MWF 8:00 - 8:50

Ah, the new semester is upon us.
Feel the fresh grass, soon to be tipped with frost,
the murmurs and shuffles, busy fingers
on minute keypads. Baseball hats and ponytails
remind us eight a.m. is too early to shower.

If books' pages still came uncut
many would remain so, their words dumb,
their covers staring back at their owners,
the two like teenagers being introduced
as distant cousins at a funeral.

An old theme.

March has caught me
sleeping, and I give a backward
sheepish glance
to a forgotten friend.

The buds peek green through brown shrouds,
morning frost still catching the less cautious.
These are days of renewal, yes,
but also moving on.

Shortening of Days

Autumn comes crisp,
a silver edge on the grass,
dappled with the uncollected
offerings of trees, their branches
growing barer by the day.

And against the cold stone stacked
to parcel this from that,
leaves gathered in corners
tremble with every chilled breath
that mocks their makeshift shelters
and troubles their thinning husks.

Those that were young and green,
that danced with each insistent gust,
that reveled in the wind’s warm rush
across their bright clean faces,
now huddle fragile,
twisted and brittle
against the dying earth.

Once again, the past keeps knock knock knocking at my door...

Let me tell you a story about my technical past. In college, I used the Macintosh computer labs, because the College of Education worked with Macs. In 1991, I received my first computer. It was a Mac Classic. Sometime around 1995 I bought a Mac PowerPC, and that was my computer until sometime around 2003, when I purchased a PC for the first time in my life.

What that means for me and you is that pretty much all of my graduate work was done on the Macintosh and remains on floppy disk. In fact, everything I did on computer was on Macintosh floppy disks, and has been nearly completely inaccessible for the past five or so years. I'm digging through those disks right now with the help of a program call MacOpener, trying to see if there's anything in my scholarly records salvageable and publishable with a little dusting off...

In the meantime I'm also finding that I've got quite a bit of poetry that I haven't seen in long time. So here's a little gem from the archive, circa 1995, from a period in which I must have been trying to write sonnets.

Love and its attendants

Though you make tears flow in torrents
and fill my nights in dread dreams,
I pull myself to your side: quiet moments
with palms pressed or the unspoken need
of lips upon lips as the memory recedes
like a tide at its ebb. In wave's wake
the gulls walk stilted and pick tender meat
from stranded shells, the lonesome fate
of those who would leave the hidden deep
for a sunlit world, like those who expose
their soft bellies in the name of a dream.
I've seen vulture-cleaned bones in the glow
of moonlight, when the clouds split above,
and despite the terror, I will speak of love.

We have overlaps and sutures and it all blends together.

What did Dante write? Something about halfway along the journey on the road of life or something like that. Perhaps the Divine Comedy was an outburst of well-directed mid-life crisis. Where is our mid-life anyway? I suppose you could take average life span, but other than that, we aren't really too sure of the hour of our deaths, and therefore none too sure of the midpoints of our lives.

I'd like to think I haven't reached the midpoint yet, and to tell you the truth I'm not so sure the midpoint of one's journey is terribly meaningful, because we've had so many lives, first as children, then as adults, then as parents, perhaps one day as grandparents. The strands interweave to form continuities that existed before you were born and will continue to exist once you are dead, and not just as wikipedia entries or dormant myspace accounts. Sometimes these continuities crystalize and ossify into dogma, like nationalism or "tradition," and we forget the living changes to glorify a stagnant never-was.

Maybe I'm feeling this way because I'm re-reading Sharon Olds' The Wellspring, a tremendous book of poems that hit me much harder in 2000 after our son was born than it did in 1996 when I bought it.

"Bathing the Newborn"
by Sharon Olds

I love with an almost fearful love
to remember the first baths I gave him–
our second child, our first son–
I laid the little torso along
my left forearm, nape of the neck
in the crook of my elbow, hips nearly as
small as a least tern’s hips
against my wrist, thigh held loosely
in the loop of thumb and forefinger,
the sign that means exactly right. I’d soap him,
the long, violet, cold feet,
the scrotum wrinkled as a waved whelk shell
so new it was flexible yet, the chest,
the hands, the clavicles, the throat, the gummy
furze of the scalp. When I got him too soapy he’d
slide in my grip like an armful of buttered
noodles, but I’d hold him not too tight,
I felt that I was good for him,
I’d tell him about his wonderful body
and the wonderful soap, and he’d look up at me,
one week old, his eyes still wide
and apprehensive. I love that time
when you croon and croon to them, you can see
the calm slowly entering them, you can
sense it in your clasping hand,
the little spine relaxing against
the muscle of your forearm, you feel the fear
leaving their bodies, he lay in the blue
oval plastic baby tub and
looked at me in wonder and began to
move his silky limbs at will in the water.

If my house were to catch fire, there's plenty of fuel.

Happy May Day to all!

I unearthed a whole folder full of horrifically embarrassing song lyrics that I wrote twenty years ago. Before I turned to poetry in my college years, I would write song lyrics obsessively, and I would date everything. Ostensibly, the lyrics were for the band my best friend and I hadn't yet formed, but by the time we'd graduated high school we'd actually recorded a few of them on a little four track recorder. I have no clue where any of that recorded material is, and my musical talents at that time were so primitive that I didn't play any of the instruments or sing on the recording. So my contribution in the studio -- aka my friend's bedroom -- was as lyricist.

