Wednesday, sunny

And even though the wind and rain knocked all the blossoms off the cherry trees, the world seems nothing but blooming. I have eaten berries and fresh yogurt and walked miles and been kissed. I have read how the whale's heart beats only five or six times per minute and how the hummingbird's heart beats one thousand two hundred and sixty times per minute, and now I will take a pen to my students' essays and hope they send my own heart closer to hummingbird speed. God, I love it when the sun comes back.

Tuesday, cloudy

Today, I have done nothing from yesterday's list.
Neither cried nor puked nor meditated nor yelled.
Strange though--
I still can't decide whether or not I feel better.

Monday, rainy

Today I have:

1) cried.

2) thrown up.

3) napped.

4) forced myself to meditate on the subway.

5) stepped in a dirty puddle.

6) yelled.

7) eaten a pumpernickle bagel with vegetable cream cheese.

Now I will go to yoga.

Spring in New York

Cherry Blossoms:

Check.

Light reading in Central Park:

Check.

Hundreds of wiener dogs congregated
in a two hundred square foot area:

Check.

Check.

Triple check.

Recent Keyword Activity

"pattycake loves veggies sexy"

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

I've heard it said that writers have the cleanest refrigerators. So intent are they on not staring at the computer screen that they're standing in the kitchen, slightly chilled, hip propping open the door, running a damp sponge around the neck of the mayonnaise jar and (once again) viciously rubbing the red circle from under the bottle of Frank's Red Hot.

Let's just say, I've got a quiet day at home and a whole drawer full of old broccoli. I can only hope that by nightfall, my eyes hurt and my fridge (still) emits the most peculiar of odors.

And a Square of Butter, Please

Love Poem With Toast

by Miller Williams

Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.

The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something,
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.

With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,

as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.

from Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems, 1999
University of Illinois Press

Longing #423

A mailbox stuffed with postcards,

all bearing good news.

You?

April Morning

You know it's a good day
when you wake up
and you're out of milk
so you slip on your jacket
to run to the deli
and you open the front door
and spring just engulfs you.

The air is perfect;
the flowers bloom;
the old man tips his hat,
and the deli guy beams.
Gonna be a beauty, he says,
and you nod your head wildly--
the fresh cold milk,
its own sweet promise--
an absolute beauty.

A Homerun of a Binge

We sat in the fat white light of Cici's. Dad rolled up his sleeves and declared each plate an inning. By the time he got to the seventh inning stretch, he looked over at me, alarmed that I was matching him slice for slice. This was not a dream; this was lunch.

But you can't eat like that, he said.

Oh, but I can, I said, dangling a pepperoni in the air. I've been trying to get him to go on the diet that's not a diet for years now. My last resort: all-you-can-eat pizza for $4.99 and a little reverse psychology. You see, pappy, I said, this is what I want every day. I just choose not to have it.

Hmm, he said, grimacing as I sopped up Ranch dressing with my cheese bread. I never thought of it that way.

The game stretched on. Even Dave was looking full. In a final gesture of sportsmanship, I licked the cinnamon bun frosting from my fingers; Dad's starting tomorrow! As we walked to the car, Joe patted me on the back. Taking one for the team, he seemed to say. Yes, indeed, taking one for the team...

Stay tuned tomorrow for: Other Crap-tacular Rationalizations I Make Upon Consuming my Body Weight in Cheese.

Other Blue Things

Measuring 5-16 mm in diameter,
this fruit has a flared crown at the end
and is a Southern favorite when making pies.

It's Poem in your Pocket Day

Get rid of the gumdrops;
ditch the dirt;
let go of the lint;
pick out the pennies
and place them heads-up
for passer-byers
in need of a spot of luck.
Yes, you. Today's the day.
Clear out your pockets
and make room for a little magic.

You, Mama, You

Happy birthday, mom! I couldn't love you more.

Countdown to my Mother's Birthday 2

What she's taught me:

1. To surround myself with people I love.
2. That mayonnaise is almost always the secret ingredient.
3. To laugh until it hurts.
4. To walk until it hurts.
5. To love the hurt.
6. To stand up straight and suck in.
7. That a good night's sleep can cure anything.
8. That memory is slippery.
9. That there's no one to trust if you can't trust yourself.
10. That every moment is as wild and spontaneous and magical
as you make it.

Countdown to my Mother's Birthday 3

When I was young, my mother often dreamed that she had killed a man. Terrified that she would be found out, she did what any good mother would do and buried him in the basement. I remember listening to her recount her dream on the car ride to school. Possibility swelled through the Honda as I sat in awe of what we humans might be capable of, mesmerized, really, by all the secrets we could potentially lug around--stuffed into the glove compartment or thrown into the backseat-- discovered only if we happened to be looking for something else entirely.

Countdown to my Mother's Birthday 4

My mother has five children.
She, too, is stunned by this.
I just woke up and was the mother of five!

Of the five, at this moment,
two have broken bones.
Kenny, 12, was sliding into base;
Madeline, almost 10, fell off her bike.
The rest of us, at least on the surface,
appear unscathed.

