theology&geometry

Risk

And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to Blossom.

– Anaïs Nin

That’s something we know. And yet when we create we do our best to try for something new anyway, against the damned odds.

I’m always slightly amused/horrified when I belch up something (that’s always how it feels when I write, really: Like a force of nature, something to be gotten out of me and once it’s out, I feel better and lighter) and then later find something in this world that already existed for some time, something shiny and succinct in its own right that I might as well have pointed to as an obvious influence. An homage, on good days. There are things around me that I absorb and internalize to a degree that I don’t realize. When I unwittingly retrace my steps and stumble upon those things every now and again, I get quite a start. I feel confident that this isn’t just my problem; everyone who tries to make things has to run into this fact occasionally, right?

I’m rambling. It’s 4 a.m., so that’s expected. The point is this:

I wrote a poem-ish thing. The Great and Secret Thing was kind enough to publish it. I wrote it months and months ago. September. Maybe October. I sat on it for a while, as I sometimes do with intensely personal things. Had to psych myself up to put it out there in the ether a few weeks ago.

And then it just happened that this past Thursday night, as I was combing through my bookshelves in hunt of a (bacon-themed!) book for Agitatrix, I happened upon a Sharon Olds collection I hadn’t picked up in a couple of years. I plucked it out and set it aside. And then, after I had found the bacon book and stuck it in my bag to take to work the following day, I leafed through Blood, Tin, Straw. And I lost words as I read “The Factors.”

Sharon Olds planted a seed in me the first time I read that poem years ago, and I didn’t realize it until just now. “Humbling” isn’t even an adequate word.

On The Clock
(Mine)

That last half of August
the part of me I don’t admit to
the tyrant I didn’t even know was in there
set up shop
(I worked on commission)
and I think it’s fair to call it a shop
of sweat
and tears
and blood
eventually
after I had put my handprints in the dust
everywhere
and spent you
again and again
at ridiculous hours
ferocious
without shame
the clang of metal echoing
my brain sure of bad ideas
my body ready for science experiments

those stifling August days
we just shut out the sun
and worked in the dark

The Factors
(Sharon Olds)

Sometimes we seem almost to be working,
as if making something, wrapped tight
around my body from either side as it is
pouring off our gleaming pieces of work, which could be
nearly seen, for a moment, in the air, and we can
hear them, the clear note of their molecular
structure stuck—
sometimes you and I are like a factory
minting invisible artifacts,
hot shuddering that floats in air,
more of it is continuously needed,
and more, and more, sometimes we wring
the whole factory like a shimmering rag,
harder each time, the cloth-cries go higher and
higher, from within comes pulsing a lambent
wobbling vessel, off the wheel it
whirls, indented with the muscles’ bright thumbs,
transparent with kiln-fire; another is needed,
and another, we don’t know who orders it, we are
workers in a doting frenzy of making.
And where is love? This is its room,
where this is done; it is the bed,
the air; and the glowing not-things
wrenched from the body, rushing from it
as though they are being born, those
are acts of love. One could not call it
patience, the hour you kneel, turn,
rise, drawing the, pressing the, made
love out; inside each one
a half-god, calling to the other
half-one, in the other one,
come, come, yes, my darling, my
sweetheart, come.

by Leonard Cohen (from the Book of Longing)

My time is running out
and still
I have not sung
the true song
the great song

I admit
that I seem
to have lost my courage

a glance at the mirror
a glimpse into my heart
makes me want
to shut up forever

so why do you lean me here
Lord of my life
lean me at this table
in the middle of the night
wondering
how to be beautiful

So I’m rifling through every single thing I own, trying to toss what’s expendable and pack what’s not. I came upon my stack of Collages, dating back to the mid-’90s (working in what used to be the Student Publications office had many perks, one of which was access to back issues), and instantly remembered these two poems from the Fall 1997 edition that I’d fallen in love with when I encountered them back in 2001 or so. Both are by Mary Cummins. I’ve Googled her and the poems to no avail. I hope she’s out there still writing poetry, because the things she writes speak so softly but mean so much. Anyway. Here they are. Hopefully she won’t mind me sharing them here.

Honeymoons
by Mary Cummins

There was that time
in your mother’s house.
She had blue curtains
and flowerpots on the balcony,
watching the lake and our
occasional exploding
semi-melodramas
of those years,
way before she died
and we became calmer lovers.
It was some morning when
we argued over something,
maybe distances or faults
or the frying of eggs, and
she wondered why we visited
west Nevada every June
to pet her cats and shout
profanities in her kitchen.
You slammed some door
and I threw tupperware
at your stubbornness
and her hand-painted wall,
cringed as she surveyed
our splattered breakfast,
its plastic bowl
bouncing on the floor.
She shook her graying head,
clicked her tongue and said,
honey, it’s not love
’til you break something.

I don’t know you.
by Mary Cummins

You pour coffee
and I sell shoes.
You have Clark Kent eyes,
fuzzed goatee, a tattoo
round your bellybutton.
I wear big heels and my
mother’s college dresses,
line my lids in black.
Weekdays I size up customers,
wonder where I’m going
for lunch, send you good
mornings in corner glancing.
I hate life this way.
You give me chamomile tea,
dollars and soft fingers for change.
If one day I say hello,
I am twenty-two and stuck,
perhaps you would run
gentle hands over the ruins
I’ve made of these years.
I place my tired hair behind my ears
and go for doughnuts.
I offer you pennies,
my pressed skirt whispers please.

