Benevolence

Sorry about the lack of new material lately -- class assignments have become slower, and the last few poems have been icky, personal things I don't want to subject you to. But I do have something new today -- I wrote this two weeks ago, in a twenty-minute exercise. It's the Lloyd Expressway. ;)

(By the way, this should be on USI's creative writing department website by the end of the week, under Best of the Workshops for April. http://www.usi.edu/libarts/english/creative.asp Exciting!)



Benevolence



You have seen them, in their old white
Neons and bulging Caravans, throttling past you
And throwing Cheerios or Ke$ha on your windshield.

You have fought them where the highway squeezes
Itself around men in orange with Plexiglas heads, where the fast
Lane is elbowed into yours twenty yards after the stoplight.

You have waited nicely
While they pitch forward, wiggling past and then rolling
Back into your bumper, tapping the brake righteously:

Their child is on the honor roll. They must obey the speed limit.
And you have thought, haven’t you,
Of tooling beside them cheerfully instead,

Window to window, and waving
Them into the fluorescent barrels, listening
For the crunch of axle on humpbacked median.

Perhaps you would stop and hold their hands afterwards,
Let them use your phone, and you should –
They are the golden retrievers of the world,

So firmly assured in the inherent goodness of man
That they don’t check the mirrors before sliding in front of you;
They leave the windows down and sing loudly like children.

So you sit at the stoplight, singsonging I can’t see you
Because they’ve plastered two hands over their eyes,
Or throwing the tennis ball again and again, and smiling.

Baggage

There was a free duffel bag

With a bank logo on the side under her bed;

Every few weeks she would pull it out

And threaten my mother with it:

Take me to the station in Fulda! I'm going

Home to Chicago on the next train!

She filled the bag with newspapers

And soft, fibrous photographs from the thirties; later that night,

When she unpacked, she was twenty years younger, visiting friends,

And greeted us graciously.

My great-grandmother would talk

To my brothers and I if we brought her pictures

Or found the concertina case in the closet. She had run

To Chicago when the Midwestern farms dried up;

She worked in a factory and spun

Wheels of meter with tap shoes each night.

Once she and her twin sister rolled out of a car

And into a ditch after they were picked up

By the mafia. We only heard stories

About the pretty lady in the sparkly dress;

I knew nothing of the man on the badge

In her drawer, Anthony Chmela, Supervisor,

The charming man who she married

After he gave her a baby, a baby who withered

Between them a few months later.

I was allowed to play her piano, stumbling after

LEDs above the forty-something plastic keys

That taught chords and melody to eight

Pre-programmed songs. She knew the words

And sang them on clear days, I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles

Or When the Saints Go Marching In. She sang another,

About a dear Augustine, in German, and I asked her

To teach me the words in English for a long time.

But she always finished the chorus back in her own language;

She would not remember anything else.

It frightened me then, the loss of control;

I never could tell her the train station was gone.

But she had the gift to sort through all the pieces

Of memory and choose which she wanted

And which to leave in the shoe box. I wish I had

That mercy time gives, wish I could only sing about

Her voice, reaching into the well-grooved German.

I cannot repack my bags to my liking yet.

Earthworks

I'm definitely unsure on the title...I hate titles!
Turned this in today -- I'll probably know what everyone thinks by next Tuesday. Good reviews on Antecedent!


Earthworks


I was seven when my cat died.
He was a werewolf, hunting
In his lunacy for a chunk of days,
Then returning to sleep on my lap
For a week. I read him Where the Wild Things Are.
One October he came from the woods
Dragging his dead hind legs, meowling.
I touched his head, terrified; he growled.
We bolstered him in rugs on the garage floor, left
Tins of vinegar-sweet canned meat
Beside his thrashing slow-mo head.
I stood on a bucket outside the window to watch
So I could not smell him rotting from the spine out.
We buried him in a paper grocery sack
That proclaimed its own virtue – No need
For double bagging! But we did
Anyways, wrapped his coffin a second time,
And my dad took it out to the woods with a shovel.
I followed warily from my room with binoculars, a blanket
Buffering my face.

