I had to fight back tears on the train today
Remembering myself barefoot and
Half asleep beside you in your car
Those nights you used to drive me home.
Monday, November 17, 2008
East
A man calls for prayers outside the Islamic Center and I follow
His voice toward Mecca and into the frigid evening-
East
Toward the river and my run-down apartment,
East
Toward a lonely ocean,
East
From where my family came,
East
Toward Jerusalem and the stories I hear at Mass.
I haven't set foot in a church since March, it snowed then too.
It is always well into the afternoon when I wake on Sundays
And I drink tea under the sliver of western light
That, on occasion, enters my living room
While the last services close at Immaculate Conception.
His voice toward Mecca and into the frigid evening-
East
Toward the river and my run-down apartment,
East
Toward a lonely ocean,
East
From where my family came,
East
Toward Jerusalem and the stories I hear at Mass.
I haven't set foot in a church since March, it snowed then too.
It is always well into the afternoon when I wake on Sundays
And I drink tea under the sliver of western light
That, on occasion, enters my living room
While the last services close at Immaculate Conception.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
A bit more about dreams
The zombie dreams have returned. I've probably told you about them. They come randomly, every few months or so. I still don't know what they mean. They are markedly sadder this time and lack the campy movie bravado of the past. Now, people are forced to watch as their loved ones are changed and destroyed. In the last dream, a man killed his own (undead) daughter with his bare hands in order to save my life. Then he held me as if I were a child again. But I'm not a child, in dreams nor here now, and although it wasn't real, I could feel the weight of that much sacrifice.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Do your best to make these things real
Today I waited for hours in the center of the Ben Franklin Parkway. Police barricades had stopped traffic and it was too hot for October. By the time the sun fell behind the trees my back was sore from standing on the pavement and my calves ached from reaching on tiptoe to see past the heads of the people in front of me, to see the man on stage.
Then everything froze as a few familiar harmonica cords were played and, all together, tens of thousands of people began to sing every word of "Thunder Road". The voices began hesitantly, just a low murmur over the parkway of people breathing...
Roy Orbison's singing for the lonely, hey that's me and I want you only, don't turn me home again, I just can't face myself alone again...
But the Boss told us to "Go ahead, take it" and with this permission the sound grew, words that I have had in my memory for as long as I can remember music...
You can hide 'neath your covers and study your pain, make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain, waste your summer praying in vain for a savior to rise from these streets...
It was one of those rare, surreal moments where your surroundings seem to vanish and you're caught up, for a little while, in the music and the idolatry and the lyrics that seem to speak your own sorrow. It was like falling in love for just a few moments or leaving everything behind, like Mary climbing into her lover's car to look for the promised land on a deserted road somewhere across the river from here.
Then everything froze as a few familiar harmonica cords were played and, all together, tens of thousands of people began to sing every word of "Thunder Road". The voices began hesitantly, just a low murmur over the parkway of people breathing...
Roy Orbison's singing for the lonely, hey that's me and I want you only, don't turn me home again, I just can't face myself alone again...
But the Boss told us to "Go ahead, take it" and with this permission the sound grew, words that I have had in my memory for as long as I can remember music...
You can hide 'neath your covers and study your pain, make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain, waste your summer praying in vain for a savior to rise from these streets...
It was one of those rare, surreal moments where your surroundings seem to vanish and you're caught up, for a little while, in the music and the idolatry and the lyrics that seem to speak your own sorrow. It was like falling in love for just a few moments or leaving everything behind, like Mary climbing into her lover's car to look for the promised land on a deserted road somewhere across the river from here.
Saturday, August 2, 2008
One night I dreamed of an angel: I walked into a huge, empty bar and saw him sitting in a corner with his elbows on the table and a cup of milky coffee in front of him. She’s the love of your life, he said, looking up at me, and the force of his gaze, the fire in his eyes, threw me right across the room. I started shouting, Waiter, waiter, then opened my eyes and escaped from that miserable dream. Other nights I didn’t dream of anyone, but I woke up in tears.
Before these past few months I've rarely remembered my dreams. I'd wake occasionally with a few images in my head or a fuzzy story but mostly there was nothing but sleep. I don't think I've had a nightmare since I was a child. Then I changed and they became constant and so real - the dull, pounding fear of finding myself stranded in foreign country with no money and no ticket home or the more piercing terror of the night I spent balanced on a rusty folded chair on top of a swaying and crumbling tower, the nausea and sorrow I felt watching a dog die on the bathroom floor of my fathers house, filling white towels with seeping blood, then the night I woke sobbing after listening to a friend tell me he hated me over and over in the coldest voice I've ever heard and I was unable to tell if I had dreamed it or really had received that terrible phone call.
