Day Twenty Five

Title: This, my favorite memory.

Ah, what a fine poem to end on. Yes, folks. This is the last of my daily series. I'm wrapping this project up and working on a larger installation, taking what I've learned with these small pieces and putting it into a bigger context. I'll be posting pictures as I progress on the installation. It should only be another week or so before I complete it. I'll give you one hint: the installation is for the poem, Elegy (see Day Fourteen).

This poem, First Winter with You, speaks to the new vocabulary I had to learn when I moved to the east and experienced Winter for the first time. I became fascinated with how the natural world changes. It seemed (and still does seem) so full of mysteries. Ice, in particular, caught my attention. How it changes from day to day, how you can never really trust it (but people do!), how you can make a foot print in soft ice and come back the next day to see your footprint filled with water that has frozen over, like a mold.

Jim, who has grown up with very cold winters, laughs and laughs at me when I make these kind of discoveries. Endearing moments, those ones.

***

First Winter with You

I walk out onto
what should be water
and wonder why
I do not fall through.

I wave at you.

This, my favorite memory.
Not falling through.

I press the heel of my boot
down, dare a crack.
Come through, water.
Come.

You take my hand
and lead me away.

I do not fall through.

Day Twenty Four

Title: and what happens when the bird flies in?

Check out Day Eleven for the background story on this poem.

***

Greatest Fear

And what happens when the bird flies in?
I would like to imagine you will
turn a new shade of flustered, more
awkward and lovely, all girl, all
fluttering over a small winged thing.

I get that it’s not just a bird.
I get that the universal symbol for fear
is a sparrow.
I get your defiance.

If only your hands did not resemble
wings. Your heart, that feathered vessel
shaped for flight. If only.

Day Twenty Three

Title: love, we have made good time even in bad weather

Sometime last year at work, one of our engineers said something in passing about a steady state angle. I had never heard this term before, and I asked him what it meant. His explanation was that it was the angle a certain substance always made in a pile. For example, sand. When you make a pile of sand, the angle it makes in relationship to the ground is always the same. For you science buffs out there, wind and weather will alter the steady state angle. And different types of sand have different steady state angles. I know. But for arguments sake, I was interested in the idea of the steady state angle as metaphor for bodies coming together.

***

Steady State Angle

love,
we have been bodies
inside bodies
on a highway headed south
with no space, no
outside between us.
I miss that.

they say
sand always piles up
at an angle of twenty-seven degrees

love,
we have made love
with our two bodies
in a snow-covered cornfield
near 200th Ave.
I miss this.

it is called a steady state angle

love,
we have been
coming to our senses
catching our breath.
I miss you.

it doesn’t matter how much sand there is

love,
we have made
good time even in
bad weather,
we have been lost
but still made it,
love,
we are here

the angle is always twenty seven degrees.

love,
we are here.

Day Twenty Two

Title: i try for years

This poem goes with the dream series I blogged about on Day Twenty. It was a real dream, as dark and real as anything. What I remember most about the dream was my inability to speak to him, to say anything meaningful. I suppose real life with him was like that, too. It wasn't so much a speechlessness as a mind-tripping kind of self-censorship. I always felt like nothing I had to say was smart enough or witty enough or whatever enough. I could not compete with him.

It's been years, and every time I see him it's the same. I fall silent and flat.

***

Dream of my complicit silence

He’s sitting there
in the middle of the pub,
the empty Irish pub, picking
at a Spanish guitar.

Once, he told me his father
was an alcoholic, is an alcoholic,
he told my hair, which was
bunched in his hands and dying.
He told me in the dark.

The guitar is not important.

He’s alone and I’m
alone in the pub and I try
to say something. I try for
years while dust collects
on the windowsill.

I follow him
when he leaves.

What’s important is the flask
in his left pocket.

I don’t know how to tell him
to stop.

Day Twenty One

Title: the sleeping world glitters

Well, this poem got kicked out of my thesis in the final run-through. Again, it didn't thematically fit. Boo.

