Piecing It Apartogether

I'm not so great around my birthday anymore since my mother died. I feel deeply lonely, no matter what, and a scrambled, frenetic energy that goes nowhere. For my 56th birthday, I was determined to make the best of a year that was divisible by eight, my favorite number. I collected all the self-portraits I've written over the years, took them to Staples, and had copies made to create a book. My plan was to make the book interactive with pull-outs and pockets with secret messages for the recipient, and collaged covers. This never happened because the project was beset with printing errors, user errors, and a general sense of "maybe this just doesn't matter all that much to anyone other than me." So I relegated all 100 (why?!) copies, and the special binding machine I purchased to the attic storage, and forgot about it. A week or so ago when I was digging around for art supplies, I opened up a suitcase and rediscovered all the copies of poems.

I left them out as I worked on another project. "Maybe now is the time to do something with these," I thought. Then I really looked them over, all these versions of me, poems I no longer related to, and I threw them all away. The spontaneity! Whee! I'm letting go of all this ego! Also, how wasteful. I felt liberated, with a coating of light guilt and melancholy.

Later that week I was looking for some drawings to show my friend, and I found yet another box of those self portraits. I must have said to myself that if I left the poems within view, I'd do something with them. But the box became part of my everyday landscape, just another object my eyes grazed over to get to the glue sticks or pompoms they were truly seeking. I ignored them.

"Those are some determined poems," I decided. Now I had to do something with them. 

Every morning I've been cutting these self-portraits apart, redacting myself. I redacted my own book of poems, Year in the Blanks, a few times over, and I have so many versions of that book now on my hard drive it's confusing. My process was different for that. I started by blacking out words and phrases on the printed pages, and then quickly went into the file and removed words, and tinkered with space. It had less a physical, visceral feeling to it. I was, for the most part, focused on a screen.

Cut-up technique is nothing new. The Dadaists started it in the 1920s, and William S. Burroughs began cutting up newspaper articles and rearranging the words to create prophetic phrasings in the 50s and 60s. Many artists use the technique now in varying ways. 

"When you cut into the present, the future leaks out."  - William S. Burroughs

I'm not exactly cutting into the present when I take apart my old poems. I'm cutting into the past me, revealing what I hope is more present tense, and less about me. It's hard to get away from yourself when creating though. There's always just a titch of you flavoring the soup. I think that's what I find fascinating about this. How much do I pare away and what do I keep?

Cutting up paper is a very tactile, focused experience. The screech of scissors from the 1970s, the little slivers of paper that I flip over carefully with a licked finger then shuffle around the desk. I trim away suffixes, prefixes, rearrange words in a puzzle that has no end goal image to follow. When I'm done I take a few photos of the poems as they rest on the desk, and then I whisk them into the trash bin. Ephemeral. That kind of letting go feels good too. It is pure play. Quiet and filled with delight.

Here's the source self-portrait I used this morning. The poems you've seen throughout this post were made from this poem. 

The Best of It

“How is the ring of my being singing through others?”

- Nora Bateson

Of course this book of poems

is me, and you, 

and the stranger who

starred in it, looped, bracketed, underlined

whole passages —

order is always

starting over

A reminder that objects

invite our touches,

just a highlight here

and there

As though the self

were eager to be wrecked

As though each of our selves

were dying to be found

and then cut out 

of our muzzy landscapes

and the chap of dreams, 

rearranged, out-of-context,

and out of order.

How messy

it is to live, all

marks and meaning

to get to some final

point of exclamation,

to feel connected.

How distance

begins to look extraordinary

and logimagical enough to abandon

this poem-book-lover-past-tense-childhood

for someone else to pick up 

and start over. 

A Few Typewriter Poems

Bare November trees

slip on wigs of grey clouds

lunch ladies at dawn

Woodpecker on oak

taps to find what feeds her

Royal typewriter

Alcoholic friend

sends a text at 2 a.m. --

the only light on

 

Self-Portrait at 52

Hex of snow I pluck,
lattice of lines I live with,
and this body, Saturnalian,
still rises at 5 a.m.
A quick jerk, upright
each minute the last minute
in this hollow hour.
Bees spark inside me,
and stones moss over,
the entrance shaded.
There’s less to say now.
I see.

A Couple of Idiomatic Hearts

 Broken

Sometimes you don’t have the heart
to cross your heart and hope to die,
stick a needle in your eye —
Feint of heart
is the heart of your matter,
you feel the skipped beats.
Sometimes to know one’s heart
is to lose heart,
to steal another heart,
then cross it,
make it bleed, and harden.
It’s a craft that for some
means you’re alive
in affairs of the heart.
You’ve crafted a heart of stone,
a heavy, sinking heart,
that strikes fear
into the hearts
of others.


Idiot Valentine

Follow me, yes me,
your heart, hello! Gladdened.
I’m doing you good, baring all,
hanging out on your sleeve
for all to see.
Warming the cockles, that’s me,
reminding you that you are young
forever in my eyes, but not
necessarily young anywhere else.

