My son and I were in Arax Market the other day, which is where my old student Hrach works. He’s in his 40s now and runs the store, but he’ll always be 17 to me. When I come into the store, he shouts Ms. Harris! MVP! We’re frozen in time, each to the other. Being frozen in time is one of the perks of teaching.

Hrach tries to give me a deep discount on the items in my cart. It’s all stuff that’s hard to find anywhere else, like sumac, bulk cumin, fava beans in a can, and a fruit called Rambutan, which I’ll get to in a minute. I refuse the discount, and we argue about it, like we used to argue about the characters in the stories we read for English class at Watertown High in the mid-90s. Back then, even though Hrach knew he’d be taking over his parents’ store after high school, he gave our class his full care and attention. He read every story I assigned—Carver, Oates, Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, Doris Betts, Chekhov— even though he thought most of the main characters lacked spine.

Way back then, if I stopped into Arax on my way home from school, Hrach’s beautiful mother would come over in her apron and grab my hand to lead me back to the kitchen to sample whatever she was making that day. You’re too skinny. Eat this. Hehhh? Good? I remember something with eggplant that was silky, saucy and tangy, and so delicious it gave me a little shock. Like in Ratatouille, when one single delicious bite transports the dour critic back to his boyhood, to his real self. You like it. Take some home.

Now my 22-year old son and I are standing in line at that same Arax with our rose water, feta, humus, and some Armenian candy. We spot a spiky round fruit by the register, dimly maroon and dusty looking and about the size of a large kiwi. What is that? we ask Hrach. A mini UFO? Haha. A Covid germ? Lol. Hrach is standing at the register with his sister who looks not only his age but like his female twin—amused resting face, apple cheeks, brown eyes, long deer lashes.

Is it a fruit? Hrach and his sister answer in tandem, enlisting a purveyor’s pastiche of overlapping images and tastes to convey Rambutan-ness. It’s like a lychee. Or like a grape crossed with Yuzu? Tart, sweet. Yeah, if a grape and a creamsicle had a child. That would be like a Rambutan. Hrach gave us one each so we could try for ourselves.

*

Most of us spend at least some of each day doing this kind of triangulating, trying to explain to someone how something is to us. Rarely, we do this in elevated, compressed, and beautiful ways (poetry, film, stories, some obituaries, good graduation speeches), but mostly we use metaphor in mundane ways, for pragmatic reasons. To explain our ailments and get them treated, for example. It hurts here, like this. More dull than sharp. No, it doesn’t radiate.

We do it, also, to share beautiful things. Life is so short. Plus, it’s human, I think, to like being the one to find and share a good thing. It’s the mixtape impulse. We like to share beautiful things and say look or listen or try it and Isn’t it something? In this spirit, I share the poem “Demigoddess” by James Tate, a man who’d planned to become a gas station attendant after high school but then his friends went to college and so he figured he would too, and while there something literary caught his fancy.

It’s difficult, and probably unnecessary, to explain why you love the beautiful thing. Why does this new-to-me James Tate poem feel so familiar, strange, and good? I don’t really know why, but: For two weeks one summer, a family of three raccoons lived in the attic of the abandoned house next door and popped their heads out of three holes in the roof at dusk and watched us; I love other James Tate poems—the way he plunks the reader down into a surreal and dreamlike scene that he codes as normal and then punches you on top of your head with his last line or image. Plus the people I love are all aging, I wonder if one of anything is enough, and I have a general preoccupation with things breaking or dying. But who knows? Anyway, now you have it for yourself.

*

Things are always falling apart on houses, and on bodies. We don’t visit our elders enough. Raccoons are cute nuisances that some of us wish could be our pets. We make up stories sometimes when we want people to stop asking impossible questions.

I wonder if Aunt Myrtle even invited her neutral nephew/speaker/observer to her falling-apart home. Because I notice she’s doing something people do when they don’t want others to pry, which is give the onlooker something flashy to look at (hundreds of raccoons out to get me) while you keep the real, more private thing for yourself (one raccoon, I just need the one, but I do need it.) Is it her game—I’ll make him think I’m crazy, and maybe he’ll leave me alone—or does she believe her own story?

Ram Dass had a story about a lady in New York who was tripping on LSD and feeling out of control and called him to get help. The reason she called him and not 911 or a friend is because Ram Dass’s (Dr. Richard Alpert’s) claim to fame was getting fired from Harvard along with Timothy Leary for his personal and professional fascination with psychedelics.

So this tripping person called Ram Dass on the phone and said something like I took acid and now I’m going crazy. I’m completely out of touch with reality and I’m going crazy. And Ram Dass, who is waking up because it’s the middle of the night where he is on the West Coast, orients himself to this person’s predicament. And he says Okay, you took acid and you’re tripping and you’re going crazy. After some back and forth, he has a realization and he says to her I’d like to speak to the person who dialed seven digits and an area code and thought “I know. I’ll call him and tell him I’m going crazy.” Because that person clearly has all their marbles.

I first heard this story on a cassette tape I borrowed from a hippie book store in the early 90s, and I still think about it a lot. Ram Dass realized that even in our most confused (or high, or scared) moments, there is a no-nonsense, grounded, observing self, around which our other selves flutter and carry on, forget, tantrum, lose hope, lose touch.

This notion has come in handy over the years, especially when I’ve doubted my own body or senses, like during or after scary bad news, panic attacks, grief, or even powerful bad dreams. You keep some important part of you from flying away when dark things are swirling. I hope Aunt Myrtle knows her own game, and her predicament. Then again, in the world of the poem, it doesn’t matter much. In the end, Tate clears away the concerns and destabilizations of this off-kilter world he created in his one blocky stanza with And one is enough in this world.

Maybe all it takes is one. As long as a neutral nephew cares enough to wander the house at night because he can’t sleep for worrying—which is, I know for a fact, a love language—and continues to be our eyes on Aunt Myrtle and all the rest. As long as that neutral person cares, it’ll be okay. It will.

I’m looking out the window now. I see a yellow finch. I see bees (one stung me this morning at the bee balm). I see a garbage truck with guys who will reverse if I remembered too late to put out the trash. I see new neighbors (try to remember to pick some flowers to give them later), I see a son coming up the street bouncing a basketball, I see some Rose of Sharon bushes (think of The Grapes of Wrath, the perfection of breast milk). I see zinnias and sunflowers. So many. Now my dogs have come to join me at the window. They think something needs their tending to or their protection, that something is happening out there. I tell them It’s nothing. It’s okay. Nothing to see here. Nothing bad. Not right now. Let’s go out to the garden.

—

Tate, James. "Demigoddess." Poetry, vol. 176, no. 2, May 2000, p. 64

—

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Dear friends, readers, subscribers— I’m thrilled to share the news that Dorothy Parker’s Ashes has published my essay “Instructions for Dancing.” The magazine truly is so cool (go read their “About”!), and I’m honored to have my work published by and beside such witty dames. They asked me to record an audio version of the essay, and I will asap. Anyway, go read the whole issue. It is wonderful.

AND—some of you have asked me what gives re: the dearth of regular posts here lately. It’s been crickets. Just working on other chapters and projects and things—all of which I’m excited about. I hope to get back here soon (I paused paid subscriptions last month, again with immense thanks for that support.)

In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you think of the essay. Let me know—here in comments, or email me, or come over, or I’ll see you with our the dogs in the woods, etc.

P.S. Thank you Diane Zinna for the time and space to revise this!

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Lighthouse

Its vision sweeps its one path
like an aged monk raking a garden,
his question long ago answered or moved on.
Far off, night-grazing horses,
breath scented with oatgrass and fennel,
step through it, disappear, step through it, 
           disappear.

-Jane Hirshfield 

In the long stretches of night when I should be asleep, clock-time hurtles toward daylight like a drunk being chased by another drunk. Ideas come in airhorned bursts. Yearnings and regrets parade by while I try to keep up. The dogs sleep.

In the dead of one night last week, I started to buy a sink extender on Instagram. A way to stack more dirty dishes? Hell, yes. Brilliant. I should invent things. Reminder to put pad and pen near bed for night ideas. Remember to look at Camus quote about ambition first thing tomorrow. Tomorrow is in two hours. Tomorrow will be shit. The email from the sink extender people said Complete Your Purchase, but I thought it said Complete Your Purpose, which reminded me to look at the Camus quote.

The lighthouse has one job, and it’s all right there in the title. It’s a house, it lights the way, and is itself a light. Lighthouse. Purpose and function nested together in a single word, nothing wasted. I admire not wasting. Insomnia is wasted time, wasted rest, and a wasted next day, so I hate hate hate it. Worrying is a waste, too, for the worrier and the people we worry about, who think we think they can’t be okay without it. Grasping at straws is a waste, but so is trying to avoid straws altogether.

When my son was seven, we watched a PBS documentary on The Buddha. The poet Jane Hirshfield was one of the talking-head scholars, and I loved her. I found her again last week in a book that the same son, now 22, gave me for Christmas—an anthology of poems about impermanence.

We watched the documentary on my old Mac in his attic bedroom, which was painted a color called Milk Chocolate that he picked right away from a lineup of dozens of other tans, taupes, coffees, and mahoganies on long skinny cards in the paint store. We shuffled the whole stack and laid them out to see if he’d choose the same one again, and he did.

If you happened to find yourself up there in that room on a sunny late afternoon folding clothes or just sitting there by yourself thinking, you would catch the same slanted holy light you get in a cathedral. And if you did catch it, it was a guaranteed good mood for at least 15 minutes–a quick and sure thing that blasted away everything else.

We sat side by side on his bed and watched. I looked over at him every few minutes. Blonde ‘66-era Beatles haircut and cheeks as soft as a kitten belly. I thought he might be humoring me sitting still and watching for so long, but 7 year olds are too busy for that. Instead, he was jotting and drawing things in his small notebook. 4 noble truths. Middle way. Suffer. 8-fold path.

My son at seven was like he is now–smart, with a pinball mind and a tender busy heart. Over a period of a couple months back then, he was hectored and seduced by existential concerns that were growing in their complexity and fervor, and always came late in the night. Why are we here? Behind us it’s blank. How did you know to be my mother? What will become of us? I wondered if any of the ideas in the documentary might help him with the worries.

He didn’t seem bothered by all the talk about suffering in the movie. Even about the three human conditions–old age, sickness, and death–that drove Siddhartha beyond the palace walls to investigate. I learned later that he was drawn to the idea of impermanence, which made sense. When your uncomfortable thoughts are in recursive overdrive, impermanence is a promise. You hang in there, knowing it’s temporary. Keep grazing. Light is coming. This darkness won’t last.

*

The pain ends eventually. When relief comes, you want to stay there forever. You embrace the conditions you think brought the relief, and hold on tight. Maybe you’re newly in love. Maybe it’s just that you’re not sick anymore. Phew! Maybe you’re a new mother, or just enjoying your youth and your friends, or your good, old dog. The shapeshifting idea of impermanence that once felt like hope now looms like a threat. Darkness is coming. This light won’t last.

Once you get some up-down cycles under your belt, you find some solace in the big picture, like the earned wisdom Tobias Wolff describes in This Boy’s Life: “Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.”

*

They say one of the best predictors of how long you’ll live and how healthy you’ll be as you’re having your long life is grip strength. Only literally, though. Figuratively, it’s the opposite, at least according to that Buddha documentary and my own ongoing efforts trying to direct this or that. Suffering seems to escalate in tandem with the tightness of your grip–on the people you love and your opinions about what would really be best for them, on temporal states, physical states, mental states. It’s an art knowing when and how to loosen your grip. Looking back and also forward, most important decisions seem to live on that axis somewhere.

Even given all that, though, sometimes grabbing the nearest thing feels like the best option. If you think your body may do something unpredictable and unseemly at any given moment, for example, you reach for what is available: A table, a poem you memorized in 6th grade, a person’s arm. Or your mother, even when you should be long past that.

This happened when I tried to return to school as a newly diagnosed 8th grade epileptic after I had my first seizure in school. The re-entry fiasco was stranger and scarier than the seizure. I just couldn’t do it. I went from epilepsy diagnosis to full blown school phobia. And you know what has a strong and healthy grip? Phobia-induced panic.

Every seizure seems to have its own personality, like movies that stick with you. In some, you’re traversing time or space. In others you feel still or maybe stuck in a liminal space, your brain’s version of an empty airport’s international terminal at midnight. Some seizures are zippy and loud; others are sloggy and muffled. It really keeps you guessing.

The seizure that day was a scary, time-travel one, and it happened in school during health class while we were taking our own blood to determine our blood type (I’m O negative). I hit my head on the way to the ground, and woke up to a circle of my peers’ surprised faces looking down at me. My burly next year’s English teacher scooped me up and ran with me down the hallway as people in doorways shouted advice disguised as questions. Shouldn’t we…? Shouldn’t she…? Then there was the hospital, the EEGs and spinal taps, and seeing my father without his usual bluster looking stiff and formal in my hospital room, both fists clutching a crumpled grocery bag that held my jammies and toothbrush.

Unlike seizures, phobias and their ensuing panic all seem to follow the same basic script. Going back to school should have been smoother sailing. I wouldn’t be having another surprise seizure because of my new medicine, and I was strangely unworried about what the other kids thought or might say. But on my first day back I walked through the front door of the school, felt sick to my stomach, made a beeline to the nurse’s office, and threw up in her trashcan. She called my mother to come get me.

Over the next couple months, this is how it went. Most days, I’d make it a little deeper into my school day–to homeroom, say, then to art, then lunch, and then even to science–before I’d feel sick and have to raise my hand and ask to go to the nurse, where I’d wait on the tissue-wrapped daybed for my mother to arrive. The symptoms would disappear as soon as I got into her car. Then we’d go home and do stuff–quiet stuff–together. I’d read and she’d do something else, which now I know was going back to sleep.

When I developed another phobia many decades later, all of this made sense. I just didn’t trust my body to do what bodies normally just do on their own without our interference–breathe, have a heartbeat, not vomit. Your phobia needs proof that the body can handle itself. Finally, I made it through to the end of the school day, and once I did, it was over. No more phobia, no more panic.

This Christmas I asked my mother about it. I asked how she avoided swinging between her two available extremes: You have to power through and Stay home with me as long as you need. Even more impressive was how she finagled it so I had no shame about it, no embarrassment in the moment or in hindsight, and no guilt. All she said was It was hard.

Maybe it was too much, me asking about all this with no warning on a Christmas morning. I just wanted to make sure she knew how remarkable it was. She was. Is. I know the anxiety of seeing a child stuck in limbo and the temptation to find comfort in certainty, one way or the other.

We sat on my sister’s big sectional while the rest of the family darted back and forth yelling conversations and navigating small plates of meatballs, drinks, new sweaters. She told me how scary the seizures were, and that diagnosis was back in the late 70s. She reminded me that during all of it, she was working the third shift in the hospital–an RN on labor and delivery. So when the school nurse would call every day at 7:45, then 8:00, etc., she’d wake up, throw on a coat and slippers, and drive to the school. She told me that after several weeks of feeling helpless and worried, she and my father asked my gymnastics coach to come by the house and talk to me, and he did, which is more complicated than I’ll get into here. Like many things having to do with him, I don’t remember it at all.

*

Imagine being the monk in the poem, freed from either/or. Neither letting go nor holding on. Just going about your raking with no more questions, having moved on from whatever non-raking concerns had once preoccupied you. Unlike the monk, I still have my question and I still hold on tight. So I can only imagine.

Step through it, disappear.

This is what comes to me: Close the curtains and open them. In the dead of night, cuddle the dogs and read your book. Miss everyone, here and gone, then step through even that. In the light. Out of the light. The garden is whatever you have, and it needs raking. Go ahead, then.

*

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Jane Hirshfield, “Lighthouse” from After: Poems. Harper Collins, 2006

John Brehm, ed. The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy. Wisdom Publications, 2017

The Buddha: The Story of Siddhartha. PBS Distribution, 2010

Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life: A Memoir. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989

Share Wising Up Together- Karen L. Harris

Why I Am Not a Painter
Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

The worst record review I ever got is also the funniest. It was in a local music rag–they called themselves a rag; that’s not me being bitter. The writer (“writer”...but, again, not bitter) described my lyrics as “fancypants wordplay.” That’s a deep cut, because one of the two things* I try to avoid in writing is cleverness. Semantic sleights-of-hand, too-tidy parallels, planned happenstance, idiomatic vogueing–I have an aversion to all fancypants wordplay.

*The second thing is adverbs.

It takes me a long time to write prose, and the cutting voice in my head is not very nice. I get embarrassed at words I wrote just seconds earlier like you get embarrassed at a thing you said at a party last year, or tripping up steps in public. I keep learning the same thing from writing that I learn and re-learn from the O’Hara poem: Set out with an intention, and by all means start with your good idea. Then just keep working and get at least a little bit out of the way.

Six hours go by and I don’t have what I feel to be six hours’ worth of work to show for it. Lots of words, maybe a headache, and a dust-up of sadness that seems fresh but is probably old. Like the writer in the poem (we’ll call him Frank O’Hara) and his friend Mike Goldberg the painter, I assess and guess: It was too much, and It needed something and There should be so much more. Then I try again in the morning. It’s not unlike the guessing and revisions of teaching, except no cahoot of teens and their retorts and wisdoms, no laughing, no warm demanding, no comments on your try-hard sneakers or dumb haircut.

Right now I’m writing an essay about working at the emotionally disturbed kids’ school, my first job out of graduate school. I’m writing about the kids there, and how tense and violent it was every day, and about the four-point restraints that happened daily. I’m trying to articulate how these episodes were more complex than they seemed, and that the process was more than an abused kid’s primal outburst followed by four people holding him. It wasn’t all hell breaking loose, and it wasn’t an attempt to extinguish. It was an ordered, even choreographed, container–a way to hold kids who had pain to unleash and nowhere good to go with it. It seems, looking back, like the least we could do for them.

While I’m thinking about this, I look over at the guy on the roof next door with his nail gun, so definitive and satisfying. The sound–ga-joonk–and the clear plan and pattern of shingles in line. Next, and next. But what was I saying/trying to say again, about the school? Wait, I’m writing about how painful these kids’ trauma was for me? Ga-joonk. No. I’m sure that wasn’t it.

I read over the paragraphs and pages from the beginning. And like Frank in O’Hara’s poem about writing a poem, there are just pages and pages of words that should be, or do, something else. After some hours, after more oranges, shingles, sardines, restraints, etc., I go to Mt. Auburn cemetery to walk around. But it’s already dark at 4:00, and I have to take the dogs out, and meet with students and people and do other work. I’ll try again in the morning.

