All Images and Text Copyright (c) 2009-2011 Michele Marie Summerlin Shimchock. All rights reserved.
All Images and Text Copyright (c) 2009-2011 Michele Marie Summerlin Shimchock. All rights reserved. I know a lawyer who will eat your face off if you use any of my stuff without prior written permission from me. Thank you.
"It would have to shine. And burn. And be / a sign of something infinite and turn things and people nearby into their wilder selves / and be dangerous to the ordinary nature of signs and glow like a tiny hole in space / to which a god presses his eye and stares. Or her eye. Some divine impossible stretch / of the imagination where you and I are one."
An excerpt from "Something New under the Sun" from Steve Scafidi's Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer
Today is my last day with Mr. T. I’m going to miss him. He’s 88 years old and lives in an assisted living facility. A little over two months ago, he lost his wife of 62 years, and he is a very sad man. He has spent his entire life hyper-focused on being a “business man” and developing big things like subdivisions and golf courses. I believe he has a lot of regrets. I know he has a lot of stories, and I have been trying to get him to tell them to me. But he’s not much of a talker.
I pick him up after lunch, and we drive around town. Check up on his subdivision-in-progress. Hang out at the golf course club house. A quick jaunt to the office. An impromptu trip to the doctor to flush the wax out of his ears. Yes, we really did that.
A couple of days, because of the storms and heavy rain, we went to his house. He would shuffle around some papers on his desk. Then, he would lie down on his wife’s bed. He’d pull her pillow under his head, take off his glasses. He napped. Each day, my heart broke, and I sat on the couch. Flipped through Poets & Writers. Was mindful of the thunder. Intrigued by the lightning, as always. I wrote a poem for him.
In fact, I began my new poetry manuscript project thanks to Mr. T. This idea has been brewing in my head for six years, and finally, I have my first poem. Also to thank is the mystery dove that’s been hanging out on one of the power lines in front of the house, both early in the morning and late, late at night in the thick blue fog. I imagine her a mother dove.
And, in spite of the steady rain, she remained there, stoic.
Today is a new day with a new moon, a day with new hopes.Green beginnings.I woke up today, and I breathe.I slept next to the man I love, although I did not sleep very well.It’s the matter of uncertainty and this pesky nerve-thing that causes my left thigh to fall asleep whenever I lie down.And it burns, burns, burns a bonfire from the inside out.I’m not worried.It will subside.
Today I breathe, and I write, take a step back.Welcome myself, again, to this sanctuary of blank space.
Hello.
So, I won’t say too much about that evaluation-to-hire job that I started at the end of March.Obviously, it didn’t become permanent.They said they just didn’t have the revenue.In these times, however, no one has enough revenue.And I won’t say anything at all about working for an employment company.
I will say that I learned a lot about industrial wastewater treatment; I learned more about chemicals than I cared to.I learned about hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, diatomaceous earth, and caustic soda.I learned that hydrogen peroxide is considered a hazardous material.My understanding that I am a verbal girl (as opposed to a math-and-science girl) has been fully reinforced.
Altogether, it was a learning experience, so I cannot say it was all for naught.
This afternoon, I will meet an elderly gentleman who needs an afternoon companion.It’s something I’ve agreed to do for a friend’s mother while she is out of town for a week or so.I’m excited about it.Maybe he will need me as much as I need him.
And who knows where I go from here, but you will be right there beside me, won’t you?
I have pictures I want to post from our day trip to the creek a couple of Saturdays ago.
I want to tell the world about the wonderful growth and transformation my son is making in his new school program.
Congratulations are in order to a college friend who just had the most amazing birth experience earlier today.
Another friend just signed a lease on her new living space that bursts with possibility, and another friend in Colorado signed the lease for her new business venture, her very own medical practice.
I have so many stories to tell. So many stories.
But, today, my story is that I was offered an evaluation-to-hire, full-time position through a staffing agency in just a matter of hours. After months of independent searching, months of wrangling back and forth with the first staffing agency, months of unanswered calls and emails, and a mound of rejection letters that would heat a house in the winter, I was offered this position in a matter of hours. It was like a gift or a sign. I could not say “No.” I could not say “Please, can I have until Monday?” I start first thing tomorrow.
