The English Geek

Because It is Cold,

and dry, and cold, and the inversion is making everything grey, and the snow won't fall, and I'd like to revisit warm and humid and peaceful, a poem and a photo to go along with it:

I go down to the edge of the sea.

How everything shines in the morning light!

The cusp of the whelk,

the broken cupboard of the clam,

the opened, blue mussels,

moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred---

and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,

dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.

It's like a schoolhouse

of little words,

thousands of words.

First you figure out what each on means by itself,

the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop full of moonlight.

 

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

 

~Mary Oliver ("Breakage")

for Emily

It is 12:34 AM. And 12 degrees outside. And for the first truly-cold winter night in fifteen years, I don't have to worry about the cat (the outside cat, who slept in the garage in a box with a big, fluffy blanket that my I-hate-cats husband made sure was replaced with something equally fluffy and warm when it gone worn out) being too cold.

Because, for the first time in fifteen years, I don't have a cat.

I haven't had one now for three weeks.

She was a good kitty, Emily.
We got her almost exactly, to the day, one year before Haley was born. She was this tiny grey fluff ball when we brought her home. And I swear: even as a kitten, she was mellow. She'd just hang out, purring, digging her claws into whatever soft surface she could find---you know how cats knead when they're happy? She was great at happy kneading. 
When we brought Haley home, I was nervous, because there're all those urban legends about cats smothering babies by licking them to death or sitting on them or whatever. But Emily just sniffed the baby and wandered off.

As each kid grew to a certain age---18 months or so---Emily became this unnameable combination of sibling/playmate/auntie/pillow. She was always so patient with them. Sure, if they pushed too far (well, if they pulled too hard) she'd scratch back. She was a cat, not a saint. But always, I am certain, with restraint: her scratch meant too much, not I'm unleashing my inner lion on you and now I will prepare to eat you. She'd let them cover her with blankets (mostly Kaleb), or with stuffed kitties (a Haley specialty); she even didn't freak out the time Jake managed to climb a tree holding on to her, but just sat in the tree with him and let him pet her.

She was our walking shadow. Walking down to the corner and back is a phase all of my kids went through; there was something magical about walking all the way down to the other end of the street and then turning around to come home. She'd follow us both ways, and we'd include her in our walking-to-the-corner conversations. In the winter she'd get really fat, but in the summer she'd lose it all, only her belly was still droopy, so when she walked the skin sort of flopped back and forth.

We all giggled at that, every now and again.

She knew all the warmest and comfiest places in the yard, the spots where the sun hit just right. We'd sit down next to her in the grass, me and whichever kid was in the I-love-the-cat-so-much-I-could-eat-her phase, and pet her warm fur. This was especially nice on chilly days. If their feet were bare, the babies would try to wiggle their toes into her warm fur, too.

Of course, she really wasn't a saint, just a cat.
She had an inordinate hunger for birds, and I don't think I've ever been more angry at a cat than when she managed to somehow eat every. single. baby. robin one summer. She'd sit under the trees, watching the birds and mewing her hunting mew at them, and I'd clap my hands at her and say "leave those birds alone!" but she'd be back at it, a few hours later. What she would leave alone: mice. Well, the one mouse we've ever found near our yard, which got caught in the little plastic swimming pool we had (it was empty at the time). Since neither Kendell nor I could bear to kill the mouse, but also neither one of us wanted a mouse hanging around, we put Emily in the pool with the mouse. Thinking, of course, that she'd do the catlike thing and eat it. Instead she found the warm, sunny spot in the pool, curled up, and took a nap. No doubt kneading her claws while she slept. And dreamed of birds for breakfast. (We ended up scooping the mouse into a pail and handing it over the fence to our neighbor, who took care of the mouse and then tossed the empty pail back over.)

But she was fiercely protective. A few years ago, we had a set of troublesome dogs in our neighborhood. They'd run all over, pooping in people's yards and biting unsuspecting children. (The pound was called several times that summer, and not just by me.) They stayed out of our yard, though, because she would unleash her inner lion on those dogs. Seriously: they'd come sniffing around, and once she got her startled fur under control, she would make an entirely different hunting meowgrowl, and then chase after the dogs. Then she would leap, claws out---happy-kneading makes for really sharp claws---right onto the back of one of them and start biting for their jugular.

The dogs didn't bother us much.

The thing that makes me saddest is that she was Kaleb's surrogate little sister. Every spring, summer, or fall morning, he would want to go outside to eat his breakfast with the kitty. He'd sit on the back porch, dripping milk and bits of honey-nut Cheerios on the step, and she'd be right next to him, licking up the dribbles. She'd sit in the grass by the swing set and he'd swing next to her, telling her stories. He would hunt her out and love her until she couldn't stand it anymore, and then she'd walk along the top of the fence, and over, into the mouse-killing neighbor's yard. Then he'd cry, and we'd call her together, and eventually she'd come back.

Plus, don't tell Kendell, but she wasn't always an outside kitty. Sometimes, after the kids were gone to school, we'd bring her inside. She'd sit on Kaleb's bed and he'd cover her with blankets and pet her and kiss her. Even though he doesn't get to have a sibling his age, Emily sort of made up for it.

"Let's go pet Emily," he still says, because he doesn't understand that she's gone. She'd gotten sleepier and sleepier, and she started ignoring the birds, and she stopped making her hunting mews. Dogs felt safe in the yard again. She began drinking gallons, seeming, of water ever day. I think I was filling her water up nine or ten times, and sometimes she'd wake us up at night, yowling with thirst. She'd sometimes not make it to her litter box after all the water. And after a dream that made me wake up at midnight knowing it was time, and talking to my friend's mom, whose husband is a vet, and listening to my gut, I knew: she was ready. She was in pain and more than likely diabetic, and what was best: a fast falling asleep, or a slow, cold death in the garage on a night like tonight, at 1:07 AM and 11 degrees?