I guess it seems strange to say, then, that I like this version better and never want to go back to those old, vacant nights.
Before these past few months I've rarely remembered my dreams. I'd wake occasionally with a few images in my head or a fuzzy story but mostly there was nothing but sleep. I don't think I've had a nightmare since I was a child. Then I changed and they became constant and so real - the dull, pounding fear of finding myself stranded in foreign country with no money and no ticket home or the more piercing terror of the night I spent balanced on a rusty folded chair on top of a swaying and crumbling tower, the nausea and sorrow I felt watching a dog die on the bathroom floor of my fathers house, filling white towels with seeping blood, then the night I woke sobbing after listening to a friend tell me he hated me over and over in the coldest voice I've ever heard and I was unable to tell if I had dreamed it or really had received that terrible phone call.
I guess it seems strange to say, then, that I like this version better and never want to go back to those old, vacant nights.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
In case of emergency I think the contents of my purse may be too revealing
So I'm cleaning it out, pouring onto the hardwood floor potato chip crumbs and two laundry claim tags...$2.67 in lose change, three packs of Orbit gum (one empty), four prescriptions, a bottle of aspirin and countless pharmacy receipts...a Moleskine with a pen that keeps coming uncapped...headphones and Raybans, a Citibank deposit slip and a water stained copy of Don Quixote...chamomile tea and dozens of tiny yellow post-it notes falling out like leaves sketched with phone numbers and scraps of poetry.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Review: Nazi Literature In America
Roberto Bolano is one of my favorite contemporary authors. I am endlessly impressed by his ability to move one step beyond the "magical realism" style of his mentors by toying with and expanding the form and very definition of the novel. Nazi Literature In America is no exception. The book, while clearly fiction, does not act as a traditional novel. It is an encyclopedia of fascist American writers who have existed only in Bolano's imagination. The chapters are intricately divided into various schools of thought and an expansive bibliography fills the epilogue. The level of detail is nearly exhausting.
Many of the chapters are simple - dry biographies and lists of works or historical accounts of the conflict between fascist writers and the growing leftist movements in South America throughout the past century. Yet in these segments, readers will catch glimpses of how dark and twisted Bolano's fantasy world is. One author is photographed being held by Hitler as a baby and spends her life cherishing the picture and idolizing the dictator. In another chapter, a white-supremacist from Texas embarks on a poetry career from prison. The image of the Aryan-Brotherhood publishing literary magazines is a humorous one, as are many of the other snapshots offered up in the book. However, the overall message is one of the evil that quietly exists in society.
This idea comes forth most clearly in the story of "The Infamous Ramirez Hoffman" that closes the novel. In this chapter Bolano himself appears as narrator and a character in the story. Ramirez Hoffman is an artist, poet and serial killer that Bolano purports to meet in his youth. Many decades later, an ex-police officer recruits Bolano to help him track and kill Hoffman. When the aging Hoffman is found, Bolano begs the officer not to kill him: "He can't hurt anyone now, I said. But I didn't really believe it. Of course he could. We all could." In these lines Bolano suddenly brings the reader into the action of the novel with the painful realization that we are all capable of harm.
Bolano's novels often point a magnifying glass at the literary world, whether is be the "visceral realists" of The Savage Detectives or the right-wing movement throughout the Americas. By dissecting these marginalized fictional groups, Bolano is able to make a commentary on the larger concept of human nature. Nazi Literature In America exposes what is indisputably an evil society, but it is an evil that exists only in the pages of the book and which which the reader will never be exposed to. Yet, by inserting himself into the tale and drawing the reader in alongside, Bolano is able to show us that the ideas on these pages are not entirely fantasy. It is this final realization that makes the book so frightening.
Many of the chapters are simple - dry biographies and lists of works or historical accounts of the conflict between fascist writers and the growing leftist movements in South America throughout the past century. Yet in these segments, readers will catch glimpses of how dark and twisted Bolano's fantasy world is. One author is photographed being held by Hitler as a baby and spends her life cherishing the picture and idolizing the dictator. In another chapter, a white-supremacist from Texas embarks on a poetry career from prison. The image of the Aryan-Brotherhood publishing literary magazines is a humorous one, as are many of the other snapshots offered up in the book. However, the overall message is one of the evil that quietly exists in society.
