recapitulation
Monday 20 August 2007 | 4 cookies in the jar
There being nowhere in particular to begin, since dozens of unbegun beginnings have rocketed past me and been lost to ahistorical oblivion (”…but then you are headed there anyway”), I’ll begin with…right about now.
The Brujo is in my study recording his radio show; I hear snatches of music and back-announcing, sometimes the name “Max Roach”—who died last week, I think. In arranging this week’s playlist, the B.’s been playing Roach’s solo statements for me, their intuitive precise pulse overlayered with a calculated, deceptively fugitive messiness.
Also passing on last week, apparently—Liam Rector, a distant poet acquaintance from Boston. Heart disease and lung colon cancer; then a decision. Leaving behind his wife, Tree; and never enough writing.
This abruptly announced at the beginning of tonight’s poetry workshop by its instructor, a venerable gentleman I’ll call Walt Whitman, in honor of his long white tobacco-stained beard and vestigial Beat mannerisms. Walt attended Goddard in the sixties, wears black shirts with handbeaded necklaces and malas, and is pale and shaky, as though laterly emerged from decades of a kind of debauchery at which we younguns can only guess. A gaping friend of the Brujo’s informed us that Walt is “famous….he’s in the Norton Anthology!” but we couldn’t find him in any of our Norton Anthologies, so I don’t really know how famous Walt really is. What I do know is that he’s authentically insane, the way a good workshop teacher should be; that there were only nine of us nervy or dumb enough to sign up for his class; that he name-drops exactly as an insecure minor poet should; and that I suspect there’s way more going on up in there than you’d guess from his slightly foolish presentation (e.g. a tattered, yellowed envelope, circa 1963, with its pencilled list of suggestions read aloud in lieu of a syllabus). Sharpness squiggles beneath his postures and I caught it a couple of times gleaming out of his eyes, as if the follies of age had taken control of his behavior but original sin still lurked, wily, inside his mind.
Class was over after ten minutes, most of which time was taken up by Walt’s morbid listing of the dead and dying, including “a young man…a student…as healthy as you look today!….who dropped dead a week after classes were over.” He opined that the biljillion-dollar poetry center was haunted, which is why he held our class in the unprepossessing cinder-block rooms of the Language Arts building; and that said biljillion-dollar poetry-center endowment had already been, in his fucking opinion, fucking woefully fucking mismanaged. My twenty-something comrades titter and/or smirk, according to their gender. I am waiting. At some point he’ll be done showing off, he’ll feel confident enough to stop—probably when we dig into actual text—and what he knows will shift and shimmer out of him and right into my lap.
Until then, our first assignment, pedestrian enough: Write a poem, make ten copies, bring them next Monday. Then the weeping will begin. It’s all fun and games until someone gets an eye put out; and after that, it’s hilarious.
Walt asked us, in introducing ourselves, to name a friend, another poet whose work had influenced us, and to say why we admired it. The last and first person to show up in my brain was, the Librarian. (Though the Parisienne flitted through, but I feel so alienated from her work in the last few years.) So I said, a self-published transgenre modernist unlike anyone else I’ve ever read. And left it at that, which was surprisingly difficult to do.
I have a week to write a lyric poem, presumably one with line breaks!
When what’s on my mind, that could constitute subject matter. The caterwauling Pyewacket. Cloth pads with lilac dots, purple flowers, dancing skeletons. Racks and racks of bicycles and their stolidly unhelpful sales clerks. The massive German photocopier meekly spitting out a hundred sheets of the wrong page entirely, while the chair stands there frowning (”You’re going to reuse the blank side, right?” I’m PMSing, and surreptitiously stow them white-side-down in the recycling bin after he leaves the room). Shrimp spring rolls from the Vietnamese noodle shop; mineral water con limon and cold, creamy rice “pudin” from the Hispanic market. Sitting in plastic lawn chairs with the Brujo, us hand in sweaty hand looking out at the orange streetlamp night, feral cats chasing moths in the weird thorny mint that has jungled half the house. A dream of Maman (sitting up in bed, in a fabulous nightie) meeting the Brujo, sweetly placing her hand in his and telling him that she didn’t die of cancer but only because she was a little bit (and here she lowers her gaze modestly) fatiguée (I try to signal to him with my eyes that this is total nonsense, but he’s enchanted by her and not paying attention.)
A full hamper of laundry. Fiona’s unscheduled trip to the vet for what may be an abcess, an insect bite, or something much worse; a few days of antibiotics will tell. Addressed and stamped envelopes with unwritten letters. The 50 unanswered emails and the 38 first-year comp students I’ll meet tomorrow morning (7:40–8:55, 9:15–10:30). Whether we should keep the thermostat at 83º or 85º. The wild winds that come every several days and tear branches and twigs and beans our of the trees and strew them across the yard. Various discretely growing quietly encroaching blades of grass and strands of hair at which I hack and mow and trim, lawns and armpits and legs and hedges and tender insides of thighs. James and Faulkner and Agee, still crashing and bumbling around in my brain. Three versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but why—what fears do today’s filmmakers try to hide in its heavy-handed metaphors? This most recent lot seem edgily pleased with themselves for including the newly taboo image of a man and woman, hand in hand, leaping off a building together; so what do the body snatchers stand for this time—capitalist warmongers or holy-war terrorists, instead of McCarthyites, Communists, Cold War boogiemen?
I will have my period on Friday, the day of the department barbeque/welcome party. All the boxes are unpacked now but the books are thrown up on the shelves any old way, trashy lesbian sci-fi next to John Steinbeck. (”He’d love that,” says the Brujo, surveying the hodgepodge.) Mandarin has generously sent her copies of HP6 and 7, so escapism isn’t far—it never is. I brush my teeth at night (with hippie toothpaste, cherry or orange-mango) standing over one sink while the Brujo brushes his (with violently minty, purple-sparkled stuff) at the other. I spit and think about death; I don’t know why. Teeth make me, sometimes, because they’re the part of our skeletons we can see. Or getting ready for bed. Will I be there when I wake up. Or just being happy. Not much longer now, it whispers, small internal metronome.
I type this with one hand on the laptop and scratch Pyewacket with the other, so she will be relatively quite while the Brujo’s recording. She trills and tries to walk across my sore breasts. I remove her with difficulty. In the other room the Brujo says something about Mingus and Duke Ellington. Pyewacket licks my thigh urgently. She doesn’t like her new low-fat diet food; I think it’s like eating popcorn. It’s nearly nine. Should I make pasta for dinner? Should I paint my toenails some pale neutral color? I seem to be the only woman on campus wearing sandals without nail polish. Should I write letters, write something shaped like a poem, or do a little class prep, since I don’t actually know what exactly I’ll be doing for three hours tomorrow morning?
I guess I’ll just post this, and see what happens next.
4 cookies in the jar
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Stones in the flesh. Hard to believe it, but there they are.
Do you mean that’s what Finny’s “tumors” are? Or do you mean, that’s what my teeth are?
Your teeth! Your teeth!
Ohhhhh….right.