The Interim List

It has been an unforgivably long time since I wrote anything creative, much less blogged… or really did anything other than eat, drink, work, or sleep. But it’s autumn (almost), that unforgivably crisp time of year that snaps your senses into better habits (other than the pies and donuts) with inelastic tautness and forces you to shed the leaves and look at your bare branches.

I’m not in the mood for self-examination or reflection tonight, so I’m going to stick with straight-up creative writing. Two poems that feel fall-ish to me with their mix of sexiness and sadness. Things die, things move forward. At least we have pumpkin pie.

Communion

By: SPL

1. Press lips to enchanted chalice, where other lips have pressed before, communal quest for second comings, hands pressed palm to palm.
2. Crush jeweled kisses into soft gold metal, warm from breath and body, lined in gilded charms of flourished tongue looping like filigree, prying vines hungry for wine, wanting to wind over legs and hallelujahs.
3. Move lips to softly speak salty truths—anguished amens of a hurt-so-good love shouted in the soft shade hours of sunrise, on top of a bridge, our feet suspended above water and air, divine in our flustered gropes, fingers moving like morning doves, slow but steady.
4. Let the words wash onto your hot hands that wrap around fluted neck, the hollow exposed, fill your mouth with me.
5. A pang in my side, a thorn in head: the subtle signs of soon-to-be crucified love.

The Ossuary of Divorcees

By: SPL

1.  I bury your skin and bones in my backyard, deep inside a ditch I dig with broken nails and the crosshatch barbs of last words left unsaid.  I bury myself beside you.
2. My skeleton is mined, dusted, displayed for tourists.  I tell the story of separation to anyone who’ll listen, hope they’ll throw mossed pennies into the well and whisper wishes on the stone.
3. Ribs unfold like brittle fingers to cup the thunder and rain, squeeze our petrified hearts to see if they still leak.  Disappointment when they don’t, so I cover them in crumbs of dirt, let the worms consume the corpse.
4. Someday someone might unearth our skeletons, arrange them into an unlit chandelier.
5. We’ll hang among the crystals. We’ll calcify there.

Prague Texture List

I’ve been in Prague for three full days now and am just skimming the surface of the things to see.  I have so much to say about the city (yes, it’s beautiful; yes, people are friendly; and yes, I’ve gotten lost about a hundred times), but so far the thing that has struck me the most is how textural the city is.  Pressing your palm against the plaster, cobblestone underfoot, the lipped curves of rooftiles overhead.  It’s all pretty amazing, and I’ll post pics soon.  In the meantime, top textural moments from Prague:

1. The fence of lovers’ locks.  People come to a fence that hangs over a canal, carve their lovers’ names into the metal of a lock (or paint it in some cases), and hook them to the iron posts.  Legend has it that if you carve the name of someone who you want to be your lover, your wish will come true.  The colors of the collection are striking, as is the fact that so many people still believe in love.
2. The John Lennon Peace Wall.  Graffiti abounds in the city, but nowhere is it more powerful than the Peace Wall, a plastered exterior wall where John Lennon once protested.  The wall has since been painted and repainted by visitors from all over the world as a symbol of freedom of expression and the undying desire of all humans to be heard.
3. The rose garden.  Because of the exceptionally cool weather Prague has experienced this spring, the roses bloomed late, and I stumbled upon them at their height.  Visitors come here and sting their significant others with kisses (supposedly good luck to kiss here) among the bumblebees.
4. The river.  The Charles River flows through the center of the city, and while I wouldn’t want to bathe in it, I adore how it flows under and through bridges and buildings, and snakes through the main arteries of everything.  Prague faced serious floods from the river, some of which destroyed a number of original statues from the St. Charles Bridge, but on a whole, the pros seem to outweigh the cons.
5. Marionette windows.  Anyone who knows me knows I’m terrified of puppets, especially the carved, creepy kind with little faces painted on them.  Nevertheless, en masse, the marionettes here take on a kind of aesthetic value not found in solo puppetry.

Lovers’ Locked (by SPL)

Don’t delight in the sight of a lock unhinged and crooked.  Hooked to a feral fence, a wish decrepit— a magic man, puff puff puffing the magic dragon on the spent end of a lit nicotine finger, watching her carve clandestine initials of her best friend’s man with the metal vee of her key, etch etch etching the purge into steel.

The Flood (by SPL)

Wash the unholy watermark, moonlit moss and overflow fungus feel like concrete clean.  Foundations lift from their feet.

This is it! shouts a man sure the world will end.  He’s in the street, his eyes opal and drunk on the future.  Wash the unholy waterstain from the sides of the home, its pebbled plaster pilling, rubbed raw.  A wall agape.

