Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Let them come in.

-D H Lawrence

Every fall class in the undergraduate creative writing program will have four minutes to share work from their class. From the fiction and creative non-fiction classes, this will probably mean one student reading an excerpt from a larger work, while the poetry classes will most likely present two poets who will each share one or two poems. A great friend of mine will be sharing some of his fantastic fiction writing and I’m sure the rest of the readers will be wonderful as well. Matthew Rohrer will host the event.

Come hear some undergraduate work at the Lillian Vernon Writer’s House at NYU if you’re around on Friday! For most of us it will be the first time we’ve read in public, so it should be a very exciting event.

It must have been 45 degrees in your basement bedroom some nights.
We’d burrow under the covers with our piles of clothes still on
and huddle together shivering
breathing as hot as possible into each other’s necks
trying to avoid grazing our freezing fingers, toes, and noses
until our bodies created a pocket of warmth under the bedclothes
and we’d shed quickly
finally touching and sweating together in our nakedness
until we’d throw off the blankets
gasping in the cold winter air.

The thing that most obviously remembers her eighty-seven years, though,
is her skin.
It’s thin like silk,
transparent like cellophane,
and sometimes I think I can see through it.
If I squint my eyes up against her papery arms,
I can see people walking around down there.

I see my grandfather at the church picnic,
twenty-five years old and laughing that enormous laugh.
I spot my six-year-old father running up and down her fingers.
He’s wearing a hand-knit sweater,
and screaming something wonderful.

There’s a room that’s packed with people,
four girls and a boy,
all talking at once,
and someone’s playing the piano.

There’s a window that looks out over Chicago.
The Cubs are playing and everyone is wearing blue.

At just the right angle,
I can peer down to the space between her shoulder blades.
It’s an amhiptheatre,
with a beautiful grand piano on its stage.
The whole family is sitting in the audience:
the Birds, the Ellis’, the Hasselbachers,
the Stansfields.
I’m in the front row next to Grandpa,
wearing a green velvet Christmas dress.
We’re all smiling,
and someone is singing something
lovely
that I can’t quite understand.

A little foray into surrealism, prompted by my current creative writing class. The assignment was to write a poem about a vessel and what it’s bringing into the world.

owl post

black threads stretch between us
and tiny telegrams rush along them.
Andy just got engaged
and Mom and Dad went to St. Louis
and sometimes silence
or garbled nonsense
but mostly:
miniature fireflies
size-12 font
and iron type-set
gallons of ink
electric pulses
foreign languages
missing articles
and extra modifiers
therapy
digital signals
carrier pigeons that don’t know what they’re carrying,
can’t read the messages,
can’t speak the languages,
but if they did…
perforated hanging chads
graphite-filled bubbles
music
more music than we can ever listen to
more books than we can ever read
sex in word form
sex in audio form
maybe even visual sex,
but you’ll never feel it,
never touch the gold-embossed spiral notebook
or kiss the ribbon that ties it shut,
never see his face when he tells you he’s marrying her,
never hold her hand as you cry,
never see if she’s actually listening to you,
for that matter.
but it all matters.
every dried peach slice
every canned string bean
every sugar cube
every tear-smeared sheet of stationary
from the desk of G.M.S.
All well.
Wire money.
Stop.

I’m standing under scaffolding on Bond Street,
But I’m back under that oak canopy at the Reservoir,
When my shoes were full of water and
My eyes were full of your smile.

We just stood there and looked at each other.
We let the city soak us to the bone,
And I wanted to stay like that always:
Oversaturated,
Spilling over,
Eyes wide open.

I want to be back there with you right now.
I think about calling you,
But how would I say it?
How do I tell you
I have your smell and your smile memorized?
The way you breathe,
Slowly.

This rain is you in my lungs.

A friend of mine gave me a copy of the Tao Te Ching for my birthday and it is blowing my mind.
In a peaceful way.
Some of my favorites:

FOUR

The Tao is an empty vessel; it is used, but never filled.
Oh, unfathomable source of ten thousand things!
Blunt the sharpness,
Untangle the knot,
Soften the glare,
Merge with dust.
Oh, hidden deep but ever present!
I do not know from whence in comes.
It is the forefather of the emperors.

