The Next Morning

No photo today.

The helicopters are circling, have been circling since yesterday afternoon when a peaceful protest turned into an afternoon, evening, night of violence and looting in my neighborhood and in downtown Los Angeles. It was deafening. I can only write what I know and what I feel. I refuse to dwell on the looting but will sit with the churning in my stomach, shooting out my fingertips. The questions. All of our blind grappling in the darkness as if answers will come. I've argued with my own mother. Carl saw a bear yesterday somewhere and I haven't had the chance or even desire to ask him where. I set up a bird bath in my front garden, powered by the sun. Powered by the sun. I keep thinking of the Wallace Stevens' poem Gubbinal, its simplicity and paradox. How tempting it is to despair. The world is ugly and the people are sad. The body. The sun. The imagination. How to inhabit the body, the individual body and the collective body. Everyone was peaceful until the cops showed up, my son reported. Showing up. Riot gear. Helicopters, their blades slicing through air. I watched a video sent to me by a neighbor of a group of young people, black and white, bashing their way into a luxury store at a local mall. Do I care about a mall? Do I care about a luxury store? Do I understand the motivations? Will I condemn them as senseless? I felt afraid and not for my body, my white body nor, even, for the white bodies of my children or the black body of my love. There's a strangeness and goodness in just feeling something, not thinking about it, and I felt afraid. Cooped up for months. Twenty percent unemployment. National Guard soldiers standing outside a marijuana store called Med Men. Jewish synagogues and schools and small stores defaced and looted. People sweeping, sweeping it up. What it looks like to step through glass buckled and shattered, your skinny white legs and bleached blonde hair, your sleeveless arms clutching a large leather handbag, a blurry computer. Do not share the faces of the protestors, the young people admonish. The strangeness of it. Yet, shouldn't this be so? There's a timeline that leads to this moment and the urge to contextualize. The timeline begins centuries ago.

I'm thinking of Armaud Arbery running through the streets of his Georgia town, chased like an animal and gunned down, slaughtered by vigilantes who were free for months. 

There should not be an etiquette for people's responses.

Earlier in the afternoon, a billionaire launched a bunch of astronauts into the empty airless space over a world choking to death in a pandemic as hordes gathered in the streets to protest the slaughter of a black man who could not breathe under the knee of a white man. That is everything.

My Response to Everything Concerning Everything (that strange flower)

Sunset at Allison's
Twin Peaks, CA July 2019

is poetry, and it's not what I write but what I want to read, words floating up or by like fish in my mind. Wallace Stevens comes to mind complacencies of the peignoir.

In the span of let's say five minutes I scanned just scanned words strung together (scan, scroll, read?) Mitch McConnell Mitch Moscow his voice a drone the rap something about something and then a star not of the sky (the stars' wrapping) but of rap his radiance in Sweden who threw a guy across a street which I believe is assault (the Swedes say) but whom POSPOTUS wants out (of Swedish jail) encouraged by the Kardashian paper doll who put on clothes that her husband ordered up designed that covered her famous breasts and ass and fly waist and Cinderella feet so that she could pose with the men in orange, most recently, take a selfie and

S
T
A
N
D

U
P for justice reform and Ikea be boycotted (Ikea being Danish not Swedish but who cares but meatballs and lingonberries and soft-serve cones) and wait, who do we support here? 

remember: five minutes (maybe ten including the footage of the blue-eyed Eilish)

they ended with Meghan Markle editing British Vogue and insisting on freckles and then the photo of the boy standing in grass his thin-lipped sweetness smile shot dead at a garlic festival by another angry white man with a gun.

Precious child.

Another one (or two) added to the piles of dead children.


I've stood in a sunflower field with my sons in Gilroy.

















There's humor in befuddlement or is it wry or rue?





Here's the poem.


Gubbinal

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed —
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

Wallace Stevens



I think we (you) suffer from an intellectual laziness, a lack of imagination.


Like Stevens' also wrote:

People are not going

To dream of baboons and periwinkles. 

On another note, I am learning about pleasure.

