The English Geek

on Snow

Unrelentingly dry and sunny winter days send me for a tailspin. To my mind they are the canary in the coal mine, the obvious death that should be a sign to us that disaster is imminent. The combination of feeling like I'm the only person in the world who thinks that and the dread of coming disaster make me anxious. I yearn and hope and pray for the snow to finally come, Snow, delicate snow,/that falls with such lightness/on the head,/on the feelings,/come and cover over the sadness/that lies always in my reason (Unamuno). For the clouds to roll in and blank out the too-large-for-January sky and for the world to act like it is supposed to.

When did this anxiety start for me? I'm not certain. With the dawn of adult consciousness, perhaps, or the ecology class I took as a college freshman. And all the snow that never falls is now/back home and mixed up with other piercing/memories of childhood days (McClatchy). The winter I was in fifth grade we had one of the largest snowfalls ever. In the summer all that snow melt caused the lake to rise and flood the freeway; now there are dykes in place that hold it back. I remember driving to gymnastics and watching the slurry walls of sludge and concrete being nudged into place. Even more clearly I remember the snow day, and my mom was at the doctor with Suzette so I had to walk home by myself—I don't remember at all where Becky was—which wasn't a long walk, but cold in my thin corduroy coat with a hole in its satin pocket. Remember the quiet of the large snowflakes and how you could nearly hear them piling up.

I don't love snow sports. I tried skiing a couple of times but never had any proper lessons so it was a disaster. (There is an echo of the conglomerate of people I tried to ski with behind that sentence, entire autobiographies I could start from my small snow skiing forays.) I don't like driving in it, either; I am tense and terrified. I don't especially love sledding. I don't know how to snowshoe or cross country ski, the two snow sports which do seem appealing; the not-knowing-how has kept me from doing either one.

What I love is the falling, the piling up, the deepening layers. The transformation of sharp, dry edges to rounded lumps. The contrast between the literal coldness and the metaphoric blanket the snow covers the ground with. That was the deepest/I ever went into the snow. Now I think of it/when I stare at paper or into silences/between human beings. (shihab nye) I love listening, still, to the stillness. Love the way it conveys peace without ever saying it; peace while holding the potential, in fact, for destruction and ruin. I love the coldness of the transformed world, which tries to say nothing but what it is; The trunks of tall birches/Revealing the rib cage of a whale/Stranded by a still stream;/And saw, through the motionless baleen of their branches,/As if through time,/Light that shone/On a landscape of ivory,/A harbor of bone (Smith), love the light---the tiny bits of moonlight that seep through the dense clouds like snowflakes themselves---that makes night's bitter darkness less menacing.

At last, this weekend, the dry, sharp brownness of my world lost itself in whiteness. Not enough; barely a skiff. But enough to make me take a breath. To make my parched soul drink deep. To let me listen to the relieved whispers of my trees. mustn’t what lies /behind the world be at least /as beautiful as the human voice? (doty) The voice of the snow is also what lies behind the world and when the snow falls I hear a whisper of eternity.

on Scars

Last Saturday, a girl came up to the desk where I was working. She looked about 14, a little dowdy in that haven't-found-my-way-yet thing that girls her age have. "I'm working on a project," she said, a little nervous. "Can you tell me where the pregnancy books are?"

I walked her over to the section and showed her some of the newer ones, and tugged out a copy of What to Expect When You're Expecting because it seemed easiest to digest for a 14-year-old girl. "Good luck with your project!" I said, gave her an encouraging smile, and then went back to my desk.

Two hours later, she came back to the desk. She took a deep breath. And she said, "OK. If you thought you might be pregnant. How much do pregnancy tests cost? And when would you take the test?"

One of those projects.

So I explained pregnancy tests to her. And I told her to wait until she was at least a week late. "So if you were already, like, two weeks late, you'd just take it now? Like, today?" she asked in a quiet voice and I looked her right in the eye, hoping my gaze would be true and she would know that this complete random librarian had nothing but compassion for her. "Yes. You go to Target today, and get the store brand test, and take it in the morning. And then you tell someone who can help you, OK?"