*

I started doing yoga in the early 80s when you did it in some teacher’s dusty basement apartment or a sketchy ashram. You’re supposed to stay in the moment in yoga, but I’ve spent most of the moments thinking I can’t wait to get to corpse pose. Shivasana comes after all the other poses, and even though they call it “pose,” it’s just lying on the ground, palms up, effort over. When it arrives, I think Phew now I’ll just lay here and wonder about stuff like sandwich ingredients. And usually, that’s it. At least I showed up and did my nice, clear pattern of poses. But other times, something else happens:

It feels like it’s snowing in my body, or in the space all around my body. I am, or it is, like a shaken snow globe with shimmering particles–maybe chi, energy, bits of light and dark. They float and then settle back in to my body, which is where they seem to have come from. It’s what I imagine a good death would be. Interesting and pleasant things happening to your body and you’re not in charge. When it’s over and there are no more floaty bits, I roll over to one side, get up, make a sandwich.

You don’t get the snow globe effect just cutting right to corpse pose, I’ve checked. No glitters without all the rest of the strain and effort. And even then, no guarantee. Apparently, you have to show up for the no-frills, routine parts of any ritual–writing, meditation, yoga, walks, your job, band practice, whatever. You just keep dropping by, and then an extraordinary thing like this might happen once in a while, and it both is and isn’t your doing.

*

If you’re lucky, you’ll have people around as you do your thing. You can talk about the tedium and wherefores of painting (“Where’s SARDINES?”) and writing (“Then another page. There should be/so much more…”), and anything else.

It’s clear that Frank and Mike are steady in each other’s lives like a fountain. They persist at their routine, and seem to thrive in their mutual ongoingness. O’Hara probably has a key to the studio, or maybe Goldberg doesn’t even lock it. The dropping in and the working keep going on.

One of the things I miss about this kind of old-fashioned drop-by culture is that people live in each others’ ellipses…They see your work in progress, and you see theirs. A painting, maybe, but also training your dog, building an Ikea thing, cutting your own hair, trying to put on the duvet cover. Just friends keeping tabs, trading thoughts, coming back for more.

Frank asks Mike why you can still see the letters, but not the full SARDINES in the finished painting. It’s a palimpsest—when an erased thing comes through the finished painting or poem, essay or recording. Like a ghost of an innocent mistake you don’t want to banish, or maybe an artifact of your original intention. Maybe the title ORANGES is a palimpsest. For a writer, using a throwback title seems like a good way to wrest control from the whole loopy and painstaking revision process. A way to get both the last word and the first.

The process of recording songs isn’t the endless revision that writing seems to be, partly because revisions in the recording studio mean time, which costs money. Low-on-cash musicians befriend their mistakes. I can hear sonic artifacts–palimpsests–when I listen back to our band’s old songs. Mistakes that sounded cool enough to leave alone. Coughs, room sounds.

Sometimes I get whole tableaus coming through. I see Dave at the big sound board eating his Cup-o-Soup, and Eric next to him. They’re trying things, making decisions and revisions. I see all of us laughing and I can feel the ongoingness of recording a whole album for days, seeing each other in mornings and nights. I can hear ghosts of rehearsals, old guitar parts, misheard lyrics. The beer and later, the babies. I hear my mistakes, and my friends playing around them, making it sound like I did it all on purpose. By then, they knew what I meant.

___

Me and Terri photo credit: Tinnitus Photography

“Why I Am Not a Painter,” copyright © 2008 by Maureen Granville-Smith, from Selected Poems by Frank O’Hara, edited by Mark Ford.

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The summer I tried to run my own ice cream truck business was the summer it rained almost every day in June. It was unprecedented, and Al Kaprelian, the jocular TV weatherman out of Derry, NH, was giddy. Folks! This rain? Un-pa-recidented. I grew to dislike his voice, his bow tie, the TV, ice cream novelties, and being a broke young adult. That summer, adulthood happened at unprecedented levels.

I was paying rent on the truck while it sat in our wet driveway plugged into the house to keep the screwballs, bomb pops, and buried treasures frozen and ready. The couple of times I did get to take that ice cream truck out were as heavenly and wholesome as I’d envisioned. An alchemy of childhood and a child’s best notion of adulthood.

I drove the route I’d planned out with my father, through small southern New Hampshire towns with ranch houses and English countryside names: Pelham, Londonderry, Chester, Hampstead. I brought Sammy, our black schnauzer mix who craned his curly head out the truck’s service window. We pulled into neighborhoods and I rang the bell, a small chrome button up on the dash that you press with your left foot. The people in their yards and living room windows hesitated like they couldn’t believe what they were seeing, and then ran at me and Sammy full tilt. What a kick! An ice cream truck, a girl, the bell, a dog! Here in our neighborhood! Those were the days. Just the two or three, but they were really something.

By late June, I had to admit defeat, return the truck, and scramble to get another job before college started back up in September. That’s when I went to see Jay, my old boss from my high school job at Dunkin Donuts, to see if he’d hire me for a few weeks. “Jay” is too boyish a name for a man who used to stand too close and say borderline things to me and the other teen girl employees. But I felt more worldly now, even daring, going back there. I’d been to college. Where I’d taken Women’s Studies.

I walked in and there he was standing behind the register, far enough back to allow for the remarkable girth under his tented chocolate brown uniform top. His hair was a perfect dome, shaped and set with the kind of hairspray product my dad used to keep his bangs in a neat tilde off his forehead. As soon as I lowered myself into the booth across from Jay, I knew I’d made a mistake. He pushed his buttery face toward me and didn’t even try to whisper. “I’m not hiring for a worker, but I am hiring for a mistress.”

I ended up taking a job at another Dunkin Donuts a mile up the road working the overnight shift. It was just me and the baker, a bald man with a beard and no mustache who hardly spoke. During those long nights, cops would come in and sit, sometimes for hours. They got free coffee in exchange for the deterrent effects of their cruiser in the parking lot and their armed bodies planted on the stools at the counter. The cops weren’t anywhere near my age, but they weren’t old enough to be my father, either, and most of them flirted too much. They knew I needed them there. They didn’t get free coffee all night because the town was a good place to be at 3:23 a.m. on a Tuesday.

I’d steer the conversation to wholesome things. The classes I’d be taking in September, or the ice cream truck misadventures with Sammy, or why French crullers count as crullers. I’d marry the sugars and ask questions about their families. My challenge was to chat just enough to keep them there but not enough to encourage more. I tried not to think too specifically about what “more” might look like. It wasn’t a proud or good position to be in, and I was happy to return to college that fall.

*

My friend, Keira, thinks I’ve had an unusual amount of notable things happen. She reads some of these Substack essays and says she can’t believe I never told her this or that. Unfortunately, though, and maybe with a few exceptions like the murderous gymnastics coach, I think mine is a typical level of weird shit. To be filed under “girls learning to maneuver, staying safe, some integrity intact,” etc.

Over the years, we all learn. We learn things like: Be careful about staring down staring men; make sure you have an off ramp if you do. (They hate you for no reason.) Get to know the vice principal a bit. Don’t upstage the boss. Pretend not to hear the men screaming at you Hey! Smile! from their Lincoln Continental at 6:30 a.m. when you’re taking out your trash; just walk back to your apartment, easy and quick. If you do happen to catch one of their eyes, or even make the mistake of looking like you’re about to say something to them because this kind of thing needs to stop, drop the trash bag, turn around, and run as fast as you can back to the front door of your apartment building. The guy from the backseat is chasing you.

On the other hand: Don’t stop raising your hand because the professor is annoyed. When you overhear someone describing you or another girl as “a lot,” press them on it. Learn to fight with words, and pick some battles. Learn how to read people, especially men, from all different distances. Learn to read yourself. If you see that you’re overcorrecting or making yourself small, do what you need to do to stop doing that. In a pinch, act unhinged in a way that your antagonist thinks is scary.

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Thinking about all the dodging and parrying that comes with being and becoming a girl/woman made me return to one of my favorite stories ever to teach and read, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell. What a beauty. Spoiler: It turns out that whether you’re a wolf girl or human girl, it’s hard to know when to comply and when to resist, when to fight, when to run.

The story is also an allegory for institutional and cultural imperialism, for assimilation. It’s a journey that mirrors adolescence, and it’s a family story about loyalty and sisterhood. I guess it’s speculative fiction, and you could say it’s magical realism. Or you could just say it’s about wolf-girls and three wolf-girl sisters. Anyway, you get the backstory on the second page, and it’s really all you get, and it’s enough:

Our mothers and fathers were werewolves. They lived an outsider's existence in caves at the edge of the forest, threatened by frost and pitchforks. They had been ostracized by the local farmers for eating their silled fruit pies and terrorizing the heifers. They had ostracized the local wolves by having sometimes-thumbs, and regrets, and human children. (Their condition skips a generation.) Our pack grew up in a green purgatory. We couldn't keep up with the purebred wolves, but we never stopped crawling. We spoke a slabtongued pidgin in the cave, inflected with frequent howls. Our parents wanted something better for us; they wanted us to get braces, use towels, be fully bilingual. When the nuns showed up, our parents couldn't refuse their offer. The nuns, they said, would make us naturalized citizens of human society. We would go to St Lucy's to study a better culture. We didn't know at the time that our parents were sending us away for good. Neither did they.

The three wolf-girl siblings have different strategies and inclinations for assimilating into their new culture at St. Lucy’s. Jeanette, the oldest, decodes and complies, scrubbing herself of all lupine signifiers. She dances the Sausalito and gets her library card. The youngest, Mirabella, can’t or won’t stop chomping on the nuns’ ankles and howling at the moon.

Then there’s Claudette, the middle child, and our narrator. From her place in the omniscient middle, Claudette sees and weighs the spectrum of assimilation options and their consequences. On one hand, she watches Jeanette gain entry into the sterile human world by turning on her sisters and her pack. On the other, she watches the nuns banish wild Mirabella into the forest, free but without a pack.

Claudette tries something in between those two extremes. But in an institution that demands full compliance, it’s exhausting. She is lonely as only a narrator, or a middle child, can be. She ceases to belong, anywhere.

Near the end, the nuns give Claudette a day pass home to her werewolf parents in their cave in the woods. What comes next is stunning, especially the last line–jolting for us thresholders–but not surprising. Reading it again now, it occurs to me that maybe the saddest wolf-girl of all is the one who can see everything, and knows how it’ll end.

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Here’s the collection of stories where you’ll find St. Lucy’s. Karen Russell, you make me proud of my soiled, embroiled name. xo

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There’s a little drawbridge up in Gloucester, MA—maybe in every Gloucester—that allows small boats to pass through the canal. When the bridge lowers back down, people in the line of waiting cars can finally get on with their day. First they’ll sit there idling for quite a while, no matter how pressing the errands on the other side may be.

It’s no use getting impatient waiting in your car, but you usually do. Maybe you don’t appreciate or even register the perfect choreography of the whole thing. The bridge opening, the road parting. Each small boat getting its moment to pass through like an everyday citizen walking in the town parade. Waving to friends and family in lawn chairs on sidewalks. Isn’t it a kick.

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Since we last spoke, I started a graduate program, dropped out, and spent some days in limbo, sick at home, confused. I waited for regret to come and when it didn’t, I knew I’d have to revise my plan. It’s humbling when the thing you decide to go do isn’t the thing to do.

On the day I was supposed to show up for the first on-campus residency of the two-year MFA, I was too sick to travel or make even tiny decisions Do I want toast? What are the pros and cons? When I called the program person, she said arriving a couple days late wasn’t ideal, but it was either that or defer to next year.

After my toast, I decided that deferring is for people in their 30s or 40s with plenty of existential buffer. So after two more days’ worth of antibiotics and avgolemono, I figured I was better enough. And the doctor assured me I wasn’t contagious: It’s mechanical now. It’s your lungs.

My husband drove so I could lie down in the backseat, and before long the car smelled herbal and medicinal like a food coop- thyme tea, tiger balm. The drive took extra hours because of a heavy rainstorm that made us creep and lurch at a car wash pace for long stretches. We could see the river’s level rising as we followed it northwest through Vermont. We joked that maybe the rain was trying to tell me something, etc., haha. Cough, cough.

When I got to campus the place was empty. I figured the other students were off together on some literary summer adventure, with two days of funny stories and inside jokes already under their belt. I found my dorm, set up my mattress topper, laid out my yoga mat (as if), took more Musinex, bought an umbrella at the school store, ate an asparagus salad in the dining hall, participated minimally in a workshop, and attended a student reading. Then I shambled back to my dorm room and curled up on my little bed. I called two friends. You’re too sick to be there, they said. Come home.

My husband picked me up from my day of college just before dusk. I leaned my forehead on the passenger window and watched the sun blaze big as it set. The green hills sat there fresh and washed, and the mountain horizons were stacked into the distance like chorus girls, shimmering until dark.

Back home on the couch, my thoughts were impossible-to-hustle like they get when you’re very sick or in labor. A graduate program? Why, though? The community! Other writers and mentors and such. Remember your own mentor politely suggesting other things? Also deadlines. Assignments. Scholarship. Remember your mom and sister saying ‘don’t you already have your doctorate?’? Accountability. You’re a big girl. Do that yourself. But this was my plan, and I already told everyone. No one cares. Yeah. Just get on with it.

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Since we last spoke, my Zinnias have come up and opened like exclamation points in mismatched orange and pink—along with the herbs and the purple balloon flowers. My son says he wants to catch a balloon bud as it blooms into flower. You never do, though, even if you’re out gardening all day and keep checking. The blooming is patient, then sudden and private. A behind the scenes thing, like most of this.

Last week, I watched them demolish the old house next door. They peeled one whole side off, and for hours the house stood there exposed and open like a doll house. Anyone passing by could see the different levels and the furniture inside, the little kitchen, a robe hanging in the upstairs bedroom, figurines and dirty jars on a red shelf. The woman who owned the house and also sold us our house was a hard nut to crack. She knew life was trying to put one over on her, and she acted out from that core assumption. Still, or thus, seeing her house and stuff in the open like that made me feel naked on her behalf. It was a relief when the giant claw went in and scraped the insides away and the house came crashing down.

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These last few weeks, I’ve been down a rabbit hole about the song Marquee Moon by Television. They used it in an Anthony Bourdain documentary I watched when I was still sick and my MFA suitcase was still upstairs waiting to be unpacked.

That record is an old true love of mine; as you can see above, my old band The Vivs even mimicked its cover on one of our CDs. So it was odd that the song came to me as a bracing, remember-yourself revelation. It was like being reminded of your favorite food, which is strange, because why would you forget your favorite food? All I know is it swept me off my feet anew during this juncture of uncertainty—coming off collapsed plans, being too worried about getting old and in a hurry about everything, and thinking I should know better and know more by now.

Unlike the rabbit holes I usually go down—the ones that end with me having a rare mitochondrial syndrome or an olde disease like scurvy—this one reassured me. It told me that Marquee Moon took years of false starts, frustration, and tension to come into being—many cycles of obsessive fussing followed by giving up. Even Brian Eno couldn’t coax it out. Then one day the band caught it on tape almost by accident and it was perfect.

I admire the band’s moments of giving up and stepping away as much as I do their fussing and fighting over it. For me, the urge to produce and not fritter has become especially acute with age. Getting older brings a combo of melancholy, yearning, thrills, disappointment about your skin’s elasticity, gratitude, and the slow-motion whiplash from realizing things like people call you Ma’am now and not Miss. But I’ve revised my understanding of no time to waste in the last few months. It has something to do with working steady even when you know the end product is out of your hands.

Someone hearing only this last part of the Marquee Moon story might think it came easy. But the song showed up on its own time, and only after a requisite, unknowable, and non-linear amount of effort, attempts, failures. It was like the song itself was in charge of when and how it would appear—like the balloon flower or the drawbridge, the end of a rainstorm or the right course of action.

P.S. Phew. It’s good to be back. I’m not sure what form this Substack will take going forward, but I know I’ve missed it, and missed you on the other side of it. I still love writing around the maypole of a poem, or- as here -a song. Whatever the form, I’m planning to start up regular posts again. Meanwhile, I’ll re-activate subscriptions with ongoing gratitude for your support, interest, patience.

This venue for writers and readers, and the connection it cultivates in real life and online, has been invigorating. I will admit it is getting harder to keep current events/politics in the margins or off bracketed to one side. I’m not ignoring the disasters in and of government or the urgency of hungry children, in life off the page. I’m trying to keep certain people from infiltrating. Maybe that’s impossible or unwise. I’m not sure yet, but I think about it every time.

P.P.S. For graduate school, I had to build a reading list for myself, which was a total delight and challenge to do. I’m reading my way through it now. If you’d like me to email it to you, just say so in your comment. And many thanks to friends for book suggestions (Robert, Janet, Ron, Diane, former students, writing group friends).

Best rabbit hole sources on Marquee Moon:

Ferrier, Aimee. “What Is Television Song “Marquee Moon” About?” Far out Magazine, 5 Aug. 2023, faroutmagazine.co.uk/story-behind-television-song-marquee-moon/. Accessed 27 July 2025.

“Friction: The Making of Television’s Marquee Moon.” Damien Love, 12 Jan. 2017, damienlove.com/writing/friction-the-making-of-televisions-marquee-moon/.

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Life in the hive puckered up my night
The kiss of death, the embrace of life
Ooh, there I stand ’neath the Marquee Moon
Just waitin’ (Verlaine, Television, 1977)

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At our wedding in a spruced up barn at dusk twenty three years ago, my mom gave a speech. It was rare back then for her to do something like that. Now she talks to strangers in grocery stores, bank lines, and waiting rooms. She says it’s because she’s old now and people expect that, but also because she has nothing to lose. I like the idea of seeking and making connection without needing reciprocation. It seems like something to shoot for.

At the wedding, she had on a flowing dress– also rare– and she looked very pretty, which isn’t rare at all. Crouching down to the microphone (she’s tall), she said something I thought was lovely at the time. They say if your kid is happy, you’re happy.

I heard it not as the soft warning I hear from where I stand now, but as a beautiful, one-way calculation of mother-child attachment. Primal, mathematical, umbilical. I cried when my mother said it, and got tears on my 8 month’s old head because she was coiled around me nursing just under my wedding cape, which kept slipping off her. The hormones made me not care who saw my breast. It was hard to hide anyway, because when baby Abby nursed, she insisted I suck on her finger. She poked at my mouth hard like it was a broken doorbell until I did. She was a baby who liked to give back. Fair is fair.

