Rings in Rings

2011-04-16T13:42:00.000-07:00

I am reading tonight with Reg Gibbons and musician Mabel Kwan at an event co-sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and the PianoForte Foundation. (7 pm at the Fine Arts Building downtown.) Also on the bill are poets Ed Roberson and Christina Pugh. I'm very excited!

Here are the poems I plan to read. I'll be accompanied by 3 early compositions by John Cage.

***
Lingua

It started like this.
In delight.

How could I not see the leaves
ringing yellow with light,
taste the berry opening
on my tongue and not want
to tell you? If we

had never separated,
if we had gone on walking
hip to hip, then

just the extension of the arm, wonder
in the eyes, soft
fruit warm in the hand,
passed from my hand to
yours, just this
would have been enough.

But I walked further to gather.
You crouched waiting in hunt and what
I saw was petals
opening, a quickened winging!

How could I not pursue it?
How could I not come back

to tell you with my nimble
fingers, then a flutter
of music on my tongue.

My first word was look,
I met this missing
you—meet this—thus
an undercurrent of the word
is love.

*

When I Saw It

It was early in morning’s memory
with that fog around the edges
and me, wrapped in blankets, rocking

just up and over the rung of consciousness
into the blurred limbs I was coming
to know as my own, into a car

clapping through a broth of wind and rain,
parents murmuring in the front seat
over wiper beats and soft talk radio—

sounds to become the beginning and end
of love—a slow unwrapping
of cinnamon gum, and her, passing it to him

as he aims us straight and low.
The car slows. Then stops.
She opens the door

to asphalt, soaped sky.
Across the road, a workman
is climbing the hotel sign.

He scales the tight white rungs
until he’s high as the building,
until he’s no longer

what I understand as a man
but something small enough to hold
and bend, like an action figure

or poem. Is this the moment,
years later, when I realize the bag
slung over his heart

is filled with black letters?
Is this when I have him pause
at the top, hot luck rushing his limbs

one March dawn, and how long
can I stare like this—
at his body, interrupted with mist,

his tiny hand reaching into his tiny bag,
and me, clutching orange juice,
still swaddling my newness

in this world— before I see it:
no no no
of a moment

dropping through
the hollow pole
of a life and it goes on

happening yet
it happened almost slowly:
a man, falling,

like no more
than a bright spoked
star of snow.

With me there,
trying to wake.

*

Shetl

Rain falls all day on the day
your mother was born years before.
We’re so happy we have this soft rain,
this soft rain, someone says,
you think yes of the bloodroot pushing up
through its hood of skin. It will erupt
in a foam of white and yolk-yellow at the stem.
She was alive during the war
and safe enough on this half of the world.
But you saw her looking through
the hissing fence, pressing food
between its barbs with warm gloved hands.
She saw you too, then one day only
tired dirt and burnt grass
under the stench of skin.
She couldn’t wait to have you,
the boy with the marks on his back.
You grew and you were holy,
absorbing the blows of the rain.
Then you left, as if you could leave
the site of those gouged wings—
scars (behind the heart) of having fallen.

***

cold, cold, cold

the rearranging air

and held note of the yet

who are you

what you remember

a story

you can shine ahead

a few years

to where you are not

you and new

***

We climbed back from the beach
of three as shifting pools
dissolved the sky in swaths of peach and gold
and night folded us back to its bruise.
The dark seemed to rise like steam
from the earth, beginning in the ankles
of trees and leaves’ undersides
then up the black basalt and sand banks
until it soddenened our path, swallowing
our hands, our feet and we
could not see to see.
We pawed the ground for the soft
hemlock needles, flexed our toes
for the jutting stones
and called on our technologies,
lighting our keys, our keys, our keys.
I crawled on hands and knees
and yelled out commands while you cried
terrorized, you fell a long way
into memory falling. But somehow,
we reached the top, mostly unscathed
and after sleeping
late in time’s carapace,
we woke, alive for the first time.

***

Kauai

We’ve come back
to the site of her conception.

She calls it why
and cries all night sleepless, wild.

It seems the way is always
floating and the goal:

to live so the ghosts we were
don’t trail us and echo.

I think we are inside a flower,
under a pollen of stars vast as scattered sand.

The air pulses with perfume,
flowers calling to flowers and the ferrying air.

But my eyes are thin and elsewhere.
I am thinking,

maybe even coming into the soul
is a difficult birth,
squeezed in the body’s vise.

My bent legs like pincers
or the vegetable petals of some tropical flower.

Even my mind gripped by the folds
of the flesh, how the cell keeps doubling itself
out toward complexity. . .

The tulip trees of the valley
spread their bone canopies into slick green
leaves and fire flowers deep as cups.

Their cups fill with rain, rain
drinks the leaves drinking rain.

I begin to explain.

How on this porous peak of stone in the sea
our daughter came into me.

Little flick of a fish I could not see.

I was just learning to be human
and upright among all that life.

And what was real was stranger
than night with its dust of unnamed suns.

It was the beyond in us
and she was.

Cream of the Pour is the Cream of Skin Thickening

I look out. Black leaves color of dried blood
and my ulcerated tonsils fluttering as I
breathe openmouthed. Through the branches
there are branches.

Some remember their lives
of green some hang languorous
sturdy with sap.

The question becomes how to live
the right life filling with it
as a liquid converted from light
until it becomes the weight
that factors your place.

Until just walking to the car
with some coffee
you can sense suddenly purpose

in traffic and glances windswirls
clattering wrappers to the street

a man with a gunning hose
dividing the sidewalk into continents
of soap

commuters and students ubilicalled
to music

and that branch quivering
as it touches another

which is also of course itself.

***

Some of these poems are from a manuscript called September, and some are from a manuscript I think is almost finished called Wishing Cap & The Middle Distance: A Calling. Both books are dedicated to Richard Fammeree, but Wishing Cap is a love story told through time. The book's patron saints are Radegrunde and Fortunatus, writers who lived in the 6th Century.

Here are some of their poems:

Prelude I: Radegund and Fortunatus

They exist somewhere between time and eternity.

Radegunde was born around 520 A.D. to the ruling family of Thuringia, an area in Germany between the Rhine and the Elbe. She was of a the royal pagans, Barbarians living at the edge of the Roman empire. When she was 10, Clotaire, king of the Franks, invaded and killed her mother, uncle, siblings and servants, plundering and burning the wealth of the kingdom. She and one brother escaped because of smallness and luck. When Clotaire and his men discovered them, they brought them back to his court, educated them the Roman style and contracted Radegunde to become one of Clotaire’s wives. She ignored her worldly status and devoted herself to God. When Clotaire had her one remaining brother killed in 550, she fled his kingdom to live as a nun and requested his support to establish an Abbey in Poitiers, France. He gave this support until his death, and afterward his sons supported Radegunde’s Abbey, which was founded as a kind of safe house for women. Radegunde’s piety, strength and political wisdom won her the respect of the day’s leaders, and she corresponded often with bishops, queens, kings and princes, including Gregory of Tours. She despaired of losing her family and bloodline, but found friendship and solace with her sisters in the Abbey, especially Agnes, whom she saw as her spiritual daughter. She was close friends with Venantius Fortunatus, a poet-troubador who wrote many letters and poems to Radegrunde throughout her life and who wrote her biography after her death.

Radegunde: Illuminated

I was rescued from the forest by fate
in its dark cape and hair-covered hands.
They were men’s hands, heavy with rings, and they turned
and turned me to look at me—my body bow-thin and singing,
my terrified face shuffled with green
light dropped from the tongues of trees.

That was after they’d slashed my mother’s lap
and the lap of the earth
had caught my brother and me
in its thicket of smells, that dampness I knew as grief.

Hiding was our shared heart beating,
wracked by what we’d seen:

Head-thump onto wood, eyes wild
for the severed body, the blood-tide.

Crack of bones under ax, bones snapping
like branches, like shelter for what
through them was passing.

Cold climbed our teeth and we watched
darkness sift into the world through a torn
sky of the strangest color—something stirred
of egg and stone and brushed behind the trees in a book.

Night soaked the branches until they were cold
as our parents’ bones, then sifted down to us as dust making dust
of our shoulders and arms. We held each other and watched
the other’s face dissolve like a moon, until even the silver limn
of cheekbone was gone, until we became only a quick liquid guiding of the eye.

That was how they found us, thinned with shivering,
leaves in our hair.

That was how they saved us
from what they’d done to us.

They tipped their skins to our lips,
giving us water. They unwrapped dried venison
and cheese that broke to a powder on my tongue.

Then the muscles of their horses moved
under me, rolling my body over my body,
every shoulder-pull grinding me deeper into time.

In that darkness I knew I’d be wedded to darkness.

I’d have to let it in to my body.

Spoils

In the main hall, as plunder,
I was washed and dressed in fine embroidered cloth.

My hands hung useless
in the stone-cold air

as they pulled back my hair and combed for nits
and braided it with green
ribbons a handmaid had dyed.

While my mother was bleeding out
into dirt, she had watched this spring
color seep the silk, sleepy, thinking,
this is the sun, the sun
seeps into me, it seeps into my son through me.

That night, all her milk gone,
her nipples split by the prince’s teeth,
she’d let her own sun suck color from her thumbs.
She’d swayed and hummed against his hunger.

Plucked from our palace vaulted
with ash, I was lost in that paddle clack and strange
language, cold corridors

where I abandoned my eyes
and sought the shades, some
forgiveness from my kin
for living. None came.

I had seen my mother like the waters recede
from their strangling hands and I knew God
wasn’t anything simple or starved as a man,

not Lord as they said
in crewelled nobleman’s robes. No,
better to call God nothing

but breath moving through this barn of bones.

