november 29th.

in winter without you i send
a postcard from hawaii to myself
to somehow remind me of the week
after the first of august and towards the end
when summer would soon be placed on the shelf
and we would both realize that it really was
all just a waste of time.

Letter from Paradise. 2008.

October 2008.
Because I had been too tired too long and quarrelsome too much and too frightened of hangovers and failure and the days getting shorter, I was sent, a badly behaved twenty five year old child, to Brazil, where winter does not come and no one fails and the median age is twenty three. There I could become a new woman, there with the American construction workers on million dollar a year incentive trips, there with the Italian divorcees and the splurging secretaries and the girls in string bikinis and the boys constantly in search of something, children who were totally unconcerned regarding the economy of buying a motorbike or a surfboard for thirty American dollars, (fifteen Brazilian reais down and ten dollars, five reais, a week and then abandoning it; children who may or may have not been told, as I was told, that golden children all must, as chimney sweepers, face the dust. I was to lie beneath the same sun that had kept Astrud Gilberto and Brigitte Bardot forever hopeful. I was to play at sipping caiphirinas and wear flowers in my hair as if five years had never happened. I was to see for myself that just beyond the end of the line lay not “Despond” but secret islands of raw earthen clay and happy people without alcohol problems.

I went to Brazil as a dreamy visitor and have now since, come to bear a scary, wary resemblance of a person I didn’t want to emerge from the equator as, which has remained since my returning to the States. Simply put, I do not believe that the stories told by folklore or capoieria merit extensive study. I have never heard a Portuguese phrase, including and perhaps most particularly “beleza”, which accurately expressed anything I had to say. I have neither enough capacity for surprise nor enough heart for twice-told tales of unrequited love (Girl from Ipanema) or tedious vignettes (100 Years of Solitude) and the surprising lovely sight of prostitutes in muumuus. And so, now that it is on the line between us that for some reason I had lost a quite reasonable amount of temperament for paradise, real or not, I am going to find it difficult to tell you precisely how and why Brazil moves me, touches me, saddens and troubles and engages my imagination, my spirit and faith in people, what it is in the southern hemispheric air that will linger long after I have forgotten the smell of passion fruit and lime and the way the palms sound in the trade winds and what rainy mornings eventually would turn to look like after my first day of my first day of teaching job and everything in between.


February 2008.

The 9:45 p.m. Continental flight to Sao Paulo this evening was delayed two hours before take off from the airport in Houston. During the delay, the flight attendants served Coca-Cola and peanuts and two children played tag in the aisles and, somewhere behind me, a man began screaming at a woman who seemed to be his wife. I say that the woman seemed to be his wife only because the tone in of his invective voice sounded practiced, as though it were somewhat of a routine. Although the only words I heard clearly were these: “You are driving me to murder”. After a moment I was aware of the door to the plane being opened a few rows ahead of me, and of the man rushing off. At that time, there were quite a few flight attendants (Continental employees?) rushing on and off then, and considerable confusion even from my Ambianic state. The post-9/11 world, as we were living as travelers, had changed a great deal, and this commotion made me order a bourbon cocktail. I do not know whether the man ever re-boarded the plane before take off or whether the woman came to Brazil alone, but I thought about it while I was drinking that bourbon cocktail and I thought about it during breakfast the next morning, when I had emerged from my interrupted sleep, and I was still thinking about it when the first sight of the anticipated country appeared off of the left wing tip.
It was not until we were approaching Sao Paulo and were descending low over the city, minutes before landing, when I realized what I disliked most about all of this as an incident. I disliked it because of the couple. Because every aspect of a short story, one of those “little epiphany” stories in which the main character glimpses a crisis of a stranger’s life – a woman weeping in the powder room, or perhaps a tear room at a swank hotel, someone walking away from a lover, or an accident seen from the window of a train, “tear rooms” and “trains” still being fixtures of short stories although not of real life – and is moved to see his or her own life in a different light. I was not going to Brazil because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Brazil because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do. I want room for fresh flowers and emotions and people who may or may not be driving one another to murder but in any case are not provoked, by the demands of narrative conventions to say so out loud on the 9:45 p.m. flight from Houston to Sao Paulo.




Work in progress.

Brasil: A Traveler’s Guide.

I.
This time tomorrow,
I will be a woman of Brasil.

II.

I am
going
to
visit
Bahia.

III.

My fingers graze
the cold plastic walls.

A motionless aeroplane
goes shrieking over the bay of Mexico
and down to America Sol.

