We Can Do Hard Things, Saturday 3/21/20

Hey there, from sunny California! How are ya'll doing?

A couple of years ago -- or was it last? -- I read an article about the best masks to wear should the fires in California grow worse and our already full of particulate air get even worse, and I bought a box of those N95s right on Amazon. I balked at buying them because they were more than $50,  but I'm good (or bad) about impulse shopping so when they came I put them in the earthquake kit and forgot about them. My friend Heather posted on Facebook about a news conference in front of UCLA with doctors and nurses pleading for masks -- for the people who had bought and hoarded them in the last few weeks to donate them to area hospitals. I called one of my neighbors whose husband is a doctor at one of the most prestigious hospitals in LA and told her that I had a box of N95s and would he like them and she said yes! and then she walked over to my house and rang the doorbell and I reached out with them to where she stood, 6 feet from my doorway. She said that her husband would be taking them to the ER. She said that the hospital is ghostly, that all elective surgeries have been cancelled and that several people were on respirators in intensive care and everybody else is waiting.

We are all waiting.




My uncle has tested positive for The Virus. He is nearly 84 and lives in an assisted living/retirement home here in Los Angeles. He has no symptoms but is quarantined in his room.












I've always felt contempt toward the survivalist -- especially the rich ones who live behind barricades and have safe rooms or private jets or extra cars parked across bridges from Manhattan in case terror strikes again. People are making masks out of scrap fabric all across America as we speak.











I've thought it, but I've never written it: may that POS who is supposedly leading us drown in fluids filling his lungs, alone.








Cassandra
screamed
and
yelled
and
moaned
and
wailed.
imprecations
warnings
no
one
believed
her
comma
But





Here's one of my favorite poems by Jack Gilbert.

A Brief For The Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Cambria

Oliver and I, along with my dear friend Cara and her two daughters, drove up to Cambria yesterday. We''re spending two nights here, just hanging out and doing -- basically -- nothing.

It occurred to me the other morning when I was talking on the phone to my friend Christy Shake that the only way to survive the life we live as caregivers to children with seizure disorders is to replenish ourselves in any way we can and to do so regularly.

I know this is a privileged thought -- I know that there are many people who are out there doing the work we're doing who don't have an opportunity to get away, who dig down continually to find strength to keep going. I know, too, that some people just won't get away or refuse to get away or believe that they can't get away because there's no one who takes better care of their child than they do.

I don't know what to say to that other than it's become about as necessary to me to get away as it is to keep doing what I'm doing. As necessary and in order to live, even. Cognizant of my privilege, I can tell you that it's only been very recently that I've "gotten away" and not felt guilty about it or worried that something very bad is going to happen to Sophie. I'm going to say those things without judgement or explanation and will ask you not to as well. Tell me anything, that is.

Caregivers of severely disabled children, especially those who've been doing it for decades, know some things and we know them deep. Things haven't gotten easier even as I've learned how to dissociate and then come back. I don't know the word acceptance even as I surrender. The word toll. Taken.

There's everyone and then there's us.

Three things:

The cumulative years
The present
The projection into the future

I feel joy in my core even as that deepest part is dark. Memory.


I had a long conversation with an Italian artist in his studio amongst sculpture and paintings. Angels and toreadors, winged things, dancers and an architect, the suggestion of things broken and things free. Sophie in all of it, as was Carl and his birds. The words wing and soar. I'm most myself, both consumed and generative, in art.

Nature, too. Respite. Respire.

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew, the poet Jack Gilbert wrote.

Risking Delight

Random photo of Sophie that my friend Jody sent me over the internets this weekend

Precious child, Jody wrote when she sent me the photo above.




Isn't everything entirely wacky? Do any of ya'll listen to the podcast "The Daily?" Today's segment was like listening to a thriller. It's all about the Russians and their attempts to mess with the "democracy" that is, arguably, the United States of America. We've all been played like idiots, apparently. I shouldn't be flippant as it's actually pretty chilling. Here's the link.

Holy shitoly.


My friend Moye texted me the other day. What is going to happen to us?


