i really just adore her

my wife is remarkable.

down below, she mentioned that she wasn’t happy with the story she’s just written. i understand this - i read it a few days ago. i can tell she ended up being rushed to finish it, she had to quickly stitch some parts together, didn’t have time to edit and polish like she usually does, didn’t fully execute the vision that she felt for the story, for the characters in it.

but here’s the amazing thing - in spite of those things, and even i could see them - from the first sentence, unexpectedly, almost unwillingly, i was riveted. i was moved. by the end of the story i was full to the brim of quiet emotion - full of the True.

i told her i thought it felt something like looking at the raw ore of some precious metal - maybe a little formless, a little undefined, a little dirty around the edges - but none of that can change the property of the gold, with all of its transfixing power, all of its True.

she’s special.

some of the best writing advice i was ever given

I’m working like a crazy lady this week on a short story due on Thursday. A little glitch I hit with this story reminded me of some really helpful advice I was given once by Dr. Briante, my poetry professor. I think it was my Junior year when I wrote a poem for her class— a short little poem, mostly descriptive— that I felt was not being understood by the class. So I went to her office to talk to her about it. I told her how when I wrote it I was feeling all these complicated things about memory and loss and human frailty and survival and how I felt like so little of that was actually coming across to people when they read the poem. 

Then she said, “sometimes you get that feeling not because you need to say more with that particular poem, but because you’ve got more poems you need to write about those ideas and feelings you’re working with.” 

It was really good, liberating advice. It gave me permission to not try to do so much with each particular piece of writing, to not try to pack all my ideas and my entire worldview and all angles of a topic into one poor overstuffed little poem. The truth is made up of so many beautiful little splinters and each one needs to be written about. And anyway she was totally right about that particular poem. It didn’t need any more. To this day it’s one of the handful of pieces from my undergraduate years that I’m still happy with.  

I could tell you what's on my mind

I could tell you what's on my mind. Or I could tell you about the night of the fireworks, when we were driving to Fair Park to see the show. I could tell you how, at the last second before joining the highway, after we turned on the service road but just before the entrance ramp, there to our right we saw the Hispanic families sitting on the embankment, bordering the highway, looking to the south.

We said, this many Mexicans can't be wrong. We changed two lanes and pulled over, found a place to sit on Bank of America's manicured lawn. An ice cream cart circled. A group of kids walked up from McDonald's holding dripping cokes. Some of them spoke Spanish. We sat with our feet to the highway, as if it were a riverbank, and debated going on to Fair Park because we doubted how the view would be from where we were. Would the fireworks be small and distant, we said, would the lights of I-30 drown them, would the trees be in the way? But when the fireworks began they filled out the blank spot in the skyline, between the overpass and the stand of trees, as if they had been matted and framed for us, with just enough black margin. They were the Fair Park lights after all. Children squealed, eighteen-wheelers roared down thirty, honking, and in the distance we could just see the crests of fireworks launched in cities miles to the south.

Halfway through the show the sprinklers sputtered up through the grass. Everyone laughed and screamed and scrambled, dragging blankets and camp chairs, while children escaped their parents and got wet. The lights grew bigger and louder, and the ice cream man turned off 'pop goes the weasel,' and the mothers clapped, and everything became faster and brighter and more patriotic each second. When it was over they all walked home through puddles of yellowed streetlight on cracked sidewalks scattered with broken glass, home to the neighborhoods bordering the interstate, happy with what could be seen without going anywhere.

Yes, I could tell you what's on my mind. It's mostly ideological. I could tell you about the research, the ideals, the frustration. We could discuss the dangers of monoculture and the need for small local farms, and I could tell you how they grow our food on irrigated strips of desert in California: even the water comes from somewhere else. I could tell you that your spinach has been across more states than you have. We could talk about towns whose squares are shuttered while the people shop online, or I could tell you how we swallow supplements full of dandelion while cursing the weeds in our own yards. I might mention how I try not to leave a 10 mile radius around my house for any errand, though this city goes on forever. I could tell you how, in the end, most of us want to be anywhere else than where we are.