I wasn't thinking about the poem this line came from when I put this piece together. In fact, when I went to post this blog, I had to do a search through all my poems because I couldn't even remember which poem it went to. I had forgotten that the poem had to do with birds. Specifically, a small moment when I looked out my window at work and saw a flock of pigeons flying away. It was winter, it was cold. But those birds took little pieces of the sun in their wings and dazzled me.

***

the ones that stay

this flock they
flutter the December daylight
wings across a low-lying sun
thousands of them

flutter and flicker
the sleeping world glitters

I blink
and they are gone

Day Twenty

Title: i wanted to stop dreaming about him

A new direction, maybe. Just playing around.

This line comes from a sequence of dream poems I wrote this last spring. I often dream in cycles, with the same cast of characters showing up again and again. The dreams come in two or threes or fours. And they are never light dreams, never the kind that float away with the alarm.

For a long time, I used to dream about this boy that I loved. Even after we'd stopped talking. Even after years and years of silence. He'd just show up for a week or two in my dreams, and then he'd disappear.

This poem is not quite a dream, though it goes with the dream sequence. It is about that boy. About a letter of apology he wrote to me at the end of our tragedy.

***

Dream I haven’t had yet

There is a letter
six pages long,
at the bottom of the Pacific.
At the bottom of the cliffs.

I believe
he meant for me to keep it.
It was an apology.
It was so many years.
It was all green and blue.

I didn’t want it.

I wanted to stop dreaming about him.

Day Nineteen

Title: the way a woman sings when there is nothing left

I wrote a lot about rivers when I lived in Pittsburgh. They have a way of seeping into the darkest corners of your consciousness and leaving secret things there. Driving over the Rankin Bridge one night, I saw a tug boat pushing barges of coal down the river. It was a common enough site, tugs pushing barges up and down the river. But somehow, the silence of those barges and the reflection of the bridge's lights on the water and the warm autumn air of that night got stuck in me.

Earlier in the year, I had done some volunteer work cleaning up the banks of the river around the North Shore area. In between picking up empty beer cans and soda bottles, I'd find the oddest things - a child's snow boot, shoe strings, tennis balls, a used tampon applicator, tires. Those things stuck in me too.

When I sat down to write this poem, those pieces of the river appeared. Almost out of nowhere, it seemed. I didn't remember that I remembered them. They were just there. Silent as those barges of coal going up and down the river at night.

***

the moment the door clicks shut

is a river,
the lowest point,

is singing, heavy at night,
coal barges and tugs,
singing the way a woman sings when
there is nothing left
aside from the empty house,
the leftover whiskey,
the smell of sweat still on the sheets

is the years of things
you wished you’d never said

is the generations of junked metal
on the bottom of the river,
the flat tires and forgotten snow boots,
the accumulation of things no one wants

is a memory,
a drowned photograph,
a flood

is the sound of the tug
which is no sound at all

Day Eighteen

Title: Listen,

Last semester, we were reading Lucille Clifton's collecton of poems, Quilting. She had all these great poems dedicated to friends of hers, poems that were so full of her strong, sermon-like voice. I decided I wanted to write a poem like that, too.

Finding a topic I felt strongly enough about was a challenge. But, after listening to a friend of mine go on about finally deciding to marry a guy she'd been dating for five years, I knew I had found my topic.

Marriage. For women, it seems to be the moment when we decide whether we're going to honor ourselves as who we are or spend a lifetime in servitude to someone who doesn't quite get us.

***

Marriage, for my friend, Kate

listen,
we are closing in
on that moment,
the one all women
are told to wait for

and we are down
to the choosing
between the kind of death
that means we reincarnate
and the kind of death
that means we get stuck
in purgatory moaning
over our old selves

and I tell you,
we are perfectly capable
of choosing all kinds of deaths
but

no one’s going to
walk that far down
the brimstone just to
pull out your remains

Day Seventeen

Title: we pray for the snow, for it to stop or keep falling

Just read and look. These, hopefully, need no explanation.

***

Re: Virginia Tech

We breathe in gray
this morning, this nation
awash with grief or
shock or knowing nods.
No one understands
the cold or the snow
that is still falling.
Mid-April isn’t safe
these days, the experts
argue over why.