What else? I've been on a novel reading binge of late which cheers me.  While I like to say that reading is my only constant, it's much more difficult these days to fully immerse myself in fiction. I've finished Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel, Jaime Quattro's Fire Sermon and T. Gertler's Elbowing the Seducer. I absolutely devoured each one. I think I'd consider marriage for the third time with Jaime Quattro or at least some kind of long-distance mind meld.


What else? I saw Black Panther on Friday night with The Bird Photographer. It was an exhilarating movie, even if you don't care for action hero sort of movies. It will deeply affect you for days afterward. I figure you've read all about it already, but if you haven't, this New Yorker article by Jelani Cobb is illuminating. I learned something listening to The Bird Photographer's reflections about it. He's an intensely empathic man, a man of few words so carefully chosen and thoughtful, and I'm grateful for his patience. I talk and I talk and I talk and I talk too much. I need to listen and reflect, especially now. We white people have a lot to learn and even more to reflect on. Most of all, we need to listen to people of color, to their words. We need to soak in their art, open our eyes and our hearts, let our minds blow open.

Wise counsel told me to continue to speak clearly. Speak clearly, she said.

Keep resisting, I think. Don't normalize or conform. Be brave.


What else? This post is phenomenal. I have been reading Gabrielle of Design Mom for nearly a decade, and I admire her so much.

Here's a repost of one of my favorite Jack Gilbert poems.

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

When the Locomotive of the Lord Runs Us Down

No Lifeguard On Duty

Two more black men shot in cold blood by police, children watching. What more is there to say? Our awareness might be nothing but illusion. "Awareness" Awareness, emphasized, italicized. We watch the grainy footage with nothing but cliche hearts rising to throats and sinking to pits of stomach. We are disconnected from one another by technology yet connected down to the infinitesimal by the same. What more is there to say? Does an open heart allow more sadness to be held or does more sadness make the heart open?

A Brief For The Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Jack Gilbert

I'm in the mood for

more Jack Gilbert:

to C

In the Beginning

In the morning when Eve and Adam
woke to snow and their minds,
they set out in marvelous clothes
hand in hand under the trees.

Endlessly precision met them,
until they went grinning in time
with no word for their close
escape from that warm monotony.

Jack Gilbert
via Collected Poems













Also, please read and share, if you'd like, my most recent article on marijuana.com. It's about women and what happens when they gather together in a room:

The Wisdom in the Room

I'm in the mood

Coronado Island

for some Jack Gilbert:









It Is Difficult To Speak Of The Night

It is difficult to speak of the night.
It is the other time. Not
an absence of day.
Bt where there are no flowers
to turn away into.
There is only this dark
and the familiar place of my body.
And the voices calling out
of me for love.
This is not the night of the young:
their simple midnight of fear.
Nor the later place to employ.
This dark is a major nation.
I turn to it at forty
and find the night in flood.
Find the dark deployed in process.
Clotted in parts, in parts
flowing with lights.
The voices still keen of the divorce
we are born into.
But they are farther off,
and do not interest me.
I am forty, and it is different.
Suddenly in midpassage
I come into myself. I leaf
gigantically. An empire yields
unexpectedly: cities, summer forests,
satrapies, horses.
A solitude: an enormity.
Thank god.

Jack Gilbert
via Poetry

Making the Vague Bearable

I got up on that little stage and expressed my motherhood and then sat down and listened while other women expressed theirs, and then I and a few of my friends who had come went out for a drink and chatter and laughter. I had an elderflower gimlet and a few calamari and some french fries and lots of laughs. It was a good night.

I had some really good news today about a job -- a really good job that will help to -- well, not help, but rather -- sustain me. Negotiating is still in the works, so I'm not going to say much more, but it's a flexible job that will enable me to be here for my kids and particularly Sophie. I am beyond grateful, sort of hushed by the whole possibility. I guess I'll slip in here that I'm going through a big transition right now, a divorce, to be blunt. Is a blog really the place to say this? Perhaps not. Despite what you think you know of me, you must know that it's not all, and there are certain things about my life that I'm just not going to write about -- ever.

