Rarely, my father speaks of the slow rubble piling, before months sped hotter than his parents expected. They thought it would pass, unaware of what aches appear later. He was eight. This was before walls, checkpoints, talk of two states.
Let’s focus on one wound at a time. I can only tell a story diluted. I’ll try more softly—my father had toys, then he didn’t. He had a childhood, then he didn’t.
Here is me at a sunlit kitchen table in California, doubling as American and something like coarse salt.
How often I hear “it’s complicated” when I mention my father grew up in Palestine, went to school in Palestine, immigrated to the U.S. as a Palestinian refugee.
His voicemail last week—don’t post anything online.
For years, he lived in no-man’s-land, and I, half-Armenian, half-daughter of a man from half of a land that is half of me.
When I visited, could I call the wall beautiful, but only the painted side? My grandmother’s friend spit on for shopping on the wrong street in Jerusalem. Jews walk on one, Muslims the other. She’s neither. I started paying a man to do the errands.
Seeing my father’s childhood home, its walls adorned with sniper fire and a gravity of collisions. It consumed me, bullet holes as common as commas.
In the Armenian Quarter, the pottery store owner said he would close before things worsened. Palestine his home, until it wasn’t. Truths stitched into my grandmother’s embroidery. Did I tell you she left that too? Here is an echo no one asked for, singing of a home in Jerusalem before Armenians evaporated.
At the airport, I, though not yet vapor, say nothing to the Israeli passport agent. Not telling him I visited Palestine. Not asking for the return of the toys my father left behind
By Jodie Noel Vinson Excursion to St. Fé—Thistle Beds—Habits of the Bizcacha—Little Owl—Saline Streams—Level Plain—Mastodon—St. Fé—Change in Landscape—Geology—Tooth of extinct Horse . . . Flocks of Butterflies—Aeronaut Spiders—Phosphorescence of the Sea—Port Desire—Guanaco—PortSt. Julia—Geology of Patagonia—Fossil gigantic Animal . . . Causes of Extinction
(Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle)
Tongue crimson in morning ulcerated—stomach constricted dragging—Feet coldish—Pulse 58 to 62—or slower and like thread. Appetite good—not thin. Evacuation regular and good. Urine scanty (because do not drink) often much pinkish sediment when cold—seldom headache or nausea.—Cannot walk abv ½ mile—always tired—conversation or excitement tires me much
(Charles Darwin, note to Dr. Chapman)
Charles Darwin had “taken the horizontal,” as he would have put it as a seasick young man on board the Beagle. He lay in bed, snowy beard cascading over the coverlet that shrouded his six-foot frame. Emma could see her husband was in so much pain he was “longing to die.” Their daughter Henrietta, hovering bedside, lamented how “this terrible nausea still goes on.” Darwin, before passing away on that April afternoon in 1882 at age seventy-three, answered with the equanimity of one who has lived in daily discomfort: “It is not terrible. But it is nausea.”
At this point, Darwin had been ill for over half his life. “I was almost quite broken down,” he described his chronic ailment in a journal, “head swimming, hands trembling and never a week without violent vomiting.” The naturalist took copious notes on his malady over the years, during which his stomach caused him “incessant discomfort, I may say misery,” as he once wrote to his cousin William Fox, predicting: “I shall go to my grave, I suppose, grumbling and growling with daily, almost hourly, discomfort.”
It woke me, the high slung pitch & swoop of sound. Someone told me once that a cardinal holds a soul of someone lost: red, tufting. & every day for two years cardinals descended on the locust tree, the only one in the backyard. More than I could count. & I learned their songs. I learned how they sing. Until I moved. Now I know a man who lost his son. He rides his bike & sees his boy in robins. He told me I don’t believe it’s the spirit of my son, but I see them & I think—& I like it. & there you are today: careless, sitting on the peak of the wooden fence, blazing. The sky today is too blue, cloudless, for this kind of stillness. Sometimes I make your noise back to you with my mouth. Most times I watch the feathers fill & deflate, count their creases like a well-worn face. & today, at least, I like it.