So I took more pictures of her, some with each kid. I borrowed a cat carrier from a sympathetic friend. And I, on a random November Thursday, found her where she was sitting in the sun outside. She'd climbed to the top of the slide platform, so I climbed up with her and we had a talk. I told her she'd been a good kitty, and I loved her, and I was so grateful she could be so good with the babies. I petted her and she rustled a little bit, in the painful way she'd developed, so she could purr and dig her claws into my leg.

I cried and I told her goodbye.

Then I managed to get her into the carrier, and Kendell and I went to the animal shelter. She meowled, a sound I have never heard before, and I sobbed while I drove, and then she stopped and I cried harder. We took her to the animal shelter, and Kendell did the paperwork because I couldn't talk, I just sat on a bench and rubbed her paw, which was all I could reach of her, and I said goodbye some more, until the vet's assistant came to take her away.

On the drive home, somehow I started talking about all the other kitties in my life. Misty, our little Siamese who I remember watching deliver her kittens and who, with another batch of kittens just born, got distemper and had to be put to sleep. The kittens, I was told, were "taken to the farm," and every time we went to the farm---my mom's friend Dixie's house---I'd ask to see those kittens, only no one would ever show them to me. Hooter, who was the muscliest, jowliest tomcat
you can imagine, black and white except for where the scars were, who lived through distemper and the neighbor boys' bb guns, who gave me one of my life's most embarrassing moments by peeing in my gymnastics bagonly I didn't notice my competition leotard was soaked in cat pee until I went to change into it, whose only remains were a bit of indeterminate black-and-white fur discovered by the side of the road in the spring after the snow had melted. Hit by a car or done in by those bb guns: we still don't know. The unfortunate six months of Depeche, a white kitten who lasted about three weeks before dying of distemper, and then Abbey (the tabby) who was hit by a car---cat death as impetus. Finally Noel, a Siamese who was my consolation prize of sorts, followed by Chris the Cat (also Siamese, a fat, enormous apple headed chocolate point) who was technically Becky's, although in reality he was Noel's.

I don't know why the cataloging of dead cats made me feel a little bit better. Except for it reminded me of the good cats I've had in my life, and reminded me that cats, like everything, die. But I also remembered: lots of good-cat days, and if there is a cat heaven---and what would heaven be worth, without kitties?---all of them, in their healthy kitty heavenly forms, are there. And even though I feel like a cat murderer, I also know it was right to let Emily be in peace, away from her thirst and her sore joints and her litter box misses.

I just hope she knew she was loved and valued.

And, finally, because it is hard to write about cat death without being maudlin, one of my favorite non-maudlin poems (and I think they do have souls) :

"The Heaven of Animals"
~ James Dickey
Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.

Having no souls, they have come,
Anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open.

To match them, the landscape flowers,
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
The richest wood,
The deepest field.

For some of these,
It could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,

More deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
And crouch on the limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey

May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk

Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling themselves without pain

At the cycles center,
They tremble, they walk
Under the tree,
They fall, they are torn,
They rise, they walk again.

Poetry Night at The Cinema

Kendell and I went to see a movie tonight. (Maybe that was ill-advised and premature: he has been moaning in pain since we got back in the car, putting paid to the fact that I should have pushed harder that a movie was ill-advised and premature.) As always, what I loved about going to the movie wasn't  so much the movie itself, but the previews.

I love movie previews.

I seriously could just go, watch the trailers, and then go home. Of course, that would mean I'd never see any of the movies the previews made me want to see, but, well: I'm weird.

Still, it wasn't the trailers themselves that made me all blissed out tonight. Nope. It was the fact that two different poems were quoted in just one night. The first wasn't a trailer, but an add for Levi's jeans which quoted Whitman's Pioneers! O Pioneers. The second was a trailer, for the movie Invictus that, oddly enough, quotes the poem by William Ernest Henley.

I can't say I'd ever memorized all of the Whitman piece. I've read it, though, and little pieces came back to me: Colorado men are we! But I did, at some vague time, in some Brit Lit class, memorize the Henley poem, only I had forgotten it. By the end of the trailer I was saying the words under my breath: "It matters not how straight the gate/how charged with punishments my scroll/I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul."

Kendell thought I was weird, of course. Maybe the guy sitting next to me did too. But I don't care. I needed to remember those words right now, and the poetry gods gave them to me. Plus: tonight I heard two poems! In a movie theater, with people in it and everything!

My faith in humanity is restored.

(Plus I had a gingerbread cookie in my purse, which never hurts.)

Arrowhead

Tonight I have been reading poems and thinking about my dad who didn't, as far as I know, read very much poetry. Still, sometimes a poem reminds me of him by the act of capturing some facet of him, even though the poet (obviously) never knew him. It is one of the magics of poems, how someone can write about death, and then when I read the poem I don't think so much of dying but of how my dad liked going arrowhead hunting in southern Utah. He'd go with one of my sister's husbands, or with his brother, and once he had gathered enough, after many, many trips, he'd assemble all the arrowheads together on a rustic board, with buckskin braid and maybe feathers. When he went on these trips, I always thought it was a little strange, and maybe even questionable. Where'd he find the arrowheads? Was taking them from where ever he found them a sort of grave robbery? Or just something that some people do?

