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.

November 4th, 2014

The beautiful older woman at the coffee shop compliments me on my purse, which is really more
of a saddlebag. She had one like it in 1969. I wonder how many memories she is fitting into it now
as she stares fondly at the worn leather in the slants of morning light. Later, Genna and I walk to vote,
only I haven't registered so I sit impotently against the cold white-painted cinderblock wall of the church cellar. I think about the steadiness of this church on South Whitney, the faithfulness of it,
how like an open hand it is. How consistently it gives itself to the first of the month food stamps
and voting days, the colored linoleum tiles always bearing all that weight. Once, on a day when
I was sad, I walked home from Tisane in the late afternoon through the back ally that comes out
across from the church. The sun was setting through the window and the bare tree in front of the church was perfectly framed in the textured stained-glass glow. It was either early spring or late fall - some inbetween time I love and feel undone by. Tonight Davia and I walked 7 miles through West Hartford, first the gardens, then the neighborhoods, then the town center; it is like walking through the evolution of culture and society. I say "I'm sorry" in many different ways. I think she hears them all. How quickly silence builds fences! How thoroughly laughter knocks them down!

November 2nd, 2014

The house is so cold I want to burn it down and sit in the
center watching the flame lick through each layer of construction.
Instead I build a fire, close the blinds, boil water, and open the
cellar door because the basement is 10 degrees warmer. I am
wearing three sweatshirts and two pairs of pants. I am wearing
fingerless gloves. I want to smoke cigarettes with you, wearing
fingerless gloves I said once to somebody and I can't imagine,
though I remember, saying it. I used to be frightened of the cold.
Now it is my enemy and I am not afraid to fight. I was made for
this: this survival, this resilience. You win I said to him But you 
never will again although we both knew there would not be another
time. The wood is not seasoned well and it hisses as the heat
enters it; white smoke fills the fireplace. Does it have to be a 
competition? He says. It isn't I say. It's war. Everything is.

November 1st, 2014

You wanted to know how long I would be here
you asked as if the tree wasn’t shedding bark already
as if the dandelions had yet to throw their seed
you asked as if there was time, the golden rod and
sun collecting in the bowl of my belly. Where have you
gone? It’s not that I was waiting exactly, but I wasn’t
moving, still like a deer in the bushes who suspects
someone waits to catch her with his eye. Someone,
on whom I should not be eavesdropping, says Science 
says you could fit all of the planets between the earth
and the moon. I visualize it but even the image is
nothing more than a pretty line for a poem. My huge
book of postmodern poetry sits waterlogged on the
table. It is open but unread. The tea grows cold.

October 31st, 2014

The thing that's really rather remarkable is that I didn't feel the regret
I thought I would when I woke. A steady hum of disappointment
buzzed below my breathing and I felt only sadness for both of us,
all of us, who are less than we are. I scraped the first frost from my
windshield with the edge of a box of chalk - the classroom at the
college has only chalkboards - and watched a car pull up in front
of Josh's house. The driver got out and walked away. My throat burned
in the deep cold and as soon as I could I huddled in the warming air
of my car. I drove to starbucks and got two coffees, one hot and one cold,
because I still don't know what I want in life, and this is a decadence
I can afford. I drive the long way to school, through Elizabeth garden
and the manicured but wild neighborhoods of the west end. The grates
in the road release steam which looks like ghosts of men I've lost. They
appear at first to incline towards my car, but lean away when I draw near.

October 30th, 2014

I have been sick since Saturday, but it's only yesterday and today that I
would admit to it. By Tuesday afternoon my fever spiked and I couldn't
drive and when I looked at faces I swear I saw through skin to bone as
if it were all made of glass and I felt fear and giddiness, a pool of self
and also an unconquorable stone. So, Thursday I sat by the fire burning
paper bags and grading exams because I couldn't do anything else and
occasionally the door would bang and I would twirl around, still slightly
feverish and paranoid. In the afternoon, when the sun dips and hovers but
somehow, this time of year, feels no nearer than noon, Brett came home
to smoke cloves on the porch. My room is clean. My exams are graded.
I have been productive in spite of the virus raging through my body.
I blow into the fire and it blows back at me, a low aching moan. I'll leave 
you to your smoldering logs, Sean says after dropping off native honey
for me and a typewriter for Brett. I wait for things I don't even believe exist.

October 25th, 2014

It is the kind of gray that gnaws at your bones by the time I get home from hiking. The hike, however, was beautiful. There was a golden forest, a bamboo field, many still moments in which I peered through trees looking for a mythical creature. There was even a spear, perfectly formed, which still sits in the back of my car. I watched a hawk circle so far above me that sometimes I was no longer sure it existed. The air was warm and the rock we lay against was cool, so he gingerly, with the sureness of a child, offered me his arms for warmth. It felt not unlike hugging a straw man, but I didn't mind very much as there was nothing to it anyway. When we pulled up to the house the three of them watched and did not wave hello and the gray came then. We sat in a jarring silence, occasionally making small talk like pebbles breaking water until the mushroom lady walked by. I have never she said seen such a crop mushrooms. Strange year. The mushrooms, they are all out of order and schedule because the weather has been so wild. She doesn't say a word directly to me unless I ask questions. She doesn't say anything about the stories she has heard that were weaved from the thin bits of evidence I've left lying around. She makes no comment about the men. The porch splinters. There are ever so many canaries in the coal mine.