**********************

Haley texted me today:

A boy in our school named Jeremy killed himself this morning.

And even though I've never met this boy in my life, I wanted to weep. For such sadness in the world. For a young person whose despair couldn't be overcome. For his parents—What they must be feeling is completely unimaginable to me.

**********************

There are so many wounding surfaces in the world. Some literal, some metaphorical. The metaphorical wounds take longest to heal, I believe. The combination of these two young people's experiences bumping against my life has reminded me of some of my own old scars. Of how sharp the world is and how sometimes you feel you are wandering alone in a landscape of shards, and sometimes a friendly face is the one softness you need.

Of how I hope I can be that softness whenever life presents me with the opportunity to do so.

**********************

"Scars"
       ~ William Stafford

The tell how it was, and how time
came along, and how it happened
again and again. They tell
the slant life takes when it turns
and slashes your face as a friend.

Any wound is real. In church
a woman lets the sun find
her cheek and we see the lesson:
there are years in that book; there are sorrows
a choir can’t reach when they sing.

Rows of children lift their faces of promise,
places where the scars will be.

on Poetry

For her honors English class, Haley has to put together an illustrated anthology of some of her famous poems. I pointed her towards poets.org, which is an awesome resource full of American poets and some of their poems, arranged by topic (if you wish) to make things easier and less overwhelming. I also told her I'd share some of the poems I used when I was teaching poetry.

Even though I was an idealistic first-time teacher, I wasn't so silly as to think that the majority of my students would like poetry. In fact, I made sure to teach poetry to all of my classes because one of my goals as a teacher was to help students learn that poetry isn't scary or necessarily hard. It requires you to think and, most importantly, to feel, but its reputation of being difficult and unfathomable is one I was determined to break.

So I collected poems I thought my students would like. I looked for accessible poems, topics that related to their lives, imagery that was especially visual. I wanted them to experience poems that moved them---that made they feel something they wouldn't have any other way. I don't know if I managed to do that or not. Probably I just came across as that crazy poetry-loving weirdo of a teacher my students had to suffer through an entire 90-minuted period with.

Last night I pulled out my old poetry lesson plans, looking for some poems to share with Haley. As I re-read ideas and thoughts I'd tried to express and revisited poems I had forgotten, I realized that even if I failed at teaching them anything other than the fact that real people read poetry (well, if they were capable of seeing their English teacher as a "real person), I succeeded in some small way. Because, you know, I did find some pretty good poems to share with them. I taught them to think about what writing might mean to them as individuals, not the oft-spouted concept of "what the poet was trying to say here." (As if the poet failed at saying what she meant.) I showed them poems that make immediate visual images and then tied those pictures to how they might have felt. And, in my blathering and ecstatic way, I taught them (I desperately hope) that even if you don't understand it, if a poem makes you feel something then it is a poem that you relate to.

All of which has reminded me that I haven't been sharing as much poetry on my blog as I had originally intended. While I'm not, obviously, teaching anymore, I still have this wish: that more people might love poetry. That I could share what I know about poems: some you'll never, ever understand or even love, but others can, if you let them, change you; that understanding isn't always the point; that beauty in language is sometimes its own excuse. And that the moment when a phrase hits you and you realize I've been wanting to say that exact thing my whole life but didn't know how? Well, that moment is the best part about poems.

Take this poem, for example, which I meant to share in October but didn't:

October

~Carolyn Smart

Those fallen leaves, pale supplicants,
have much to teach us of surrender,
how, wrapped in autumn's incense
they unfurl their flags to the wind
Every year I want to kneel in damp soil
and say farewell to blessed things:
the swift geese as they shout each to each
above the treetops, the white nicotinia
at my door, still releasing its fragrance
against the chill of evening,
the memory of a much-loved hand the last day I held it
There was early morning light rich as silk,
the flash of late fireflies
amidst the cedar,
cows' tails whisking in the amber fields,
the chiaroscuro of a moth's wing
Goodbye, brief lives,
ablaze with tenderness;
today the glory of the leaves
is enough, for I am learning anew
to release all I cannot hold,
these moments of luminous grace
saying Here and here is beauty,
here grief: this is the way to come home

Oh. That ending—and today, the last day of November when the wind is grabbing, at last, the last dead leaves from my sycamores and that is enough to make me notice what is luminously graceful.

