. . . . .

. . . .

Rounded the corner from driving in the farmers' fields, in the sun, in the wind that was bright with light and cold, into the small neighborhoods behind the train yards where I passed a house with a camper for sale growing down into the spring grass and a house sagging out of its paint into its wood and a house with a baby teetering into the road with her two feet half in grass and gravel. I crept by. Another car passed us on the other side, a chromed black hulk revving through the crossroads where there is no stop sign before the fields lie wide, and the baby stepped into the road.

***

"Accidents rely on being": an underlying shadow that is the is while the green leaves float into my windshield or the sky backs away from the clouds. Shadow of leaves, shadow of sky, delineated by whatever makes the is of leaves not the same as the is of sky or the is of me, though I cannot sort out whether being must be one shadow with many manifestations--glass, metal, blood--or many shadows before one manifestation: who. The presence of the evidence is overwhelming: extension. Body. Matter. The painted veil. I look around in it for someone else to be there suddenly. Where is the tall sister stepping into view, the mother throwing open the door, rushing into the grass to grab the baby?

***

I watched her in my rearview mirror, parked now on the shoulder. She teetered in her jeans which had slipped down around her diaper and her bare feet. She stepped forward, her foot tangled in one pant leg while her waistband sank around her hips. She lost her balance, leaned to one side, touched the street, caught herself, smiled. Then broke into a headlong gait, all arms, until she reached the broken yellow line. I got out of the car. I said hi sweetie is this your house and I pointed towards the yard she'd crossed, and she watched me. She wore a plastic bag on her head like a shower cap. She was shirtless, pale. I noticed the blue veins running close to the surface of her skin along her belly, and a mass of blond hair spilling over half of her face from the bag. I noticed dried mucus around her nostrils and mouth, a wide ring of flaking milk across her cheek. I noticed her lashes in the sun and her eyes, ice blue, like a cat's. She curled one fist around a finger, concentrating, and said "kittycat," slowly, as if overhearing my last thought.

***

I lifted her up in one arm.

***

Her skin was cold. I remember this, distinctly, how she felt in my arm, though I can't recall her whole face, and how I felt groggy and a little chilled and fevery with a lingering (recurring?) common cold and with the wind blowing through my light coat. And how illness always sets me thinking about my body and other bodies, my car driving through the fields in spring, which is when the dirt puts on its green weight, and my eyes do too, days at a time. Which is also when I am waylaid by something viral, and invisible, whose presence makes itself known only symptomatically. And how the question was there again, purposefully: is body symptom?

***

I put my knuckles to the door and knocked on the glass. The house was small and ordinary, white, treeless, a single story with two front windows and a door between. The outer door had lost its bottom screens, the inside door was ajar, and a fat terrier appeared in the open frame from the darkness and barked for a very long time. I could see the back of a couch, velvet, ochre, nothing more. The dog barked, the baby sat in the crook of my arm and pointed at the dog, and I waited.

***

"Joanna what're you doing outside? Guess what. Babygate. Babygate."

***

. . .

week nine: spring

The year of committing to breakfast: remember when you gave it up? Twenty-seven years of shunning food in the morning (well into mid-afternoon), and it's not easy today, this morning, to treat anything as if it is palatable, not at this hour. Used to start with tea, degenerated to diet Pepsi. Then Diet Dew. Which was a sign of not living again. Well it happens when you live alone: you get busy and forget you exist. It helps to have people remind you, but mostly people have no idea you need reminding. Mostly your body starts making noise in the corner, so you try out oatmeal, spooning it into your body which has lately been sick, and your body says not hungry and your head says but it's oatmeal it's good and this goes on until the last of the full cup of cereal has been coaxed down, and the hot bath is drawn, and the smell of lavender in the water is something to look forward to.

***

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . .

week seven: spring

. . . .

Flunk Day: used to be the day for planting, but if it falls on a Thursday, it brings nothing more than a few spare hours of catch up. The tulip fairie can't be expected to come around for a Thursday Flunk Day. Forget it. It takes leisure time to grow tulips. It takes a whole day.

***

week six: spring

I'll be away this weekend. On retreat to Thomas Merton land and the home of Maker's Mark. Did I tell you I have an unhealthy attraction to the South? I don't even know what that means.

***

Just walked across campus in the hail storm.