Two months ago, in the rain, I saw
The face of a girl on a billboard, a girl
Someone had missed. She was beautiful.
I sat in my car at the stoplight and stared
At her set dimples and washed-out blond eyebrows.
She perched outside my windshield, smiling
As she did for all the Dateline specials, in the perpetually knelling
Too-personal slideshows – senior portrait, with infant daughter, last Thanksgiving.
She left in a provocative neon fade
Like a pomegranate thrown against the wall,
Sliding down smooth and terrible color, its own
Purple blood dropping slowly, delectable, on its head.

My wipers started, a horn barked, and I touched
The gas pedal. As the glass was mopped clear, I rolled
Under her face and glanced up again. I only smelled
Formaldehyde, and clicked the wipers off
To let the rain ebb between us.

Socialist U

...or just indignant naivety. Here, from this week's edition of the USI student newspaper --

"...today's companies and corporations are using [the economy] to their advantage to swiftly and carelessly 'screw' over their lower level employees."

"It's still every man for himself out there, and it's taking the good will towards our fellow man out of the concept for a healthy society."

"Let's not focus so much on profit as much as we do on actually working towards a better future for everyone and letting our services and employees both be the best they possibly can be, as we always hear from said small businesses, but never really see."


...and this from the pen of a staff writer, not a letter to the editor. I could make a comment on how vague, PC, anemic writers have bleak prospects in any free market society (and the USI Shield certainly could use a steroid shot or two), but I won't be petty...just thought it was funny, and likely accurate. This is the way my generation thinks. Comments, anyone?

sounding

Hey, Joel. I'm finally posting the poetry for you. :)

This is the piece I wrote last Wednesday -- I ought to be churning one out per week from prompts in our textbook. The subject we were nudged towards was (guess!) family, and I had no trouble with that, but I'm not utterly happy with the quality...it was too easy. Read it aloud, and tell me if you can hear it. Or perhaps it's just incomplete -- when I planned it out, this was only the intro, but I ran too long-winded. I have so many things to write on, but they don't fit on a single page!

Oh -- and in class, I got an idea for an amazing piece on Grandma Linda, and an image of her stuffing five-year-old newspapers to take home to Chicago -- remember that? Couldn't that make something nearly as pathetic and dully horrifying as dementia? Maybe next week...



Antecedent


She catches me in a moment of quiet, wanders
Carelessly in from the kitchen to snatch
A seat next to me. She plants a coffee cup claim on the table
Like a flag; I start at the bright black clink and glance up at my grandmother.
She smiles down to me.

She sends me unwinding about roommates and ethics and algebra,
Leaning one elbow among plates
Still globbed with Wal-Mart-blue icing and half-burnt candles.
Her age-purpled eyes flutter off to another room, where the voices
Of five children wheel in ribbons, dancing and dizzying each other
Until they collapse onto the floor, breathless from sugar-spangled happiness.

The youngest sings out, “Chocolate cake is
Superior!” and vaults over the couch arm.
She laughs, low and quick as pebbles
In a jar. When she turns back to me,
Her eyes are twined up at the corners;
They pat my hand, wile words from my mouth. My face
Mirrors hers, all hills and valleys, with the same sudden
Open-arms reflex, the same gratuitous love
Blinking out. My nose crinkles, too;
I smile up to her.



Then this next is from two weeks ago...if the metaphor/subject matter confuses you, just go upstairs and open my closet door. And come back and read it again -- it'll all make sense. Or, rather, it'll all make sense except the title -- I don't really like it, either. I apologize for that, and the point of the poem, too...but it's exorcism, and it does help...