(and no, I am not going mad but rather writing and wrestling with words)

Still

Somewhere in Durham, NC, 1982

I recently found a bunch of letters from friends and lovers in a box at the back of my closet. I also found a trove of negatives from a documentary photography class I took as a sophomore at UNC in 1982. I'd forgotten about the family that I visited over a period of three months and chronicled and with whom I became friends. I moved away. Still I remember developing them in the darkroom, my hands immersed in the bath, the slippery feel of the paper blooming shadows and light, the hands of the boy I loved mixed up with mine, his mouth.

Saturday morning. Complacencies of the peignoir.

Still. What makes me "happy" is fifteen minutes in bed meditating, then reading about authors I love and their new books, then hearing Sophie in the room down the hall humming again after more than a month of silence. Also, Costa Rican coffee from the man I love who is out there somewhere taking photos of burrowing owls.











Field Guide

Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,
up to my neck in that most precious dement of all,

I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather
floating on the tension of the water

at the very instant when a dragonfly,
like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,

hovered over it, then lit, and rested.
That's all.

I mention this in the same way
that I fold the corner of a page

in certain library books,
so that the next reader will know

where to look for the good parts.

Tony Hoagland

Sunday Morning

Spooning crunchy little potatoes into my mouth, a sip of a latte, the whine of the boy next to me on the bench, his mother's soft Indian-inflected chiding. A couple walked in and up to the counter, his clothes rumpled, her hair a mat. I knew where they'd been, maybe minutes before. My own crumpled bed, the first night in twenty-one years where I lay without Sophie in the room across the hall. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The first morning, too. Hesitation to write it thus for all that is implied. Sex and death but neither. I might have woken once or twice, alert, then sunk back into sleep, she resting at her father's. Why must I always mark the days? I'm reading a short story and there's a boy and a school and a teacher and a drawer and in it some stars and I look up from my latte and see those tiny golden stars, foil on slick white, so many stars to a sheet to want to wait to earn. Stars unbidden and bidden, hidden yet.



Blanche McCarthy

Look in the terrible mirror of the sky
And not in this dead glass, which can reflect
Only the surfaces—the bending arm,
The leaning shoulder and the searching eye.

Look, in the terrible mirror of the sky.
Oh, bend against the invisible; and lean
To symbols of descending night; and search 
The glare of revelations going by!

Look in the terrible mirror of the sky.
See how the absent moon waits in a glade
Of your dark self, and how the wings of stars,
Upward, from unimagined coverts, fly.

Wallace Stevens, from The Palm at the End of the Mind, Selected Poems and a Play

Complacencies of the Peignoir*

Enter the Mermaid Room

Instead of around the neck, drape scarves over doorway stains.



I lay in bed this morning, casual. When she screamed a thin, long nearly ecstatic sound, I knew it was a seizure. You know what we do. Later, I told a friend, and she asked whether I was scared. No, I said, I am hard and resigned.








While listening to another person (not Lou) sing take a walk on the wild side, sit at a light in Silver Lake and look forward. A flock of birds flies over, maybe 50 of them, their wings casting shadows. They circle and swoop. A convention that settles on a wire. Birds on a wire. Why? Is their path ordained or are they, pardon the pun, just winging it?





Too Many Birds






The Everyday Enchantment of Music

A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound,
which was polished until it became music. Then the music was
polished until it became the memory of a night in Venice when
tears of the sea fell from the Bridge of Sighs, which in turn was
polished until it ceased to be and in its place stood the empty
home of a heart in trouble. Then suddenly there was sun and the
music came back and traffic was moving and off in the distance, at
the edge of the city, a long line of clouds appeared, and there was
thunder, which, however menacing, would become music, and the
memory of what happened after Venice would begin, and what
happened after the home of the troubled heart broke in two would
also begin.

Mark Strand












*One of my favorite phrases, from the poem Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens

Complacencies of the Peignoir*

It's a bit gloomy today, both outside and in. A lot of us are feeling depressed or anxious or just plain Sunday-ness. I don't think there's anything to do about it other than let it be, let it roll on in and inevitably, out.

This silly city is primping for the awards ceremony tonight, and I don't think I can stomach it. I have a dear friend coming over, though, and perhaps if I print out those ballot forms and give them to the kids, I'll have girded my loins and will present a more good-humored face.

We live in an old chaos of the sun,

Or old dependency of day and night,

Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,

Of that wide water, inescapable.

Wallace Stevens, from Sunday Morning





*also a line from a favorite poem by Wallace Stevens. You can read it here.

