"Head Start" or "Seventeen Concrete Things" - A Poem Alone

Over the city’s waste management system

immortal autumn leaves burn and fly.

Below the tracks where the metal mammoth throbs,

reek rises, rot spools around the graffitied viaduct.

I am unmoved by decay.

The empty lot is just ahead, the dirt

ground of childhood stickball never played. 

Green awnings remain on the house,

as sentimental as poverty.

This is where I was raised.

One streetlight glows and sings a

magnetic, comfortable humm.  When

I return to my suburban home I know that

there are halogen bulbs burning

for no one who’s there.  For certain

there is bread and cheese, whole wheat

and guerre.  My heavy gut aches.

The boys on the stoop don’t call

me Leche Blanca or seniorina anymore. 

They eye me, suspicious of my shoes.

The girls wonder whose baby I’m expecting

to remove.  The old men at the tavern nod.

Cigarettes ash in plastic, tin, glass.

In some lined pockets of humanity

a new zygote swims, building like religion. 

The many textures of death, like ichors,

engulf me.  My death will come late

and medicated.  The boys

looking at my shoes will be lucky

to turn twenty.  What youthful mother,

a figure on her lap, finds

splintered compensation for the pangs of birth

and the uncertainty of setting forth?

There used to be more.  In the generation

between the men at the tavern

and the boys on the stoop. 

Some things were unsplintered.

Thirty years (and more than years)

have slinked past since

the warehouse was headquarters.

Deep in the dark loathsome city

our childhood foundations were

built on seventeen concrete things.

At five, the Panthers taught us

phonics, fed us breakfast.  We learned reform,

rebellion in certain terms.  Militant kindness and love

for the sake of it bred like disease. Our leaders

deserted the neighborhood, hunted for their skins.

The gangs came.  We moved. 

I was privileged and I moved on.

But I go back to the stone and dirt and

hateful love like a vice because

I know these children are built of

stone, but they’re built on sand;

low-rent property is

ideology, not geography.  It is found

in the sterilized sunshine of

an uncommitted purse, rising with the

eternal morning of capitalism and God.

I falter, confused.  I am an undesirable conundrum. 

The was no romance in our poverty. I remember

the concrete; I can still smell

basic arithmetic and bacon; I

rhythm while I write: pancakes and

Power, hashbrowns and values.

Today my shoes cost too much, and my

house is too big, and I have success

in excess.  And the boys

on the stoop eye me, and the girls

suspect, and the old men nod.

Outside I am white and my clean

hands are futile. The rising sun smells antiseptic.

Embracing it, heat caresses me,

soldering my limber spine.

Words on a Page / "Lost, In Translation"

A good while ago, I took a poetry course that broke me from writing poetry ever again.

It happens.

The one true thing I learned from the course was not actually about poetry, it was about living as a writer in general.

The leader of the workshop (dare I call him "teacher") said that he thought my work was intentionally obtuse because he thought that I was hiding behind obscure language and esoteric metareference.  Good call.

If you have read my introductory blog, you know that I have good reason to hide.

A year after the course ended, the older poet showed me one of his poems, about a married couple whose life was analogous to a tornado in a domestic bowl.  I had a flash of something and I asked him something like, "Is everything OK at home?"  He shrugged momentarily and told me that, for him, poetry was nothing more than "words on a page."  He insisted that in order to write well, we all have to extract ourselves from our work, that we cannot incorporate the emotional hullabaloo that makes us human beings (and interested in poetry to begin with).  I think what he was trying to say was, "I don't want to live with the fear that someone will know me or know my fears after having read something intimately crafted from the leas of my soul, therefore I will disavow any *real* connection to my work and I will insist that every syllable is fictional craftwork: 'words on a page'." 

Now I am totally transferring.  But, if that wasn't what he was trying to say, I often wonder why he automatically thought my work represented my need to "hide."

We are fundamentally and intimately connected to our work.  Anyone who says otherwise is either a hack or a bullshitter.

Oh, sure, I will admit that some non-fictional occurrences become fictionalized, become allegory, become metaphor.  But if they work as craft, they are, on some level, true.  If they are false or falsely represented, they do not work as craft.

I mean, once I wrote a bit where my mulletted, live-action-roll-playing-game playing, lesbian first grad school officemate became a whoreish tech-geek just so I could work in some fabulously paraphrased dialogue without committing libel.  This was the "bit" that taught me to always change names.  Always, always, always.  Even if it's an outlandish fictionalization, do not use real names.  You never know who is going to breach your firewall.  (This is not a metaphor.)

But back to poetry and "words on a page."  This moment of epiphany has stuck with me more than just about any moment in my academic life.  For a few reasons.  Most obviously because I learned that some teachers lie to students with great ease.  This is often aided by the fact that many men in positions of authority lie to women with great ease.  But, in this particular case, I think I saw a man lying to himself.  He showed me that still unpublished poem unsolicited because he wanted me to *see* something.  And once I did, he regretted it and maybe even resented me for it.

Less obviously because I left his office in tears. The conversation turned to my home-life and the supposition that I was transferring onto the poem.  This led to my admission that my husband and I were filing for divorce. Again. (We live on the far end of the cul-du-sac of divorce, we drive round and round but never seem to get out.  Now that I think of it, it is kinda like a tornado.)  It wasn't the talk about divorce that made me cry; it was his spontaneous and absolute tenderness.  This man had always been my guide to calculated detachment, a paragon of aloofness.  But he wrapped me in his arms and expressed a dam-breaking understanding which - of course - left me a puddle of something-needing-Kleenex-and-a-wubbie and left him needing to clean mascara off of his tweedy jacket.