Thirty-three dead,
I’m bundled up tight.
Tulips full of snow.

We rush to explain,
we've seen this before.
The snow is still falling.

Thirty-three,
I’m counting on my fingers.

We pray for the bodies
being covered with white,
we pray for the snow,
for it to stop or to keep falling.

Day Sixteen

Title: the pull of you is deep, stronger than the tides

It's been a few days since I posted. Between camera issues and just some general frustration with art, with life, with the cosmos, things haven't made it to the blog.

But, here I am.

This piece was a sore spot for a few days. It's gone through about three incarnations. The first was too simple. The second was too flat, not enough contrast. That was all in one day. When the thought crossed my mind to burn the piece, I knew it was time to leave it alone for awhile. I did, and when I came back, I still didn't like it but I was able to see a new direction, some small fixes, that might rescue the piece from total suckyness.

So it is what it is. Not my favorite. Which is a bit unfortunate, since I like the poem it goes with so much.

I suppose everything can't be a smashing success.

Lesson learned.

The poem comes from the series I wrote while in Costa Rica last year. We had the good fortune of being able to see giant Leatherback sea turtles nesting on a beach in the middle of the night, and I was taken by the way these turtles return, year after year, to the same beach they were born on to lay their eggs. Scientists can only speculate how the turtles are able to find the exact beach; they think it might have to do with the earth's magnets, or with the way the stars sit over that particular beach, or with the taste of the beach's minerals in the sand. In any case, it's amazing stuff.

Thinking about the turtles, I wondered if that kind of return might somehow apply to humans as well.

***

Return

In the dark, by the stars
I navigate my way back to you.

I have seen a hundred oceans,
all blue and full of things
I had no names for.

But you have been calling,
sad like a gray whale’s song.

Tonight, I remember how
the Southern Cross sits
just above your horizon
and slightly to the left.

The pull of you is deep,
stronger than the tides.

Day Fifteen

Title: gave my sadness to the river

I used to work in a building that was right on the Allegheny River. I would park each morning in a parking lot down the block from where I worked and walk the river path to the building. I loved seeing the river each day. I learned that I could tell what kind of day it would be by how the river was running. Some days it would be smooth and glassy. That day would be easy, flowing. Some days it would be rough and choppy, running too fast or too high. Those would be the tougher days to get through.

There was one morning, shortly after I'd moved to Pittsburgh, when I went into work early just so I could sit by the river a little extra. The night before had been a sad night, one of grief and trying to let go of things I had no business holding on to. The river, that morning, offered me a place to put my grief.

In that moment, this poem was born.

***

6 a.m., North Shore

gave my sadness
to the river this morning

before all the traffic began
before all the people went
walking with their dogs
before the sun was
high enough to be bright,

sat at the edge
of something bigger than
this sorrow and watched
the way the water carried
tiny sticks and tree trunks, too,
somewhere,
maybe away
from where they were rooted

before the city began
on its hushed trajectory,
opened my hands
and poured what I had
into the passing current

poured out
blood red heart stuff -
bitter endings
a freshly dead wish

poured the most
beautifully bruised
shade of grief
my small hands could hold

poured every last bit
into the big, slow waters
and begged the river,
the color of decayed leaves
and damp forest floor,
to carry these things, too,
somewhere
maybe away
from where I am rooted.

Day Fourteen

Title: because no matter how thin the river gets

In that same Latin American Literature class I blogged about on Day Three, we read one of the most beautiful short stories I've come across. The Third Bank of the River, by João Guimarães Rosa. Seriously. I've read a lot of short stories. This one blows the others away. Because you're going to go out, find an anthology, and read the story, I'm not going to give too much away. What you need to know is that there is a father and a son. Father rows out on the river one day and doesn't return. But, he doesn't disappear, either. He just stays out on the river for years and years and years, while son stands on the riverbank, calling to him.

For this poem, I took on the voice of the son.

I'm sad to say this poem got cut from my thesis (*sniff, sniff*). It's one of my favorites, but it didn't fit thematically with the collection. I've had to cut some of my best poems for that very reason. Damn themes. Someday, they'll see the light of day again...

