Three

Pyre

Three burning bonfires blowing
    smoke up straight, almost invisible,
as we pass by fast on the train.

I search hard for the people
    who started those fires.
Look for the bottles of gas,

kerosene, lighter fluid—there is
    nothing. Where is Dido, isn’t she
the one who burns on such huge,

quiet, flames?  There are no
    people, only emptiness. The train
rushes past so many piles of lumber,

dark with age and the wetness that turns
    trees almost black, unburnable
in my woodstove. But those three

piles burn and no others.  Vandals,
    workmen doing their jobs?
There is fire in Brattleboro,

on the outskirts, some nameless,
    dirty lumber mill.  The silence
inside the train blocks out

the birds, or maybe they have fled,
    terrified of the smoke, as I would
be, if I walked along the tracks

searching for bent pennies or stray,
    rusty nail spikes to give to my brother.
And I would half-expect

to find Dido among the ruined
    wood, burned alive for some man
that loved her but couldn’t stay.

The flames rise with no purpose or intent,
    wasting a warmth that could be given
freely to so many hungry, cold

hobos or wanderers in the night.
    And I smile inside as I imagine
the train whistling by hundreds

of tiny camps surrounded
    by so many travelers and strangers
no longer cold.

I wrote this in 2006, revised it in 2007 and again try to give it new life. This piece always comes back to me when I'm in this mood: slightly grumpy, verging on sad but for no discernable reason. I think I'd like to just be alone for awhile, be in the quiet until this headache is gone and then play my cello--which hasn't been touched since August--forget anything associated with work, friends, family, just be dead as far as the outside world is concerned. This morning I woke up at 7:30 despite the fact that I'd gone to bed at 3am...maybe I'm just tired.

In Memory...

Prayer for Remembering

Full moons bring apples fallen from dark trees.

Dark trees leave shadows for the sun to find.

I find small gnomes in tree-hollows, mossy.

Underneath the roots there lives my Mother

filling Herself

with leaves.

She grows upward into birds’ nests woven.

She never sleeps but brings us new surprises:

aurora, snow-scapes, honey bees and stars.

Goddess, allow me to always see your

beauty. Allow me to understand your sounds

of constant

awakening life.

Forgive my broken spirits when I’m blind

to the comfort in your snow blankets. Deep

whiteness echoing greener grass than black

summer nights, forcing stars to fight the street

lamps. Forgive me for doubting your laughter

during melancholy

sleepless nights.

Ostara

This weekend I am re-starting, re-birthing ideas and my body. Leaving for NY with some friends to go sit outside in a little black box on top of frozen Lake Ontario. Yesterday was Ostara, the Sabbot of Spring, when the Goddess circles back to her maiden form and the earth yawns and opens her sleepy eyes. I spyed crocus stems poking out from the almost-frozen dirt as I walked to work, and the trees are taking on that purple haze of buds. Still, it is bittter cold. Ice in my hair.
I've been practicing my cello and my fingers are getting quite callused. I like them like that.

Random Poem Attempt for Ostara

Swelling buds but still unable to burst.
We shiver in anticipation and in ice.
I imagine sugar dripping from maples
and sap spilling from buckets.
I want to slip my tongue inside
the tree and slurp out the sweetness,
just barely not water, the tall
tree tapped for clear blood,
her blood, mother's milk
for her roots, leaves-to-be,
rare sugar for farmers, who thank
the forest in black boots and old
coats, boiling down the liquid
for hours and hours. Syrup from sap
transformed with heat, laughter,
and always smoke.

Essay #2 (The Last One...)

James Baldwin and American Identity Issues

James Baldwin’s address “Notes on a Hypothetical Novel” speaks about the American identity. In order to speak about the problems with this American identity, Baldwin frames his points within the idea of writing a novel using his own life for examples and inspiration. Baldwin begins by telling his audience “We’ve been talking about writing for the last two days, which is a very reckless thing to do, so I shall be absolutely reckless and pretend that I’m writing a novel in your presence” (141). Why is talking about writing reckless? Is it because writing allows for an intimate connection between reader and author, and so writing is a sacred practice that enables people to cross over social and class barriers that otherwise would be blocking their paths? I think this is the reason. In the 1950’s when segregation was still a serious problem, writing could be the link between groups of people that may have very little contact with one another. In this essay, I think James Baldwin is asking his readers or listeners to put down their walls and rethink the American identity, as it blinds them to their actual, personal identities.