The Big Man was to walk five iron steps up to the linoleum ante-level behind the curtains; someone was to hold out a cup of water if he was thirsty. He was to turn left, flashing trademark alligator-print sock, then walk three paces into the danger zone near the edge of the camera’s eye, then look at the sign that said PAST THIS POINT YOU ARE ON CAMERA so he could adjust himself in any sense before seducing the millions, or trying to. There is a better world, folks, he was to say, where we meet the crawling deserts with a trillion trees, where we shake hands after work worth doing, where money’s just confetti for the grand opening of a high-speed train-line, where there’s meatless meat on every plate, local and delicious, where guilt is optional, a novelty, et cetera.
Trouble was, I didn’t tape around a single sniveling ruffle of carpet. Did the Big Man trip? He did. Did he fall? He did. Knee fractured, image dented. My job? Way gone. Three months later the primary draws near, and all I’m doing is plundering my savings and rollerblading. I’m the champion of Bleloch Street; I know all its heaves and divots. The larches in my apartment complex’s court- yard whisper: now is the time, get your job back, stop moping, call Tricia, find another candidate, get back in the ring, don’t forget us, call Tricia.
Frank thought pork chops, the way they were cut and packaged these days, looked an awful lot like excised angels’ wings. But he also sometimes just got light in the head. He was adamant— I am as fit as a mountain range! Though Frank may have suffered mania from too much weightlifting. Frank bullied his moods. If he woke up feeling angry at the world he rowed the demons out in his kayak or went a few rounds with the heavy bag. He was so dialed-in sometimes! A deer fly could make him throw punches in the air. If he walked to the gym he’d listen to the cars flying past, how they stuck to the asphalt a little, asphalt trying to suck up rubber. It was annoying! Now he heard the fluorescent lights pinging, lording it over the T-bones and bundles of asparagus. The natural color of food— the blood red of the beets, for instance— seemed to be fading, as if color were an essence weakly subservient to manufacturing and chemical abuse. Red meat, drained of blood, whimpered from where it was stacked in the meat section, bloated red by carbon monoxide infusions. Frank tightened his grip on his grocery cart. Cans of kidney beans are destined to be left standing on store shelves for centuries after the apocalypse, in which each person will have long ago been torched from their bone marrow on outward. When the pleasant checkout clerk said “Thank you for shopping at Schaeffer’s,” Frank thought, You don’t know the half of it, sonny, but said, “My pleasure” instead. He knew the boy was just a tool, cheap labor, a cog in something too sinister for words.
The woodpeckers are making holes in the eaves of my house, destroying some small part of it while I count the wood chips falling from the sky.
Isn’t it lovely that the natural world can be so companionable, keeping me frazzled and deeply alert?
Yesterday afternoon, the sky turned gray as if it were going to thunder and rain though it never did, what a turnaround.
Sometimes it’s all you need, a little reprieve, a surprise to make you think it’s not all ruthless even as the shots ring out in the heart of the city.
It’s the life we’re given the pulpit managers say, some of us having more life than others.
The woodpeckers are still at it, doing what they are born to do and I’m throwing tennis balls at them, I’m squirting a jet stream of water from my hose.
They disappear, then cheerfully come back. There’s no manual that says everything will stay as it is.
Look at the sky. It’s as clear as day.
In another hour, I might have to bolt the doors and windows against the hurricane onrush of all that keeps me weathering away
from those long expansive afternoons when I was young and the wind was a feather in my hair.
