Among other things: A Bird

I have fallen in love with this book

which Anna gave Eva for her birthday last year.

And lately, I am also in love

with poems and my girls and just being here.

All morning I have been watching the saddest news.

I stare at my computer and cry:

14 small coats hanging on hooks.

I keep waiting for Ella to wake so I can go to her and nurse her

but the house stays quiet.

I wonder when the snow will come again.

A Snippet

From a new essay I've been working on about sororities, cigarettes & Elle Woods:

There was one girl in my sorority, Jennifer, actually there were many, many Jennifers, but this one Jennifer, one who I sometimes ran prayer group with, even though out in the quad I questioned not only the existence of sororities but also of God, and on really, really cold days, the existence even of a self, but this Jennifer had worked at Disney World as a Princess, and even though, she looked EXACTLY like Cinderella, and had the most beautiful Cinderella-like hair I had ever seen, they made her wear a wig. That’s just the way it is, she told me.

For Drowning

Dreams. I recommend them.  

The easy way to go. Tipped siren,

sip of Benadryl.

There are days I want nothing more than to

step onto the seabed. There, I lived

in the hollow of your throat.

Do you remember? (It was only

a day; it's okay if you forget. Really.) Then nothing,

just the creekbed,

crawdaddy graves, Poprock husks.

Last week, I went to my sleeping baby

and reached for her. An empty crib. I knew

that they had taken her to Mexico, and I

would have to kill myself (gas)

or move to Paris. But I was still dreaming.

She was actually in my bed, had never been

in the crib. I sang and sang to her.

Louder. Still she slept.

A mistake, but I kept dreaming anyway.

In the dream: a strand of seaglass and you. I

was there too. It seemed like a punchline,

the slippery side of a gesture, end

of a joke: us, there, on the seabed,

too deep for the sun to reach.

Are we shells? you said. 

I tried to answer, open my little shell mouth,

but nothing. Only bubbles.

A river is a river is a river. Yes?

My student wants to write a story

about a man who thinks he is in love

with a woman but is really

just in love with the air around her.

My student is still young enough

to believe these are different.

And so I write on the board:

pools are pools,

oceans, oceans.

  

Thanksgiving: A Poem

In honor of all I'm thankful for this year: a poem I wrote fifteen Thanksgivings ago when I had just moved to New York City and was still in the habit of chasing love by taking buses down south. Incidentally, it's also the poem where I first wrote of my tenderness towards Hostess cakes. It was published in Washington Square in the Winter of 1997.

Thanksgiving

3 bags of pork rinds,

6 cans of warm Pepsi,

18 mentholated cough drops,

a couple of HoHo’s, a DingDong,

2 and a half packs of Marlboros,

and Dee from Louisville

pressing her elbow into my ribs,

talking her hysterectomy,

her 13 year old gone on birth control,

her 16 year old thrown in a Boy’s Home

south of Memphis for stripping butt naked

and flipping off God on top of the county library,

the 3 men who’ve beat her,

her 1 cup coffee maker,

and the turkey dinner

she’s packed in her suitcase, all boxed up,

so the jackasses won’t crush it.

We talk about the stars

‘cause I don’t get many where I come from,

and she teaches me a song about bumblebees.

Waking up alone’s the hard part,

we agree till Nashville rises too soon,

sticking up sore-thumb style on the horizon,

and a man without flowers awaits my arrival.

Yesterday I could almost love him,

could almost hear him breathing,

but today, I’m afraid,

my ass isn’t the only thing gone numb

above the roar of white walled, greyhound tires.

So we sit at the Waffle House,

careful not to touch for fear of nothing special—

coffee weak as rainwater,

jukebox blaring Blue Christmas.

The Cupcake Story

[poem was here.]

Tunneling

I am forever riding shotgun in a little brown Honda under a faded blue sky. My mother is driving. Sometimes she closes her eyes and tells me she is taking a nap, says to wake her if I see any big trucks coming, and I yell, tell her it's dangerous, until she gives in and laughs, shows me she had kept her left eye open. A truck screams past, and I am tunneling.

