How flimsy, this work of wish-making: of knotting
thread after thread to necessity, if only to make
beauty from the awareness of our perishing.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Nothing and Everything
The wind shuffled a full deck of leaves, each of them blank.
Imagine what to do with carte blanche: how you’d furnish
your rooms, the many-leaved days, nights dusky as blackboards
chalked over with dreams— And I’m sure I’d love blanc-
mange, sweet rolls, strong coffee for brunch, the hours blank
as new linen, duty shoring up the banks— And how sweet
to be able to start, mess up, do it over again; fill in blanks
that were missed the first time around. Nothing left vacant,
no stone left unturned; no check voided, gone bad, or returned
for want of funds: the empty hull pleasing as its original shape.
In response to Via Negativa: Of two minds.
And ever
[and today I have written at least a poem a day, every day, for the last two years]
“Forever and forever, and forever.” ~ Ezra Pound, “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”
When I was six, my biological mother took me to Mido Chinese restaurant in the plaza to meet the lover she was not supposed to have. We climbed the stairs to the mezzanine. The air was stale with the smell of sesame oil, fried onions, and five spice powder. You can have a dumpling with your soup, she whispered. Just don’t tell your mother that we came here, or whom we met. She was referring to her older sister, her only sister, who was raising me as her own, and putting her through high school. Both of them, therefore, were/are my mothers; and I was taught a special name for each of them.
I do not remember the face of the man we met there. I do not know for sure if this is the man she married, one grey morning months later in December. (Was it December?) Gigi, one of the next door neighbors’ daughters, served as flower girl with me. We wore stiff white satin dresses and tiny tulle veils; Gigi had stolen a tube of pink lipstick from her older sister’s dresser. She grasped my chin with her left hand and said, Pucker, then smack. I obeyed, making a fish face as she applied a waxy stripe of color to my lips. We stood in the vestibule, shivering, waiting for the cue to begin walking down the aisle, scattering dahlia and rose petals.
Is she going to faint? Gigi wanted to know. All brides faint at the altar, she said confidingly. That’s because the waistlines of their dresses are tightened, so they don’t show in case they already have a baby. She didn’t know, but I knew that couldn’t be true, because I was so far the only baby— and wasn’t I standing there, in a pair of shoes that pinched, clutching a wicker basket still full of petals husked from beheaded blooms?
No, not many knew. No one knew then, either, that one afternoon this man put his hands under my waistband and said, eyes glinting, I know another way to make you pee. And there they were, bending their heads under the veil and cord, passing a handful of coins from one to the other: making promises, drinking the wine without knowing quite yet we’d already fallen, head-first, all of us, into the rest of everything to come.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Exit Interview (excerpt)
What have you learned, I am asked; or, Who do you think you are?
I have learned that from the same window, the landscape is always the same, even when it is different. For example, today, heavy frost sheens the branches of trees. Yesterday, they were leafed in ochre and gold.
The seasons are punctuated by construction work, sewers flooding over, the high tide rising, squabbles with the local government over the correct placement and reading of water meters.
Every summer, when tall ships sail into the harbor unfurling flags from different countries, my heart feels that familiar tugging, reminding me of all the times it wants to climb the rigging, all the times it refuses to budge from its crow’s nest.
Patience is not necessarily a virtue learned only through traditional monastic disciplines; one school of teaching conducts its lessons through customer service branches on the telephone. It doesn’t matter for which product— just hit the prompt for “customer service” or “service hotline.”
There are only so many trips one can make to the mall or to the craft shops, hunting for sales, before the price tag evaporates with the steam of adrenaline. The shelf life of products grows shorter by the season.
Half a bag of apples, a few carrots, and a knob of ginger will make juice for around three people.
Who do I think I am? I ask myself the same question over a hundred times a day. Sometimes I think I hear an answer, and then I realize the sound of voices has drifted in through the window from somewhere up the street.
One thing seems a little more certain now than it was before: I do not chafe so much at silence anymore; but still, I know to crave the sweet touch of a hand, the memory of lips and eyes.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Wayang Kulit
In the skin theatre,
the characteristic of silence
is the amplification of all
silhouettes within its orbit.