We asked ten writers to comment on the use of dance and dance imagery in poems. The following feature includes:
Sara Henning on Ross Gay’s “Burial”
Sarah Nance on Lucille Clifton’s “untitled” (1991), “God send easter,” “spring song,” “homage to my hair,” “my dream about being white,” “untitled” (1996), “the poet,” “from the cadaver,” “amazons,” “in salem,” and “1994”
Christopher Kempf on Frank Bidart’s “Ulanova at Forty-Six at Last Dances Before a Camera Giselle”
Hugh Martin on Yusef Komunayakaa’s “To Have Danced with Death”
Jesse Lee Kercheval on Gerald Stern’s “The Dancing”
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke on Annie Finch and The Furious Sun in Her Mane
Bonnie Proudfoot on Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Spanish Dancer”
Therese Gleason on Anne Sexton’s “How We Danced” and “The Wedding Ring Dance”
Subsequently, we added six essays to an online expansion of this feature. Those are:
Lisa Bellamy: “‘The Dancing’, by Gerald Stern”
Maya Sonenberg’s “Dada Dance”
Karen Hildebrand’s “Blinded by Love”
Jocelyn Heath’s and Joanna Eleftheriou’s “girls/all night long: (re)constructing sappho”
My mother never took formal dance lessons, but that didn’t stop her from hanging a large portrait of Mikhail Nikolayevich Baryshnikov in our living room. Saturday afternoons, I’d sometimes catch her, bare feet and leg warmers, leaping across the kitchen floor or spinning like a top, MTV blaring. She danced without form or technique and since I, too, was not a dancer, I had neither knowledge nor language for the magic she created with her body: jeté, pirouette. What mattered was that I saw my single mother joyful in the kitchen of our small duplex. I saw my mother—same woman forced to bury my father a handful of years before—exuberant. I didn’t know how important these small moments of joy would be when my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer at the age of 59, how I would hold onto them when bilirubin from a failed liver turned her jaundiced, how I would hold them even harder as she was moved to hospice, my desperate daughter’s clutch becoming vice grip as she took her last breath in May of 2016.
Shortly after my mother passed away, I encountered a copy of Ross Gay’s gorgeous collection of poems Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), which I devoured in one sitting. It was during this time that I discovered his remarkable poem “Burial,” a poem I would turn to constantly during the throes of my personal mourning.
Featured Art: “Alluvium Variations 25” by Mateo Galvano
“when i stand around / among poets,” Lucille Clifton writes in an untitled poem from her 1991 collection quilting, “sometimes / i hear [ . . . ] one note / dancing us through the / singular moving world.” Here, Clifton configures a communal space for poets where some adjoining strand—what she calls a “single music”—transforms their ordinary path through life into a dance. In drawing a connection between dance and poetry, Clifton evokes a long poetic tradition (consider how villanelle, as one example, comes from the Italian word for “dance”) and forges an association she both troubles and expands in other work. Over the course of her forty-five year poetic career, Clifton takes what are on the surface simplistic references to dance—something one does for joy, praise, or worship—and crafts nuanced claims about embodiment, writing, and Black resistance.
In Clifton’s early work, dance is configured at first as a kind of religious ecstasy, such as in “God send easter” from her 1972 collection good news about the earth. There, the poem’s subjects “dance toward jesus” as they:
The first time I encountered it—in the June 2007 issue of Poetry, alongside work from the late Craig Arnold and Claudia Emerson, and just before I entered the MFA program at Cornell—I understood neither the first nor last word in the title of Frank Bidart’s magisterial long-poem “Ulanova at Forty-Six at Last Dances Before a Camera Giselle.”
The former, as it turns out, is Russian ballerina and Stalin favorite Galina Ulanova, the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina assoluta for sixteen years from 1944 to 1960.