I know myself. I know I don't share poetry on my blog because there's that voice saying "no one really cares, no one is interested, right now whomever is reading this is rolling her eyes because you sound like a stuck-up, pretentious know-it-all" and I listen. But today the other voice is stronger, the one that knows that here and here is beauty and that by beauty we find a sort of home, so I am giving it its vocal range, its space to speak.

And I might just do it much more often.

Delicious Birthdays

Sunday was Kendell's birthday and today was Kaleb's, so we celebrated both on Sunday with the traditional Grandmas Party. I made two desserts, since Kendell doesn't love cake and Kaleb doesn't love grown-up desserts. Everyone (except my inner thighs) was happy!

Last year, on Kaleb's fifth birthday, we didn't call this event the Grandmas Party. It was the Grandparents Party, because Kendell's dad still came. In fact, Kaleb's fifth party was the last one Kent came to:

 

As I sat at the table for this year's party, I looked at my mom and my mother-in-law and wondered: how long will it last? What birthday will it be when it is just one grandma, and then none? I hope we get in a good run of Grandma Parties before that happens, but I still felt a deep, unexpected sadness settle down on me. Maybe it was because of the weather: warm at last, the sun lowering and that delicious summer-night coolness wafting through my hair. "There are moments when the body is as numinous as words," the poet Robert Hass says in a poem, "days that are the good flesh continuing." That moment in the angled sunlight felt like that poem, a thin wire of grief wrapped up in all the happiness.

Numinous.

And sweetened, of course, by two desserts. Here are the recipes, just so I don't forget:

Lime Icebox Dessert

2 cups graham cracker crumbs
1/2 cups butter

1 cup lime or lemon juice
2 cans sweetened condensed milk
zest of one lime or lemon
2 cups whipped cream
1/3 cup powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla
dash salt

Combine graham crackers and melted butter; press into a 9x13 pan. Zest the lime or lemon, then juice enough for one cup. Whisk juice and sweetened condensed milk together. In a separate bowl, whip the cream till stiff; add the sugar, vanilla, and salt to the cream. Fold the cream into the juice mixture. Pour over the crust, then chill for at least four hours.

Bask in the adoration.

Perfect White Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

1 bag white chocolate chips (11 ounces)
3/4 cup whipping cream
1 cup butter
dash salt
1 tsp vanilla
3-ish cups powdered sugar

On low heat, preferrably in a double boiler, melt chocolate. Add whipping cream and stir until smooth. Allow to cool to room temperature. Beat with butter, salt, and vanilla till creamy; add enough powdered sugar to reach desired stiffness. Enough to frost a two-layer cake with leftovers for graham crackers. This frosting is best if you allow it to chill after frosting the cake. So deliciously flavored!

Holiday Hodgepodge #11: "Magi"

During the years between finishing my Associates and starting to work on my Bachelors, I was determined to keep on learning about literature. I read every book at the library about writing, critical theory, understanding novels, and anything else that seemed English-major-ish. There weren't a lot of choices (it's a public library, after all, not a university one), but we do have several collections of feminist essays, and feminism is the approach I wanted to focus on. During those years I might have been the only person checking out these books, but I would take one home every three weeks or so. One of my favorites is Language in her Eye, a set of essays by Canadian women writers subtitled "writing and gender." Perfect! There are many things I could say about how much I love this book, but today I just wanted to share a poem I found in it. I probably first read it in 1992 or 1993 but I continue to be haunted by it.

"Magi"
~Mary di Michele

At sixteen she would be old,
in another culture. She feels
old, unwrapping another gift
in the blanched light of the bay
window. Winter light, no warmth in it.