Post Ferguson Gubbinal

The helicopters circled for what seemed like hours, and I texted back and forth with my sister in St. Louis, with a friend in Oakland and one in New York. Henry sounded despairing as people his age can sound when they'd rather shove it all under the rug of dumb. This country is dumb, he said. I hate this country. He threw his lacrosse ball up against the house, caught it and threw it again and again. Oliver mused on the cop's fate. I bet he wishes he were in jail, he said. The boys argued over whether the helicopters were news or LAPD. There's a Little Caeser's burnt to the ground! Oliver yelled from the living room. Later, There's people lying in the middle of the intersection of La Brea and Wilshire, Mom, Henry reported.

Wallace Stevens' refrain from Gubbinal won't ease up in my own head, the poem's melding of imagination and possibility (that strange flower, that tuft of jungle feathers) with our half-baked perceptions (the world is ugly, the people are sad).

Run to the hills with your poetry.


Gubbinal

That strange flower, the sun,
is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
and the people are sad.

Wallace Stevens

Questions

Hello?
Hello?
Anyone there?
Perhaps you're out enjoying the spectacular weather or have buried yourself under the covers and are reading?
Or maybe you're cramming in the last few episodes of House of Cards and then having to take a long, hot shower?
Is blogging over?
Has Typepad recovered so that I can leave comments on those of you who use it as your blogging platform?
Must we always be grateful and cheerful?
Must we always complain?
Do we need a little poetry?

The Pleasures of Merely Circulating

The garden flew round with the angel
The angel flew round with the clouds,
And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew
        round
And the clouds flew round with the clouds.

Is there any secret in skulls,
The cattle skulls in the woods?
Do the drummers in black hoods
Rumble anything out of their drums?

Mrs. Anderson's Swedish baby
Might well have been German or Spanish,
Yet that things go round and again go round
Has rather a classical sound.

Wallace Stevens

Sunday morning

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,

from Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens

Along with the verses of W.B. Yeats' Adam's Curse from which I titled this blog, the above verse is one of my very favorite in the English language. I can't think or say the words Sunday morning without thinking complacencies of the peignoir, and the rest just rolls off my tongue, shimmering. I imagine I first read the poem, which is part of Wallace Stevens' collection Harmonium, inspired in part by the boy I loved who scratched Stevens' words on bits of paper and left them lying around. To Iris, he wrote once on a slip of paper and the cryptic To the Carolinas. The square of paper lay on my pillow. I feverishly flipped through my Wallace Stevens The Collected Poems and found that poem. The pine tree sweetens my body. The white iris beautifies me, I read.

Poetry floats and it makes a shape into which I've often stepped to make a life.

Sophie is dozing this morning, off and on, and as we move into week two of seizure freedom, I think how ill-equipped I am -- perhaps we all are -- to express gratitude, particularly as a non-religious person. I refuse to believe in an active God who has the whole wide world in his hands, who metes out justice to the wicked, or who has a divine and inscrutable plan that accounts for even extreme poverty, suffering children, devastating weather, rape, or epidemics. This lack of faith in an all-knowing god, or a universe that is anything other than constantly changing and chaotic, has prompted me to wonder if a more appropriate response to the despair I've often felt at Sophie's condition would be to go into the street, rip at my clothes and my hair and wail. In a similar way, I refuse to credit an active god with the miracle that is Sophie's two weeks of seizure freedom. I feel a modicum of guilt with that confession, a product, I suppose, of my Catholic upbringing and all the "religious" people that I know who so earnestly pray for me and for Sophie. While I am grateful for the intention, I admit to shirking, inwardly, when people say Thank God! or Praise the Lord! in response to Sophie's break from seizures. In a way, I would like to believe that God had a hand in this, because then I could crawl on my knees to Mecca in ecstasy or perhaps to a shrine. My response could be the dramatic opposite of the ranting and raving despair I conjured before. I could go to church every single day and kneel in adoration and gratitude, as opposed to feeling almost shell-shocked that a good day follows another good day and then another and another.