What my boyfriend and I were not prepared for, however, was the sheer disappointment of it.
For the last six months, we have done a lot of work. We have spent numerous hours in conversation. We have worked hard on our relationship. We have been inseparable. And we have been poor. Very poor. But it’s almost as if we grew together these past few months, like a tree will grow around a spike or wire and make that spike or wire a part of its core. And, now, it feels impossible to pull apart from one another. We both know it is necessary. We both know it is a bit of a blessing and good fortune. We both know it is a tremendous opportunity. But we both know it is a major adjustment as I have been a permanent fixture in this house for the last six months. We both are sad, stomping around and pouting like two children who have had their lollipops confiscated. We both are overjoyed.
The complexities of the human condition, of our human conditions as they are unique to each of us, are like little mysteries that we get to solve each and every day. And they are beautiful; they are difficult; they are sure as the fat, yellow moon that rose above the horizon this evening, with its hazy-soft halo hung low in the humidity.
For weeks now, I have been pondering this blog, asking myself questions like, “Why blog? Why is it important? Is it even important? Isn’t it a little narcissistic or self-important? Why put such personal bits of your life right out there in the open for anyone to see? And who would care, anyway? Everyone has a life he or she is living right now at the very same moment you are. And everyone has a past. And these lives have the potential to be far more interesting and exciting than anything you have to offer. Why not just put it all down in one of your many hand-written journals?” The questions could march on, fall down, and continue to roll along the slippery slope.
I measure the growth of my life by the number of its fractures. There have been many, and each fracture seems to have been a starting-over. Like a new life, but not a new life, exactly. And in the manner of fractures, I like to believe that each one heals over as a broken bone heals and is stronger along the fault line than before. But the truth is: I carry these bone-bits. They are gathered in a black velvet bag the shape of my heart, and it has a silver drawstring to keep them all safe inside. I wish I could open that bag, shake the bones between the palms of my hands, and release them onto the table top. I wish I could read those bones and have them tell me a fractured story that reveals the whole truth and the truth about what comes next.
I own my loneliness, and lonely is a difficult text, at best. One could be physically surrounded by some of the greatest people in the world and still be lonely. I suppose I am looking to share my loneliness with the world and hold hope that others will find solace and a kindred spirit in me and in the words and experiences about which I write. I want to share with others what is, what has been, and what will be difficult, then show them that it is possible for light to be born of so much darkness.
It’s not that I’m fishing for “followers.” Or playing a popularity game. Or fretting over the number of hits and visits to my page. Or obsessing about whether or not a reader left a comment. But the comments are a nice surprise, like flowers on your doorstep when you least expect them. Because those comments aren’t just unexpected flowers; those comments are other individuals who just stopped by, knocked on the virtual doorframe just to say, “I know this; I know you.”
And with that, the loneliness eases—if only for a little bit.
I must be repaying some kind of cosmic debt to which I am completely unaware, and I must admit: it’s bringing me down. And even though I felt like crawling back into the bed this morning and staying there beneath the constant hug of the down comforter, I resisted. Instead, I did a little paper cleansing.
I am a borderline hoarder, especially when it comes to keeping my paper records: paid bills, insurance EOBs, bank statements, paycheck stubs, receipts from when I bought gas during Christmas 2008. I stack them up in neat little piles on my desk, and after a while, the piles grow a little unruly. So, today, I gave it up to the shredder. My desk is still a mess, but the unnecessary paper has been eliminated.
Doing this, however, only reinforced how badly the boyfriend and I need to get on with renovating that spare room into my office. But such a big task takes a little bit of money, and money is the one thing I’m presently living without.
I am a sentimental person, and I like to keep things that are of sentimental value to me. I often wish I were the type of person who could just toss things out, set them next to the curb for collection, and just let it go. But I’ve moved so many times and have lived without the people I love for so long that these trinkets hold memories and have become replacements for the people I don’t get to see very often, if at all. My stuff deserves its own room or as the boyfriend calls it, “my own space.” And I couldn’t agree with him more.
