I’m either having a mystical experience or I’m totally delulu, or both / and / all? I’m spending the summer at my parents’ house, gardening, tinkering, making things in an orb of sunlight and green leaves. In the latest salvo in the war over a chemical-free garden (dad with a spray bottle of herbicide vs me with a quick sketch of bioaccumulation and being annoying), I dug out a huge patch of poison ivy from the side yard, and realized the reason the lilac bush was half dead was because the poison ivy vine was choking it. I dug it all out and mulched and planted the zinnia seeds mom bought, and the marigold seeds deadheaded from the flowerpots and bee balm seeds saved from the meadow at the Walpack Inn, when in August 2020, my sister Alie and I met Sylvia and Eric for a pandemic outdoor harvest dinner, then at night we walked in the bee balm. I love bee balm so much! It is weird and cool. When we arrived at the harvest dinner on a gorgeous August early evening, a server handed us a perfect tiny margarita with a bee balm blossom in it. I’m swooning just remembering it, that open field and seeing friends after months of confinement. The emotional charge of that year, inside an orb I drew with salt, staring into a candleflame, fear outside, a sense of mooring inside. Though I lived alone in an apartment in West Philly, my sister and her housemates were half a block away, and it was a blessing to be part of their “germ blob” and go over there and do laundry, make collages and drink white wine spritzers on the porch. I feel so much love for those housemates when I think of that time, our endless projects and “focus candles,” love that filtered through the constant worry, washing groceries, waiting in line at the food co-op. My mom and dad were alone at their house in Macungie and one day mom (a retired teacher) read us a story book on Zoom. I grew nasturtiums (and drew those little saucer plate hand leaves stretching to the windowlight), one potato plant from a potato scrap, and tulsi in pots. I was so present, watching the herbs grow and the tree buds creak open, or I burned frankincense resin from Ethiopia and lived in East Africa in my mind, feeling the wind through a tent flap.

This summer I’m in a similar orb, just doing the next thing in front of me, without trying to look too far ahead or behind, grief all around and through. I’ll start a project then need to see an old notebook at that exact moment, dig it out of the closet, and spend an hour in a disembodied reverie, reading about some crystal-cut or watery moment from the past.

I’m practicing what Dan Savage called “running toward rejection” as I am very sensitive to rejection and have experienced so much of it already, that I’m wondering if I can really feel it all this time and burn it away, not to be bulletproof, but able to feel it and it let it pass through me, without feeling like it’s a threat to my existence. In running toward rejection I’m practicing making wild requests and then seeing what happens. It’s so uncomfortable but discomfort is my comfort zone so… maybe I was made for these times.

In an old notebook I wrote, Keep your head out of the fear box.

After reading Cate Hall and Sasha Chapin’s book, You Can Just Do Things, I’m wondering,

What are real limits and what are just the edges of the fear box, my old stories and things I tell myself I can’t do. I think of that game Operation, where you have to use metal tweezers to extract a funny bone or thigh bone from a patient and the sides of the tiny cavity are electrified, so if your tweezers touch the edge, there’s a tiny shock and a zapping sound. [Adrenaline hits for 80s kids].

The wild requests lead to inner cycles of embarrassment, thrill, and what is this, shame? My brain is so loud sometimes, so many stories and inner conflict.

*

I’ve been tinkering with cyanotypes and my love of medicinal plants, starting with a love letter to Mugwort (Artemisia).

Plants are here for us in so many ways.

Mugwort has silver under leaves and grows in scruffy side lots or along road sides and abandoned places.

It pulls heavy metals like lead and cadmium out of the soil.

I met mugwort in an herbalism class with Attic Apothecary in Philadelphia in 2020, though the plant was familiar from the edge places of my childhood in a rural area becoming a suburban area.

Mugwort tea helps with digestion.

Sometimes I burn the dried leaves for protection in a ritual.

Thanks for reading if you made it this far~ If we haven’t been in touch in a while, please hit reply and say hi.

With love~

Last Sunday we dropped my friend’s daughter off at Junior Conservation School (JCS), a week-long environmental education program in Northampton County, Pennsylvania.

The 4H Center and the tents and land look the same, though everything about how we live now has changed.

In 1992, at the end of 9th grade, I received a scholarship to attend JCS in July, the summer of my 15^th year, I was part of a group of young students examining our environmental impact, hiking up to Palmerton (where 80 years of smelting zinc had denuded miles of the mountain, white trees like cragged ghosts, in 1992 it was like walking on the moon), visiting a sewage treatment plant and a raptor rescue center, canoeing on the Delaware River, hauling garbage from the stream.

*

JCS was a transformational experience, to say the least, it was the first social environment where I felt I didn’t have to hold back the weird, nerdy parts of myself. The 6am to 10pm schedule was challenging and we were working all the parts of ourselves, physically, emotionally, intellectually, learning that we had to work together to complete anything. I found a group of friends and I fell into unrequited love (or limerence?) or something that went on for decades before I woke up out of it (or something). I tried to write a novel about it, plus the notebooks. It will never be done, like when I build whole cities in dreams, then wash up from the shipwreck just holding a few of the shards.

I got a scholarship to go to Conservation Leadership School (CLS), a further program, part of continuing education at Penn State, the following summer, and returned to JCS as a junior counselor. In 1994 was hired as an Instructor’s Assistant at CLS, returned to JCS as head counselor, and completed the Advanced CLS program. I majored in environmental science and education then switched majors to Film Studies. I think maybe I regret this?

Writing this in July 2026 from a yellowy day in Pennsylvania with wildfire smoke in the air, I feel tenderness for that so young person who pestered her friends and family about recycling, lawn chemicals, water use, etc and burned to “make a difference,” a vision of a shared future and abundant fields, rather than construction and “development” and the same cookie cutter house over and over again, or now, the same apartment building with a view of the overpass.

*

When the flame of some old hurt is ash, then you can touch it, write about it.

*

October 25, 1993

I’m surrounded by 90 degree angles. All the beauty around me are oases surrounded by conformity. I can’t go 500 yds without running into signs of urban development.

*

July 18, 1993 7:45pm

Nervous apprehension filled all our senses today. My students arrived between 11:30 and 12:15. I could see my own fear of a year ago mirrored in their eyes. Today a different fear invaded me, unwanted. The fear of a year ago came from knowing no one, feeling alone and stupid. This morning, surrounded by the ones who love me and whom I love in return, the fear originated in my mind as many new forms. Fear of doing a terrible job, fear of leadership, fear that my students wouldn’t listen. On the other side, I experienced ASE (Action Socialization Exercises) as a teacher and leader, a brand new thing for me. I like it on the Other Side, but I miss the student side too. Perhaps I fear being a leader and knowing it. I have led many times before, but I didn’t realize it. It’s so easy to lead when you’re the only one who benefits, when the purpose is not important.

Is it sad that I throw all my life into these short weeks at camp? Three weeks out of 52? I truly live for three weeks and let things pass me by for 49. I dread going home, dread the end of something I’ve waited for all of my 49 dull weeks. My heart, oh my heart, it hurts so horribly to think of the end. Who can understand? T, J, G—they all have a group fo great friends to talk with, just BE with. Who do I have? At home I am left out, and when I’m with L, I still never feel truly IN. “In” is not the word I want to use. “In” is a popularity contest. I don’t want popularity, I want kindred spirits. No, I yearn for kindred spirits.

*

November 22, 1993, 10:45 PM
We live our separate lives and synchronized circles linked with one another’s. At each link there is a meeting place, and then we must travel alone for a while. But if we gather our circles together they become one powerful perfect BAND of life.

*
When you’re in school, summer is a long arc of rope, taught and slack in different places, shivering all over.

*

The site is the mud and leaf dark of Pennsylvania. The undergrowth of our psyches, still forming like a chrysalis. The mayfly larvae on the underside of a rock, encased in its hideaway of pebbles, until it hatches and leaves the water. The rocks were copper and amber in the dappled sun, wading in the stream up to our ankles.

Nearby the stream we gathered for the sun ceremony, the final gathering. We sat in a circle in the grass, holding a string of 5 beads. Yellow for the sun, blue for the water, green for grass and plant life, black for the soil, white for cloud and sky. I sat and clicked the beads and spun them on the thread. I was already half in despair because my longed-for week was over, the week when I felt the most loved and held and seen. I couldn’t deal with high school, most of the teachers were there to make you into a consumer, to keep the American machine running. Everyone seemed so plastic, I guess I was just miserable, I was judgmental, sure, but I was a smart girl in the suburbs, what’s not to be depressed about? I walked in my fake doc martens, stared at my feet, wishing my feet could sink into real soil. I longed for the excitement of the city, the different languages or the bookstores, access to culture, the exhaustion of walking and looking at art. Or I longed for the wilderness, the countryside, the hills going on to the horizon without a single building, husks of milkweed breaking bursting open and silken thread wishes floating to the wind. I longed to be a wild thing, with leaves stuck in my hair and nails clogged with paint and mud, from all the things I’d make.

*

   A university education is a room with a fire, inside a strange city. ~Judith Vollmer

   I made a wrong turn somewhere, and ended up in the Friend Zone. ~Chris Rock

*

Sometimes you meet someone and there’s instant recognition, familiarity. Something in that person answers a question you’ve been holding inside yourself. You don’t know if it’s lust or love or friendship, but you just want to talk to them. That’s how it was when I met M. 

M was in my poetry writing class at the University of Pittsburgh. His roommate was dating my roommate, so we’d overlap at parties and debate each other in class. Our group met in a wood-paneled classroom, with heavy drapes and high ceilings, in the Cathedral of Learning.