Baldwin paints the American citizen as confused about his or her place in the world, talents, and class status. He pushes the readers of this piece to see that we are not who we imagine ourselves to be, “…to try and find out what Americans mean is almost impossible because there are so many things they do not want to face” (151). This is particularly true of segregation and civil rights. Many white Americans probably believed that they were supporters of African-American rights and freedoms but in reality, did nothing to allow other people to see this. People cover up their true selves using class, race, education, and gender stereotypes as their means. Soon, it will become easier to believe the stereotype that one has painted for the world than to reach deeper and pull out one’s personal and private beliefs. In “Notes on a Hypothetical Novel” the most memorable quotes was:

There is an illusion about America, a myth about America to which we are clinging which has nothing to do with the lives we lead and I don’t believe that anybody in this country who has really thought about it or really almost anybody who has been brought up against it—almost all of us have one way or another—this collision between one’s image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish. (153)

Baldwin urges his readers to break down who they thought they were and become who they really are. Is this a positive action? For the most part, I would say yes. But I also think that some people pretend to be better people than they truly are. In this case, it seems important to work on merging the self that one pretends to be, and the self which one really is. And why is this confusion an American trait, as Baldwin claims it is. Clearly we can look to our history and see that America was created (the idea of America, anyway) by people who believed so strongly in their own religion that they were forced to move from their home to a new physical space on order to safely practice those religions.

And then things become complicated. As race enters the picture, our “all- encompassing, all-inclusive” American identity falls to pieces. For America is a “melting pot” of people who have been at odds against one another for as long as “Americans” have existed on this piece of land. It is strange to look at the history of this place and feel as if we have accomplished much in the way of protecting or even respecting human life. But I also do not want to become that tacky American who hates America. I do not hate America. I am, however, at odds with my American identity and I don’t know whether I should be embracing the person I think I am to improve myself, or throwing that person away in order to become my true self. As a Vermonter, my exposure to racial diversity has been limited, and I am ignorant of much of the slang and rhetoric of minority groups. I am very possibly naive to prejudice and just how much prejudice there is left in the world. But I am not racist, and I seek to learn as much as I can about culture and identity…because it interests me, and I can feel it making me grow.

In my small town of five hundred, there was an African drum in every house and a great hunger for textures and colors and rituals from other places. It is because of this odd community that I learned anything about peoples other than the backwoods artists and laborers that make up Saxtons River. Thus, I cannot call myself racist, because I am not…I am a white girl from Vermont rather than one who can claim a strong attachment to the identity of an American. And although I have traveled, I identify less and less with other Americans that I meet. Maybe because America is so large, or so fractured, or so full. I am uncertain of how to remedy this dis-attachment to my own country, but I suppose it would begin with working on what America means to me.

Essay #3 (About Crazy People)...Yes I am skipping #2

Creativity and Crazies

For weeks she had been screaming. The cries came from the room closest to the door, which is always locked, and always she cried out the same thing: “Help me.” Inside my glass cage I was safer than the nurses from potential threats, but the screams cut me still. Katherine was a patient at the hospital when I was still new and unfamiliar with what “crazy” people do. Eventually, she began to walk up and down the hallway, clinging to the railing, her long black hair hanging grossly down her back, she was always dripping drool. Yes, she did scare me, especially when she groped to my window hunched over, spittle drizzling down her chin, asking me, “Did I want a ticket to the show?”

Catatonia is a strange thing, and it is even stranger when this absence of just “being there” is undercut with bizarre, terrifying schizophrenic hallucinations and the inability to control the body’s natural functions like bowel movements.

Since beginning my job at the locked psychiatry ward of a hospital, I look at the mentally ill in a different way. It is difficult to see those who are screaming, tearing at their skin, talking in tongues, or urinating on their pillows as people. When humans are not acting like humans, something makes us recoil from them, both in fear and in disgust. Katherine was the first “crazy” that turned back into a person right in front of my eyes and she changed the way I viewed mentally ill people, and forced me to acknowledge that I needed to change my view in the first place.

It seems as though Zelda Fitzgerald was not viewed in the light of humanity, but rather as a fragile “thing”—according to Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay. I don’t want to assume that Hardwick’s miniature biography is the complete truth, and I would like to believe that F. Scott Fitzgerald did wish the best for his wife, but that little was known of mental illness during the 1930’s. Is it possible that the mentally ill were treated not as human, but as subhuman creatures that needed to stay out of society’s way as much as possible?