The latter is the classical masterwork Giselle, a tragedy of star-crossed love between its eponymous peasant girl and a disguised nobleman, its doomed romance steeped in the paranormalia of nineteenth-century Gothic; after Giselle dies of heartbreak, for instance, she is resurrected by an occult fairyhood known as the Wili, the ghosts of betrayed women who avenge themselves by dancing men to death-by-exhaustion. Though Freud likely never saw it, Giselle anticipates those notions of “hysteria” on which he would elaborate, since Giselle’s frantic dancing was perceived at the time as a symptom of silent—and problematically sexualized—madness. Bidart glosses this etiology midway through the poem:
If “America is,” as John Updike wrote, “a vast conspiracy to make you happy,” then one might look—though, for awhile, you couldn’t look—at President Bush’s 1991 blanket ban on photographing coffins carrying dead American soldiers. Maybe the ban didn’t ensure “happiness,” but it did conspire to make sure the American public wouldn’t be bothered with images which might, perhaps, provoke unhappiness, or at least some discomfort.
In Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem, “To Have Danced With Death,” from his 1988 collection Dien Cai Dau, the narrator recounts returning alongside other soldiers from Vietnam, and then trying to exit the plane as two hearses arrive. As the speaker waits in line, he describes how their return gets halted, abruptly, when a “black sergeant first class . . . / stalled us on the ramp.” Shattering any warm and fuzzy feelings about homecoming, the speaker quips that this sergeant “didn’t kiss the ground either.” From there, the bleakness intensifies: “ . . . two hearses sheened up to the plane / & government silver-gray coffins / rolled out on silent chrome coasters.” Bizarre as it sounds, these hearses appear to provide brand-new coffins for the bodies of soldiers, probably in body bags or other containers, still on the plane.
Gerald Stern’s “The Dancing” included in This Time: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton & Company, 1984) begins like this:
In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots I have never seen a postwar Philco with the automatic eye nor heard Ravel’s “Bolero” the way I did in 1945 in that tiny living room on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming, my mother red with laughter, my father cupping his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance of old Ukraine . . .
When I read this poem I see a child-sized version of the adult Gerry Stern I knew, dancing, spinning in circles. I see him as he was in 1984 when I took a class with him at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his bald dome framed by unruly dandelion puffs of gray hair. He was 59 then, but young in the time he had spent in poetry world. His second book, Lucky Life, the one that turned the world’s eye his way, had been published just seven years earlier in 1977 when he was already 52.
I went to a party once during my doctoral program where I noticed a man weaving back and forth as he chatted up some of the young women in the program. It wasn’t full on creepy, just sort of . . . odd. As I got closer to the group, I noticed that his speech was also a bit off, but in a mesmerizing way. He didn’t seem drunk. He didn’t seem on the make (or at least not more so than many other people there). But what was going on here? When I asked a friend about him, she said, “Oh, that’s his thing. Dude comes to every party talking in iambic pentameter like it’s 1606 or something.”
Was it an intentional flex? Maybe. But another possibility is that it was just the aftereffects of his intense study of early modern English literature. He might have been inadvertently engaged in what feminist poet and critic Annie Finch has called “en-rhythming.” In her book How to Scan a Poem, Finch defines en-rhythming as “the process of accustoming one’s ear and body to the sound of a particular rhythm in preparation for writing, reading, or scanning that meter.” According to Finch, the process can work by reading poems out loud, making music with a drum, or dancing in time with the desired meter/rhythm. Could it have been that all of his exposure to Shakespeare and Donne left those iambs so stuck to his soul that he couldn’t even engage in small talk without the echo of blank verse in the wings?
It’s a warm spring evening on La Rambla, a street leading from the Port of Barcelona into the main city, a wide avenue lined with trees, shops, and restaurants, thin lanes of traffic, and a center island full of people strolling or dining outdoors. It begins to drizzle as we join a group on a narrow sidewalk. The queue flows forward, bottlenecking at a doorway leading into a foyer, barely wide enough for a ticket-taker and a sandwich-board sign advertising featured performers. We are at Tablao Flamenco Cordobes. Photos and reviews line the walls, and our group heads upstairs into a small, crowded, circular theater, arched stucco walls stenciled with Moorish motifs, rows of wooden chairs arranged between pillars around a small stage (tablao). We are offered a glass of sweet, dark sangria. The house lights dim.