Better to be patient, I thought, trace
unknowing’s face with hands your own.

Knot of Power

Everything they gave me I gave away that was my way
of not belonging to them. I’d slip the knot of that kind of power
and know it just a twist
of hemp, matter, nothing
that would not burn. In that long dry penance
of wealth I did not tire of surprising

servants I’d decided were deserving. With a ruby ring
or slips embroidered in gold
silk—fine as the hair of a maid but secreted
by a blind and captived worm
then slipstitched by singing guildsmen.
Art and the commerce of the world.
Amassments of power was what they were
and even a milking girl knew
that the jewel secreted deep in her bodice
could buy her freedom when she needed.

I’d sit at the table mute or boring
the other wives with liturgy or lieder,
then when they’d left to their toilette,
I’d stuff crusts and plums, boiled eggs and little pewter pitchers
in my cloak, into folds I’d sewn.

In this way I slipped from my station and entered
my life. Disguised by a plainness of intention,
I fed the poor and mixed tinctures of herbs.

I liked to see the closing of a wound.
I liked to see a hungry eye anchoring
on a kindness, relieved for awhile of life’s terror.

I did not aspire to be good but truth was in me like a hunger.
It devoured the surrounding lies and left me with a seed
to tend, godlove a little leafing.

Soon

I was a girl when he took me,
bleeding me to enter and I looked into his eyes every time.

It wasn’t long before he was afraid of the still places
I could go in my body. Soon he overlooked me more

for the others, though he knew I was given to rapture,
given to kneeling in barns praying until my knees and flattened
feet split skin. In the haylight, sun spinning spores and glittering dust I
became those long blond fingers crossing and recrossing themselves.

I was hollow as a straw and holy gold. Rising not knowing

where I had been before this little flicker winging out
into hands, and works of hands.

Candling

Candling, my life was candling me, a luminous hand dipping,
dripping with an inward light, gathering gradually around

the thin twisted string I was. Sleepless, I was sleepy, dipping
candles to light by the light of the candles, my brow beading oil,

my face burning over the burning bowl of the thing
diminishing to yield up what was gathering.

That vat of wax was the sun in earth’s gut and my hands
were dunn gulls diving its broth, drawing out
the slickening shrouds, like acts

receding in a film, like days accruing indecipherable
from others, slipping from their skins and thickening

to the sludge that bodies the burn.

Jar

Clotaire returned from his latest tour
lusting, haunted by the deeds he’d done.

He’d had my dove brother killed he would have fallen had he tried
himself. He was weak as only the rich can be.

My brother who never gave a hard word
struck down in his first blond beard.

Worse than being murdered myself to know
he was gone. My own little human
life now meant nothing to me. Let me go

I said despising at that moment him
the stinking husband and all the
conquests of men just as a clay jar
shattered from the shelf the holy ghost
assisting me in my moment of need
or was it his terror bouncing off the walls.

I demanded the property in Poitiers
knowing my home was over again I would create

an abbey for girls invisible raped
and withering in the clutch of the days.

His fear of me gave me leave.

And from there we
built a life from his respect for me
and my nullity.

Regret Engine

Why was he ripped from the world
by men of little faith?

Why did I flee again, having twice
endured the enemy?

I did not even attend his funeral.

I did not close his eyes
nor let hot tears drop
to warm the unlucky corpse
inside of me. Life was denied.

I might have sent the fringes I made while he lived
to his bier.

With him went my joy.

Sisterhood

As the bloodline ended the spirit
claimed me finally, webbing

me out into the world
not as body
but word embodied

writing letters to bishops and princes
raising others’ daughters, plums
and herbs in the cool air
of my tending.

When We Met

Fortunatus was a performer. He liked stringing himself out on a lie, then
weaving it into something true.

And I was a controller. I liked being in charge and doling out bits of the vision
to my various delegations.

We both had survived too much life to believe our lives
belonged to us. I’d survived through wit, noble directness and fiery truth.
He through wit, stealth and flexibility. Not easy

to live as he did from court to court,
to stay alive through talent and flattery.

He wrote folio after folio of commissioned poetry.
Some of it good.

A Letter I Did Not Send to Fortunatus

Consider the secret recesses of the body—
pools of blood and water, knots and cords of tissue,
colors undeciphered by light.

And so love, if it must be, begins with belief,
vital and private as the body’s tributaries.

And each in our own way
has to tend it, make it breathe.

Until, eventually, we may see
our souls taking shape in the world
or the way even this dark and riddled world
has taken shape in the soul.

Can there be a conversation that contains all
other conversations?

First you were to me
an idea. I did not know what this was

to have a friend. Then I began to believe
that all this talking, song and poetry could be

real—that here was a man connected
to this story I was coming to love.

Then all those landscapes you walked through
became windows to see into you.

And into me too.

Fortunatus the Traveler

Fortunatus had always been Fortunatus. He kept returning. He wandered far, but he always returned to himself, which was his fortune.

I.

In the earliest known accounts, Fortunatus was an early Christian (Coptic?) who traveled with Paul through the desert, and helped carry back many epistles, two of which became Corinthians I and Corinthians II. He and Paul and Stephanus and Achaicus traveled through the deserts and valleys, talking of God and of Goodness, telling stories and gathering stories, which the most dogmatic among them, Paul, wrote down as his own.

TO BE CONTINUED....

पोएट्र

2011-04-16T13:41:00.000-07:00

A Few Poems

2010-01-19T20:47:00.000-08:00

I read this evening at Northwestern, along with three very talented students. Here are a few of the poems I shared, and a few I wished I'd had with me.

The Brain of the World Was Recalling Itself

in a Polish deli on the Northwest side of Chicago.
It had a kind of seeing and so perceived
the red, raw and broken all around.
Stubborn joint and gristle. The knife’s bright
entitlement. And it wanted none—no
more—of this; it wanted only to open out
in gauzy, combed formations.

All night, it had sat regal as a cake in a case.
Then, after the third shift, a man in a quilted flannel
and workboots spotted with plaster walked up
and pointed at it—didn’t even give it a name—
and an aproned woman slid her cold rubber-gloved hand
under and lifted it—quivering, gelatinous, delicate
folds unfurling then collapsing
into themselves—to the scale.

It was heavier than it looked. It wouldn’t be cheap.

She printed the label, set it on a small Styrofoam tray
and wrapped it in plastic, quickly, the way
they wrap the legs of the dead, to hold their shape,
while she thought of her husband at home—
up now, drinking coffee,
eating the sausages she’d left. She hoped
the way he’d begun to wheeze
when he came up the stairs
was nothing.

She didn’t notice it fighting against the cellophane
with a sharp right hook and deep ongoing keening,
every tiny chamber flexing, each
a lung gulping freedom.
She just passed it to the man
who grunted his thanks,
and if they’d noticed each others’ faces,
now they forgot them.

The man carried it through the market,
carried it through his weariness.
He grabbed an onion, fist-sized moon,
to bob in the broth around it,
knowing how its translucent layers
would gradually part,
like a sweater from a blouse,
a blouse from the slick cups of a bra,
pearled husks like morning
pared into a woman’s curls.

In an hour or two his wife would start the supper.
His kids would be up now, sitting mussed in pajamas,
in front of the TV that goggled loudly
in the language he only understood in scraps, the noise of it
everywhere, dividing his life from theirs,
making his a transparent, brittle peeling.

Under the plastic, it shivered, it pulsed;
it towed the man into his long afternoon
and tossed a shy light, like plaster dust, or loss,
up onto his face,
and anyone who saw him carrying it
flashed fleetingly on flesh—

the chicken’s cracked neck,
scrotum soft in the hand,
moonish sediment on the infant’s head,
her shoulder that first evening—how it almost glowed,

it was so pale,
a child would have guessed it was made of spun sugar;
an old woman would have said the purest fat,
the kind you can burn in a lamp if you have to,
or spread on hard dark bread;

and anyone close enough to look into the folds—
(flushed, bluing)—
would have felt strange,
as if they’d known all this already;
they recognized it from some throb behind the eyes.

Lookout

First we thought it was the shadow
of a duststorm or a swarm
of insects sliding over the ridge
and across the plains, the way it darkened
and rearranged the land beneath.
Then you saw the massed particles coming closer
were not bug or buffalo, but people,
carrying their young and old,
passing over the earth
as the earth was passing
in its own living skin.
All this with a scorching
want that lowed in a loudening thunder.
What was there to say?
Our tools were simple
and carved from bone.
We held them fragile
as artifacts, our eyes
smarted with dust and with sun
and we watched.

Cheyenne

I need to clear the bracken and weeds
that stick to my swimming thighs.
I went down and down, I swam
beside the boat, near its sucking wake
and tall, dangerous sides. I pulled
through water hung with mud and slick
shale-stumbled banks running up to trees
and scattered logs bleached white by the sun.
The way I loved seemed to be confounding
everyone. I was not alone, I had
a friend I did not even need language
with as we paddled side by side.
I was not shopping, scanning
the horizon for what would be a better
life. I was beside that ship of people
being ferried safe inside their deaths.
We would all arrive around the same time
but me by my own rhyming muscle.
I swam until the water grew warm
as a body around my body, until I was
in a liquid I had been before.
I opened my eyes against the current
and the stripping weeds, pulled
myself ever further into the folds
of the past, back to the riversplit
where it all began, scrambling out
onto land tingling with bramble and branch.

Late September

Gulls slide through the sky.

It’s one of those days
I’ve tried to get out
into my actual life.