January 26, 1999

Having a really silly boy crush on M. The class workshopped my poem, Elegy in Autumn. It was well received. “I should’ve written this poem,” D said, getting a bit sidetracked by her fascination with Debussy. She commented on the East / West dichotomy and talked about Debussy’s collection of Eastern art and culture. She suggested cutting the Western images and different tones, the uterus part. But I cannot, they are footholds. M said it could be called Melancholy Cafe, all the images in the cafe are melancholy.

February 12, 1999

one hour in Schenley park with M: tree sky our beginning friendship. That new spring feeling, fledgling. The body stretching out of winter’s dry husk. I got to know him beyond my idealisms. We talked as I haven’t talked with any man since—dare I say it?—since my under-the-sky non-thing with T. He’s a writer and played football and does things like landscaping and construction. He was wearing a green t-shirt, had a pimple on his chin. I was thrilled and had a sense of possibility, even tho I didn’t know if he felt the same. And similarities in our adolescence with thinking ppl are “plastic” and being misunderstood. Laughing at ourselves then.

We’d walk from class to a park, sit on swings and talk, or sit on the steps of Hillman Library and share yellow biryani from the Indian food trucks. Once he said, “I hate when writers talk about their writing as ‘my work’, like, how hard can it be?”

We both came from families where work was work, some kind of physical or office labor, not crafting whole worlds in ink and paper.

I worked as a waitress, carrying trays of drinks and greasy meals to waiting customers. He worked at a beer distributor. We were still becoming ourselves. We hadn’t learned the work of writing, yet. It was obsession and fun and it kept us up at night. I would scribble in my notebook, then bike the blue, 3am streets to the all-night computer lab at Forbes Quad to type up a draft, then print it out and scribble all over that print-out. I’d crash on a maroon pleather couch in Heinz Hall before a 9am class, paper cup of acid coffee on the floor with my scuffed notebook.

I was fascinated with stories and the ways words could collide and fracture and build. I fictionalized M as an amber carpenter, my lover, we lived in London together in a tiny wreck of an apartment, went to shows, fucked in a bed we never made.

That winter I turned 22, and vowed never to sleep again until I could sleep with him. Meanwhile my roommate and his roommate got closer. They went from crush to kiss to sex. She told me all the hot details. I slept in a tiny single berth in a freezing room, winter wind crackling the plastic sheets over the window, streetlight on my white blanket.

Spring arrived with squelchy grass and icy flowerbuds and insomnia. I waited, wrote, filled a giant French notebook with ink. M and I lunched. We talked poetry, jobs, metaphysics, the crazy thing x said, the annoying thing y said. We walked from class to swings. I was fueled by lust that had no outlet but for my silly stories, no object but dream.

In the quad, B, M’s best friend, said he wanted to tell me something, but he was late and ran off. I’ll see you after Padunov’s class!

M was in a play. On opening night, I bought one red carnation from a vendor on the corner of Craig and 5^th, the old man who’s there everyday with his white food industry buckets full of flowers and branches. The sun rang in those buckets, slanted at the end of the day.

I bought the crimson flower because I had seen M at the library earlier that day and he said, “Gimme one word. You’re good at this stuff.”

…Crimson.

“See!”

What do you mean I’m good…

“Well anyone else would be like, ‘Why do you want to know that, what’s this for?’”

I’m excited to see your play tonight.

“Oh, you’re coming! Awesome! Stick around outside and I’ll come out after.”

So I buy the crimson flower—How much for just one?

“25 cents.”

Thank you.

He wrapped it in green tissue paper.

I met K for coffee at Kiva Han before going to the play. I told her how silly and scared I felt about this crush, I showed her the flower, I’m so ridiculous. “Oh, Jenny,” she said. “I wish you could see you the way I see you.” What do you mean? “Just so brave and creative.” Whatever.  

All I remember of the play was M’s leonine torso in silver light, his hair long and blonde on his strong shoulders. I met him backstage after the play and we hugged, and I kind of goofily handed him the flower. “Hey thanks,” he said, his head to one side, smiling. There were crowds waiting around to talk to him so I quickly said I’d see him in class and left.

May 28, 1999

Saw the play at the studio theatre. M was intriguing tho the rest of the play bored me to tears (literally) only I was crying bc altho boring it was worth three dollars to see M shirtless in pajama bottoms as he flung himself around on the sultry messy white bed. His copper chest hair and puckered half moon of his belly button.

I thought the only way to move this forward would be to, well, tell him. Just have it out. Just say the words.

Hey, can you meet for lunch tomorrow? I have something I’d like to talk about with you.

A few days later we sat across from each other at a brown formica table at this Mediterranean place on Oakland Ave, not intimate, and therefore perfect for our meeting. He bought me lunch, grape leaves and spinach pie. A fug from the deep fryer hung below the track lighting. We talked about class and the Komunyakaa poems we were reading. I stared at the scratches on the formica until I couldn’t stand the pent-up-ness another second. So I just wanted to tell you. I took a deep breath and continued, I really like hanging out with you and I think it would be fun to spend more time together… and I…I have this ridiculous crush on you.  

“I know.” 

You know?!

“Yeah, the flower you brought to my play?” 

Oh—

“The red carnation?” 

—yeah. 

“But I’m not sure I’m feeling it. But listen, you’re awesome and rad and so funny—just look at all the crazy things we’ve done!—and I’d like to spend more time with you as well, only as your—I hate to use the F word—as your Friend.”

Right, ok, I understand. I just thought I should tell you rather than being like hi, bye and dancing around you.

“Yes, I’m glad you did.”

 I was silent for a beat. So, how’s the play going?

From there, our conversation moved to classes and mutual friends, plans for the summer. I kept up, although I just wanted to put my forehead down on the table.

A few days later, B came up to me in front of the Cathedral. Hey, what did you want to tell me? I asked. “Oh, I thought you and M should go on a date or something, but he told me you did something about it.” He told you about that? I said, Oh god. “Yeah, but he said it was amazing; you were so awesome about it. And after, you just went on like nothing had ever happened.”

It was then I realized I had a skill for hiding my real feelings. What they didn’t know is that after the rejection about which I was so awesome, I rode my bike as hard as I could, neck screaming, pedals piercing my flimsy shoes. I tore up the hill to Homewood cemetery and sat on the grass under the biggest cragged oak and sobbed. It was dusk, spilled gold. Are we too much alike? How can he share so much of himself with me yet just want to be friends?! I shut down my heart like a stalled computer.

And then I dreamed of children. I was on a ship. The children were twin boys with blond hair. They yelled at me bc I removed my shoes and didn’t put them in the designated shoe area. One boy had to stay behind on land bc he was sick and cried bc his brother was going out of sight.

/

Last night, getting trashed at Harris’ Grill with A and B, ran into K, J, and two of their friends, Alaskan Jake (cute) and James (faded into the woodwork a bit but seemed cool). I asked B why he wanted me to talk to M long ago. And he said, “Well I thought you and M should go on a date or something and now I know you did something and it’s not needed.”

B, what did he tell you?

“He told me what happened at the restaurant. He thought it was beautiful and cool that you guys just went on from there no problem.”

June 2

Did I tell you about the beauty of the cemetery? I asked J.

J said, “You aren’t letting yourself feel this. Don’t tell me how beautiful it was.”

I was devastated I admit it. I’m not hiding from it but I have to associate it with something lovely so I can get past it and not let it eat me alive.

June 12

Last nite, walking through Shadyside on Negley, Joe M was out on his porch, barefoot in khaki shorts and a Rollins band tee. And I’m considering just stopping by and hanging out like I could never do before with boys, follow them around until they realize I’m there, hang out being supportive to his ego and tell him how rad he is (as someone said). Instead we’re on his porch talking and I told him about the book and he told me about his movie. I said, Are you in editing hell? He said it’s done and on video. “Do you want to see it?”

29 may 1999

W invited me on a bike ride and we rode the jail trail all the way downtown. Smell of honeysuckle, down by the Allegheny, underpasses with crazed graffiti, night moisture, periodic mists of rain, the moontower, the wildflower bench, city vistas. We explored the city like insects with iridescent wings. And I dug the bike ride and felt young and powerful but kept wishing I were with M.

June 1999

B said love is memory worship. Loving not the individual, but your memories of that person.

This applies, in absence, to my Theory of Separation of Love

There’s no great redeeming end to this story. M and I kept talking, though less and less; he got a girlfriend. I’d see them at parties, laughing. She was lithe, her body like a comma against his. I stayed up writing, applied for a Brackenridge summer fellowship and got it. M graduated with a degree in Creative Writing and went home to the Philly suburbs to paint houses and save money. I waited tables and met the other fellows each Wednesday for Dominoes pizza at the top of the Cathedral, where we would present our projects. I was studying the decisive moment in photographic and literary imagery. It was an excuse to write poems and shoot photos all summer.

M and I aren’t friends on Facebook, so my memories of him are all I have, and that’s exactly the way I want it. I want to remember the winter he grew his hair long. I want to remember him in that play, shirtless, a crescent of light on his chest. I haven’t had to follow along as he marries, his wife gives birth, his kid plays baseball in the yard. I remember the black and white portrait I took of him, in our empty classroom, his strong profile in the window light. I don’t have to see pictures of him at a dinner party, greasy light on wineglasses. I only see the young man he was becoming, his poems scribbled on college-ruled paper, the fresh cut of grass in the park. I didn’t read the announcements to his “friends”, addressed to everyone and no one, addressed to the Feed, of new jobs, new apartments. I am not a weird eyeball, one of hundreds or thousands, on his life, as he has a second child, his wife exhausted and triumphant at the hospital, the kid’s little alien face pressed to an iPhone camera, blinking, confused, thrust into the world.

