How It Sometimes Feels

The Origin of Baseball

Someone had been walking in and out
Of the world without coming
To much decision about anything.
The sun seemed too hot most of the time.
There weren't enough birds around
And the hills had a silly look
When he got on top of one.
The girls in heaven, however, thought
Nothing of asking to see his watch
Like you would want someone to tell
A joke - "Time,"they'd say, "what's
That mean - Time?", laughing with the edges
Of their white mouths, like a flutter of paper
In a madhouse. And he'd stumble over
General Sherman or Elizabeth B.
Browning, muttering, "Can't you keep
Your big wings out of the aisle?" But down
Again, there'd be millions of people without
Enough to eat and men with guns just
Standing there shooting each other.

So he wanted to throw something
And he picked up a baseball.

by Kenneth Patchen

Long Road Home

There seem to me...

few things sadder than old blue curtains held up by thumbtacks.

Jimmy Dale Bland: Double Death

So maybe you had to run get milk this morning or your neck feels a little funny because you slept on a weird pillow; maybe you're holed up in a little motel mountain room trying to write the great American something or other and all you're coming up with are cryptic little poems called "Bud says;" maybe summer's going too fast or not fast enough and they fired you or gave you a job you don't just love; maybe you're hungry or sleepy or feeling fat or your hair looks a little crooked or you've lost all faith in god and humankind and you haven't had a slice of cake in months--oh reader, it could be worse! You could be this man:

Jimmy Dale Bland

Not only is cancer eating up his insides and the doctors promising him no more than six months, the good state of Oklahoma is speeding up the process by executing him this afternoon. Thank you very much, Jimmy Dale, your services on this here planet are no longer needed. Wow. And I just thought having a last name like "Bland" was bad.

Donate to Benefit Autism Research

All that money burning holes in your pocket? Get rid of some of it! In lieu of pelting me and Cody with serving spoons, donate to Autism Speaks. Go on; do it now!

Through the Broken Window

pink plastic tulips
an empty blue suitcase
dust

Green Beans

Joe took this picture: a jar of green beans sitting on the windowsill of the house our grandmother was raised in, a house that has been abandoned forty years now and is grown over with poison ivy and kudzu.

I remember being little at our other grandmother's house and spending all afternoon sitting on the porch snapping and stringing beans. Mama Heaton would spread her knees and make a bowl out of the skirt of her dress, throw the heads and the strings of the beans into that bowl. Heather and Joe and I'd snap until our fingers hurt, and Mama Heaton'd tell us to keep snapping, and we'd snap some more.

I'm up in the mountains now--in Blowing Rock, North Carolina--not even an hour from that front porch. I've got this feeling of emptiness that I keep trying to find words for but it only comes to me in flashes: a salted tomato, the cracks in the sidewalk that ran up the street, a hickory bush, the smell of bologna frying, Bob Barker's voice coming from the bedroom.

My mother told me once that her father (before he died--almost everybody is dead now) was building a boat in the basement of that old house. Every evening when he'd come home from the gas station and before he'd go to the mill, he sanded the wood and sawed the notches. He spent hundreds and hundreds of hours building a boat that--if it would have been possible to take out of the basement (it wasn't)--could have sailed around the world. It was a giant ship in a bottle. The walls, though, weren't made of glass; they were more like mud, and there was nothing much else down in that basement: old boxes of torn paper dolls, a washing machine that was nearly always off balance and metal shelves stacked with canned green beans.

When I dream about the basement, and I often do, there are secret tunnels and holes, places to hide, places to be found. I am usually reaching for Cody when I dream of it, terrified, and I go downstairs, take an Advil, drink cold water, make small deals with God to get me back to sleep. Sometimes, though, I dream that there is a door that opens into the back and that the back is a beautiful orchard: magnolia blossoms and Queen Anne's Lace, ripe apples and just fallen pecans. When I dream of the orchard, I don't even bother to look back to see if the house is still standing. I almost hope it wouldn't be.

Oh Lordy

It's been years since I've stepped into a church for anything more than to cool down on a hot city afternoon in the pale stained glass light. Somewhere along the way, Jesus has become a feeling more than anything else; when I hear the name I think blue sky and hot milk and love; I think goodness and blackberry pie and stopping to talk to your neighbor on her stoop.

But driving from New York to North Carolina, I listened to twelve hours of talk radio. It made me feel ridiculous and naive and angry and not just a little sad. It seems Jesus ain't blue sky to many (K. might yell at me for even thinking it!) but more of a back alley to kick people in their knees.

It makes me think of this dream I had about Brad Pitt last week. In it, he was snorting a heckuva lot of cocaine. The white stuff rimmed his nose. And I said, heartbroken but aloud, "Oh my. I can't believe I've been fooled by the media."

The Rearview Mirror

Don't let me tell you that I didn't look back.

Roadtrip

Bring on the corn nuts and Dr. Pepper, I'm headed to the homeland!

I Do!!!

(My heart just did a few flips about marrying such a wonderful man. That's all.)