One day, I was sitting at my secretary’s desk, dealing with the usual administration, and Katherine sauntered up to my window. She was walking straight; her hair was not stringy but brushed smooth and luscious. She had hazel eyes that were clear and sharp. I opened the window and she smiled that full, warm smile of a woman who has spent her entire life caring for others. She was only the day before a creature living in a person’s body. Now she was telling me I looked lovely, and about her education at Columbia University, about her beautiful children all grown up and doing work for their communities. She was married and worked as a Pastor at her local hospital.

Creativity is something that we all have, and as human beings we are constantly creating things, from art to children to clean space, safe space, all numbers of things. Zelda’s creative energy intimidated her husband, possibly because the energy of a schizophrenic could be seen as subhuman, or inhumanly intense. Some of the artwork and writing I’ve seen at the hospital has been unsettling. Some of it has been beautiful; some of the artwork has been given just to me and is hanging on my wall. If Zelda had been allowed to create as freely as she had desired, what would she have made for herself, and her audience? The nurses will often discourage patients from drawing sexually disturbing pictures especially if they depict staff members. Are the two comparable? Every time that a person is told to stop creating that thing, are we unknowingly hindering the birth of something that will be truly genius?

Katherine never drew any artwork, and if she wrote, I never saw anything. She left the hospital with her husband, wearing one of the nurse’s sweaters because her husband, in his excitement at taking her home, forgot to take her jacket. She told me I was sweet, and wrote down her address for me. I never did write to her, thinking that the long interruption in her life was memory enough.

Even now I see people shrink away from “crazies” on the street. They might be dangerous after all, which is true. But I see passers by looking at these people as if they are not people, but a suspicious and troublesome type of animal, or is the carrier of a contagious disease. Neither of which is the reality. I am sincerely grateful that Katherine was able to teach me to treat all people like people. And I hope that F. Scott Fitzgerald did not have to learn this lesson as I did, but recognized the humanity in his wife, even as the schizophrenia did its best to mask it.

As Promised...Essay #1 (About Collections)

Strange Revelations in my Closet

Reading “Unpacking My Library” forced me to reconsider my possessions and the order in which I keep my possessions. Benjamin says that “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories” (60). Each article of clothing in my closet, folded in my dresser, and in one case, hanging on my wall, strings together my life so far like clothes hanging to dry on a line. Everyone has a collection of some type, and as much as some would hate to admit it, clothes are the most memory steeped of all the objects one could own.

“The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership—for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object” (60). I used to work for a woman who bought and sold antique clothing to fashion designers, Hollywood productions, and famous musicians. I have a blouse from 1890 with embroidery done in those awful Victorian sewing factories where little girls got their hair caught in machines and died prematurely from inhalation of textile dust. I find myself out and hunting for a new article every time there is a big change in my life, or a moment worth noting. The bright turquoise mini skirt—one of my most colorful acquisitions—marks a moment of lucidness that I had rarely experienced before then.

By giving our memories shape, texture, and physical space we are able to create order out of memory—and thus, order for our emotions. What I think that Benjamin was getting at, was that books, or clothes, or whatever one happens to collect is a way for us to possess our memories. Photo albums and scrap books also serve to this end—people need physical manifestations of memories. I still own my prom dress—it is in my closet at my mother’s home in Southern Vermont. The dress is black and red striped and backless. I will probably never wear it again, but it marks the memory of graduation from high school as well as my unexpected recognition as Prom Queen. We all have these strange relics saved and stored in safe places. There might be a box of photographs under a bed, or a collage of magazine cut-outs hanging in a dark, less traveled hallway. Some people track their lives with music, some with their own writing. Each of these cases are examples of people claiming their memories—giving birth to their emotions as tactile objects. For what else are memories but strings of emotions lighting up spaces in time for us to replay?

Walter Benjamin ends his essay with “..ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them” (67). We collect our memories, little pieces of ourselves in the form of objects. My closet is a disorganized timeline of my life since the eighth grade, proof that I have experienced change, loss, happiness and sex. In this way I am able to live in memories, and also grow within them. When I grow out of a piece—either physically or mentally, I put it aside until it can be of use to me again. Right now I wear the same brown woven scarf almost every day—it is a mark of growing up and accepting the idea of adult responsibilities. It is more than possible that I will need to pack this item away at some point when it no longer suits my mood or style.

Desert Dreaming

The desert has broken trains
of thought—
as if my mind had been robbed
by bandits.

The desert haunts my sleep:
scorpions crawl across
my face with spindly arachnid
legs. Mottled brown lizards
shit on spotted gray rocks.

Maybe because this city
has sucked me dry—again—
I need a place
dehydrated: where things
nourish themselves on sunlight
and through layers of sand.
Maybe because the desert
is empty and I am far
too full.
Of plans, of heat,
of fear, claustrophobia.