She takes the bow off the package
sticks it on the window instead
of the paper plate with ribbons
she is meant to decorate and wear.
A small unconventional act.
As if to decline the crown.

A bow bright as the spot of blood
she prayed for. A bow the red
of poinsettia. (How they simulate flesh!
How they burn in the treetops of Mexico
like the campfires of primates!)

Her belly, full and elliptical,
moves as if with sudden light.
Unexpected connections. Her eyes
strain to see the star predicted
mathematically.

The boy she hardly saw, the apparition,
so thin. Stroking his back, she sensed
through the sharpness of his shoulder blades
the stumps of wings.

She pulls out, as if
dreading, perhaps, the nip
of something feathered, something furred,
simple garments: a sweater and cap
knitted in a knobby weave
as if in braille.

Her fingers sniff for the scent of the child
about to be found. To discover
the arm in the shape of a sleeve.

This poem taught me something about what poetry is (that complicated definition) and what it can do. Mary at a baby shower, with a sort of contemporary feel—like an unwed mother, full of uncertainty about her choices. It is a Christmas poem in perhaps the loosest sense of the concept, but it is still my favorite one because of all the unexpected connections it makes for me. It is a sort of a gift, one I return to (I eventually bought the book) over and over.

Holiday Hodgepodge #9: Star-Silver

Yesterday, trying to find my Christmas-card address list, I stumbled upon an old file I'd saved years ago, full of holiday poems. Holiday poems with the qualities I admire in poetry, that is. (You'll not find forced rhymes and maudlin sentiment, for example.) I think I will share one for the next few days, just because I think they are beautiful. This one I first read during my university days, and it continues to stick with me. Why does the story never grow old? Because it is, I think, like the silver light from the star, ultimately about hope, which our hungry hearts are hungry for.

STAR-SILVER
      ~Carl Sandburg

The silver of one star
plays cross-lights against pine-green
And the play of this silver cross-wise against the green is an old story.
Thousands of years.

And sheep grazers on the hills by night
watching the woolly four-footed ramblers
watching a single silver star.
Why does this story never wear out?

And a baby, slung in a feed box back in a barn in a Bethlehem slum
A baby's first cry,
mixing with the crunch of a mule's teeth on Bethlehem Christmas corn
Baby fists, softer than snowflakes of Norway

The vagabond mother of Christ
and the vagabond men of wisdom
all in a barn on a winter night
and a baby there in swaddling clothes on hay
Why does this story never wear out?

The sheen of it all—is a star, silver and a pine, green
For the heart of a child asking a story
The red and hungry, red and hankering heart
Calling for cross-lights of silver and green.

 

Second Day of Thanksgiving: Autumn

I think I've probably said this before: fall is my favorite season. The changing trees, the gorgeous colors, that chilly-warm thing the weather does and the blue the sky turns. The scorching days are past, but there are still flowers; we hike and rake leaves and go on random walks, just to get outside. Plus, it's full of anticipation, and in some sense anticipating the Big Three holidays is better than the actually holidays themselves. Plato suggested that we only desire what we don't have—once it arrives, we have it, so we don't need to desire it anymore. But there's something about that desire, that looking forward, that tingles autumn for me.

This autumn has been especially perfect—nearly too perfect. Indian summer for weeks, golden afternoons that were perfect for running through. A few big rainstorms, and then the warm days came back.

 
In fact, it was such a temperate fall that my sycamores, which usually just turn bronze (euphemistic for "boring brown"), turned dark yellow, the leaves edged with sienna and burnt umber. They've never turned this color before.

I'm grateful to live where there are seasons. I know that the places where it's eternally summer are desirable by lots of people, but not me. When the world is always changing, you notice the world. I am happy here, in this landscape, with its inconsistencies and changing temperament. I am grateful that fall exists and that I get to experience it by walking through the world.