I could tell you a lot of things I think about, and I would probably sound pompous and opinionated, even though I didn't mean to. You would probably want me to stop talking, and I would probably hate myself later for offending you. So instead, I'll say that when the show was over, we drove the 10 minutes back up Garland Road to our own small house in our own small, quiet neighborhood, the one that's bordered by the train track and yet another highway. I'll tell you how good it was that night to have never been on the interstate, to have watched out over it with people who had walked there. I'll tell you how I relished what I felt, sitting on the roadbank with the brown-eyed children. I'll describe how all the way home through the dark sagging neighborhoods, we heard the pop and barely saw the flicker of small illegal firecrackers, sparkling in the yards beneath the live oak trees.

welding pool

into the black lake at midnight,
a teacup full of ink beneath the brighter stars,
we dove, dark into dark, improbably,
piercing the oilskin surface, the thick black gloss,
molten steel poured into the mold of the hills;

plunged like metal fragments,
we were melted down, dissolved,
and the whole world was made from
or becoming formless black;

we were destroyed, we were born.
reassembled in the moment we rose to the air
from the void, from the cool furnace
forged again into our selves, retempered, new.

in which i theorize

For Dr. Turner's poetry workshop last semester, I had to write an artist's statement to go along with my portfolio. I'm sharing it on a whim, though it is long and awfully high-falutin.


In other words, don't read it if'n you don't want to. Obviously.

-----------------

When I write or read poetry, what I am looking for is a kind of knowledge that breathes, that bears the shape and rhythm of our world. We live in a created and creative world, after all– the fertility of this place is unbounded. Sometimes I picture our universe as a tide of energy flowing constantly from God’s creative passion, and all of its diverse people and objects and spirits as manifestations of that one energy. We try to match the pulse of this energy, and that is holiness. This is an essentially creative view of the world, because to be like God, we must be creators as well. We want to place ourselves as artists in the center of His energy; we want to match the flow and rhythms of that tide, match the patterns of God’s unsettling, dangerous, yet transcendently lovely creative power.


There’s much I don’t know about how this works. But I am at least convinced of three attributes that poetry written by these beliefs has: it is held to the highest standard of craftsmanship, it is accessible, and it is resonant. Einstein once said that God is subtle, but not malicious. I paraphrase: God is subtle, but He is not esoteric. He is not trying to trick anyone. He wants to communicate and be understood– God, after all, is Word, is revelation. Thus, I seek a poetry of revelation, a poetry of connectivity between the author and the reader. There’s no room here for the self-indulgence of works that are only meaningful to the author, or that are vague enough to mean anything to anyone. This is only complicating what I believe we instinctively know– art is communication, and the driving desire behind communication is to be apprehended, to be fully revealed and understood. There’s no need for the alienation that often arises between author and reader.


Thus, paradoxically, creating like God means creating on a human scale, with a human heart and sympathies; it results in a poetry of generosity that longs to give itself away. Pablo Neruda wrote, "I have always wanted the hands of people to be seen in poetry. . . I have always preferred a poetry where the fingerprints show. . . A poetry of bread, where everyone may eat." This last metaphor feels especially right and whole. I want to create poetry that is nourishing, that welcomes people to itself like a full table. Like the food we both produce and consume, poetry should both sustain life and be the product of life.


The perfect poem, I think, would have the craftsmanship and integrity to appeal to skilled readers, and yet be something that the person who doesn’t like poetry could read, and find a piece of themselves or of their world that they hadn’t previously known to look for. Such poetry may not accomplish much in the way of artsy cleverness, or reference and allusion to our literary canon, but then that is not what I want. I prefer a poetry that is closer to our collective heart than it is to our fading cultural memory.