***

Community of St John Kentucky “Holy Land” pilgrimage, May 2-4, 2008
(200th anniversary of the diocese of Bardstown, KY established on April 8, 1808)

May 2, Friday
1:45 pm Meet at St Mark's parking lot
2:00 Departure (picnic enroute)
10:00 Arrival at Srs of Loretto: Nerinx, Ky
(The first American women's religious Cty founded in the US--1812)

May 3, Saturday (Derby Day at Churchill Downs!)
6:30 am Silent prayer in Srs' chapel (optional)
7:30 Lauds (Srs' chapel)
8:00 Breakfast (Srs' dining room)
9:00 Tour of Loretto grounds
11:00 Mass at St Rose Priory (The first Dominican house founded in the US—1805)
12:30 pm Buffet lunch in Springfield, Ky
2:30 Tour of Maker's Mark Distillery
4:30 To Gethsemani Abbey (The first Trappist Abbey in the US—1848):
Vespers, Holy Hour, picnic supper, Compline at Gethsemani
8:30 Return to Loretto; visit Holy Cross parish on the way
(The first Catholic parish in Ky--1795 )

May 4, Sunday
6:30 am Silent prayer in Srs' chapel (optional)
7:30 Lauds (Srs' chapel)
8:00 Breakfast (Srs' dining room)
9:30 Mass at St Martin de Porres Cty
11:30 To Bardstown: brief stop at St Thomas Seminary (the first seminary west of the Allegany mountains—1811) and at St Joseph Pro-Cathedral the first Catholic cathedral in the “west”--1819).
1:30 Lunch at the home of Fr Joseph Mary's parents
3:00 To Peoria---arrive around 8:30 pm

***

. . . . . . .

April has not improved. Bought angora/wool/acrylic/rayon hoodie cable sweaters at Old Navy for 5.99 each. Felt justified. Don't own any sweaters anyone would want to wear. Will wear them this season. Today in fact. And all week if I choose. Three days from May we have the heat on. Tomorrow night's to dip down to 28 degrees. The barrel cactus languishes in the sunless kitchen window. I languish in the big blue chair.

***

If you want to shake your confidence, ruin your positive outlook, make hope look like goo, do the thing you promised yourself and the universe you wouldn't do. Then look around: nothing's changed. That's the worst part, the unexpected worst part. It unveils again your solitary way.

***

. . . . . .

. . . . .

Paradise Lost suffered for centuries under critical presumption that Milton failed in his experimental effort ("To justify the ways of God to man") because he was himself so taken with the Devil's Party (as poets are) he could not help but make Satan more attractive than God, or because God could not effectively be humanized and still be God, or because to humanize Satan is to require that the Devil be somehow superhuman in his loftier fall and therefore seem like (the more attractive version of) God...

Then Fish stepped in and said Surprise: this isn't authorial anxiety. It's a performance of readerly anxiety. And I think that's part of what I've been trying to say: readerly anxiety thrust onto the poet and the poem is so, well, compelling. It's a powerful position to put oneself into.

***

. . . .

. . .

week five: spring

When Evening Becomes Stellar

Orchid sky seeps through
our window veiled with branches.

The day heals itself in amethyst
fever, entangled limbs.

Iridescent corona,
keep safe your ivory

light. My calf's tusks
are attached to the skull

of the sun. Ancestors
run under our bellies

like clans of mule deer
sinking into sky's velvet.

There is the constant beat
of prowlers' paws on the desert

drum, a watering hole
to find, there are pairs of teats

gorging with white. In the cover
of bosque and penstemon, a she

beast is born, unafraid:
with trembling legs.


--Emmy Perez

(The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, Francisco Aragon, Editor, University of Arizona Press, 2007.)

***

"When": the whole of the poem is here, at its outset, where nearly every attempt to hold in place a healing between time in motion and bodies in time is suspended in a a single moment of becoming. "When Evening Becomes Stellar." The tensions are all here too, for "when" isn't really a beginning as much as it is a an interruption, a turning point in which the day closing down "seeps through / our window," making time nearly visible in the changing light. But as always, it is only visible through a window of seeing, a tangle of obstacles, that both veil and reveal what is and what is about to become. Night is arriving, and with it, darkness, but not yet. Not just now when the evening, a time of before-ness, a time of erotic announcement, prevails in a dramatic purpling of vision.