Now that it's too late, though, I wish I would have talked to him about his trips. I wish I knew where he'd go, and how he'd find them. I wish I knew which were his favorites, what were his motivations, how he thought about his finds. Did he think what I do, when I hold one of those chipped, triangular stones, of the person who shaped it, wondering how he lived or what he killed, imagining a sort of connection between my modern-day self and that long-ago person? Or something else? Was the arrowhead hunting about connection, or about discovery, or about the rugged beauty of a perfectly-shaped spear point? Or simply the wild peacefulness of being in the desert, the stone a way of carrying home sky, heat, dry bushes, sere stone?

He is not dead, but he (the dad I knew) is gone. I still love the silent, confused man who needs help sliding his feet into his shoes, who seemed baffled by the bright sun at our last visit. We sat together on a park bench, and I told him how my kids are, how my last run went, what book I was reading. He didn't answer, of course, and I wonder: what does it feel like to be him? Where did the dad I knew go to? Is he lost somewhere in the dark, a chipped stone I could find if I knew the path through his personal landscape? Or perhaps he is a million little stones, scattered in earth, and I will never, no matter how much I search, put all his pieces back together. The arrowhead trips are just one stone, just one facet of what is lost and I am again left with the same heartache, the same regret of not asking, of not telling, of thinking I had as much time as I needed, of not knowing how much I didn't know. Not guessing that, one day soon, he would be curled in the dark of his mind, needless artifacts scattered around him; that I would need to become an archaeologist, sifting through time's refuse, to know anything much at all about him.

"Every Dying Man"

is a child:
in trenches, in bed, on a throne, at a loom,
we are tiny and helpless
when black velvet bows our eyes
and the letters slide from the pages.
Earth lets nobody loose: it all
has to be given back — breath, eyes, memory.
We are children when the earth
turns with us through the night toward morning
where there are no voices, no ears, no light, no door,
only darkness and movement
in the soil and its thousands
of mouths, chins, jaws, and limbs
dividing everything so that
no names and no thoughts remain
in the one who is silent lying in the dark
on his right side, head upon knees.
Beside him, his spear, his knife
and his bracelet, and a broken pot.

~Jaan Kaplinski

Book Note: Ballistics by Billy Collins

Since in April I only read poetry, or books about poetry, I've got a feeling there'll be tons of book notes about poetry popping up on my blog. And as I am certain that my blog readers wait with bated breath for my book notes, AND you all love poetry too, there is a general cheer going around the blogosphere right about now, correct? ;) Here's my first one.

Ballistics  by Billy Collins

The poet Billy Collins is officially on my List of Writers I'd Like to Meet. (Not that I have, in reality, written down this list. But if I did, not everyone I like reading would show up there, for varying reasons.) (Who's on your list?) Of course, the few times I have meet authors on my imaginary WILtM list have been sort of disasters. Like the memorable day when I met Margaret Atwood, and I told her it was her fault I became an English teacher, and we talked about English teachers in general and one specific one that left an impression on her, but the whole time I was thinking she's got to be wondering exactly how my reading an excerpt of Cat's Eye in eleventh grade turned me into a teacher, and really it's my eleventh-grade English teacher's fault because I never would have found Cat's Eye had it not been for Mrs. Simmons, and surely someone as astute as Margaret Atwood can see my faulty logic and knows that my proclamation---like the first sentence of an essay, constructed with the goal of hooking the reader---was simply a good way to get her attention and actually spend a few minutes talking to her while the rest of the line behind us rustled impatiently. OK, maybe not a disaster, but not the immediate friendship I hoped would develop. (Because, yeah, I know, writers totally make friends with the people who come to their readings. Happens all the time.) Or the time I listened to the poet X. J. Kennedy talk in an intimate group of only ten people, and how when he spoke about all families having their poet laureate, or how they used to, and the way poetry is declining in the eyes of the general public, I wanted to hug him but knew it would be highly undignified to his very dignified grandfatherly self, and then when he opened it up for questions I couldn't think of anything to ask. "Do you know how much I love your anthologies?" isn't really a question he could really answer. So if I did meet Billy Collins, I'm sure I'd either be struck dumb or say something dumb.

But it would still be cool to meet him.

What I would want him to know but be unable to say is how much I appreciate his poems for their ability to be simultaneously accessible (meaning you don't have to know the entire history of everything in order to understand them, nor even aspire to impossible erudition of the English language) and yet, still, intelligent/thoughtful/full-of-that-double-meaning-thing that good poems have. I would discuss the limits of language, and how the word I want to describe his work with---delightful---is so pallid and wrong and yet, at the same time, exactly right. I would tell him that every once in a random while, some image or other from "Taking off Emily Dickinson's Clothes"  pops into my mind. That's the sort of impact his poems have on you. You start with one---just open to any one of them---and start reading, and you fall right into the poem; when you come out again, some little essence of the poem or of the poet himself still clinging to you. It'll never stop clinging, and you'll think about the poem at unexpected moments. He manages to get the everyday details of life, the little objects and times, into his poems, but in a way that makes you laugh, or stop to realize: although I have never thought of it that way, the poem gets it exactly right.

In a sense, though, his newest book, Ballistics, was just the tiniest bit of dissapointing to me. Not because he doesn't do all the magic he did in his previous poems---he does. But because I wanted the magic to be bigger. I wanted it to be the new Billy Collins book: the Collins-esqueness, but newer. Which isn't to say I didn't love the poems. As I read, I tried to decide which one was my favorite---which had left the strongest impression. I wanted it to be "What Love Does," because it is a non-mushy love poem, a little bit edgy, even: "It turns everything into a symbol" and "it may add sparkle to a morning," lines that are almost mushy, but not quite, that build to the unexpected point: "but mostly it comes and goes. . .it will arrive like an archangel/through an iron gate no one ever seemed to notice before." Or maybe "The Effort," which runs along the lines of "Introduction to Poetry,"  how misguided some attempts at reading poetry are. "The Effort" pokes at the perrennial "What is the poet trying to say?" question that pops up in English classes. (I love poems set in English classes!) "As if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson/had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts---/inarticulate wretches that they were." I especially like the last line: "and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed." When I finished it, though, I couldn't really pick a favorite. So I'm ending with this poem, which is neither grandoise nor particularly poetic in the traditional ideal:

Oh, My God!