Old Story, New Home

So, I've just found out I got a story published! Shadowbox Press which specializes in beautiful handmade limited edition books sent out a call for poems and stories to be anthologized in a book called The Musculature of Small Birds, a book devoted entirely to poems and stories with the things that are hope!

My story, "Love Song," is about a woman named Melissa who works in the maternity ward at a hospital in Amarillo; her job is to ink the newborn's foot and press its print onto the birth certificate. The story is a letter written by Melissa to a man who was in her college poetry workshop and who fathered her child. He's moved to New York City where he's become a fairly well known poet, and she's been dreaming she gives birth to a bird. The doctors believe the father of the child was a sparrow; the reader is led to believe the father may actually be dead.

Yowza! I hope the story itself isn't so confusing! I thank the kind editor who accepted it, and also give a shoutout to my old friend Jason Nelson who inspired it by taking me to a bbq restaurant off Old Highway 9 and telling me stories about the end of the world.

One of my Favorite Poems in the World

Shrimp


by Amy Hosig, my dear friend


Bless these shrimp from Sing Hing
Restaurant
that I am about to eat,
that spent their life, hopefully,
jetting about
in odd, propulsive motion
without minds
and before language.

Oh you little shrimp
who involuntarily
died for me,
make me,
like the intelligent whale,
able to change you
into song.

Health & Fitness Tips #13-#14

From the Belgian aesthetician who painted me in warm algae and wrapped me in Saran Wrap:

13. Begin every day with an eyedropper-full of liquid oxygen. Put it into your water (see fitness tip #1!); do not stir. This will, apparently, make you live forever.

14. While sipping your liquid-oxygen-infused-water, contract your gluteal muscles. (Heck, do it now! In fact, do it any time you think of it.) Cellulite--and I apologize for typing out such an ugly word--is drawn to flat surfaces. Rounded surfaces receive far less of the unattractive stuff, so rounded bum equals smoother bum equals perhaps a generally happier person though surely I shouldn't bring happiness into this because, lordy, what kind of a woman equates happiness with glute contractions?

Home Sweet Home

Have been dreaming of:

1) Running into the glass-breaker and her mother in a bakery; I am eating a croissant and avoiding their eyes; her mother asks me where the bathroom is.

2) Spiders crawling out of spider veins.

3) Sunflowers.

4) My dress missing, the cake unordered, the music not playing, the flowers not blooming.

5) Joe telling me a joke but forgetting the punchline.

6) Dave having heart palpitations.

Some things, though, I'm not sure if I dream, or if my mind just seems to have dreamed.

The little siblings: Madeline, Tommy, Kenny. I imagine them swinging double-dutch ropes, and mom (sweet, sweet mom) yelling out ready, set and then running and jumping in those ropes:

Cinderella, dressed in yellow, went downstairs to kiss her fellow, made a mistake...

7) And snakes, too; sometimes I dream of snakes, but mostly of missing trains, not remembering the track or waiting tables and not remembering the order, of being in the high school play and not remembering the lines, of not remembering it seems...

I think that's what I fear most: not remembering. If only I knew what it is that I don't quite remember.

An Empty Shell

What I fear my life without children would be:

A Diddy for my Daddy

O, it's father's day!

What can I say?

You dream all night,

and you think all day!

Your mind's a whip;

your picking's a force;

your wife's your sweetie;

your heart's a horse!

You got Joe and Dave and Chuck and me--

all your younguns, as strange as can be.

And o my pappy--I hate to get sappy!--

but you're the reason we're so durned happy!

And you?

This is where I am today:

The Falling Sky

In Switzerland now but thinking much more of home than of here, and not home Brooklyn though I miss our street with its deli peonies and its corner yoga, but home North Carolina. I'm thinking of the summer that Joe and I drove our little brother Dave out to the Outerbanks to camp. Dave was probably 14 at the time, and Joe and I were still smoking (the glory days!), so the windows were down, and the music was loud, and we drove and we drove until we got to that place that feels like the edge of the world. All night, we lay on the sand. There was a meteor shower, and the stars just poured from the sky, so many stars we couldn't even count them, and I remember thinking: this is how it's supposed to be; the sky is falling, and we've got nothing but each other, and this is exactly how it's supposed to be.

I'll have the sole, please

First, there was Amsterdam.

From the wild:

To the caged:

Then came Dubai.

From the extraordinary:

To the bizarre:

Now, Brussels.

Simple:

For lunch, I had the most exquisite fish I have ever tasted: sole, grilled with a wedge of lemon, hot, peeled potatoes, more tender than I imagine any potatoes ever having been, a side of spinach, and I was thinking, this is what I want; this is what I crave; this simplicity: this perfect hot fish on this cold, cloudless day.

After lunch, Thorn's business colleague drove us in circles around the town, and we saw the Atomium:

I have been thinking of atoms ever since:

how they are indivisible

(I cut my thumb on the red-eye from Dubai);

how the human hair is a million carbon atoms wide

(I am wild with frizz on this side of the sea);

how they were there at the Big Bang,

right when it all began,

they were there,

just dashing around, flying about, looking for each other,

trying to make matter,

trying to make it all matter.