The flood takes two hundred years to brew, ten minutes to spill its steeped tea into the city.  Percolation and a sneeze—bless you!—flooded homes and cracked trees.  My husband always forgets to bless me, wash me clean, scrape the grit from my home and innermost mind.

Book List: Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”

What do you say about Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being?  Per my earlier post, I finished it in tears while eating a Subway sandwich, and like my ultimate experience with it, the book is both heart-rending and completely absurd.

1. Sabina… has there ever been a more beautiful mistress?  I propose not.  The scene with the seductress posing in front of her lover in a bowler hat might be among the sexiest and saddest in literature.
2. Dogs… if you are like me, you love dogs and animals more than most people.  The last chapters justify this love philosophically, religiously, and zealously.  I no longer feel the need to apologize when I pick my chihuahua as the one person I’d take to a deserted island.  They are the last bastions untainted by original sin.
3. Love… doesn’t fair well here.  But does it in life either?
4. History… I adore Kundera’s sophisticated perspective on revolution and politics in this book.  So often Eastern European authors (or western authors writing on the subject of Eastern European countries) take a pro or con stance on Communism and Russian occupation of countries.  This work, like Russian Dreambook (reviewed earlier), takes a more nuanced stance in the form of Franz, perhaps the most compelling character in the novel.
5. Roads not taken… perhaps the most alarming, obvious point of the book is the oft-repeated motif that we will never know if our life choices are “good” or “bad” because we only live our lives once.  How many unborn children could we have had should we have met the woman of our dreams on a passing subway card?  How many husbands have we passed without so much as a glance?  I’m often struck by the exciting/horrible possibility that a thousand alternate lives constantly swarm around me, and Kundera’s writing does nothing to allay this fear.  So I dwelt a bit on it and wrote the following…

A Love Song for My Never-Was

By: SPL

1. I write love songs for the never-was, who is better than the has-been—that itchy wool coat I wore for thousands of years, summer heat and all.
2. The love song I write starts with the word “if,” the conditional—which is code for the negative, for the never-was.  There are other times to use the word “is.”
3. I write love songs for the never-was, who is far superior to the present-is—though the present-is is also a never-was.  Dilapidated, half-built house of heart he has.
4. The love song I write is written in eggshell notes that I need to break, whip my insides into froth and want, foaming with hurt.  But you are my never-was, so these are things I’ve never done.
5. I write love songs for the never-was, whose imaginary kiss alights my lips at night, a soft moan that is my own since you and I never were.

Book List: Alan Lightman’s “Einstein’s Dreams”

I just finished reading Alan Lightman’s novel Einstein’s Dreams, a novel slight on pages but full on thought.  I’ve often wondered whether a novel without lead characters can carry the day, but Lightman’s precise, poetic language flitters around the page like a firefly that I can’t stop watching.  While Einstein and his friend Besso do make appearances as characters throughout, the book’s blend of musicality and theoretical physics shines brighter than all else.  A list doesn’t do the work justice, but my blog format insists upon itself.  And so:

1. After reading this novel, you won’t view your watch the same way.  I stopped wearing one during my first year of law school (too depressing to keep track of the many hours were spent highlighting Latin words), but if I hadn’t, I would have stopped somewhere midway through this book.
2. Lightman has a joint appointment in the humanities and sciences teaching at MIT in Boston.  Yes, he’s brilliant.
3. As an author, he illuminates the depth of the human need to capture and store (and ultimately ruin) beloved moments.  While reading the novel, I got the sense that seconds were escaping through my fingertips, seeping into the pages, and diffusing into the air.  I finished the book too fast, and wished immediately I had paced myself.
4. Per Wikipedia, Lightman’s physics research “has focused on relativistic gravitation theory, the structure and behavior of accretion disks, stellar dynamics, radiative processes, and relativistic plasmas.”  I don’t understand any of that.  But I do understand that he studies black holes and the ways they accrete matter via their gravitational pulls.  He also studies the human heart, and how it accretes matter from life.
5. Favorite line: “And they know too that time darts across the field of vision when they are eating well with friends or receiving praise or lying in the arms of a secret lover.”  J’adore, Mr. Lightman, j’adore.

In time, there are an infinity of worlds…

No creatively inspired SPL-knockoff for this work; it’s too good.

Wedding List: A Poem for a Princess on Her Wedding Day

I was suffering from writer’s block today and solicited ideas for a prompt.  A friend came up with the following first line: “Scene 1. Your mother turns you into a whore,” which I was all too eager to steal for multiple reasons, including my love of the word “whore,” my deep-seated belief that even good mothers destroy their children (exhibit A: see my dog Bruce), and my utter lack of any better ideas.