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Once I got to my teens, my parents’ interventions were rare. At least that’s how it seemed at the time; I’m sure there was more happening backstage. For one thing, they both worked so much and so hard. And I’d learned by then how to make it look like I knew what I was doing. Intervening probably seemed unnecessary to the adults around me, or even to peers, I think. Meanwhile, I was often careless and generally just tested my luck, like many teens do. Maybe extra.

All of that was before I knew about the four death-grip loves: romantic; unfinished; unreturned; and the biggest and bossiest one: maternal. These loves teach you that you have to be in charge, and that you are not in charge. Once I encountered each of these loves in turn, I overcorrected from my former carelessness however I could. Sometimes by avoidance or fake bravado tactics, but usually by holding on tight.

I bristled at advice in the ‘let’ family: Let go, let it go, let it be, let’s wait and see. Deep down, I knew the wisdom of it, but functionally, I saw ‘letting go’ as an all-or-nothing proposition, as you do when you’re especially attached to people and ideas.

When you’re in one of the death-grip love modes, ‘let’ seems like a privileged dimwit. It’s a real Zelig, too: Do you mean allow? Give up? Surrender? Grant permission? Ignore? There’s leasing and releasing, relenting, forgetting, forfeiture, and sacrifice. And anyway, most of these assume ownership where there isn’t much or any. What’s ours to let? Our kid? Our desire, illness, a cricket, fox, dew, stars, or the moon? This is the bread and butter of Jane Kenyon’s poem. Let evening come? I’ll think about it.

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Being a parent has been the tightest of all tight grips. There were periods in my kids’ childhoods when I felt like a much better parent to the kids I was teaching at school than the one I really was, at home. Teaching required the perfect balance of planning and control on one hand, and release and improvisation on the other. As a teacher, you forage and collect and hold things up to the light for examination. You respond more than react. You check in, change course, draft and revise. I foolishly thought that these skills I’d practiced for years would transfer over to my parenting when and if I had kids. Please allow me one lol.

From the beginning, I struggled with how much control I wanted and thought I needed versus how little I really have. This tension has driven most of my screw-ups and revisions over the years. At home, it was a round the clock endeavor trying to discern what’s too much involvement and what’s not enough, what’s possible and not. This was true with both our kids, but especially with our neurodiverse kid. Trying to learn how to be a good parent to him has brought me to my knees at times; in love, always, but also in humility, frustration, helplessness and shame (always about myself, never him).

At low moments, I’ve joked that my son should have had a different mother. I even chose my replacement– my friend Keira, who is gentle and equanimous instead of willful or fretful. She has a voice like a lullaby and a hundred different fun and pretty dresses. I thought maybe he should have had this punk rock Mary Poppins with a background in special ed for a mom. He got me, though, and I got him, and god do I love that kid.

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What a beautiful baby he was. Then a happy toddler, zooming by pushing a big plastic truck in wide loops through and around other kids’ games. Singing during naptime, bouncing or making announcements during storytime, or any time. Peers and teachers were entertained, fascinated, curious, and then sometimes bothered. He’d skip over the basics and swing for the fences. It was hard for him to sit still with ideas coming in and going out so fast. He’d come in hot and then melt. It was Willy Wonka, Richard Lewis, Buddha, Maria Von Trapp, Tigger, Bart Simpson. There were meetings with school people, strained friendships, and existential crises about matter and anti-matter. You’re only as happy as your least happy kid. That’s another thing they say.

In little league he was a great pitcher, even a little savant-like, for a couple of seasons. His ragtag team had a surprising, relentless cohesion. There were computer kids, townies, hippies, kids on the spectrum, plenty of ADHD, a kid who spoke mostly French, and a sweet kid who told us he was in trouble all the time in school. Everyone had a good nickname, the coaches and parents were great, and it was just pure delight.

Those little league years gave us all a reprieve from the struggling and hypervigilance that flanked them. When he moved up a level with the older and bigger kids, it was a different ball game. At dusk during one of these games, our kid said, to no one and everyone, “Guys, look! What a beautiful sunset!” A kid walking by said “shut up” in monotone, and another snickered. I was proud that our kid just shook his head later and laughed about “shut up.” We still laugh about it when we see a pretty sky.

For years, we struggled to choose our interventions and battles at home and elsewhere, and it took us a while to stop choosing them all. To let go of trying to coach him, or ask why he did this or that (a useless question). We learned and kept forgetting and relearning the same two things: One, that his brain is wired differently. Not deficiently, and in most ways quite the opposite, but differently. And second, that navigating these challenges was a matter of skill and not will on his part. That one’s a good distinction to keep in mind for any kid.

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I didn’t know that letting go is a thing you can at least try to cultivate with practice, or that it’s on a spectrum. Or that it’s sometimes a requirement or at least a gift to those you love the most. As in: Let their brains be their brains, let their road be theirs, and try to let your love and not fear be the driver.

In Let Evening Come, Kenyon repeats let a dozen times and it rocks us back and forth. She points to particular and inevitable beauties that are ours for loving, but not ours.

Let Evening Come.        - Jane Kenyon

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving   
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing   
as a woman takes up her needles   
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned   
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.   
Let the wind die down. Let the shed   
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop   
in the oats, to air in the lung   
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t   
be afraid. God does not leave us   
comfortless, so let evening come.

After the chanting rhythm of the first read, there’s an echo and some light baggage you carry on the second reading now that you have the last oddball (I think) stanza in your mind. That stanza has the doorknob moment: “don’t/ be afraid” and then the line about god not leaving us comfortless. I wonder about this stanza and what it does to the rest of the poem, because I think God/life does leave us comfortless sometimes. But evening will come with or without our worrying, meddling or allowances, it’s true. Crickets will chafe. Dew will collect.

The natural world rarely needs our pesky intervention, but other things do. Things will do their jobs, and we must go on and do ours. Be afraid or don’t, but figure out what’s yours to do, and then figure out what to do with it. I learned that last part from my kid. Our kids. The kids.

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In the Classroom:

Attachment, Non-Attachment. As all this humbling was going on– rooting around to find the best ways to parent both our kids–the classroom was where I could usually find and practice balance, as I’ve said in at least one other essay. And I was happiest when I was teaching a class called Spirituality in Literature. I know the teacher’s level of happiness isn’t the point, but it was a nice side-effect. Over the years, teaching made it easier to endure hardship and celebrate joy.

When I was teaching Spirituality in Literature, relevant things would serendipitously appear: a play version of a novel we were reading; a reading or talk given by a poet or scholar. It was like when you’re in the market for a car and you start seeing that car everywhere.

Something we grappled with in the classroom that was both fraught and productive year after year was our reading, writing, and talking about the concepts of attachment and non-attachment. By that point in the semester, we would have read Siddhartha, The Stranger, a bunch of poems, excerpts from the short fiction collection A Celestial Omnibus, and from the non-fiction anthology The Enlightened Mind.

When the students and I discussed attachment, we’d discover that it seemed to apply to characters and speakers in most of the literature we read, TV shows they watched, and films we screened. The class of 10th, 11th, and 12th graders talked about caring and not caring, needing and trying not to need, and attachment theory. Isn’t attachment necessary? At what point do you know you’re too attached, or too disconnected? What about the singular attachments–to a relationship, booze, dogma, notoriety–that seesaws and catapults us up and away from any ground, far from our own moral self, or any sense of connection with other people?

And then, we’d come to non-attachment. First, we’d tease out the differences between detachment and the Buddhist concept of non-attachment, an important distinction. For students, both hearken painful experiences of aloof and uncaring social scenes, shaky or tanked friendships, being ghosted, distant romantic partners or distracted parents.

It’s scary stuff, even though teenagers are some of detachment’s most loyal adherents and practitioners; they withhold, post keep out signs, keep their distance, lie about where they’re gonna be, talk in code, etc. (And no one can shut you down and out quite like a teenager; see this Tina Fey video for reference.) It’s still scary even when the kid has chosen detachment and knows that it’s elastic and temporary, a dance, a weapon, or a strategy.

As English teachers know, using literature as our referent and anchor makes it possible to get some critical distance, to examine and dig deeper. We’d talk about the smothering, destructive conditionality that detaches King Lear from his daughters and then his reality. We’d discuss Walker’s Everyday Use and the distancing of seeing your family as symbol and signifier—a kind of folk art— rather than flesh and blood- and the loving non-attachment of the mother. During our reading of The Stranger, we’d witness our individual and collective reactions to Meursault’s slow, jerky ambulations, how he murmured when he should blurt and vice versa, and his blank version of living in the moment.

The kids would be frustrated but inspired by Siddhartha and his navigation of suffering and attachment. And if it doesn’t come up organically, I do always note that it’s only once Siddhartha has a son himself that he can really practice some serious letting go.

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Teachers/parents/everyone: What are the difficult but worthy conversations you’ve had with students via literature; or with your kids or family via books, TV, or film?

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Forster, E. M. (1912). The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories. London: Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd.

Mitchell, S. (1991). The Enlightened Mind: An Anthology of Sacred Prose. HarperCollins

“Let Evening Come” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by the Estate of Jane Kenyon. Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

There’s a soft-sided suitcase sitting in the middle of my little office. It’s in my way, and I’m not crazy about looking at it. It’s full of letters and keepsakes from the late 70s to the 90s that I’ve hauled around unopened for decades.

Last week, I lugged the case— pale yellow, vintage but not nice, POD scrawled on it in black Sharpie—up from the basement during a cleaning trance. I was in the thick of the kind of choring you do to keep the panic at bay. The suitcase presented itself as just another task. Why not dive right in, I thought. Make room. Clear space.

For a week, I avoided the contents of the suitcase because I’m wary around my younger self. But I’ve had persistent questions about home and loss, aging, and what people leave behind, etc. circling my head like a halo of tired, loyal birds. What mental and physical stuff is worth keeping? What would I want to save if my home were disappearing into rubble or ash, instability or misfortune? I wondered if the things inside that case might give me a tangible answer.

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Sentimentality is like ether. It can put you to sleep while it’s also setting things ablaze. Whether we’re feeling precious and protective about junk in the basement or wistful about imagined better times, sentimentality can tip into magical thinking. Like the great Gladys Knight said, “Well…everybody’s talking bout the good ole days, the good old days…” Talking about good old days in a hazy, lazy, unchecked way can sharpen vague yearnings and emptiness into ill will, envy, and zero sum grabbing.

If I get lured away by the smell of a trick pie in beckoning cartoon hand form, I’m not home to mind the store. (Besides, it’s not a real pie, it’s a cliff.) Minding the store seems important right now. I don’t want to be a deluded person, un-useful in this moment while fancying a misremembered past, all weighted down with unchecked stuff in the basement, but bats in the belfry. So I press stuff into my kids’ arms on their way out the door after they visit. Here’s a coffee maker, a juicer, a prayer flag, pint glasses, perfectly fine scatter rugs, duplicates of photos, such a nice blouse, cookbooks. Take this, I don’t need it, don’t you need it, won’t you use it, you’ll use it, take it.

On an episode of Miss Scarlett (female detective) the other night, they were combing through some guy’s stuff post-mortem like a wrecking ball. I don’t want my kids going through my unvetted stuff after I die, so I opened the suitcase and started vetting. We’re each responsible for our own sentimentalizing, our own un-etherizing. So:

There were love letters from a serious boyfriend who died a few years ago in Denmark. I regret not going over to say goodbye. His sisters said he wouldn’t want me to see him like that. I love his sisters. I still wonder, though.

And letters from five or six close friends I’m no longer in touch with, all with allusions and specificity that characterize the blow-by-blow correspondence of people who have a dense and layered history: And you know how you-know-who can be…I ended up not getting that shirt…

I found four “This is my last letter” letters from a turbulent boyfriend, and a couple breezy ones from male letter-writers I don’t remember, even though it was clear from the letters’ contents that I had indeed known them.

And letters you get from your parents after you leave home, their handwriting familiar from birthday cards and notes about stirring the spaghetti. One letter from my mother apologized in advance for anything my first therapist would unearth and blame her for. Don’t they always blame the mother? I didn’t.

I found artifacts like the wedding invitation of my gymnastics coach to the woman he went on to murder a decade later. I tossed that one into the trash bag like a hot potato, and called it quits for that day.

There was an “ERA!” button, a large keychain fob that asked “Donde estan mis putas llaves?” and a welcome volunteer pamphlet from John Anderson’s campaign. There were business cards from job interviews, Pez containers, lip smackers, and concert tickets: Boomtown Rats, The Who, Jim Carroll, Patti Smith, The Kinks.

I got less sentimental with each pile, and started moving things along: toss toss toss. I put keepers into a smaller hard shell vintage suitcase. It says “Going Places” and has a picture of an old fashioned girl throwing her head back in laughter, skipping ahead.

The next morning at dawn, I was outside at the trash bin intending to dig out the cast-offs. But the bin was full, my bag of stuff was already at the bottom, and dog poop bags dotted the top like sentries to the past.

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Long arcs of time and consequence give us context whether we want it or not. This Andrade poem balances its own quiet chaos with the comfort of ongoingness and implicit reassurances of resilience: The poem is here. You’re here. We’re still here.

Souvenirs of the Ancient World
Carlos Drummond de Andrade (trans. Mark Strand)

Clara strolled in the garden with the children. 
The sky was green over the grass, 
the water was golden under the bridges,
other elements were blue and rose and orange, 
a policeman smiled, bicycles passed, 
a girl stepped onto the lawn to catch a bird, 
the whole world—Germany, China—
   all was quiet around Clara.

The children looked at the sky: it was not forbidden.
Mouth, nose, eyes were open. There was no danger.
What Clara feared were the flu, the heat, the insects.
Clara feared missing the eleven o'clock trolley:
She waited for letters slow to arrive,
She couldn't always wear a new dress. But she strolled in the garden, in the morning!
They had gardens, they had mornings in those days!

- 1976 

Brazil during or just before WW II, in the morning, in a garden. It’s lovely, and also something is off. In the first Wonka-vibe stanza things are the wrong color, but the colors are so pretty! There’s Clara and she’s strolling with children, so we stroll along with the rhythmic certainty of the lines and sentences. We’re not suckers, though; we know something dark is afoot. Former prohibitions are lifted in premonetory, self-redacting riddles. (Look up. It’s not forbidden.) Some girl is stepping onto the lawn to catch a bird. Plus, it’s too quiet. Later there’s fear and no new dresses.

Finally, the poem tells us, it’s all from days bygone! Like all souvenirs. But, again, the poem remains, and we’ve already been invited in. There’s resilience in that, like there is in this recent Robert Pinsky essay where he tackles impossible history.

*

After downsizing from POD to “Going Places,” I know that some stuff is important enough to keep lugging around: The things that situate you in time, place, and sequence. Notes with your father’s handwriting. Curiosities that keep you honest: What happened to those friendships? Did you stick with things too long or not long enough? Where did Maggie H. go? Who the hell was Fred Butkis?

Whether ancient or just old, remembered things can place us, without sentimentality or deal-making with the past. I think about history and patterns of suffering and loving, all happening, right now. There’s my sweet angel dog Hank dying, and a puppy next door yipping. There’s my son’s laughing, and families fighting, and my daughter teaching in the same place I did. There’s chicken marbella, and hand holding. Vital jobs lost, people crossing busy city streets safely, dates kept, sad texts, bad news, and babies latching on and nursing. All of it.

It’s ongoing, as are we. We don’t “just” keep going. But we do keep going. I think of this scene at the end of the novel Siddhartha where Govinda sees a stream of images pass over Sid’s face. It’s trippy, and rich with yes…and empathy for the predicament of human suffering:

He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships to each other, all helping each other, loving, hating and destroying each other and become newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory.

There’s no minimizing the scale of the particular suffering that’s here with us right now, and coming. Hunger, disease, unsteady peace, big promises broken, hate in the name of god. Funding for a good project is at risk because what was required yesterday is forbidden today. A kid in school won’t get the disability services they need, and shame will be the result. Shame all around. Vets in care won’t have the lives or the good deaths they deserve. Many people won’t.

I’m trying to keep a clear eye on the chaos inside me and out. I keep checking for optional chaos I accidentally or carelessly invite in. When my chest is a churning mix of nostalgia, alarm, and anger, these things help me: Looking for and listening to wise elders, skiing in the woods, reading, cuddling Hank. Keeping heart. Walking forward. Titrating the news. Taking care of my people and other people’s people. Feeding them. Exclaiming and using exclamation points. Looking up. (It’s not forbidden.)

*

To beautiful Hank, 2/14/16-2/20/25. We will love you forever. And ever.

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Souvenir of the Ancient World. Published by Antaeus Editions, 1976. Translation Mark Strand.

Excerpted from Looking for Poetry by Mark Strand, 2002.

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, 1922, Guttenberg version

A Song on Porcelain. Robert Pinsky. The New Yorker, Jan. 30, 2025

I used to have a Kill Your Television bumper sticker on my VW Fox. Now I like TV, so it’s good I don’t have that car anymore. One hazard of having old friends is that they’re happy to remind you of a lifetime’s arc of inconsistencies.

About TV, my rule is that after I watch the news or some other destabilizing thing, I have to watch what my son calls a wholesome show. So, CNN or Frontline would be followed by Miss Scarlett (Female Detective) or All Creatures Great and Small. My world view skews dark, and it’s hard to get moving without strong and regular proof of good. Please send over any reminders of care and joy hiding in plain sight. Like this:

Filling Station by Elizabeth Bishop. 

Oh, but it is dirty!
—this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it’s a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color—
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
esso—so—so—so
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

Bishop’s poem proves what I need proven when I need it, which is often. But the poem is no yes man. It doesn’t shush us with “oh there, there now.” Instead, it mandates humble and sharp witnessing of care and holiness, without cleverism or dismissal. It starts off clever and blunt and at a protective distance from the subject, but it goes out in bareness and awe. Our speaker enters the world of the filling station seeing dirt and filth, and progresses to sidelong (but then just plain old) wonder.

I figured that if I need regular reminding about why to bother and such, then you might too. So I got the poem from my Favorite Poems binder and kept it out on my desk. One night re-reading it before bed, I remembered something that happened to me— a time I got caught off guard by the simple genius of care. Strange to have forgotten it until now. It was back in my mid-20s. Still, though.