In the spirit of Virginia Woolf, I need a “room of one’s own.” There, I could write without disturbance, whether it is a poem or a blog update. I would set up a makeshift worktable where I could hand-bind art books until my fingertips bleed and my heart’s content. I could handcraft notecards that incorporate my original photographs, quirky designs, and found art.
I admit that I am sensitive: to words, to actions, to energies. I am a Cancer. We are, by nature, sensitive to all things almost to a fault, and shifts in time, at least for me, are not excluded. Last night, most clocks “sprung” forward an hour, just one hour. And in the grander scheme of things, what is an hour, really? Right? But that loss of an hour to my circadian rhythm is the equivalent of a day. Perhaps, even, more like a week.
I woke up this morning with this inner nagging that I was missing something. And it seemed like I was missing so much more than an hour. That hour could have been spent with a chapter or two of a good book, a cup of spearmint tea too hot to drink, in the arms of my lover as we contemplate all the promises of spring: grass growing greener day by day, buds emerging on the lilac bushes, sprouts on the sugar maple despite its dying from the inside out.
I must make a concerted effort not to squander so much of my time.
Which reminds me of one of my favorite poems ever written…
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
by James Wright
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year’s horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life.
I haven’t updated this blog like I would really like to this past week. It’s not that I haven’t done anything special—because I have. I went to a poetry reading/open mic night last Tuesday. I read three poems for open mic, and I was a shaky, sweaty, nervous mess, but I loved it! It was my first time at the Poetry Lounge, which takes place at Studio Roanoke, a wonderfully intimate theater that I wished more people would support. But, then again, I try not to expect too much of Roanoke anymore. And I’m awfully disappointed in the Commonwealth of Virginia here lately, as well, what with our fine elected officials (not by me) trying to deny gay students rights against discrimination AND cutting funding for the already-emaciated Arts and Education.
I just haven’t been feeling well. I’m not talking about a case of the sniffles or hayfever or a general end-of-winter malaise. There’s this disquiet inside of me, and it grows from the center. It’s got spiritual arms, emotional legs, intellectual fingers and toes, and black, empty eyes. It is hungry, and I don’t quite know how to feed it. What I do know is that this growing thing inside needs a job and health insurance, and, believe me, I’ve been diligently searching, applying, waiting, calling, revising, applying, waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and calling, and testing, and waiting, waiting, waiting. There has been little forward movement. But I can say, with 100% certainty, that I can type 55 wpm with 100% accuracy; I am 100% efficient in my data entry skills; I am 90% customer service ready, and I possess advanced skills with Microsoft Word and Excel. Who doesn’t want a temp with two college degrees who is willing to work for minimum wage? Sounds like a damn good deal to me.
Feeling put-out like this always intensifies the physical pain, too. On a good day, it’s not easy to have a non-specific, yet-to-be-identified, auto-immune dysfunction that causes inflammation in the blood vessels of your retinas and sets all your connective tissue on fire, whether those connections are in your knees, the balls of your feet, your shoulders, or your spine. Vasculitis, they say, but they don’t know why. “A curious case, indeed!” the Big Doctor at UVa proclaims. But, on a bad day like Saturday, this dis-ease will leave you flat in the bed, especially if it aggravates the neck injury you sustained in a car accident a few years ago. Silent tears will fall down your face and into your ears like you’ve rolled sideways in the swimming pool, and they are silent because you simply can’t bear the physicality of sobbing.
Right now, the shadows outweigh their light source, and I abide, patiently, patiently.
Merriam-Webster Online describes *prosaic* and *daze* as the following (and I am forever fascinated by the etymology of all words English).
In fact, when I was married, I almost bought the entire Oxford English Dictionary in print, but it was expensive, (it, now, runs almost $1,000.00!) and I knew I would be getting a divorce in the very near future, and since said divorce, I have been brokebrokebroke. Seriously, broke. But I *will* own it in some form, some day.