I will include a poem, though, because poetry makes the vague bearable.




Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Jack Gilbert, from Refusing Heaven

Morning Devotional

Barnside, Marin County, CA 2015

Jack Gilbert's poetry

The blue sky after a bit of rain

A friend's dream of me being pregnant, two times

Not being pregnant in any way but the metaphorical


Suddenly Adult

The train's stopping wakes me.
Weeds in the gully are white
with the the year's first snow.
A lighted train goes
slowly past absolutely empty.
Also going to Fukuoka.
I feel around in myself
to see if I mind. Maybe
I am lonely. It is hard
to know. It could be
hidden in familiarity.

Jack Gilbert

Ease in Failure

Marconi Center, Tomales Bay 2015

The Sweet Taste of the Night

When I woke up my head was saying, "The world
will pardon my mush, but I've got a crush"
and went outside. The wind was gone.
The last of the moon was just up and the stars
brighter even than usual. A freighter
in the distance was turning into the bay,
all lit up. The valley was so still I could
hear the engine. The dogs quiet, worn out barking
all night at the full moon. Their ease in failure.
The ship came out the other side of the hill
and blew its horn softly for the harbor.
Waking a rooster on the mountain. It went
behind the second hill and I started back inside
the farmhouse. "All the day and night time,
hear me cry. The world will pardon my emotion,"
I sang from my bed, up into the dark, my voice
unfamiliar after not speaking for days.
Thinking of Linda, but singing to something else.

Jack Gilbert

Mooning Over Los Angeles

The Abandoned Valley

Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket in the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?

Jack Gilbert
Refusing Heaven (2005)

Standing at the prow, again, of a small ship

I've posted it before, but it seems as good a time as any to head for the hills with poetry.

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only 
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront 
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

from Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert

Jack Gilbert (1925-2012)

Jack Gilbert was one of my favorite living poets, until yesterday when he died at age 87. If you haven't read his poetry and you're so inclined, I highly recommend him.

Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was 
old enough to know better. But anything 
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while 
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
come back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but coming to the end of his triumph.

Jack Gilbert, from Refusing Heaven

This is a wonderful article that appeared in this past Monday's Los Angeles Times newspaper, and I've quoted quite liberally from his poetry on this blog, here, here, here -- well, that's a start.

3:56, Monday afternoon

It's nearly ninety degrees outside today, and I'm waiting. I'm waiting for Sophie's bus to get here. I'm waiting for the weather to get cooler. I'm waiting for election day. I'm waiting for the doctor to call me back about medical marijuana for Sophie. I'm waiting for Oliver's existential dread to abate. I'm waiting for my friend's sister to die. I'm waiting for a break, for a ship, for a sign.

A Close Call

Dusk and the sea is thus and so. The cat
from two fields away crossing through the grapes.
It is so quiet I can hear the air
in the canebrake. The blond wheat darkens.
The glaze is gone from the bay and the heat lets go.
They have not lit the lamp at the other farm yet
and all at once I feel lonely. What a surprise.
But the air stills, the heat comes back 
and I think I am all right again.

-- Jack Gilbert, from Refusing Heaven

Making Cakes on the Autumnal Equinox

I don't have too much to report from Los Angeles. It's now a couple of minutes past the autumnal equinox, which I guess means the days will begin to grow shorter and if I weren't living in Los Angeles I'd be thinking more about dead leaves and cold and a shortage of green. I've just finished decorating a cake. I've another one to finish before the afternoon, and then it's on to multiple loads of laundry and a flag football game in the late afternoon. The air conditioner is humming, Sophie is sleeping after a giant bowl of oatmeal and berries, The Husband and Oliver are in the front yard selling junk, and Henry is hiding from them in his room. In lieu of this post sounding like a child's diary entry, I'll leave you with this poem:

Between Poems

A lady asked me
what poets do
between poems.
Between passions
and visions. I said 
that between poems
I provided for death.
She meant as to jobs
and commonly.
Commonly, I provide 
against my death,
which comes on.
And give thanks
for the women I have 
been privileged to
in extreme.