There is an elegance to our universe; we see continually how all its divergent parts ultimately serve the whole. In keeping with this, I believe that art can never be simply for itself. It must be fertile– it must serve life, even (or perhaps especially) if this service is unquantifiable and mysterious. I believe that the highest function of any art is to teach people to love their own lives, to train them to see and hear and feel so that when they shut the book, the life they return to is a life deeply rooted in the best things of the earth, a life well-tended and beloved.

if i may

alright. i really really really don't want this to seem braggy or show-off-y or anything horrible no good bad bad bad like that. but. this makes me awfully happy and i wanted to share. so here we are.

from my teacher's review of my last short story:

"You are writing strong, sincere, literary stories that belie your age and writing experience, and this is a wonderful thing. When I read your work I can feel the care and investment in the story, the deliberation, even the emotional connection."

AAAAHHHHH!!!!!

. . . ok ok ok yes it's been a week since I got this review back. but i'm still that excited about it.

AHHHHHH!!!

for your sake

lowered, once

into dark water

the last light closed

into the closing door

“time cometh when I shall

no more speak

adrift in a troubled river

“I go away

“I was not there

lowered, once, into dark water,

how long before I knew

what I was there to be

cleansed of

how long before I knew

it was not water

“I was not there

the last light closed

into the closing door.

unmoored in textured darkness

the heft, the stain, the drift

of wine, of blood

“yet many things to say

to you, but ye

cannot bear them now

submerged in that lush

simmering dark how long

before I knew how I

was cleansed:

“if I go not away

the comforter

will not come unto you

lowered, once, into darkness

the last light closed

into the closing door

“I have yet many things to say to you

“time cometh when I shall no more

speak to you in proverbs

“and I am glad for your sake that I was

not there

Parícutin

Maybe there were signs beforehand: earthquakes,

restless animals, the slender stream unseasonably warm

in its shifting bed, the ground puckering or gaped

at random in Dionisio’s resting fields, as a garment

from an apprentice seamstress–

Dionisio and Paula Pulido, farmers, citizens

of the Mexican state of Michoacán, Catholic, members

of the indigenous P’urhépecha tribe, whose ancestors

were there when the Spanish arrived, tilling

the same fields he rose to tend that morning;

Dionisio and Paula, in early February, in 1943,

burning brush off their cornfields, preparing

for spring plowing, when the earth yawned open,

shrugged ancient sleep from its hunched

and crumbling shoulders and rose against them:

“I heard a thunder,” Dionisio said, “the trees trembled. . .

there was a smell of sulfur.”

The people of Parícutin: did they pray for a miracle?

Did they dig up their potatoes in time?

Harvesting the winter vegetables before they were ripe,

hurrying, one eye on the blooming volcano,

on the tongues of viscous lava creeping toward their homesteads,

kerchiefs tied across their faces against the white-hot ash.

Maybe they sewed money into their clothing,

went to the fields each morning with pockets

stuffed full of their belongings, ready to run.

Was he jealous,

Dionisio, the cuckold farmer,

his pregnant field swelling with some other seed

than corn

as the volcano loomed meters higher every morning,

as lava spread ten miles outward from his rebellious field,

as the government evacuated Parícutin, relocating

to California as seasonal farm labor the people who spoke

neither English nor Spanish, but their own language

like a field tilled and fertile for a thousand years.

Years later, when the movie came to theaters, “Captain from Castille,”

“The largest location expedition ever to leave Hollywood

went deep into Mexico to the actual local

of this romantic story of conquest!”

did they take their children, their friends, their American

sweethearts,

to show them the mottled wasteland, the drowned village,

the volcano in living technicolor! pointing to the church spire

still visible above the swamp of seeping lava;

did Dionisio go back again the next day

and the next, paying fifty cents to squint his sun-bleared eyes

at a grainy screen, searching for some trace of the fields

his oxen could plow without guidance; trying to guess which mound

of lava crested his buried home, or where in all that barren writhing

his plow lay waiting on its side?