I am dreaming of the desert.
Broad, open places
like oceans on land, or forestless
space—alien worlds for my
mountain-eyes.

Essay for Fun

The Miner’s Wife
By Jacqueline Lyons

sees dark crescent moons
in a sky of light
the dirt forever curving
under his fingernails.
When he goes below the earth
unnaturally, farther than
he could go alone, farther
than he would go for himself,
her own gravity threatens
to tear loose. At the store
she might rise and bump
the shelves of flour and sugar,
making them shudder
and sift themselves down.
Dreams her husband in a jar
she can see into through no light
passes through or reaches
his night inside it.
He works the black
with bare hands, becoming darker
and darker, disappearing,
and she shakes the jar
to make him reappear.


From Her Point of View

“The Miner’s Wife” by Jacqueline Lyons is a poem in free verse, using one long stanza. There are, however, little spurts of rhymes throughout the poem such as “sugar” and “shudder” at the ends of lines 12 and 13, and also “jar” and “reappear” on the the last two lines. Lyons begins the poem with the title, the first line acting as the second line of the poem so that it reads, “The Miner’s Wife / sees dark crescent moons.” This is an abrupt beginning (if one begins reading at the first line and fails to read the title), but a clever one—I have not seen many poets use this device. The speaker talks of this wife in an informal manner, by cutting the “she” out of sentences and starting with verbs like, “Dreams her husband in a jar” instead of saying “She dreams...” which would be the more obvious choice, and not as interesting for me, as a reader.
Lyons is concise with her word choices—she uses limited adjectives which give the poem strength—the topic of a miner’s wife being a strong woman and the emphasis on nouns instead of adjectives alludes to that. The outcome of this noun-heavy poem pleases me. The language is subtle—it took me a couple of reads before I realized the lack of adjectives. The words that the author uses are simple but definitive like, “fingernails,” “moons,” “earth,” and “dirt.” In fact, one of the only places where an adjective is used is where the speaker says “bare hands.” The unexpected adjective describing “hands” is also a device that places stress on those “hands” which is the only part of the miner’s body that the speaker describes.
Hands are subject of the first couple lines, and then the subject toward the end of the poem as well. It seems as though the speaker wants the readers to understand the hardship of the job. Hands symbolize work and difficult labor, and the hands are parts of the body which are visible—and dirty hands have been the scarlet letter on physical laborers for centuries.
The poem’s subject is the wife of a miner, and the readers learn about how she worries for his safety—mining is a dangerous and difficult job. The speaker communicates how the wife deals with his worry, by imagining her husband, and seeing what he sees, “she can see into through no light / passes through or reaches / his night inside it.” The speaker discusses the husband going underground in this poem. The references to death and to the demands of the job:

When he goes below the earth
unnaturally, farther than
he could go alone, farther
than he would go for himself.

The speaker is likening mining to being buried after death (“farther than / he could go alone”), and also making the point that his job was not chosen out of love for the work, (“farther / than he would go for himself”). However, the speaker describes mining with the adverb “unnaturally,” which the speaker has highlighted with the line break and the comma. This brings environmental concerns to mind—and also the impending danger of mining—if Mother Nature did not intend for men to dig, what will happen to those that try?
This question is never answered in this poem, which seems intentional. The miner’s wife will continue to worry, to try to imagine what her husband sees down underground in the dark. Jacqueline Lyons brings the miner’s hands to life in this poem, and thankfully, they can exist there every time I read this piece.

2nd Draft of Something New

Swimming in Lake Champlain, September 19th 2007

Running down the shore and straight into the shallow
(cold and sharp and smelling of rain),
water, splashing each other in the dark, the drops glint

bright as the stars burning white from up above, the Seven
(light so fierce, the stars drown out the moon—or keep it hidden),
Sisters approve of our loud acknowledgements of beauty

which simply could not be captured with cameras, the words
(early autumn air mixed with summer sand, everything white and black),
we say fill us again with life sucked out by daily monotonies

breaking us over and over, but these moments of cold sharp
(fleeting, skin prickling, feet freezing against rough sand, rocks, pavement),
contentments remind us again of what lives in the lake, and the forest

as the autumn equinox pulls us toward winter, we splash water
(hitting us with frosted sparkles, knives against the skin leaving no marks),
and submerge, remembering how much we are in love with this earth.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

I keep writing about the water. Does that mean something? Maybe I am having an urgent water crisis...needing the ocean...rivers, brooks, anything but the cement sidewalks of Burlington. I think I need to go home and sleep outside in the grass.