*

Julie and I were waiting to catch the last bus out of a medieval Bavarian town called Rothenburg Ob Der Tauber. After a few hours roaming the fairy tale streets, we were ready to not be there anymore. The town charmed and spooked us the same way fairy tales do: At first, you delight in the atmospherics of the whole scene—in this case, the rows of primary colored dwellings and apple cheeked citizens with mustaches and baskets of sweets. Then you notice there’s something dark lurking around the edges of the story, like there’s a catch—a subtext, disclaimer, or condition coming into focus. Maybe a lesson learned too late. Something about the cost of hubris or animus. Whatever it was, the air in that town felt heavy. Plus all Julie and I could afford was a pretzel and an apple strudel and a coke.

We showed the bus driver the address of a hostel we’d found in our book, and he nodded. The bus carried us beyond the tall walls that have protected the ancient town over the ages. Rothenburg didn’t get bombed away at the end of WWII. Despite the fog of war, a few people remembered that if we can leave beautiful things behind and intact, we should. So they did. This knew that this perfect example of a little German town deserved to be saved, not for the Nazis who had been its most misguided preservationists, but for humanity’s sake. For the rest of us.

Julie and I sat right behind the driver and looked over his shoulder into the dark for our hostel. We were the only passengers left on the bus. Finally, the headlights spotted a crooked sign on the edge of some brush and thick woods. The driver looked at us in his rear view mirror and said Geschlossen and kept driving. We figured he must have another place in mind, and he did.

We pulled up to an empty bus station and saw a woman standing up on a landing. While climbing the stairs with our backpacks, we realized that the driver lived with his family above the bus station. We’d be staying the night with them.

Our room had just a twin bed and a doorless closet with a very small pink coat and some little gray boots. At dawn, Julie and I walked out to the family’s narrow kitchen to see that they’d laid out quite a spread. Best plates, jams, breads, meat and bitter coffee. The father mimed that they’d already eaten, so the two of us sat and chewed while their young son and toddler daughter watched from behind their mother. The unexpected intimacy of the whole scene seemed to make all of us shy. The dad turned on the radio, to the BBC. Then the mother packed lunch sacks for me, Julie, and the father, and the three of us walked down the stairs. We were the first to board the first bus out that morning.

*

There are kindnesses that can prop us up and keep us going for some time. There are forces for good working among us. Sometimes they’re behind the scenes, or not in the form you’d expect. God in drag, as Ram Dass used to say. I tell myself to be on the lookout, especially when the evidence to the contrary seems so much easier to find and carry around like a sack of low hanging fruit.

I try to remember, and it’s getting harder. I write things down. I try to write everything down. Because the faultiness of my short term memory is proving to be a feature and not a bug, I think it’s likely I’ll forget more and more (genes, concussions, the 80s). If I could choreograph my own memory loss, I’d wish for a looping slideshow with images of care that would be the stubborn last ones to go.

I hope I remember, for example, the look of deep concern on a dog’s face when they’re looking at you when you’re crying. Or any look on a dog’s face. Any dog. Any look.

I hope I remember the heart attack that didn’t kill, and the doctors that made that so.

And the miracle boy, my high school student who lived alone but got himself to school on time and read every assigned story even when none of the other kids did. (Raymond Carver was fine, he told me, but he’s no Flannery O’Connor.) The boy wore one of three clean heavy metal t-shirts to school every day and had good friends. I hope I remember that boy and the other miracle people.

I hope I remember the births of my children. Chicken pot pie, warm and waiting. The big carved rocks in Dogtown. The bus driver. All the doilies and the rhythmic cans and places left just so, and soothing things and dark fairy tale places.

I hope I remember somebody loves us all. I really hope so.

P.S.—

Copyright Credit: Elizabeth Bishop, “Filling Station” from The Complete Poems, 1927-1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.

Source: The Complete Poems 1927-1979 (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1983)

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I went skinny dipping in Walden Pond with a boyfriend one late night when we were about 22. Somehow it seemed not unwise at the time, especially for the few minutes we were actually in there swimming. The cool water on our bare bodies felt smooth and new—Everyone should do this! Why haven’t we ever done this?—until the officer appeared with his giant flashlight and called us out of the dark water. We swam and then waded toward shore in the slow motion up and down molasses gallop of people asked to clear out of the water in a hurry. We walked up through the center of the cop’s cone of light, and scurried naked and spotlit over to our towels in the sand.

The pond cop led us up a trail through the woods toward where we’d parked. We picked our way over the roots and rocks as he verbally laid out what could have happened to us. Danger upon danger– rape, murder, kidnapping, assault. He shouted back over his shoulder to the boyfriend, things like: What’s wrong with you? Putting her in this situation. Jesus. Look at her. In a towel! His voice was pitched high for such a stout guy. Maybe it was relief we heard in his voice, but I think we both feared it was nervous excitement about something only he knew was coming. But he left us at our car, then got in his cruiser and drove away. Then we got dressed. Nothing else.

I don’t know if the pond cop was upset because of bad things he’d seen happen, or if he had a predatory impulse he didn’t act on. I’d learned by then to always wonder. Like most women in their 20s, I’d had brushes with men in charge whose positions of authority I mistook for shelter and safety. I’ve been lucky, often and by the skin of my teeth.

For example, there was that train official in France who knocked on the door to my sleeping car. He had one of those flat-topped conductor’s hats and a ring of keys inside his big leather ticket book. He stepped into the cramped compartment and propped his foot on my bed. Then he lit a cigarette, offered me one, and warned about the dangers of being a young woman alone in a sleeping car. When he started sliding the door closed behind him, I grabbed his leather book and flung it down the aisle as hard and far as I could, then locked the door. Phew! Then I realized he had all the keys to all the compartments. I stayed awake and at attention all the way to Brussels. Nothing else happened, though. Again, lucky.

It shouldn’t be a life or death thing getting a sleeping car once in your life or being in your dumb 20s and swimming at night in a lake. Still, I look back at risks I didn’t know I was taking, and toggle between Wow. Thank god. and What the hell was I thinking?

*

The Government Lake by James Tate presses us with similar questions. Are we moving freely in the world or moving wisely? Can it be both? It’s a dizzying montage, and it’s not so festive, and I’m sorry for the timing on that. (I’m including a chaser at the end for your trouble.)

We each bring the weird ever-emerging totality of ourselves to whatever we read. We make meaning from where we’re standing now and all the places we have stood, and through our own lenses– temporal, pedagogical, demographic, and contextual. That’s why it’s illuminating to read poems and stories with a mix of people, in person and over time. I discovered this poem too recently to bring it to the classroom, but even without the benefit and zest of students’ insights, I wanted to share it with you. It’s extraordinary.

The Government Lake            
        The way to the toy store was blocked by a fallen tree
in the road. There was a policeman directing traffic down a
side street. I asked him, “What happened?” He said, “Lightning
in the night.” I took the turn and drove down the street
looking for a way to turn back. Other streets were blocked by
fallen trees, and I couldn’t find a way back to the toy store.
I kept driving and soon I was on the outskirts of town. I
got on a highway and drove, soon forgetting the toy store and
what I was supposed to get there. I drove on as if I was hypno-
tized, not noticing the signs for turnoffs. I must have driven
a couple of hours before I woke up, then I took the next exit
and had no idea where I was. I drove down a straight tree-lined
lane with farm houses on either side. There was a lake at the
end of the lane. I pulled over and parked. I got out and
started walking. There were several docks along the shore.
I walked out on one and watched the ducks swimming and diving.
There was something bobbing in the middle of the lake. I stared
at it for a long time before I realized it was a man’s head.
Then, a moment later, it was a coconut. No, it was an old tire
floating right side up. I gave up and started following the
ducks. They would suddenly fly up and circle the lake and
come down and splash land again. It was quite entertaining.
A man walked up behind me and said, “This government lake is
off-limits to the public. You’ll have to leave.” I said,
“I didn’t know it was a government lake. Why should it be
off-limits?” He said, “I’m sorry. You’ll have to leave.”
“I don’t even know where I am,” I said. “You’ll still have
to leave,” he said. “What about that man out there?” I said,
pointing to the tire. “He’s dead,” he said. “No, he’s not.
I just saw him move his arm,” I said. He removed his pistol from
his holster and fired a shot. “Now he’s dead,” he said.
- James Tate

The vignettes of diversion in the poem are surreal and real, like real surreal life. It starts with the speaker looking for a toy store, which my friend and fellow teacher Ron Fletcher insists is enough to carry a whole poem, and I agree. Toy stores are places you break up with one day even though they did nothing wrong and you’re still a little in love.

We get more, though. We get the rest of the poem’s strange traversing and voguing: the speaker losing himself, trees downed and roads closed, nature and man diverting him at every turn. Rules, authority, and civilization are set against earthly things like ducks and storms and the organic momentum of having a task.

The poem has surprises, and most of them aren’t very nice: After our speaker’s toy-flouting detours and bewilderment, he gets more lost and then found by a bad government lake supervisor (BGLS), who kicks him out because it’s a government lake, or just because. There’s a tire bobbing in the lake that might really be a dead man’s head, but also the man might be alive, but then he’s dead again–shot by the BGLS.

For me, Tate nails how it feels to be lost in dreams, surrounded by the real, rigid world. I wish I could teach this poem. Maybe you’ll teach it and tell us what it was like and what the students said and wondered. Or you’ll read it yourself and tell us anything you want.

As promised, here is a tiny story, related to all this, but not dark: It’s called Milan, 1986. This is the way I’d like to be surprised, from now on:

Two kind Italian boys lived in Milan and worked at the huge central post office in the middle of the city. One day, they snuck the two of  us–me and my friend Julie backpacking and broke–into the commissary and told us to point at the cured meats and pastas and dolci we wanted as we shuffled down the line with our trays. The next day they drove us to Lake Como. When we pulled up to a hotel, Julie and I said no, no. The boys looked wounded and surprised and showed us the separate room they’d reserved for us. They weren't anything like the boys in Rio Maggiore who said they’d make us spaghetti dinner and then made plain boiled pasta that sat hardening on a plate while they kissed our necks all wrong–wet and mean– and tried to steer us to flat surfaces like hungry dogs. We got out of there and had nowhere to sleep but laughed later about their “prima volta! prima volta!” protestations, like it was their first time being told no. Our Milanese post office boys were the opposite of that. In the hotel in Lake Como, one of them knocked on our door to say goodnight, and he was wearing his jammies. Matching tops and bottoms. They’d just wanted to show us pretty Lake Como. It was our prima volta. 

Source: Poetry (January 2019)

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Not Waving but Drowning              
by Stevie Smith

Nobody heard him, the dead man,   
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought   
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking 
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,   
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always   
(Still the dead one lay moaning)   
I was much too far out all my life   
And not waving but drowning.

***

My father called me about a week or two after he lost his long-time job as a mechanical engineer. I was in my rent-controlled apartment in East Cambridge. There was a guy in the apartment below me who got drunk every night at 7:30 p.m. and screamed for 15 minutes– no more, no less–sometimes up at me, sometimes adding BITCH!!! The apartment was $350 a month, and I was in grad school. Fifteen minutes seemed fair. 

My dad wasn’t a phone guy, and him calling was something new. I picked up and asked him how he was: How are you, Dad?  

I don’t want to talk about it.  
What?
Talk about something else. 
All I did was say how are you. Like you say, you know, like as an opening thing…
Talk about something else. Talk about your cat. 
What?  

Then he hung up. We didn’t talk for months. I learned later that during those months he spent a lot of money on pyramid scheme water filtration systems. When he gave up on those, he hustled to find another engineering job. By then we were talking again.

He’d work the phones in his suit-and-tie voice with a cigarette going at the kitchen table, wearing a cardigan and jeans. He’d peck out cover letters with his index fingers. It makes my heart swell and sink to think about it. In the end, he took his old job back at half the salary. The water filters sat stacked in the back of our garage for years. When he died, my mother tried to give them away to people. Take two!

My father wouldn’t or couldn’t show people his messiness, vulnerability, failure– anything in that category. He covered, dodged, and pivoted with a combo of humor, silliness, denial, and certainty. Even though it was his messiness that made him lose his job, the shame of having to hustle again at his age just about undid him. I had to stop teaching Death of a Salesman after all that.

Years later, he would die of a pulmonary embolism, and I wonder if it’s partly because he didn’t ask for help often or directly or soon enough. But I can’t be sure. The doctors confined him to bed with deep vein thrombosis for a long time in what seemed like a holding pattern. He became a big fan of Brazilian Beach Aerobics on TV and started calling me at work regularly and saying things like “Let’s keep calling” and “Talk to you soon.” When they finally put a stent in, the clot that killed him had already slipped into his lung. I should have been more involved. I should have paid closer attention. I think we were all navigating around his pride and his privacy. Still though. 

***

In college I broke up with a boyfriend who wasn’t the love of my life, so it was a surprise when a couple days after packing up his stuff I felt myself unraveling.  The extremity of my sadness was like nothing I’d experienced up to then. Whatever it was– saved-up grief, a crisis of faith, depression–I hunkered down. I was living in an old farmhouse in Lee, NH across the street from a big open field of daisies and tall grasses. I loved my classes, but I stopped going. For about a week, I stopped most things, including answering the phone.

I heard a knock at the door one night, wiped my face with a damp washcloth, and opened the door to Tom and Pete, classmates who were brothers. Tom, the older more stout one with glasses and curly brown hair had a couple records tucked up under his arm. Pete, no glasses, shorter, had a bag of groceries.

Tom, Pete, and I were at that point in an English major’s trajectory when other course requirements like Finite Math (D+) are out of the way, and you’re reading and writing all the time. Every discussion feels like a mystery unlocked and you feel believed in and smarter than you are. The brothers and I were just starting out in our friendship. Both of them were shy and smart. And you’ll see: so kind.

We heard…well, noticed, too…You haven’t been in classes. You’re not picking up the phone. 

They’d never been to my house before. I cleared a space on the sofa–kleenex, books, maybe plates– for them to sit. I realized what they were seeing and got nervous and started tidying up and they said to stop. Then we talked and ate the food they brought and listened to records. They stayed until I felt better.

I had other friends– very good ones–but there was something supernatural about those brothers showing up. Their timing, their way, and their ability to override their own shyness and my hiding. My mini breakdown and the arrival of those brothers were illuminating to me. I didn’t know until then that I could go that low and come back up. I didn’t know until then that you should show people your messes and weaknesses along the way– and not wait until you’re on the floor with a mug of whiskey crying to Patsy Cline. Or out to sea. 

Like most Gen X kids, I was taught to prize self-sufficiency and resilience. I knew I was loved, and that my parents believed in me–even if one of them was a little touch and go. I was left to figure things out on my own, and there were many such things. By my late teens, I was overconfident when out in the world and deeply sad when by myself. Bravado only gets you so far. And like any lie, it can make you lonely. 

When I was teaching, I tried to remember to keep an eye out for kids who seemed to breeze through the day, who seemed fine, cheery, well-adjusted, happy all the time. Those kids are trickier to watch out for and more difficult to read than the kids who are transparently miserable, or disruptive, or just adept at vocalizing their needs. It’s easier to read kids you know well. Small schools help.

There’s another thing I learned from Tom and Pete’s friendship, and from other friendships since. To quote a post-it note I have up in my office: Make a Fucking Effort. 

***

In Stevie Smith’s Not Waving But Drowning, people are talking. And that’s about all they’re doing, except the guy who’s waving and drowning, then dead and moaning. The onlookers are guessing, surmising, lamenting, assuming, and finally and too late–maybe listening.  It’s painful to be invisible, and it’s painful to hide. Being misunderstood seems like the worst of both.

Smith’s poem is a strange, small, and bristled treasure. It has a great punchline. And leading to that punchline is a droll and frenetic cautionary tale about miscommunication that implicates everyone and no one. We see the consequences of seeming fine when you’re not—of making your confidence public and your troubles private. Mostly, the poem shows us the hazards of assuming everyone is fine, especially those who lark around like everything is. It’s tragic living as a nobody in a world of other nobodies. Smith’s poem reminds us: Pay better attention. Make a fucking effort. Then you can talk about your cat all you want.

***

It’s not surprising that teenagers have plenty to say about this poem. Being misunderstood is in their wheelhouse. Finding themselves in sudden and emergent duress is familiar terrain. They hear about grit and resilience and the importance of being vulnerable and asking for help. What a crazy and confusing mix of messages they get. From us. 

Some excerpts from years of student papers and discussion:

On the waver/drowner:

The poem sounds crazy, fast, like heavy metal. No no no! Dead guy talks, people watching a guy drown. Saying they’re surprised, but no one really knew him. Epic.

He always loved larking. Does that mean he was a partier?

Clueless citizens Poor guy.

He’s moaning. And dead? This is a very disorienting poem. Is it a little much?

On vulnerability: (cobbled from two class convos and group of essays re: same thing)

Yeah, well not everyone can afford to be vulnerable. 

True. Easier for girls? Maybe. And white people, definitely.

What about kids with social cred. Is it easier for them to show their true selves, or harder?

I think that’s how they got their social cred: by pretending.

 But Instagram. Is there performative vulnerability? Isn’t that a thing?

Don’t you already have to be in a power position? Otherwise you just look pathetic or invisible like the drowning guy?

On not drowning, just waving

What about parents who think you’re drowning when you’re just waving?

Oh god a whole can of worms, yes.  

Yes.

***

P.S. Also, can we start using “larking?” Comment in the comments whatever you think about any of this. Sorry about the swearing. It can’t be helped. xo

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I keep finding the same Wallace Stevens poem on top of different piles of papers and books in the rooms of the house we’ve been renovating for a couple years. No matter where the piles are stacked, it’s there: The House was Quiet and the World was Calm. Like a card trick. Cut the deck; there it is.

Our new house is on a quiet, in-between road. It’s a fixer upper in my old neighborhood in East Watertown, where I had my first classroom and taught for a decade at the turn of the century. These days, I run into old Watertown High students, teens in their 40s now. They work in their families’ Armenian grocery stores, or they’re cops, or they’ve had big lives in Hollywood or New York and have come back home to settle. 

I’m hoping to settle, too, into this strange and good old house with nooks and stairs that lead nowhere. In the couple years since we moved in, I keep migrating my writing and working spot from one room or desk to another. From my latest outpost, I can see giant conifers out the window and our nice Lebanese neighbor down below collecting grape leaves from vines coiled around a chain link fence and low hanging cable wires. I see the tiny, stunningly angry lady next door—an old art and music critic who writes now about getting the most from three day visits to various small cities, etc. She’s in her slippers, moving our survey markers.