-- Jack Gilbert, Collected Poems

Jack Gilbert, me and you

Have you ever read Jack Gilbert's poetry? It's pretty astonishing -- wild and angry and incredibly passionate. I got a copy of Collected Poems in the mail yesterday and, as is my wont, flipped it open. This is what I read:

Meaning Well

Marrying is like somebody
throwing the baby up.
It happy and then throwing it
higher. To the ceiling,
Which jars the loose bulb
and it goes out
as the baby starts down.

Don't be tempted to wonder about yourself when you read poetry as if all words were from a collective unconscious. Don't be tempted to worry or wonder about me. My mind is drawn toward Jung and the notion of synchronicity or the string theorist's games of chance. Or maybe it's just words on a page, a random stringing together. Meaning well.

I'm home again in Los Angeles after a perfect weekend in San Francisco and just outside of it. I spent most of the time hanging out at my dear friend Jody's house. I wore my pajamas until noon, and she lay on my bed and we talked and talked. Her husband made delicious coffee. We went to a ridiculously fancy restaurant on Friday night in San Francisco and ate tiny portions of too-rich and fussy food. We went to a beautiful benefit for a school for kids with severe disabilities -- the school where our darling Lueza attended -- and I sat next to Jody and cried when the slide show ended on her soulful face. Despite the sorrow of Lueza's absence, and it was palpable, the love that surrounded that child fills her home still, and I can honestly say that I have not felt so relaxed and happy and at ease in years. Thank you, Jody and Jacek, for your warmth and hospitality, for your beautiful home and for being such steadfast friends.

We woke up this morning and visited Jody's good friend, ate the most amazing homemade biscuits and orange marmalade (honestly, I could have eaten a jar of it) and sat out on a high porch in the hot sunshine, laughing and talking. After that, Jody drove me into the city to my blogger friend Sally's house where the famous Maggie lives, and after listening to Maggie's jokes and chatting a bit in their wonderfully quaint San Francisco home, Sally drove me to City Lights, where I raptured in the poetry room upstairs and purchased a small stack of black and white postcards of poets and a copy of Jack Gilbert's The Dance Most of All.

Sally and I walked to North Beach and ate eggplant parmigiana sandwiches at a corner bar and continued a conversation that lasted all the way through lunch and to the airport several hours later when she dropped me off and we decided that meeting one another was exactly what we had expected and that we'd known each other forever. 


Reader, I've a perfect score on melding my real life and my blogging life as every single blogger I've met personally has been an unequivocal pleasure. I'm awed by this and very, very grateful.

January Rose

Less Being More


It started when he was a young man
and went to Italy. He climbed mountains,
wanting to be a poet. But he was troubled
by what Dorothy Wordsworth wrote in
her journal about William having worn
himself out searching all day to find
a simile for a nightingale. It seemed
a long way from the tug of passion.
He ended up staying in pensione
where the old women would take up
the children in the middle of the night
to rent the room, carrying them warm
and clinging to the mothers, the babies
making a mewing sound. He began hunting
for the second rate. The insignificant
ruins, the negligible museums, the back-
country villages with only one pizzeria
and two small bars. The unimproved.


Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven

Heading for the Hills

Giancarlo Giannini in Lina Wertmuller's Seven Beauties

When things get too crazy, negative and out of control, when I get too crazy, negative and out of control, consumed by anxiety and the S&P credit downgrade, the back and forth of Krugman et all, the impending disaster, the relentlessness of bad news, the baggage, the Tea Baggers, Tea Partiers, the greed, the comparisons to Jonathan Swift's time, the weird windfalls that plug up holes and then slowly leak and drain, I think of Candide and his silly little garden (Il faut cultiver notre jardin) or Pasqualino in Seven Beauties, who survives to live -- and then I head for the hills with poetry.

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only 
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront 
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

from Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert

A Stubborn Gladness

A Brief for the Defense


Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only 
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront 
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

from Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert