Tag: determination

Letting Go, Poetry

Self Swathing

smirkpretty

At the bend where curb meets street,
leaf debris writhes as if trying to awaken
at long last
into sentience.
Alas, no such magic here. Instead, intention
or perhaps merely instinct
compels a worm hidden below
to travel without regard for freight
or sight. Under cover of dust and plum
blossom, mint-brushed helicopter pods
and the laced bottlebrushes
of a doll’s kitchen, she undulates
in her inexorable attempt at progress
towards some primal certainty
of open ground. Laden
with ornament, festooned
like a May queen in her azalea crown
and grass skirt, she twists back into the wall
of concrete, unable to climb. She cannot see
past the mantle she must bear
to retain her precious title.

These pretty burdens
we refuse to shed.
How they slow us down.
How our majesty rivets us
to corners.
 

Determination, Parenting

Object of the Game

smirkpretty

It isn’t the gray. It is not the shaft of air tunneling down the black or even the thin promise of light. It is not the howl of gears in need of oil and spit and breath, the places where teeth rub against brittle skin worn to rust and grit. It is not the blood even or the lost child or the empty wallet or the anticipation of want.
 
It is a recollection. Become a parent and everything changes. Down we go, compelled.
 
Once I played Mancala on the sofa of a shelter with a girl who had a child.
 
Her own mother stayed there, too. Three generations in one borrowed room. She told me her mother had taught her the game. In the smooth divots of that wooden palette, she doled out glass beads. Our turns shifted the place they needed to land. Each play altered the number of beads in our hand. The little marbles dropped, leading us around the board. We were Hansel and Gretel following gemstone breadcrumbs, trying to find a way home. Count, calculate, move, hold your breath. Nothing stays. Someone comes like a crow to pluck your shiny things. She told me she learned so well her mother refused to play her anymore. She needed someone who would be willing to lose. She had never lost.
 
We sat in front of the ceiling-high windows. The panes of glass looked out onto a street in her neighborhood. It was the place she had been born and raised, the place she could not find that just-enough combination of work + babysitting + bus fare to make rent. Who would have taught her how? Her mother was on the other futon in their room upstairs. She slid the gleaming bits of glass, 2-3-4. She said she decided she was going to master this game. She didn’t care if it made her mom feel bad to lose. She needed to win. This was her chance.
 
I was no help at all working there. I had no job leads, no contact at the ANFC. Nothing but the key to the locker where donated diapers and spaghetti-os lived. That, and keeping watch. In the heart of a city both cagey and caged, I could bar the doors and ensure an unmolested night.
 
There on the sofa, I was merely a convenient opponent. Company. This was more than nothing, though not by much. Do we not know this now? In a situation so dire, who can endure remembering without pause? The relentless press of need will cripple the very capacity required for filling it. Who can hold awareness of how much is required, how many miles the blistered feet must still cover, without curling into a ball? Without giving up entirely? I was a vehicle for distraction. For collecting glittering baubles. Anything but the Real for that precious pause.
 
You work and work and work just to keep getting up again to work some more. You are an accident of birth and the blind flailing towards some kind of coherent life. From the time you are little. You do your homework or you put it off, you start a lemonade stand or you peddle drugs. You aren’t getting closer to anything it all it seems until one day, there it is: A door. One of your company walks on through and the other is still trying to stumble down the corridor. Then it whispers shut. Then is gone and with it that first one, the one who was only just steps ahead. Behind a wall without a way through. That other self. That could-have-been.
 
That doppelganger.
 
Who sits across you from the couch, offering nothing but company. And a silencing of the noise of everything that still must be done to keep your child safe, to give her some chance of getting down that dark tunnel faster than you ever did before the door slips shut.
 
In the low light of those oversized windows, the girl with no place to live taught me her game of strategy and luck. She beat me every time until I learned. Then she didn’t stand a chance. I was young. She was younger but had more years under her belt by far. Ages. Epochs. I held all the advantage and forgot to let her win there in that one place where she could. We put the board away. She went up to the room to rouse her child from her hot nap. I went home.
 
Her baby would be 20 now. Older than the girl was then.
 
Did her little one make it? Did she arrive? Did she beat her mother at the game?
 
There are doors here. We find them. For our children. We push our way down that black tunnel. Push past the terror. Down past where we know others have gone. Some have tipped over the edge into pits we dread. Others slipped out into those places just beyond, those places we ache to be.
 
We feel blindly at the edges of damp concrete and steel, press our hands down into those cracks where the grime collects. Where the gears bite and groan. We know the danger. We also know there is a treasure there. A lever to pull. A place where things fall open. We seek the shape of the doors we only vaguely recognize. We have seen the shafts of light. Even if we missed our own chance, we remember the feel of the air blowing through. That noise, that thump and howl, it could just be the empty wind. Also, it could be a trumpet song trying to find its way to our ears. It could be music somewhere here. A stage door opening onto string and brass. The velvet curtain lifting. A trough of glass beads. All of what was lost and more, glittering there for our children to claim as their own.
 

