proteanme

Love Song (Lame)

This is a little like high school
he said, when I wouldn’t take off my clothes.
It was true, although in high school
I would’ve come over to torture him deliberately
and now the torture was an unfortunate side effect
of my sadness, and had nothing to do with him at all.
Sleeping with you would be like
a drowning woman grabbing an anvil,
I explained. A burning man guzzling gasoline.
Lame analogies, but I was trying to make a point.
When he got up for a drink, I missed him
but that feeling disappeared once he came back.
I sat there and tried to feel sad,
tracking my blue mute form
as it sank to a furrowed ocean floor.

-Courtney Queeny

New Ohio Review
Spring & Summer 2010

Wow – sunshine! It’s all promise and hope right now. All warm air on my skin and blue sky every where. It’s lyrical stuff. Speaking of which, I keep meaning to post William Matthews short summary of all the subjects of lyric poetry. I love reading this when I’m feeling too serious about being serious.

• I went out into the woods today and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious
• We’re not getting any younger.
• It sure is cold and lonely (a)  without you, honey, or (b) with you, honey.
• Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spent on we know not what.

Ned linked to this great piece on writing by Barry Sanders.

I do believe that as you write more and age, the arrogance and most of the vanity go. It is a vanity met with vast gratitude: that you were hit by something as you stood in the way of it, that anybody is listening. When you are ashamed and revising your comments to old girlfriends of thirty years ago, you might be shocked to find out you really have nothing much better now than what you said in the first place.

Two weeks of rain in late May. Oh Portland, you’re breaking my heart. I should be used to this by now, a spring that runs from February through June, but every year it bums me out more and more. And this year I seem to be adding salt to the wound by looking at Facebook photos of friends in t-shirts and shorts and reading about how it’s hot and sticky and time to get out the kiddie pool. Today, I feel almost desperate for warm weather and sunshine. Fucking desperate. The prospect of having to wear a coat or a rain jacket on my birthday is bringing me down and pissing me off. I swear that I’ve got to reclaim my birthright for a summer commemoration.

May marks the end of my writing program. It’s been a terrific experience. I’ve met some really wonderful people, written my ass off and learned how to layout, print and bind a book.  I was so ambivalent about writing when I applied for the program. Grief had knocked so much out of me; it’s amazing now to feel that I want to write. Hmm. The end result of this endeavor is a self published book. I’m already getting ready to print  my 2nd edition seeing as how I found a number of typos in my first. And I cut it crooked too. There’s always a learning curve. But my plan is to have a pdf version available for download here for free and then sell the book version which has some extras, like photos, appendices, nice paper and a cool cover. Stay tuned on that note.

I’d be forever grateful if you sent me some wishes for sunshine.

When poetry works it turns language into art. Just read.

A Night in Martirios

Sometimes when the story is wildly implausible
the author will have one character say
I have a hard time believing this
and the other explains:
it’s the axle working loose,
the fog in the orchards,
controlled fires in the canebrake.

Now we are resting at twilight
on a frayed floral quilt
and the dimity curtains open
in the wind from Orizaba.

Now the author has the characters undress
and sleep together, they are naked
as the space between words,
the lamp is unlit, the bed unmade,
the silence is absolute,
occasionally a faint hiss of rain
or the scritch as the author
erases his own name.

Evora

Maybe we may talk our way out of death
given that the I disappears so disingenuously
whenever you look for it, so does the poem,
leaving only the track of a snail
in the stucco alcove where we catnapped
in Evora, in late summer, scrunched
in the osier bed, before you knew me,
before I didn’t know you, when the future ended,
cracked sun in the mirror, when the finches
instructed us in thin scattered voices
to stand our ground against delight.

D. Nurkse

Rest in peace, Studs. A real American icon, if you ask me. He had hoped to see Barack Obama elected president. And I hope we do right by him in that respect.

It was dark and rainy this morning.  I like riding in the cover of it when it’s not cold. It’s like riding in a dream but being awake. I remember being wistful last spring as the days got longer and brightened up my morning ride because I had like pedaling in the darkness so much.

The worst question you could ask David in the last year was ‘how are you?’ And it’s almost impossible to have a conversation with someone you don’t see regularly without that question.” Wallace was very honest with her. He’d answer, “I’m not all right. I’m trying to be, but I’m not all right.”

David foster Wallace killed himself this past weekend. I have been feeling really sad about it. Sad for him and his family. For his friends and his students. And sad to loose his voice. I’m sad we won’t be able to grow old with his voice growing old in our lives. I just started reading some of his essays this summer and I was pretty blown away by his writing. This excerpt is from a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon this past spring:

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible — sounds like “displayal”]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

When work comes up in therapy, it’s not a good sign.  As a rule, I don’t use this space to talk about my job, so I will leave it there.

I have been trying to write because I want to tell some stories that aren’t getting told, like Toni Morrison said “If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.”  Lemme be clear though, a book sounds kinda ambitious, at least once you’re sitting there on page three and hating yourself.  Hold your tongue RU! I had been telling myself for the last several months that I don’t need the help of a group or a class and I dunno why.  Bullheadedness, most likely.

I recently discovered Wendell Berry and was quite moved by his writing. This from a Harper’s article that could be described as commentary oh human greed: We are, in short, coming under pressure to understand ourselves as limited creatures in a limited world.

And this from Daniel Mendelsohn, who last year became one of my new favorite writers: I know a man, a handsome young man with an agile mind and a brilliant professional career, who has sex with a different stranger every night, if at all possible.