Restlessness is a bitch. Healing from Covid, I watch from the couch as my college kids add to their piles of new apartment stuff from T.J. Maxx and yard sales—cutlery, colanders, incense, pillows. I make them lists they don’t need and didn’t ask for, and the steroids I’m taking make it all seem sadder, I think, than it probably is. It takes me a few days to realize how much I fear the coming emptiness of the fixer upper. And that I miss our old house and my garden. It’s strange that you don’t take your garden with you when you move. It feels a little like leaving your dog behind for the new owners to take care of.

***

It’s a predicament to be bugged or bogged down or sad but not know the source– usually a thought– that brought it on. You notice you’re moping around, awash in sadness or worry or irritation, but you can’t pinpoint the particulars yet. Maybe you try to shake it off, go and pet the dog, get coffee, talk to people about current events. If you’re lucky, you catch it early, tracing your thinking back and back until you find the thing—a-ha! of course!— that set off your mood. Or maybe you don’t even notice you’re down in it, and so you stay down, lost for quite some time. 

Sometimes sad or restless starts with a trickster thought, usually some dopey comparison like: I should be vacationing like they’re vacationing. Or Why am I home when other people go out and learn to surf? But sometimes the beginning of a mystery mood is not a trickster thought. Sometimes it’s a thought that got banished or ignored, and deserves attention: Oliver is dead. Or Why did I talk to my kid that way?

I think it takes a lot of practice to be good readers and careful caretakers of our thoughts. They can be hard things to catch before they settle into your body and register as fact. This is easier said than done. And while specifying and sourcing vague woes won’t disappear them, doing so makes the consequent moods less daunting and mysterious. Now you know where to find them, on your own terms. None of this comes naturally to the restless among us.

*

It was a good thing I had the house to myself tonight, and it was good the windows were shut. Because I cried in a loud, medieval way, with wailing and such, that would have been alarming to passersby or family members. It didn’t alarm me, though. For one thing, I knew at least some were steroid tears. And two: I knew where my grief came from, pretty precisely, after mulling it for some time while being sick and forced to be still. I was too tired to fidget or futz around, or fight it.

After a couple minutes of the crying, I blew my nose and cuddled the dogs.  Then I sat down and read the poem that’s been so gently in my face these past few months. The House was Quiet and the World was Calm. It was just what I needed. I read it again. I thought about my students, and about times we read it and other Wallace Stevens poems together, and we felt mystified, stumped, annoyed, gratified, satisfied, delighted, neutral, etc. Then I went upstairs to read my book. I read late into the night. 

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm by Wallace Stevens

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Note to teachers, students, anyone: 

Stevens once said “Personally, I like a word to sound wrong.”

Students and I can always find a way to take it from there…(“much most”??) Like John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) put it: “You should never, ever be understood completely. That's like the kiss of death, isn't it? It's a full stop. I don't ever think you should put full stops on thoughts. They change.”

Wallace Stevens and Johnny Rotten. Together at last. 

Sometimes when I’m reading any poem by Wallace Stevens and I try to “teach it,” I  feel small and silly. But I feel enlarged and alive when I read him with students. We read a lot of him– the long poems and the short. Of course we–me, students– marvel at the language, or are made restless by it, or wonder why this choice and not that. Or we think there must be something we’re not getting and wonder about that. I don’t mean to be breezy about it. I just don’t know how much teaching of his poems was any different from or better than reading them and working with them and asking questions together. Enjoying them. I’d say most students like being a little mystified together once in a while.

We spend a lot of time with “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and we read and come back around to “The Snowman” over the course of a school year. Kids do projects/poems/paintings/dances:  (“13 Ways of Looking at Envy,” “13 Ways of Looking at My Mother’s Suitors”...) and emulations. 

We notice how villanelle-like this poem is and what that dirge-y quality does to lull us, lullaby us, soothe and calm and rock us, or rattle us. Every few years over my 20 year span teaching, I’d go to Porter Square books or Wordsworth and buy a book of essays on Wallace Stevens. Always interesting, but again, I’m not sure my “teaching of Stevens” improved.

Still, some starting approaches/questions (aside from Stevens’s “I like a word to sound wrong” quote above): Look at the lines vs. the sentences. Where do they dovetail, clash, complement, antagonize, and how? Look at what his couplets do, separately and together/in context; and how coupleting and line-making don’t always mirror sentence-making. Look at how his iambic pentameter couplets work on your rhythmic sense of the poem, to your reading, to your intuiting, to your understanding, to your undoing of your understanding, etc. What makes a good line; what’s the shape of the poem; where’s the repetition; which words are key (hint: all of ‘em, but which could you absolutely not spare?)...etc. 

And of course: Does this get at the one-ness of the reading experience? Of a house quiet at night? Of calm? What is it to become one with …?

“Stevens so often highlights the often-hidden process of translating into words that we become conscious of what and how words are.” - from A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens by Eleanor Cook (2007)

That’s what I got. You?

Xo

• Wallace Stevens, "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens.  Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

• The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Alfred A. Knopf, 1954)

• House postcard purchased on Ebay.

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I used to carry a set of my parents’ spare car keys around the Mall of New Hampshire and jingle them casually but conspicuously when walking by a pack of cute (or any) boys. I was 13 or 14 but looked younger and wanted to look old enough to drive. If you see a small girl shaking keys at you at the mall, now you know why.

I’d usually be with my best friend, Christopher, who often shoplifted. We were in Filene’s one day when he walked out wearing an expensive down coat. I thought he was trying it on until he yanked at the tag, slipped it into the pocket of one of the other coats, and started walking through Men’s, past Cosmetics, and then out into the Mall. I followed at some distance. When he stopped near the water fountain, I kept walking. I didn’t dangle any keys and I didn’t look back. Later, he tried to give me the coat. 

From there, Christopher just kept escalating the risk, and later I’d understand why.  It turned out that stealing things was like a placeholder risk that was standing in temporarily for the big-ticket one that loomed. When he called me from his East Boston apartment the year after high school to tell me he was gay, I said something like Yeah…I mean…I…Didn’t we know that?  

His being gay was something even we had elided, which also makes sense in hindsight. It was precarious for Christopher in rural early 80s New Hampshire. His nice house with a pool and fancy kitchen came with a new French Canadian stepfather, Roland, a round and grave contractor who wore flannel and slacks. He’d married Christopher’s mother fresh off her bad divorce. She and Christopher had moved out of their studio apartment in Lawrence and over the border to New Hampshire into a house Roland had built himself.

There were more trees and fewer sirens, but no downtown or stores or independent way to get around. The country high school had a thriving agricultural program, including cows you could see outside the classroom windows. It was an uneasy habitat for both of us, but especially Christopher with his pressed Levi’s and pastel alligator shirts and stolen jackets. We loved the B-52s, Bronski Beat, Joy Division, and Seventeen magazine.

I plunked all the change I had into my dorm’s payphone and listened about his new life and apartment near the airport until I ran out of quarters and dimes. I had to say a quick goodbye to this new, more embodied and comfortable version of my friend. 

I took placeholder risks back then, too. I’d figure out where the edges of things were, and then bend or go around those edges to accommodate what I wanted to do. Could I kiss a new boy if my friends were around? Could I hitchhike if it was daytime? Could I trust the older, sweet-talking fireman? Looking back, the answers are all no, girl. No. I was a poor calculator of risks, because I was more innocent and ignorant than I imagined myself to be. When I get wistful about childhood– usually my own kids’, but my own, too–there’s always a chaser of gratitude that the ignorance of my teens and early 20s didn’t cost me more.

***

I’m a sucker for stories where the protagonist has a shaky relationship with the passage of time, especially crossing over from innocence to something else. Not just the coming of age that happens around 13, but all the comings of age that come for us after that. 

I think of the adults in Little Miss Sunshine who get their existential second wind from their kid, Olive’s, impossible dream. Or the scene in Adaptation when Meryl Streep’s character says “I want to be a baby again. I want to be new.” I think of poems we’ve discussed in these essays, like Atwood’s You Begin and Bishop’s In the Waiting Room and Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays. I think of Updike’s story Pigeon Feathers, and Joyce’s Araby.

I think of the episode of Pen15 when the besties envision aloud their sad and separate futures as adults, but then just can’t abide it. So they amend that vision into a commendably and sustainably realistic version of the middle school best-friend future fantasy (“We’ll probably get divorced around the same time/Yeah, because they got in the way of us…” and “We’ll probably have kids a couple years apart/Yeah because I’m gonna have issues and you’re gonna have to help me with that…”) 

I think of the episode “Napkins” in The Bear this season with Tina and Mikey talking about Tina’s middle-age job search:

T: And I was thinking it would be real easy for me to get really angry at these kids.

M: Like “Fuck them kids. They don’t know shit.”

T: They haven’t been through nothing, they don’t know real stress (sighs) but I’m also like…“I would give anything to be one of them motherfuckers.”

M: Ah, dude. So fucking true. I’m jealous as fuck.

In Mark Doty’s poem, Coastal, the speaker encounters a child’s faith in the world to repair itself, and in her own power and obligation to fix a broken loon. In the poem is an adult-child interaction where the child is not asking advice and the adult is not giving it. Instead, we see the audacity of innocence as a powerful force even against more powerful and inevitable things. She’s the more evolved one, and we all see it.

COASTAL

Cold April and the neighbor girl
—our plumber’s daughter—
comes up the wet street

from the harbor carrying,
in a nest she’s made
of her pink parka,

a loon. It’s so sick,
she says when I ask.
Foolish kid,

does she think she can keep
this emissary of air?
Is it trust or illness

that allows the head
—sleek tulip—to bow
on its bent stem

across her arm?
Look at the steady,
quiet eye. She is carrying

the bird back from indifference,
from the coast
of whatever rearrangement

the elements intend,
and the loon allows her.
She is going to call

the Center for Coastal Studies,
and will swaddle the bird
in her petal-bright coat

until they come.
She cradles the wild form.
Stubborn girl.

- Mark Doty

Doty, Mark. 2008. Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. 

It’s pretty amazing and challenging to look at this poem–and this idea–with teenagers. I taught a class called Childhood and Memory in Literature once.  Just once. Because it only half-worked—the reading part was great, but the writing part less so. I learned that asking a teenager to write about their childhood relies on something most teens don’t have quite yet: the critical distance and insight that come only with time and experience. It’s like standing too close to a big painting.

But in literature and stories, writers can give characters that time and critical distance. So reading stories about characters reckoning with childhood–its pain, luminosity,  grandiosity and (for the lucky) its faith in goodness–well, that was really something. That was so good.

The speaker in Coastal beholds this kind of faith manifest in this little girl. When students and I would read and discuss this poem, they’d sometimes feel sorry for the speaker, and wonder if he’s jealous of the girl’s innocence and her belief in goodness and in her own power. The kids saw a gulf between the child and the speaker, whose adult vision is sharp but whose chances at guilelessness are nil. To boot, the guy doesn’t have just “plain adult” eyes (direct quote!)  but the eyes of a poet, which some of the students saw as a heavy burden and others saw as a way to be more childlike and “in wonderment”. The students said: 

• Being a poet. Isn’t that like having the eyes of a child? 

• Yeah- but with the word skills of an adult

• Shouldn’t all adults be cynical? Or heartbroken, with just multiple heartbreaks…

• I love Pink parka, and sleek tulip and Look at the steady, quiet eye…

• Such a sweet way to put it…

• It’s tough, though. Imagine all the shit you’ve seen as a full adult but with like superhuman observational skills…

The speaker knows that the natural world is and might always be indifferent to pink-parka’d girls. But as one student insisted, he also knows that the Center for Coastal Studies probably won’t be. That’s something, isn’t it? Our speaker can’t be a child, but he can look very clearly and carefully at the way she does her looking. He can observe this girl, who’s foolish, then stubborn, and then worth writing a poem about.  He can get some of her shine, proximal and refracted.

Here it is again:

COASTAL

Cold April and the neighbor girl
—our plumber’s daughter—
comes up the wet street

from the harbor carrying,
in a nest she’s made
of her pink parka,

a loon. It’s so sick,
she says when I ask.
Foolish kid,

does she think she can keep
this emissary of air?
Is it trust or illness

that allows the head
—sleek tulip—to bow
on its bent stem

across her arm?
Look at the steady,
quiet eye. She is carrying

the bird back from indifference,
from the coast
of whatever rearrangement

the elements intend,
and the loon allows her.
She is going to call

the Center for Coastal Studies,
and will swaddle the bird
in her petal-bright coat

until they come.
She cradles the wild form.
Stubborn girl.

- Mark Doty

Doty, Mark. 2008. Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. 

When you’re a pre-teen,  you don’t like to stumble upon conversations between adults, in the same way you don’t want to walk downstairs to get a glass of water in the middle of the night and see your parents doing the bump with the Rosenthals from up the street. 

Maybe the Sullivans were there, too. That’d be six of them holding their drinks aloft and aiming their unsteady middles toward each other. I keep missing your bum hahaha! Mr. Rosenthal is also your dentist. Hearing him say “bum” is unsettling. 

Once you begin to see things like this, there’s no going back—only endless turning away, which you’ll do for the next several years. In the meantime, you can’t stop overhearing or overseeing. From the back seat of the car or doing your homework in the next room, you hear adults talking. You connect the dots and decode some of the euphemisms and references. There are backstories to everything and everyone, you learn. The adults don’t know yet that you’ve started listening. It’s like walking in on someone, but you’re the one who’s naked.

***

I was 12 and at a gymnastics meet about to compete with my team. While marking my floor routine, I noticed my coach, Dick, talking to one of the floor exercise judges. She was pretty and seemed young. I overheard him say See that one? and saw him nodding toward me. She’s the one to watch. The only one on my team with style.

It was an unnerving and transgressive comment coming from an adult I counted on to feel exactly the same toward all of us, like I thought parents did with their kids. And why was he even talking to the judge and telling her secret things about the team? Was that even allowed in the world of recreational competitive town sports? Anyway, I pretended not to hear this first comment or its even more outlandish follow-up, something like: The only one with something special.

My still-then-beloved coach Dick Ferguson, with his strange, ridiculous, and surprising proclamations, had set me apart and away from my teammates. I didn’t think coaches were supposed to do that. Sadly, Ferguson would go on to do much more alarming things than play favorites.

I pretended to go chalk up my hands. I stood at the basin and watched my teammates doing their tumbling passes. In theory, they were warming up for the meet, but really they were trying to spook or impress the other team by adding in some too-advanced, last-minute flip or twist. One of us always got hurt during this dumb foreplay and had to sit out for the whole meet, which we’d then go on to lose. I loved those girls. Even the ones I didn’t like, I loved. I was proud to be a member of the Little Leprechauns town recreational gymnastics team.

None of us would go far. We’d all started too late or didn’t have enough money to go to the next level. Some of us already smoked pot, etc. But that team was my first outside-the-family communal group. I loved who I was with them, and who I became. Those teenage underdogs from assorted Merrimack Valley towns gave me people to move with, and a pack to call my own. We rode our bikes at dusk to the industrial park where our gym was. We did exhibitions at the local mall dressed in our green leotards and got leered at by older boys and men in the Papa Gino’s. We loved Olga Korbut. It was 1975. 

 ***

In 2015, there’s a small boy on the sidewalk across the street from an idling car. He’s standing just outside a circle of other 12 year old boys. The group is a closed system, like an ant farm or a castle with a moat and a drawbridge. The boys in the circle are much bigger than the other boy, some by a foot. Their adult-size bodies move in stop-motion herky-jerky.

The small boy looks like he’s about 8, and he never forgets it, even when his parents say you’ll grow soon don’t worry it’ll happen or you’re so good at this or that and so smart we love you. What are they supposed to say? He’s one of a kind and such a beauty. Funny boy, worried about anti-matter and if things are real. And do we see the same red when we look at red. Always singing, too, like a little Leonard Cohen. Okay, the parents tell him. We’ll take you to an endocrinologist.

The boy remembers moving in packs with these boys–girls, too–when they were all little. His body craves the simple and sure intimacies. Sleeping on toddler cots lined up on the floor, tiny hands clutching, breathing steady, dreaming of cake. He’s not sure how to get back there.

For now, on the sidewalk in front of the middle school, he finds an opening in the circle of boys. But he laughs too loud and talks too much, or in the wrong places. Pretty soon, out of sync with the other boys’ inside jokes and cons and boob talk, he wanders off toward the cement-colored school. There’s a rage fermenting in his belly that he doesn’t know about yet. It’ll give him some trouble later. The whole thing will take years to figure out. The car across the street moves away. The boy grows to be six feet and two inches tall.

***

When we’re reading Mark Doty’s A Display of Mackerel, the students and I wonder about the ways we’re individual and ways we’re communal. What things become possible only when we set aside our individual identity in service of the community? But then, what about personality and self-expression? Can we have both school uniforms and guitar solos? 

Here’s the poem:

A Display of Mackerel by Mark Doty

They lie in parallel rows, 
on ice, head to tail, 
each a foot of luminosity 

barred with black bands, 
which divide the scales’ 
radiant sections 

like seams of lead 
in a Tiffany window. 
Iridescent, watery 

prismatics: think abalone, 
the wildly rainbowed 
mirror of a soapbubble sphere, 

think sun on gasoline. 
Splendor, and splendor, 
and not a one in any way 

distinguished from the other 
—nothing about them 
of individuality. Instead 

they’re all exact expressions 
of the one soul, 
each a perfect fulfilment 

of heaven’s template, 
mackerel essence. As if, 
after a lifetime arriving 

at this enameling, the jeweler’s 
made uncountable examples, 
each as intricate 

in its oily fabulation 
as the one before 
Suppose we could iridesce, 

like these, and lose ourselves 
entirely in the universe 
of shimmer—would you want 

to be yourself only, 
unduplicatable, doomed 
to be lost? They’d prefer, 

plainly, to be flashing participants, 
multitudinous. Even now 
they seem to be bolting 

forward, heedless of stasis. 
They don’t care they’re dead 
and nearly frozen, 

just as, presumably, 
they didn’t care that they were living: 
all, all for all, 

the rainbowed school 
and its acres of brilliant classrooms, 
in which no verb is singular, 

or every one is. How happy they seem, 
even on ice, to be together, selfless, 
which is the price of gleaming.

We think about those multitudes that move as a single entity and the magic (or sometimes horror) of that. We talk about murmurations and symphonies and choreographed dances and mackerel. But also about militaries marching and harm going viral. We talk about what an architect of language Doty is, and about words like shimmering and gleaming that make the whole bottom part of our faces move when we say them. We think not just abalone, or sun on gasoline. We think mother and baby in birth. We think flash mobs. We think relay teams and power trios. 