My husband and I did not divorce.  The poet and I sort-of broke ties.  Then later we really broke ties (which is, ironically, not unrelated to my having not divorced my husband).

Like the snakes and Billy Ray Cyrus references I told you about earlier, this moment in my life keeps coming back to me.  As I write, I try to separate what are simply "words on a page" and what are real sentiments.  For me, the answer is: "everything is both."

So, for your reading enjoyment, I offer the last poem I ever wrote.  This was the straw that broke the poet's back.  And the piece that ties all the bifurcations of this narrative together.  This is both absolutely, positively, simply "words on a page" and it is simultaneously absolutely, positively not.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Lost, in Translation

In the Vieux Carré we should feel grown up.

Nevertheless - - we hid

from moments when we couldn’t tie our shoes,

or roller-skate,

or waltz, and we pretended to be

deliberate boogeymen

each under the others’ beds. 

I want a drink.

It was dark outside and newborns

were debating Nietzsche and Twain.

I disagreed.

But kept it to myself.

I walked Bourbon Street with you

in my incredulous heels,

my mischievous hair

stealing the wind (oddly cold this year)

catching errant whiskers of your face.

Benignly intimate, I fed you duck from my fork,

like Uptown lagniappe, it was unexpected.

We were looking for alligators in a kiosk

on Decatur and Dumaine

when I realized that I hadn’t thought of it yet.

You were a tourist on a visa;

I didn’t imagine you

as someone to love until

(I hate to be alone) I dropped my guard. 

Then a deluge, a broken levee in my heart, oh, no! the cliché!

Allegory for falling in love in New Orleans

can be trite.  Painfully trite.  Painful.

Tragic confidences and the throes of

intention, of loss, of stupidity

made me live the life I should have seen coming.

The nightlight stayed on to keep

shadows away,

shadows away, shadows away

while we fell together, together, together - -

and I fell. Alone.

Terrified.  Brazen.  Awkward.

Mortal-guilty.

A living creature,

exotic as a school bus.

The morning that brought bignets and café au lait

found me mistakenly undisheveled.

I should have been more demonstrative.

I should never hold back.

And I should hold back more.

Perfunctory haunts me.

There must have been a language gap.

I was speaking English and you

were speaking English when

you said, something about us.

It wasn’t the words, I’d heard those before.

But I didn't hear what your eyes were saying

until it was too late and the pie lady sang.

Are you thinking nothing of it?

Or wishing you’d foregone Jackson Square,

alligator sausage cheesecake, not-quite-pints,

hurricanes, all turning unproductively?

The White Flag

Sometimes it's just time to give up. To give in. To surrender.

The universe will sometimes tap you gently on the shoulder or whisper in your ear in order to bring you a subtle message, warning, or alert.  You know how it is, the same damn thing will pop up over and over in seemingly random manifestations.  If you don't listen to the subtle messages, the universe will punch you in the gut.  But the universe will only give you so many punches to the gut before tossing you, headlong, into the abyss.  (I like to imagine the universe as a David Carradine character.) 

The abyss is not a fun place.  I know.  I've been there. It's full of people who never listen and who have an ailing sense of humor. There's a lot of self-absorbed whining and monotonous kvetching in the abyss, and chocolate candies are rather thin on the ground.

Lately, I've gotten my share of abdominal Kung Fu.

Most of those center-punches have played out and have been sent neatly on the road to denouement.  A couple of them have not.

For instance, snakes.  Yes, snakes.  I've had my fill of Diamond-Back Rattlesnakes in Alabama for the month, thank you very much.  Until a few weeks ago, I had never seen one that didn't have a little biographical information plate and a thick pane of glass between it and me. Both daughters, mother, and sister-friend have all had close calls with rattlers in the past two weeks.  I'm listening.

Last week it was Billy Ray Cyrus.  I don't know what that was about but I'm paying attention so that I don't tell anyone's achy-breaky heart (not that I think it'd understand).

And then there's this blog.  I have a few friends who have their own blogs.  They each use them for different reasons and it seems to work for them.  But blogging is a vulnerable thing.  Any publication is, but blogging is more so.  It's so immediate and, sometimes, so intimate that there is no opportunity to revise or create personal distance from a blog.

I'm not that brave.

But I'm less afraid to blog than I am to get roundhoused into the abyss with the chocolateless miserables.

While I used to be "out there," unguarded, and ultimately ingenuous, over the last decade, my lack of chutzpah has caused me to become restrained, withdrawn, and confined. I'm terrified of losing my individual privacy - something I consider sacred.  I have folders full of fiction and poetry on my computer that, occasionally, I will share with one person or another. In the last five days, I've been told in several ways that this is a poor choice. 

One of these instances has been particularly wrenching.  I feel as if that universal martial artist punched through to my spirit and ripped it out only to look at it and say, "Meh, is that all you got?"

I got your message, Grasshopper, loud and clear. If I don't sacrifice my privacy to people who kinda like me, or at least find me interesting enough to open a new tab and read a blog, you will place me in the path of someone who will ravage my private thoughts and then use them against me. Kinda like a poetry workshop from hell.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I embark on my journey to "show you mine."  A journey which will (hopefully) not end in the abyss.

Here's how (I hope) it will work.  I will write.  Whatever I end up with will get displayed for your perusal, accompanied by a little (hopefully entertaining) preface.  Then I will humbly invite your critique, for which I will be grateful, and with which you (hopefully) will not fillet my soul. 

All parenthetical hopes considered, I think (hope) this will also be a bit of fun for us all.