Even the gods and monkeys dance.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
In One and the Same Moment
“I am small in the rain.” ~ Eugene Gloria
We are all small in the rain;
we are even small in the sunlight,
though the shadows might grant the brief
illusion that we are taller or more brave
than we really are. And we can be small
at dusk, especially at dusk; smaller,
certainly, than in the early morning
when there is that sensation that we
are somehow taller, taking the first
sip of water or coffee, or sliding
into the car behind the wheel. Not only
are we small, returning in the morass
of traffic, or holding on to a strap
in the middle of the lurching bus
or train— also, we are flattened,
hollowed out, or pleated with
nervous anxiety; so that the howl
of the accelerating vehicle passes
like a blade across our bones,
and the drops of actual rain
pelting the windowpane border
on something that can be equal
parts tenderness and sorrow,
or simultaneous regret and
sweet nostalgia. Things live
like this in one and the same
moment, the large sometimes
in the small, the small more
rarely, but brilliantly, filling up
the inside of a room; the chest expanding
with the sudden intake of breath, the cupped
palm curled around a tiny, wavering flame.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
4 Etchings
They made the inch-long incision
at the center, where they stuck a set
of surgical wires like crosshairs,
one on each side of her right breast.
Because they insisted on clarity,
clarity, clarity, one procedure
led to another, and another.
*
We could not tell what he mumbled
into the ear lowered near his mouth:
the attending physician simply put
her clipboard away and bent her head
in silence. Later, his family and friends
were surprised to learn he had no will—
though he had drafted many as a lawyer.
*
In the recipe book, bata las claras
a punto de nieve means to whisk
egg whites until they form soft peaks—
useful when one is attempting to make
a merengue, or a pavlova, upon which
handfuls of fruit might be strewn.
To get it right takes some
practice, some experience.
*
There is a forecast of frost,
and later, pellets of icy rain.
I am thinking it may be a good
day to stay indoors, the shredder
humming at my side, turning drawers
full of documents into so much chaff.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Prelude
Most days now, the rushing of wings overhead.
Startling as one, rising from the grass,
arrowing into formation;
always ahead of inadequate prophecy.
The moon leans against the roof of the world.
Most of us live in the lower levels:
there, we burnish the soil
with the fire and hunger of our bellies.
With everything this close,
even the hollow in a reed has meaning.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Notes to/on the plagiarist
“It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form….” ~ “The Solar Anus,” George Bataille
The senator takes to the floor and makes another speech. The birds must know something: they tremble the branches of all the trees, and ripples move through the entire assembly. What is that nervous tittering in the gallery?
If, as Bataille says, the world is all parody and copulation is the principle of all things, then the senator is fucking with himself, his mother, your mother, our mothers, the president’s mother who was also a president, his father who was also a senator, also assassinated like Robert F. Kennedy though in different circumstances and in another part of the world.
You know of course that this is not just word-play. In more than a hundred tongues the world over, this is the most grievous insult a man might give and/or receive.
Which is not the same as saying women cannot find a suitable equivalent.
But, returning to the topic at hand: what is the punishment for the crime of extended plagiarism by copulation or related means?
It is at the very least bemusing (which is very different from “amusing”— though not at all surprising) that a man violently opposed to the idea of women exercising sovereignty over their bodies and reproductive health, could have been so ignorant about where women bloggers write about that sort of thing.
We all think we’re so cool, taking those long silver skewers and spearing chunks of bread, chunks of meat, dipping them into the gooey communal fondue pot that is the internet.
Here is the text I am reading tonight. The lesson is to differentiate the paraphrase from the precis and to write an example of each. The next lesson is proper citation, using page references within parentheses. There is an appendix which tells you how to do this for electronic sources.
One passage reads: “…lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator.”
Which is to say, no amount of alchemical manipulation can change the outcome when you have made a colossal fool of yourself.
The man in the mountains playing a bamboo kubing in the fading light could tell the senator as much.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral
The woman calls from the window that it is getting dark. And as if her saying so makes it so, night descends upon late afternoon. How will she keep her eye on that sparrow, as the song instructs? The evening is inkier than the underside of a wing. If she hesitates and doesn’t turn the lights on right away, she has only the tips of her fingers to tell the lintel from the post. There is more than flour and oil and water in her house. There are sheets and comforters and coats. Across the city are several warehouses brimming with food in boxes and jars, cases of water stacked on wooden pallets. There is always more than one mouth to feed, each with more than its share of hunger, each saying give, and give. She remembers her grandfather arriving from the farm: how swiftly he worked in the kitchen, deboning a fish or butterflying a chicken, not getting a drop of blood on his white shirt; his mouth puckering as he recalled the war— We were lucky if we had salt, if we found husks of grain that we could chew. He asked, Have you ever had to eat the peel of a banana? Peel off the wing of a roasted beetle? The flame on the stove gutters. The year draws to a close, and here we are, sliding around in its maw, listening for the rasp of implements adjusting.
In response to small stone (174).