This idea comes forth most clearly in the story of "The Infamous Ramirez Hoffman" that closes the novel. In this chapter Bolano himself appears as narrator and a character in the story. Ramirez Hoffman is an artist, poet and serial killer that Bolano purports to meet in his youth. Many decades later, an ex-police officer recruits Bolano to help him track and kill Hoffman. When the aging Hoffman is found, Bolano begs the officer not to kill him: "He can't hurt anyone now, I said. But I didn't really believe it. Of course he could. We all could." In these lines Bolano suddenly brings the reader into the action of the novel with the painful realization that we are all capable of harm.
Bolano's novels often point a magnifying glass at the literary world, whether is be the "visceral realists" of The Savage Detectives or the right-wing movement throughout the Americas. By dissecting these marginalized fictional groups, Bolano is able to make a commentary on the larger concept of human nature. Nazi Literature In America exposes what is indisputably an evil society, but it is an evil that exists only in the pages of the book and which which the reader will never be exposed to. Yet, by inserting himself into the tale and drawing the reader in alongside, Bolano is able to show us that the ideas on these pages are not entirely fantasy. It is this final realization that makes the book so frightening.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Story
Couldn't I be your Holly Golightly?
You've finished my story, so where is
my Hollywood ending?
I'll end up with the original version.
A watered-down Manhattan on the bedside table.
I now sleep next to dog-eared
books of poetry instead of you.
A Sikh cabdriver once recited poetry
and gave me a silver bracelet,
a dollar store version of the one
permanent on his own wrist.
He told me kindness always come back around
and, I actually believed him then as I told you
the story (breathless and shivering)
over the phone.
You've finished my story, so where is
my Hollywood ending?
I'll end up with the original version.
A watered-down Manhattan on the bedside table.
I now sleep next to dog-eared
books of poetry instead of you.
A Sikh cabdriver once recited poetry
and gave me a silver bracelet,
a dollar store version of the one
permanent on his own wrist.
He told me kindness always come back around
and, I actually believed him then as I told you
the story (breathless and shivering)
over the phone.
A few lost words
My grandmother started therapy today. The goal, as I've been told, is to repair the damage from the stroke and re-teach some of the language that has been lost. She spends three hours a day on it and it is apparently exhausting.
It is very odd to think of an 82 year old woman having to relearn how to talk. It's almost like something has come full circle and people return to childhood as time passes. Language seems like something so elemental. It feels like something that is automatically part of me, something that I cannot remember ever being without. It is nearly impossible to get my head around the fact that it can actually be lost in a matter of moments.
And yet, things surely have been lost. No matter how successful the therapy is, there are things that will not return to my grandmother and things that have been slipping away for a number of years now. Perhaps, at the next party she will not be able to recall the verses of "On the Way to Cape May" or "The Wild Rover". We may never again hear the story of how she used to dirty her childhood clothes watching a baker make cinnamon rolls through a basement window or listen to her try to hold back her laughter as she recounts that infamous van ride to South Bend.
In spite of all this, I don't think these things are entirely gone. Out of this a family legend can be built. The stories may be hazy, and we will likely get the details wrong. Joe and Terry will lie, of course, but that's what makes it legend. In the end, these stories will continue to be told over potluck brunches and tables covered in empty Miller Light bottles, even if it is not our matriarch doing the talking. Plus, I can guarantee that after all those beers are finished we will all still know every single word to "Sweet Caroline".
It is very odd to think of an 82 year old woman having to relearn how to talk. It's almost like something has come full circle and people return to childhood as time passes. Language seems like something so elemental. It feels like something that is automatically part of me, something that I cannot remember ever being without. It is nearly impossible to get my head around the fact that it can actually be lost in a matter of moments.
And yet, things surely have been lost. No matter how successful the therapy is, there are things that will not return to my grandmother and things that have been slipping away for a number of years now. Perhaps, at the next party she will not be able to recall the verses of "On the Way to Cape May" or "The Wild Rover". We may never again hear the story of how she used to dirty her childhood clothes watching a baker make cinnamon rolls through a basement window or listen to her try to hold back her laughter as she recounts that infamous van ride to South Bend.
In spite of all this, I don't think these things are entirely gone. Out of this a family legend can be built. The stories may be hazy, and we will likely get the details wrong. Joe and Terry will lie, of course, but that's what makes it legend. In the end, these stories will continue to be told over potluck brunches and tables covered in empty Miller Light bottles, even if it is not our matriarch doing the talking. Plus, I can guarantee that after all those beers are finished we will all still know every single word to "Sweet Caroline".
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