December 31st, 2014

It really is glory to glory. I am abandoned to joy. In this year I have learned how small
miracles come at every moment, from the nuances of reconciliation to the nuances
of a love that is not a lover's love but is scintillating all the same, to toast falling on the
floor butter side up. I have watched beauty carve itself into my face and weave itself
into my hair, though this is a different beauty than I have met before. I have learned that
loss has two chapters: the absence of thing, an immediate shock, and then the slow receding
of memory from the thing. Eventually the edges of the space left by both wear down until
they form only a doorway, smooth and sanded, safe to walk through or lean against,
depending on the need of the moment. I have also learned that things take back their names.
Lies do not prevail when we are walking through losses and reveling in the miracle. I used
to say "love" and mean "destruction of ego". Now when my mouth forms the word what I
am really saying is "mystery". And something else: how easily magic is coaxed from the
corner when we are not afraid to open our hand! No seduction is sweeter than that between

this Magic and I - how it bids me follow further into my own chambers...  

December 30th, 2014

What is true of sunrise in winter over the ocean is that the sky is light long
before the sun is born.  As I watch it crowning slowly, and then quickly rising
between two clouds, it is no longer light that is emitted, but fire, and somehow,
in those moments, everything seems darker because the sun itself has appeared
and is so light  the sky, which seemed fully illuminated before, is the color
of a glass of milk into which pieces of ice have melted. Yesterday I sat for a long
time and collected many pieces of beauty and hung them around the living room
so when the low winter sun shone in they would become illuminated. The dust
in mid afternoon light when I was 8, the choreography of a fly, a bird, a plane, all
ticking in time to Sigur Ros in a golden field behind a tobacco barn when I was 20,
the warm summer rain falling into a gray ocean at low tide, all things silver, when
I was 23, and then yesterday, the way it seemed as if the sun itself made ripples
in the sea, every angled wave a precious metal, shimmer before me like standards. 
These are the moments that represent a life. Keep this poem if I leave first.

December 29th, 2014

I want to address this to you Steve, though you have long forgotten our talks and the way they felt both like the velveteen rabbit and a scarlet fever. Never mind, I am happy to have those conversations as references on this map. Over there, by Mt Revelation, on which you said "I don't know who has hurt you to such a degree that you no longer take yourself seriously, but you must stop treating your body and heart casually, and stop allowing men to bruise you" is where I last wore this dress that I am about to burn. It is tight and sheer and it has every vital vein of my body stitched onto it in silver, I guess so the vipers would know where to strike. I have always been very kind to my enemies. Steve, it will make the most glorious snapping sound when it burns, like pine sap crackling or birch bark curling back in flame. I will send you the ashes if you like in a little box. You see, your voice was a hand when I needed one, and a sword knighting me when I needed that. How easily I brandish my own sword now! If I thought it wouldn't terrify your small children or whatever woman you are in love with at the moment, I would send you, in hat boxes, the heads of men who wished to bruise me. And right now, right now, I am sitting by the Lake of Solace and looking into quiet waters which appear gray and then purple and then, suddenly, to spark with the cool fire of a waxing moon.

December 15th, 2014


They are bending over their exams and I should be grading their last papers
so they can fold that "feedback" into the rest of the feedback from me that
I'm sure is very insufficient but instead I am trying to keep my eyelids from
falling and dreaming about the title of a book I might someday write. And,
then, in the middle of it, a text. This text results in a necessary, but unpleasant
conversation. I feel my cheeks grow hot and wonder if the students notice. They
write on, occasionally pausing and resting their chins on their hands. They are
writing about their progress with writing, a meta-analysis, and this is hard and I
watch them strain and I wish I could guide them even now. What they don't know
is that this exam really is less of an assessment of their own knowledge and more
an assessment of my teaching. I have grown miles from this kind of exam. The
texts keep buzzing in. This conversation was dead before it started, but it continues
on, a stubborn ghost. It lasts much longer than their exams, and by the end I am
laughing the nervous laughter of one who narrowly avoided a car wreck.