And so, it begins. Two male guitarists and two percussionists whose wooden sticks rhythmically strike the floor are seated under an archway at the rear of the tablao. Just out of sight, a tenor (el cante) begins to sing. His tones rise and fall, stretching out syllables as if his vocal cords merged with the vibrato of a violin, as if he is almost weeping. As the song concludes, from behind the archway, a woman with long dark hair steps forward. She wears a tight, sleeveless, bodice, a fringed, knotted shawl, ruffled skirt slightly raised in the front. In deliberate, high steps, clapping her hands as if to gather both the tempo and the audience, she circles the stage, skirt flaring, boot heels accenting the percussion. It is impossible to look away.
“Doing the Undoing Dance”: Anne Sexton’s Brutal—and Brave—Struggle for Agency
By Therese Gleason
Featured Art: “Persona-1” by Mateo Galvano
Dance imagery abounds in Anne Sexton’s ouevre, but the waltzes and allusions to fairy-tale-inspired ballets in her poems are characterized by compulsion and madness like that of the girl in “The Red Shoes” whose feet “could not stop” doing “the death dance.” In this and other archetypal tales interwoven in Sexton’s poems, danger—a wolf, a witch, a dark wood—lurks beneath the choreographed steps of the perilous rites of passage to womanhood, especially marriage. As Sexton’s truth-telling, taboo-shattering work attests, breaking destructive intergenerational cycles to chart a new path—symbolized by the amputated feet in the red shoes that “went on” and “could not stop”—is an ongoing, even violent struggle.
In her 1971 collection, Transformations, Sexton reinterprets and revises stories such as “Cinderella,” “Briar Rose,” “Rapunzel,” “The Maiden Without Hands,” and “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” with a personal (and female/ feminist) lens. (Notably, a number of the fairy tales in Sexton’s poems are also classical ballets with famous waltzes, such as Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake.) Yet Sexton’s preoccupation with these themes transcends just one collection, permeating her entire body of work. In particular, marriage, as an institution—and as a reflection of dysfunctional relationships in the family of origin—is dissected under Sexton’s brutally honest and psychologically astute gaze in numerous subsequent poems, including “How We Danced” (number two of six parts in the poem “Death of the Fathers” (The Book of Folly, 1972) and “The Wedding Ring Dance” (in the posthumously published 78 Mercy Street, 1978). These mirror-image poems expose cycles of abuse and oppression at the hands of the father (both literal and symbolic), and they articulate the struggle for female selfhood and self-expression.
Over decades, the late Gerald Stern crafted an exuberant, talkative, and highly-performative narrator. His first-person narrator’s consciousness—his loves, memories, opinions, and passions (personal, literary, intellectual, and spiritual) —is itself the true subject of the poems. External activities, objects, and other characters, in constant interaction, offer an opportunity for the narrator to react, explore, and reveal himself and his world.
“The Dancing,” like so many Stern poems, is a poem of largesse: very much in the lyric mode, existing outside conventional, linear time. The core scene in “The Dancing” is a family of three simply dancing together, in a spontaneous, joyful moment. It is a scene of heightened, intimate intensity, against forces of evil and inequality.
The narrator’s consciousness broadens past the moment, though: space is elastic, in motion. The narrator is active, mobile, depicting a mother, father, and child dancing in 1945 Pittsburgh, even—as noted with irony, and underlying sadness and horror—there is “other dancing,” thousands of miles away in Poland and Germany.
In May 1968, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company premiered Walkaround Time, their homage to Marcel Duchamp, that grand Dadaist. The idea for this work had been ignited the previous winter at the sort of dinner party one can only imagine taking place in the New York City artworld of the time, with Duchamp and his wife Teeny, composer John Cage (Cunningham’s life and artistic partner,), and painter Jasper Johns (the company’s artistic advisor) in attendance. While Cage and Teeny played chess, Johns sidled up to Cunningham and asked if he’d be interested in “doing something with the Large Glass,” Duchamp’s famous artwork more formally called The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. “Oh, yes,” Cunningham replied immediately, and Duchamp agreed, as long as someone else would do all the work.[1] Johns took on the job of creating the set, consisting of seven clear plastic boxes silkscreened with motifs from The Large Glass. Several of these stood on the stage, while others hung from the rafters. Composer David Berman was enlisted to create the score, titled … for nearly an hour….