***

Elegy

because your row boat is singular
because I am your son
because your hand on my head is a blessing
because you row and row and row
because your hand on my head is goodbye
because I am waving to you as you
float farther, farther into the river

because you have not come back
because you have not gone far
because the rains will come soon
and the river will flood
because your old, brown hat
because I have only sad things to say

because you are not a ghost
because sometimes I see you
as a speck on the river’s longitude
because I worry you will drown out there
because it has been years

because you must need new oars by now
because no one worries for you anymore
because you are old
because you are still rowing

because this year there is drought
because no matter how thin the river gets
you will always be buoyed to another shore

because I will always be standing here
calling for you

because I am the third bank of this river

Day Thirteen

Title: the possible side effect of desire

This may be one of my favorite pieces yet. I started this one at home, of all places. Jim has decided that he is now a painter, too (he says poetry was so last year), and he cleared the Cadillac out of the garage and made himself a nice little painting studio. Since then, he's always asking me to come hang out with him while he paints. My standard response is - hang out and do what? Just hang out, he says.

But I'm not very good at just hanging out, and I usually wander off into some other part of the house where my hands don't sit idle. This makes Jim sad, I realized after we'd had that same conversation several days in a row.

Well last week, he asked me to come hang out with him while he painted. This time I said yes, thinking I'd just sit and keep him company.

So I sat.

Thumb twiddle. Legs crossed, re-cross. Twiddle. Twiddle.

No, I'm not so good at sitting still.

Eventually, I grabbed a canvas and started painting with him. He's been into using tempera paint, so it was fun to experiment with the new media. It's been a long, long while since I used tempera. Much thinner and more easily blend-able than the acrylics I've been working with.

We also had a broken mirror lying around the garage because I seem to have a thing recently for breaking everything glass in our house. So I picked up some shards and started gluing them onto the canvas.

Then this morning, I finally took the canvas into the studio and found a poem line to fit the piece. It was a little tricky. The piece itself has a lot of violence in it, and I wanted to find a line that also had that violence but also had some other dimension.

The line that I settled on comes from To Make a Woman Come, a poem that I had published this spring in Hayden's Ferry Review (woo hoo!). In it, I wanted to explore those moments of sex where our bodies seem to want to be pulled apart. Where pain is a pleasurable sensation. Where something in us is asking to be split completely open.

***

To Make a Woman Come

Dislocate the legs from the hips
and push back gently but firmly.

Delicately remove the fingers, the arms,
one sad joint at a time.
This is the unraveling
of the stomach’s sinewy strands.

Peel away the right breast,
then the left, being careful to
sing or hum as you go.
The smell of discovery
should come fresh and sudden,
like the first cut of an onion.
The stinging that follows
is inevitable, is the
possible side effect of desire.

Press back the head,
the flushed face,
the blue eyes.
Press decisively, with determination,
until the skin glows golden
and the flesh comes softly
off the core of its own accord.

Day Twelve

Title: and I will show you the beauty of drowning

Sometimes, I love the darkness I walk in. Sometimes too much. I am slippery, uneven. I sink, and I love the sinking. The way the surface looks from below. I become transfixed.

Years ago, my brother was on a ship off the coast of Africa when he told me the story of the Cape of Good Hope. It is almost the southernmost tip of Africa, the place where the Indian and the Atlantic Oceans meet. The current there are wild. Wild in a way that breaks boats. He said the troughs between waves become unusually wide so that when boats sail through, their hulls often split because long lengths of the boat go unsupported with the wide troughs.

I thought about that Cape and about my own seas. About the graveyard of ships below my surface.

I wanted to look poetically at that capacity that I have, especially in relationships, to sink ships, and to marvel at the view from the bottom of the sea.