5.

One afternoon in 2001, I sat with my notebook in the Luxembourg gardens. It was May, chestnut trees in full flower, set in rows in the bone-white gravel. André Le Nôtre had designed the formal gardens in the center of the park around the octagonal basin: green-gold shrubs razored into little boxes, arranged in geometric patterns, rigid designs. Le Nôtre was a sadist, I wrote. The forest has its own inner organizing principle but he only saw chaos. He imposed his rational worldview on nature, the way that the Empire imposed its Enlightenment view on the world. I think therefore I am. But those who were allowed personhood, to think and therefore be, were white men, everyone else was enslaved or a womb to birth the labor force that would extract and build and conquer more territory, steal more gold for these domes, more art for these museums. No votes, no rights. Pelouse au repos.

My wild scribbling attracted the interest of a slight, spry older man with white hair and a blue dress shirt. I saw him watching me when I looked up from time to time to gather my thoughts. He approached:

Qu’est-ce que vous écrivez avec une telle passion?

Juste quelques idées.

Vous êtes écrivain?

Un jour, j’espère.

C’est passionnant, l’écriture.

Oui.

On peut voir des choses plus clairement.

…

Vous vous intéressez à l’histoire j’imagine comme beaucoup d’écrivains?

Oui.

Pas loin d’ici il reste le dernier mètre de Paris.

Le dernier mètre?

Oui.

C’est quoi?

Alors, viens, je vous montrerai.

After hours of solitude with my notebooks, I was ready for some company, so I walked across the Luxembourg with him. We exited the park at the tall spiked iron gate near the Sénat and he told me about its history and the artwork inside. It was early evening, swallows in flight, traffic. We entered a long arcade, gold light on white stone, turned a corner, and arrived at a marble monument at 36, rue de Vaugirard.

Le voici.

I’m looking at a white-grey marble slab with lines etched in it.

In 1796-97, the newborn republic built monuments like this in 16 sites around the city to educate Parisians about the new system of measurement. What is a meter? This is a meter: this line carved in marble between two bronze ingots. Hold up your ruler to see if it matches. Use a meter stick, not your foot or your thumb. The body is not a precise instrument. This is a meter: a distance from the North Pole to the equator (well, 10 millionths of it).

I see a line that starts at the North Pole, a place where the summer sun never sets, just traces the horizon. I see the line curve over ice floes, white snow, inlets and dense forests of Scandinavia, across the North Sea, through Paris’s observatory, across the Mediterranean, Algeria, the Sahel. To control the universe by measuring it, as atoms whir and electrons spin, even existing in two places at once. An atom is mostly empty space, the space of a hippodrome: horses in the nucleus, electrons high in the stands in the outer ring, waving. See the light on the horse’s russet mane, his wet muzzle, his breath? Water droplets from his breath vaporize and return to air, the invisible. Unseen processes and forces work on us, our bodies, the moon pulls on the water inside us, while we worry and plan, categorize, seek to control.

Yet, how do we know what we know? According to Bruce Lipton, in his book The Biology of Belief, our unconscious minds process 20 million pieces of information per second; our conscious minds are slow, they can only process 40 pieces of info per second.

We are water. The moon pulls on us as it tugs on the tides along the coasts of the Americas, Africa, Europe. We wander towards the horizon. Water responds to the sounds of language, forming complex geometric shapes for “love”, “hello”. The ice crystal for “thank you” was the same in every language. (See Emoto’s photographs of ice).

In liquid states

of matter, what

solid thing

can we stand on?

Back at the Luxembourg gates, the man and I parted. The hirondelles were crying, signaling evening.

Bon, he extended a hand, je suis ravi.

I took his hand. Moi aussi.

Je vous souhaite bonne continuation.

I walked back to the foyer Jeanne d’Arc, my student residence. The breath of the green park through the black ironwork, the purple evening sky. Stone like bread, still warm from the sun as dusk swept over the city.

I climbed the four flights to my creaky single berth with its white coverlet.

Paris was good for a young writer, the man had said.

I felt the solitude, layers of history, pages of handwriting.

The city is a living thing

the polis

the

city swept

over and over with

brooms, wind. The city

is a sentence; her verb is _____

(love / ache / or

hunger).

Can you fight the urge to run for another day? ~ Brandi Carlisle

*

My father would drive us an hour and a half to the cardiology appointments in Philadelphia (red flags from Temple University, bare branches)

then we would go to the Franklin Institute and walk through the heart.

In Paris the waiting room at the cardiologist’s office has gray chairs, gray linoleum, and a gray-haired woman who smells of shampoo and stale cigarettes. She puffs and moves with a cane. We smile at each other.

There’s a way of being that is not seeking.

Weeks before the Challenger launch we wrote letters to Christa McAuliffe, drew rockets and comets. It was all anyone could talk about, a teacher in space. My 3rd grade teacher wheeled a tv into our classroom that January morning in 1986. Am I remembering this right?

The shuttle traces an arc in that clear sky, then the white orange flame on the convex screen. Camera cuts to people gathered at Cape Canaveral, Christa’s parents, faces turned to the sun, hands shading their eyes.

Escape velocity is 25,000 miles per hour.

A stable resting heart rate is 60 to 100 beats per minute. Blood moves through branching tributaries to the sea.

Everything is spinning (electrons protons neutrons) we just believe we are solid

What else can we believe?

The wind blows across the city and through my bones

Yesterday I was thinking of S who said, You may have peeked into satori, but we have to live here, pointing, finger to the table top, in the physical world.

I am tending to my life, rose petals in my tea

I remember the doctor who said the heart is the size of a fist, the one who said the procedure wouldn’t hurt because I’d be asleep.

It’s yesterday and it’s 5 am or it’s tuesday and it’s 4 am and I wake up to a thundering heart. Scan the news. Handcuffs. Teargas. Flame.

(the cruelty that I thought my work was working against)

Blue light filters through the curtains.

You must sew a life out of all of this sorrow, said a voice.

Circle cast by flame.

Burning leaves.

*

The friability of the law. These structures that form(ed) our society are fragile and fall apart without public engagement and political will. Our consensus reality. In the face of ICE raids, Minneapolis residents have coordinated, with a massive concentrated effort, to bring food to people who are afraid to leave the house, to blow whistles and obstruct ICE activities as much as possible, to document these abuses of power with their phones.

To move towards a new, stronger, system (or organizing principle), with enough co-concentration, co-creation and release.

*
Green hills and leaf dark of Pennsylvania. Swing state. In summer the sycamores are heavy over Hamilton Boulevard, in winter they are cragged ghosts. Coal: land gashed and stripped and thrown back. Creeks and rivers, trestle bridges, concrete pilings ringed with muddy water. My grandfather operated a shovel as big as a small house.

The steel mouth of Bethlehem, the forge that built the armored ships in WWII. Looming Victorian houses on the hill, milled lace, Welsh china. Tiny row houses like cat’s teeth for steelworkers, most of them immigrants. Heaps of slag, spindly trees on shaky ground. Class fractures. South Mountain is a lady lying on her side, an old mountain, softened by rain and wind.

There’s a star at the top of the ridge line.

Meet me there.

*

May your path be your own… ~Patti Smith

Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

How to perform adult CPR (See full instructions here at redcross.org)

Is it safe to approach?

If a person seems unconscious, ask Are you ok?

Call for help.

If they don’t respond, shake them, rub their sternum. If they don’t respond, check their airway. If the airway is clear, check for a pulse (at the wrist, neck, groin.)

If they have no pulse,

Feel for the sternum, press the heart to a depth of 2 inches between the bone of the sternum and the spine, elbows locked. Pump for the heart because it can’t.

After 30 compressions, open the airway with a head tilt / chin lift, give two rescue breaths.

Continue thirty compressions to two breaths.

Blood moves to the vital organs.

Watch for chest rise.

Call for help. Feel for the sternum.

Each rescue breath lasts one second.

Is it safe to approach?

Are you ok?

Paris in winter is like a smudgy charcoal drawing, stones erode in the drizzle, dome of fog. Then lamplight, then flare.

Clarity eludes.

A world in every coffee cup or eyeball.

Something is being made in this scribbling. I don’t know what.

I had a dream about Pittsburgh in the late 90s which was, in waking life, when I lived there. It wasn’t a destination city then so there were only 3 poseurs and they were all in the same band. Paris is overrun with Insta-ready Emily in Paris clones and poseurs wearing red berets. They’re all so enamoured with Paris and don’t speak French. I guess it would be cute if E-in-P was watchable rather than insupportable.

I dreamed I tattooed the entire lower half of my face a cadet blue color and this helped weed out many people who wouldn’t like me anyway and everyone else thought I was the coolest.

In waking life I met a man who had tattooed his face a cadet blue color. He was bipolar and lived in a tent under a bridge in Allentown. The physician’s assistant and lead of the street medicine team climbed into the tent and listened to his breath sounds and heart rate.

What can we get for you?

I’d like a cup of Earl Grey tea.

The lead PA said he was usually a great resource for the street med team, connecting them with other unhoused people and/or transmitting their requests and needs, yet that day he was having a major down and only peeked out of the tent.