Midwinter

The sounds of passing trains settle like silver dust on our houses

on still, subtropical nights like this, before a storm. The doors are open;

somewhere down the street a child is crying.

A freight yard borders the neighborhood,

and on clear nights we can hear the clanging bells.

The sounds of passing trains drift like airborne seeds above our houses,

sowing weedy, shapeless memories of places we've never been.

The neighbors play the mariachi station in the street at twilight;

trumpets spill from dashboard radios in a jangle of bright shapes.

Somewhere down the street a child is crying.

The ice cream man still takes his cart three times around the block

on temperate evenings. It’s painted aqua and pink, but plays no

music. On nights like this,

the sounds of passing trains accumulate in drifts against our houses,

and somewhere in the dusk a child is always crying.

spud's on the job!

here is me, holding the latest edition of Sojourn, UTD's arts journal. yes. that is in fact a plastic cow jumping off the roof of a model building. i love my school.

here is me, looking at the list of contributor's names on the back cover. why look, is that a familiar name?

why yes, it was! that page is my poem. and that face is my "why, yes, i've been published" face. it's very artsy. i hope you like it.

(recall last year when I won second place in the utd undergrad writing contest? that's why i'm in sojourn. so not just a huge deal, really, but still something. my first time to hold a publication with my work in it, anyway.)

Descent

This year, you’ll know winter’s coming

long before cold or calendar or barren

trees or lengthened nights insinuate

the hour of its arrival. Deep in the broad

hot heart of summer you’ll find

a knot of ice, you’ll feel the ebbing

summit of an arc become descent.

Maybe you used to measure seasons

by hours or days, regulated

in a ticking grid of time.

You’ve changed. This year,

your reckoning will log the waning

intervals of light, the malice

of the slowly lowering sky.

You might have guessed

the calendar wouldn’t help you

in the end. This is the year.

One day, soon, you’ll understand

what kinship binds the tree limbs

and your bones. That’s how you’ll know.

In the memory I've never understood,

we were walking, (the early 90's, I wore velcro sandals

and a dress with sunflowers) and at the old

Mrs. Baird’s there was a delivery truck idling

by the curb and the air so full of the reek and rise

of diesel and warm yeast, it smelled like earth and

home and highway and hunger and full and everything

was heavy beneath my breastbone all at once and

I breathed it in till my ribs ached. I had no words, then,

like ‘Totality’ or ‘Existence’ or ‘Paradox’ or ‘Evocative’

or even ‘Longing’ only the familiar shapes of is, and am, and be,

and was, filled.

Lullaby

such lullabies we sing

to one another in the lamplight

we cradle, reach and rock, and

the low fullthroated melody sings the wildness

of the moaning winds, cold stars and empty streets,

the nameless shadows of a paling moon,

and then sings hush,

we’re here

and darkness is only a deep-voiced humming

and all that is not us is a murmuring haze

our songs like silhouettes of homing birds across

the dusky sky,

we draw the horizon close with low

warmthroated singing, lips

to your ear whisper, hush, whisper,

murmuring, hush.

This Canvas World

Painting my kitchen (green

as oak leaves in the sun) I watched

how willingly the wall took the color

Thought of how the thirsty ground is ready

to take in rain, water’s shadow

spreading effortlessly, drawn

Drops of sky-blue watercolor,

heavy with hue, pull from the bristles, fall,

and bloom across the ready page,

till all is blue and blue and blue

This canvas world– even the air fills

with fragrance, fills with sound and song

All things are suffused with one another, filled

to the brim and over, permeable, except

this page furrowed with crabbed trenches

of pencil lead. This white recalcitrant vastness

never saturated, only scratched and scarred

December 22nd, Solstice

Chopping onions, you think about grace,

About the knife’s edge as slender

As the solstice afternoon. A starling

In the yard. Cooking steam in the stairwell.