Some students say it takes a certain kind of individual to give themselves over to the communal endeavor. Is it confidence? Love? It seems like it might be both?

High school students are asked to switch between being individuals and a collective of meaning-makers every day. I know this is true in English class, but I think it’s probably true in all high school classes, and most friendships, to boot. How does one stay loyal to the self and to the group–and (in the case of English class) to the poem or the work being studied? How to balance desire and patience? How to practice risk and care? Hold multiple truths, we tell them. But can we?

Back to the words: We say certain ones over and over because we like how they sound– words like oily and abalone. A student says it’s crazy when you say any word over and over it turns into some weird other thing, like a chant or nonsense. We try it with everyday words like that and soon and mustard.

One student says We’re so into individuality in this culture. I feel like I have to prove 24/7 that I’m not a follower. 

Another says Dead fish in a supermarket. Thought-provoking. Who knew?

And another: What if you can lead and follow at the same time? Isn’t that what a school of fish does anyway? 

And what could I possibly add to that? Here’s the poem again:

A Display of Mackerel by Mark Doty

They lie in parallel rows, 
on ice, head to tail, 
each a foot of luminosity 

barred with black bands, 
which divide the scales’ 
radiant sections 

like seams of lead 
in a Tiffany window. 
Iridescent, watery 

prismatics: think abalone, 
the wildly rainbowed 
mirror of a soapbubble sphere, 

think sun on gasoline. 
Splendor, and splendor, 
and not a one in any way 

distinguished from the other 
—nothing about them 
of individuality. Instead 

they’re all exact expressions 
of the one soul, 
each a perfect fulfilment 

of heaven’s template, 
mackerel essence. As if, 
after a lifetime arriving 

at this enameling, the jeweler’s 
made uncountable examples, 
each as intricate 

in its oily fabulation 
as the one before 
Suppose we could iridesce, 

like these, and lose ourselves 
entirely in the universe 
of shimmer—would you want 

to be yourself only, 
unduplicatable, doomed 
to be lost? They’d prefer, 

plainly, to be flashing participants, 
multitudinous. Even now 
they seem to be bolting 

forward, heedless of stasis. 
They don’t care they’re dead 
and nearly frozen, 

just as, presumably, 
they didn’t care that they were living: 
all, all for all, 

the rainbowed school 
and its acres of brilliant classrooms, 
in which no verb is singular, 

or every one is. How happy they seem, 
even on ice, to be together, selfless, 
which is the price of gleaming.

© Mark Doty, Atlantis: Poems (HarperPerennial, 1995)

Here is Doty reading it (and talking a bit about it before reading it).

And here’s an essay he wrote about writing it.

On my father’s gravestone there’s an etching of a guy fly fishing, mid-cast with waders on. My father is a serious fly fisherman, even in perpetuity. 

Serious fly fishermen tie their own flies. So on weekend evenings, he’d drag a kitchen chair into our TV room and set up his coffee cans and candy tins of supplies on a fold-up card table. It could have passed for the craft table of an eccentric third grade girl if you took away the beer and the ashtray. Peacock feathers, rubber eyes, hooks, animal pelt pieces, shiny threads, tiny surgical tools, a clamp spotlight, a bottle that read “fly head cement.”

Sometimes he’d turn his spotlight too bright and we’d have to insist he angle it away from the TV. We can’t see H.R. Pufnstuf. Or we’d have to ask him to stop whistling. We can’t hear what Nixon is saying, and it looks like he’s crying. Turn it up.

Most of the finished flies were preening, beautiful things in costumed reds and silvers instead of looking like the real versions of themselves. To the fish, the flashy imposter looks more like its prey than the real thing. It’s tempting to go for flash, even for fish.

Growing up, my father worked in his father’s decoy shop in upstate NY, making the decoys that hunters would set in the water to entice unsuspecting ducks to fly over and join in. The decoys didn’t look like real ducks– just crude black and white duck-shaped cork. (Their allure relied on numbers, not flash.) By the time the real ducks realized their mistake, they were shot out of the sky. 

After a time, my grandfather started making the kind of elaborately painted decoys that people put on their mantels as folk art, instead of the utilitarian kind. The family scraped by on the art ducks from then on. 

***

At supper one night, my father asked me to get up early and go fishing with him on a river in New Hampshire. I was about 13. I’d go with him, I said. Just to be outside and poke around. I didn’t like fishing with him. I’d learned by then that when he was fishing, he could be (even more) bossy and rigid and forget you were just a kid. His focus was total, and it wasn’t on you. But I liked the drive with him, just me and him. And I liked that he asked me. 

We got up to this old mill town and made our way down to the river. He put on the waders and toddled out up to his waist while I hopped around the rocks closer to the riverbank. He was about 15 or 20 feet upriver when he cast his line back and the fly’s hook caught my cheek a couple inches under my eye. It felt like I imagined a slap in the face would feel. Sharp, surprising, and demanding of a response you’re too bewildered to give. I touched it. Fuzzy and bulky, like a wasp.

I wasn’t thinking about the trajectory of my father’s casting line or the stop-motion arc and lasso snap of the line. I was busy balancing on a rock, watching the river around my feet. The tufts of underwater grasses looked like lady’s hair from mythology or a shampoo commercial, undulating around obstacles from steady places. It was a stunning display, and maybe I had the momentary thought that it was all laid out special, just for me. And maybe I imagined the water grasses replying Hell, no, honey. I was swaying when you woke up this morning, and I’ll be swaying in this little town boom or bust, forever.

I must have been looking up at the sun or at trees on the opposite bank when the fly’s hook found my cheek. My father, then in the middle of the river in his waders, felt his line catch and twisted around to see me holding my bleeding face. He stumbled and waddled trying to get over to me. He held my chin with his wet hand and angled it to have a look. He said things like Oh god, shit, wow, look at that, and okay. He told me to ready myself. He’d have to yank the hook back out like you would out of a fish’s mouth, the reverse of how it went in. So I cried.

He wiped the slippery tear and blood mixture from my cheek and told me it was good the face didn’t have many nerves. He grabbed the hook with his thumb and forefinger and held his other palm against my chin and did it. Then he pulled a clean-seeming bandaid out of his tacklebox. We stopped for pancakes on the way home.

Like I said, taking a hook in the cheek feels like a slap in the face probably does. But only literally. It wasn’t “like a slap in the face” despite the easy metaphor. Instead: The hook in the cheek hurt, but not as much as you’d think. It did bleed a lot. My father had been lost in his bliss, out there in his ridiculous waders. I’d made a mistake standing behind his casting arc, with the weeds and the water. He was a careless caretaker sometimes. Often. And there’s an abandoned prison overlooking the river with a chainlink fence so overgrown with flowering vines and tall grasses that you can’t see the fence itself. Just the wall of flowers and reeds.

***

There are a few black and white photos of my father as a little boy with his family and a couple of black labs. They’re in front of their farmhouse and a beaten-down old car settling in for what looks like a picnic. When I asked my father about it he said they were just eating outside, that was all, and that they did it a lot. He said it made meals not as big a deal. It lowered expectations.

***

I see a hawk, and I wonder if it’s the same hawk who’s been hanging around Mt. Auburn Cemetery, where I go just about every day. Years ago, when I needed to, I would say something about the hawk being my father’s spirit coming down to visit. Now I just say it’s a hawk. True, my father and I did both love birds. He did, and I still do. But the hawk is the thing I’m seeing, and the thing I’m pointing out and talking about. And it’s plenty.

***

Jamaal May’s poem is plenty, too. I love it, and I’m glad it’s here, especially now. Maybe it’s calling out imposter metaphors and their makers. Those who’ve said: Oh I will take your trauma and your history and maybe your neighborhood and make it my beauty or my penance. 

Razed buildings aren’t symbols for something else. Detroit’s children playing and feeding the birds are that. Not something else. Again, plenty. Don’t doom the children. 

When my daughter was a little girl, she would refer to all the birds she saw with these literal, no-nonsense descriptors. Look! she’d say, It’s a small brown hopping Arlington bird. We know the real names of birds now, but sometimes for fun we name them Abby’s way—by their actions and appearance in the moment. Hey! Blue, white, and black pointy-headed fighting bird of Watertown! Stop kicking the little brown hopping birds off the feeder. Bluejay asshole.

There Are Birds Here                	by Jamaal May
For Detroit
 
There are birds here,
so many birds here
is what I was trying to say
when they said those birds were metaphors
for what is trapped
between buildings
and buildings. No.
The birds are here
to root around for bread
the girl’s hands tear
and toss like confetti. No,
I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton,
I said confetti, and no
not the confetti
a tank can make of a building.
I mean the confetti
a boy can’t stop smiling about
and no his smile isn’t much
like a skeleton at all. And no
his neighborhood is not like a war zone.
I am trying to say
his neighborhood
is as tattered and feathered
as anything else,
as shadow pierced by sun
and light parted
by shadow-dance as anything else,
but they won’t stop saying
how lovely the ruins,
how ruined the lovely
children must be in that birdless city.
 

Jamaal May, "There Are Birds Here" from The Big Book of Exit Strategies. Copyright © 2016 by Jamaal May. Reprinted by permission of Alice James Books.

Source: The Big Book of Exit Strategies (Alice James Books, 2016)

Postscript by Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

***

I broke my toe the night before my wedding. I kicked the same furniture leg with the same foot twice running around our little wedding cottage in my underwear about to nurse the baby. We were late to our own dinner thing, and I had to go barefoot. I tried to drink enough wine to forget about the foot. 

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The next morning, my pinky toe was throbbing. Broken toes really hurt, but they’re clownish and so get little sympathy. The toe was purple and stuck in position pointing sharp right. Squeezing it into my vintage Italian white go-go boot was out of the question. And those boots were not an optional part of my wedding outfit. 

I had to promise the ER doctor that I wouldn’t dance at my wedding before he agreed to give me a nerve block. I promised. When I threw up from the pain medicine he gave me, my mother held my hand and rubbed my back. It had been a long time since we’d been in the roles of soothing mother and sick kid. She was a nurse who worked nights. Always a consistent, no-nonsense nurturer. If you’re sick stay home, but I have to go to work/sleep. Flat coke and toast.

Sitting there on the exam table in the ER, I started to feel dizzy and airy. Something like homesick. Neither here nor there. I bent over and closed my eyes and thought about being a kid. Maybe about wanting to be. My mother said You’re okay, hon and patted my back the way my sister says I do to signal that I’m done hugging. Big day ahead. An anxious melancholy was stuck in my throat like a cough drop. It felt like wanting my mother, which sounds strange because there she was. So that couldn’t have been it.

While the doctor was getting his nerve block together, my breasts started leaking wet circles through my t-shirt. My mother looked at the milk circles and bent over and laughed, holding on to the table with her long arms. We both laughed, probably a bit too much. It seemed to annoy the doctor, and I can’t say I blame him. So much fuss for what he thought was just a broken toe.

Ready? He held his needle above my foot. This will hurt. The heaviness from a few minutes ago–the homesickness feeling–passed through my chest and throat and out. And then I realized something my body already knew: It was my baby I wanted. On the way back up the mountain, my mother and I listened to Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. It’s a good one for driving a little too fast.

I danced at my wedding. We had a swing band, and people of all ages were flinging and dipping each other. I had to squeeze in all my dancing before the numb toe turned back into a hurting, living thing and I’d have to take off my wedding boots forever.

The next day, my husband and I drove slowly down the long driveway of the inn, with the baby in her carseat and a bag of ice on my foot. Our friends and family waved from the porch in their shorts and t-shirts and messed hair and raccoon eyes, eating the leftover fruit pies we’d had instead of cake. I felt a pressing, desperate love for this collective of people I knew would never converge again. It wasn’t a scene anyone would want to leave.

Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly.

I leaned all the way out the car window and yelled goodbye and waved like I was trying to flag down a rescue plane, until the porch and our people were out of sight. My husband eased the car to a stop. We did think about turning around. 

But the three of us—my new husband and our 8 month old—were headed to Acadia. We drove out and away, through mountains that sparkled from a morning rain. We headed across Maine, then all the way down to a little cottage at the island’s most downeasterly point. We set up pillows in a circle on the cottage’s living room floor and put the baby–8 months old, bald, beautiful, spry– in the middle, and got in there with her. And we took her outside into the sun-dappled woods all day, pointed out at the sea, and put our feet in the cold water. That was all we really had to do. It was more than enough.

***

I’ve banged into many things since then. I move too fast, and don’t look where I’m going—or rather, I only look where I’m going. I see the book I want from the bookshelf, but not the sharp, head-height edge of the bookshelf. Lately, I try to plot my movements more carefully, but it doesn’t come naturally. It feels like I’m sneaking up on someone.

Teaching was the only setting where I wasn’t too impatient. I wasn’t in a hurry, I wasn’t trying to get away from anything, or take shortcuts. I never once hit my head or stubbed my toe in the classroom. My own kids used to complain that my students got a much more patient and reasonable version of me than they did, and of course they were right. I wonder if the main reason was always some version of this: I didn’t argue with students about something stupid that was really about them growing up and leaving.  

***

It can take an extra, painful, or awe-inspiring thing to stop people in their haste and haze. Furniture legs, divorce, leaking breast milk, bad news, the natural world, grief, a migraine. Something to make us look closer and wider. Poetry is good at that.

Postscript invites us to pull over and look. The way I read it, it also reminds us about the limits of our seeing, our timing, our permanence, and our importance. We are “a hurry.” Neither here nor there. Solid and ephemeral, like everything. Busy like the swans, the wind and ocean, and the light. All busy.

In the world of the poem, it’s a lucky thing to be caught off guard. To hear Heaney tell it, that’s what the poem did to him: “Now and again a poem comes like that, like a ball kicked in from nowhere: in this case, I was completely absorbed in writing one of the last of the Oxford lectures when I had this quick sidelong glimpse of something flying past; before I knew where I was, I went after it.”  

We have hearts that can be blown open. And despite our homesickness and stumbling, we can show up and look. Some days it’s hard to get out of bed, the house, your head, the neighborhood, your habit. But sometime, if you can, make the time. Put yourself where the buffetings and the good poems and the good people can find you.

***

Here’s the poem again:

Postscript by Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

***

Things students said and wondered and wrote about Postscript:

Is it saying you can’t you possibly see everything? Mari 

The guy seems to have low expectations? Like, for us? Diego

He’s telling us what to do…then he’s descriptive in the middle I guess?  Scenes of bird, rocks,  water…Nora

Then just tells us how it is. Then tells us how we’ll be (and what could happen) Oona

Can we see a photo of where he’s talking about? Ari. (Let’s not yet. me)

There’s a tension between tone and content…like, “dude sometime check it out” and then like, “do it exactly this way, on this date and time and place” Devon

Very Irish. Rose

You know…keep your hopes in check. Don’t be earnest. The world’s too beautiful for us. Rose

Also useless to think you’ll capture it. Then why suggest going exactly there? Sam

Isn’t he trying to capture it? He’s talking to himself. Lee

Useless to think you’ll capture it more thoroughly. J.P.

More thoroughly than… what…?  Abby

And then things shift. You are neither here nor there. You’re a hurry. But you’re doing your part. Just don’t get ahead of yourself. I can’t tell if this is a comfort thing to say or an insult. Eli

Again, Irish. Rose

Love “soft buffetings”... It’s a gentle word for a whipping wind (if it can blow your heart open) Zohar

Same. Amir

Through which known and strange things pass. Is the speaker saying we’re all like ghosts? Also known and strange things. Expected and unexpected?  Isaac

Makes me wonder about past lives. May

The human parts seems so floaty. Oliver

Like when he’s talking about the natural world, it’s solid matter…but with people..we’re just like see-through. Oliver

How we talked the other day about giving props to awe. About grandeur Tara

And then the wind knocks you over. Blows you open. Sam

Blows your heart open. That’s a good thing. Think of the grinch. Lonni

I need to read it again. May

I’m not a fan. Let’s move on. Joe

What?? Celine.

Now can we see the pic? Ari

“Postscript” by Seamus Heaney, from The Spirit Level. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.

When I was a kid and old enough to go to the mall by myself, my father would give me his Jordan Marsh credit card and some cash before Christmas and send me to the Burlington Mall to do his Christmas shopping for my mother. I felt grown up and trusted, brandishing a credit card. But after a while wandering the mall, I’d get melancholy passing the Santa and the queue of kids, and criss-crossing through all the adult shoppers. I never told my mother about these trips, but I’m sure she knew. I’d try to hide the bags somewhere, but now I know there’s really nowhere in a house a mother doesn’t go. 

I’d hoist the pile of gifts–a White Shoulders special gift set, some flannel non-skid slippers, a prettier than average watch, a fluffy robe, or some Jean Nate–up to the ladies at the counter. I said yes to whatever gift-wrapping was offered, and sometimes had to show the note my dad gave me that said I could use his credit card. When I started to look a little more like a teen, the cosmetics ladies would accuse me (or us, if I brought my brother or a friend) of stealing and loitering and try to shoo us away. I’d say I was shopping for my father and show them the card, though, and then I’d do a lot of unnecessary touching of things while they hovered.

I don’t remember my dad ever picking out gifts on his own. I was surprised the time he got me an unfinished pine dresser and stained it himself and even tied a bow around the whole thing the Christmas after I got my first apartment. I still have the dresser in the cellar. It holds vacuum filters and screws and things like that, which would suit him.

The biggest surprise gift from my father came a few years later. One Christmas, he got me a Fender Telecaster guitar that he’d researched and picked out himself. He wrote a card to go with it, which I still have in an old train case with other important things. On the card he wrote a little ditty in his angular handwriting of tilted slashes: “If you do a lot of strumming and fretting, an American Standard Telecaster is What You’re Getting.”

My father showed his love in funny and inconsistent ways. He was limited in what he could give, and there were reasons for that, and I understand those reasons much better now. His gift giving habits were just one of his many riddles. But, as you can see, he could really keep you guessing. I think he did give his all.

My telecaster was stolen 12 years ago when our house was broken into and robbed. I got the news late after school when I was packing up my stuff near the old church pew in the hallway where we’d all linger after school and in between classes. 

My husband had come home from work that afternoon to find the door to our house wide open and furniture tipped over. I was on the phone with him as he was going through the broken-into house for the first time. I asked him if the telecaster was gone, and he said it was, and I thought of my father, long dead by then. I told my husband I’d call him back.