I remember being very enthusiastic about the way the team interacted with the men (we didn’t meet any women) in a very direct, human way. Not sure why this should be a surprise, but I had been around way too many NGO people who came to East Africa from the UK/USA etc to interact with locals in a very condescending/patronizing or overly I’m really listening kind of way, which spanned just-wrong-to-super-annoying for different reasons.

AI slop

Why read then? I’m not interested in endless rearrangements of 26 letters of the alphabet. I read to have a human exchange, to be in the company of another human intelligence. There are other ways to transmit info. I read to find insight into my human life.

I’m interested in connection with the feeling sensing human mind and vision that is conducting the words that are transmitting something that I need to hear. Reading gives me solace, the feeling that I’m not alone in my struggles or in my questions.

//

sorry, I could have made a positive difference in the world but 85% of my cognitive processing power is preoccupied with whether or not my ass looks fat in these jeans love you bye

My position now is familiar: I’m trying to stop or slow down time, as if I could get a better view and understand things better, if said things would only stop happening so fast. It’s futile and I haven’t learned how to let go of wanting to grasp and understand the ungraspable, wild mystery.

*

Things are moving really fast.

*

Over the past five years or so I’ve been practicing meditation, or a presence practice, more regularly. I have practiced yoga on and off for 20 years, but it’s only been daily and sustained in different periods. These days if I start the day with some yoga and sitting, I feel I’m building a stronger container for the wild fluctuations that seem to characterize the times we’re in. Sometimes it feels like I’m meditating all the time. Sometimes it feels like the practice is saying, Here’s a dark corner of your subconscious that you haven’t visited yet, how’s the view? and then there are flashes of light and insight like a vein of gold. Overall, confusing.

*

I’m thinking about power, impunity, panic and other contagious emotions as I read about events from the former United States, and as lives and livelihoods are destroyed around the world in service to the caprices of a handful of billionaires. (Stop the mass behavioral modification strategy, I want to get off [checks Instagram]). But how to get off the ride if I’m a freelancer and trying to trade my creativity and cognitive output in an online market, and the same addictive tools that erase my memory / control my imagination, are the tools I need to find new clients?

Last night I went to a conference at the AP offices, Journalists in Peril, with panelists from AP, Reporters without Border (RSF), AFP. How to report safely and freely and independently when a few billionaires own the top media houses in the US and France? Olivier Legrain, who made millions in business and now is creating the Maison des media libres (House for Free Media, opening in 2027) to fund independent journalism and push back against the far-right, said, My fight is to do everything I can so that the Rassemblement National (RN; France’s far-right party) is not in power in 2027. France’s next elections are in 2027. Macron can’t run again and he’s not very popular anyway (his approval rating was 11% in October). Far-right ideologies are gaining ground in many places, with “ideology overriding evidence.” (This quote is from Your Local Epidemiologist writing on the CDC publishing false information about vaccines and autism spurred by a directive from HHS).

*

On 7 August 2013, I was due to arrive back in Nairobi. The week before, I changed my flight to stay in France a few more weeks and go to Visa pour l’image, the photojournalism festival in Perpignan.

On 7 August, a massive fire broke out at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, shutting down the main international arrivals terminals and stranding over 16,000 passengers. Ole Lenku, then Interior Cabinet Secretary in Uhuru Kenyatta’s government, said the fire was started by a lightbulb that fell into a waste basket.

After ruling out arson and terrorism, authorities declared the fire was caused by an electrical problem.

In September of 2013, when al-Shabab terrorists attacked Westgate Shopping Center in Nairobi, killing at least 67 people, the army and police and authorities had the attackers holed up in a corner of the grocery store while they looted the mall for three days. On the Monday after the start of the attack, we [the press corps, Red Cross, other groups who had based themselves across the street at the Oshwal Center] heard a huge explosion and dark smoke started to filter out of the mall. A panic broke out at the Oshwal Center when we heard gunfire very close by, as opposed to gunfire we had been hearing for days coming from inside the mall. The crowd panicked and ran toward us. I shot off a few frames and ran to the door of the Oshwal Center.

I looked back and saw a plainclothes officer with a pistol at the door. I photographed him and was hustled into the echoing, cavernous hall. A woman asked the plainclothes what he saw. He said something I didn’t hear and she yelled, “Oh my god, they’re coming in helicopters!” I asked the plainclothes, “Did you say the attackers are coming in helicopters?” He said something like, “No, they are coming in a truck.” Oshwal staff herded me and about 100 people into a central room. I did not want to be stuck in there. Crow trapped in my chest. Panic at the idea of being stuck in that room not able to see what was happening.

I walked out of the room amongst protests by Oshwal staff: Madame, stay inside. Madame, stay away from the windows. Saw some journalist colleagues near their bomb-proof Land Cruiser. They suited up in flak jackets and helmets and offered me one. Only if you have a spare one, I said, already castigating myself for my earlier panic. Panic is contagious. Then with a crooked helmet went back to the gate and photographed the scene. It was a false alarm and the Oshwal Center was not under attack.

Later that afternoon, Ole Lenku held a press conference, web of cords from the television cameras, photographers crouched in front of the long table covered with floor-length cloth.

I was crouched in front of the long table where he was giving his briefing, trying to stay out of the way of the cameras and still hear what he was saying. I kept the helmet on because it was easier than lugging the clunky thing around and juggling it in my hands with my cameras and bag. It’s funny in retrospect. Anyway. I listened as the interior minister said,

The fire at Westgate is from mattresses that have caught fire.

Later reports confirmed the explosion occurred when the Kenyan army shot an antitank missile into the grocery store, collapsing that part of the mall, the “siege” was officially declared over the next day, on the fourth day after the attack started.

When in power and billions richer than your citizens, you can say and do whatever you want and buy your way out of any roadblocks. A few scapegoated army officers were sacked for looting tho it was very widespread and a full postmortem of the attack was never delivered.

I met the speedboat at the jetty in Shela at 5am. The almost-full moon was out and the sun rose as we sped toward Pate Island inside the Lamu archipelago, a string of islands on the Indian Ocean coast in Kenya, near the border with Somalia.

It took about 90 minutes to get to Mkokoni on the mainland on the other side of Pate where we had breakfast at a hotel. Mkoko means mangrove. Mangrove roots tented above the waterline. Dropped off half of the group nearby then I went with Dr. Masoud Ali, a nephrologist at King Fahd Hospital in Lamu, to a village called Chandani on Kiwayu island.

Dr Masoud “Masoudi” they called him. He was born in Lamu and went to med school in Mombasa. He works with young Kenyans on mental and physical health issues, r/t lifestyle leading to diabetes, so he set up a youth radio network called Radio Lamu to address these and other problems like unemployment, and drug use (mugoka, marijuana, valium, amiltryptine).

He said he’s getting fake or substandard drugs at the hospital.

At Kiwayu Chandani, we were met by a health ambassador from the village. Some residents had set up a plastic table and chairs under a tamarind tree. (This environment~! remote, warm, near the water, so far from the windowless freezing-in-January-and-in-July ER where I worked). There were about 8 households there, solar panels, tv discs. I did some assessments and Dr. Masoud re-assessed, took patient histories, and wrote prescriptions. We saw a lot of upper respiratory infections, patients with diabetes. There was no covid here. There is dengue on Lamu Island but not on Kiwayu.

When all the patients had been seen, we went to join the first group at Mkokoni dispensary on the mainland.

//

Captain Fahmi loves Bollywood.

At the Mkokoni dispensary, he lay on a bench in the triage area, watching Bollywood on his phone, the sweeping music was the soundtrack to the scene: health care workers taking vital signs, prescription papers rustling, conversations in Swahili.

Patients were waiting outside in a ribbon of shade along wooden benches, for triage, for consultation, for pharmacy. A girl of about 4 or 5 watched cartoons on a Chinese-made smartphone with a friend.

There wasn’t anything for me to do, so I took notes and talked to Amina.

The Mkokoni dispensary is run by the county government of Lamu and Safari Doctors was piloting a new charting system app called Banda Health. At the triage station, Amina Abshir, a health ambassador, said she liked using the app and it helped with inventory. “It’s easier to package and stock meds. And it’s easier to know a patient’s diagnosis and what meds they take.” The app collates how many patients have x problem and analyses the data, to see if instances of diabetes are going up or down, for ex.

The main health problems in Mkokoni catchment area (844 pax) were diabetes and hypertension. Some patients were referred to Lamu since hypertension can lead to stroke.

We spent the night at a house in Tchundwa on Pate Island. In the evening after we inventoried the medicines we took a slow walk to the football pitch where Masoud was playing a pick up game, talking and laughing and relaxed. Light on the long leaves, chewing moringa seeds from the moringa tree in the garden, and then sitting on a cement platform, asalaam aleikum to the older men gathered to watch, their shoes on the ground, laughing and talking and cheering for Masoud.

I shared a room with Mary, a nightshift maternity nurse in Lamu town, who was also volunteering that week, and we talked about nursing and night shift while lying in our beds. Mary’s schedule is 7 nights on, then two weeks off, which seems like a perfect schedule to me. Part of the difficulty for many nurses in the US is vagaries of scheduling. At the hospital where I worked, we were required to work a certain number of Mondays, Sundays and weekends so I never had a regular schedule, and on night shift this meant I was always in a half-awake fugue state, having micro-sleeps while standing in line at the grocery store.

Curtains, ceiling fan. I slept well and we had breakfast at 7.