Ironically eating a hot dog at the time, I couldn’t get my mind out of the metaphoric gutter, yet couldn’t muster the deep depression that it usually takes for me to succumb to writing straight-up erotica.  Imagine my delight when, while watching E!News (let’s face it, should be called: The Only News, at least in this country), I was reminded 9 times in 10 minutes that the Royal Wedding airs tomorrow morning.  Creativity stirred from  within, and I took my grinchly pen to paper in order to sully an otherwise celebrated day.  (Please don’t send me hate-mail, Wills and Kate fans, the poem is merely a bitter old hag’s musings on royal marriage, not a reflection of any ill “wills” toward the couple… badabump.)  In five list-ish parts, of course.

A Poem for a Princess on Her Wedding Day

By: SPL

Scene 1. Your mother turns you into a whore.  She binds your ribs with whale bones and kohl-rims your eyes until your tearducts leak tar bubbles on your cheeks.  Never fuck on the first date, she says, but remember that princes like backdoors–for the discretion!–if you do.  And always eat cantaloupe to stay lubricated.

Scene 2. Your father dreads the wedding day exchange–he glimpses a fatherless girl holding an upside-down flag, an ugly omen, from the carriage window–but when he tries to take your hand, a harangue of bodyguards grab his wrists and glue diamonds to his skin to assure the crowds, who clap and claw to catch the carriage.  She was always such a commodity, your mother tells him, meaning she was meant to be consumed.  Let’s hope the dear prince chews her longer than his communion wafers.

Scene 3. You sell your baby to a magazine–in locus parentis.  Bulimia binges lay bare your bones etched from ghost lovers past, would-be-daddies who would have been at the birth, no demotions for purebred polo matches.  Your mother says that not all women are meant to be mothers, but some photograph better than others.  And eat more cayenne to prevent the popping of additional princes.

Scene 4. Your confidants turn you into liquid, pouring drops of you into gilded goblets and gulleys until they’ve drunk you dry, the skin schisms under your eyes infecting your cheeks.  You offer wine (yourself?) to a charming chauffeur and he cringes crooked from the front seat before fluffing himself.  Meanwhile, the magazine’s calling to tell you your son’s escaped with some slut to South Africa, dry desert of runaway royalty.  The news comes half-hearted, as you do too.  Some boys can’t be trusted, says your mother.  Some boys break souls, having suckled on vinegar and pickled their hearts.

Scene 5. Your lawyer turns you into a sponge, sopping up sleepies from the eyes of ex-queens.  When they squeeze you, sapphires and angostura bitters seep from your skin.  You receive a postcard from your son on safari stamped with a portrait of you that says “good riddance.”  Divorce is for commoners, your mother says–she’s a widow now, your dad died from diamond dust embolyzing his lungs.  You must not have eaten enough cantaloupe, she says.

Author’s List: Book Excerpt

I’m about 100 pages into a book (collection of bridged short stories).  Here’s an excerpt early in the book; more to come later!

Chapter Two

By: SPL

I’m bad with time.  I don’t mean I can’t tell time; I mean I lose it.  Once, I had a watch.  My mother bought me the watch to wear so I’d be home in time for dinner.  I dropped it in a drainpipe before its third day on my wrist.  The leather latch dangled loose as I folded purple paper into the shape of boats and sent them into the water.  The loop slipped over my thumb, and even though I felt it fall, I didn’t care to catch it.  The clock on my computer is always set to the wrong time zone.  I don’t like to commit to any single zone for too long.

This is a metaphor, I tell my husband.

It’s not a metaphor when it’s obvious, he says.

Yes it is; it’s a bad metaphor.

But I’m not a writer yet, not at this time yet.  I’m on the thirty-eighth floor of a fifty story building.  Not at the beginning of the office coffin, but not exactly at the end.  Windows along the water turn on and off like pixels, and I catch my reflection in the glass.  I should be researching Illinois law on wrongful termination and intentional inflection of emotional distress; instead, I’m typing about lost childhood ticktocks and origami boats made of paper.  I stand, stretch, and press my forehead against the cold glass.  Condensation forms on my forehead and smears my face.  When I look down, the Chicago River runs like spilled ink into Lake Michigan.  If I fell, my body would float past my husband’s office down river, and I’d bloat on the shore at the cafe where he buys lattes on winter mornings.  After the last major recession, law firms replaced skyscraper windows with panes that could not be opened from the inside.

On the phone, my husband and I agree that we’ll be better about making time for each other.  Making time, as if that’s possible.  They’re driving the girders for a skyscraper into the ground next door, and the metal cylinders spark into the dark.  If time could be made, it would be made like this—driving cold steel into the earth until even the air shakes.  Before we hang up, we agree to go on dates at assigned times.