***

for the light of the surface

tell me you won’t mind
carrying this weight with me
a boat full of sand
carrying the weight of me

the ocean has its own density
and I have mine
and some boats never make it
around the Cape of Good Hope

they will not float where the currents
of the Indian and the Atlantic oceans meet
it has to do with wave lengths
and boat lengths
troughs and peaks

and boats are heavy things
even without sand in them

tell me you won’t mind
the fickle currents
or a ship-wrecked kind of sinking
from time to time

and I will show you
the beauty of drowning
and rising again for the
light of the surface
and not for the air

Day Eleven

Title: if only your hands did not resemble wings

Was playing with taping off sections of canvas and came up with this. The verdict is still out. Comments?

The poem is a strange one. It comes from some experimentation last semester after reading the likes of Dean Young and Maxine Kumin. We were working on the love poem in its platonic form - love poems for friends, animals, places. If you think writing a non-love love poem sounds easy, try it.

Well, at the start of class one day around this time of writing the non-love love poems, a moth flew into the classroom and our professor mistook it for a bird and started freaking out. Picture a tall, boyish woman in her thirties, tough, stringy, fierce. Doesn't take anything lying down. Now picture her freaking out over a small pair of wings. No one understood. Finally, she explained that she has fear of birds and that the previous semester, a bird had flown into the classroom and gotten stuck fluttering around the light fixtures. To keep herself from completely losing it, she said, she promptly moved everyone into another room.

What I remember, that day the moth flew into our class, was her saying: you just wait to see what happens to me when the bird flies in.

And I wondered - so, what does happen?

***

Greatest Fear

And what happens when the bird flies in?
I would like to imagine you will
turn a new shade of flustered, more
awkward and lovely, all girl, all
fluttering over a small winged thing.

I get that it’s not just a bird.
I get that the universal symbol for fear
is a sparrow.
I get your defiance.

If only your hands did not resemble
wings. Your heart, that feathered vessel
shaped for flight. If only.

Day Ten

Title: in an effort to love you more, I remove my skin

This line comes from one of my favorite poems, written for one of my dearest friends. She was going through a gut-wrenching kind of heartbreak with someone she loved, an ending that just wouldn't heal over. It's been awhile since I've been in that kind of space, but being with her as she went through it brought me back to those dark places of my own that I know by heart. Places that bleed you out, run your blood the wrong ways.

**

The painting took me a bit by surprise. I had set out to make really bold, white, plain text to contrast with the mish mash of handwriting in the background. But, I used a water soluble pen for the handwritten stuff, and when I laid the white paint on top of it, the black started bleeding through. I started freaking out and going back over the letters, adding more white paint to cover up the black. It didn't do much good.

Then I stopped and thought about the poem this line is from.

And I got it.

***

Bruises
- for B.C.

1.
And what of the soft tissue?
The memory of your hands
lies lodged there like
a stone or
a star, a black density
invisible now except for the disappearance
of all things familiar and good.


2.
In an effort to love you more,
I remove my skin.
Veins, blue and tender, appear
like grief or like
letters never sent
and I know this will never heal,
the capillaries will never mend,
the blood will always be pooled there
just like that,
a watercolor stain.


3.
And if the hemoglobin
forgets how to turn?
Yes, I suppose you are
already too far
from the bed that
still smells like you,
too far to return,
too far to stop the bruises
from bleeding out.

Day Nine

Title: i am sure of the lie

Ah, the poem bowl picks At Last, Ursula Buendia Weeps for Her Husband again.

Actually, I chose this one. My process has changed a bit from how I started. I began with doing one painting at a time - doing the background, waiting for it to dry, then laying down the text and other bits and bobs. Well, turns out I get a little antsy waiting for paint to dry. So I started doing more backgrounds at a time.

I still start by drawing a line out of the magic poem bowl and doing the first canvas in direct response to the line. But then I take the colors that are left on my palette, and I keep painting until I don't feel like painting no mo'. Lately, I've ended up with 5 or 6 backgrounds in one sitting. The first one already has its poem line, but the others, I have to find lines that will fit the painting. It ends up working well both ways.

It seems the stranger (and often better) juxtapositions of art and text come when I have to choose the poem line after the painting has been done. Perhaps because I've had a little distance from the painting and the initial head rush of color?

See Day Four or Day Three for the full text of the poem. I've got it about memorized by now, I think. You should too.

xo
~J

Day Eight

Title: if i keep driving

This piece comes from a poem I wrote about leaving a man I almost married years ago. We'd bought a house together, I had the diamond ring, we were on that track.