I imagine she hears bones
cracking in her sleep--
brittle as birds--

It's a wonder she's managed
to keep us all
so whole for so long.

Countdown to my Mother's Birthday 5

I was nine. We were living on an Indian Reservation in South Dakota where evenings we played Blackjack and fell asleep on the couch--head to foot--watching Vanna turn letters on Wheel of Fortune. The winter was horrific, and we had to drive a hundred miles for groceries that got packed on dry-ice so they wouldn't spoil on the drive back.
The Honda packed with paper sacks, we raced through the Badlands. I remember mom telling me that some people thought the Badlands were beautiful, and I couldn't even imagine it; they seemed haunted and desolate and lonely, seemed a little like us.

But the day I'm thinking of we hit a patch of ice, and the car spun and spun, and mom yelled, This is it, kid, and we held our breath ready to die, and when we didn't go over the edge, when we actually lived, we got all giddy and rolled down the windows and yelled like hyenas the whole way home.

And my Mistress is the Mountains

The Miniscule

All night I dreamed
of small things:
sesame seeds, peppercorns,
English peas, lima beans.

Waking--
all seems ungainly.

My tea mug: a bath tub.
Even the tabletop flowers
loom large.
It's as if it would take me
a hundred days
to climb from root to petal
to take in the smell.

[somewhere i have never travelled]

"nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands."

--ee cummings

Feeling Hopeless?

(Just read your junk mail.)

Dear Nicole,

The next few weeks are going
to be DECISIVE for the
ENTIRE WORLD;

but even more so,
they will be DECISIVE FOR YOU

because FOR YOU this is
going to be a TRUE REVIVAL
and the beginning of a NEW LIFE,
full of joy, happiness, and MONEY!

I have seen it, read now:

http://www.sara-freder.com/code46/index.asp?CClient=990916/63833HN

Adam Schatz: One Heckuva Magician

(I mean...musician.
Or do I?)

My former student just got a write-up in the Gothamist. Check it out: here.
I love this kid.
I once saw him perform in a space opera that made me weep.
Really.

Being in Bodies

Thursday evening, I went to an art opening at the NYU Medical School. A woman named Laura Ferguson who has suffered from scoliosis her entire life has created a gorgeous series of art pieces depicting her body. At thirteen, she went in for surgery to have her thoracic spine fused; she wore a full body cast for almost a year.

I thought of the scoliosis tests endured in grade school. Girls lined up from one end of the gym to the other, we bent over towards our toes, pulled our shirts up to the bottom of the neck, and let a stranger run his fingers the length of us, bone-by-bone to see if we were straight. Imagine the tap on the shoulder, the you need to come with us.

At the exhibit, I met a woman named Nadina LaSpina. She had a wide smile and dark hair and prosthetic legs. She sat straight-spined in the front of the room in her wheel chair. After the exhibit, we chatted, and she handed me a postcard. It was a photograph of her (looking particularly beautiful); in it, she had taken off her legs and attached them to her shoulders. Below the photograph in script was written: I'd rather wear my legs as wings.

There are days after working with students who have limited mobility that I find myself walking in tight circles in the kitchen. I walk and walk as the water brews for tea, amazed at the ability of my feet to move one in front of the other--such expectations of the body, I think, so much we take for granted--and then the tea kettle whistles, and before I know it, I am back in my mind, letting it flap wildly, feathers strewn, flapping and flapping and hardly even making it off the ground.

Wonder

Maybe it's the sunshine,

but I've been filled with such a sense of wonder today.
I'm just in love with everything.
Tiny blooms and soft skin,
mangoes and tea,
and I wanted so badly to depict this wonder...

I dug into Google images to find exactly the thing to express it...

*
*
*
*
*
*

A
n
d

t
h
i
s

i
s

w
h
a
t

I

f
o
u
n
d:

(Cue the birds; start the drumroll.)

*
*
*
*
*
*

(I suppose it's back to the drawing board.)

Let's Make a Liar out of Eliot

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Such a shame to disgrace the lilacs. And for goodness sake, Thomas Stearns, what's so wrong with memory and desire? Aren't those what turned you to poetry in the first place?

Introducing Jonas Hefner!!!

This morning it felt like Christmas.
"You think Jonas was born?" I asked my love,
like I was five and asking, "You think Santa came?"

"I don't know," he said. "We'll have to go check."

We crept down the stairs and turned around the corner,
got into hotmail, and there: JONAS,
all 8 pounds and 8 ounces of him.
I cried, blubbery, and my love rubbed my back,
as I said something to the tune of...
"A little Hefner. My baby brother's had a little son all his own."
(& Erica's, of course!)
"Look at those toes."

"Yes," my love said. "Toes."

So...welcome to the world, Jonas!
I can't wait to hold you.
(& for you to become a world leader and win the Nobel prize,
cure cancer, climb the highest peak, land on the moon,
travel across time, dominate the spelling bee...)
I already love you, little one.