The stars will arrive too, and soon, but just as we'd give over to their distant remove and look away, we are turned back again, to a single star, to the setting sun, hailed in a wistful apostrophe: "Iridescent corona, / keep safe your ivory / light." But what is there to keep safe against? Not against the shadow of the turning earth, and not against another cyclical usurpation of darkness. Not when the crowning moment of the poem is an imperative that breaks open the constellations between this voice, human and longing, and this body of light. It is not, after all, the light of day that must be kept, but what it signals as it arrives at the window. It is a deep and ancient conversation carrying on between these two, one that is grounded in the white bones running through the legs of the bodies standing in the tracks of the sun where the bones are bleached bare in its stead: "My calf's tusks / are attached to the skull / of the sun." The image is complicated, resonating in a strangeness that brings together the human journey on foot and the herd animal's (javelina? bison?) death on the wayside. The skull becomes as much the place where the sun rests in reflection as it is the enclosure of the light of the mind: light inside and out is jointed at the mouth where light enters, where voice exits, and where hunger tusks into the light of the air from its jaw.

All of this play on the materiality of light and its interchangability with thought prepares us for the collapse of generations, "Ancestors under our bellies,"mythic past and present, into the surrounding (invisible) field of life that is animated--no, birthed into being--by the onslaught of night: "clans of mule deer / sinking into the sky's velvet," "the constant beat / of prowlers' paws on the desert," "pairs of teats / gorging with white." And again, the poem returns us to the desire to slake thirst, pointing towards water, towards milk, yes, but primarily towards finding, locating, connecting, healing, which is the first impulse of these lines. The same attempt made in the beginning at "When" and "Becomes" is reiterated now at "a watering hole / to find," as well as in "sky's velvet" touching down on the velvet of deer hide, and as well as in the "prowlers' paws" finding the pulse of the "desert drum." So much so, that the poem could only end with a parallel to the branch-entangled sun in the window, another veiled becoming:

In the cover
of bosque and penstemon, a she

beast is born, unafraid:
with trembling legs.

The river oasis of the bosque is rife with this birth, and though it is also a separation, one beast from another, the animal's unsteady legs, we know, will carry her to attachment where she will heal the great distance between her and her m(other) in an all consuming nurture. In this close, we are reminded of the necessary relationship between the poem's speaker and the setting light, between the sun and our ancestors, and between our ancestors and this landscape of beasts. It is a crown of mothers, a halo of mouths opening into more. Stellar, this "our" keep at the window.

***

Revelation 12:

1 And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars:

2 And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.

***

. . . . . . .

High platelet count, elevated ALT, fractionally high glucose ... indicators of infection, organ trauma, irreversible damage perhaps, and a future in insulin. What you get for enduring that irritable woman and her needle: I've been waiting for her most of my life: this is no surprise. All my elders went on insulin. Oh, the crackling in my knees, the years in miles. The other years I don't remember. Thirty some years ago someone cornered my fridge in my kitchen and plugged it in where it's been running ever since: the real age of the machine, the repairman said, shows up in the cogs. We two (the fridge and I) are something like the same age. I filled it with fish and broccoli yesterday. Something to do.

***

Meanwhile at last it's time to get busy. For a long time I thought I'd offer here brief readings of poems I love but put it off for getting 'round to it. (Rigoberto: "My point here is that Chicanos and Latinos need to write their own criticism instead of waiting for critics with a weak understanding of our work to mistranslate.")

Another thing: "I don't cook for myself" means someday when I grow up I will. Got black beans and chile reducing on the stove. The makings of a beautiful dip.

So deadlines are useful.

***

[First a statement on criticism: for the critic forgets (me too) that authority isn't pandering to the law. For the law has so many conflicting desires motivating its selectivity, but most of them are about power, and authority isn't about power.

Authority isn't about the No-of-the-Father, either, not since it exhausted that option by bringing it to light decades ago, anyway. Or at least if authority is to remain on that level, it is choosing to remain on the level of forging categorical divisiveness, marginalization, hierarchy. I've said this here before. It does not matter what the critic chooses to hold up: where there is made an up, there is a down made too. This is Fallen World sensibility. The tree (of good versus bad) took root and felled the forest beneath it. Except it was not a tree, nothing as natural as that. It was a building. A tower, right?

In reality, authority in the hands of the critic stands in precisely the same relation to corruptibility, or to love, as art stands. Which is a metonymical--an artificial--and not an essential, relationship (so watch where you put that thing). I'm pretty sure authority is nothing more than service work, and that criticism has no true authority over art, and that criticism is itself equally not for art's sake. I mean that especially in the sense of that privilege which art so often takes over people, even negligibly. What I would author, critical or otherwise, is for my sake and for the sake of other people. Not the other way around.