"In Heaven it is Always Autumn" ~John Donne
      by Elizabeth Spires

In heaven it is always autumn. The leaves are always near
to falling there but never fall, and pairs of souls out walking
heaven's paths no longer feel the weight of years upon them.
Safe in heaven's calm, they take each other's arm,
the light shining through them, all joy and terror gone.
But we are far from heaven here, in a garden ragged and unkept
as Eden would be with the walls knocked down, the paths littered
with the unswept leaves of many years, bright keepsakes
for children of the Fall. The light is gold, the sun pulling
the long shadow soul out of each thing, disclosing an outcome.
The last roses of the year nod their frail heads,
like listeners listening to all that's said, to ask,
What brought us here? What seed? What rain? What light?
What forced us upward through dark earth? What made us bloom?
What wind shall take us soon, sweeping the garden bare?
Their voiceless voices hang there, as ours might,
if we were roses too. Their beds are blanketed with leaves,
tended by an absent gardener whose life is elsewhere.
It is the last of many last days. Is it enough?
To rest in this moment? To turn our faces to the sun?
To watch the lineaments of a world passing?
To feel the metal of a black iron bench, cool and eternal
press against our skin? To apprehend a chill as clouds pass
overhead, turning us to shivering shade and shadow?
And then to be restored, small miracle, the sun shining brightly
as before? We go on, you leading the way, a figure
leaning on a cane that leaves its mark on the earth.
My friend, you have led me farther than I have ever been.
To a garden in autumn. To a heaven of impermanence
where the final falling off is slow, a slow and radiant happening.
The light is gold. And while we're here, I think it must be heaven.

What is your favorite season?

Ah! Bright Wings

The city center of the town where I live contains the library, the city building, the courts and police station, a handful of baseball/football fields, the senior center and an arboretum. A library errand I needed to run today found me walking the length of the block, from the library to the senior center. It was chilly;  I was grateful for my scarf and wished for gloves and a coat. But the walking warmed me, and the expanse: still-green grass dotted with trees the late-afternoon sun lit on fire. I could have walked on the sidewalk, but I chose the leafier route and crunched through all those yellow skirts around the trees. I walked quickly so my meandering route wouldn't take much longer, but I concentrated on enjoying scuffing through every length of leaves. That delicate sound of scuffing leaves, a crackling susurrus; the hint of woodsmoke in the air; the chill on my hands but the warmth of the light on my forehead. Deep, cold breaths. It was exactly what I needed to lift my black mood, which had been scrawling itself across my psyche all day, making me doubt the efficacy of my existence. Say you could replace me with a laundry-doing, kitchen-cleaning, errand-running automaton, without pesky things like emotions and needs and foibles—wouldn't that be better? I felt, all day, like gathering up anything of mine and tossing it into the recycling bin, ridding the world of the evidence of my existence. Erasing myself. My walk pencilled my outlines back in, and while I perhaps still feel the futility of my efforts just as strongly, my hurting edges were smudged, made bearable.

 

I walked and scuffed the leaves, thinking of this poem (which I have blogged about before), which I always think of on certain bright-cold fall days like today, even though it is not a poem about fall, really:

 

GOD'S GRANDEUR

      ~Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge & shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast & with ah! bright wings.

Hopkins does this thing with praising the world that I so relate to. He was an ecstatic, able to see the joy in the small and the large aspects of the world. He wrote poems like that one, full of praising the world, of the setting forth of the world as a place of joy, but he also had his darknesses, too. (He has a whole series of poems we now call the "terrible sonnets," not because of the quality of the writing but by weight of the darkness in them.) I relate to that, too, and that combination—myself flayed black all day, then healed by goldenness and a long-dead poet's words who was, himself, flayed black but gilded—is what makes me love poetry.

On Memory

Today, I read three different reviews about Nora Ephron's new book I Remember Nothing. Probably the title jumped out at me because when I read it I thought "me too!" I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but somehow my memory is shot. Like...I'll ask Jake literally six times in four hours if he has any homework. Or I completely forget appointments even when I think about them two hours before. Names flow through me like water drained from pasta; I'll remember reading a book but not the title, or seeing a movie but now what that actor's name is in real life. Last weekend I sat through almost all of the first part of The Two Towerstrying to remember Legolas's real name. I finally just had to google it. (Orlando Bloom, my apologies.)