Much has been written about the specific ways this dance responds to The Bride…, and Cunningham himself noted that he placed numerous references to the work in his choreography. In the following, I’d like, instead, to consider how Walkaround Time aligns more generally with principles of Dada visual art and poetry, ideas reflected, of course, in Duchamp’s work and in The Large Glass and, most importantly for this essay, in the poetry of Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball.
An elegant light-filled space inside the São Luiz Theater in Lisbon resembles the marble terrace of a palace. A Botticelli style mural fills the wall behind the stage. As I enter, a commemorative plaque catches my eye:
Pina Bausch Dancou Café Müller Pela Ultija Vez Em Maio De 2008 No Teatro São Luiz [trans. Pina Bausch danced Café Muller last time in May 2008 at the São Luiz Theater]
It’s 2017. I’m in Lisbon to attend a literary festival—on vacation from my job in NYC, where I work for Dance Magazine. In a matter of minutes, I will stand on this stage and read my poems—the same stage where the storied choreographer Pina Bausch once performed a dance work I adore. After twenty years of deep engagement with both poetry and dance, it seems I’ve arrived at the literal intersection of my two artistic paths.
This essay alternates between Jocelyn’s voice and Joanna’s, beginning with Jocelyn’s and changing after each section break.
I first heard Sappho as an undergrad when Rosanna Warren, our visiting writer, recited a few lines in Ancient Greek for our workshop. I didn’t need to match word with sound to love the insistent, rhythmic press of syllables rising and falling. The fluidity of a waltz with the intensity of a tango. Lines that spoke what I could not yet understand.
Like the odd-numbered beat of the sapphic stanza, 11-11-11-5, I felt at odds with an even-beat, rise-and-fall meter of the world I lived and wrote in. Something felt incomplete, rather like the fragments I would later learn made up our record of Sappho. But something in these ancient rhythms stirred a familiar step, and like Sappho, I knew “I would rather see her lovely step/and the motion of light on her face” than so much else.
It happened well into my thirties, over a decade since I’d last performed, and only a few years from publishing my first full-length collection of poems, Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center. I’d said the words thousands of times—En pointe. In French, it means “pointed,” as in, “to make a pointed argument.” It can also mean “cutting edge.” Yet, I’d heard this terminology used by dozens of ballet instructors to describe the action of rising up on the toes in pointe shoes—en pointe—and I’d read it hundreds of times in newsletters and marketing materials from ballet companies and schools all over the world. En pointe. Never once had I stopped to consider whether the term was correct or not; my rudimentary French never prompted me to question it.
I was sitting in Studio Nine at American Ballet Theatre, surrounded by other aspiring ballet teachers, some who had been accomplished dancers, in the cavernous space. We applied, we were accepted, and traveled across the country and across the globe to learn how to translate our experience as ballet dancers into teaching proper technique. For me, it was easier to get a position teaching ballet than finding one teaching creative writing.
Raymond Lukens, one of the coauthors of the ABT National Training Curriculum and an internationally renowned pedagogue, wasn’t imposing perched on a tall stool at the front of the class. He was often warm and funny. Still, he was intimidating. He’d traveled to all the major schools, studying the methods of the best ballet teachers in the world.