November 20th, 2014


He told you last night how he bought a rose but how it had died very quickly and how he had removed slowly the dead petals until all that remained was the protected center. The story had touched you, the gentleness of finger, the consideration, but the single white rose, stripped and small, tucked under your windshield wiper and gleaming in the 5:45 am streetlight, was halting and lovely. It made your cold tired face break into a smile, the weariness and gathering age, gently, but immediately, stripped. The man at the Indian restaurant seems very disapproving that I ask for a table for one. I am drunk off just this one glass of wine. And how, I wonder, is this possible oh and now the table next to me is talking about Versace. I feel very cold near them. "I would enjoy it more if it were 3500" he said. He bought the coat, it turns out, at Gods urging. "Does Marriella want to get married?""well, you see, yes she would, but", her father interposes, "it is better to not be married than married to the wrong person". And this is perhaps what I have come to hear. I am now the kind of professional woman who takes herself to dinner to think, and this thrills me to the ridges of my shins, to the tips of my shoulder blades. As I prepare to walk into the sharp night I feel all my points as coordinates lining up with the stars; there is a map at work and I follow its blossoming.

November 18th, 2014

There are some children that aren't really children at all, they are pillars of flame that burn everything they touch and there are some children who are just pillars of ash and they fall apart when you touch them said Sherman Alexie through a character in Smoke Signals and I am shaking with sobs in a down vest that must have been my fathers. It is too big on the shoulders and too tight on the chest and as my body trembles the huge shoulders rise and meet the edge of hair and graze my jawline so the sobbing becomes corrugated sound, like a salt shaker, like tiny pieces of ice falling at different pitches. I dream of South Dakota and skies like blankets. I dream of the wholeness of pitted city streets. This is the second day in a row I have called out. I am not well. The mind, which is eternal wants what is eternal. The hand, which is ephemeral, wants work it can finish. These two fates are ours as humans; we cannot choose one over the other. For the first time in weeks I feel happiness while scrubbing the shower walls of dead skin I've shed, but if I did only this my mind would ache like an old tooth. How everything here in the divided room of this world endeavors to disconnect us from ourselves and still we are expected to illumine! What is a light bulb without the socket!? I do not expect to survive this life, but I do expect what life I live to be alive.

November 10th, 2014

For three whole periods you speak in an accent because you find that it both engages
the students -- who want only to pretend a little longer, to squeeze the last bits
of childhood from their senior year -- and allows you to be better, sharper, funnier
and firmer because there is protection in personae. From behind the accent you do
not blush when you correct them. This cannot last forever, this strange ritual of the
false, but for now you settle into it. You have pretended at many things - pretended
to like the fishing pole, the tool box, the poem, tokens of clumsy love. What you want
is the elegance of a semicolon. You want transition words to slip their long fingers
over your body, between your ribs, along your thigh. You want a smoothing, a sleeking.
You tremble at this desire. You want metaphors to nuzzle your breast and similes to catch
in your throat. You want to be overcome by allusion and style and the subtleties of voice.  
If my brother was an instrument writes a student he would be a loud drum. That's good you
say and she blooms. The room shimmers and moves, the chairs in a sort of dance, the desks
resisting their invitation. You are busy tucking your real self away - mostly your heart.


November 6th, 2014

Full mooned face but not just yet it's tomorrow and you haven't taken the muscle
relaxers but you feel all bent up like a wire hanger that's been through a violent
transcontinental move. You will take them though, in hopes of unlocking secrets
that curl in the center of your sinews and crawl inching through your bones. They
will stuff you up with hot air like a balloon, only you will still end up being the
one the clowns make animals out of, it will still be easy for you to bend in whatever
way is required. In the morning you pull your dripping body off the bed and wring
yourself out - who turned you into a sponge while  you slept? - and you will step
carefully past the puddle and into the shadows of winter dawn. Whatever you find
there will not please you like the muscle relaxers, but it also will not saturate your
body with the loud and pulsing emptiness of drugs. It is more of a filling, an almost
gluttony of every day, the excessses of ugly and beauty. And when you are done with
that day there will be another, and another, each with its own particular high, long
after you have used up the last of the prescription.