We left for Shanga Ishakani dispensary on Pate Island, piled into the Land Rover. I helped out in the pharmacy area with Mariam and Halima from SHA. Mariam and I talked about the USAID cuts and the repercussions here. “People are starting to die now,” she said; deaths from manageable (with consistent care and medicine) illnesses like TB and cholera are rising since healthcare workers’ pay has been frozen, vital HIV and other medicines are blocked in warehouses. ((Clearly reforms were necessary within USAID and it’s an opportunity for Kenya’s Ministry of Health to step up, but ending these vital health programs with no plan in the name of “efficiency” and then spending more than the money saved to bail out Argentina’s far-right was one totally insane act in this too-hot-in-the-hot-tub hot pot we’re swimming in.))

We saw many women and babies. Many older men and women with hypertension. They got stat losartan and amlodipine, handed directly in a paper envelope.

Headscarves and lesos.

Primary care is communication and trust.

So here’s my survival strategy for November of 2025

1. Go to drag shows

I went to a drag show, Topcoat, on Wednesday night at Theatre de la gymnase on the Grands Boulevards. Now I only want to be around drag queens forever. Beyond the duet sung in meows, and the rendition of People by Barbara Streisand, there was a gorgeous, complex, and defiant moment when two of the queens sang Creep by Radiohead and changed the lyrics to We are creeps / We are weirdos / What the hell are we doing here? We do belong here.

This song, which was an anthem of sorts for me in my troubled adolescence, holds it all.

“No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.” ~ Mark Doty

2. Narrate parts of each day with song

My sister Alie and I have made up entire mini-musicals on the spot, and now my day to day singing looks like :

people behind their computers in the afternooooon~!

cleaning the tub with a bit of bleach, yea yea~!

Hmmm, in words on a screen it doesn’t seem nearly as fun. Try it and let me know how it goes?

This singing is part of an overall strategy (ha ha) to

3. Make / find / orient to enchantment.

I put rose petals and star anise in my tea, drink moringa and marshmallow and nettle infusions, sprinkle rosewater on my pillowcase. When I was in Kenya I geeked out and bought a liter of moringa oil from farmers on the coast, and I’ve been mixing and blending it with essential oils of lavender, patchouli, rose, geranium, cedar wood.

4. Map the interior

Mind maps help me visualize the otherwise vague and shifting mists of my interior life. I sometimes call my journals Maps of the Interior. I was feeling a bit far from the process that sustained me all my life. I started thinking, What if I never write again?

So I started waking up and starting the day with this process which creates subtle shifts; and if nothing else when I start the day with writing (even if it’s just executive whining) then I feel like I have more space to maneuver in, that there is not such a weight pressing down.

I also map the interior when I sit and stare into a candle flame and breathe.

“Art does not reflect the visible, it renders visible.” ~Paul Klee

Since 2020, in the deep lockdown days, I’ve been drawing more and more. Recently, a friend commissioned me to draw pictures of her cats to give as holiday presents to her daughters, and I’d love to draw more cats in November. Would you like me to draw portraits of your cat (or dog/turtle/goldfish)? It works like this: If you send me a photo of your pet, I’ll make an original drawing in ink and watercolor crayon on thick watercolor paper. Here is the link to place an order~! I’ll keep the link open until November 29th to give time for completion and shipping in time for the holidays. I can’t ship to the former United States from France with regular mail, so it has to be FedEx.

Thanks as always for reading ~

I can remember the feeling of holding and being held as we said goodbye then never spoke again.

We were unavailable (it’s almost built into the definition of a certain kind of journalist) and even though we only kissed, after that I played the shame game as if I’m not allowed to be a human who fucks up and makes mistakes.

Time races then sputters. We made it up. I want to make up something new.

Feeling of being dragged through a napkin ring.

What a meat grinder of a time this is.

Here’s what I’m doing lately to stop becoming an amorphous blob constantly tapping at the screen for _________ (news, info, likes, love, togetherness):

1. Going toward friction

If there’s no friction, how do I know I’m alive, I wrote in 2020, thinking about big tech, driverless cars, swipe-swiping though life, digital payments, faster expressways, Uber, access, Zoom calls and internet dating. The underpinning of suburban life : comfort and cheap gasoline.

Going toward friction means feeling my resistance and fear to doing certain things and doing them anyway. I mean I’ve actually done this a lot but now without dissociating. Along with this, I’ve become so comfortable with a certain level of discomfort, trying new things, “running towards rejection.” Earlier this year I wrote, How would I move in the world if I were not trying to “feel better”? Thinking about the ways self-improvement messaging in the US can be so harmful.

2. Running towards rejection. In 2019 I heard an interview with Dan Savage of Savage Love and what he said that I remember most and think about often is : Run toward rejection. Very hard, given that I’ve already lived with so much rejection of all kinds. Yet I might be starting to see a tiny glimmer of a tiny space where I can live, in which being rejected doesn’t matter. I’m running toward rejection by trying online dating on Feeld (eek, sooo far from the rain-lit room and my GenXness), saying / posting things before I’ve obsessively combed through them for everyway I can potentially be rejected or misunderstood for saying / writing them, trying things I feel resistance / friction around, talking to people I don’t know that I’m not already in a work/social situation with, etc. It’s kind of fun in a terrifying way.

3. Keeping my environment so so so organized, wiping down the counters, dusting out the corners, doing the dishes the night before so I can wake up to clean surfaces. Still the papers pile up… A poet I know has been setting her table with antique china tea sets and beautiful napkins, flowers, candles.

4. Staying informed about events in the former United States (and its interconnecting networks of harm) via these vital resources:

Heather Cox Richardson

Your Local Epidemiologist

Recovering

5. Practicing a martial art and swimming also walking everywhere

6. I’m teaching photojournalism at Spéos, a photo school in Paris, and it has been enlivening to talk with them and tell some stories and talk about their approaches and what they want to do and have been doing. Talking together in a circle is ! !

Thanks for reading and please stay in touch~

We set the table with china scavenged from the rich side of the city.

Bone white. Bloodstone.

blue lines and dates etched, napkins folded thrice

steam on the city picture window you should see the view from

here

i pour tea and grind glass

Red thread, pages

the sky as a page. The page as sky / corrupting what she said last night

Something lights up, a pathway a spark

I almost understood everything, whoever “I” is.

(I saw something flash open then lost it. ~Anne Carson)

Lives on the brink

hinges.

We kept partying in the streets, flags, then tanks.

Arms / up

marveled at how clean the city was, after.

Being hinges on… what?

Can’t explain it to you, daddy.

Don’t you see

There’s no time

I can live with power cuts. It’s the hubris I can’t stand.

“Can you fight the urge to run for another day?” ~ Brandi Carlisle

*

December 2022

So what’s the secret to ED nursing? I asked P. He was eating peanut butter and graham crackers off of the desktop at the nurses’ station. P was mostly in the trauma bay and had shaved off his mustache. I guess it was just for Movember.

Slow and steady. maximum efficiency, have a thick skin, he said. Getting all the tasks done one after the other. Can I go into each of these three rooms and collect all the labs and print out the labels and bring them to the lab in one stretch?

Want a paper towel? I asked and he laughed about needing to challenge the immune system sometimes. I say that but I just got sick last week, he said.

From eating graham crackers on unprotected surfaces? I laughed.

No, from having a kid in preschool.

*

*

28 January 2023

Yesterday I went in early and had two patients. J was in atrial flutter so the docs cardioverted her. With the help of F (she was so calm, I was so nervous!) I prepped the room, suction, BVM, O2. We put the pads on her chest and back, hooked them up to the Zolls AED. F gave the fentanyl (because being cardioverted fucking hurts, I’m told). I gave 2mg of Versed, the sedative. They called clear and shocked her.

I charted all of her pre- intra- and post-procedure vitals and RASS scores. It was a good intro to using and setting up the Zolls AED without the pressure / panic / anxiety of a code. I was anxious anyway because it was all new. 3 docs in the room. 2 techs to help us set up. I was so glad F was there.

The cardioversion was successful; she converted back to normal sinus rhythm. Once J came out of sedation I stayed with her and got the EKG and a few hours later she was dressed and going home.

3 May 2023

Bumbling forth, making my discoveries.

The feeling of stuckness is just me bumping up against the part of the mind that doesn’t “know” and that seeks to control everything.

I slip out through a trap door in my heart (“the latches of being” ~Anne Carson) and into a bright garden (of song).

*

January 2023

Candles lit. Listening to sirens, and rain.

I did the math for my life and at least for this month I will be okay.

Sometimes I feel like someone who kills herself in jail because they can't imagine a future. Sometimes the future dream is all that pulls me through the day.

Candles lit, listening to sirens and rain.

I did the math for my life and just for this next month, I am okay.

Wet streets, leafless trees, the interior cocoon of january.

I felt a bit of peace, waking up at 11:00 in my rain-lit apartment.

I feel invisible. Who can feel visible when everyone is looking down at their phones (the face I gaze into more than any other).

My hands ache. Sometimes it wakes me up at night.

Limited avenues of the rational mind.

A murder of crows in the yard, big and fat. Wings, caws, acid swaths of black feathers.

May 6

Outer time aligned with inner time: slow, generative, way leads onto way.

Inside my own snow globe, encapsulated time, colors and lights projected on the rim, the sclera, cornea, aqueous humor, veined, held.

*
May 7

Patient H and her overprotective husband. Couldn’t get a vein; it kept blowing. He was dismissive “We should’ve gone to Sacred Heart”.

*
10 May

I called off work yesterday. Oh yes. After a four-night stretch. I picked up my glasses at LensCrafters. I went to South Mountain and hiked up to the stream, then followed a tiny path and ended up in a copse of pines with a Japanese dogwood dropping petals on the pine needle floor and the late afternoon light on it all. Someone had formed a sitting place from a log wedged into three slender trees and planted in the ground. I sat there and asked to give love to receive love to see love to move with love. I could hear the highway and a truck backing up.