Staking Out


I am cleaning house, sweeping
My life into Rubbermaid buckets
To carry elsewhere. Dusting.
There are fountains of dead
Flowers along the cedar chest; the sharp petals
Of a chrysanthemum have dropped, remembered
Like teeth after a fist. They gum to the dust.
I scrape it all into my hand,
Brushing shards off over the trash can. Some vases
I set by the door to throw out; others
Will sit on the closet shelf until I come back,
Sit in front of the picture frames. If I am thorough
In my journey, when I return,
I will only find topsoil.



...love you, brother! And I promise to attempt to make this a regular thing...just keep reminding me.
(And if anyone else actually reads this [Bryce?], I appreciate your time, too!)

Alive Again

It's been too long, and I'm hungry for a writing outlet again. Round three. :)


And I won't say too much today. I've lived a lot of life since the last post, and I'm still feeling my way back into triviality, rediscovering washing dishes and watching birds and making hot chocolate. I still don't think I can reach it for you yet, but I've something better today anyhow.

Joel introduced me to Matt Maher's Alive Again CD last weekend. I've heard the cover song on K-Love for a few months now, and enjoyed it -- but it's just a generic, catchy CCM personal-resurrection anthem, as the title so subtly implies. But Joel explained the theory of the whole CD, how it begins with a bright song to draw the listener in and gradually creeps into poignant, wince-inducing truth. And he was right. We listened to it on a road trip, and the point of theology this "CCM" reached, the hard things it dared to speak, took my breath away. Matt Maher must be a pastor.

And this particular song was near the end. Please note the departure from bland, self-help exorcism, the fact that the speaker's pain is not the whole world, the incredibly humble conclusion he reaches (humble in that he forgets himself entirely). It comes to a full circle, justifying and maturing the first, "I was blind and now I see -- happy day!" song. The music grows spiritually, with increasing knowledge and love of Christ, and it's breathtaking to listen to.


You Were on the Cross, Matt Maher

Lost, everything is lost
And everything I've loved before is gone
Alone like the coming of the frost
And a cold winter's chill in my stony heart

And where were You when all that I've hoped for?
Where You when all that I've dreamed?
Came crashing down in shambles around me

You were on the cross

Pain, could you take away the pain?
If I find someone to blame, would it make my life seem easier?
Alone, all my friends are asleep
And I can't find anyone to stay awake with me

Where were You when sin stole my innocence?
Where were You when I was ashamed?
Hiding in a life I wish I never made

You were on the cross, my God, my God, alone, alone
You were on the cross, You died for us, alone, alone
You were on the cross, victorious, alone, alone

You were there in all of my suffering
And You were there in doubt and in fear
I'm waiting on the dawn to reappear

post-English 302

I have been outed. My old-school, New England liberal writing professor asked for a showing of hands on who, in the class, was homeschooled, after reading an article on the local phenomenon. There are two of us, apparently, and we represent both ends of the spectrum: the tidy, early, verbose Latin scholar and the perpetually almost-late free-verse partier. Well, we aren't normal. On Thursday, we're assigned a poem on death. I want to make it something beautiful and terrible, something Sylvia Plath.

But I was also surprised in class - when he asked us two freaks if our parents didn't "believe" in evolution, like people don't believe in gravity - "Is the earth flat?" - half the other students started talking about how most schools teach it as a theory, and with other theories. He laughed at us, but the harassment was over - he didn't even defend the exaggerations, or claim a studied cultural disconnect, as he does when we have to explain references to Mario 64 in our work. I do wish I'd taken debate, though, sometimes...

Yes, I am skipping theatre class; I don't want to be present for today's assignment. I can take their language and innuendo; it only further cements everything I believe about the world. I bury my nose in the book, write excellent papers, and exult quietly when I find a fellow dissenter. But I will not stand in the middle of a black box stage and sing their songs, play their hand-organ, dance like a chained bear.

It is a day for Earl Grey tea, with the sky all fog and mold. The colors of the world are wet coals now, an infusion of cynicism and rusted loveliness. I shake an extra packet of sugar into my cold black bergamot and leave to run paperwork upstairs to the dean's office.