but if a living dance upon dead minds why, it is love;[1]
Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre, Op. 40, opens with a D struck twelve times for midnight, inviting death to emerge from its grave and dance.[2] Its earliest iteration, for orchestra and voice, featured the text of a poem by Dr. Henri Cazalis — Zig zig zig on his violin/The winter wind blows and the night is dark[3]— but audiences objected on the grounds that it made them feel weird, so Saint-Saëns replaced the voice with a violin, Franz Liszt transcribed the piece for piano, and pretty soon it was 1929 and Walt Disney’s skeletons were absolutely cranking it all over the cemetery.[4]
Danse macabre has since scored figure skating routines, whiskey commercials, and a short scene in the first episode of “What We Do in the Shadows.” You can catch it near the end of Shrek the Third and install it as your vehicle’s horn in Grand Theft Auto Online under the title “Halloween Loop 2.” In 1872, it was an appeal: remember death. Now it’s the quintessential spooky jingle.
but at the earliest spear of sun perfectly should disappear moon’s utmost magic, or stones speak
Today, I came to work eleven minutes late. My co-worker Lenny said he didn’t know if he could cover for me, even though he thought I was “cool” and “down to Earth” and “pretty for twenty-four,” whatever the fuck that means.
Lenny is sweaty. He sweats near the hot dogs sometimes, and that’s not cool. I try to avoid Lenny when he’s in one of his moods. He cries loudly in the Target bathroom because of his impending divorce, but he’s also extremely hairy and his eyebrows are out of control. Since his wife left him, he kind of resembles a giant, lumbering piece of sage. I know because I smudged my apartment last night to keep the bad spirits away.
I also made sure my Target Pizza Hut uniform was clean ’cause I dumped Alfredo sauce on myself yesterday like a total dope. It smelled like hot garbage. Then I got quarters from one of the girls at the registers so I could do my laundry. No more free laundry.
I mean, I feel like that’s a metaphor for something, I just don’t know what.
“We know what we are, but know not what we may be” -Ophelia, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5
Uncertainty looms heavy before sunrise. Dark driving, she calls it, at 5:00 AM to the hospital for her surgery, when she mentions losing our dog, Penny, a few months ago— anxiously lumping together unknowns— and I had trouble focusing but I tried to turn the conversation around with compliments—her outfit, hair, shoes— but I shut down when she said, It’s okay, Dad, I know that living is dying…
Stuck in the white shock of her wisdom I wanted to say something to redirect us but I couldn’t decide whether she was that conscious of her own mortality or if she was just being a child— redirecting gravity away from her upcoming operation toward something more certain.
At the last minute, the operation was canceled. As we walked out, my daughter took my hand because she knew I needed it telling me she felt good. She said she still missed Penny, and she would miss her as long as she was alive— me too I said but holding back on diving deeper trying not to lump together more unknowns, as we headed home with just enough sun to get all the way there without headlights.
today which is hotdog day at forest hill methodist i ran into my old high school lit teacher from the tenth grade one of the great influences in my life and it really got to me while i was waiting in line to put in my order and i thought about all the other teachers i used to have who lived and died maybe never realizing how much they had meant to their students and here was a perfect opportunity to express my gratitude and not to just any teacher but miss ruby herself but then huh oh all of a sudden i thought ohmygod what if my eyes were playing tricks on me and it was just some little old lady that somewhat resembled her so just to make sure i went over to another former student wanda she used to be wanda yow i forget who it was she married but wanda was one of the volunteers who was bringing food to people’s tables and i said wanda is that her is it really her and wanda said oh yeah that’s ruby all right don’t she look wonderful but she’s deaf in one ear i think the good one is her left but you better hurry if you want to speak to her she’s already called her grandson to come pick her up so i left my order with wanda and circled around behind ruby’s table hoping i could surprise her and leaned down from the left side with my face just barely touching her hair which smelled my god like violets a really refreshing smell and there was something else some kind of perfume from elsewhere and i don’t know how it happened but i was already starting to weep it was such a profound moment for me and my feelings damn near overtook me but i managed to get it out even though my voice was shaking when i said miss ruby until i had you for a teacher i didn’t know what great literature was and i— but then i just ran out of words and out of breath and as i started to pull away she reached her hand back and slapped me right in the face turning around with a stare like she had seen a ghost saying oh goodness jimmy is that you i thought it was a brown recluse