A double pine needle fell in my lap, and I found it had curled into a heart shape, a loose knot.

I don’t have words. I have colors, moods.

*
May 12

I worked last night. I woke up at 4 PM with messages from Maggie and I called her. Kevin is moving back to Allentown from Florida with Kenza and the bébé.

Just in time before it falls into the sea, we laughed

I told Maggie about night shift and she said, Aye, you’re doing the Lord’s work.

I’m tired of doing the Lord’s work! I laughed.

Well, only the Lord is hiring, she said, and we cracked up.

*

Notebook slowing down as it comes to an end. I have a halter monitor on. I got a bike! Dad and I rode yesterday in the Parkway.

Went walking in Rose Garden, saw a bird chase a squirrel!

I still feel like a wan little mermaid in Ursula‘s garden, the life sucked out of her.

Being a full-time artist is too scary at the moment, the depths, with no support.

*

May 14

Dream. Jason. Prophecy.

Blank eyes, lace trees.

Most writing is memoir, I said.

In the dream, I was writing the dream down on the couch cushions, ink bleeding through fabric

I don’t have to tell you there was something sacred in it, the sheets tucked, the wheels along the hallways, the heart monitors. There were nights that were quiet even if we didn’t say so (you never say the Q word) and it almost felt peaceful, especially in that old building in the center of town, with its grandfather clock and folding doors, its layers of history. There was a small pewter lamp in a glass case (the Nightingale award) mounted next to the carbon monoxide alarm. I don’t have to tell you there were times when it was impossible to see the shape of anything. It had to be enough just to get through the night.

(Thanks for opening this text. If you liked it, please click the little heart at the bottom, or hit reply to send a message directly. I love your replies and comments. If you’re a regular reader and you enjoy reading these posts, please consider sharing this Substack with a friend.)

I’ve been walking around lately saying, The End Times have got me down. Trying to bring gallows humor because what else am I good for? One of my big fears is to be a burden or a drag. Also it’s a position I aspire to, seeing it all, without flinching, taking it all into consideration, seeing and not bringing more damage or panic or hatred to an already untenable situation, or just to a conversation. To see and remember the fucking gorgeousness of this earth and our world (seas, corals, octopuses, lawns full of dandelions, babyfriends, orchards, rivers, sleep) which is the poetry that is not to be fucking fucked with. I’ve been in some very bad situations and I’ve known that my role was at the least to not fall apart (at least not right then) and try to hold it together for those who were having a very bad fucking day.

Ongoingness, we buy bread in one part of town while the port is being shelled.

The billionaires love the end-times narrative (building flashy bunkers with armed security guards and asking, How do I get them to obey me after the Event?) it’s better for arms manufacturers and tech corporations for us to be terrified and buying stuff, stocking up, terrified people are so easy to control, endlessly scrolling the machine, looking for answers, disembodied, pixelated.

When I scroll too much I feel flattened out under a microscope slide, thin and transparent, with no access to the depth and breadth of my human life, my memory frays, I confuse the details, I forget the beauty. (Jia Tolentino wrote about something parallel in her recent New Yorker essay, My Brain Finally Broke.)

My dark subconscious loves the end-times narrative, the worst thing imaginable, it’s got a magnetic energy that is exciting, oh good, no more responsibility, I finally don’t have to live like a domesticated cat anymore and can find out what I’m actually made of, alone and maybe armed with a past I can’t face… ok maybe I’m too influenced by movies like Cyborg and Blade Runner and Mad Max and I’m not a man so maybe part of the dream is that (very American) idea-myth of total self-sufficiency. It’s certainly not as ordinary as boring old daily life … just… going on. Still having to make the bed, do the dishes, file the taxes. Certainly the militias in Pennsylvania playing GI Joe in their hidey holes with their AR15s are loving the end-times story, called up, a sense of purpose. Even tho none of them (minus the veterans) has seen what a bullet can do to a human body. In the US there’s not much to hang a cohesive national story on (like what are we given for purpose, happiness?) so we atomize and here we are.

French researcher Charles Rojzman made his life’s work about social therapy, and did conflict resolution and reconciliation work in Rwanda, Colombia, etc. His main theme was the importance of moving through (interpersonal or international or intergroup) conflict without violence.

I had a dream where I was in a close conversation with a guy who said he was elonmusk but wasn’t elonmusk. He said humans were herds. I said, thinking of Nadia Bolz-Weber and Ram Dass, we are all divine little fuckups far from home. He said he was going to win the sim. I said even if we were living in a sim what would that even change, especially for the most vulnerable? We’d still be confined to gravity and whatever else keeps us in 3D on this plane of reality. I took a lot of color-coded notes in my notebook with diagrams.

elonmusk said Casey Means was involved in something top secret. I said stop trying to make Mars happen.

I have to admit this wasn’t my first dream with elonmusk. Once, deep in the pandemic lockdown in 2020, I dreamed that I died and was standing outside the gates of I guess heaven. Sometimes when I tell this story I say I was “standin’ outside the pearly gates” using a voice that I think of as my Italian Long Island cousins’ or Mel Brooks’. The gates opened and elonmusk came out and said, How did you like the Earth sim?

I think this dream was sparked because in January in waking life elonmusk followed me on Substack, except it wasn’t elonmusk. Then in April in waking life Amanda Fucking Palmer followed me on Substack, except it wasn’t AFP, it was some kind of pirate bot. The real AFP is such a badass.

On Sunday my friend Soizic and I went to Théâtre de Chaillot to see 360, a contemporary dance performance by the choreographer Mehdi Kerkouche, 8 dancers on a circular stage with a metal cylindrical platform. In part of the hour-long performance, the dancers grapple with each other and each one tries to climb to the top of the platform, they pull on each other, move and flip in and out of the metalwork of the center of the cylinder. One makes it to the top and spins and dances and the light shines on her. I thought it was like how we are online, trying to get 15 nanoseconds of attention, or trying to get others to pay attention to something, before that spotlight moves on and that something gets buried in the next something and something vital frays at the center. Two of the dancers were locked together, holding hands, they tried to separate and throw each other to the ground, then they held each other and flew around in circles, a dance of I fucking lovehate you so much I can’t let go why are we like this?

*

The future is unwritten.

So I’m posting these notebook pages instead, and I’ll tell you a bit about about now now. A tiny daily act of creativity, filed under Stay Human.

Last week there was a sudden hailstorm that shredded new leaves from the trees and clipped these geraniums from the neighbor’s window boxes. My friend’s plexiglass skylight was smashed and churches in the area reported broken stained glass windows. There were little piles of hailstones all over the neighborhood but it didn’t occur outside of central Paris.

I moved into an empty apartment along the Camino, where it moves through central Paris towards Notre Dame, brass markers in the cobblestones. The apartment looks empty but it is not empty, it is everything. It fills with light and church bells in the late afternoon. I washed the walls with salt water. It feels like open space to think and write and draw. It is the void, alive with potential. The first rule of the Void is you don't try to fill it. You are just in it. Being in the void is being in the creative not-knowing.

it is a vast mirror (sea)

and you have to sit (t)here in désoeuvrement (a kind of effortless concentration) even tho there’s no there there and sometimes it feels like sitting in a raspberry bramble, itchy and thorny.

You were never not in the void; though you may have filled it with a story.

The void is the blank screen / page / lake

Cursor / pen / waiting

In April I went to visit friends in Catalunya, near the border with Spain, and I saw an owl! The owl was on a window ledge outside of a museum. We stared at each other for awhile. Then I went outside and the owl was still there and we stared at each other for another while. This drawing of an owl only kind of looks like the owl I saw; both owls are fledglings.

In March my friend Soizic and I did a series of workshops we called Lire le paysage (based on my book project) with her history/geography students who are studying to be professors in lycées in France. We walked around Ile Seguin, and studied its history (Renault car factory) and present day (Seine Musicale concert hall designed by Shigeru Ban), while making sketches / thinking about the visual and somatic experience of the place, falling through layers of history.

/

Basically now every time I make a decision, I usually end up thinking something like, You really stuck your foot into it this time, McFly.

I’m looking for a new form.

/

/

Below is a basic story I wrote 7 years ago about a trip in 1996, when I drove across the US, our broken history held together by highways like twine. Yet what flashes and cuts is the last light on the water near Sleepy Eye, the splintery brown paneling of J’s apartment and the strip of dried grass near the parking lot chainlink fence, August morning too bright by 9am. The way the land went dark green and grey after the dusky red and violet of the Badlands, then the purple loosestrife and pine of Mount Rainier, coyotes in the night.

(You’ll say I’m nostalgic, but I am not. I am grieving this world.

I’m always living at the very edge of my capacity, creating my life anew and without maps or guides, pushing myself onward, so I’m often anxious or nervous or afraid. So in my memory I return to old rooms and faces to see their light again, to live inside past experiences so I can see their beauty and texture without the screen of staticky fear and anxiety.)

What is better than a Quest? Time stretched out across roads, hills, counted in bags of pretzels and gas station coffee, scratchy heartbreak music from the West,

calls made from pay phones to let you know I’m ok.

/

I went everywhere I wasn’t supposed to go. As a kid, I ran in the cornfield across from our house, making trails and mazes. I waded in the creek that cut through the small woods. I trespassed in the new houses that ate the cornfield, climbing in the raw ceiling beams and crawling through the newly-laid cement drainage pipes underground.

