? he asked.

Huh?

You know, health and fitness tips.

This is the man I'm marrying in five and a half months, the man who knows and loves me better and more than anyone in the world, and he believes that if I were to start a blog it would be to share health and fitness tips. So here they are, folks. Alvin, listen up:

1) Start and end every day with a glass of water.

2) Keep cherry tomatoes on hand.

3) Laugh liberally. Do yoga. Choose watermelon over banana pudding.

4) Listen to your heart. If you can't hear it, listen to your breath.

5) Don't yell something over shredded wheat like "Health and fitness? Do you not understand how complicated I am?"

6) At the end of the day, take inventory. Have you been kind to guests? Have you stayed within your allotted caloric intake? Have you waved hello to the mobsters who run the flower shop around the corner, and by doing so, encouraged not only neighborhood safety but also the glimmer of hope you have for a free peony? And your heart, that big, fat content beast you've been hauling around town--have you given it a shout-out, a little hello, a little thank you for the rhythm, maybe even just a good night?

Just a good night, sweet dreams.

The BBQ

I have bought the lavender, chips and buns. At five o'clock, six students--few of whom speak English with any ease--will arrive at my house. I will stuff them with hot dogs, cupcakes and lemonade.

Before I decided to take on this International class, I was working on a novel with a character who taught ESL. The classroom scenes were always delightful: a comedy of lovely linguistic errors. The true experience is nothing like I imagined. We will sit--rather awkward but still somehow charmed, just happy to be in each other's presence. We will nod a lot but say very little, and then they will leave. Jiexun will take the remaining food. Sung and Jae Shin will thank me profusely though Sung will likely have snuck in alcohol. Hyeji and Li will speed away with Jordan in his sports car as I stand on the stoop waving and smiling. I'll take a damp sponge to the counter wondering why we do it, all the reaching out, the trying to understand.

Honestly, it sometimes seems easier with these students. From the beginning there is no pretense of understanding or construct of shared space. Every gesture is new; every word is reaching towards connection.

A lotus blossom, I tell my students. Unfolding.

They laugh at my attempt to translate into what I believe is their culture.

Rose? they ask. Red rose, and again we nod, smile, pass the potato salad, unknown flowers blooming wildly in our heads.

Now I Remember Why I Began This

Way south of Sackett Street and this cup of tea and my red paper bird and my shiny diamond ring is this old house. It's the one my grandmother was raised in. This is the tree that shook in the storm, the one that plastered fat leaves on the windows, the one no one even bothered trying to climb.

After coming in from the Brooklyn rain and wringing my t-shirt out in the sink, I couldn't figure out why I started this thing--The Blue Pitcher--what it even means: to be blue, to be full or not full.

Some time last fall they cut this tree down. Henry River, North Carolina might never be the same, but I wouldn't even really know it, haven't done much of anything but drive through it. Not too long ago, though, we were there--Dad and Linda and me--staring at the tinroofs and the slopjars, the peeled blue bonnet wallpaper and the graffiti: "You bum of chicken shit," sprayed on one wall, and then the more (or less) traditional: "Fuck Satan."

"Let's skat," dad said. I was looking at Linda's reflection in a pane of broken glass; she was spelling "kudzu" for me as the kudzu piled around our legs. You wouldn't think that vultures would really be on the powerline, but there they lurked. We searched for homeplate in a field of trees; then a pickup truck with two boys in the bed scared us into leaving.

We drove into Hickory to meet Lynn at the cafeteria where I wanted fried okra and banana pudding but got green beans and watermelon. On our way there, we crossed the bridge built in 1960, the one my grandpappy had the very first wreck on just weeks after it opened. Dad says it was icy, nobody's fault, just icy.

Brooklyn Rain

Wild rain Crazy rain
Oklahoma rain
Cut your legs rain
Plants go belly-up in your backyard rain
Old men getting blown over rain

The kind that falls when you're far from home without an umbrella

Gravity

For years I was friends with a woman who broke glasses. Nothing, it seems, could keep her from dropping wine glasses and tumblers, juice glasses and goblets. In the days after she'd been over for dinner, I'd spend hours sliding my bare feet across the surface of the floor, trying to catch a shard of glass before someone else did. I'd stand on stools and crouch in corners, shining flashlights in almost unimaginable angles hoping for a glint of glass. It happened so often and for so long I came to believe it was a part of gravity. Now, with her gone, I'm given the luxury of holding my own glass more carelessly, sometimes balancing it on my head as I spin wildly, sometimes placing it just so as I type and type waiting for that old familiar sound.

Upon my Pappy's Command

My pappy keeps trying to get me to set up a blog. He wants me to make him famous, he says, or wants me to get famous or maybe just wants to see how it is I spend my days so far away from North Cackalacky. So, here it is, folks: dedicated to the man who gave me this blue pitcher that I fill with water day after day, the man who plays the meanest ukulele in town, whose name will soon fall off your lips, the myth, the legend, the fryer of livermush and lover of Krispy Kreme--my haplessly happy pappy!