On a different note, Lolita is becoming an obsession as I travel further into the novel. When I finally finish reading the monster, I will write a whole post about it and bore my nonexistant readers to death with my unoriginal thoughts. But Nobokov intrigues me and his writing style is fatally delicious. Delicious like beautiful prose (roses) and fatal like pediphiles with eyes like knives.

Love,
Willow~

Country Girl Wants her Country Back...

Autumn in the City

Every day the sun sets over the lake

and I need to be in the lake, in the water

and I need to be surrounded by trees,

wild things, I need to be wild, touching

the grass, sticks, clover, thorns with the hard

callused bottoms of my feet. I need to be lying

still on a cool granite rock, just barely damp,

coated with dark green moss, rolling a feather

between two fingers, building a miniature log

cabin out of twigs, following the claw marks

of a black bear, sliding into the icy water

of a small brook on slippery stones. Every

day the green darkens to red, orange, brown,

purple, yellow and my arms and legs itch

for mountains, for height, for that wicked

wind that pulls and pushes you down against

the cliffs when you reach the top. To be

at the top with the lake below me, wild

and small, and I will be surrounded by trees,

tiny, changing before us, brightening the forests

like small suns setting before winter.

90 Degrees with Cats

The cats have been keeping me company:

Last of Summer

On the blue couch, the cats

spread their limbs around me stretching

out and I—larger and cooler with the hot

late summer air pulsing in my skin—

curl in between, the last of the days

like this beg me to rampage in the heat,

fly kites, submerge in water, expose

my body to light. But on the blue couch,

the cats seduce me to sleep, loving their

soft fur: gold and green eyes, sleepy faces

stealing half glances in my direction, each

of us dreaming of winter.

PS-

I saw a HOVERCRAFT yesterday!!! For real!!!

Lets Eat Poetry

I wrote this essay last year and though I'd share. For some reason I feel like a poem, and that I could live off the stuff...something about the autumn crispness and the promise of apples.


Astragaloi
by Mark Jarman

We know there must be consciousness in things,
In bits of gravel pecked up by a hen
To grind inside her coop, and spider silk
Just as it hardens stickily in air,
And even those things paralyzed in place,
The wall brick, the hat peg, the steel beam
Inside the skyscraper, and lost, forgotten,
And buried in ancient tombs, the toys and games.
Those starry jacks, those knucklebones of glass
Meant for the dead to play with, toss and catch
Back of the hand and read the pattern of,
Diversions to beguile the endless time,
Never to be picked up again...They're thinking,
Surely, all of them. They are lost in thought.


Mark Jarman’s Knucklebones

“Astragaloi” by Mark Jarman is a poem which strongly suggests that “there must be consciousness in things.” Jarman has written the poem in one single stanza of 14 lines, which calls to mind a sonnet, although there is no rhyme scheme which would place the poem in that category. The speaker explores the idea that inanimate objects might be thinking, that “They are lost in thought” and he uses references to ancient Roman and Greek history in order to articulate that idea.
For example, the word astragaloi (singular astragalos), is an ancient Greek word holding several meanings. One of the meanings is “knucklebones”—a divinatory game or practice which included a person throwing the bones of sheep of goats and divining the future from the position of the thrown bones. In the ancient Greek language, the word looks like this:
. The other meaning for this word is simply “knucklebones” without the implication of predicting the future. It seems as though the speaker is referring to the first meaning, since the speaker says, “those knucklebones of glass / Meant for the dead to play with.” The speaker also brings to mind the Roman sense of numina (singular numen) which was the Roman peoples’ idea of inanimate objects having an essence or presence in the world. For the Roman people, everything that existed had a spirit, even if the object is a rock, or glass knucklebones. The speaker articulates this as the objects are named off: “And even those things paralyzed in place, / The wall brick, the hat peg, the steel beam.” In fact, all the objects he names hang off the first line where the speaker declares that “We know there must be consciousness in things” and then describes those things.
In that first line, the “must” stands out to the readers who are almost forced to take this poem as fact. The poem does not ask the question “is there consciousness in things?” but instead assumes that there is, and then reflects on that assumption. The speaker does not attempt to teach the readers anything new about this concept, but the simple reflection does not leave the readers the same after they read the poem as before the poem was read. After the last line, “Surely, all of them. They are lost in thought” leaves us with the nagging feeling that we should be gentle with our belongings, and handle them with care or we might anger the numina and our favorite shoes might walk away from us or our childhood games might suddenly decide to find new owners.