Sometimes in the middle of the summer when it was so hot that the tar on the road stuck, like Juicy Fruit gum, to the bottom of my tennis shoes, I’d see a mirage in front of me and think of my grandmother—imagine her a painting. She loved the heat in the summer, and she told me that she even chewed a hunk of tar when she was a little girl. I’d imagine her head was a wide stripe of white across a green-colored canvas, and her hips were shimmering shades of red and caramel; but the craziest of all were her lips—they were yellow buttons, the same kind on my spring coat. At night in our room we shared, I’d think of this painting when I’d watch her remove her Junior Petite coffee-colored stockings, rub her shins with the clinical expertise of a practiced masseuse at the Y, then rest her feet in a bucket of Epsom salts, while I studied the gap between my front teeth with her compact mirror. She’d repeat the story about her sixteen-year-old daughter who died; “Molly, there is nothing worse than losing a child.” She kept a lock of her daughter’s hair in the second drawer of her dresser, along with fortunes from Ray’s Chinese takeout. On the night table, her top teeth sat in a jelly jar painted with the outline of Fred Flintstone. Without her dentures, she sounded as if her tongue were swollen.
Featured Art: “Pebbles vs. the world” by Leo Arkus
As a kid, I spent Saturday nights underneath this boardwalk, poking a dollar bill between cracks, pulling it back after luring unsuspecting tourists. Now I’m back around, fixing up a friend’s beach bungalow: paint-peeling and porch-rotting on the bay side of town. I’ve only walked the boards a few times mostly forgoing views of the ocean for beer-drenched nights at the Shamrock. Tonight, a thunderstorm rolls in and the preacher at the boardwalk chapel offers shelter to all but those with a still lit cigarette. Zombie Crusher and Terrordactyl don’t let lightening stop them from barreling over jumps made of beach sand but the amusement rides have ceased to amuse. The tram car watches me. I like riding the Sea Serpent with its upside-down and backwards thrills; how for that 1 minute & 48 seconds it’s hard to think about anything other than staying alive. I like the monster trucks too. The way they flatten. I put out my Marlboro and take shelter in the wood-paneled chapel next to a handlebar-mustached-man sporting a throwback Hulk Hogan t-shirt: Hulkamania is running wild, Brother. I think about how Dolly Parton made a spoof music video in which she married Hulk Hogan after reading in a tabloid that she was having an affair with a professional wrestler. “He’s got a headlock on my heart, it was a take down from the start.” For Dolly, it’s all fertilizer; she’s a western- wigged buddha two-stepping through life. For me, it’s been more of a hot-coal- hop-skip. The rain slows, thunder booms. I have no special someone for whom to buy a pair of custom booty shorts. I grab a beer before the concessions close, toss rings on bottles, land quarters on plates. The unbridled ocean gives me chills. I think about how sailors wore earrings worth enough to cover the cost of their return and burial, salt-slicked mariners with no need for gold hoops. I bend down to pick up a dollar that disappears before my fingers can grasp it. I think I want to be buried at sea too; being decomposed by sea lice seems more exotic than earthworms.
My dad warned us that aliens were watching him before he disappeared. He also had checked himself into a psychiatric hospital five times throughout my sixteen-year lifetime. During his last visit to the hospital, the doctors said he vanished in the night. His clothes were left in his dresser. The framed photo of my sister and me left on his bedside table. None of the night nurses saw him leave. There were no tied up sheets found dangling outside his open window. The doctors reminded our family that my dad had admitted himself voluntarily and was free to leave at any time. There was nothing they could do. My mom didn’t seem worried at first. He’d left and come back before. One time he left for almost a week and returned with a pet frog that died the next day. Another time he traveled halfway across the country to tour a NASA museum. He needed space; he’d tell us later. Most of the time he checked himself into the hospital for a long weekend, casually packing his car as if he were leaving for a fishing trip.
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