The kid who happened to be standing there when I got the call was John-Paul, a student of mine who I was always bickering with because he told fibs about why he didn’t do his work or the reading for class, etc. But as my father used to say—and I wish I could remember the exact referent—“You can’t shit a shitter.” So this kid and I really got on each other’s nerves. But on that day, John-Paul walked me over to the hallway pew and we sat down. He’d overheard enough to know what had happened. He put his arm around my shoulder and said “I’ll just sit here with you.” I cried for another bit and then he walked me out to my car. After that, we went back to our normal bickering about class things. But it wasn’t the same.

In a classroom full of teachers once, Robert Pinsky said something I’ll never forget– one of many things. He said when we love people, we spend a whole life analyzing them. And it’s the same with poems, he said. If you love anything enough, he reasoned, eventually you’ll want to see how it’s put together. He told us a story about the time he walked into the living room, and on the TV screen was a dog’s cranium, open and being dissected and explained. His daughter, who was studying to be a veterinarian, was watching it, rewinding it, taking notes. That was how much she loved dogs. 

I had a student once write her senior thesis on the art and subtext of the mixtape. She used a mixtape that her new-ish boyfriend had given her. In the context of this budding relationship, she parsed the extent to which a given song’s lyrics were meant to be taken literally. Versus the songs that were just a gift to be shared, like you share a ripe apple, or shown off like you show off your best new weird pants. A good mix tape, she concluded, can have many layers of discourse. It can say I know you. I love you. It can say I thought you would love this song. Or, I love this song; this is who I am. 

How well can we know a person if we don't know or try to know their tastes, pleasures, aversions, and edges? Remember that scene in Hi-Fidelity when the dad comes into the record store looking for a crappy record for his daughter, and Jack Black’s surly record store clerk responds “Do you know your daughter at all? Go to the mall!”

You can glean plenty about the connection between people by the gifts and things that pass between them, especially over time. As recipients, there are gifts that we keep, or keep wondering about, long after the giver is gone. And it’s not about money; some of us give the best gifts when we're broke and in love.  

The Assignment

All this made me think of a favorite assignment. Here it is, in mini: 

Find a poem that your chosen classmate would love, and give it to them at the end of the semester.

On the first day of class, each student gets the name of a classmate (and keeps it secret). For the next 20 weeks, the giver attends a little extra to their person, trying to suss out taste, biases, inclinations, habits, aversions, and ways of interacting with different poems and poets, and with different stories and films. At semester’s end, the givers present their person with their carefully sought and chosen poem, along with a letter including their rationale.

As a teacher, this involved some front-loading and reminding, but it was worth it. One student called it “the literary stalking assignment.” At the end of his semester, this heckler/student was given Autobiographia Literaria by Frank O’Hara. And boy did he love it.

I wonder what I’d put on a mixtape of poems and songs and other favorite things for you–the collective of readers here. Doing that kind of one-size-fits curation would be antithetical to the things I said above about needing to know a person to give them a good gift, etc. There are all kinds of you– teachers, former students, friends, strangers, family– each with your own taste and likes and loves and irritators and inclinations. 

But if I were to do something like that, here is some of what I might put on such a thing:

Xoxo 

Baked Alaska at Oleana
Ways of Seeing (Berger)
Yo Yo Ma solo cello (For tinnitus)
Sula (Morrison)
Extra salt in the Tollhouse Cookie recipe & also make butter very very soft
The Wrens Happy 

There Are Birds Here (May)
Time (Louise Gluck)
In the Coma (Pinsky)
Townie (Dubus III)
Pen15 Season Two- Finale- envisioning joint babies, marriages, divorces, etc.
Happiness (Elliot Smith) (especially the Gondola Man outtro)
The Snowman (Stevens)
Sugar scrub (sugar, vegetable glycerin, almond oil, grapeseed oil, lavender eo)
Euphorbia (hardy, weird, beautiful perennial; not cut flowers, b/c stinky)
The Bees (Lorde)
Jig of Life (Kate Bush)
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (Russell)
Snapware
Poshmark
Red Hand Files (Nick Cave)
The Expert on God (L'Heureux)

Plus: All the poems I’ve included in the Substack essays

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The anxiety doctor and I met in the Starbucks in Fresh Pond a couple times a week. She was one of the country’s top researchers in the field of severe anxiety, especially phobias. I think she was a doctor, but I couldn’t remember, so I tried looking her up on the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders website. Even clicking around the website made me sweaty and nervous. I’ll just call her “the anxiety doctor.”

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She had an aquarium in her office full of spiders for arachnophobes, and another with a pile of snakes for patients with ophidiophobia. It was unusual. She took people with aerophobia up in small planes and had them pilot. See? Just turbulence! And me? We went driving on the highways, and we didn’t just stay in the right hand lane, or go at specific times of day or on specific highways with a backroad plan just in case. 

The anxiety doctor had a long waiting list, but she took me because I was an interesting case. 

Sometimes, it’s not  good to be interesting. Like that ancient Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” It usually doesn’t augur well when someone in a medical or mental health field considers you an interesting case. Take my newborn son, for example. In 2003, a week after he was born, Emmet, 8 pounds, was admitted to Mass General with breathing problems. They didn’t know what was wrong with his lungs, but they knew it wasn’t good. 

One prematurely confident resident thought the oxygen saturation machine was broken until a nurse/perfect person shoved him out of the way, grabbed Emmet, and sprinted into the depths of the ER. Doctors circled around our new baby. It was a blur of yelling, fluorescent lights, and white jacketed arms all moving so fast but in sync. My husband and I stood out of the way, stiff with grief, saying oh my god oh my god and ignoring the ominous presence of the social worker who’d appeared beside us.

For two dark and awful weeks after that, our hospital room was a popular place. Teaching doctors and their students filed in and out, standing around our new and interesting baby, asking each other questions that started with “could it be…” and “what about…” Emmet looked like a small UPS parcel in the middle of his adult-size hospital bed, flanked by machines, a cannula taped to his cheeks. One monitor signaled five beeps whenever Emmet’s oxygen levels dipped. If no one else was in the room, my husband and I would sing along: “Baby not breath-ing, baby not breath-ing.” Because what else do you do. When the cohort’s numbers dwindled to just the one main doctor, we felt so relieved and elated. We would have danced a jig if we weren’t so tired. It meant our baby was getting better. 

It took me years to stop saying “be careful” to Emmet. It’s a useless thing to say. 

***

I was an interesting case for the anxiety doctor not just because I’d developed a phobia of driving on the highway, which isn’t that uncommon.  It was because I’d also had a seizure disorder, which made my case and its treatment more complicated. They said.

Exposure therapy is usually pretty straightforward. All phobias start to look the same once they get bad enough: Avoid the threat, believe the fear, try again, panic, avoid, be ashamed, avoid. Exposure treatment calls the phobia on its complete shit by doing the thing you’ve been avoiding, over and over. With enough exposures, your brain and your body realize it’s been in your head the whole time. See? Silly.

I have a subtype called PTSD highway phobia, which is more about the fear of losing control while driving. It always has a trigger. So, the thing I feared more than the highway was the unpredictability of my body. And my trigger was the time I thought I blacked out driving home on 93 from my parents’ house in New Hampshire. I was about 25. Over the next years and decades, my brain attributed a moment of dissociation at the wheel to the seizure disorder I’d had growing up, even though the seizures had mostly stopped by then. Most drivers would just say Argh! I spaced out and missed my exit! and then circle back and carry on. Not me. I thought my consciousness and my body had both ditched me, leaving no one in charge. No one to drive.

For the first few years, I overrode the panic. I even took a solo driving trip across the country, camping and mountain biking and visiting old friends along the way. So normal!  I should tell you, too, that I’m a good Boston driver, and I don’t mind being a passenger on the highway or anywhere else, really. But after years of tweaking and accommodating my elaborate and specific made-up rules, I stopped being able to drive on the highway at all. Until now, only a couple close friends and family know anything about it, and they don’t really know specifics. Even though I try not to feel ashamed about anything, ever.

***

The anxiety doctor and I didn’t do a lot of small talk. During our first meeting, I told her about my rules and avoidance patterns, and then we got in my car and started on Route 2, which my phobia counted as a lesser highway. Just a humble two lanes, mostly bound by trees, and no medusa of on and off ramps.

Every driving session after that got harder. I drove further out beyond my rules each time. And every time, I’d feel so free and proud. Then fresh terror about the next session. I told my husband I’d rather give birth than go out again. A couple times I tried to cancel. But I had to admit it was starting to work. After Route 2, I graduated to major highways, even that stretch of the Mass Pike flanked by high walls of cement with no breakdown lane. It was a miracle. I could feel my brain retraining itself right up until the day it all went wrong.

We were on 95 during morning rush hour. Cars were cutting and near-missing even more than usual, even for Boston. The anxiety doctor told me to loosen my grip on the wheel and I did. Then I stole a glance over at her and realized she looked nervous, and that was it. My arms felt funny, my heart pulsed in my head, and my breathing needed me more involved. Even she didn’t think I could do it. My body felt like a mirage. The highway and other cars– all mirages. I was in charge of our safety and not in control.  

The anxiety doctor’s voice came at me garbled. She told me to breathe out and hold it and tighten my diaphragm. But then she wondered aloud if that was smart to do given my seizures. Then she apologized for saying that. I don’t remember anything about the drive back to the Fresh Pond Starbucks. I never talked to her again. 

Goldilocks Theory

Most of the mistakes I’ve made as a teacher, and a parent too, were caused by misreading a kid, usually because I didn’t know them or the context enough. I’d give them too much or not enough– whether it was help, support, benefit of the doubt, whatever. I’d either over-challenge them when I should be backing off, or go too easy when I should have been pushing. I made many, many such mistakes.

In graduate school we learned about a theorist named Lev Vygotsky, and his concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). One of my high school students renamed the theory of ZPD the Goldilocks theory. It says that if you want to teach someone something, it can’t be too much, too soon, or too easy. It has to be just right. For learning and growth to happen, you have to know the learner enough to be able to aim for their sweet spot, which is just a hair under “too much/too difficult.”  It’s not a perfect theory, and I’m simplifying here, but to me it’s pretty on the money. Vygotsky recognized that teaching isn’t just transactional. It’s relational. 

You can apply the theory to algebra or relationships, potty training or highway driving, social anxiety or Mandarin. But again, you have to know who you’re dealing with– the learner’s idiosyncrasies, body language, inclinations, tolerance for fatigue and ambiguity, and even their fake-outs. Like when I pretended to be helpless in woodworking class in 8th grade because the teacher didn’t think girls could make things, so he made my pump-lamp, step by step. It was the best one in the class. I gave it away to someone.

The anxiety doctor must have overshot my ZPD that bad day. I’ll never really know by how much, or when I would have been ready, and I don’t blame her. I just don’t know. Maybe she hadn’t settled on how to deal with the complicating factor of my prior body stuff.  Or she didn’t know me enough. Or maybe it was bum luck that the highway was so chaotic on that particular day. 

I’m not sure when or if  I’ll try again. I hope I do, and I think I will, because it’s a thing about my life that feels limiting. I don’t feel brave, and I would prefer to feel brave than how I feel about it right now. In the meantime, if I’m driving to you, and you’re far away, know that I love you so much that I took back roads to get to you, and that I’ve been in the car for hours, and that you’re worth it. Of course. Now you know.

***

I’ve noticed looking back over these Substack essays that a lot of the poems I keep close have to do with the body and our negotiations with it. Being anchored by it, transcending it, worrying about what it will do next, wondering who we’ll be without it. And as with the body, so too with our children. When to protect, push, weigh in, shut up, leave them alone. And when to go cry in a corner (or “fold laundry”) without letting them see.

It’s a challenge to look at any murky thing long enough for it to come into  focus, but not so much that it burns you. The poem Zoloft by Maggie Dietz gives us a way to think about the twin pains of too much and not enough. About how much help is too much and which kind of help cultivates the too easy that nothing should be....

When a friend moved back home to Boston a few years ago after a stint in California, she said “I’ll take sincere hostility over pretend kindness any day. I just wanna know what’s what..” Same here. The poem makes me think of that, too. It was a student favorite, too, and a favorite of mine to teach.

Zoloft by Maggie Dietz

Two weeks into the bottle of pills, I'd remember
exiting the one-hour lens grinder at Copley Square—
the same store that years later would be blown
back and blood-spattered by a backpack
bomb at the marathon. But this was back when
terror happened elsewhere. I walked out
wearing the standard Boston graduate student
wire-rims, my first-ever glasses, and saw little people
in office tower windows working late under fluorescent
lights. File cabinets with drawer seams blossomed
wire bins, and little hands answered little black
telephones, rested receivers on bloused shoulders—
real as the tiny flushing toilets, the paneled wainscotting
and armed candelabras I gasped at as a child in 
the miniature room at the Art Institute in Chicago.

It was October and I could see the edges
of everything—where the branches had been a blur
of fire, now there were scalloped oak leaves, leathery
maple five-points plain as on the Canadian flag.
When the wind lifted the leaves the trees went pale,
then dark again, in waves. Exhaling manholes,
convenience store tiled with boxed cigarettes
and gum, the BPL's forbidding fixtures lit
to their razor tips and Trinity's windows holding
individual panes of glass between bent metal like
hosts in a monstrance. It was wonderful. It made me
horribly sad.

                                                      It was the same
years later with the pills. As I walked across
the field, the usual field, to the same river, I felt
a little burst of joy when the sun cleared a cloud.
It was fricking Christmas, and I was five years old!
I laughed out loud, picked up my pace: the sun
was shining on me, on the trees, on the whole
damn world. It was exhilarating. And sad,
that sham. Nothing had changed. Or
I had. But who wants to be that kind of happy?
The lenses, the doses. Nothing should be that easy.

Maggie Dietz, "Zoloft" from That Kind of Happy.  Copyright © 2016 by The University of Chicago.

What the students and I said and wondered…

At some point in the discussion and often in students’ writing, there’s talk about antidepressants.  Kids aren’t unfamiliar with antidepressants, or with the rub/tension that animates the poem.

Wearing glasses…Interesting that taking the pills makes the speaker remember the before and after of seeing clearly, and how seeing everything so clearly isn’t all it’s cracked up to be…Maybe she missed her sort of impressionistic way of seeing, because it made it hers. Antonia says  (in a paper)

We talk about the differences between seeing and looking, and talk about Berger’s Ways of Seeing, which we’d read earlier in the semester and keep going back to.

One kid wonders whether this is an “anti-anti-depressant poem.” Another says she doesn’t think so, pointing to the poem’s tension and ambivalence…like a pro and con list coming out in poetic form. 

And it’s not shaming at all, another kid says.  

It’s the speaker on a journey trying to figure out the right amount of help she needs. Yes; and what the cost of that help is. And then the sadness when something becomes… not itself because you’re not yourself, or not looking fully.

We look at the line “it was all horribly sad”...The fulcrum…the hold on a minute here moment.

We talk about this kind of horribly sad, and when we’ve felt it…Like a cheap unearned thing, sometimes a beautiful thing made less so by the way it came to us. Kids mention hook up culture…Horribly sad.

One kid noted that the glasses in the poem are like a primer for this question of aids. Because you really need them to see, and not just metaphorically either. Are they kind of a foil, or prep, for what comes later, for the Zoloft? Could be.

It’s about how much relief from pain do you really want? And when does it become inauthentic and unreal? I think we all ask that. 

Another imagines the last line being “Who wants to be that kind of unhappy”

I tell kids about the time I went off Wellbutrin when my dad died because I wanted to “really feel it all.” My therapist at the time, a real straight-shooter, said No, what? Nonsense. Not now! She was right about most things, including that. 

Some kids wonder whether the speaker here is being too impatient with herself, with the Zoloft. Some think it’s brilliant to use the Zoloft as a narrative driver, but also as itself…so it functions on two (or more) levels…The Zoloft in the immediate and the glasses, and then the cascading questions of  Is it real?, and What’s real? and With how much help? 

When does a helper become the “too easy” that “nothing should be?”....

The veering over into false happy, false okay? Should we tame our sadness?  We talk about ease and difficulty, and the importance of choosing your difficult things and moments well.

And the weird time shift in the way she brings in the the Boston Marathon Bombing. Like a Dickensian ghost of future pain. 

What is it to get too much help with a problem, a thing, a leg up onto the horse?

Who wants to be that kind of happy? is a question that kept coming back to help and haunt us as we read our novels, our stories, our films, our poems. What is that kind of happy? What’s the other kind? And truly– who does want to be that kind of happy? 

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The other night, my friend Franc and I went to see Lucinda Williams perform. Lucinda had a stroke a couple years ago, so she couldn’t play her guitar, and she sat down for some of the show. When she stood, her legs wanted to move and dance more than they can right now. But her voice was as strong as ever, beautiful and slanted, singing about pain and lamentation and wonder. And her black jeans and leather jacket and high-tops— all still there. 

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I was trapped in the middle of the aisle, flanked by a dozen old people who were our age or so. During Lucinda’s banter and long stories, I shifted around and noted the best route to flee, just in case. Franc’s back hurt from the stiff theater seat. Stroke or no stroke, we’ve all aged. It’s still strange when it happens to you. 

I met Franc 30 years ago in a songwriting group started by my roommate’s girlfriend, Barbara. There were four of us: me, Franc, Barbara, and Alexis. We sat around the table with our acoustic guitars and took turns playing our ideas. I was nervous, so I focused a lot on Barbara’s cat, Flea.  Months later, I wrote a song, “She’s Wasting You” about beautiful Barbara breaking my sweet roommate’s heart, and that made things a bit awkward. Good song, though.

Franc was funny, friendly, and too pretty to get used to right away. She walked in wearing vintage pants with yellow and orange swirls and a Bucks County sweatshirt. I really liked all three of my new songwriting friends, but there was something different with Franc. It was like I recognized her.

For the next couple months she and I did early friendship things like going into stores the other person liked, swapping clothes, confessing things over drinks, and asking questions about photos on the refrigerator. One new-friend afternoon, we were eating Mexican food when intrusive thoughts and middle school doubts hit me–boom– like a small, certain bird flying into a window. Was I pushing this whole thing and Franc was just going along? We’d joked once that I was courting her. Should I get the check and get out of there?

I did a quick tally of initiations and reciprocities. She asked me if something was wrong and I told her. She said oh my god and apologized and explained she’d just never had anyone insist on being friends before– didn’t think anyone would like her enough right away like that. 

The friendship relaxed into itself after that. We learned about the ways we were alike, and ways we weren’t. Most of the time, we found refuge in the similarities and humor in the differences. We kept learning. We learned all kinds of things.