At 19 I bought a car for 500 dollars and drove to California, alone. I wanted to go alone, it was a quest, a mission. To put myself in a position where I had only myself to depend on. I feared weakness and I thought this kind of quest could strengthen me. I burned a lot of rocket fuel to burst through the centrifugal force of my family’s worry and doubt about this plan.

Young girl on the road alone! You’re a target! What if the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere?!

I’ll call AAA.

What if you get a flat tire?

I got a jack and a spare.

They kept it up though, daily barrages of worry and doubt, worst case scenarios, Dad being stern, That car’s already been in an accident once. Mom pleading and afraid, Just find someone to go with you! And eventually they wore me down and I started asking friends to go on the trip I had planned, which would even start with friends: E and M and I would drive up to Montreal and then hit the Phish concert in Plattsburg before heading west to the Active Resistance Counter Convention in Chicago. Then I’d be on my own across the Badlands, the Black Hills, Montana, the mountains in Washington. I planned to leave in mid-August and I figured I had enough money saved to last about two months. I saved money from a job unpacking frozen bagels at Insalaco’s grocery store while in school, and a job at Rodale Childcare Center that summer, plus babysitting. I took a leave of absence from college to go. Most friends were starting school themselves or had jobs so they couldn’t go. This guy J said he’d be game. I had met him once before in Maine, a stoner from Minnesota.

J bailed when we got to Chicago, said he didn’t have the money he said he had to travel, said he was going home to Minnesota with some friends.

I had what I wanted. And now I was afraid. Should I just go home? Maybe it was crazy and irresponsible to think I could drive thousands of miles alone. What if I did break down in the middle of nowhere?

I decided to follow J and his friends in their car on the all-night drive up to Minnesota, just to not be alone for another day and sort myself out there. At 3 in the morning we got lost on some flat roads surrounded by nothing but cornfields, junctions were severe 90 degree angles that looked exactly the same, so if you got turned around and lost your bearings, you’d have no idea if you were facing the way you’d just come, the road you’d just traveled. We made it to J’s apartment around 9 am, he climbed up the stairs to his faceless apartment in a block of brown paneled apartments and said goodbye. He didn’t invite me in to use the bathroom. Now I was really on my own. I looked around the parking lot, cracked and faded, with a frayed chain link fence around it and a 4-foot-wide strip of grass between the fence and the faded asphalt. Critically exhausted, I pulled my purple cotton sleeping bag out of the car and laid it down on that little strip of grass. I hadn’t rested five minutes before a woman yelled from her screen door, “Hey! What the hell you think yer doing? You can’t sleep here!” She stepped through the door. “Get on out of here!” I stuffed my sleeping bag in the car and drove away. The tears I was choking back burned my eyes. I was so fucking pissed off and also now so fucking scared. Dad was right. I’m totally irresponsible. What was I thinking!? How can I travel all these miles alone? I’m such a target. I’m all alone.

I just drove West, I got what I wanted after all. I saw an exit for the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Highway and headed towards Sleepy Eye.

Hours later, I pulled off to the side of the road at a campsite. The end-of-day sun was slanting over the ground and the campsites were arranged around a little stream. It was deserted. I walked to the stream and put my hands in the water, rinsed my face. The sun made everything glow. I looked at the water in my hands and I thought, Right now, I’m safe. I’m ok. The fear is caused by the voices yapping in my head about worst-case scenarios and what ifs. Right now, I’m ok. It’s a lesson I’ve learned and forgotten and relearned and re-forgotten countless times. It’s rare that we can just be present and not tossed away by our thoughts. For once there was some space in my head, I felt the sun and the water. I just focused on that. I accepted that I was alone but I had everything I needed to continue.

Truth music. Banjo. Appalachia. Journeys. Why have I never heard of her before? These are songs from the hills, where my grandmother, Arleeda, spent the early years of her life until she met my grandfather, Pasquale, and went with him to the mining town of Hazleton, PA, where she kept a pot of coffee on the stove and the screen door open for friends and family and canasta parties for the next 50 years. I write this from Kenya, where somehow I've lived for 3.5 years. I don't know what drives me to live so far from my family and the daily loveliness of finishing each other's sentences and filling each other's cups and knocking around playing Scrabble in our "house outfits" or why I traveled away at all. I only know it was always there. The need to go. To trespass. To explore. From the time I was three and packed a tiny suitcase of scarves and pretended to ride a train to San Francisco. And Arleeda never drove. She walked. Maybe I got my love of walking from her. She always said when I was 16 and got my license we'd drive to California. At 19, a year after she died, I drove to California in a 500 dollar car. I picked up her voice in songs like these all across the U.S. Do we have children to fulfill the dreams we couldn't touch?

I first traveled to see how I can live, if I can live, as someone unattached by family bonds. When I first came to Paris, I wrote about trying to “write myself clean. To learn who I could be without the centrifugal forces of family, nation, and language.”

[Insert book-length manuscript about a young American’s geo-political awakening in Paris here]. In short, or, the tl;dr is, I don’t exist without my connection to my family, nation, etc, we are all entangled and part of each other. I am still my mother’s daughter, even if I’m often (physically) far from her. There is no clean slate.

A few months after that moment by the lake, I traveled to Sardinia for my cousin Nathan’s wedding to Marta, who was born there. All of the Italian American cousins and aunts and uncles came from Pennsylvania and Delaware, and it was the last time our family was whole. I missed my flight from Nairobi yet made it just in time for the sun on the tablecloths and toasts and petals thrown. From Rome, my Italian cousin Casimiro led us in a convoy of vans to San Mauro, the stone village where my grandfather, Pasquale, and his sister, Angelina, were born. We spent a few days there with the last remaining Italian family members. I walked in the hills and sang, calling across the sea, that longing and distance and presence.

I’ve been making notes all my life for an epic book about this family. It’s a story about how we create our lives out of the stories we’ve been given, and what we do with facts, rumors, family story, and intrigue. I’m aware that because most of the people involved are dead, it’s probably not possible to ever know “what really happened”, and so I am writing notes about the journey and process of collecting family stories and trying to find some small truth. And it’s a story about the early 20th century immigration myth of the “new world” where you could leave your terrible past behind and be made new, blank, clean-slated in the English language and the open terrain of “America”.

How much of the “past” can one take in, before it takes over?

This book will most likely never be completed. Or someone (or a robot) will find my notebooks buried in a tin box in a garden and finish it for me, for us. (In this way, the robot would learn about human life and longing and family.)

Grey light, black hats, grim faces. Where does that image come from? The photos (Steichen?) of the immigrants arriving at Ellis Island? Smoke stacks. The slanted wooden plank with a rope railing where two children in rough cotton shirts, Pasquale and Angelina, walked off the ship, the SS Conte Biancamano, and touched this new, bitter land. They were promised gold. They were alone. People everywhere at the port. The sea as gulf, cipher, as they crossed. He stood on deck and looked at the flat grey blue sea and grey sky, a line between two greys like a Rothko. Coal dust in his clothes, he didn’t know yet that it would be his future.

This is a photograph of my grandfather, Pasquale DeCusatis (L), with his best friend Gene Lucadamo in Hazleton, PA. He looks to be in his 30s then, maybe on a rare day off from the coal mines, but I’m not sure. He crossed the Atlantic at age 9 on the SS Conte Biancamano, arriving at Ellis Island and waiting for three days in a residence until his father came to take him to Pennsylvania. At this point, he thought his mother, Grazia, was dead, and his father introduced him to his new stepmother.

Grazia didn’t see her son again until he was a man in his 40s, with three children of his own and a wife with a voice from Appalachia. That day, as they stand in the kitchen back in Naples, Grazia keeps touching his hand. That’s all I can see and all I can imagine from the fragments of the story I’ve been given. They barely have a language between them anymore, his mother tongue wrung out of him by the years, the coal, the “American dream”. They stand in the kitchen and she keeps touching his hand, a lace curtain shifts in the window.

Their language was burned for fuel.

Screen of leaves clinging, old stone, wet smears of amber lamplight, sound of horses’ hooves. smell of lamp black and river moss, a bridge. translating these visual images into language.

aligned with the (purity) of the vision

(American food like crack)

water running in the sluiceways to the river and the sea

two people in their mid twenties in the night garden lilacs a’flare with late spring early summer, June 2001 in the world before

Dimanche, no bells

Carole Maso’s American Woman in a Chinese Hat was a Pastis fever dream, the interiority of a breakup, a mental break / through.

What I want to take from it for my project is that interiority, notebooks full of ink, the gorgeousness of the notebook process

(Through the walls I can hear mom on the phone with her friend Linda, the clicking of the plastic Cinderella figurine that was Grandmam’s. She dances when the Sun hits her. There's Grandmam, Dad will say, standing at the window looking out at the bluebirds. I hear the slower click of the clock. Even Dick was in heaven, Linda's coal region accent is so deep. I look for quiet when I do my work but maybe what I need is presence.

Quiet just isn't possible anymore, or soundlessness might be, sealing the walls with tape and foam, or stillness which is what I seek overall. Quiet isn't possible with traffic, construction, the collective freak-out here in the US, bombarded constantly with commerce, TV at the gas pumps spewing ads I can't turn off.)

Paris has been a solace, likely not in the same way this time.

Cloud-cast sky, bare branches and springy paths of humans and dirt.