I’m always in the right and wrong places,
leaping, melting, speaking.
I have all your best interests!
I’ll find a way to be near
or into, at, by, or from (I love a preposition).
After all, I am after myself, or is it you?
I am your desires, the thumping, pumping center
of your days. There’s a song in me, etched.
Pull on my strings and I’ll pour it out,
sing it out, sob it out.
I’m full, content, weeping.
I go out to you,
full of potential for failure, 

angling for the win.

There Must Be More

The trouble with my soul
is that it won’t stay inside
where it belongs. It won’t
just rest, make a nest
in the crook of an elbow
or perch in the ribcage.
It flaps, floats, bashes
itself against the windows,
knocks itself out looking,
I guess, for its own pair
of eyes, sure that the two
we have now are missing
a sunrise of eternal humility.

I Dream of Rain

My body buzzes with the grumble
of a tractor beneath it, my feet
become tires, my back a cart
that carries pails of water
to dry fields, and stones
to fill the swale. There’s
a heavy hope in our air,
tension in each lump of clay
we release to crumbs.
I point out the boulders
across the road, and later,
returned to my own legs
for balance, crouch to lift
a duck feather from the grass
and watch it drift,
a weightless curve
of what we dream on,
find our rest.

Excavation of an Uneven Path

I prefer to kneel in the ground
until my back and neck ache,
use my hand as a trowel,
a rake, my fingernails filling
with dirt
as I search for a path
someone else laid out decades ago.

Here it winds toward the shed,
and there it ends
in a profusion
of terra cotta shards and gravel.

A pale grub of frustration
from not knowing
which way to turn
dissolves
in a spontaneous mudpie
experiment. I find reward
in the tiny
ceramic basket with gold trim
excavated six inches below
where I began this morning.

It makes sense to me to bow down
to where the path might be, search
many generations worth
of stories I hold,
handle,
hear,

let anger (that lowly, but helpful worm)

with my spatial lacking lead me

to feel the grit

of whispers
from everyone who lived here before.

I listen, aware of my spine
and every impulse my body
still has in its living cells,
I hear what it feels like
to not know what I
might unearth next.

As We Become More Inside

For the past forty days
or so everyone is inside
and no one knows
what to do about it
but a snail is outside
and on the edge of rain
exploring a blade of grass
riding its slow green wave
relaxed and ready
for whatever may be
at the end.

Sweetgreen

Kneeling in the kitchen garden
in his torn plaid jacket and Irish flat cap,
broad back to me,
head bowed,
he concentrates
on a tiny, living thing
perhaps a pea start —
its thready,
vulnerable roots
and new leaves
shivering in dim light.

The April sun is a giant he follows,
who also kneels each day
to clear room for the stars
as they kiss each sprout
in the same way my eyes
graze this man
whose rooted hands
bring me all the food
I will ever eat.

I Wanted To Sing

That morning, I wanted to sing
to my students, full of feeling
about ancient voices
that were showing us
how much we are alike.
I don’t remember the song
that had such tidal pull
I wanted to share it.

How little has changed.

We wrote poems together,
combed Sappho’s fragments
for their meaning and messages
and with only two weeks time
ourselves, ripped our own poems
apart to see what still breathed
in the pieces.

We glued our sea-drift words
to blocks, built up and tore down
poems over and over again
to see what we could lift
from the wreckage.

Their senior year voices
bubbled like the secrets
of Tu Fu or Issa:

I only wanted everything,
all you have to offer —
life

My soul is heavy
I’m alive

I didn’t sing that day.
How could I?
It was the end of homeroom,
drone of announcements,
the pledge of allegiance,
lunch orders —
patty melt or fish sub?

They would think it
out of place, my song.
I took a coward’s silence.
I groan for this.
But what can I do?

How much I wanted
to give them,
any handful of seashells
or polished glass, sand
passed through fingers.

How little has changed:

My soul is heavy
I’m alive.

Nature's Sweet Message For You Today

Two days in a row I’ve seen the same frog
snugged into the mud by the makeshift
bridge in the watershed.
Yesterday she didn’t move at all,
just sat there, all brown and earthy,
a testament to camouflage and
will you just keep your mouth shut
for once and listen.

 •

I wrote to a friend recently about how I really want to create right now. Every twenty minutes or so I get a blind energy, a dustup of motivation that moves me to research, take notes, or roll around on the floor with a chair and dream. Then it seems as soon as that phase is over, the doomblob rolls in, and everything feels dire and purposeless.

There's a list of projects I am pursuing very slowly, like a cat in the underbrush, wiggling and pausing, adjusting her line of sight, and pausing some more. Is this bird worth it? Is it too big? I may get my eyes pecked out.

When I'm not having full on panic attacks, making soup out of leftovers, or avoiding Facebook by reading Boing Boing, I do yoga, keep up my hoop practice, or "follow along" with free Zumba routines available online now. There's plenty online, and I'm terrible at Zumba. I do not have the hair-flipping, sexybod moves for the choreographies, but I really enjoy the attempt, the fail, and the increase in heart rate. I laugh at myself. What else is there?

Then and only then, when I have written and exercised, do I have permission to go outside and stare at a frog.