Late September and I don’t even need
art to heighten my seeing.

The low spotlight of the sun does it for me.

Each blade of grass sidling up to its black.

Trees lapped by shadow and the Great
Lake’s frayed unending waterbreath

amid a yellowjacket hum
and the whirring spin of crickets singing
we are all just river pouring over
the wheel.

From here, I can see them at the park.
They are framed by the green ruffling

and all the times we will not be.

He leans against the slide reading a paperback.

She climbs the red step.

He lifts her into the cup of the swing,
and she throws her head back laughing.

I can’t read their faces, only their forms.

They have the same saturation into body
that turns the grass to strips of light.
I am one of those
who can’t forget, who loves
the one burning branch turning the tree
to something various and mortal,
something true.
Who sees the world a long way off
even when it’s close
as this girl I love now running up.

The SBC-Ameritech Endangered Species Carousel

The children wait in line, hopping,
hoping for their first choice—
a fiberglass panther black as a car,
a panda smoking bamboo,
a harbor seal with velvety questioning eyes.
Measured by the bar, they clamber on,
beat their feet against the creature’s bellies,
say, giddyup, hurryup, while their parents smile,
wipe ice cream from their hands and mouths.
The recorded organ bells out clownish now, louder
as the animals shiver up and slide back down
on fat brass screws, threading the afternoon
with their tragic imagined grins.
Only the gorilla stays level,
looking down under lidded brows,
his heavy knuckles bolted to the floor,
and the boy on his manlike back looks worried
that he’s only going round and round.
He’s crying now, It’s okay, his mother calls,
as he passes behind the lion,
the swan, the mandrill, the camel,
Don’t worry, Hon, it’s almost done.

The Blue Grotto

2009-09-18T14:39:00.001-07:00

I have a new chapbook out with Dancing Girl Press under this title. You can buy it through the link below for only $7. I'm very grateful to Kristy Bowen, editor and publisher, for her selection of the book and for its beautiful construction.

http://www.dancinggirlpress.com/bluegrotto.html

The cover is a collage that I did, titled "The Sea Came Up and Drowned." It goes with a song Richard and I have written (which we will record and post properly. . .eventually). Here are my half of the words:

The Sea Came Up and Drowned

*

It was the only way to live.

Usurp yourself to yourself
in waves, in centuries,

while something like truth
cooled below the surface in stone.

While something like a voice
began unwinding into the whorled pearl of its own home.

The earth is the earth and the memory
of water, every ridge a recollection
of water’s recession.

*

Those years stretched long
and flat as our palms,
lined with grass,
wind-whipped, twisting tendrils of grass.

That was after they’d been grabbed
by history, after we’d entered our lives
through our dreams,
our dreams through the seams in our hands.

After they led us back here,
to the sunstruck prairie
where we’re broken open again
as chaff, where the grass chatters
in the endless chatter
of the ancestors and the unborn ancestors.

Where you hold the seed of you before you.

Moon

2009-08-11T13:22:00.000-07:00

This poem is for Alice Gorman Singer.

Moon

You’d floated in your mother seven months

that day she lifted her blouse, washed her stomach

in the silver light of the television,

whispered, Look, little pigeon,

we have landed on the moon. Now you play it over

and over in your mind: your parents

following those distended voices,

watching that one underwater step,

until she goes luminous

with you against the screen, and he kneels,

puts his mouth over her rounding navel,

circles his arm around her thigh.

This is how you became one of us

born without a moon, with a stone

lit in the distant inside.

For fathers

2009-06-21T12:23:00.000-07:00

Here are two poems I wrote for my dad and grandpa. Happy Father's Day.

* * *

Meanwhile I Was Floating, I Was Ferried

My dad owned the boat and I owned the prow.
I arced off the front like the carved maidenhead
and the waters divided around us
in white-furred furious paws
while inside me, life
was weaving its red nest.

Sometimes while we anchored—
the radio on, our mouths working salted chips and peanuts—
I could see it—a dark mark further off, a circle
I knew held a child.

I thought she was.
I thought she was.
I thought she was my girl.

And I pointed the way to her.
Faster! I’d call to my dad.
Open it up! I’d lean forward then.
toward her waiting, her rescue.

How long did I dream her like that,
my life, afternoons into evenings
that settled their pink gauze along our shoulders and arms

as the water silvered and the sky
silvered and the horizon bled
into only the memory of separation.

And wasn’t that all we’d ever wanted—
to come upon life that way,
on the horizon, always
on the horizon,
almost as if we’d crafted it with our own hands

or lifted it from the milkdream of being.

We were the vessel. And the clear braid
of our own wake.

***

Brown Portal

They were a cement
made of many —
stones, those steps where I sat
in my brown knees selling strawberries.

I sat so long the brown
became a portal to me,
an entry where a mud-colored
rock had been, thick as a thumb
and unlovely. I pressed my live
one into it and rubbed
it over the gravel grain
and the hum of what was once:

the river below and men
trawling the flow for the little stones
that would constitute the steps back home.

They must have carried them up the bank
in buckets. My grandpa and his brothers,
in undershirts working. And I must have been
a glint on wet pebbles then, back
in that everything, a sprinkling
of sun through the trees.

Mine never was a thumb
at all but a thumbplace where a stone
had been, the mark of some
past when we were earthwarmed
and solid faceup in sun.

****

Confinement and Release: New Poems

2009-06-07T19:38:00.000-07:00

I'm going to try to post poems more regularly. Here are this week's:

She Assumed A Narrow Corridor, Then
Unfolded It

Nature offers up so many tongues
to untie, to let the ink and dyes
drip from their cuts.
What is wrong with us? Why
have we fallen from our dust?
Wool-colored sand, someone
said, the blown hem of the sea,
as if such saying were enough.
As if starting out we only
meant to be an art piece.
One more dulling day
in what it wasn’t.
Apples and sentences cracked
at your teeth, back before
you were lonely and used
to delineating. Then you flew
through the vowels, they lofted you
up over houses
with screen porches, little doormats
and you saw it all sorely
on your feet the long shift.
But now this rich sleep
is yellow and sickly, a yolk
over the eyes. I guess
we could intellectualize,
could invent a religion
or go on trying.
But sometimes in a hot bath
we remember fire that climbed
the bones’ scaffold, live air
singing, how it sang us.

*

Someday We Will Be Post-Gender

As a girl I was a little god,
a stripped stick, divining rod.

Then that hollow bone bled and I turned
to polled people, opinions instead.

What had I done with my speeches,
those names I’d wield for little ones

against bullies on buses. Justice
you abandoned me or I

abandoned you for a plum
ass and tight jeans. I wore

them rolling coils of clay,
strategically licking my waiting lips,

forgetting what it was I'd meant
to create. Love, love, love a pink

throb in the crotch and art
class bowl I thought little of.

I didn’t like myself enough
to like what I could make.

I was self-annihilating. That’s why
I was always in love. It was nothing specific

that wounded me, just humanity
and all the ways it entered

to eat. Mistakes of the inverted
world, the snake with its tail

in its teeth. Now it rings out
on a rhythm older than my words

which are old already and used.
The end in the beginning

and a stone in the gullet
of the end, etc.

I never woke
to see where I was,

unless seeing saw me leave
and leaving I could see it all so tenderly.

Now how do I stay, be-
come the one to cut

through this thicket, begin.

*

Apple

She was just doing her job
cracking into the skin
and bringing him in
to the world

***

"Apple" is about Eve, and springs from a feeling that I have sometimes--a sureness that all is right with the universe and always has been and always will be. In the story, Eve opened the sealed perfection of the apple, so that life, real life, could be tasted and lived. The imperfection became the perfection because it was alive.

This statement, "Someday We Will Be Post-Gender" is not just a wish. I know that day is coming soon, (and has arrived for many people already, if not the wider world.) And I also know that I have to wade through my own thicket of questions and passe habits and "issues" about gender to get to my freer being. When I do this I become even more a woman, more female because I am less concerned with what it means to be female. I see a freedom in my female students that I did not know at their age, and this excites me. They--and my daughter, I hope--will not have to wade through some of these thickets of doubt and foolishness that I have waded through. The first lines here refer, I think, to the dillemma of being a girl-becoming-woman in a culture that worships only male gods, and mostly male writers, and still asks girls to sell themselves through sex.

Also. . . in childhood we are all magical, connected to our superpowers. It's up to us, I think, to tell girls that they do not lose their powers of imagination and intuition when they hit puberty--those powers only deepen and change.

"She Assumed A Narrow Corridor, Then Unfolded It" is written to another friend of mine--a singer--and also to myself. Again, it comes from that dillemma of being tired, and afraid to soar and sing, but knowing that's what we are here for.

These are all unfinished, as am I. Just part of the process.

***

I've been angst-ridden all week, wondering why I am not able to be happy, which is self-perpetuating, an elaborate way of looking backward and blaming myself. So often, I am given a gift, I receive something that I have worked for or hoped for, and then I forget, I move through to what I want next. . .

This week I have spent a lot of time feeling some kind of blame. . .toward myself, other people, society, the literary world. . .

and it is all just a smoke screen. I am realizing that I fall into this pattern when I need to make a jump forward. I become afraid, look around for some situation to blame for my stasis and then usually create an elaborate plan for shooting myself in the foot and not taking the next step. I have spent years of my life on relationships, and while so much of this is good, deep learning, a lot of it is fantasy--thinking someone would solve my life for me, and then falling into blame and disappointment when that does not happen. When of course real change does not happen that way. It is not passive but creative.

I think being in love is just being in a spiritual-emotional dimension of rightness. And being out of it is awful.