The captain has turned on the FASTEN SEATBELT sign.

"I can see the world and it ain't so big at all".


Brazil will be waking now.

We fall desperately into Sao Paulo.

VII.

who I am doesn’t matter
as you see me
fighting to survive.

fighting to be esteemed and honored
(so that my past vanishes)
you will dismiss me as nothing terrific

Fair enough
but there is one thing about me:
I can take you to Salvador.


VIII.

Now although I hate to travel
I go to a lot of places

and have noted

a certain recurrent phenomena.
A journey, for example,
begins with a voice

calling out your name
behind you.
This seems a convenient arrangement.

How else would you know it’s time to go?
On the other hand,
who is it?

And what do they want?
So too a friendship
begins before the first meeting,

love
before the first conquest.

maybe
the people of Salvador
can explain
some of this to me.

tired sex.

trying to strike a match in a matchbook
that has been laid up all winter under the woodpile
damp sulfur
on sodden cardboard.

i catch myself yawning through the window.
i watch mrs. whiskers the cat
batting around.

like turning the pages of a book the
professor assigned-

you ought to read it, he said.
it's great literature.

lost and safe.

In Ithaca,
even the lake that is in the nearby fields
can moisten the dry season
of the farms right outside of town,

could make men move mountains
for the healing green of the inner hills
glistening like slices of winter melon.

and we were graceful
as graceful can be

But we left home
to move freely.

There
in Ithaca

I gathered patience,
learning to walk
without breaking
the grace of my movements
dormant as butter cups
as redundant as the farmyard hens.

But I didn’t travel far
in surviving,
learning
to quiet the demons,
the noisy mouths of men.

And there was a young woman
who lived near the lake
who made jade green jewelry
next to the house where I watched
the Aurora Borealis
and the rising tide of locusts.

only I swarmed with others
to inundate another shore.

In Cleveland,
there are many streets
where women can stride along with men.

And in this other wilderness
the possibilities,
the loneliness
the emptiness
can strangulate like jungle vines.

The meager provisions and sentiments
of once obliging to
fermented roots consisting of dominoes and firecrackers-

set up in a flimsy house
in an apartment
in a forest of another nightless city.

A giant snake rattling above and

where dough-faced landlords
slip in and out of your keyholes,
taking claims you don’t understand,
tapping into your communications systems
of laundry lines and restaurant chains.

You find you need Ithaca
your one fragile glimpse of identification-
a jade link
on your left wrist
you remember the lake
and the stars
and the bare feet
and legs to walk
and thoughts to fly
and there is a body of water.
There
at that lake-

the constant space of your
happiness.

notes from a native granddaughter.

I wrap the blue towel
after washing in the pacific,
around the damp
weight of hair, heavy
as a sleeping cat,
and sit out on the porch.
Still dripping water,
it'll be dry by just about dinner time,
by the time the dust
settles off your shoes,
though it's only five
past noon. Think
of the luxury: how to use
the afternoon like the stretch
of lawn spread before me.
There's the laundry
sun-warm clothes at twillight,
and the mountain of stringbeans
in my lap. Each one,
I'll break and snap
thoughtfully in half.

But there is this slow arousal.
The small buttons
of my cotton blouse
are pulling away from my body.
I feel the strain of threads,
the swollen magnolias
heavy as a flock of birds
in the tree. Already,
the red velvet cake
is rising in the oven.
Set at 350 degrees
I know you'll say it makes
your mouth dry
and I'll watch you
drench each slice of it
with whole milk
and lick the plate clean.

So much hair, my grandmother
used to say, grabbing
the thick bun
in her hands while we washed
the breakfast dishes, discussing
dresses and pastries.
My mind sometimes elsewhere
as we did the morning chores together.
Sometimes, a few strands
would catch in her cocktail ring.
I worked harder then,
anticipating the hour
when I would let the tightly woven bun
down
at night to roll around in the strips of sheets,
knotted and tied,
while she slept in tight blankets near the
air-conditioner downstairs.
My hair, freshly washed
like a measure of wealth,
like a bridal veil
I used to dream about.
Crouching in the grass,
you would wait for the signal,
for the movement of curtains.

for virginia
and for charlie.

untitled #33.

although it is summer, I sit in the bathroom waiting
for the red eyes of the heater
to stare back at me
as I feel the sweat prickle behind my knees.

and the only thing I see, is that room outside
and everything in it.

i must stay still now
while I prepare for what might come next.

certain hard days ahead
when I’ll need what I know so clearly
this moment.