Main Entry: pro•sa•ic Pronunciation: \prō-ˈzā-ik\ Function: adjective Etymology: Late Latin prosaicus, from Latin prosa prose Date: circa 1656 1: a characteristic of prose as distinguished from poetry: factual b: dull, unimaginative 2: everyday, ordinary; (heroic characters wasted in prosaic lives — Kirkus Reviews) — pro•sa•i•cal•ly \-ˈzā-ə-k(ə-)lē\ adverb
Main Entry: daze Pronunciation: \ˈdāz\ Function: transitive verb Inflected Form(s): dazed; daz•ing Etymology: Middle English dasen, from Old Norse *dasa; akin to Old Norse dasask to become exhausted Date: 14th century 1: to stupefy especially by a blow: stun 2: to dazzle with light — dazenoun — da•zed•ly \ˈdā-zəd-lē\ adverb — dazed•ness \ˈdā-zəd-nəs, ˈdāzd-\ noun
I know this blog is in its infancy; it really hasn’t decided what it wants to be yet; it hasn’t discovered its purpose. But I would be okay with it if it wanted to remain without a specific purpose.
I do know, however, what it is not. It is not a business-centered venture. It has no specific formula for success. It is not a marketing device and is not designed to make money. It really isn’t even a lifestyle blog, although it does and will contain tidbits of my life as I try to live it. Who knows? It may grow into vignettes of how this one woman survived life, still breathing but not unscathed. And with a few of the poems that carried her through along the way.
And I know why I named it Prosaic Daze. The words are often prose as distinguished from the poetry I post here. However and more importantly, I named this blog Prosaic Daze because I want readers to know and understand that, sometimes, some things considered dull, unimaginative, mundane, or banal can simply dazzle, stupefy, and stun you with their inherent beauty.
Because there is beauty in all things; sometimes, you just have to let open that third eye to find it. Sometimes, finding the beauty in plain, ugly things is all that will carry you through to the next vibrant sunrise. And the sun *will* rise.
I had a conversation with my half-sister on Tuesday evening.She is 25 years old, married, and has two children.She also had a relationship, if a somewhat fractured one, with our father.But I believe all of my father’s relationships were fractured because, from the beginning, he was a broken man.I imagine he descended from the womb like that.
Those of you who know me are probably saying, “What?!?Sister?You?You’re an only child!”For all intents and purposes, this is true.I am the only child of my mother, who divorced from my father some time shortly after my first birthday.But I still have a picture of the split second following his moment of brilliance when he thought it would be funny to shove my face smack down into the cake’s center.Had I known then the things I know now, I would have been pissed.I should have screamed and cried and flung my limbs all about until someone took me out of that high chair.But I didn’t do this, so maybe I enjoyed it?That was a long time ago, and my memory is a little fuzzy.For the record, however, I never shoved my own son’s face into his first birthday cake.
I also have a picture of my father with my mother’s brother.They were close, and, to this day, Henry says, “Danny taught me how to be a man.”I wish someone could say the same for Danny.Hard liquor, Budweiser, cigarettes, and women: these were a few of his favorite things.He married five times before he died.Apparently, he was pretty magnetic and smooth—parts of him I never knew.Well, I never knew much about him anyway.But I know he loved his cigarettes so much that, in spite of having a softball-sized cancer tumor in his lung, he continued to smoke.Lung cancer killed him in February 2007.I have his obituary on my desk, which I printed out from a Google search.I was planning a reunion for Father’s Day that year.I thought it would be a good time for my 10 year old son to meet his grandfather.Well, you can’t have a reunion when the guest of honor is dead, and because we were so estranged, I didn’t expect to cry, but I did.A hard, long, guttural, lung-shuttering cry.It must have been the surprise of it all.He was only 50 years old.I tried to find him some years before, but that Google search only turned up information on his “fourth or subsequent” DUI.I chased that phantom-man around every jail and penitentiary in Northern Virginia, but he was nowhere to be found. He must have had a good lawyer and used all the back child support to pay the attorney's fees.