Song lyrics are of course meant to be set to music, and they sound far better with a backing beat to take some attention away from the inanity of their content or the obviousness of their rhymes. There are of course exceptions; I think The Decemberists are incredibly inventive in the construction of their lyrics...I am in love with lines like "You come from parents wanton, childhood rough and rotten/I come from wealth and beauty, untouched by work or duty," from Picaresque's "We Both Go Down Together." Still, even their lyrics don't always scan well singled out from the music:

Here on these cliffs of Dover
So high you can't see over
And while your head is spinning
Hold tight, it's just beginning

They aren't bad lyrics -- in fact, they're incredible with the music driving behind them, but standing alone they're kind of naked. The proper music behind something can transform the words from bland quatrains to overwhelming angst (see: Smashing Pumpkins).

Looking over my contributions to the field of song lyrics, I'm getting the feeling that pretty much any teenager who writes a journal/diary/poetry/lyrics can seem in retrospect like a pretty despondent and maladjusted loner. I don't exactly remember it that way, but I do think that teenagers, for better or worse, have a good bit of trouble turning off the immediacy of their emotions. It's everywhere, hence the Nirvana lyric, "Teenage angst has paid off well, now I'm old and gray." Or Bart Simpson's offhand remark, "Making a teenager depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel." So from 1-23-1986, I offer the following:

I've had too many chances
at too many dances
but the chances weren't right
I sat around all night

It's a sad thing to put your faith in the ceremony of the high school dance especially when you can't stand 85% of the music the DJ plays (and you can more or less guess the exact playlist for the entire year beforehand). I was the very definition of a wallflower. However, I do remember looking forward to going, if only because it was one of the few things to do in a small town on a weekend night.

I continued to write lyrics up until the early years of graduate school, at which point I ran out of spare time to sit around and play with words, and I often recorded them in a primitive way and having to sing the lyrics myself, a task I do not enjoy since my voice makes Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Tom Waits sound like the Three Tenors (don't get me wrong: I love Bobby, Neil, and Tom). Which is to say that it remained an obsession and an outlet until replaced by other writings: the dissertation and this exercise I'm currently engaged in called blogging.

Fun with iTunes.

I just ran across a bunch of forgotten CDs and loaded them into iTunes. I'm listening to Depeche Mode's "Master and Servant" right now. What a trip. It's like stepping into a time machine, but the memories are actually kind of disjointed, and interestingly enough, they revolve more around Depeche Mode videos than anything else.

For instance, I'm remembering seeing for the first time the video to "I Feel You," from the Songs of Faith and Devotion album. I was living in Delaware at the time, teaching school and basically alone. To a large extent that album represented a re-visioning of the band, but that's not so much the important part to me. It's that remembering the video for that song brings me back to that moment in my life when I was intensely lonely and the television and my pre-internet computer were my closest companions. I wrote a lot back then, poetry and a good chunk of a novel that I abandoned when I left Delaware to attend graduate school, so I sat in front of my little Mac Classic with the 9 inch screen a good bit of the night, when I wasn't watching every single college basketball game espn broadcast between 1991 and 1993.

Anyway, here's some maudlin poetry from that period (no: I don't throw out anything):

A piece of something

Although you weren't in this town today,
and haven't been since two years to this day,
I have seen bits of you, or maybe pieces of what you do,
stuck, like old papers in crevices, in my life, wedged
in this little apartment between books and magazines,
the sad papers half-marred with uncompleted words --
an old promise to write, an address written
on a piece of ripped napkin
and stuffed into a drawer with other slips and receipts:
these are spilled from my memory (which was never complete)
and remembered only when found, like an old scar
from some forgotten wound.

I'm hoping that was an early draft. Dig this quick revision:

Although you weren't here today,
and haven't been since two years to this day,
I see bits of you, stuck
in my life, like old papers in crevices, wedged
in this little apartment between books and magazines,
the sad papers marred with half-thoughts--
an old promise to write, an address scrawled
on ripped napkin, stuffed
into a drawer among slips and receipts:
cast out of my memory (which was never complete)
and reconjured when found, like an old scar
from some forgotten wound.

It's still not terribly good, although I like the image of scraps of paper stuck in crevices -- and I think about the "found memories" of the old things that fall out of my books sometimes: store receipts, palmcards, folded over notes to myself, etc. So maybe one day I'll come back to the poem and rewrite it properly.

Until then, it's time to find my own ... personal ... jesus.

This is just to say...

This morning was a glorious morning to be on a bike. If I hadn't already missed most of last week due to family illnesses, I'd have probably called in sick just to take a ride down the GW Parkway, or maybe down to Hains Point. Either way, it would have been better than coming into work.

We only had a few weeks of real winter weather, so I'm not complaining about that. It was just beautiful whipping around Dupont Circle this morning with the sun behind the fountain. Seriously you know it would be good riding along the Potomac right now, in the few months we have before the air sticks to you like a wet shirt.

Let me leave you with this gem from Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Spring

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.


---

Ode to Inconsistency

How I curse you, L2, most capricious of busses,
you of the infrequent stops and skipped promises.
I despair of reading yet another 9x line marquee
still each time my pulse quickens in my hope
to read your name writ bold atop your broad face.

Bah, you have dashed my hopes!

Twice, you have dashed my hopes
and I look to my feet
like a scorned suitor, his rival
escorting his love through the dance floor.

Then, like the sun cresting the hills at dawn,
you appear, come rumbling past the post office into sight.

I am saved, dear diesel-scented mistress of my desire!