Mid-stride, I realized it was all wrong. And I left. Not in a mean way. He was a lovely person, a great friend. Just not the person I needed to be marrying. So, I packed up everything that would fit in my car, left what didn't, and started a cross country drive towards Pittsburgh (well, almost cross country).

The poem, If I keep driving, looks at those very last moments of leaving. Pulling out of the garage. Waving goodbye. Seeing the house in the rearview mirror. Seeing him standing in front of the house in the rearview mirror, waving.

It was the strangest sadness.

***

If I keep driving

our house will grow small
and eventually be gone.

If it suddenly begins to rain,
the distance between you
and your reflection in the
rearview mirror will seem shorter.

If I keep driving,
you will walk back
through the front door
after some time, a long time,
your arms folded over your chest,
and eventually you will be gone, too.

Day Seven

Title: add in here some phrase about solitude

Different direction with this one. The line comes from the poem At Last, Ursula Buendia Weeps for Her Husband. I won't post the poem again because I've posted it twice already (see Day Four - Part Two and Day Three). The magic poem bowl seems to keep spitting out lines from this poem. Who am I to complain?

What I was trying to get at with this line, though, is the fact that Marquez, in 100 Years of Solitude, never actually mentions the word solitude. Or loneliness. Or alone. Or any other word you might associate with solitude. He never spells any of those things out in the book.
The characters just become those things with their lives. It's quite a masterful move, from a writing standpoint. One of my favorites.

The studio

There's nothing like waiting for paint to dry. Really. It's like the quiet time in between dreams. Because my pieces are so layered, I've been spending a lot of time lately waiting for paint to dry. You should try it sometime.

Today, the painting mess I made was exceptionally beautiful, so I thought I'd take some pics and post them for you while I'm waiting.

Actually, I'm just avoiding finishing my thesis introduction. Taking pictures is funner. Yes, funner.

xo,
~Jen

Day Six

Title: don't let me leave

Early last winter, Jim and I took a trip up to the twin cities for a poetry reading he was doing at the Soap Factory. I was in a terrible mood, I don't remember why now, and I just couldn't shake off the intensity of the mood.

Some days are like that. Inexplicably sad. And when I'm having one of those days, I have trouble saying what I need to say. I speak in code, give only very subtle hints that anything is wrong, and I withdraw from the world.

After the mood had passed, I thought I'd sit down and write a little code-breaker, a kind of map, for Jim. Translation is that map (at least part of it).

***

Translation
- for the guy with good intentions

When I say
I’m going for a walk
and it happens to be dark
and the night happens to be cold
and we happen to be in St. Paul
in the shittiest part down by the Soap Factory
what I mean is
don’t let me leave

When I say
do you like my dress
the linen summer one
that settles just so around my hips
the one you asked me to wear
all last July
what I mean is
tell me I am beautiful

When I say
I’m tired
and I cry without cause
and recede like seawater into silence
when I weep for the dead and the undead
when I puddle and twist
and otherwise make a heap
of a body on the floor
what I mean is
pick me up
untangle the knots
put me to bed

When I say
tell me you love me
and then I am silent
what I mean is
tell me –
with your hands on my face
with your breath, with your eyes
as close as you can get
– tell me you love me

Day Five

Title: you will break over this soon

About a year or so year ago, my friend Paul wrote a blog about his mother's failing health. It was one of those rare and beautiful moments of openness when grief trumps loneliness and a hand is reached out.

***

fold & break
-for Paul

your mother in a nursing home
your mother wiped blank, clean
your mother broken

will is
a strange blue flower
folding delicate
folding in on itself
in the end
the will is being drawn

you will break
over this soon,
fold and
break

Day Four - Part Two

Title: 4 years, 11 months, and 2 days of rain is a shipwreck

This line comes from the poem I posted a few days ago, At Last, Ursula Buendia Weeps for Her Husband. I'll post the poem again below, but if you want the story on the poem, go to Day Three.