Thank goodness for friends. . .who remind me of old patterns and who can help guide the way to clarity. Tonight I found the blog, http:findjoy.blogspot.com/ and was helped by the graceful wisdom there. I later realized that this was writen by a real, live friend of mine. What luck!

This is for you, KF, with love:

Bike Wheels

Purr of rubber on gravel
and the red pulse of a truck
backing up. Also the whipporwhill
trilling its wings into wind.
I like the way treelight falls
to eggs and chimes my hands
amid the chipping of another bird.
That jogger left his keys in his pocket
and they bell him in step.
Are you fucking joking me,
a girl says, walking by.
I have lost years of my life
talking worry, doubt
and shallow palaver.
But all those conversations
with you I've needed
to lead me back to this
living weave of skin
we breathe each other in.

Holocaust Remembrance Day: Four Poems

2009-04-21T19:29:00.000-07:00

I wrote two poems this morning. After I finished writing, I decided to clean the kitchen. I turned on the radio and heard that today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Here are the poems.

***

Survivor

Rain falls all day on the day

your mother was born years before.

The neighbor keeps saying, we’re so happy

we have this soft rain, this soft rain.

You think yes of the bloodroot pushing up

through its hood of skin. It will erupt

in a foam of white and yolk-yellow at the stem.

She was alive during the war

and safe enough in this half of the world.

But you saw her looking through

the hissing fence, pressing food between

its barbs with warm gloved hands.

She saw you too, then one day only

tired dirt and burnt grass

under the stench of skin.

She couldn’t wait to have you,

the boy with the marks on his back.

You grew and you were holy,

absorbing the blows of the rain.

Then you left, as if you could leave

the site of your own gouged-out wings.

***
This poem is about Richard and his mother. It is illogical; time in it eddies and backs. But it speaks to this sense we have that we have known our parents, and our children. So many of us recognize them when we are born. And this connects to the feeling we have—good and bad—that we have been here before, that we have lived through the horrors and triumphs of humanity as souls in other forms.

***
This is the second poem. Last night, I fell asleep reading the poetry of Paul Celan, and I jotted this down just before I slipped off.

Reading Paul Celan

We reach back into our own oceans.

We slept and while

we slept the rooms filled

if not with life then

the stuff life is

lived around.

The dreams rolled us
with their many yellow hands.

Now our eyeroots are as dry
as our mouths

and the swimming remember
the in in in of the ear.

***

The poetry of Paul Celan helps me remember the “in, in, in of the ear”—the ever-deepening space of listening that I may enter into. This listening is the poetic act. It sings and it instructs, it chants and hallows. It caverns my connections to the ancestors and to the mysteries.

***

Paul Celan was born in 1920 in Romania, and although he survived the terrible war and Holocaust, his parents did not. They were sent to an internment camp in 1942, and both died there—his father got typhus and his mother was shot in the neck. His loneliness of living on after them--and after his culture, homeland and people had been exterminated--must have been the most acute mix of wonder and torture, a stunned living between worlds, half out of the world. As the Holocaust survivor said on the radio today, “You have to understand, I was seven times dead.” He made of that completeness of death a song—he moved to America and became a soulful cantor. And Paul Celan made of it poetry—luminous, searing poetry. Here are two of his earlier works:

Memory of France

Together with me recall: the sky of Paris, that giant autumn crocus. . .
We went shopping for hearts at the flower girl’s booth:
they were blue and they opened up in the water.
It began to rain in our room,
and our neighbor came in, Monsieur Le Songe, a lean little man.
We played cards, I lost the irises of my eyes;
you lent me your hair, I lost it, he struck us down.
He left by the door, the rain followed him out.
We were dead and we were able to breathe.

Under a Picture

Swarming of ravens over a wheat billow.
Blue of which heaven? The higher? The nether?
Late arrow that the soul released.
Louder whirring. Nearer glow. This world and the other.

Translated from the German by Michael Hamburger.
Reprinted from Poems of Paul Celan. New York: Persea Books, 1985.

Happy Easter

2009-04-12T18:27:00.000-07:00

Pesach, Eostre,

In so many of our spiritual narratives, this holiday celebrates the release from a winter of bondage or death, and new life. Martin Luther claimed that proof of the resurrection appeared every year--in the first leaves of the season.

I don't see my life changing dramatically this spring, although I know that the hardest changes are beyond our control. I am hoping that, within my home and my routines of family life and teaching and writing, I will be able to open myself to what has just begun growing. I hope I can recognize what is old and spiritually dead and cast it off (or bravely let it be stripped from me) so that a tender extension of new shoots may begin.

Nature is my great guide. I love the fact that the plants right now--bloodroot and trillium and tulips biting up blindly through cold earth--are both totally fragile and totally tenacious. And I love that all of our nourishment--of food and of color and healing--begins in these tiniest folds of stem and leaf, in a glowing green lit with some wondrous trust in life and life's continuance. It is a trust unbelievable to us, I think, or we would aspire more to the earth than we do. And yet it is the trust of transcendence, and it is our biological, human inheritance, imprinted in the folds of our own minds, our own cells.

Below is a tiny excerpt from my manuscript, Mary is River, which tells the Christian passion story from a female perspective--a renewed perspective, which I believe our spiritual stories continually need. I heard a wonderful quote the other day by midrash scholar Aviva Zornberg, who was featured on the NPR program, "Speaking of Faith." Myths are not myths because they never happened, she said, but because they happen all the time.

So many of us seem to grow by spiraling outward, like plants! I think that's why we need these ritual stories, and why we need to keep telling our versions of them.

More of Mary can be found on this blog, and I hope that the whole book will soon be available in print, or as a website.

Thank you for visiting.

I hope your spring is glorious--full of clear light,

and joy!

Rachel

From the last chapter of Mary is a River:

I know now the taste that comes from having slept through cycles of pain—
how the mouth wakes in the sealed skin of its own ignorance, tearing first in thirst, then chewing itself before any fruit.
And, at last, as water and as water’s song, I know the strange sense of having survived, faceless, nameless, diasporaed with light. I know what it is to blink in synchopated reflection,
in the sun’s innumerable multiplications, amid everything shimmering,
as if the world has become only the reflection of the world, a prismatic memory mirroring endlessly off the changing substance of itself.

In this, I have fished for modest, quick-slipping truths:

His hand sweeping across my cheek, eyes catching eyes.

The red, fisted faces of brothers hacking at recalcitrant land.

The sea-deep trust in the newborn’s eyes, and her mother
bending to her.

And always, the joy, the lamentation and bewilderment and joy
of having loved, of having been like anyone, and like no one else at all:

one who loved.

Ash Wednesday

2009-03-02T21:33:00.000-08:00

Everything seen through a sheen light. Puddles in the park knife-bright. The mirroring, the joy-bite.

Our daughter is learning how to swing. She can’t touch the ground. I lift her up and she dangles over mud and slips of slush. I push her and she leans and leans. She is learning the ratios of body to air, air to air to movement to air. She will work with the weights and reactions of things to guide herself up into flying.

Her face cracks open with delight, then concentration on delight. She is alive! What we dreamed is becoming.

It’s Ash Wednesday, you say from the bench and I say, so that’s why this metallic light.

The light knives my eyes, it makes everything shine as if seen it from some silent floating hold underwater. Now glowing through the wet sheen of memory.

I remember what I wrote this day three years ago:

***
Afterward

I write this from the window of a French café in New York City on the Upper West Side. It is evening, the hour when people hustle to trains, carrying rolled newspapers and bunches of nodding flowers, the hour when friends meet for drinks. I have crusty bread and a cappuccino and a new pen, and I am filling the last pages of this worn-in, almost finished book. I sit, head-bent, my hair pulled back, my face pulled inward and absorbed, and I know I am a thing of beauty.

Men slow and pause, decide impulsively to step in for bread. And then a woman stops and stares in the window. She stands there a long time squinting, and it is as if her gaze keeps getting ribbed and refracted in the glass, as if she can’t quite see into here, where the music plays and black words bramble and bloom beneath my hand. She wears a fur coat, a large knit hat and bright lipstick. She is older, and clear-eyed, living as a widow in the last quarter of her life. And I see now that she is me, looking at me, in the window, still lithe in my 30 year-old body, free, knowing I am free, knowing that I am, for a time, a thing of beauty.

She cannot quite see into me but she remembers me here inside of her. Once, she sat here as me, sipping at foam, dipping bread into sweetened oil, and she knew herself reflected in a single golden moment, framed in time’s glassy mirage.

I write this now from that moment, from the beginning of love, and from the book in which I first tried to hear its voice. I write from the evening of Ash Wednesday, 2006, from a day when people are passing quickly by with the dark marks of burning thumbed on their foreheads. To see it is so strange, this smudge of what has past. I look into the faces in the migrating crowd and see the future, or is it the past, that each will be dust, faceless, a smudge on someone else’s living brow.

All day I’ve been held in the haze of a dream I had. In it, we were children again, playing side by side with bright cards. The cards were stories, colored flashes of presence, lives, and the game we played was memory. But it may have been called absence, each card bounded and backed as it was by blank pattern. At last, after many rounds, many lives turning over, I grew tired of playing absence and climbed up onto your chair, facing you, and we found our eyes in the other’s eyes. And I read all the marks on your body then and we tried to give back the images, the moments we had missed. We did that in poems and stories and songs.

In real life today, we were on opposite sides of the earth, talking on cellphones. You were walking through tropical fields and I was walking through Central Park and were talking of the lives we’d lived alone before we met. Then I picked an ivy leaf and said your name was that dark green. And the leaf was the trinity, the trident, the tongue of the green man. It was the size of the cards we turned in the dream, the size of a child’s hand.