Here's what I believe. I believe these two weeks were gained, as it were, by my own dogged persistence to obtain CBD for her, by The Husband's backbreaking labor to make the money to buy it for her, by the efforts of the farmers who are growing it for her, and the individuals who have worked to bottle it and get it to us legally. I believe these two weeks were gained by the power of the internet to connect those of us seeking help for our children with epilepsy and by the glorious and chaotic bounty that the universe holds for us, even in spite of our very alive-ness. I believe in coffee and oranges and complacencies as much as dark things around the corner. I believe in the implacable sun.

So, how long has it been since you've received a real letter in the mail? The only ones I receive are, ironically, from Anthem Blue Cross, and they always say the same thing and they always include a third piece of paper that lists the ten thousand languages available for translation even though that must cost a pretty penny and they already know that we speak English as a primary language in this health care-exhaustive family. Today, though, I got a real letter in the mail from Rebecca. It was sealed with golden WAX, a honeybee over the flap, and there were stickers all over it, including one that read OPEN ME. I didn't want to break the seal, so I used a tarnished silver pointy letter opener that has been sitting in a pencil box since the last time I got a letter thirty years ago or so. Before I did that, I turned the envelope over and over and admired, even, the stamps. Can you believe she put a Wallace Stevens stamp on there and a fabulous Charles Demuth? Here's a poem by Wallace Stevens that a boy I knew wrote the title of on a tiny slip of paper and left on my bed in my dorm room, about as long ago as I received a real letter in the mail. It's for you today, Rebecca:

In the Carolinas

The lilacs wither in the Carolinas.
Already the butterflies flutter above the cabins.
Already the new-born children interpret love
In the voices of mothers.

Timeless mother,
How is it that your aspic nipples
For once vent honey?

The pine-tree sweetens my body
The white iris beautifies me.

Sometimes, especially when I do so in the early hours of the morning, I think of this blog as my "correspondence," in the way that women of leisure might have in the olden days. I sit down at my desk, raise my hands over the keyboard and begin.

Thank you, Rebecca, for the envelope and the stamps, for the perfect card inside and for the letter in your beautiful, sexy handwriting. I've written a blog post in gratitude, but I can't wait to wrap my own fingers around a real pen and write you back.

Low Country Questions

When we were children, my sister and I would ask one another the impossible question: If you had to, who would you kill? Mom or Dad? Neither! we'd scream, Neither!

If someone asked you whether you'd kill a terrorist who threatened your children (popped an olive in his mouth, an unsalted nut), what would you say (as you pull the plump mussel out of the lemon broth)? If  you toss and turn in bed all night, will those precious hours after sunrise seem heavy or deep and restful? Is the pen really mightier than the sword? Is your child's life worth more than mine? Is that child's life worth more than that one's? Or that one's? Would you send others to do your killing or would you hold them back and do it yourself?

Is Gubbinal about imagination and illusion or is there a world at all external to it?

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say,
Have it your way.

The world is ugly
The people are sad.

That tuft of animal feathers.
That animal eye
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire.
That seed.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly.
The people are sad. 

Wallace Stevens

The world is not ugly, and the people are not sad**

Fog lay thick over most of Los Angeles this morning and is something of an event, strange enough that both boys jumped out of bed easily when I said, You should come quick and see the fog! It's so weird! The rainy season in our part of the world has set in, there are tiny black mushrooms clustered around the base of trees, and yesterday I practically tripped over a white one that looked more like it should be called a toadstool than fungi. I have so much to do these days, so many telephone calls to make and people to think of and meetings to attend. I'm juggling my son Oliver's anxiety and mild depression, Sophie's seizures and Henry's applications for high school. The new job has me attending healthcare round-tables where harrowing stories of children removed from their homes due to neglect are presented and professionals from seemingly every profession one can imagine put their heads together to discuss and help. Someone asked me whether it's depressing, and so far, it's not. It's uplifting, rather, to participate in something positive. I'm grateful to not only have the work but to do it. I crashed into another car today, a tiny fender bender, while stopped at a traffic light. I jumped out of my car and exclaimed my apologies to the burly guy in his. He fingered the scratches in his car, a shiny, red convertible and sighed. I thought he'd be angry. I thought he'd accuse me of something. I thought of the insurance premiums rising as my adrenaline did. He sighed, though, and he didn't get angry. We exchanged information and went on our way. I got an email a couple of hours later. He included a copy of a bill from a hardware store for some paint. He said that he would touch up the scratches himself and bang out the dents. The bill was for $8.13, and he wondered whether I would reimburse him for it.