For example, Franc pointed out that I sometimes made snap judgements just to get the decision-making over with. Also, I learned to fold my t-shirts in rows in the drawer so I can see them all instead of digging in the pile like trying to harvest a single potato. She made me cards that were these little amazing paintings (I still have them all in a Welcome Back Kotter lunchbox). She took me to Bucks County to meet her five excellent and complicated sisters and funny handsome dad. And her tricky mom who made her own yogurt and granola in the age of Pop Tarts, nursed six babies, sewed all their clothes, and was a nurse like my mom. Maybe not so tricky–just tired. 

Meanwhile I taught Franc to return shoes without feeling bad, and how to ride bikes fast in the woods weaving your way through rocks and roots. How to pack a suitcase quickly and leave early on Fridays if you can. And that when you move apartments, you don’t have to pack your spices gingerly in a shoebox. You can just line them up on the kitchen table and slide them all at once into a paper grocery bag.  Sometimes, I helped her remember that people often don’t know what they’re doing, especially the ones who are absolutely certain they do.

We both formed bands–both with us writing the songs and being out front with guitars and singing– but much different kinds of music, which was good. We each had our own lane, our own separate scarcity of resources from which to try to draw. At least in this case. 

***

I’d last seen Lucinda Williams 22 years ago in New Haven. I was 7 months pregnant with my first baby, my daughter Abby. It was September, 2001 and Franc’s band was opening for Lucinda, which was a huge deal. 

When Lucinda herself called that summer, Franc thought it was me pranking her from the next room. Once that was cleared up, Lucinda told Franc how much she loved her songs. She asked Franc to open for her in New Haven. A few days later, Lucinda’s manager called and asked Franc to do the whole tour. Sometimes dreams do come true he’d said to her. 

I have a photo of Franc in a vintage sleeveless dress. She’s bent over a piece of paper on a wooden table with a pen in her mouth while another friend sits nearby on a couch holding a guitar. It was the day the manager called about Franc’s dreams coming true. A bunch of us—friends and a couple sisters— were staying in a big rented cabin on a lake in Plymouth, MA, so we were there when she got that call.

In the photo she looks all business. In the background, you can see five or six of us, including me with my big belly and baggy eyes. We’re laughing, and everything is magic hour—honey-colored light coming in the windows just so. There’s an abandoned Boggle game on the table. You can see strips of paper with our scribbled lists of three and four-letter words, and one extra long list with bigger words that Rori made because he thought you could use any letters at all.

After last week’s Lucinda show, while Franc and I waited for our Uber on Tremont Street, I asked her if I’d been jealous back then about her big Lucinda news and the rest of it. My band at the time was going nowhere. We kept appearing on “best undiscovered bands in Boston” lists, year after year. I already knew the answer.

You were, she said. A bit. But I remember you just wanted to tell me and be done with it. That was all before I learned— through trial and error, and time and loss—the power of just being in a friend’s corner. That their happiness is your own, and it has to be that simple.

We all drove down to New Haven for Franc’s big break. Images of that day and the day after come to me saturated in the kind of rich, after-process color they use to dye old black and white postcards. September and its strange light and confusing cues. Warm skin, melancholy, cool air, vague nostalgia, beginnings, and also the instinct to start hunkering down. I spent a lot of the ride to New Haven trying to adjust the seatbelt around my belly while my friend Sue drove and tended to things sweetly and brusquely like she did.

The theater was packed, and Franc was wonderful. Lucinda told the audience in her sleepy twang, Ah’m a Franc Graham connnnnvert! Franc’s dad was there, and all her sisters, along with our gang of about a dozen friends– a collective that has converged, drifted, re-grouped, and cemented itself into family over the years. 

Between Franc’s songs, our friend John O’Connor shouted “Frank-eeeeeeeeeeeeee!” He was a big guy with a big heart and a big mouth—an older brother figure, her erstwhile boss, and a denizen of green politics, earnestness and influence. He had his office floor redone in parquet like the Celtics. He would die a couple months later at age 46 playing basketball at the Cambridge Y, just before the birth of my daughter. I miss him.

Abby was one day old like a little loaf of bread when we watched John’s funeral procession to Mt. Auburn Cemetery from the window high up on the labor and delivery floor of Mt Auburn hospital. It was a slow, serpentine convoy moving up Memorial Drive, lighting its way through the foggy December afternoon. The cars kept coming. I sat back down in the rocker to nurse Abby with milk my body made just for her. I couldn’t get over it. I couldn’t believe I was someone’s mother. 

I took my fertility for granted like you do in your 20s and maybe early 30s.  Around age 35, I stopped assuming I’d have kids, and also tried to stop thinking about it. When I got pregnant by surprise at 37, I was terrified for just a blink, mostly out of habit, I think, and then it felt like Christmas was coming. It was the same for my boyfriend-now-husband, even though he’s nine years younger and maybe not the Christmas part because he’s Jewish. It felt like that even through weeks of morning sickness and then the cascade of grown-up-adjacent things: home owning, birth classes, a will, getting a good vacuum, advocating for maternity leave, planning a wedding, appreciating my mother one more notch. 

I think most of this was hard for Franc. The day I called her with the news about being pregnant, she’d been lying in bed with her long term boyfriend having a tearful talk about the future. She only told me that years later, and it explained the dissonance in her initial response to my big news—Wait. What? Oh my god! I can’t believe it!. It was joy and being sucker punched I heard in her voice. I think I understood. I hope I did. I do now.

Franc attended the births of my daughter and then two years later my son. But when it was time for her to have her son several years later, we were on the outs. So I didn’t get to be there for it, or for her. I don’t remember what we were fighting about, but it doesn’t matter. I feel so sorry about it.

***

The morning after Franc’s big show, she went to breakfast with her band and her sisters and niece and dad, all up from Bucks County. I imagine them jovial and buzzing in a little diner, eating pancakes and drinking coffee spiked with something. Franc going from booth to booth, getting congratulated like you do at your wedding. 

I was back in my classroom at Watertown High School in the middle of teaching The Great Gatsby. I was trying to get students to argue with me about the character Nick–about deception and loyalty- when I heard someone clomping down the hallway toward our room. It was an administrator, a mysterious and interior guy who hadn’t formed any connections with staff or students in his two years there. He’d quit soon after. In this moment, he was panicking. 

They’re bombing the capitol! The capitol is being bombed! 

It was the morning of September 11th, 2001. I opened the door to an adjoining classroom where there was another teacher, and one of us went to find a TV to find out what was happening.  I don’t remember much else from that day. Just that the students seemed so small and young, even the boys who towered over me. They were scared, even the ones making jokes, and I tried to figure out how to titrate the news for them. I worried. I kept a hand on my belly.

I reached Franc by phone sometime in the early afternoon. She was still in New Haven. 

Did last night really happen? 

It did, I said. 

And this just happened. It did.

Franc never did get to go on tour.

***

When Abby and her friend Izzy were about 6, we took them to the Somerville Theater to watch the Spike Jonze adaptation of the Maurice Sendak picture book Where the Wild Things Are. Within about 15 minutes, Abby clambered over her seat, climbed up onto my lap, and buried her face in my armpit. Izzy did the same to her mom. Abby whispered things into my shoulder like This is scary. This isn’t good. It’s not like the book. Why is it like this. I don’t like this. 

We shuffled out past the hipsters with their beers and popcorn and took the girls for crepes at the place next door where they liked to sit together at a window table and wave to strangers walking by. Maurice Sendak isn’t a believer in soft-pedaling things for kids. Like he said: Just tell them if it's true. If it's true you tell them. I don’t know why I was surprised that his book didn’t make for a sweet kids’ movie.

I really love this movie, though. I felt lucky to be able to teach it and talk about it and write and argue about it with teenagers. It’s a complicated ode to the cycle of creation and destruction, and reckoning with the powerlessness of being a kid. The desire is to be a catalyst, whether it’s to the creation of something or its destruction, especially when you’re straddling being a kid and becoming a grown up.

The film’s teen monster is KW, and the other monsters are afraid of her sadness. The thing that terrifies them the most about KW’s sadness is the prospect of her going away and never coming back. She wields her moodiness like a defensive weapon, and creates pretend friends so she’s not dependent on her real friends, who disappoint her.

The movie cycles through pettiness and love, jealousy and love, forgiveness and love, over and over. Not unlike life; just compressed into a couple hours, and with monsters. It helps me think about envy and what a tough nut it is to crack. That, and the fear that you can’t always help the people you love. It helps me understand panic’s triumvirate—fight and flight and freeze. 

***

I sat in the car with my son singing my favorite Lucinda Williams song, Pineola. We sang it loud:

BORN AND RAISED IN PINEOLA! HIS MAMA BELIEVED IN THE PENTACOST!

He was about 16 then, and we were parked outside where he used to go play tennis– this big suburban cavernous beige place. It was during an uneasy time. High school, post Covid, applying for colleges. He was trying hard to place himself in the scheme of things, all kinds of things, practical and existential. Parties and what to say to girls, and also fairness and cruelty and why the news never covers Africa in a regular, substantive way, and why people are the way they are, including him.

He woke up every day happy and singing, and at the end of the day sometimes went to bed doing whatever is singing’s opposite. I guess all kids do some version of that? I often felt like I was doing either too much or too little or just the wrong things to help him through rough patches. It was humbling and it tore at me. But as Maurice Sendak seemed to know, you have to see your kid in pain sometimes, and let them do with it what they will. You can’t eradicate it like an infestation of bugs. If you do that, you kill all the good bugs, too, and everything else around it. 

We had such different tastes in music at the time, but the first time he heard Pineola, he loved it. A great song is a great song. What a good story-telling song. Let’s play it again. I’ll be a little late for tennis. He was turning out to be a really formidable guitar player, and was writing and recording songs. And they were really good. We played Pineola again, and sang, again. He’s 20 now, and away at school, and playing guitar and studying Buddhism. That boy was full of surprises and treasures, and still is. And now he’s writing songs…and now I’m not. I’m writing other stuff. Like Franc is always saying, keep ‘em guessing.

Sometimes it’s hard to be happy for a friend, even a good or a best friend. It’s not a very noble thing to say, but it’s true. Especially when resources feel scarce and you’re scrambling just to get by. It’s a tall order to fully commit to the conviction that another’s happiness is your happiness. The alternatives aren’t great, though: Fear, panic, carelessness, destruction.

The other night we wished Lucinda had done more songs. She was promoting her memoir, and telling a lot of stories. And she told stories the way an old dad would, with meandering and tenuously connected bits and pieces, some dead ends, epilogues and prefaces like which reminds me of another thing about that…But if you wait it out til the end, it holds together as one big story.

When she finally did play Pineola, it was worth the wait.

No one else but Franc could have appreciated the messy gestalt of Lucinda and all the history and being stuck in the middle of all the old people, and you might be one of them. After the show was over, we went and waited by the old granary burial ground for our Uber to pick us up. We crossed over the Longfellow Bridge—and boy does Boston look beautiful from that bridge— and then we were home.

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Note: I’m not big on trigger or content warnings, but I did want to include this note to readers: This essay touches on Buddhism’s first noble truth: In life, there is suffering. It also mentions an act of violence and also sexual assault, briefly and not graphically. Though they’re upsetting in their context, neither is the focus of this essay, which is about who we choose as our teachers. As always, the essay centers and celebrates the students and the literature, as well as teachers and mentors everywhere (with one exception). Big love and appreciation to you all, KLH

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When I was teaching, I’d assign students difficult things and wait for them to complain, resist, or tell me I was being ridiculous. But they almost never did. Or, if they did, they did it in a self-mocking way that acknowledged that whining was an expected response from teenagers. In truth, it was rare for students to balk at difficult things. They’d ask for more clarification, maybe, or more time, or ask how many pages something had to be (they learned eventually as all writers do how much harder short things are than long).

They didn’t always hand things in on time, and some kids almost never handed in anything. Sometimes in their writing and in class they talked too much about themselves and not enough about the literature. But they never seemed to question the worthiness of the whole endeavor. That still amazes me.

Over the years there were assignments I gave that I was secretly glad I didn’t have to do myself, some I wish I’d written, and some where I felt all of that, like this one about unlikely teachers:

Here’s an excerpt of that assignment prompt:

Next Paper: A Most Unlikely Teacher.	Harris/SWS, Spirituality in Literature, 2019
 
As we’ve seen in our stories, poems, in Sula and in Siddhartha, teachers and teachings can come in many forms, and they don’t often come on schedule. Teachers, teachings, and mentors might come in the form of:
 
People you love or people you really don’t
Literature and stories, artwork, film, dance
Babies and children and elders. Birth and death
Thinkers and philosophers 
Strangers or other “neutral” people; a person you’d never noticed before
Enemies and frenemies
Moments of truth; comings of age; cognitive distortions; fictions you’d always believed
Official or unofficial rites and rituals
Times you’re challenged beyond what you once thought was reasonable
Identity confusion and/or approval seeking
Experiences and things you got but didn’t want
Experiences and things you wanted but didn’t get
 
You’ll use this paper to explore an unlikely teaching or teacher in your life. This teacher/teaching should have an element of the unexpected...

***

When we read Siddhartha, the kids would get annoyed with Govinda, the sidekick they thought followed Siddhartha around like an eager puppy, without his own trajectory or will. Kind of a loser they’d say, and Such a follower! My son called him an NPC (non-player character). Not so, though. Govinda ends up manifesting the balance and equanimity that elude Siddhartha for most of the novel, partly because Sid’s busy chasing more flashy spiritual practices like asceticism. Then Siddhartha has a kid and really learns about attachment and suffering. Anyway, it all works out.

I always knew what I’d write about for the unlikely teacher assignment: Dick Ferguson, my childhood gymnastics coach. He was such a gifted teacher, so real and good, silly and funny, hard-working, generous and loving. “Dickie” was embedded in my life like a third parent— the adult I spent the most time with from eight to fourteen.

I was always the smallest, but he made me feel mighty, which remained a through-line in the story I’ve told myself about who I am in the world. So when Ferguson murdered Helen, his beautiful wife (a high school English teacher), and it came out that he’d been sexually assaulting young women for years, I had to double back and question all of it. My memory, my identity, and a big chunk of my childhood. This was in my early 20s.

I’ve tried to write about Ferguson many times. But when I do, I think about Helen and their daughters and feel too confused or ashamed to keep going. I compare my relatively time-bracketed pain to their life-altering trauma, and I abandon ship.

Right after it happened and in the years that followed, I tried to shake down my memories for any sign that Ferguson groomed or abused me or my teammates. But all I can ever remember is the good version of him, and it was the same for the few teammates I tracked down. Still, it’s impossible for me to think of one Dick Ferguson without being ambushed by the other. I try to do the mental or allegorical version of cutting faces out of photos trying to salvage the parts of the story I want to keep as my own. It doesn’t work. I’m glad I don’t have to do this assignment. 

Aside from Dick Ferguson– or maybe including him, despite everything– I think I’ve been lucky; I’ve been rich with mentors and good teachers, and some of the best of those have been heartbreak and difficulty. I’ve had practice with FGOs (fucking growth opportunities.) They’re the real veteran teachers, and the ones who get tenure. A stupid system.

Most of Siddhartha’s FGOs come from suffering—clinging, loss, premature certainty, parenting a grief-stricken teenager. But he also learns from Govinda, who quietly leads even when it looks like following. It’s satisfying when a guy like that—an even-keeled straight man— ends up being the real rock star. A visionary without the fuss.

The same phenomenon is part of what makes Heather McHugh’s poem “What He Thought,” so in-the-pocket and satisfying. Plus we get Italy. Food. A gang of tipsy poets. Funny wordplay. Blurting and humility. History and Giordano Bruno. Putting forks down to listen…

What He Thought             by Heather McHugh
for Fabbio Doplicher

We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the mayor, mulled
a couple matters over (what's
a cheap date, they asked us; what's
flat drink). Among Italian literati

we could recognize our counterparts:
the academic, the apologist,
the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib—and there was one

administrator (the conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated
sights and histories the hired van hauled us past.
Of all, he was the most politic and least poetic,
so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome
(when all but three of the New World Bards had flown)
I found a book of poems this
unprepossessing one had written: it was there
in the pensione room (a room he'd recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by
the German visitor (was there a bus of them?)
to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before.
I couldn't read Italian, either, so I put the book
back into the wardrobe's dark. We last Americans

were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there
we sat and chatted, sat and chewed,
till, sensible it was our last
big chance to be poetic, make
our mark, one of us asked
                                             "What's poetry?"
Is it the fruits and vegetables and
marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or
the statue there?" Because I was

the glib one, I identified the answer
instantly, I didn't have to think—"The truth
is both, it's both," I blurted out. But that
was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed
taught me something about difficulty,
for our underestimated host spoke out,
all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:

The statue represents Giordano Bruno,
brought to be burned in the public square
because of his offense against
authority, which is to say
the Church. His crime was his belief
the universe does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government, but rather is
poured in waves through all things. All things
move. "If God is not the soul itself, He is
the soul of the soul of the world." Such was
his heresy. The day they brought him
forth to die, they feared he might
incite the crowd (the man was famous
for his eloquence). And so his captors
placed upon his face
an iron mask, in which

he could not speak. That's
how they burned him. That is how
he died: without a word, in front
of everyone.
                     And poetry—
                                        (we'd all
put down our forks by now, to listen to
the man in gray; he went on
softly)—
                  poetry is what

he thought, but did not say.

***

I choose Heather McHugh as a mentor. She doesn’t know me, but I choose her. She came as a guest scholar a few times to our Favorite Poems Project institute for teachers, where I worked during the summers. I always clammed up when I saw her in the bathroom.

I like to think I have a pretty quick mind most of the time, but during McHugh’s lectures, I’d have to hang on tight and try to follow along as she talked fast about the language of poems, the poetry of language, convergences, insights and confusion, and love.

Note to subscribers, especially teachers:

I’m here to share anything that will help teachers and their students. If you’d like to see the Unlikely Teacher assignment in its entirety, or learn more about the context of this assignment in the classroom, or see a sample syllabus for Spirituality in Literature, comment here or in Notes, and I’ll get it to you.

And always, teacher or not: Share thoughts and works you’d use as pairings for the McHugh poem, and/or for anything. Share your wisdom whether you’re a prized veteran teacher or a brilliant newcomer, a mentor or a student. Don’t clam up.

xo

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***

Source: Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 (Wesleyan University Press, 1994)