Our first scheduled date occurs at a bar, and by the time he arrives, I’m four vodka and tonics in and accuse him of being a phantom.  I tell him he might be dead, though he assures me he’s not.  He takes me home and holds my hair while I vomit.  Another date begins with wine tasting, six globes of progressively shaded glasses: diamond to rose quartz to ruby to amethyst.  I want every gem in my crown, so I toss them back quickly.  Possession is half of ownership, according to my legal studies.  My husband tells me I’m making a fool of myself.  His boss is here, and I should behave.  I tell him that the merlot tastes like animal, all earth and dirt.  To prove my point, I go outside and pull a weed from the city sidewalk.  I press the dandelion between my teeth and speak in country tones.  Dirt dangles from its roots onto my chin.  On the train, I rip my tights against the station sign.  I’ll get you a new pair from Walgreens, he says, and kisses my forehead.

On a Thursday, we go to the Art Institute.  As we maze our way through the wings, he picks an impressionist work by Georges Seurat as his favorite.  He likes the prim appearance of the portraits in the painting, how the picnic-ers look like puppets without the strings.  The dogs are the only ones at ease in the piece, even though stippled sunlight slides over the entire Sunday scene.  I pick Mary Cassatt’s The Child’s Bath as my favorite.  I like the way the child’s toes bend like goldfish fetuses above the bowl.

A little in-your-face, even for you, he says of my choice.

Just one baby.

Let’s just enjoy each other for now, he says.

Just one.

Just, meaning only or exactly.  Just, meaning based on or behaving according to what’s fair.  My husband suggests I channel my maternal musings into my writing and into my career change.  He pats my head like he’s trying to scour it of its thoughts and moves us to innocuous sculptures of adult saints.

Author’s List: The Break Up

Things you should not do when writing…

1. Be overly sentimental.
2. Use setting too metaphorically.
3. Foreground a weeping willow.
4. Use real life to construct fiction.
5. Omit quotation marks.

The Break Up

By: SPL

The air is cold and crisp, but the muddy grass sticks to my hands still warm from the fading heat of summer.  I sink into the soft hill, and I ask you to sit.  You stand, a blot on the horizon as the sun creeps away.

I think it’s better this way, you say.

I pull a tuft of grass from its roots and divide the blade into two.  I avoid your face and watch the river shore as fall rolls in.  The oaks are still solid and strong and cling to their leaves, even the bruised and gnarled ones.  But my attention wanders.  I have always loved the willows here – bent, fluid, perpetually on the brink of jumping into the river where they drape.  Air moves their leaves; it sounds like they’re running away.

I think you knew this was coming, you say.

I did, but don’t answer.  I can just barely trace a sliver of moon in the twilight sky.  Streaks of clouds make the moon strobe, and I stare hard to try to find the shadowy craters on its surface, but it’s only whisper white.

You take a heavy step towards my face and demand that I not be so dramatic.  The only reason I even know you’re there is the sole of your boot suctioning in the mud next to my ear.  I count the clouds and wish for stars.  Sometimes the night comes so slowly that you barely miss your shadow.

Reading List: Etgar Keret’s “Four Stories”

Late this winter, I read Etgar Keret’s Four Stories, a compilation of, you guessed it, four stories.  Here is my listful thoughts and homemade mashup of his words:

1. Keret rhymes with carrot, but tastes much better.
2. His stories have both heart and shoes; they “beat” you with their “souls.”
3. Keret’s style is lean; my style is fat.  One of us is talking about his or her waistline.
4. Four Stories should be five stories.  This is what happens when lawyers get involved.
5. After WWII, students in Jewish schools used to stand silent and still for two minutes per day during memorial drills.  I wonder who cheated…

I am trying to write about two kinds of memory.

The memory of those kinds of mausoleums.  Where you’re supposed to be quiet and not touch anything.  The slow shrivel of kidney cancers in grandmothers, the pancreatic decay of geriatric grandfathers.  The plunder of emotions shed at the altar of first love.  The teacher says not to touch, but I do.  I touch one of them, a cardboard photograph of a pale and skinny man, a former vision of my father, and I see the fork fly tines-first into the floor during a fight with mom.  Its vibrations hum a dirge that follows my parent’s relationship for years.

The memory of the shoes.  The memory that touches you all the time, that you get dirty, that you sometimes forget, but it’s part of you.  The amber ring—mother-purchased piece of prized gem—given as a gift to ease a small failure.  The way winter stings front teeth, cracked-ice nerve endings, moved from Mississippi to Massachusetts.  You sift through the memories that pop into your head.  Lifted by the suspenders during a tantrum, superman style hurled through the air by father’s hands.  Wedding shoes scuffed too little, soles untouched.  Choose the most important ones.

And those cost you too.

Because when you go and mention the number of memories, then the feeling that you have is a feeling of awe, you are petrified.  It’s not that you can really feel the pain of those millions of memories.  You just feel that there is something there that paralyzes you.