If I prefer to live in an artificial world, though, I will hurt other people with it. It's that simple. This is why personal opinion is so much roomier that critical evaluation. (There's a person in it.) In this way, then, if you accept it, I offer only my view points.]

***

"When Evening Becomes Stellar," Emmy Perez
The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, Francisco Aragon, Editor, University of Arizona Press, 2007.

[in process]

***

. . . . .

. . .

. .

In the dream my brother expressed disappointment over the jeans that shrank: remember how nice they were, he said, and I did. I remembered: what it's like, too, to finally have something new, something nice, something you can't afford, and to lose it to the wash. I remembered my father saying it's the luck of the poor, poor poor people can't win for nothin'. My brother kept saying goddamn, you know? Goddamn. I woke up sad and shaken. Such sorrow in things. This morning my coffee is weak.

***

(It doesn't: matter.)

***

Obama was explaining his trouble winning over small-town, working-class voters: “It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

This sent me to Marx’s famous statement about religion in the introduction to his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”:

“Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.”

Or, more succinctly, and in the original German in which Marx somehow always sounds better: “Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes.”

Now, this is a point of view with a long intellectual pedigree prior to Marx, and many vocal adherents continuing into the 21st century. I don’t believe the claim is true, but it’s certainly worth considering, in college classrooms and beyond.

But it’s one thing for a German thinker to assert that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature.” It’s another thing for an American presidential candidate to claim that we “cling to ... religion” out of economic frustration.

***

week four: spring

. . . . . . .

April 13, 2006:

Slept with the windows open. Trains and birds woke me. Yesterday when I left the porch door open a cardinal flew into the house and banged around the six living room windows. She knocked herself out twice but was off again before I could get to her, both of us panicking and unable to see what to do. In a daze, finally, she landed on the easel by the porch door, beak open, panting, eyeing me. She looked defiant, a bit fierce, and so it was: just as I closed my hands around her she flew out the door into the day.

***

April 13, 2008:

A few snow showers around this morning, otherwise mostly cloudy. High 43F. Winds N at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of snow 30%. Tonight's low: 28.

***

week three: spring

Last year's yesterday post reminds me April is like this. Wintery minded, fiery. I am restless, a little bruised somewhere, as though having forgotten there was a fall. There was a fall, several, all those years, each night waking in the dark, every light in the house on, a blackened thing on the stove, a spilled cup of squeezed limes wherever the blackout left me to sprawl against the wood. The stained wood bleached white, the spread of ashes.

***

78 days and waiting.

***

. . . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . .

. . .

. .

There is more to say about this weirdness, but not just yet.

Still trying to catch up with the job. Still longing to get back to a clarity of speaking aloud. Here, for instance. I think there are other heads I'd prefer to live in. The ones without the metal garbage can lids for cymbals.

***

Holy Week Retreat Schedule at the Brothers and Sisters of St. John:

Palm Sunday, March 16
10:00 am Spiritual Conference
11:15 Procession and Mass

Wednesday, March 19
Retreat begins: 8:00 pm Retreat Conference

Holy Thursday, March 20
6:15 am Silent prayer, Lauds
11:00 am Retreat Conference
12:45 Sext
1:00 Lunch (and dishes)
3:00 pm Rosary
3:00-4:00 Confessions
4:00 Retreat Conference
6:00 Festive Supper (and dishes)
9:00 Mass of the Lord’s Supper
(Mass replaces Vespers)
Night of private Adoration until 6:00 am

Good Friday, March 21
6:45 am Silent Prayer, Lauds
9:00 am Way of the Cross, Sext in private
1:00 pm Collation (light lunch--and dishes)
3:00 pm Office of the Passion (replaces Vespers)
7:00 Soup (and dishes)
7:45 Retreat Conference
8:30 Vigils of Holy Sat

Holy Saturday, March 22
6:45 Silent Prayer, Lauds
10:00-11:00 Confessions
11:00 Retreat Conference
12:45 Sext
1:00 Lunch (and dishes)
3:30-4:30 Confessions
4:30 pm Retreat Conference
5:30 Vespers, Silent prayer
7:00 Soup (and dishes)
10:00 Easter Vigil Mass (all made of light)
1:00 am After-mass celebration

Easter Sunday, March 23
6:45 am Mary Magdalene Eucharistic Procession (and adoration)
7:30 Lauds before the Blessed Sacrament
11:15 Sext and Easter Mass
1:00 Festive lunch (and dishes)
5:30 Community adoration
6:30 Vespers
7:00 Supper (and dishes)

***

week two: spring

. . . . . . .