Waterline

Lady Wreck raises her glass
and drinks to the stiffness
in her neck, lostness of the day.
She veers into the sofa, her helm
of anxiety crashes into waves
of ambient light and laugh tracks.

Lady Wreck is so grateful to be here,
hello, hello, it’s lovely to be back
where no one can see her
billowed under blankets,
the words of her friend in a loop:

there are refrigerated trucks
outside on the streets
full of dead bodies

Lady Wreck sets her head down,
sweats, shivers, breathes in all
the hull of her body (a dinghy)
wouldn’t allow before,
takes the full weight
of the ocean on board.

Enso

You can lose your life here
or let go of it.

Take off the costume
of your over-amplified voice
squeezed through a funhouse mirror
for so many years even you
can't translate it anymore.

How is this yammer-hammer
of anxiety's bungee cord
holding your skeleton together?
Those winds of unknowing--
that blue grey paradise
in your fingertips,
surf of sorrow
like a slouched sock,
a lazed flamboyance you allow.

This is the scrumhum of sand
as it passes through the body,
your physical world.

Your whole life
you never heard
the sound of pages
turning in the background.

How impatient you always were
to just fill a page with words.
How exasperated your partial
circle of a heartbeat was.

No one is surprised
when you take off one mask
to put a different one on.
No one is surprised
by the sound of their two syllable
footsteps that say:
alone
alone
I am.

Just the Contents

There’s really nothing to report, just the contents
of these little boxes, objects almost absent,
lost in a landscape of pure bric-a-brac.
They were once filled by me, who has a knack
for forgetting where things really belong, their intent.

So lift the treasure chest lid with confidence
and find paperclips in a room without documents.
Who needs closure? Office supplies just show us
there’s really nothing to report.

A wooden box with a smooth top and a bent
latch holds a few Euros, money meant
for sunnier purses and glasses of cognac.
And this one, hand-painted with the blackest
of flowers holds a few matches, their fires spent.
There’s really nothing here that’s just content.

--
Poet's Note: Kind of a rondeau, but not really at all. A bit more of an unraveled doily.

Grenade

All the angels in me are tired
of the chain reactions
and plutonium triggers
of my wishbones.

They pant like dogs
in their bullet-proof vests.
Go out in the world, I say,
but they’ve read the headlines.

Better to sandbag my ribcage,
count my teeth and name them
like stars, chain-smoke and laugh
about their ghost stories.

They pull on the long rope
of my brain, uncoil, re-twist,
search for the films of
births-marriages-deaths
so ordinary and solo.

They’ve traded in their harps
for the skirl of harmonica,
light tin can fires at night
as the General stokes
the indigo bulb
between my eyes.

At daybreak, they startle, 
Why is she up so early?
They aim for my mouth
but shoot at my feet instead.

Go out in the world, they say.

I dance with this bomb
that is my body.

Cleave

This is version three of the original poem, "To Be Eligible,"which I wrote and shared the other day. I've been following my instinct to take the poem apart in different ways. This version uses press on lettraset lettering in the center rift, the gap, the river of no that separates the body of the second version of the poem, "Don't Cry." The process of making this version was physical and angry -- pressing down the letters to see them adhere the paper, blacking out all the space around the other words, creating a void.

Cleaving

To be eligible

for the tarpaper dream,
the rubble of glassy mouths,
our silent, violent, majestic home:

Keep your eye
on the eye
that watches you.
Don’t cry.

To be eligible
for once upon a time
and a sky not on fire:

Here is a stone
for your throat.
Don’t cry.

To be eligible
for happily ever after,
a path free of bombs:

Here is a feather
to replace your heart.
Watch it drift.

To be eligible
for the Mother of Exiles,
the glow of welcome,
open arms:

Set forth in section 101a
we have a history
of turning away.

We’ve collected your sun,
your son, your daughters,
for those who tinker
with status best,
revel in the forlorn
perfection of files.

To be eligible
we number your guilt
for wanting better:

You get one call
to your child.
He answers
but sounds
broken.
Or the phone
on this land is your land,
this land is my land
just rings
and rings
and rings.

Wednesday Pickup of My Truth

My truth is that I know nothing.

One day I will return to chlorophyll
and it’s easy for me to face this
while I still remember my own name,
can write these words with my hand
on this piece of paper that was once a tree.

The body of the Marquis de Sade
became a tree after he died.
His request was to be buried
with acorns, and their little
green horns nosed
into his flesh,
nourished.

To be greening!
Or green!
A fresh lawn!
An oak!

To dream of joining the chorus
of twig, bark and root,
the mysticism of up, up, up.

Maybe you know everything then,
have all the answers but can’t speak,
how poetic, forced to watch others
make mistake after lonely mistake
in their crosswords and delegations,
negotiations lost.

You unfurl your tiny green flags
and they wave. You change
them all to red, a warning,
and finally just give up, your truth
on the ground for others
to rake up into piles, thrust
into paper bags and park
at the curb for Wednesday pickup.

Your heart is a nest of squirrels.
Birds mate in your brain
and then there are more birds,
and don’t cardinals carry the souls
of the dead?

I know nothing,
but can speak,
today.
It feels dangerous,
reckless,
to be alive.