I pressed it in this book, and I felt it, the child’s hand, the way I would tell her about her grandfather. I felt it as a living thing, slowly drying and signifying through the layers, pages, days. And the marks, the insights of this one showing faintly through to the other days, to the day far ahead when I would walk here in the future. I knew I would pass the Met and think of this moment, would remember how I picked this leaf in faith in our connection, in a shy evening in early spring.

It was a three-pronged moment, walking through my present and future at once like that, both pointing toward you. Now that I have met you how could I ever walk this path without you? Now even your absence is a presence. Now it seems absence is only a game we played. We drew it again and again and then we knew we could stop and we stopped.

This morning, I set the phone on the sink and washed my face and made it up
and you sang,

Everything changed again.

You were once a tree shimmering its leaves.

Then everything

changed again.

2009-02-15T21:44:00.000-08:00

"The circle has healing power. In the circle we are all equal. When in the circle no one is in front of you. No one is behind you. No one is above you. No one is below you. The Sacred Circle is designed to create unity. The Hoop of Life is also a circle. On this hoop there is a place for every species, every race, every tree and every plant. It is this completeness of life that must be respected in order to bring about health on this planet. To understand each other, as the ripples when the stone is tossed in the waters, the Circle starts small and grows. . . .until it fills the whole lake."

--Dave Chief, Oglala Lakota, Grandson of Red Dog

Reprinted from 365 Days of Walking the Red Road: The Native American Path To Leading A Spiritual Life Every Day by Terri Jean

New World

2009-01-21T08:18:00.000-08:00

The flame
cupped so long in the hold
with the shackles and rations
braves
its bright tongue
to the air
and catching now
its light pours forth like the waters
shining our eyes

***
With gratitude to President Barack Obama
and his beautiful family for their courage,
grace and example of excellence.

They inspire me to look inward
at what is yet guarded and undeveloped
and then give that light more fully to the world.

We all travel a middle passage
from what we have believed possible
to what we must make possible.

May we each of us come to arrive on the terrain
of our real, unfolding lives
and these exciting unfolding times.

In Joy!

Rachel Jamison Webster

***

The New World II

After Grant Park

2008-11-06T21:53:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday, I stood in Grant Park with 200,00 people, and it was the most peaceful crowd I have ever been in. Every one of us was rapt, every one of us was weeping, every one of us was swollen with a wordless joy, as President Barack Obama said,

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”

The New World. We have crossed over. This time we did not cross a violent ocean. We crossed a middle distance—treacherous and doubt-stirred and vast—that existed within our nation’s idea of itself.

Now what we have imagined, what we sensed was America, what we hoped would become our shared truth, can know itself as real, and can thrive in the daylight.

We have entered the 21st Century. We have finally come out of the closet with our sense of destiny, and with our hearts. Together we expand from here.

Change has come because of sincere young people, and courageous and dignified African Americans, and countless individuals working tirelessly for good, and people who have spent years with their hands cupped in peace around the fragile, flickering flames of hope and righteousness.

And it has taken this good and great man—Barack Obama. He wears the mantle of destiny with solemnity, grace and wisdom, and he has dedicated his destiny to our renewal.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Jefferson wrote, “that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.”

This was the most idealistic project ever—a government based on belief in human liberty and potential. And yet, at the time of its writing, one quarter of our nation’s population was enslaved, one half of the free population was unable to vote or own property, and the indigenous people who had cared for the land long before the colonists’ arrival were not even counted.

At last we can acknowledge this terrible wound and its scar tissue—which appears in any comment, institution or habit that assumes that one person is worth more than another. At last we can heal. We will do so as we continue to create a world in which all people are given equal opportunity and respect, in which the bonds that hold one person above another are broken in favor of mutual listening, and shared evolution.

“I’ve known rivers,” wrote 19 year-old Langston Hughes. “Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

I felt those streams—our country’s soul, and our country’s government—surge together on Tuesday night.

What a privilege and a joy it is to be alive now.

I feel humbly grateful to all of the ancestors who worked and waited for this,

and to all of you, who are together creating our new, more perfect world.

With peace, love, and, yes, that fundamental freedom,

happiness!

An excerpt from "Mary is a River"

2008-05-13T13:49:00.000-07:00

Mary is a River is a booklength series of prose poems written in the voice of Mary Magdalene. From her death, she speaks the truth of her love, a truth which has been buried for centuries.

1.

I’ve been folded like a mushroom in the dirt.
I’ve been trapped like something dirty in the dirt.

I wake now with lime on my tongue, sputtering the dry taste of time.

And at last, there is nothing left for me to do.

I have hidden myself in layers of self, I have folded into curtains and veils
and mothering and now there is nothing left to do but begin to tell—myself—the story.

I could tell it all so simply. I could say, once upon a time,
I lived, and my living was like divining. The deeper I moved
toward the truth of my life, the wilder the wand of me sang and was sung.

I loved, and when I loved, even deserts beat in me like a sea.

2.

Sometimes when I think of us, I think of our bodies, how fragile they were through all of it. How young.

I think of the way the sun sunk into the skin of our wrists
and glittered the skin’s broken geometry.

I think of our hands. Our hands became balms and tutors and birds.
They led us like strange elders. We moved through so many languages with those hands.

I think of my stamina then, how even walking miles I felt myself dancing.

And sometimes, when I’m thinking like this, waiting for my voice to thicken,
I think of us as children, born so sensitive we chaffed against the world.

I think we were people so terrified of death we had to make ourselves myths.

3.

Then I think that’s just a small way to tell the story, a summary.
And aren’t summaries always a little mean?

But how can I explain? It was abstract even as it was happening.
I felt myself walking through my physical life, quickening
into the life of the spirit.

I felt the wind moving through the sieve of my skin.

I felt myself a vessel.

And I was happy.

4.

We met in my faith, where he needed me.
And in my faithlessness, that wind in which I needed him.

Our actual meeting happened at my front gate. Of course I had heard of him.
I’d heard he was coming to our town, and I figured I’d go listen and decide what I thought.

I had not been aware that I was waiting for anything.
As a girl, I had awakened every morning in destiny’s hot eye,
but lately, I’d felt that gaze widen and retract from me.

I had married, I had learned more deeply the ways of women.
I had grown golder, becoming, slowly, wheat in a field of wheat.

With the others, I moved in seasons, I chattered, and in our waves of generations
and the thin rooted tendrils between us, I knew my destiny was our destiny.

And so I had what I needed. And I had my longing, which I’d always had,
and it seemed I would always have.

It had taken the shape of a certain spirit-guide inside me. I’ve never described it,
but if I tried to now, I would have to say it was like a string threaded with a stone,
hanging somewhere in my center beneath my breastbone.

And I could visit it—not like a place, but like a musical tuning—
to see if it were balanced in me.

In this way I lived. In this way I read in my body the currents of my time.

5.

And so I knew I’d know when I saw him if he were legitimate—a teacher,
a messenger, a son of man.

I stood at the gate to watch him pass, and he saw me. He turned his face
and became the first person ever really to see me. He saw—in that instant—
more of me than I had seen.

And I felt him, his goodness, immediately. It was beyond what I had called human.
It was what is possible for the human who has given up smallness.

I was stunned, then immediately ashamed of my own surprise, which I judged
as a lack of preparation. I didn’t know his true name, I realized, and this pained me,
and I thought it meant I’d been living wrongly.

So I ran inside to get something, anything, so I could anoint him.

Yet even as I acted, I was embarrassed by my action. I was suddenly self-conscious
about my prosperity, which seemed petty, and by my grabbing at some baldly symbolic thing—some matter—to give to him.

I saw then how we humans cover lack with our belongings,
and I felt that even my gift would be evidence of my unworthiness.

He was beautiful.

I grabbed the expensive perfume because I wanted his beauty to be recognized.

And because I wanted to free myself from the wealth that had contained me in the world.

So you see, immediately my love was buffeted by my thinking.

Immediately, everything was upside-down and righted.

6.

But when I came back outside, he was gone—up the way, talking to a gathering crowd. So I, who did not follow, followed. I, who usually led, stood at the back and listened.

And in those minutes, I experienced lifetimes, longer and longer lifetimes,
in which I thought I had done something wrong, in which I thought that by not following immediately, by going inside instead to see what I had to offer,
I had missed the opportunity to learn his true name.

I didn’t hear a word he said that day. But I saw who he was. And I wept.
Tears coursed down my face like the rivers that throb under wheat.

7.

When he finished speaking, he walked through the others to me. And I thought, God is, simply, mercy.

And right then and there, I anointed him, as if to tell him, I serve you by seeing you. And I see you are a man.

Everyone else saw, too, so this moment had to become part of the shared story. But how? How could a woman be at once so base and so audacious?

So they mingled and muddled me. They made me into no woman, two women,
all women, because what one woman could contain such contradiction—

and believe me it roiled through my body like a wail,
like the birth scream of centuries, I shook all over with it—

the shame and bravery intertwined, which is love.

8.

He washed my feet as I had washed his. And we washed the other’s feet and then the other’s brow because we wanted to root the other to earth even as we rose. That was how we loved. I loved him like an angel and a man at once. I loved him from the ground up.

Most would say I was not ashamed enough. That I was too bold in my love.
Some now will say I was not bold enough.

But from the beginning, I saw in him divinity mingled with man.
And I saw that both had been lonely.

9.

And so it began like that.

Everything I had known or done became only a preparation for the moment I was in.

When I knelt before him. When I raised my eyes to his eyes. When I left my life for my life.

I knew who I was, who he was.