Habits die hard, and you can’t escape the double-helix.I didn’t even have to be around him to live his kind of life.I was a chain-smoking, drunken philanderer who tried to commit suicide and spent some time in a PsychCenter—all between the ages of 15 and 30.But I’m trying my damnedest to turn over every green leaf in my path.I wish I could ask him the burning question, “Why did you try to commit suicide?”I will forever wonder what the answer would be, if it would be anything like mine.
I also have a half-brother who is 27 and another half-sister who is 20.Christmas of 1992, I went to visit my father, his wife, and my three half-siblings.I believe the youngest was just 2 years old at the time.I spent the entire afternoon at their house just catching up.My father was too embarrassed to drink his Budweiser or smoke his cigarettes in front of my legal guardians, one of whom was a preacher, so he would excuse himself to the fridge then head down the hall to his bedroom where he lit the stick.One time, I followed him back to that room, and he explained his embarrassment over the drinking and smoking.And he was nervous talking to me.It was as if, at any moment, I would morph into Medusa and command my head of snakes to bite his face off.That day, I think my father spoke the most honest words he would ever say to my face.Actually, that was the last day he and I ever spoke. I was 17.
Our father did the same thing to the youngest sister that he did to me, the whole out-of-sight-out-of-mind mentality.She just wasn’t old enough to insist on a relationship like the other two could.And until I can talk to her directly, I’m just saying that by the time she was old enough and could rush to his side, she probably had no desire to do so.Anger is hungry and powerful.I know that by the time I was old enough, I lived too far away, and by the time I lived closer, before the days of the Internets, I didn’t know how to find him.I’m still angry with him to some degree, but hell if it isn’t hard to stay mad at a dead man.Besides, he’s coming to see me in my dreams, uninvited, of course.Sleep is hard enough for me to do on my own without him showing up all crazy hours of the morning.
Our father’s habits covered him like a thick skin, and he took pride in them like a Boy Scout boasts about each of his earned badges.Our father was famous for calling up to say that he’d “be there in a few minutes, get the bags packed, be waiting on the porch,” and then, he would never show up.I would sit outside on top of my suitcase on the wraparound porch for hours, watching the daylight fade to dusk and dusk turn night.I would insist that he would be there; “He’ll be here.”But he wouldn’t be here; he was always somewhere over there doing something other than that visitation thing, and my mother would drag me inside, eventually—all kicking, screaming, and flailing limbs against an ink-black sky.This was a pattern he repeated often, and he even repeated it with my siblings, too.Further, he was a chronic job-hopper.Always one step ahead of the Department of Child Support Enforcement, and if he wasn’t that one step ahead and they caught up with him, he certainly would be that one step ahead first thing tomorrow.
I’d like to know about the good things I inherited from him, if I inherited anything good from him.Maybe I’ll ask him one night in my sleep, and maybe it will be him and not just some figment of him, and maybe I won’t be so bitter and hardened because it really is hard to stay angry with a dead man who was born so broken in the first place.
Inspired by Dorothea Lange’s Tractored Out, Childress County, Texas, 1938, A photograph taken during her tenure with the Farm Security Administration
I. Security
The government controlled the development process, kept a tight grip on the negatives, dictated just what and just how much truth was released to the public. But they underestimated the power: speed of the shutter, grip of the lens, how one woman could harness blatant lies told by natural light. She could photograph a soul without a single body trapped in the picture.
II. Agency
We did not know, some sixty years prior, we’d been caught in a frame. The taxed-out state of soil not yet evident, sold undisclosed. We did not know our new coat of paint would peel like dead skin from a clapboard farmhouse in the heart of drought. Can we be blamed for our love, long dead before the purchase—a gray-scale field, one thousand rows, monochrome rainbows bled fruitless to frowns?