The line, in particular, comes from the end part of the book. After Ursula's husband dies and her sons have all left or died, the town falls into a long, long period of ruin. It rains for 4 years, 11 months, and 2 days without stopping. Everything in the town (Macondo), even the cars, begins to grow mold.

***

At Last, Ursula Buendia Weeps for Her Husband

1.
Peel back the first layer and
the second, flowering, the third
comes off bloody, the fourth
bone and bruised blood vessels,
no swelling, no tell-tale sign.

They say you have died, but
there you are, under the chestnut tree,
just as I left you, just as
the forever falling rain of
last year, just as my eyes red
and dry from cutting onions for
your supper, just the quiet, the
clay horizon, just the wind,
maybe your ghost, passing through.


2.
Just a moment ago you were
here, we were here, circle of hands.
Four years, eleven months, and two days of rain
is a ship wreck. I question the moment
the sun appears. I am sure of the lie.


3.
The trees weep without magic
when the cold does not come. Come
back, I cannot stand the silence and
more than that the nothingness, the
uselessness, my arms my body folding
at night into the shape of you, gone.
Come touch finger the raw place
I’ve collapsed into, bone over
bone over bruise over skin over night over
quiet.


4.
Add in here some phrase about
solitude - fall comes in one breath,
the leaves can’t even remember
what they’re supposed to do. Change
the mistake I made for some Mums, wait
and wait for the shipwreck to come,
hold out for rescue – sinking feeling.


5.
When the chestnut tree finally dies –
burnt gold, the alchemy of love –
you will return and I will
weep a river to carry us both
home.

Day Four - Part One

Two pieces for today, with very little in common...



Title: the tree we have been turning beneath

This line comes from my poem, Second Burial, which draws on the old burial traditions of the native peoples from Costa Rica. Their practice was to dowse the body in mangrove pulp and juice to quicken the decay process, bury the body once, wait until only the bones were left, dig up the bones and arrange them into a small stack before burying them in the ground a second and last time.

After my travels to Costa Rica and after I'd had a chance to think more on this curious process, it occurred to me that second burials are often what we do with people we love, living or dead. The grief of letting someone go comes in stages.

For me, I wanted to use the metaphor to speak about a particular relationship that I seemed to keep digging up and burying again and again.

***

Second Burial

Under the mangrove tree,
I find a place and bury you.

In a dream, roots wrap
around you, which is us,
which is me, which is you.

And when the juice of the mangrove
and the mash of the pulp
have pulled the soft tissue away,
I will go to the tree
we have been turning beneath,

unearth the remains,
unbury you, which is us,
which is me, which is you,

I will gather the bones we have left,
and tie them tenderly
into the shape of a gift,

give them back to the black soil
and watch as this last offering of us
is again returned to the thousand pieces
from which we came.

Day Three

Title: the uselessness

A few semesters ago, I took a course in Latin American Literature. For the first time, there, I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude and fell in love with the book. One of the central characters is Ursula Buendia, the feminine whirlwind that keeps the family together through death after death after death.

I wanted to write from her perspective and give her the space to say the things it seemed she might have always wanted to say. Mostly, I thought she needed to grieve openly. And so this poem was born (along with a whole series of poems speaking from various characters' perspectives).

***

At Last, Ursula Buendia Weeps for Her Husband

1.
Peel back the first layer and
the second, flowering, the third
comes off bloody, the fourth
bone and bruised blood vessels,
no swelling, no tell-tale sign.

They say you have died, but
there you are, under the chestnut tree,
just as I left you, just as
the forever falling rain of
last year, just as my eyes red
and dry from cutting onions for
your supper, just the quiet, the
clay horizon, just the wind,
maybe your ghost, passing through.


2.
Just a moment ago you were
here, we were here, circle of hands.
Four years, eleven months, and two days of rain
is a ship wreck. I question the moment
the sun appears. I am sure of the lie.


3.
The trees weep without magic
when the cold does not come. Come
back, I cannot stand the silence and
more than that the nothingness, the
uselessness, my arms my body folding
at night into the shape of you, gone.
Come touch finger the raw place
I’ve collapsed into, bone over
bone over bruise over skin over night over
quiet.