The world is not ugly, and the people are not sad.

**one of my favorite Wallace Stevens' poems:

Gubbinal

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

Complacencies, writing, Burbank and stoplights : To Lueza

I sat at a stoplight the other afternoon in Burbank, the sun going down. The light stayed red for some time and when it turned green the cars ahead shot through in a strange syncopation, one black, one white, a chaotic (coming straight at me) yet ordered (they missed me with precision) checkerboard. A plane slanted through the sky, impossible, the traffic light dangled and when I remembered to press the pedal to move, I imagined my car lifting up over the line ahead, the white turned to metallic shimmer, needle nose forward. Someone slammed a car horn, and my foot responded, the setting sun slanted its light, loud and insistent, and I was in my car, the sky ahead blue and clear.

Does a writer ever have unprocessed experience? That's what I'm thinking about this morning -- the ability to make narrative as things unfold, something more than note-taking and less than creation, the spinning of story and the making things up as one goes, the complacencies of the peignoir, the green freedom of a cockatoo (no green cockatoo exists in nature), Lueza's eighteenth birthday (she is not here) and these two verses from a poem by Wallace Stevens:

Sunday Morning

1

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

2

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul. 

from Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

Sunday Morning

I read The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens over and over during college and for years afterward. I can still recite some of them from memory, and for some reason the phrase complacencies of the peignor lives very close inside my head, so close that nearly every Sunday morning I think of it. Here's the first verse of the poem Sunday Morning, and you can listen to the poet himself read the entire work below.

I

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkness among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

Two Winter Poems

The Snowshoe Hare

The fox

is so quiet --

he moves like a red rain --

even when his 

shoulders tense and then

snuggle down for an instant

against the ground

and the perfect

gate of his teeth

slams shut

there is nothing

you can hear

but the cold creek moving

over the dark pebbles

and across the field

and into the rest of the world --

and even when you find

in the morning

the feathery

scuffs of fur

of the vanished

snowshoe hare

tangled

on the pale spires

of the lost summer -

fluttering a little

but only

like the lapping

threads

of the wind itself -

there is still

nothing that you can hear

but the cold creek moving

over the old pebbles

and across the field and into

another year.

Mary Oliver, 1992

via The Writer's Almanac

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens, 1954

Epiphany

Chink chink chink. I am sitting in the alley, car idling and reading a snippet of Stevens as a janitor carefully taps the glass of an old window. Complacencies of the peignoir from Saturday Morning, quoted by another, through glass I watch the man break glass. When the cars start up, I turn on the engine, the sound of flapping wings, dappled sun on bougainvillea, dead branches on cement, blue sky. 


Small Stone 6

What mothers say

when they are greeted grumpily in the morning by their children, told that there's nothing to eat or I hate that kind of cereal or I don't have any clean underwear and how come our laundry isn't done?, what mothers say is do you understand what it's like to have to ask someone to do something all day, every day? What if you had to ask me to do your laundry or make your breakfast or buy you new clothes or pay for your sports equipment like I have to ask you to pick up your towels, feed the dog, brush your teeth, empty your lunchbox, take out the garbage, pick up that piece of paper on the floor that you've just stepped over.


Harrumph.

There's always poetry, though, women in peignoirs, the complacency of peignoirs (thank you Wallace Stevens), etc.:

Angry Women

Women in peignoirs are floating around

the landscape well out of eyesight

let alone reach. They are as palpable

as the ghost of my dog Rose whom I see

on long walks, especially when exhausted

and my half-blind eyes are blurred by cold wind

or sleet or snow. The women we've mistreated

never forgive us nor should they, thus their ghostly

energies thrive at dawn and twilight in this vast

country where any of the mind's movies can be played

against this rumpled wide-screened landscape.

Our souls are travelers. You can tell when your own

is gone, and then these bleak, improbable

visits from others, their dry tears because you were

never what you weren't, so that the world

becomes only what it is, the unforgiving flow

of an unfathomable river. Still they wanted you otherwise,
closer to their dreamchild, just as you imagined
fair maidens tight to you as decals to guide
you toward certainties. The new pup, uncrippled by ideals,
leaps against the fence, leaps at the mountains beyond.

         -- Jim Harrison