SIXTEEN

Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind rest at peace.
The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return.
They grow and flourish and then return to the source.
Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature.
The way of nature is unchanging.
Knowing constancy is insight.
Not knowing constancy leads to disaster.
Knowing constancy, the mind is open.
With an open mind, you will be openhearted.
Being openhearted, you will act royally.
Being royal, you will attain the divine.
Being divine, you will be at one with the Tao.
Being at one with the Tao is eternal.
And though the body dies, the Tao will never pass away.

The rope-swing hung between two of the tallest pines I’d ever seen.
It was on the Marris’s back lot,
Behind the raspberry patches
And the rhubarb that I was afraid of,
Because my sister told me it was poisonous.

We’d climb onto the picnic table,
Hold on tight,
And jump,
Clutching our freckled knees around the rope
And wrapping our feet around the giant knot.

Some of the boys would even jump from the roof of the woodshed.
I would stand to the side,
Frightened,
In awe,
Mesmerized at their bravery,
As they let their bodies fall 20 feet
With only their calloused hands holding them
And a weathered, yellow rope keeping them
Swinging like a pendulum.

Sometimes I would go there by myself,
Wrap my boney legs around the knot
And sit on it,
Like a park swing,
Talking or singing to myself
And imagining I was Huck Finn.

Sometimes,
When I left to go play on the granite boulders
Or sneak up on chipmunks stealing our blueberries,
I would leave the rope swinging,
Imagining a ghost-child playing,
A pine-woods spirit balancing
On the slowly-fraying rope.

The longer I stay in New York,
the more I love it.
But sometimes,
I wish I was driving down a flat country road,
counting mile-markers and reading bible verses on billboards.

City people and Easterners are so quick to condemn Middle America-
the Bible belt, fly-over country-
but do they know what it’s like to ride your bike to the library where you’ve read every book,
to grow wildflowers and tomatoes in your backyard,
to stomp loudly through the creek behind the church,
never worrying where it’s leading you or who’s property your on
or what kind of trash might be floating by?

Because after a half-mile or so,
it opens up to a rocky bed big enough to swim in,
where you can crush the slate in your hands
and build monuments out of the clay.

You can take your shoes off
and lay down in the cold water.

You can forget that your mother told you not to go that far,
because for all you know,
you might be in Indiana or Tennessee by now,
discovering new places that your older sister hasn’t even seen.

If you go even farther you’ll get nervous about the 4-feet-deep water
and how fast it rushes over the broken, concrete giants.

You don’t even know what they are or why they’re here,
but you know that you were meant to find them,
to invent secret tunnels to other worlds,
to cut your feet open and lose your friend, Laine, behind the birch trees
and get scared when the sun goes down,
trying to hurry back to a familiar-looking place
and knowing you’ll be in trouble when you show up late to dinner,
soaking wet with scraped knees and leaves in your hair.

And maybe you’ll start to resent going to church every Sunday,
and hopefully, you’ll want to leave someday,
at least for a little while,
but you’ll remember the way Laine’s tree house smelled,
you’ll remember walking to the city fireworks with Mom and Dad
and laying on the scratchy wool blanket,
holding Mom’s hand and staring up at explosions you couldn’t understand.

You’ll remember getting lost on purpose on the way home from school,
the town newspaper taking a picture of you and Laine bundled up in your winter coats.

You’ll remember the park where you and Kristi played Madeleine,
and dressing your American Girl dolls on her closet floor.

You’ll wish you had more pictures of home,
of childhood,
not just of you and your family,
but also pictures of the flatness,
the cornfields,
the highways and
the space between buildings,
the goldenrod
and the farm silos,
the bumpy train tracks,
the old Amtrak station beneath the overpass,
the playground at your elementary school,
the tiny walk-up dance studio where you learned your first pirouette,
the cobblestone road that hasn’t been paved because Lincoln walked on it.

You wish you could show these things to your friends.
You want to brag,
You want to romanticize your childhood
and show them why this, too, is America.

It isn’t conservative politics.
It isn’t fundamentalist religion.
It’s life and love and tomatoes in the backyard.