"April," Cornelius Eady
Suddenly, the legs want a different sort of work.
This is because the eyes look out the window
And the sight is filled with hope.
This is because the eyes look out the window
And the street looks a fraction better than the day before.
This is what the eyes tell the legs,
Whose joints become smeared with a fresh sap
Which would bud if attached to a different limb.
The legs want a different sort of work.
This is because the ears hear what they’ve been waiting for,
Which cannot be described in words,
But makes the heart beat faster, as if
One had just found money in the street.
The legs want to put on a show for the entire world.
The legs want to reclaim their gracefulness.
This is because the nose at last finds the right scent
And tugs the protesting body onto the dance floor.
This is because the hands, stretching out in boredom,
Accidentally brush against the skirt of the world.
The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
- Jack Gilbert
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.
Oh, the storytelling.
It gets to be such a thing.
Whether tis nobler to want a living made of watching films
or intead of making a living, making a legend.
Or even instead, just living.
Just breathing in...in night air, being with people, being out and fun and a little bit new.
Or across a quiet, studied river:
Noble, true, epic.
Does a film blog do that? Or is it just exercise? An exercise in attention-getting?
Thin film of excuses over everything.
And also, I do secretly love people a lot.
Like a vampire, like a sacrement.
Hmm perhaps better posted here than a random person's linked page.
My first job in Austin was at an industrial bakery. Through one winter I wore and wore out all my summer clothes gathered over years of Texas summers. I arrived first to make the dough, then two more to cut the first batch into loaves. The bakers came in and got those rising then baked while we did rolls and then small batches of rye and pumpernickel. The smell of bread never got old, though it did not make you starving. Someone might bring jam and butter once in a while but mostly you took a bit home and had simple suppers at 4am or french toast at noon.
It was my first night job and my first subculture experince in Austin, lesbians of a couples friend group, a bisexual witch, and a transexual bartender. I didn't work there that long, but it was a neat intro to a new life. I still to this day can tell how much six pounds is because of all the restaurant bread we churned out.
The strongest memories were the moments out of place:
1. walking in the cold while fetching lunch. I was in almost-freezing weather in tank, shorts, and flour-dirtied apron. The bread required summer-like heat and humidity, so I was happy drinking my giant sweet tea and getting out into brisk cold. I was there and back and not yet cooled enough to feel chilly.
2. the lone man of the operation, tall and walking about in size 12 women's pumps he'd gotten in nyc for his other gig bartending at a popular nightclub. He made a pretty woman but him walking with his long hair pulled back and simple sexless white, no swish in his step, breaking them in by wearing them for an hour. He brought a TV sometimes so we could watch Tracey Ulman. Ruby Red shoes and discovering the simpsons
3. my boss telling me that a perfect dough was like a perfect breast. pretty perfect analogy actually
4. having the lights go out during a rainstorm. The other early-in girl and I climbed up above the room built into the big warehouse space and got high. We expected a long night of listening to the rain through the open bay doors. Only the lights came back on. And then the phone mysteriously rang and was a creepy recording of a man offering funeral plots. We did not say a word over a mumble until all the bread was baked and our buzz gone, working alongside the bakers like little stoned ghosts.
I should go to bed, but I do so miss writing.
I'm thinking about a film blog. The thought is in a pot at the back of my mind, stewing.
We had a successful small party last night. I had to explain to my friend's girlfriend that this was our idea of small, because the house was still quite filled. But not so full you couldn't move around, not filled with people who knew none of the residents, bored and just looking for the booze.
All that said, it still was the same story for me. I busted ass afternoon into evening. I finally got done with doing just in time for my door shift.
Which explains why I never sit down and am always outside. Once I'm outside, I can just be standing there, talking to whoever is around. I lose the anxiety that comes with having people all around me. When the party is not huge, it's not at a panic "must get out" level, but still, combined with rushing around to get things done, I'll suddenly notice that my heart rate is rabbiting and that I'm uncomfortable.
And so I drink. And then drink. And also, drink. Not excessive per se, but the drinking is to get through the nerves and takes me past the point where I can focus on things. The anxiety is still there, so I avoid the inside. The drunkenness is there, so I seem flightly and forgetful.
Which is how I get to the end of a fabulous party having talked to almost none of my friends, the people I specifically invited because they make me feel better, more real, happier, calmer. I may have to consider changing how I socialize.
Last night, as the very successful party wound down all on its own (quite amazing) around 3am, the number of people met an optimal smaller number just as my drunkenness got to that happy place of changed-over but not disconnected. I had just noticed something good going on in my words, confirmed by a girl looked over at me, head cocked and noticing me intensely, surprised by sudden eloquence. I spoke a few more times just to confirm that I just jumped over to that rarely seen self, the megaphone artist, speaking to entertain. Extemporaneous, well-executed.
I'd like to find time with that me who is so comfortable speaking. She needs a special array of things: lowered inhibition, kind strangers, a sense of safety, a slight vacuum, and a reason to speak.
There are other things I'd like to find, optimal states.
I've fallen into a habit of being motivated to avoid the bad. Nothing higher, no passion, just striving for even keel.
The question I've been asking myself, what is there that would make me happy?
Not just free of pain or discomfort, but actually onto a different track towards fulfilled.
It's an interesting question to ponder, especially after a successful party.
I want more and better, even than I've already got.
I miss the days when what to say found me,
when there was a spilling out of story and our mutual experiment felt important.
Now I've found the time.
But without the busy dizzying pace, what is there to say?
Who listens here in the quiet?
My plan was to add something, something external, some daily doing to fill up senses.