Considering my dad's condition, this memory thing freaks me out. I think I would rather experience almost anything other than Alzheimer's. Anything. I'm not sure there is one single disease I fear more than it, unless it's a brain tumor or...anything else that would leave me sitting silent in a chair, having forgotten everything.

What am I without memory?

Those who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat it, so the saying goes. I say: those who forget their history are simply doomed. Doomed to a shell of self, to a half-life, to a mindless ache. There is already so much I have forgotten and so much more I don't want to. Consider, for example, this post that Becky wrote about our Grandma Elsie. The details she remembers about her house are so vivid and precise—I am grateful she wrote them down because I had forgotten. In my mind, her formal living room is simply white: carpet, chairs, couch, walls; a blank mirror in a silver frame. Her kitchen table has intertwined itself with my other grandma's table; I know that yellow Formica belongs somewhere else but I cannot remember Elsie's table in its place. I remember the dark yawn of her cement basement and the afternoon I spent sipping nectar out of her overgrown periwinkle bed. But not much else.

And that's just the far-away memory. What about the closer ones, like exactly how it felt to be newly married and without any kids, or the day I brought home Haley and became a mother. What did I learn during my days at college, and which Theodore Dreiser novel did I read, Sister Carrie or An American Tragedy? What were the details of that messy break-up I had at 18, and how did I get the enormous bruise on my right thigh?

I don't remember.

I have this sneaky feeling, though, that my memory issues are somehow connected to my not-feeling-anything, locking-out-the-world thing. Because, here's a confession: I hardly even pray anymore. It's too much—I don't want to feel anything. I think the not-feeling thing is severing the remembering thing. I know I am wired to be emotional—overly emotional, in fact. This is as much a part of me as my turning-grey hair and ability to stand on my toe knuckles. Valuing memory is, too. Of course I am constructed by the people and things that surround me, the tasks I do, the clothes I wear. But the things I experienced yesterday and in 1990 and five years ago constructed me, too, and I cannot bear the thought of losing their memory. I cannot bear to open up my heart to feeling and yet its is withering from lack of remembering.

And how strange is it, what we remember and forget? I can, for example, recite the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish, something I learned in eighth grade, but I can't remember if I ever mailed my American Express bill last month; there are snippets of poems in my brain ("The way you say the world is what you get" for example, and "I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief" and "a woman like that is not a woman quite") but I can't recall exactly how it felt to write a poem.

Perhaps those who fear losing their memory are doomed to do just that. Perhaps my doom is coming fast toward me, a devastation caused by something I forgot I'd done. Perhaps it is sympathetic Alzheimer's and will clear up eventually. I don't know—but I am fearful. I'm afraid I will forget to be fearful, and then it will all rush away, every cherished and happy and awful and horrid and sweet and everyday and amazing moment will sink, leaving only dimples in the path leading to my grave.

Forgetfulness
          ~ Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart

Poem for October 29

Which is an anniversary of sorts.

In knowledge of Young Boys
~Toi Derricotte

i knew you before you had a mother,
when you were newtlike, swimming,
a horrible brain in water.
i knew you when your connections
belonged only to yourself,
when you had no history
to hook on to,
barnacle,
when you had no sustenance of metal
when you had no boat to travel
when you stayed in the same
place, treading the question;
i knew you when you were all
eyes and a cocktail,
blank as the sky of a mind,
a root, neither ground nor placental;
not yet
red with the cut nor astonished
by pain, one terrible eye
open in the center of your head
to night, turning, and the stars
blinked like a cat. we swam
in the last trickle of champagne
before we knew breastmilk—we
shared the night of the closet,
the parasitic
closing on our thumbprint,
we were smudged in a yellow book.

son, we were oak without
mouth, uncut, we were
brave before memory.