Not on in church
and nightly by their bedsides
do young girls pray these days.

Wherever they go,
prayer is woven into their talk
like a bright thread of awe.

Even at the pedestrian mall
outbursts of praise
spring unbidden from their glossy lips.

But still satisfying, still with that particular Collins-esque zing. I think I love this one so much because it bothers me how often people say "Oh, My God!" Maybe that sounds churlish but instead it goes to the power of language itself. Remember playing with words, saying one over and over and over, until its very sound became something foreign, its meaning a pile of dust? That happens in a broader sense to phrases that everyone uses, all the time, and there are some phrases whose meaning I'd like to keep. But here, like he always does, he turns the idea upside down, making the "Oh, My God!" squeal into something that isn't meaningless, but a prayer. Of course, he's also being sarcastic. Still, when I hear the phrase squealed in a girlish voice in the mall, I will stop to think a bit about how miracles are everywhere, and how maybe those girls are able to see it better than I am. In the end, that's exactly what I go back to poetry for: it helps me see things better than I did before.

You Can't Go Home Again

There's a poem I used to use when I was teaching sophomores about literacy, "Voice You Hear When You Read Silently" by Thomas Lux (who said he wanted to write poems that work so well, even your cat loves them). The poem presents the concept of the individuality of reading, the way when two people read the same book, their reading experiences are completely different, in a way that (even) sophomores can understand. What image comes into your mind when you hear the word "barn"? The poet discusses his: "horse-gnawed stalls,/hayloft, black heat tape wrapping / a water pipe, a slippery/spilled chirr of oats from a split sack,/ the bony, filthy haunches of cows." Your barn is not the poet's barn; you imagine something completely different than I do for each word you read, and that is why no one ever reads the exact same book.

I was thinking about this poem some weeks ago, when, after I'd dropped Kaleb off at preschool, I found myself driving to Springville, the town where I grew up and the place where my mom still lives. I was thinking about reading, and about the personal images and emotions we each associate with words; I was thinking about libraries, not barns; I wasn't really thinking about what I was doing, and why. Every word is loaded; you hear it and "a sensory constellation/is lit." When I hear the word "library," the first, raw, emotional image that comes to my mind isn't the place where I've taken my children to check out books and where I now spend twenty hours a week. Instead, it's the libraryin Springville I grew up going to. On that random March Tuesday, when I drove without thinking about my purpose, I did have a goal: I wanted to take some pictures of the city library, because a couple of months ago I'd read  that a new one was being built. Before the old one was torn down, I wanted a photographic image to match the constellation of imagery that lights in my mind when I hear the word "library." It's the place where, on lonely days, I could find a friendly book. The building I can only remember my dad bringing me to, even though my mom must have taken me far more often. The home of the orange biographies, the place where my first-grade teacher worked during the summer, the residence of story and escape and the comforting scent of paper.

As I drove, the library constellation continued its myriad connections: the time I had fourteen books that were two months overdue, and my dad talked the librarian into letting us pay the fine by donating our own books. The library park, with its wide, metal slide and tire swing all situated in the shade cast by enormous old trees. How sometimes, on days when I was cutting class, I'd hide out at the library in one of the chairs on the east side, by the windows, and how that felt like school enough. The summer reading program they used to have, where you'd get points for however many pages you read; I don't remember what you could use the points for, but I haven't forgotten sitting in the air-conditioned foyer after riding my yellow bike to the library, talking to a librarian about the books I'd read. I still remember exactly where in the stacks I could find my copy of Little Women, how the circulation desk was organized, the way the librarians would stack the books to stamp the due dates in the cards. All those emotional memories are superimposed on the physical shape of the library itself, and I wanted to create a photograph, somehow, of the library's exterior that would match up with that emotional library constellation. Just so I would have it down, once the physical library was gone.

Problem is, I waited too long. While the library wasn't demolished yet, it was surrounded by new buildings, the torn-out parking lot full of orange backhoes, construction trailers, and a crane. The little playground under the trees is gone---the trees and green space, too---replaced with a new fire station. The new library (which looks to be elegantly architectural instead of the sturdy utilitarianism of the old one) takes up part of the remainder of the library grounds and extends into the space that used to be occupied by a grocery store. I can't remember the store's name, but they used to have ten-cent Tuesdays, when you could buy a donut for (obviously) ten cents. Jennifer and I used to go there every Tuesday morning, and then we'd discuss, over fried, frosted, and sprinkled dough, whether or not we'd be going to school that day.

I'd like a photograph of that old grocery store, too.

I pulled over to the curb and looked at the library. It wasn't ramshackle, exactly; it looked forlorn, or confused maybe, encroached upon by new and bigger  buildings. I thought about how often it had been my refuge, a peaceful spot in a place where I was intensely unhappy. I thought about my intentions that morning, and how I had driven to Springville thinking about poems and memory constellations but not, very purposefully, about my real intentions. I'd waited too long to capture a photograph of the library as I remember it---probably years too long---but in a way, it didn't matter. I'm not sure any photographer is good enough to capture what I wanted to, which wasn't really a picture of a building. I came to my hometown that day not just to photograph the library, but to find a little piece of myself. If the building's gone, is that piece of me gone, too? I don't know. I sat thinking in my car until a bulldozer honked at me, and I pulled away.