Here, lately, with all the topsy-turvy things going on, I regret that some pharmaceutical company hasn’t come up with an anti-nausea medication for your life events and subsequent emotions. Maybe they have, and I just haven’t been informed of what it is yet. Maybe it’s Thorazine and a rubber room? But this is why liquor was under my employ for so long. Nights after days like today, I would love nothing more than to down a fifth of vodka and club sodas, all fizzy and salty and tart with a twist a lime. And tomorrow morning, I would wake with a hammer keeping time on my eardrum and a long string of sick balled up in my stomach like twine, but at least the chalk would have been erased from the blackboard. Tomorrow morning, I will actually wake up with all the psychic weight I will carry to bed with me tonight.
And my thoughts on faith will have to come another day. In fact, my thoughts on faith could fill a book in three or four volumes.
So, I’ve returned to the Tarot because it knows more than I do. The Tarot just knows. It takes your energy and manifests it in a spread. I trust energy; it’s ubiquitous. I had the great pleasure to meet up with some friends from college on Sunday and was given a reading by K. K is incredibly perceptive and intuitive and an all-around smarter-than-your-honor-student girl. She used a deck and spread with which I was unfamiliar, but the sentiments were the same.
The Querent card is the first card in the spread and it represents you, the person asking the questions. I didn’t ask a specific question; I just wanted a general reading because it had been so long since I’d had one. My Querent card on Sunday was Oppression, which I feel is pretty self-explanatory. And afterward, some pretty deep and deeply personal discussions ensued between the three of us. It will not be the last time.
Later that night, I had a specific question, so I broke out my deck from its dark wood box, carefully pulled away its silk covering, and proceeded to shuffle and shuffle the deck. I focused only on this one question and repeated it aloud until the cards started to get warm. I spread out a Celtic cross, which is the spread of my particular liking.
People read in different ways, and some may say that you are supposed to hand-pick your Querent card, but I like the deck to tell me how I’m feeling because, sometimes, I lie to myself to make myself feel better—like picking the Queen of Pentacles when I’m really the Three of Swords.
In relation to my question, the Querent card was the Knight of Wands, Reversed. The Knight of Wands is the card of Growth and Enterprise. He is a free will, Minor Arcana card, which means the Querent has the power to turn it upright, should she choose to do so, of course. In His reversed state, the Knight of Wands feels powerless, awry, disorganized, chaotic. He lends himself to a journey, but is the journey postponed or even worth taking in the first place? Certainly the other cards in the spread further illuminate the path to the ultimate outcome, but I’ve begun to see a pattern develop in the Querent, a pattern in me.
Tonight, I had another question because this is all I seem to be right now—question bones and query skin—and the deck tells me that I’m feeling a little Eight of Pentacles, Reversed. Mind you, some cards reversed in the Tarot deck can be a positive thing. The majority of the time, however, reversed means trouble, difficulty, or delay. The Eight of Pentacles’ focus is on productivity, but in its reversed condition it implies that a slow-down or impediment is evident. A lack of tools is indicated, and the “work” environment is mediocre, at best. On a literal level, perhaps, it’s suggesting a different place of work or a whole different career direction should be sought. And I’m okay with this. This is what I’ve been trying to do for the last three months. But it’s what the Eight of Pentacles, Reversed, suggests on the figurative level and in relation to the actual question that leaves my lip quivering just a bit.
A pattern is developing in the Querent, and that pattern is me.
My mother has a few stories of her own to tell. My mother’s stories would be enough to give you lockjaw and twist your spleen. My mother’s stories are fetched far beyond any modern-day soap opera story line.
My mother’s stories are sad and true.
My mother was born in 1955 in Barcelona, Spain. For a few years, she lived in Caracas, Venezuela. For a few more years, she returned to Spain, and a few years after that, she relocated to Puerto Rico for about six months. Her siblings, who were still in Caracas, joined her there, and this is where they lived while waiting for their green cards. Their mother, my grandmother, had been in the States for quite some time trying to build a decent life-nest before they arrived. They all have stories: my mom, my grandmother, my aunt, my uncle.
But they aren’t stories any of them want to tell.