I had plans for this, but am grounded, immobilized.
I had been talking about February and how it is my darkest month.
Always with the stories that I make come true.
It's so hot I am in underwear with the fan on, but because I believed my story so well, I am as alone as dead of winter, with just words and no pretty things to puff them up.
Ah, but the key to the dark month, even when externally the days are bright and summery, is to just do. Give up the questions, both why and how.
Just do. Then also: don't.
Every day, do something.
And every night, choose to stop and let go, stop and let be, stop and sleep.
Okay, first: I realize how blessed a life I have.
If that were not underscored with every sunset, it is spelled out every Friday night.
But please, no, no, no more attempts at dates.
So awkwardly sitting with the ball in my court, tempted ever to walk away from the thud of nothing.
Because it isn't really my game to play. But I think it should be, so I try.
And up, batted over, lightly lofted, here: an easy one.
Thud. Back to me, my question answered without flourish and back again, here in my court.
I realize that I am supposed to be the pretty one, but please understand that I am spoiled.
I expect any human of my interest to have flourish and flesh, fully realized.
I expect gumption and make it go.
And, sad for you, date-like would-be wannabe, I have people.
People who are unaffiliated in affection.
But still, I feel bad that I aligned myself with the loosely defined.
That I felt such quick relief at being with a friend who talks easily for hours.
Because I do want that tiny tango, that careful mis-step of oh-so-tangled.
I do.
But this world of do's and don'ts is much easier to navigate with people who understand my slow smirking smiles that mean always all the time only maybe.
This morning begins almost purely, coffee
enveloped in cream, those clouds that bloom up
like madness in a cup, and I take the first swallow
before the color changes, taste the bitterness
and the faint sweet behind it, steam
rubbing my nose, an animal nuzzle,
and the sharp, nearly painful heat
at the back of my tongue, the liquid
unraveling down the raw tunnel of my throat.
And I feel my body fully, vessel of desire,
my stomach a pond of want and warmth,
utterly human, divine and awake. And I can hear
each bird's separate song, the chirt and scree,
the sip, sip, sip, the dwindle and uplift yearning,
the soup's on, soup's on, let up, let it go
of each individual voice, and I know I am here,
in this widening light, as we all are, with them,
even the most damaged among us or lonely
or nearly dead, and that for each of us there is
some small sound like an unseen bird or
a red bike grinding along the gravel path
that could wake us, and take us home.
This morning I think I'm prepared for
the final diminishment, with something
like a waking, ready awe. My complaints
folded and put away in a drawer
like needlework, unfinished, intricate
woven roads that go nowhere or disappear
in the distance, rough wanderings
that have brought me here, to this
sleep-repaired morning, these singing trees
and into my own listening body.
It's been strange lately, the world. I was glad someone posted about the strange ways of the current moon because I was beginning to wonder.
So much tension over things that are small or even good.
Not that it surprises me, as I come from emotions overblown.
But I have to wonder why I am so placid.
A strange kind of gratitude: I think it's because I broke myself a few different ways.
And just like my heart learned: relax that first year in the desert,
it also unlearned all that in the rock starring of life that resulted.
I had been thinking of that in terms of loss, mostly.
But watching this churning go on in people, so much seeming unnecessary,
I find myself grateful for the quietness that I'm feeling a yearning to be in and of.
Some of this may be overwhelm apathy, an aversion to stress where I simply cannot care.
But then I find myself making a braking or tamping gesture to someone,
or sometimes not making it because wow, how that would condescend, just shut up and listen.
I had a run-in with a homeless man stopping by my work to pick up my forgotten phone.
He was lifting his head from a sleeping bag as I came around the corner and I let out a yelp.
I had been considering deciding to let go of this fear that has settled on me after the murder near my house on New Years. Perhaps it worked a little; I recovered quickly and reacted calmly after that. And had the recognition that his alarm was the norm. He probably gets at most a few hours between security visits. Still, my energy was up because of the surprise.
But here I am finding calm again, seeing a few friends posting things that make me smile and reading a lovely poem that speaks like it was just for me. That, and I've actually been wanting to come here and write about the world through these eyes and the goings-on of the unseen sky.
I pondered resolutions briefly and spoke several times of my successful "cookies are not a meal" resolution from several years ago. Yesterday, because I ate a cookie while making coffee. Life at the Palace continues to afford me silly moments of being known.
As does my writing group. Got zombied up for the Zombie Prom and ended 2011 wearing a red bridesmaids dress that I'd stomped on in the remains of a fire. There was a much-despised girl at the party. I had steeled myself, thinking it would ruin my night. I don't usually think of myself as a happy person, but I would catch sight of her pinched, unhappy face and realize that I was far distant from that, smiling, laughing, dancing. I finally spoke to her and her boyfriend, a friendly invitation to play DJ. I am happy for these friends and grateful for my life.
I considered making a resolution to get more sleep. I got braces in mid-December and it seems to make me need sleep more. Certainly the little scratches inside my mouth are better after sleep. However, if that is my intention, I am failing utterly. Instead of going home, I went to a small party where I knew I would find people who would still be up. I walked in at 3am in my zombie formal and the wave of happiness that washed over me was palpable. I dozed for a bit, I suppose, because noon came really soon after sunrise.
And here I am, showered but not napping like I should.
I will try to sleep enough most of the time. I can feel healing happen very distinctly and it feels good. I like to feel good.
But perhaps an intention to get more Xs and Os along with Zs.
It might be just as hard to keep, as there's a knife's edge potential to that feeling good.
But if I resolve to do more kissing and cuddling, I am already doing well at it.
So, yes, I may just keep it going.
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