And I understood I could only serve him by serving myself. I could only know God by knowing us.

I felt the divine craving for the human and knew that we were creating each other. I understood then that everything we had was a gift. Even our doubts were gifts.

Truth began to move then, taking shape against my questions,
the way the sea rolls in to form the shore.

10.

I remember those first days.

We were so busy, we were both leaders. We would look across at one another, through the crowds and generations, and recognize what we’d been given to do with our time.

Our feet would bleed from walking. Our tongues would thicken and our lips would crack from the dust and the sun and discussions. And the nights descended on us heavily as crowns,
settling cold silver on our hair and our brows.

I remember, I would watch him as I ate and imagine my hand was his hand, feeding me.

An excerpt from "Floating About on a Liquid Interior"

2008-05-13T13:27:00.000-07:00

Floating About on a Liquid Interior is a book-length series of poems mined from a book about mining. The poems were found John McPhee's masterful, Pulitzer Prize winning account of geological history, Annals of the Former World. (Mr. McPhee has read these poems and has given his permission for their publication.)

I opened Mr. McPhee’s book at random and wrote one poem from each page on which I landed. The words in each poem—including titles—appear only in the order they appeared in McPhee’s writing. A few phrases were extracted whole, but most were assembled by me from the rich ore of his syntax and diction.

In part because Mr. McPhee spent considerable time with the geologist David Love, a human narrative glints through these poems, suggesting three main characters: a woman (noted in the first person), a man (indicated by “he” or “you”), and Love, a force that, in this story, sometimes takes the male pronoun.

I realized after writing this book that the alienation between these characters echoes the alienation of us plundering humans from our earth.

*

Floating About on a Liquid Interior

Western Africa could lock itself tight
around the horn of Brazil
—these originally conjoined—

and again some catastrophe
rent asunder
the ocean between them.

Likewise
I am indebted to
a jigsaw fit and likeness.

Its infancy
years away

plowed like ice
through solid basalt.

Yet no one believed.

*

I Once Stood Looking East

at all of it converging, the drop
was giddy. Below

the pass in deep winter, I
have stayed a guest.

The scenery owes less to finishing than
to pouring, varying levels
in unexpected places.

To sense structure,
one must develop a talent for seeing through—

*

Across Deposits and Badlands

In the slow lane seagulls headed home.
We traversed the theme, predictable—

Love looks for wealth
in exploitable rock Love turns over.

Love carries within, me, beset
by contradictory interests, inevitable clutter.

*

Between Studs and Siding

The chase becomes hot, desperate.
But a running is expected to end.

Spinach in the yard.
Forge and anvil.
The creek, a Russian olive,
a balm of Gilead.

What does never mean?
I ask.

Love was used to storing.
Now its door was swinging in the wind.

We looked in. He said nothing.

*

Attempts to Extract

We are at the mercy, Love said.
It’s called colonization.

Scene after scene returning
to this theme:

Love is a prospector.
He will follow his instincts.

And he is a frequent lecturer.
Thus he carries within him a spectrum of paradox.

Beset by contradictory interests,
he cares passionately for energy

words and images and what you can see
through dimming tracts of time.

*

In the Process It Makes Sense to Imagine the Mother

A living town just uphill.

A white wooden church,
its paint peeling.

A sign that says “bait.”

Roadcuts. The intrinsic bond
and its relationship to the serpentine.

A headlight, a brake, a drum.

Such spreading
and subduction, not to mention
the consumption.

Still Intact Were the Subtle Flanges That Had Caused the Roulette Wheel to Stop

Where the dealer kept wild cards,
Love received his education.

They came for three months in summer,
the boys, taught by their mother.

The child saw sunbeams,
thought contents. Chaos
in this house of men.

Mental Problems.
Figures on large cards.

The lessons stopped, she sewed up the boy.

*

“A Blunder”

The two sides lie open like butterfly wings and are immense.

(Throughout, ice acquired while underwater.)

Running through over beside, we cross
and moments later close and parallel,

steepness breaks,
goes right through.

The sea, it
came up and drowned.

*

Food Stayed Cold All Summer

The cellar was vacant.
Love walked silently from room to room.

Resources would hereafter be employed
to fortify present possessions.

The cupboards were two feet deep
in pack-rat debris:

correspondence, information, journeys to green hindsight.

*

One Has to Settle

I put my foot to the ground.
The shovel broke in half.
After that, I had to hold its head in my hands.

There’s more to this than reversals,
more than just determining when, and whether.

You can tell from the more subtle positions.

Facts perceived confirmed the origins
but did not resolve the mystery

because there seemed to be two
equal explanations:

either the rock had moved
or the whole earth.

Poems from "Wishing Cap and the Middle Distance"

2008-05-13T13:20:00.000-07:00

Wishing Cap and the Middle Distance is a book-length manuscript that combines poetry and prose and unfolds stories within stories. Prose sections tell a fictional, allegorical story of two characters dreaming of connection, and then the book’s poems explore the “middle distance” that must be crossed in order to move from isolation to love.

Here are a few poems from the book’s middle distance:

As Eurydice

I’ve been among the roots
and there’s a warmth in the world
people have forgotten.

Inside the kettling bed and rotting
of everything that lives
it’s hot as the body.

Oh, I know how you looked for me,
on sidewalks, in the silhouettes of leaves,

how you lived on like a man
with your work and work
in the bonecold you call dread.

But we both had known you once
as me, and, God,
were you heroic in your need,
coming back like that

Then we set off
toward who you’d been

and it snapped
in you—what
had I known without you—

that fast flash of cheek—

and what did you see?

Gleam
of my shoulder or knee?

Anyway. They were live things
coursing with light.

It happened so fast:
me, made a part
in a gesture you called your own.

*

So again we are made into opposites

as your night becomes my morning.

Once when we lived together as one
and many—before you named yourself
history—Achilles, Orpheus, Nicodemus,
John the Baptist, Jesus, Buddha, Robin Hood,
Martin Luther, Prince and Peter Pan—
we had names we were born knowing.

They surfaced in me, in the slow river of sleep,
they turned in me and now
I have to spend lifetimes
meeting them back.

So in one epoch we lack faith.
In another, doubt.

In both there comes a moment
when to turn back is to lose everything—

the world of greens we live in
and the world of shades we write about.

There our voices hollow like wind through bones,

There our voices whittle the bones
and there is this sense

of having traveled far
through stone and standing water

to arrive at something so natural
and known all along:

the bowl of the belly,
the vessel and port,

stone and roots riddling us
porous until we are again

tendon-pull and fetal-pull
in a species-pull tided as the seas.

Where—do you see?—
any suspicion is a severing.

*

The dogs at the gate will stop barking

The snow on the ground will shine
coarse as sand and the day’s conversation.

There will be redbuds and steeples again,
sun sparking on cinders.

And at the end of the day
you will sleep, dreaming salt

on your tongue and the body
you loved and wore around you once,

paddling eyeless, rooted, in water,
swimming through bloodbeat to a song.

Did you feel the tiny ancient lives
nipping at your ankles?

Did you fish them out
and call them sounds?

I was one of them—minnow, crayfish,
urchin or hinged seed—

before you called my name and it
summoned me.

*

All night I am ferried in a boat

by my pregnant friend.

The water is deep, the night
velvet and deep.

She steers expertly, past diminutive white cities,
through archipelagos of blue and green.

Then she delivers me
to the other side, where I have a child

who wants to wear a necklace
strung of beads of blood.

Is this the bardo, the ocean,
the expanse between death

and the unbegun? the child asks.
I am trying to tie the strands

but I am unfamiliar with my hands.
I try, again, and fail, a knot,

and fail a knot again
when you call, waking me

to the ring and the wand
of your voice.

It wants to steer me, shield me
through the wilderness of sleep, of me.

Undifferentiated liquid, it breathes
both within me and outside me, heavily

as an ocean. I listen
amid the clock’s tick,

counterfeit drum of what the blood does.

A child asks,

What is the middle distance?

The space before your name, I say.

What is the middle distance?

The space that between us remains.

The wish of me?

The you of you.

Who is the you of me?

The little god we call the future.

At this the child straightens,
and stays awhile in silence.

What else is the middle distance? the child asks,
coming closer.

It’s any desert you’ll have to cross when you arrive here
in your life. It is your long highway over land

sculpted by a longing to be what it was
when it was water.

It is the body, which will stun you with its beauty,
with the way it changes shape and shines.

And it is the metaphor of the body,
which will surprise you with becoming—

avocado in the mouth,
a pale blossom on a branch,

the stinging grass,
and oiled knee, another’s light-swimming eye.

It is the metaphor of self,
which will inure you with its innumerable faces,

and the self itself,
which will humble you with assumptions.

What else? the child asks.

It is your past, your early arrivals in cities—
thirsty and sleep-deprived but bitingly alive

in which you will know yourself
in your aloneness. And it is this aloneness,

which you will find like a blood-rooted tooth
in the bread of every one of your loves,

Even this love? The child asked, frightened.

Yes. Even this love,
I had to answer.

*

Turtle

Years later, after cities and acquisitions, we took a tour
to see eggs buried in sand. In the center of night
we were rowed across a channel, a flat, reflecting
tendril of the sea. We stared into the drifts of stars
and folds of dark water and no one spoke.

Our guide was weary of being a guide.
He was tired of peeling himself away from his wife
and their yeasty bed of sleep after a long day of work and low pay
to row people through miles of night
to what they may or may not be able to see.
He’d met so many who did not see.
And yet it was his job. He had children to feed.