When my mother moved to the States, she was 14 years old, and she lived in New Jersey. She spoke no English, but she went to an American high school, went to every American class. And, yes, she did have to walk to school…in the snow. Back then, there was no such thing as ESL or English as a Second Language; it was FOF, or Fight or Flight. Perhaps it was SOS, or Sink or Swim. And she fought a good fight, kept abreast with each labored stroke because she learned how to speak English by watching Sesame Street and The Monkees, which explains her life-long crush on Davy Jones. She tells me that learning to speak English was one of her most difficult accomplishments--next only to raising me, that is.
My mother first married at age 19, married a Southern, roughneck boy. He was my father, and he is dead now and comes to me often in my dreams as if to make peace, but I digress, and he deserves a story all his own. No one ever told my mother that there was such a thing as birth control, so, at almost 20, my mother gave birth to me. Our birthdays are just over a month apart. I’m a Cancer; she’s a Leo, and sometimes, when she wants (or needs) to, she will eat me alive and spit me back out with a different perspective. My mother did a lot of growing up in a very short amount of time, and it was hard on her. I don’t blame her for anything, and I like to say that we have a great relationship, albeit a very long distance one. But this is not to say I don’t have a bone to shake at her, because I do.
Learning to speak English on her own was so traumatic for my mother that she made a secret vow to herself that her child would never suffer like that. Her child would only speak English, and this was a promise she refused to break. I understand where she’s coming from. I really do. But every single day, I wish I could speak Spanish. I feel like there’s a hole in my cultural tongue. It contributes to my crisis of ethnicity. And when you fill out as many job applications as I have been, it becomes a repetitive crisis. Ethnicity and race? Um, I dunno. As many things as I do know, I don’t know how to check off these little boxes. Do I check Hispanic (Non-Latino)? Do I check White, even though my father’s mother was American Indian? Can I just check Two or More races and leave the Ethnicity blank? I don’t speak Spanish, and I cannot prove my grandmother was Cherokee.
I’m without a community, but I certainly look and talk like your plain-old, average white girl.
And when I get a job making some money, I'm buying myself The Rosetta Stone software.
I love Gertrude Stein, not because she was a lesbian and an expatriate, although lesbians and expatriates rank high on my admiration list. I love Gertrude Stein because she was imaginative, inventive; she challenges. She challenges and far surpasses any boundary of what is (or was) considered “mainstream.” Tender Buttons is to me, to this day, an inspiring work of literary art. Both of these poems were born of Tender Buttons, and one even borrows from it.
Servings
…and it is wet wet weather wet weather wet. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot and the steam rises; sequent torsos stretch to the light pull of the dusty stove fan. Its heat and red-hot rim, an exposed eye, hold me. Those bodies weeping, bleed kelly green, harmonic bend of tired spines press against the steel pot, stainless. This makes it art, found in a life so grown from dirt.
**********************************
Dreaming of Gertrude Before Morning Comes
Short days and nights shorter still and still is night when I no longer write the cycle begins again and again again and then I wake just wanting to take a lover and no belongings but this longing to run away.
“Individually, we are difficult. Together, we are impossible.” He said this to me yesterday, after our first joint-counseling session, and he is right.
We are energy people, and the energy is often palpable, perhaps a little salty, the consistency of homemade playdoh. But he, in particular, has the ability to manipulate his, to shift it, squeeze it, ball it up, and hurl it across the room—should he choose to do so. I, on the other hand, cannot do this. This is not to say that my energy does not shift or sway; this is to say that I cannot control it. We sat there together on a tattered couch in the center of a small room and watched this poor woman choke on what could only be felt but not seen. She didn’t know what to do with us; she couldn’t take a position, and she didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. She had seen him once before. Neither of us will be going back.
I love deeply and hurt easily; I am not quick to anger. What I do not know is this: how to forgive. Forgiveness is an art form, like putting a brush to canvas or modeling tool to moist clay, and you may do this a million times before you are good at it or have a complete peace. Lao-Tse said, “a thousand mile journey begins with one step.”
Seven years ago, my then-6-year-old son looked at me out of the blue and said, “Momma, you’re just like a cat in a tree.” And to this day, I say he’s too intelligent for his own good, but I took those words to heart. I have been thinking about those words for the better part of seven years now. Why would he say that to me? And, why, exactly, does a cat climb a tree?