4.
Add in here some phrase about
solitude - fall comes in one breath,
the leaves can’t even remember
what they’re supposed to do. Change
the mistake I made for some Mums, wait
and wait for the shipwreck to come,
hold out for rescue – sinking feeling.


5.
When the chestnut tree finally dies –
burnt gold, the alchemy of love –
you will return and I will
weep a river to carry us both
home.

Day Two

Title: I dream about dreaming about you

When I first moved to Pittsburgh, I spent the first three months losing my way. The city is one of the most difficult to navigate. Hills everywhere, one way streets, rivers, bridges. I got used to it eventually, but somehow, the changing of the seasons always seemed to disorient me again. I was never quite able to draw a map of Pittsburgh in my head, so I navigated by certain trees or buildings or sidewalks. Those changed with the season.

At the same time that I was learning Pittsburgh's streets, I was coming to terms with the ending of a long relationship. The two became inextricably linked in my mind.

***

The Penn Avenue Way Home

I am driving Liberty Avenue,
hoping I’ll find Penn.
All I see are row houses
and bad sidewalks,
leaves stuffed in gutters
and crowded cheap storefronts,
sudden potholes,
and an October-gray sky.

A dream that you have
returned to sender everything
I ever gave you.

I find Penn Avenue
but don’t recognize
anything:
this bridge
this hill
this corner of stores
these sleeping black branches.

You should know by now
that if I am dreaming of you like this
I am sorting something out,
untangling one sad root from another.

I get to Negley Boulevard
and finally see
the Babyland store
that I’ve seen before,
then the Presbyterian cathedral
with the homeless people
out front and the rainbow flag on the corner.
I have been here before.

I dream about
dreaming about you.

It’s at the light on Shady Avenue
in front of the Giant Eagle,
the one I shop at on Sundays,
that I remember
the rest of the way home.

Day One

Title: Radiation is a week without sleep

This piece comes from a poem about an old friend of mine whose father passed when we were in junior high.

***

Re: Fallout/1995

I.
The memory begins
with the death
of your dad.

It was Nevada’s
nuclear science
that started the tumor,
old men living so deep
in the desert that
radiation chooses skin
instead of sand or rock.

This is cancer.
It is unavoidable.
You will be compensated.
It will not be enough.

II.
Even at the funeral you didn’t cry.
I was suspicious.

I’m sorry.

III.
The beauty of speed
is that I never knew
until your bones
showed through
and you stopped showing
up for school.

Your mother worked skeleton shifts
in the Emergency Room.
Even she failed to notice.

IV.
Maybe your father had been dead
a long time.

Maybe your father had always
been dead.

V.
Radiation is a week without sleep.
Scientists are studying you
as we speak, smashing particles
over your widow’s peak.
Your mother gives you an Advil
and goes back to work.

You dye your hair black.

The memory ends here.

So what is this art series anyway?

Welcome to my new blog-a-roo, folks!

I've been a little out of touch lately (sorry about that) with all the traveling and the moving and the new album and the finishing my thesis stuff.

I've started a special project this summer that I think worth sharing. To finish off my time at Chatham, I'm doing an independent study focusing on the integration of my poetry and my art. This project has been a long, long time coming. I've been monkeying around for years with putting words on pottery, canvases, walls, and of course paper. The experimentation has been loads of fun, but it was time to get serious and actually do something with my ideas. So, I hunted down the perfect art professor to work with (the fabulous Ingrid Lilligren), some studio space, and took the summer off from working.

The idea is to create a painting a day.

And here's how it works:
I took a whole bunch of my poems, cut them up, folded them into tiny scraps and threw them into a bowl. Each day, I sit down and randomly pull out a scrap. The line that comes out of the bowl is the foundation of the painting. No throw backs. No starting over.

I'll be posting the paintings daily, along with the poem the line comes from. You're all welcome to comment on any of it - the poetry, the art, whatever strikes you. You can comment on this site (but I think you have to register as a user?), or directly to me by email (jenmcclung@yahoo.com). Let the conversations begin!

Big love,
~Jen