I wish I could write erotic poetry about laundry day like Erica Jong does:

This is the dirty laundry poem—
because we have traveled from town to town
accumulating soiled linen & sweaty shirts
& blue-jeans caked & clotted with our juice
& teeshirts crumpled by our gloriously messy passion
& underwear made stiff by all our joy.

No, my laundry poetry would sound a little more like

This shirt, perfectly clean
has been kicked from corner to corner
absent a hanger
accumulating dust and cat hair
until it’s as filthy as everything else
that comes through here

I’m not sure which poem would embarrass my mother more.

[Project 365]

The New Stranger
by Sharon Olds (from Blood, Tin, Straw)

They would peer in the carriage and ask was your father
Chinese, your lustrous, curly-lidded,
slightly tilted eyes, your elegant
forehead. You were a stranger to me—
I thought I would know you, but I had to get to know you—
I know your bowl brow, and serious
eyes, but sometimes you were alien to me
as a foetus, the large-brained head, the brain
forming its ancient folded flower
like a vegetable, you could not talk,
you looked at me as if from far
away, Mars, the newt, I did not
know you, I had never known a newborn, you
had to arrive into the arms of an amateur.
No one has known my ignorance so well, so
smelled my fear, there, with the fresh
abundant milk. And from no one have I learned
as I learned from you, you brought me forward
from brine and kelp and alkali
through mitosis, meiosis, zygote, delicate
blastocoele, with your eyes I swam up
from deep in your face, with your lips I opened,
with your tongue I formed your name, with the stub of your
hand I budded, with your baby-fat
I put on cells, with your brown, swirling
crown I crowned, with your life I came forth,
and a moment later, rose-blue, you opened
the new package of your breath. I looked
up, and saw you. Hard to tell,
in those first moments on the delivery table,
gore, and cord, and packet of gore,
who has hooked whom—you caught me
into the human. I learned to sit still while you
hauled that whale of milk tail-first down
out of me—split, fiery
flukes of your first sips—I learned to be
nuzzled as they might cuddle an autistic child. I learned to croon to you,
to cry and moan, and all this time
you were getting your first looks at the earth, it was
you, and I did not know you, I was not
there to greet you, I didn’t exist
until you smiled at me, and in your
brilliant loam-colored iris I saw,
tiny as an embryo,
your mother smile.

The Flood
by Leonard Cohen

The flood it is gathering
Soon it will move
Across every valley
Across every roof
The body will drown
And the soul will break loose
I write all this down
But I don’t have the proof

[Project 365]

My mother has been grieving for weeks over a ring that my dad gave her on April 1 four years ago that she lost recently. She left me the saddest voice mail earlier today, first recapping all the local news (my sister has pneumonia, my dad’s heart doctor appointment here in town is for the 9th, etc.) and then wrapping up the message by saying how she was kinda down today because of the missing ring. I talked to her and she seemed okay, but I could tell it was really bothering her.

Tonight as I was leaving work, my phone danced its little pocket jig and I saw it was my mother calling again. It went to voicemail (stupid slow fingers) so I called her back. She then told me all about a poem she’d written for my dad the night before.

Here’s where the story gets achingly cute. You’ve been warned.

See, my dad always always always pranks my mom on April Fool’s Day. First thing in the morning, of course. So, anticipating that and still feeling awful about her lost ring, my mom left a note out for my dad last night. (She read it to me over the phone but I requested that she e-mail it to me too, for posterity.)

It goes:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
Please don’t April Fool me,
For I am feeling blue.

You see, it was on this very day
Back in Two Thousand Five,
That you gave me a ring and my heart did sing!
And my hopes for years of getting that special ring that very day
came alive.

O, those seven sweet diamonds that sparkled for miles
Could only make brighter my own proud smiles.

So you see, in a way,
This for me is a “mourning” day.
But I’ll always keep looking in hopes that it might
Reappear to me somehow–and oh! what a sight!

So I’ll cherish the memories of how it did shine–
Until that day may come when I can say, “you’re back! You’re
MINE!”

My dad read the note this morning and got a little teary-eyed when my mom told him she hoped he wouldn’t be mad that she wasn’t in the mood for pranks. He said of course he wasn’t mad. The day went on as usual until just a few hours ago. Mom had been dinking around in the walk-in closet, then came back a little while later to get some socks or something. She said she saw a black box on the floor that she swears wasn’t there before. Lo and behold, it contained not only her ring, but some earrings and a pendant she had apparently also misplaced.

When I talked to her, as she was reading that poem to me, her voice sounded a dozen times lighter than it had earlier today.

Although she’s not exactly sure what she did to this photograph, my mother is extremely excited to have her ring back.

Scanning Memphis blogs, came upon this poem. It’s fantastic.

Emptying Town
by Nick Flynn

I want to erase your footprints
from my walls. Each pillow
is thick with your reasons. Omens

fill the sidewalk below my window: a woman
in a party hat, clinging
to a tin-foil balloon. Shadows

creep slowly across the tar, someone yells, “Stop!”
and I close my eyes. I can’t watch

as this town slowly empties, leaving me
strung between bon-voyages, like so many clothes
on a line, the white handkerchief

stuck in my throat. You know the way Jesus

rips open his shirt
to show us his heart, all flaming and thorny,
the way he points to it. I’m afraid

the way I’ll miss you will be this obvious.

I have a friend who everyone warns me
is dangerous, he hides
bloody images of Jesus
around my house, for me to find

when I come home; Jesus
behind the cupboard door, Jesus tucked

into the mirror. He wants to save me
but we disagree from what. My version of hell
is someone ripping open his shirt

and saying, Look what I did for you…

(HT: Bait and Switch)