I am fancy dancing on the moon, that's what they called it, fancy dancing. I learned it on the reservation, but my dad lives inside the moon, and he can't sleep with all the dancing. Horses, he says, and bangs the inner mooncrust with the long handle of a broom. His ceiling is crumbling; his wife is having trouble hearing.

But the stars still sing. Slews of them. In the third of the four decades I've lived, my brother, Joe, and I sat in a kitchen drinking beer and telling jokes. For ten years straight we did nothing but laugh about passing the butter and the cat on the roof. Every two or so months one of us would go out to buy smokes but we'd come back fast, and we'd miss the other the whole time we were gone.

Decade one was for Heather and me to run around in dirty bathing suits sipping Cheerwine and eating French Onion Dip; decade two, they tried to clean me up; decade four is mostly dreamy houses and milky bliss. Oh, and hunger. Sometimes I am hungry.

And I am tunneling. We are waiting for an exit. Mom says there has to be something eventually but we have been driving for years, and there is nothing. So we keep driving, and I remember how there are afternoons when I am playing my daughters and burying my head into the beautiful sweet smell of them that I think, I was pregnant with a boy once. I think, This might have felt so different.

But that was forever ago: it was the summer when it rained so hard the walls were soaked, the summer when Eva fell into the pool; dad came back from the moon; my brother, done, pushed his chair away from the kitchen table, stretched his arms into the air, said, I gotta go to bed; and mom and I, finally out of gas, sat in a field of upended Cadillacs waiting to be saved.

Dear Blue--

Dear Blue--

Would you have any advice or ideas on how to calmly deal with a child diagnosed with ADHD?

Signed,

Troubled Gemini

Dear Gem--

When I put out a blanket Facebook request for "questions" I imagined a thousand different answers I might give. Wear a yellow scarf, I'd say, or, Just go back home and love on her, or, The ability to operate a cordless power drill goes a long way in making you feel powerful. But then your question came.

I love, by the way, how you use the word "calmly," as if to say that we all know how to deal un-calmly; we all know that spine-surge to pinch, to yell, to maybe even throw just one thing because for-Chrissakes-I-need-you-to-listen-to-me!

But calmly. Calmly.

There's breathing, of course. For you. For her. Lots of breathing. Lots of audible inhales, reminders that there's plenty of oxygen, plenty of space in the world, plenty of time, some day even if it feels forever away, that you two won't be together, that you'll be separated.

Last week at the tail end of summer, one of my dear friends came up to our country house. She doesn't suffer from ADHD but, having just turned forty, she's going through this unsettledness, this quickness of mind and body, this distracted texting, and she's wearing cut-off's and rolling her own cigarettes, and for the past six months or so, I've felt very far away from her.

I think that's what we're talking about: distance. How can I deal with someone, calmly deal with someone, who appears to be right in front of me but is not seeing me? And how can I do this without totally checking out?

Let's see, Gem, for me, it's poems and walking right beside the person, maybe even letting our shoulders touch, and being near the water, even if it's just the sound of a fountain.

A couple of weeks ago I was having issues with my daughter, Eva, who's almost four. She kept saying no to me, and I felt like I was going to lose it. I called the Nursery School director and asked her what I should do. She told me to hug her. She told me to remember that Eva is three, that her job in life is to tell me no and to define herself, and that my job is to make sure she's defining herself in a way that's appropriate to the world. Hug her, she said, and I did.

Have you ever heard of Temple Grandin's "Hug Machine"? I don't think it's the answer. But it might be. I guess anything could be. I want to tell you to get a fish tank and start every morning with a poem. Examine your reactions; try not to take anything personally, and for goodness sake, make sure you're taking care of yourself. Floss. Up your Omega-3's. But all of that amounts to nothing if the distance is still there.

Maybe it does go back to breath, that reminder of being alive, being together. Savor it, even if, at the moment, it seems unsavory. Let it be, and be with it. I think that will make it easier. If it doesn't, try the fishtank, and if that fails you too, there are always yellow scarves.

Still breathing,

Blue