Rather than just get back on the freeway and go home, though, I thought about all the other buildings I wish I had those impossible photos of, places where other bits of myself might be stored. I found myself driving a surreal route: the roads themselves familiar, but so many things changed. Chris and I used to drive this route, which took us past key houses. We'd drive the vaguely-oval-shaped route sometimes five or six times at a go, talking and laughing and drinking our sodas. (I was a Pepsi girl even then.) When I didn't want to go to school, but Jennifer wasn't awake yet, I'd drive it on my own, crying and drinking coffee. The high school, the junior high, the middle school; the art museum, the dentist office, the building where Becky and I went to gymnastics, the old, empty schoolhouses; the houses of friends and boys. Of course, boys. Even the house I grew up in, which itself has changed: the trees are bigger, the front door a different color, the once-precise stone walls that formed the flower beds now in a state of slanted disrepair. But not even a half-mile into the route, I took a detour. I couldn't follow the path, couldn't be a 30-something woman caught in 20-year-old memories. For a moment I felt completely lost, neither 30-something or teenaged, not any version of myself I could recall. I couldn't even go to the home I grew up in, because it would just be more mute evidence of how I've disappeared.

Instead I went to the fabric store, which is a new building built to look like an old one. I realized that while I love this fabric store, I never shop there because I never come to Springville unless I have to. For family parties and holidays, or as a gateway to Hobble Creek canyon, yes. But not for something as unnecessary as fabric I could find in other stores. It has been nearly two decades since I found myself on those streets, driving aimlessly without anywhere specific to go, and that is exactly the thing I have avoided. Because she's still there, that version of myself, even if it's only in my memories. Just like the library and the nameless grocery store and the ten-cent donuts. There isn't a picture of her---my mom disliked my goth days so thoroughly that she never took a picture of me that way. She exists only as another constellation of my memory, only visible in darkness.

on Daughters

Yesterday morning I woke up from a dream about being pregnant. The "I'm-pregnant" variety is my most common dream, and my favorite, even though in the dreams there is still a part of me that reacts just as I would if I were pregnant in real life: a mix of I can't be pregnant, I get to be pregnant again!, we can't afford another baby, I can't wait to feel it kick!, there's no space left in our house, will it be a girl!, it's not just financial but emotional, Yes, I get to plan and shop and make and buy and fold little tiny clothes again!, no, I'm too old and worn out. It's just, in the dreams, the negative stuff is quieter and the happy stuff more joyous, and even with the ache of reality behind the dreams, I hate waking up from them because the real ache of waking reality hurts more.

Then, at work, I helped a woman who had a newborn baby, her first child. Our elevators haven't been working, so I've been doing more running around for books for patrons, or carrying empty strollers down the stairs. For her, I just had to run upstairs to grab a book off the shelf, but in my still-remembering-the-dream feeling, what I really wanted to do was hold her baby while she went and got the book. Somewhere within the morning I remembered that since it was April 22, it was sort of an anniversary; fourteen years ago I brought Haley home from the hospital (back when insurance companies practiced the medieval torture rite of sending you home 24 hours after the baby was born) and began the real work of being a mom.

Part of me is glad I never have to be a first-time mom again. Remember how terrifying it was? The nurses hand you this tiny little bundle of flesh and send you on your way as if the knowledge of how to take care of the child will just be there, in your brain or your system or something mythical and magical and motherly. And maybe for some women, it does. For me, it was a bit harder. I remember feeling like they'd forgotten to pack the instruction manual with her, like it should have come wrapped in plastic with the afterbirth. And the first night home with Haley? It was awful. She was starving and my milk hadn't come in yet, and I was utterly sold on the idea presented by the nursing Nazis that if anything even vaguely resembling a bottle came within fifty yards of her mouth, she'd never nurse again. Finally, after I had a complete and utter meltdown at the changing table, weeping about how I should have never become a mother and I was destined to ruin her, Kendell took her, fed her a bottle, and put her at-last-asleep and very content self into her crib, and I got to sleep for a few hours.

After that first night, though, things got better. I figured out the nursing thing (something I was surprisingly good at. Overly abundantly, even, despite my, well, my lack of endowment!), I realized I had to figure it out my way, and I began to calm down a bit. First-time motherhood was still terrifying, but it started to become less about doing it the right way and more about how I felt taking care of my daughter. I can't even describe the head-over-heels-in-love feeling I had for Haley during those first few weeks, nor how it grew and blossomed into the closeness we had for the two years, nine months, and nine days when it was just me and her.

Someone asked me once, after Kaleb was born, if, could I chose to do it all over again, I'd like to end with my girl instead of start with her. (I am still trying to forgive that person for asking that because it was such a loaded question at a time I was already struggling with giving up on my desire for one more daughter.) But even if I could, I wouldn't switch it. I'm so grateful I got to have the relationship I did with her before the boys came along. Not because I don't love my boys---I do, in individual ways but not with any diminished amount--- but because it was this thing I got to have that I didn't know I would need. I thought, during the days when I only had Haley, that my life would turn out much differently than it has. I rested on assumptions about the future that turned out to be far from reality. That time of being a mother to a little girl was something I thought I'd do at least one more time. Despite the frequent pregnancy-dreams and despite how hard I hoped and prayed and yearned for another little girl, though, it wasn't ever going to happen. I feel blessed now, looking back, at the wisdom that gave me that time alone with just my little girl. It was exactly how it needed to be.

Fourteen years later, there are still things I desperately miss about little-girl Haley, but I also love, so much, the young woman she is becoming. Again it is hard to say with words how it feels. She is so different from me, so much stronger and more confident and able to deal with life. I often watch her and think how could such a creature have come from me? Motherhood is amazing. It is so good it hurts, but the hurt itself is even good. And while much of me still yearns for another little girl, a large part is just grateful that I got to have her at all.