He wearily, evenly rowed us across,
the hopped out into the shallows,
holding the boat by a rope
and we took off our shoes
and stepped into water ankle-deep and skin-warm
and the ocean we understood then was a body
beating with stars.

Stars laced the waves and glinted like chips of glass in the sand.
They dripped in glittering strands over our ankles
and across the pleated tops of our feet,
and we walked through them,
over that soft borderland collapsing,
while the water swallowed the marks we’d made.

We walked until we forgot why we were walking.

Then one of us asked, What are these lights in the water?
And, like that, her question made them real.

Plankton, our guide answered, tiny plants
spawned to communicate with the moon.

And we were that luminous and we were that numerous,
but we were caught in the gauze of separateness.

Then our guide stopped.
And before us a great viridian creature emerged from the water.

For months she’d ridden the currents with the others.
She’d set off, quick as a skiff, then threaded the tides ever deeper, further,
arriving, finally, to give birth on the same star-strewn sand,
at the same star-strewn moment, that she was born.

She lumbered up the dune.
She chose her spot, blind, in a daze,
she had not eaten for days, and began to dig.
Her broad muscular flippers plunged and scooped
the sand—she was not made for land—
and in damp fists it slid again
into the space she’d created and again
she paddled back
to protect what her body had made.

She did not know if she would survive,
she did not wonder.

We were the ones who’d invented surviving.
We were the ones who had walked all that way holding our own shoes.
She dug and she was digging
to her own death, as it was in death that the egging began—
her body releasing the slick, living balls,
little, viscid, jelly-eyed moons,
color of light before color
they came from her
quickly and quickening,
clustering beneath her, wet, quivering,
each a world and a furtherance of the world,
as we in our wonder leaned closer, kneeling
in the sand like children.

And watching her work like that, we saw the world
we thought we lived in had been much too small.
The sky was not a woven thing.
The night was not a tablecloth scattered with salt.

Our hands that had been wet with flecks of ocean,
secret tears, secretions of boredom,
shone now with something shared.

Our toes hooked the sand and flashed
once their drying, dying stars.

Essay: On Race and Courage

2008-05-11T19:33:00.000-07:00

In 2004, I was teaching an after school writing program at Senn Public High School in Chicago. That fall, the Navy gave CPS a hundred thousand dollars, and the Navy set up a military academy inside the school. This created a direct recruiting vehicle conveniently located to enlist the poorest of the poor while remaining nearly invisible to the affluent neighborhood’s white citizens. I should say here that fewer than 10 percent of Chicago Public School students are white. This particular school was made up of a diverse mix of African and Asian immigrants, Latinos and African Americans, and I was the only white person in my classroom. There was heavy security throughout the school, as there are in all CPS high schools, and the place felt more like a jail than a place of learning. Our program was housed in a room used to store old desks and textbooks, so we were surrounded by towers of boxes held back by metal gates. Still, amid the yelling of teachers and the chanting and marching of ROTC students, we wrote our poems and stories.

On that strange day when George Bush was reelected, I came in, eyes swollen, and somehow—though they had been in school all day—I was the first to tell the students that the presidency had gone back to Bush. I could not have imagined their response. “They stole it again!” some of them yelled. Kids threw things and got up and started pushing things around. More than one cried. I remember a 16 year old boy—a cool, handsome, basketball playing boy, put his hood up, laid his head on his desk and just cried.

Their fear was real and well-founded, as was their grief. They sensed that, under Bush, war would escalate and they would lose more friends and relatives to fighting overseas and joblessness and crime here. They knew that they were not being protected. We had a discussion. I made some speech about the history of courage and dissent, the importance of involvement. I was surprised by their ignorance of the political process and sympathetic to their deep feelings disenfranchisement. What could I do? It was a poetry class. I guess I could have had them write rants, elegies to America, or elegies to the friends they’d lose in Afghanistan or Iraq. But I had them write letters to the new Democratic senator, Barack Obama.

I sent the letters off. I wish now that I had made a copy so I could reread them. I do remember the gist of them. They introduced themselves. They asked not to be forgotten. They asked if it would be possible for them to get a student loan to go to college. They said, “I don’t want to die in this war.”

Several of them are in Iraq now. The most talented—and the luckiest—I see when I get groceries and pump my gas, where they’re working to put themselves through school.

I didn’t even remember this incident, and I voted for Hilary Clinton in the Illinois primary, but everything changed for me last month when the discussion of race mushroomed in the media. I was stunned by white America’s naiveté and ignorance and infuriated by the media’s whining and adolescent response to Barack Obama's speech. Quippers qualified only because they are CNN or Fox “Contributors” had hours of air time to argue about the speech, while the speech itself—in its thoughtful, candid and comprehensive entirety—was not shown. It seems that our big business networks, like conservative radio hosts, are afraid that Americans will wake up and start thinking. It is hard enough to learn to think in underfunded, test-driven public schools, but when networks favor emotional, off-the-cuff commentary over thoughtfully composed reasoning, it becomes nearly impossible. In their race for profits, networks have lost track of real news and its positive potential. And viewers seem to have forgotten that being challenged is actually far more entertaining—in a sustaining and nourishing way—than being entertained.

Democracy, we must remember, relies not on a population of consumers, but a population of thinkers, co-creators of a just and evolving society. It also relies on leaders who will risk the difficult truth, and who will trust that people will get beyond sound bites and slogans to do their own thinking.

With his speech, Barack Obama did just that, graduating from being a politician to being a leader. And the difference between a politician and a leader is similar to the difference between an artist and an entertainer. An entertainer works to maintain her audience, while an artist works to maintain her freedom. Similarly, a leader responds to the moment, using the materials of his time—imperfect and challenging as they may be—to create a better future, while a politician aspires merely to be elected. At best, electibility is a result of responsiveness to constituents’ needs and values. At worst, electibility is a goal, divorcing the candidate from his own convictions and the creative power that is released when one acts in the name of a greater truth. It reduces politics—which, like art, is ultimately a human contract—to a market mentality. And our imperiled markets and plundered earth are telling us right now that it is time for our market mentality to evolve into something more wholistic and humane.

The fact that Barack Obama responded with complexity to a complex issue reveals his belief in us, the people, and his belief in what our country may become. And the way that he used his own life and experience of his own family to strive for greater understanding presents us with all with a model of intelligent and courageous examination. Such examination relies on willingness to look at what is difficult and conflicted, to differentiate between current truths and old wounds, to condemn and reject the action but not continue to love the human being. Healing relies on this kind of clear-thinking and compassionate continuity, and we must heal in order to evolve.

I have continually been humbled by my experiences as a teacher, and I have been most humbled and educated when I have been the minority in the room. The first time I taught, I was the only white person at the school, and for months, I was met with suspicion and distrust from my colleagues. My intentions were good, but they were right to distrust that old dynamic of a white woman teaching their brown and black children; they were right to suspect “charity,” and the condescension that lies at the heart of it. I realized this and realized too that I was merely experiencing the same suspicion and distrust that confronted my co-teacher, a gentle black man, every time he walked down the street or boarded a bus. It was stressful, exhausting and very lonely.

The great scholar and speaker, Cornel West, calls slavery and its legacy America’s shadow side. Surely it is our great wound, bandaged in silence, the part of our story that is most unsatisfactorily told. It is told mainly in February, with a happy ending and brief, totemic biographies of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. If slavery itself is dealt with, it is usually handled through the lens of war—which still sadistically thrills as many people as it horrifies. Or it is told as a bad idea that was perpetuated by bad people—losers who lived long ago. It thus becomes diorama propped with characters in strange costumes rather than a living dilemma, whose very history provides the map for its transformation.
It could be told as what it was and what it is: a money-driven institution founded on the idea that some people are worth more than others. That some people are people, and others are here merely to serve those people.

Seen from this distillation, we may begin to grasp how many of our current institutions rest on the same assumption. I have to ask if the “illegal” Polish cleaning ladies or Mexican yard workers labor under any such assumptions, or the people who work in sweat shops so I can buy a 10 dollar t-shirt like the one I’m wearing now. I have to ask why the poor citizens of New Orleans were kept in the Superdome like animals without sufficient food or water, or left to float as corpses down the streets, while wealthier victims of other, more recent natural disasters have already been reimbursed.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

I love these words and the fact that our country was founded on an ideal—a truly revolutionary idea that aimed to protect heavenly qualities like joy and freedom for the first time in a kingdom of men ruled by men. It was extraordinary to dissolve dominant hierarchies and the divine right of kings in favor of brotherhood, in trust that people would be courageous enough to overthrow a tyrannical government, and intelligent and vigilant enough to create and maintain a better alternative. If their authors had miscalculated—if the people were not strong enough to fight and beat the British, if they were not cooperative and intelligent enough to establish democracy--they would have been beheaded. Or their bodies would have been burned at the stake.

So, as I often remind my students and myself, it has never been easy to be courageous. Freedom is never just granted. Our freedom—as individuals and as a nation—always exists in proportion to our courage.

Today we need to find the courage not to fight, but to be honest with ourselves. And honesty—in terms of rooting out hypocrisy— has also always been difficult. After all, when The Declaration of Independence was written, thirty percent of the country was not at all independent, but enslaved to those others who were “considered equal.” These people were not counted. They could not keep their own property, their own names, their own hours, or their own children. And, ironically, hundreds of these people were “owned” by the Declaration’s main author, Thomas Jefferson.

In today’s media frenzy, I like to think that he never would have gotten away with such hypocrisy! None of us should get away with it now. We cannot talk honestly about the greatness of America without also talking about our shortcomings—not out of shame, but out of consciousness that our shortcomings hold our opportunities for genuine, meaningful change. We should not deny our complexities because they are the source of our wisdom and our creativity. To do so is to surrender to fear and self-loathing, and it collapses our future.