I’m no animal behaviorist, but my first and foremost guess would be that a cat would climb a tree for protection from a predator. Or, because the cat is, by nature, a curious animal, and the added height gives it a certain perspective it otherwise does not have with its feet planted firmly on the ground. Maybe the cat was just checking out the world around it. Or, perhaps, because it just needed a quiet crook of a limb in which to cradle and take a nap. But that cat may have been hungry, too, and trying to satisfy its primal instinct to feed by hunting an unsuspecting robin as it was just about to light in its nest. A cat could climb a tree for one or none of these reasons. But, if that cat is me, it’s in that tree for all of those reasons.
Seven years ago, I was finishing grad school and my marriage had fallen gravely ill. Saturn was beginning its seven year transit through my astrological house, and Saturn is one stubborn, messy, slow-moving, bossy little bitch. Seven years ago, I did not fit in my body, and a fifth of vodka made me just liquid enough to be comfortable, if only for that night—and every night thereafter. The bad days didn’t seem so bad and the worse nights didn’t matter at all if I couldn’t remember them. Seven years ago, I was suffering a crisis of identity and crippled with existential depression. I don’t suffer so much with the identity issues anymore. I *know* who I am more today than I ever have. I’m just not too confident in why I am who I am, and I’m certainly not confident that I like her all the time.
I am a sensitive person. Overly so, in fact. And I have a teensy weensy problem with perfectionism. Addiction runs rampant on both sides of my family, and because of this, I never even had a chance. Because of this toxic cocktail of brain chemistry, I have struggled with depression for the better part of 20 years, which is, now, more than half of my life. I have tried just about every antidepressant under the blistering sun. I have seen cognitive behavioral therapists and psychiatrists and licensed professional counselors. I have self-medicated with all kinds of drugs and alcohol and cigarettes, and I know this probably makes me look like I ought to be locked in a sanatorium somewhere, but this little space on the World Wide Web is my canvas, and I want to paint it all the ugly colors of truth. And, trust me; you’re in trouble when you can’t confront the truth. I am sober now. I no longer drink, and I don’t abuse drugs. I also do not go to AA. And I would *love* to quit smoking, but I can’t seem to make it longer than two weeks. No matter what, I will continue to try. It’s just that cigarettes are my one last crutch, and some days, I feel so broken that they prop me up.
I am depressed in spirit, and I know it’s going to break my mother’s heart to read that. I have been let down and abandoned time after time, and my fathers haunt my dreams. Especially my stepfather who is still living. I have struggled—for myself, for my son, for others—and I know this is why I can’t sleep at night. In fact, it is 1:30 a.m., and I am still typing. Currently, I am living based primarily on the support of others. And when I say living, I mean food, water, heat, housing, toilet paper. This is disturbing to me. I have a friend who is battling a bedbug infestation many states away from me, and I worry about her living out of plastic totes and Ziplock bags for the next 18 months. I worry about her loneliness, and I dream about it at night. I know I can’t do anything about natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes, mudslides and tsunamis, but that doesn’t mean I don’t *want* to do anything about the hurt they inflict upon unsuspecting people. I haven’t been able to watch an ASPCA commercial, or a plea from the Christian Children’s Fund or St. Jude’s for that matter, since I was a small child. They make me want to vomit, and I will cry. I can’t force ugly, mean-spirited, hateful people to believe in peace, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to try.
And I cannot stress enough the gut-punching importance of love. But you’ve got to be open to it, and, after all this time, I still have trouble with this. I have labored very hard to make it through the last 34 years of this life alive. I am a dedicated and hard worker, although I may be a little too exacting. I just want to know when, and if, living gets any easier.
In fact, I began my new poetry manuscript project thanks to Mr. T. This idea has been brewing in my head for six years, and finally, I have my first poem. Also to thank is the mystery dove that’s been hanging out on one of the power lines in front of the house, both early in the morning and late, late at night in the thick blue fog. I imagine her a mother dove.