After the patron with the newborn left, I did some shelf-reading in the poetry section. I came across a book of poems by Anne Stevenson, a poet I researched and wrote about extensively during my senior courses at BYU, but whom i've not read for awhile. It was a serendipitous find, because I flipped to this poem, which says part of what I can't say about having a daughter, and helps me feel reconnected to that hopeful and believing and non-jaded person I was fourteen years ago, showing up at home with my newborn daughter. It is good to remember she used to exist.

Poem for a Daughter
~Anne Stevenson

'I think I'm going to have it,'
I said, joking between pains.
The midwife rolled competent
sleeves over corpulent milky arms.
'Dear, you nave have it,
we deliver it.'
A judgment years proved true.
Certainly I've never had you

as you still have me, Caroline.
Why does a mother need a daughter?
Heart's needle, hostage to fortune,
freedom's end. Yet nothing's more perfect
than that bleating, razor-shaped cry
that delivers a mother to her baby.
The bloodcord snaps that held
their sphere together. The child,
tiny and alone, creates the mother.

A woman's life is her own
until it is taken away
by a particular cry.
Then she is not alone
but part of the premises
of everything there is:
a time, a tribe, a war.
When we belong to the world
we become what we are.

Wastelands, Balms, Naked Women, and Other Stuff About Poetry

The opening  image of T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” is a poetic line almost everyone knows: “April is the cruelest month.” It pops up in goofy places—tax websites, the dreadful exams week at college, the clever meteorologist’s “it’s snowing” commentary. But Eliot wasn’t being goofy; he was setting the tone of his poem by bashing expectation right from the start. That April isn’t all hyacinths and baa-ing lambs, like we might expect a poem to tell us, clues you in to one of “The Wasteland’s” major themes: life is made out of death.

I’ve been thinking more about T. S. Eliot these days than I have since my time at college. Well, and about poetry in general, and about some specific poems and poets. It’s really Becky’s fault; a few weeks ago, way back on a dark March Friday, we were talking, and I was listing off all the books I’d read lately, making a point about why I was feeling dark and twisty. What hit me, when we got off the phone, is that I hadn’t told her about a single book of poetry, because I hadn’t read a single book of poetry in I-can’t-remember-how-long. I decided right then that in April—the cruelest month, but also National Poetry Month—I would only read poetry (in addition, of course, to my continually-trying approaches to daily scriptures). And, aside from one novel which I sort of had to read because I lucked into a copy without which I would have had to wait for months, I’ve done just that. Plus, I’ve tried to include some little (or bigger) bit of poetry in all my blog posts this month.

Eliot’s line continues to worm around my brain. Not just that first, well-known line, but the complete first image: “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain./ Winter kept us warm, covering/ Earth in forgetful snow, feeding / A little life with dried tubers.”  Dull, dead, forgetful, dried; the way that winter kept us paradoxically warm and forgetful: this image is, to me, a powerful bit of writing, conveying depression without ever saying the word. And while my scripture-reading achieves something important, it’s only through the reading of poetry that I’ve realized how metaphorically winter-esque my spirit has been. April—or the thing that strives to wake you—is the cruelest because, as it mixes memory and desire, it creates hope (those blooming lilacs), and hope is painful.

None of this is to suggest that I’m needing a prescription for Prozac, but just to say that I needed waking up, needed to shed my winter, and it was re-reading Eliot’s poem that made me see my recent bout of dark-and-twisty. The only other writing that’s as curative as scripture, poems seem to achieve a focusing in me that is also scripture-esque. The idea goes that all the answers to life’s questions can be found in holy words and that, by studying and pondering, you find what you need to know. We hear the stories at church so often of someone opening their scriptures to a random spot, beginning to read, and discovering their answer. Over and over, I find that poetry
focuses my problems in the same way. Not, exactly, with answers, but with, at least, balms. Seamus Heaney says that one of the questions poetry tries to answer is “how with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?” How, in other words, is there room in the world for poems when so much is consumed by “rage”—war, poverty, starvation, cruelty? He says the answer is that poetry must offer “befitting emblems of adversity.” Poems, in other words, that don’t just describe the lilacs but give space for suffering; poems that use beauty to create an elegy for adversity. In my life, those emblems of adversity, like the random spot in the scriptures, arrive at the time I need them.

Take this example. Maybe six or seven months ago, Kendell and I had our annual “why do you spend so much time reading?” argument, the one that leaves me feeling stripped to my very core—my seemingly very faulty core. In the aftermath I found myself vaguely remembering a short story I’d once read, about a teenage girl whose mother had the unfortunate and bewildering (to the teenage girl) habit of running, in her very gauzy nightgown, through their neighborhood at midnight. I don’t remember the title or the author or even the point of the story, but I do remember that image: the slightly-off mother in her white gown and bare feet, racing nearly-naked down the street where she lived. It came to me in that moment of uncertainty because, for the first time in my life, I understood the mother’s impulse. I felt like running through the dark, completely naked, not in a spirit of joy or even of exhibition but because it felt like the response to have, felt like night against nakedness might be the thing to heal what was hurting.

A few days later (I managed, by the way, to not run around my neighborhood in any form of nakedness, something I am certain the neighbors are extremely grateful for), when I could read again without feeling guilty (recriminations and apologies and a few nights of sleeping on it having done their trick), I picked up an anthology of poems I’d brought home from the library, flipped through it without much purpose, and let it open where the spine was cracked. And it
happened to be this poem:

Naked
~ Jennifer Michael Hecht

The reason you so often in literature have a naked woman
walk out of her house that way, usually older, in her front garden
or on the sidewalk, oblivious, is because of exactly how I feel right now.