The Other Side of the World

After all the tulips and girls riding bicycles in their skirts, windmills and VanGogh's, I woke up today in Dubai. All afternoon I ran around with a group of Scottish ex-pats trying on huge fakes of designer sunglasses and slopping up hummus and minced lamb with warm pita bread. It's so hot here that I feel half in a dream. Surely that dream feeling will continue come tomorrow morning when I go skiing:
Let's just hope the bear doesn't speak to me in French!

Health & Fitness Tip #12

Even if your ancestors hailed from the Netherlands, do not be tempted to take "Step Aerobics 3" at the gym next to your Amsterdam hotel. Remind yourself that you do not speak Dutch, not even at some deep cellular level; flashback to that Nicaraguan spin class; opt, instead, to tour the museums.

Tomorrow: Bikram in Dubai!

A Day at the Garden

Yesterday, I rode this small yellow bus to the gardens of Staten Island.

The whole place reeked of honeysuckle,

but the sky was crazy blue.



We read poems about foxes,


and we spoke to the trees;

we made birds with our hands

and we lounged in the grass.

In the end,we were left with nothing but the dandelion chains.

(oh, but, really, in the end, is there anything else that we truly need?)

Update on the Nuptials

I just had my wedding dress shipping affidavit notarized at the corner funeral parlor. Gotta love Brooklyn!

Little Miss Merry Christmas

All morning I've been plagued by a horrific image: I was ten, and I begged, begged, begged my mom to let me enter the "Little Miss Merry Christmas" pageant in this tiny South Carolina town we were living in. For the talent, I choreographed Snow White en pointe (that I could neither choreograph nor double-pirouette didn't seem to bother me). I wore my Sunday best, teased my hair a bit and slopped on some of my mother's Lancome Rosewood. In the light of the pre-show dressing room, it was clear that I would be discovered that day, plucked off the stage and carried off to Hollywood.

I think there were five of us. Let's just say I didn't win, and I wasn't one of the three runner-ups. If you could be transported to that day, you would laugh until you cried. Really. Until you cried.

Let them eat cake!

This is Addison Maxine. She is my (very sweet and funny) god daughter. Last week she turned one. Imagine being one! Imagine the cake! Imagine burying your face into the cake, and your fingers; imagine going deeper and deeper into it and not knowing that this is exactly what you are supposed to be doing, that this cake is all for you, that no one will say no or slap your hand;
you won't have to go to therapy or Weight Watchers or to that little place with the psychic in the west village; you can bury yourself in the chocolate, and the people around you--the people who have never hurt you, who have only loved you--will clap and snap photographs; they'll sing you a song, and you, you delighted little beast of a human, will keep eating because you have made it; you have made it to one (to one!), and you need all the chocolate you can get to make it another 99 years!

Cody's Green Thumb

In case there were any questions as to why I'm marrying this man.

Dr. Joseph Hefner: My Genius of a Brother

As a teenager, my brother had the habit of picking up roadkill and throwing it into the back of his Geo Tracker. He'd boil the skin off, bleach the bones in the sun and then paint colorful symbols on the skulls. Wa-La! Merry Christmas, mom--here's a raccoon skull with an arrow!

While this habit may have led my Irish twin of a brother to be a serial killer, he did what few Hefners have done before, he took the high road! Yes, folks, my brother has finished his dissertation and is getting his doctorate. I like to refer to him as a craniologist. The man loves skulls; he'd be the first to reach out and rub your head at a party.



This is the brother who painted the walls of the room I'm in now; the brother who, at four, pretended he was Hulk Hogan, who, at eleven, break danced on cardboard, who, even now, can pull quarters from behind your ear and rabbits out of baseball caps, who can pluck a tune on the ukulele and catch a fly with his bare hands; the brother who loves quickly and fiercely, whose laugh is maybe my favorite sound in the world; the brother who I could ride around in a car with for years, not caring where we were going or if we ever got there.

This morning I am thinking about the red bag he used to carry on his weekend visits. He was living with our dad and Linda, and I was living with our mom, and weekends were magic because we got to be together. When he came to stay with us, Linda would safety pin an index card to the bag which stated its contents: 2 pairs underwear, 2 pairs socks, blue corduroys, yellow Mr. T t-shirt, green sweater.

Just thinking about the red bag twists my heart a little bit, makes me think of the long drive back, after we had dropped him off, how quiet the car seemed.

But, my brother, we've made it! We are neither killers nor druggies, lunatics nor thieves! Heck, we're not even boring. You, for goodness sake, have a woman you love, a dog with a French name, and, come August, a piece of paper, you can proudly frame and display among your famous collection of skulls.

It Ain't the Hamptons...

...but it sure feels good:

Me and Cody, sitting in the backyard, sipping on cold beers and squirting each other with the garden hose.