The lowering dusk is heavy with ice

And most of all with silence.

You can’t ignore such insidious silence,

Waiting behind every door. It takes grace

To descend stairs slippery as ice:

The wrought-iron handrail is slender,

But you still hold on, going down the stairwell.

The hard surface of water confuses the starling.

Fading light on the wings of the starling

Reveals their sleety glitter. Silence,

Darkness gather at the foot of the stairwell;

The eye of a storm is no more still than grace

When it gathers, a reprieve as slender

As the birdbath’s tentative crust of ice.

The driveway, the branches coated with ice–

No matter where it lands, the starling

Finds no sure foothold. One slender

Line of light left in the trees. Silence

And darkness meld. Say grace

Over a lonely supper, listen to the stairwell

Which is too quiet. What waits in that stairwell,

With capable fingers, cold as ice?

It’s too much like the action of grace

For comfort; you’re skittish as the starling

Whose alert eyes do not trust the silence–

Sharp as a knife, with an edge as slender.

Midwinter solstice, like the slender

Hairpin turning of an ancient stairwell;

These early evenings you hear more in the silence

Than in the anonymous noise. Falling ice

Startles the watchful starling

And your thoughts turn, inevitably, to grace:

Its ice, its silence, its revolutions,

How it flickers from watching eyes.

Grace pools in stairwells, in off-hand times and places,

A slender edge, a subtle widening.

Synapse

Birds rise in unison of wings,

a flock of neurons firing

at the impulse of some unseen spark

while on this page, the gap

between each word is a synapse

intention may or may not cross

Do birds feel this way, vaulting

across the myelinated passage

between earth and sky–

An aphasia of flight

when earth and sky feel far

apart as in a child’s watercolor,

twin stripes on opposite

edges of the page,

the unformed space between

so vast, so spattered

Radius

No light left in the sky except the chalky pink around the rim, the circle of sight. Across the street my neighbor’s open garage door is a frame glowing in the thickening darkness like picture-book illustrations of the nativity, a fluorescent porchlight where the star would be. Andy stands at the washing machine, turning to scare his daughter, five other children. They scatter, flapping like startled pigeons, flicker in and out of the light, moment by moment transformed from flesh to silhouette to flesh again, bumble into storage bins and laundry baskets. These narrow post-war houses overflow with my neighbor’s lives and goods; mismatched dogs and children cross and recross the street, make everything feel smaller, as if their footprints stitched the path of a gathering thread, the wrinkled sidewalks and exhausted yards puckering at the tug. Furniture sits uneasy on the porches, in the yards, fills the garages while cars throng streets and driveways like escaped and tentative cows. A silhouette slouches stealthily across the light holding a stick in crooked arms like a gun. A moment later children scream in English, in Spanish. Impossible to know where each belongs, which houses will claim them as the streetlights hum drowsily, shedding slumber from their amber eyes. Illumination ripples across block after block, like the whistle from the nearby freightyard. The darkening window empty, a tiny glass drained; pungent liquor only drunk one horizon-full at a time, one strong sweet sip, one window brimming, warm.

Psalm

O David

a new song won’t

be enough this time

O Chief Musician

–more, a whole

new language, honey-

savored, spice-warm

on the tongue

O Abba, Father

how I’d come

running, an eager mouth-

full of fragile

newfound syllables

Harvest

I watched a boy in a Superman t-shirt try to climb

a low-slung live oak and fail, stumbling backwards

Remember the apple trees in the yard

of the rented house? A good climber, they sent me

up after the apples– mealy, but tart and fragrant, brushed

with the crimson I looked for through waxy leaves

Or the pear tree my uncle climbed

before we knew he was dying, to shake ripe pears

from the limbs. We ducked, laughing, gathered them

in brown paper grocery sacks decorated with falling leaves,

falling snow, “May Your Days Be Merry And Bright”