You tend to hear about how it felt to come upon such a mythical beast,
the naked woman on the street, the naked man in a tree, and that makes
sense because it is wonderful to take the naked woman by the hand

And know that you will remember that moment for the rest of your life
because of what it means, the desperation, the cataclysm of what it takes
to leave your house naked or to take off your clothes in the tree.

It feels good to get the naked man to come down from there by a series
of gentle commands and take him by the elbow or her by the hand and
lead him to his home like you would care for a bird or a human heart.

Still if you want instead, for once, to hear about how the person came to be
standing there, naked, outside, you should talk to me right now, quickly,
before I forget the details of this way that I feel. I feel like walking out.

There it was, exactly: the poem I needed to read and just the moment I needed it; the emblem of my small adversity offered up, beauty in the place of rage. Also: magic. I don’t know how the magic happens, how I stumble upon a poem I need when I need it, but it does. The poet
Brendan Kennelly (I seem to be stuck with the Irish poets today, don’t I?) writes that  “Poetry is, above all, a singing art of natural and magical connection because, though it is born out of one person's solitude, it has the ability to reach out and touch in a humane and warmly illuminating way the solitude, even the loneliness, of others.”  There are many poetic-device things I love about Hecht’s poem—like the way most of it focuses on your response to the idea of the naked man or woman, how you might handle such a situation, rather than the elephant in the poem, the thing no one wants to look at but yet can’t stop eyeing, just from the periphery (and just as we might both look and not look, want to and not want to look, at an actual naked human striding around our suburban normalcy): the naked woman. By not ever telling us how the woman feels, but inviting us to ask her, the poem lets the reader connect. But I love even more that it simply exists, and that someone else has felt “this way that I feel.” And I love that the poem came to me at the right time, a balm.

I’m not sure exactly when I forgot I needed to read poems. I think it has to do with work, because when I do get a question that’s about books, it’s never (literally:  never) about books of poems. I want to be able to quickly and confidently recommend a novel to a patron, want to have read more than I have, and reading poems in that context seems pointless. A waste of time. No one will ask me to recommend a poem to them. But I know this: I needed to be reminded. I needed the coincidence of a random anthology I took out from the library’s poetry section because (honestly) I liked the typesetting on the cover, and I liked the title; needed the random fact that “The Wasteland” was included in it. Needed T. S. Eliot’s work to be an emblem of the lack of feeling the lack of poetry engendered.

Literary FYI: William Wordsworth

Today (April 7...it might be yesterday by the time I get this written!) is the poet William Wordsworth's birthday. I know: it's a fact that will stop your life in its tracks, causing you to break out in unfettered joy. For certain.

I've just spent a good half-hour trying to write about why Wordsworth's birthday would matter to anyone. But it's coming out all stuffy and scholarly and boring; details about the Romantic period in writing, and his Lyrical Ballads, and how his poems revolutionized poetic thought are hard to write about in a bloggerly way. So, here I go: I'm going to delete all the drivel, and just say this: 

I was thinking about poetry tonight after work, and about the things I studied for my Bachelor's, and how happy it made me to finally be learning about literary stuff. At work, we were talking about the value of a humanities degree, and while the world definitely doesn't place much value on learning about books, ideas, philosophies, or ways of thinking critically, I still value it. Studying different historical periods and movements in literature felt like putting together a puzzle for me; all my life I'd heard or read about things like romanticism, or the Victorian era, or feminism, but I didn't really understand it. Whether or not the world in general values it or even cares (and, trust me: it doesn't), some of my life's best experiences came in my college English classes.

And maybe the world is right: maybe my knowledge of the romantics doesn't do much for me. It certainly hasn't brought me much money! But I still cherish what Wordsworth brought into my life, the knowledge of people who paid attention, and wrestled with words, and did both things in an attempt to make art---to create something larger than themselves. Wordsworth is a case-in-point of that idea: More than 200 years after his first poems were published, and nearly 16 decades after his death, I'm here, thinking about his poems, his ideas, his life, and in that way he continues to matter, even thought the mattering is pretty small compared to things like recessions and presidents, basketball madness and whether or not Jessica Simpson is still hot or not.

Maybe it would be seasonally appropriate to share his daffodil poem, considering how the lines "they flash upon that inward eye/which is the bliss of solitude" are some of my favorites, and especially how my daffodils were particularly gorgeous today, when it finally warmed up. But I'm going to share my favorite Wordsworth sonnet instead, just because I love it so much and because I want someone else to think about the poem today (or tomorrow), too. It says much that I feel but cannot say in another way.

THE world is too much with us: late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. -- Great God! I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Solitary Run

I was feeling a little bit sorry for myself at the start of the half marathon I ran on Saturday. For one, the cool-but-sunny morning I had hoped for hadn’t happened. Instead it was freezing: low thirties with intermittent snow. And not just snow, but spitting snow, splayed through the air by bitter wind. Plus, I wasn’t sure I was ready. No; I was certain I wasn’t ready. My longest run since my last half was only seven miles. I was afraid my ITB would start to hurt, or that I wouldn’t have enough stamina to finish. But what really had me gloomy was a little bit of down-right pathetic loneliness. My friend who I’d planned to ride to the race with had decided not to run it. And even if she had come, she’s much faster than I am, so it’s not as if we’d have run the race together. As I walked from the parking lot to the starting line (bundled up in a wind breaker, a long-sleeve, insulated turtleneck running shirt, gloves, and ear warmers, yet already shivering), it seemed like everyone around me had someone to run with: husbands and wives, big groups of friends. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, to have a friend to run with? Someone with a similar pace and a similar crazy desire to run long distances, even in the cold?