As a poet, I know that the poem that most frightens me is probably my best poem. I know that the shadow of the subconscious holds tremendous power. But I also know that when the shadow is drawn out—onto the page, into the room—it is not the monster I’d thought it would be, but, rather, some tenderizing evidence of my humanity. It is, as I am, good and bad, heroic and foolish. And in that moment, I have a choice—I can recoil, say, “that isn’t me,” and retreat into denial. Or I can say, “that’s me too” and trust that if it is true of me, it is true of others. I can work to love myself and others enough to confront what I don’t yet understand.

I’m relieved that the shadow of America is finally being confronted. I’m glad we have a leader to guide us in this work. And it’s exciting and clear to me that, once again, evolution relies on our collective, and conscious participation.

Four poems from "Flywheel"

2008-05-09T16:00:00.000-07:00

I Know Why I Make the Past A Destination

I remember the ivy,
the way it whiskered up the brick
of the hospital’s old wing,
its broad, red-edged leaves lifting,
drowsily, like paws. So beautiful,
and disturbing—its tenaciousness,
the way it seemed to insist climbing
was the only natural thing,
while, across the lot, the new glass wing
I waited in shivered like a mirage,
like a rib that had been extracted from a cloud.
We don’t need medics to push you,
these things run on tracks now,
the doctor said, and he looked familiar
in his white coat and corduroys,
explaining how now it was possible
to get a map of every illness you’re likely to get,
or to die from, in your life.
I kept looking past him, at the vines outside,
those burnt hands curling,
thinking it’s always been frightening
to be alive, the way we can almost,
but never quite, remember the future.
I’ve traced fate on the underside
of a hand, and on a leaf,
but that was quaint,
nothing like it would have been once
to pass your palm, damp and shaking,
across a table to the reader you needed to believe.
It must have felt something like this—
sweating under a paper gown, swallowing blue fluid,
buckling the body and its unknown future to a table
that inches persistently forward under slicing light.
Always this stillness before you divine.

(First published in the New Delta Review.)

*

The Bone

I found it in the garden
below the flint arrowheads.
When tapped, it rang like glass,
and was so light to hold,
it could have been composed of breath.
Space gave it form
by way of endless inner catacombs,
miniscule brittle chambers
I saw as epochs of air,
that once had been water,
once dust, and once marrow.
One side had broken from its host
with the frayed, desperate edge
of the death rattle or birth tear.
I could see where it had fought
not to be so individuated.
The other was a smooth knob
I rubbed like a worry stone
and felt long ago rolling
in a socket swaddled in sinew,
swiveling amid the blood-beat
the hip of some dark, swift being.
I wrapped it in soft cloth.
Carried it secretly to school.
Laid it in a drawer and checked it
so often it shined and darkened
with my life, its shared air hollowing me.

*

What I Meant to Say About Childhood

was the morning infusing us and
borders more like fur
than surface, slurred
with sun and somehow spilling
into others, bowls into bowls,
our heads dipped and bobbing
as we sat in the half-moon
on the wooden floor.

This was in Indian-style,
our legs over and under,
knotted in the trust that everything
was what we had to learn.

And so we listened
as the white-haired woman read
the words: purple, juniper, bread and spoon,
and she called each world
good in the way she held it—
its laminated spine
like the crackling stem
of a newborn’s head.

Our heads then were huge
bone baskets, made mostly of openings
and we leaned them into the moment
light crested and split
against the frames of things,
the shapes they told us to memorize
while we felt their volumes filling up.

Remember that, when still my hand
in yours was either one? Wasn’t it
the most gradual thing, this sharpening
into edges?

(First published in The Southern Review.)

*

The Animator

It’s terrible work for the lighthearted.
I meant to do cartoons or video games,
but the law firm had the only job I found,
doing reenactments. Each week,
a lawyer sends in a single-spaced brief
and I begin again the history of blame.
I order the events like a dog-eared deck
of cards, show how a lover’s finger
stiffens, in increments, as it pulls a trigger,
or the way a semi-truck can ricochet
and swipe a van like a bottle over a guardrail.
Once, I had to follow underwater,
make the father unbuckle all three kids
before he ran out of air and couldn’t kick
the windows free. The children’s hands reached out
like starfish, their hair rose into golden bells,
but their faces—I had to make their faces blank.

Mostly, we concern ourselves with things,
frame the flight of a bullet as it tears
through a jacket, into the dune of a woman’s breast.
Did you know bullets explode into roughly drawn stars?
Have you ever seen cells rush in to sluice a wound?
You can almost hear the body’s coalition
roaring with rage. It gets predictable
as science fiction—skin a desert crust
over red drifts of tissue,
ribs the battened hull of a mother ship,
and the blood, the minions and minions
of diligent soldiers.

My job is to direct the juror’s eye,
so I cut a little beauty into every frame—
maybe a rain-slicked street ribboned with headlights,
a bright maple leaf or worn gold ring.
But the best it gets is when I spend all day
with something small and concrete—
an axle, say, or a buckle— something
that failed through no fault of its own.

Essay: There is no other

2008-03-30T12:46:00.000-07:00

As I write this, my daughter is sleeping peacefully in her bed, and the news is flashing nightmarish updates about the latest shooting on a college campus. Like most parents, I spend my days navigating how much of this information to let in and how much to shut out, to create a sense of solace for our family. But can there be solace anywhere when students are shooting each other, and themselves? Can we honestly go on telling these stories as if each is the result of one mentally ill young person and not a barometer of our national mental health? I wish that instead of one more psychologist being interviewed about personality disorders and their corresponding drugs, someone would connect some dots call this tragic trend what it is—an outbreak of simmering insecurity that is, if anything is, a matter of national security. Then maybe we would spend some of our resources looking inward rather than outward for what threatens us.

In addition to being a mother, I am a college professor. I love my job and am grateful that it allows me to learn from young people. Last fall, I asked my freshman classes to write research papers and give presentations on topics of their choice, and many wrote about issues affecting their generation.

They wrote about prescription drug abuse—how so many people their age are medicated for ADD, anxiety and depression, and how many fiddle with their meds in order to focus in school, calm down, lose weight, or, increasingly, get high. These prescriptions are easily available online, but most don’t even need to sneak around to get drugs, because their parents and doctors have been providing them for years with few questions asked.

They wrote about parental pressures—to test well, to go to the best possible school and then to get a lucrative job in order to pay off astronomical college debt. Several of my students said they would like to be teachers or international health workers but have been told that they won’t be able to “afford” these professions.

They wrote about media pressures to be rich, thin and successful—in short, to identify entirely with external values rather than internal values, which, some admitted, are hard to even identify at this point. While media pressures have been around for decades, they have never been as invasive as they are now, with advertisers text messaging cell phones and reality television insidiously replacing “reality.”

And what is their reality—the one that doesn’t make it onto TV? These students have grown up during wartime. September 11 crashed into the beginning of their adolescence. Yet, unlike the “Greatest Generation,” they do not face a clear enemy, and they hear a world community criticizing US military involvement rather than soliciting it. And unlike the Viet Nam generation, they do not see their war on national television—ever. They have friends fighting and falling, but they do not see their struggles or their faces, nor do they see the faces of the “enemy.” The result is a war that is increasingly abstract and terrorizing, and an enemy that could be anyone sitting on the bus, or in the classroom.

In the two weeks that my students gave their presentations, there was a shooting in a shopping mall and another shooting on a school bus--both by people their age. I asked what they thought was going on and saw a haze of emotion on their faces. They have been living with vague orange and yellow alerts since they were kids. Fear is in their atmosphere and is one element of their isolation.

There is no way to summarize the pain and confusion behind these shootings, and no way to reconcile their losses. But my students told me that they see so much violence on television and in video games, they don’t know how to feel the reality of it. They also told me that there is not a big enough difference between pulling a trigger in violent video games and pulling a trigger in real life. We know this is true because the military uses video games as training tools to help soldiers cross the psychological barrier to killing another human being. Military research proves that if an 18- or 21-year old shoots often enough at a computer target, they can shoot and kill another person with far less anxiety.

Young people are deeply passionate and impressionable, and they have always been the ones to react first and most dramatically to hypocrisy. These shootings are terribly hopeless acts from a despairing minority. They are suicide bombs much like those of our “enemies.” And they suggest whole groups of young people who do not see a way out of a culture that profits at their expense.

Every parent wants the best for his or her child, but I think we need to reevaluate what “the best” means. I am at the beginning of my journey as a parent, and I do not know yet what specific challenges, joys and griefs it will hold. I do know that I enter the process with many questions. I wonder how much longer we can afford the kind of “prosperity” our country has been living for, the kind that puts us into competition with one another and implies that we are different and better than other people in the world. I wonder if I will be able to identify short-sightedness—in myself and in society—and protect my daughter from mainstream values that seem to me skewed and dishonest. I wonder if I will be able to stay conscious, to be a guide and companion for her as she creates a meaningful life, because it is clear to me that new, more humane and rigorous meanings must be created.

I think the best way to respond to my child is with all the honesty and attention that I can muster. And the best way to respond to this tragic insanity is with all the sanity we can muster—with gun control legislation, of course, but also with a deeper look at ourselves, our families and communities. Sanity must begin with the difficult and necessary evaluation of our anxiety and its masking addictions—to consumption, prescriptions, violence, hectic schedules, frenetic media, and to ideas about America that are no longer true. If we can find the courage to see ourselves, then, together with our kids, we can begin creating a future they can live with.