i am making use
of the one thing I learned and all the things my father tried to teach me
about the art of memory.

i am letting this room
and everything in it
stand for my ideas about time
and its difficulties.

i’ll let your faint whisper of questions,
slight discussions and
those spacious notes
of a moment ago,
stand for distance.

your scent,
of hinted spice and a wound,
I’ll let that stand for my only distraction
keeping me from writing other things
that hold real necessity.

around, the walls of this room
and everything in it, a voice
goes whispering,
just be careful

your old bloated belly
is the daily cup
of coffee I drink
each morning when i've already forgotten
about you.

the picture of your brother
above the kitchen sink
is when he was young and you were king.
and how you used to build towers
made of recycled vine
that stretched
high above the sky
and eventually fell
all around your feet.

i'm beginning to see the difference
between places and faces.

the sun on that face
of the wall
is god, the face
i can’t see, my soul.

and so on, each thing
standing for a separate idea,
and those ideas forming the constellation
of my greater thought
not pertaining to you.

still, one day, when I need
to tell myself something intelligent
about this occasion,

i’ll close my eyes
and recall this room and everything in it:
that in this room, the only thing gone uncovered
was when we would lie and discover what each other’s bodies
were made for.

now
i’ve forgotten my
idea.

nevertheless,
i continue to look around, this time, just
merely with a glance here and there,
sitting on the carpet in front of the
blue sofa
in a curtainless morning
with my nerves open to the air like
something skinned,
hoping to trick myself into some interior vision,
but all i saw
was a man and a woman in a room across town
making their beds and laughing.

the book
on the windowsill, riffled by wind –
the even numbered pages are
the past, the odd –
numbered pages, the future.

your thoughts are songs for the dreams your brother had about
different ways to die.

my idea
has evaporated.

it's funny, really.

because all of this had
something to do with
with a message or a phone call,
a chance meeting,
a bad fuck that lasted too long

it had something
to do with a room and
everything in it

where
in one afternoon I learned
I could never
love you.

december.

sometimes you have to take
your own hand
as though you were a lost child
and bring yourself stumbling home

back home
over twisted ice

witness drifts over your house.
a page of warm light
falls steady from your open door.

here is your bed, folded open
Lie down and let the blue
snow cover you.

2007.
for m.

things to pack and wear.

assignment:

Find Arthur “Bobby” Harrison.
Find G.B. Smith.
both living somewhere in upstate New York.
Ask them about 1971.
Then ask them about Attica.
They will be expecting you.
But, first
go to Albany.


to pack and wear:

2 skirts
2 house dresses
2 t-shirts
2 sleeveless shirts
1 pullover sweater
boots
soft socks
bra
nightgown, robe, slippers
cigarettes
bourbon
bag with:
shampoo
toothbrush and paste
lip salve
aspirin, prescriptions, tampax,
face cream, powder and baby oil

to carry:
mohair throw
2 scarves
laptop
2 legal pads and pens
list of telephone numbers
house key

This is a list that is taped inside my closet door on the third floor of my mother’s house for the past two years as I have lived there more or less steadily. The list enables me to pack, without thinking, for any piece I was likely to do.

Notice the deliberate anonymity of costume: in a skirt, a sleeveless shirt, and boots – articles of clothing that would allow me to pass on either side of the socioeconomic bed.

Notice the mohair throw for truck-line flights (i.e. no blankets) and for the motel room in which the air conditioning could not be turned off. Notice the bourbon for the same hotel room. Notice the laptop for the airport, coming home: the idea was to call my mother, check in, find an empty bench, and start typing the day’s notes.

It should be clear that this was a list made by someone who prized control, yearned after momentum, someone determined to play her role as if she had the script, heard the cues, knew her narrative.

There is on this list one significant omission, one article I always needed and never had: a watch.
I needed a watch not during the day, when I could turn on the car radio or ask someone, but at night, in the motel.

Quite often I would ask the desk for the time every half hour or so, until finally, embarrassed to ask again, I would call someone, gather up an excuse as to why I called in the first place, then kindly ask them the time.

In other words I had skirts, t-shirts, a pullover sweater, shoes, socks, bra, nightgown, robe, slippers, cigarettes, bourbon, shampoo, toothbrush and paste, lip salve, asprin, prescriptions, tampax, face cream, powder, baby oil, mohair throw, laptop, legal pads, pens, telephone numbers, and a house key, but I didn’t know what time it was.

This is perhaps a parable, either in my life as a writer during this past few years after college or of the period itself.