(In therapy today (15 October 2024) S said Trastevere had always been a healing site. Now the maternal hospital is there. I was telling her about this project, the energy that gathers at these sites where today grand churches stand, yet in the classicist’s view, you'd walk around and feel the energy and then build a temple there. S said I should read Peter Ackroyd, his book on London. I'm not sure what kind of brain I have but I intimate it is creative and makes connections across “ walls” of disciplines and domains and thought systems… and that is how I have always actually worked and will continue to work until my hands stop working amen)

On the walk to St Cloud over the passerelle

the city

La defense

The periphery highway as a border, a wall

who is allowed in, kept out?

the wall becomes porous

I am porous

led by intuition, crows.

(( Sites like Delphi

deep in the psyche

the world is a thought, consciousness. no boundary.

the Border exists in our minds (this is how we will co-create the next World)

the Border (on a map in our minds in laws and language) doesn't exist in the present, on site, on land)

when S talked about the energy at Delphi I felt electricity in my body

I am moving towards that feeling of electricity ))

The fact

of a notebook (a door frame)

the material (materiality).

To sit at the sacred sites

You are here, said a voice.

lamp black and soot on stone

Notre Dame wears a scaffold, lines rewritten by fire.

((For the past week I have been watching Killing Eve in the evenings. Villanelle has (had) a sanctuary apartment in Paris. Gray raw walls, armoire, she has a sparkling sadness.

In the show Villanelle and Eve have a tension, a push pull, attract and repel, their magnets flipping back and forth.

Eve destroys Villanelle's Paris sanctuary.

Today in Pennsylvania there is wind. D reports there is wind in Cape Town too. The Aurora Borealis was visible in much of the further southern hemispheres due to solar activity. What does it mean, etch-a-sketch, the erasure

This is so BORING!

Villanelle at the Rijksmuseum before the Old Masters

I bore myself with word play

What I want to say is I am alive

Today (14 Oct 2024)

It is Tuesday. I feel a quiet presence guiding me. The world is burning. I don't know what to say or do. I'm writing in a zone of stillness before my parents return and start watching network news, of a world aflame. How many more of these hours? ((before they come for me too?))

Say one of the voices in the work is a resistance fighter undercover as a maid.

I am writing about Paris as a bell, a cipher. I write this in the context of

a darkening (sky)

Paris is / was a halte

a stopping place

for people on the run

.

I started writing this post a few months or weeks ago as notes from working in situations where things fall apart. Then I wrote something to trace the absolute absurdity of everything going on right now. Then it all accelerated and is accelerating and everything I wanted to write got scattered.

My strategy for, not keeping up with the news but titrating just enough info to not become incapacitated, is to go to a newsstand and buy the paper FT Weekend, read the headlines and some articles in lemonde.fr, read the headlines of the nytimes.com, scan reax on LinkedIn, try (unsuccessfully) to ignore reax on FB. I was checking in to IG once a week or two, which I told everyone was “amazing,” but then posted some pictures in a bid to start trying to work as a photographer again, and hence became hooked again, and felt terrible again, and now check in once a day or two, as if I ever found work via IG in the first place. It’s fun to try to re-enter an industry I was never in in the first place, and which can be argued doesn’t really exist. But as a total masochist I’m down.

I started reading whitehouse.gov for laughs, which is something I never thought I’d do, and just, wow. The language of the decree that now the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of America is very … fun.

If you haven’t read it by now, the VP, Secretary of Defense, and top government officials texted war plans via Signal app. They included Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg in the Signal chat, and then talked about their detailed plans (locations, personnel, materiel) for strikes on Houthis in Yemen, then two hours later said attacks, um, occurred. Their use of emojis was everything; the Financial Times agreed!

I guess no one gets out of the clown car funhouse horror show unscathed.

Here’s something I wrote to my friend Maggie during the WMD absurdity of the US war in Iraq in 2005. As teenagers, Maggie and I used to write newsletters to each other from a town we made up called Coogan’s Bluff, our misunderstanding of the title of the 1968 film with Clint Eastwood. Coogan’s Bluff was ruled by a group of entitled inbred billionaire evangelical fanatics. Maybe we sniffed the future in the fumes of rubber cement.

*

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Skunk Hollow, PA

19 November 2005

Former vacuum cleaner company, DustBuster, announces its merger with

Haliburton. The new company, OilBuster, has updated the Cold War-era eraser

cleaning machine:

"It's something the kids can really get with," claimed Stew McGibbens, CEO

of DustBuster. Although the eraser cleaning machine of yore was a clunky,

50-pound device, the new version boasts a soundless dust sucking mechanism,

interior self-cleaning features, and automatic shut-off. Now kids won't

spend precious minutes running the erasers over and over the rubber runners.

This eraser cleaning machine holds the eraser in place while its micro

scrubbing action removes the dust particle by particle.

The new model also navigates the office by way of its robotic hover-craft

mechanism, shreds and memorizes confidential documents, contains a built-in

camera and 50 MB of memory. Valued by the White House and the CIA,

President George W Bush said,"Under the Patriot Act, the new eraser cleaning machine is now imperative for all 'Merican families."

Widely hyped by Wal-mart, MTV, and Fox News, the newly-minted eraser

cleaning machine is expected to be the #1 big buy for Christmas this year.

*

This winter in Paris went on forever, as Rilke wrote, There is one winter that is so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it can your heart survive.

I thought I knew winter, but I forgot how weeks can go by without seeing a sunbeam in Northern Europe. My first notebook of 2005 was called One Long Winter. It didn’t end until 28 March.

This winter had cozy day-long walks in bare forests with the smell of woodsmoke and salt; I followed GR trails with red and white blazes that track through a green belt that encircles Ile-de-France, the main region around Paris. I walked through a place where druid stones are still standing around a giant oak tree.

This winter started in November on the day after the elections. Jen, a poet friend, and I wrote in our notebooks in response to Bhanu Kapil’s 12 questions from her book, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. Here are some things I wrote then.

Question # 4 How will you live now?

I don’t know. I really do not. I am a runner. I ran. Thought I’d lean into cowardice. I will continue. How can you stop the rot? How can a fruit not rot when the neighbors are fuzzed and decaying? when the barrel doesn’t hold? I deflect. I do not know how I will live now. By the pen. Tracing a contour from inside the insides. By lamp black, by wick, inside the shadow cast by flame, white taper.

Question #8 What are the consequences of silence?

Your silence will not protect you. You cannot draw silence around you like a cloak of invisibility. It won’t hang like that. Won’t shine like that. Your silence won’t rebuild the rubble, won’t make water for your thirst. The consequences of silence are never finding a patch to stand on.

Question #7 What do you remember about the earth?

The earth was home, for a time. It was paradise, once.

*

Now the snowdrops and cherry blossoms and daffodils are out~ And we even had almost two weeks of sun in a row~! The peacocks are spreading their feathers. I carry a small notebook to catch things like this:

Fledgling things are unfurling.

This daffodil print on 100% cotton paper is on sale in my shop.

Sending love and courage.

I struggle with being human. I only just recently realized I’m not a wood sprite with unlimited energy and time and capacity. I have so.many.creative.ideas. I want to realize them ALL. I used to think with enough EFFORT and creativity and tenacity I could sieve them from the ethers and present them, spinning with life, to the world.

The unwelcome realization that I’m not a wood sprite came sometime in the middle of the year and a half I was a night-shift emergency department nurse. All during the first year I thought I would be a nurse in my hometown, and write books, and make pictures, and work as a rapid response nurse in emergencies around the world while having a tiny house and a big garden, tinkering with plants and making tinctures and drying herbs in cabinets. It was a beautiful dream. I brushed up against it and it almost became real: I had a cabinet for herbs and tinctures. I collected rosepetals and mugwort and mint. I filled notebooks with my scrawl. I sat at the computer and dreamed into a document which I sometimes shared on this platform. I didn’t realize that as a non-woodsprite I would need more sleep, and time to recover, and this would mean time to do not very much which means not-writing novels and not-rapid-responsing. I also struggle with human feelings, jealousy especially, and anxiety, and fuzzy states that don’t have the depth of sadness or the elation of joy.

There was sun today and I laid out mint leaves to dry, feeling the herbs in my hands. The scent of the acrid, pungent plants was centering.

I am always living just alongside the life I see and dream of, pressed up close like a cell membrane. Color and light infuse across the boundary, and yet I feel outside of it, never fully inhabiting it, this life that is mine. Is it that I don’t have the courage to claim it? Or do I see too many possibilities?

This is a day and I am alive, standing in the center.

*

Some of my daily practices are feeling weak in the face of everything, so the following poems are a kick in the teeth, or a good reminder of the pure sieges poets have lived through in the past and yet kept writing despite it all, or just a reminder to live when alive.

Invictus

By William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

*

Osip Mandelstam from Tristia, trans. Clarence Brown and WS Merwin:

I have studied the science of saying goodbye
in bareheaded laments at night.
Oxen chew, and the waiting stretches out,
it is the last hour of my keeping watch in the city,
and I respect the ritual of the cock-loud night,
when, lifting their load of sorrow for the journey,
eyes red from weeping have peered into the distance
and the crying of women mingled with the Muses’ singing...
Who can know when he hears the word goodbye
What kind of separation lies before us...?

When the Bolsheviks took over life in the new Soviet Union, communicating via propaganda, Mandelstam sang of daily life and art and stood in the center of his human life. Mandelstam kept writing despite exile and tortured (he wrote texts critical of Stalin). Yea it didn’t end well for Mandelstam, arrested again in one of Stalin’s purges, he died of heart failure in a Soviet work camp.

I first read this poem in Black Sea, a book by Neal Ascherson, while traveling in Odessa in the summer of 2007.

*

In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver


Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us
will ever know.

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.