I wasn’t sure what to do with my race number. Usually I pin it somewhere low on my shirt, but I didn’t want it underneath my jacket; plus, there was the off chance that it would magically warm up, and I could unzip my jacket—which would be problematic if my number was pinned across the front of it. Plus I couldn’t stand the thought of listening to it crinkle and rustle in the wind. I’ve a weird thing about sounds when I’m running. I don’t carry a water bottle, for example, because the sound of the water sloshing around with each step makes me want to hurl. A number rustling in the wind would make me equally nauseous. So I walked up to a complete stranger—an older, grandmotherly-type woman even more bundled than I—and asked her to pin my number on my back. I asked another complete stranger where to put my timer, as I’ve never run a race with one. (It goes around your ankle. Good to know.) And that, dear reader, was the extent of my race conversations.

So I wasn’t very cheery or optimistic when the gun went off. Except—it is hard to maintain gloom when you’re running in a big group of cheering runners, even if you feel like you’re the only one there without a friend. The cold began dissipating as I began to run, and even with the course’s only real uphill, I managed an exactly-nine-minute pace for the first mile. I didn’t even turn on my music, just ran and thought, trying to find my stride, listening to the voices around me, blurred from individual words to sound by my ear warmers. The swish of my jacket, the staccato of feet hitting the pavement, that tiny sound a snowflake makes, falling on your shoulder. Suddenly the cold seemed perfect; my cheeks were stinging with the snow, and occasionally my eyelashes filled up with it, but the rest of me was pleasantly warm.

The miles slid past. The first three felt fast and easy; by mile four I had slowed down a bit, the road’s berm beginning to take its inevitable toll on my ITB, starting the painful numbness along the bottom outside of my knee that's something akin to that feeling you get when you bump your elbow on something—but nothing too painful. I turned my music on, took a bite of Cliff Blok and a gulp of water at the four-mile water station, and settled into my run. Despite the cold, the nervy knee pain, the want of a running friend, I found that place in my head, the one that makes me love running, a quiet zone that must, by its very definition, be void of the negativity that’s usually sprinting around in my head. It’s not even a place that’s filled with encouragement. It’s just...quiet.

At about seven and a half miles, though, my body was like "OK, that’s as far as we need to go. That’s as far as we usually go. That’s as far as we’ve gone for a long, long time. That’s as far as we’re going. Really? We’re going to keep going?" and my quads were starting to sing an unpleasant tune. My quiet place slipped away. This part of the race was on a country road weaving through cold fields. Horses galloped their own races, up to and away from the road, a course only instinct could show them. Then it met up with the lower part of the Provo River Trail, which I’ve never been on, a tunnel through still-naked trees and swampy bits of marshes, then houses. Out of my quiet spot, I had to coax myself not to stop, and my pace became a mantra: keep going, keep going. Every once in awhile, a huddled group of people would appear on the side of the trail, cheering the runners on. As I ran, and ran, and ran, I started thinking about my loneliness at the beginning of the race. I watched the three girls I’d been following for the past two miles, listened to their voices, saw the way their strides all matched. But I wasn’t lonely anymore.

Instead, I remembered: this is what I do. Most things, for me, aren’t about doing with someone else. Mostly I am alone. And it wouldn’t matter, anyway, even if I’d come to that race with 18 other friends who also ran some miles in nine minutes and others in eleven, because in the end, everyone has to run the race on her own. The friend next to you can’t run it for you. No one else could be that voice in my head, the one saying keep going, keep going. No one else but me could hush the "you’re not strong enough to do this" voice. No one else but me could make me just keep going. And probably I wasn’t getting enough oxygen, but it started to feel like that’s how life is, too, not just running. People at your side make it easier. The cheering of spectators along the way gives you bits and bursts of energy. The thought of someone waiting for you at the finish line helps pull you along. But no one else runs the race. Just you, alone, pushing along.

I found a long-buried poem, C.P Cavafy 's "The Road to Ithaca," surfacing in my mind. "Hope your road is long," I kept thinking, instead of keep going. I had started with Laistrygonians in my soul, had brought along my demons, but I had dropped them along the way. Exhausted, my legs wanting to stop, I didn’t want the race to end, didn’t want to get to the finish line. I wanted instead to keep running, to keep wanting to get to the end, to keep anticipating it while I grew "rich with all I gained on the way." To have the running be the point of everything, and not the end of running. But it came anyway, the end. I ran the last block, looking for Kendell and the kids, and when I saw them at the finish line I nearly cried I was so glad to see them—to know I managed the race alone, as I had to, but also not alone, because they were waiting for me, filled with a new knowledge that life is always like that, that everyone is both alone and not alone, and that there are people cheering us on, and that someone is always waiting for us at the end.

"The Road to Ithaca"
~ C. P. Cavafy

When you set out for Ithaka 
ask that your way be long,
full of adventure, full of instruction.
The Laistrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon - do not fear them:
such as these you'll never find
as long as your thoughts is lofty, as long as a rare
emotion touch your spirit and your body.
The Laistrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon - you will not meet them
unless you carry them in your soul,
unless your soul raise them up before you.

Ask that your way be long.
At many a summer dawn to enter
- with what gratitude, what joy - ports seen for the first time;
to stop at Phoenician trading centres,
and to buy good merchandise,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensuous perfumes of every kind,
sensuous perfumes as lavishly as you can;
to visit many Egyptian cities,
to gather stores of knowledge from the learned.

Have Ithaka always in your mind.
Your arrival there is what you are destined for.
But do not in the least hurry the journey.
Better that it lasts for years,
so that when you reach the island you are old,
rich with all the you gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to give you wealth.

Ithaka gave you the splendid journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She hasn't anything else to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka has not deceived you. 
So wise have you become, of such experience
that already you will have understood what these Ithakas mean.