Creativity, Happy Days, Parenting

Happy 100 Days: 21

smirkpretty

My son is standing at the kitchen counter with a handful of permanent markers and  a stack of recycled paper. The brush in my hands works its way through his golden hair. The tangle in the back tightens like the fist of Christmas lights we threw into the corner after 30 minutes of trying. The smell of spruce clings to the morning.
 
Bug continues on a picture of a golf ball factory he began last night. His running commentary distracts us both from the small knots yanking at his scalp. “This bin is for one color, and this one for blue. They get sorted into the right boxes, and here is where they go if the wrong color is in the box. Ow!”
 
“I’m sorry, baby. I’ll go slow.”
 
He fills the page with tiny circles, long funnels, and snaking tubes. He writes the words “picker” and “golf ball tools.”
 
When we were decorating, I managed to pick apart one fist of lights and unfurl a string to adorn the tree. When I finished, I hooted and cheered. “Perseverance pays off!” I hoped this would make us all forget about me tossing the other strand aside and declaring it hopeless.
 
Bug leans close to make a thin line on the edge of the page. My hands follow his arc. I separate the twisted locks at the base of his skull one snarl at a time.  The brush barely moves yet its work is relentless.
 
“I am going to be an engineer,” he tells me. “Not the train kind. The building kind.”
 
“Yes, you will, baby. You can build anything you see inside your mind.”
 
“I know, Mom,” he says.
 
Good. I lean in and kiss him on the damp head. He barely registers me. He is too focused on crafting his vision one perfect circle at a time. Let’s keep it that way.
 

Fitness, Happy Days, Home

Happy 100 Days: 22

smirkpretty

Inside the gray morning, a storm churns. No one looking down from a weather balloon would ever know. Calm skies lay a low blanket of mist over this patch of concrete. Upstairs, my boy dreams on. He will wake on his own and climb into my arms so I can carry him down to our waking day. For this singular pleasure, I continue to press my weight against the porch step. I jump skyward straight up from a squat 20 times over, roaring past my own screaming heart then begin again once the stars dim.
 
Inside the neighbors’ homes, small thunderclaps fall on deaf ears. Who would know? Secrets, stillness, fury, love. White lights twine around poplars and oaks dotting the unfenced green. In the low dawn, other women walk their dogs at a racer’s clip or jog in nylon sheaths. I wonder who these people are. Even the ones whose names I have learned over wine and block-party gossip are exotic, sleek-billed things. They married the ones who became captains and commanders. Very few of wives themselves hold such sway. They feather their nests and pine for more yet seem to possess a knowledge that eludes me. Gloss and curl, breast and fawn. Perhaps just dumb luck? Whatever the code, I have not cracked it yet. I rely on pulse and sweat. I bend and crunch my belly, powering the core which sustains me. It is, after all, the only one I’ve got.
 
Next door, the couple stands bickering over the placement of a red bow on the new porch light. She wears the teal track suit, he the familiar scowl. The stout pillars of their new portico twinkles with lights. Their long-legged girls soar past on in-line skates, hair swaying. The silent distance of proximity has me hungering and recoiling. What quiet thunder brews there? Any? None? They have lived here since the girls were toddlers. I have never seen the inside of their home, yet I long to inhabit it, whether it be the shelter or the storm.
 
I lunge 50 times on my patch of damp concrete. I get to 51 and keep going. Past 75, past 100. These thighs will never fail me. I will climb the stairs. I will scale these walls. I will leap over rooftops, up past the front that taunts us with its constant pressure and threats of deluge. Up into clear skies this surging heart will carry my boy and me, winging us into the place we are meant to be.
 

Uncategorized

Happy 100 Days: 84

smirkpretty

Some days, happy is not a feeling. It is taking a blowtorch to the invasive species. It is burning off the tangle that has choked off the native leaf. Remember those parasitic cuttings you pushed into your soil when you did not know better? Remember when the blossoms made you stupid and the fragrance made you swoon?
 
Remember the beautiful lie?
 
Those fine tendrils have twisted into steel coils. You see now, can’t you? How it happens?
 
Your folly then can be forgiven. Your devotion now cannot.
 
Some days, happy is not a bouquet. Some days, it is the making way.
 
It is the slash and burn.
 
And so, the purge.
 
(In the absence of a conflagration, an industrial shredder will do.)
 
Some days, happy is not a state of being. It is a trowel and a bucket of wet cement. It is an intention. A slog, even.
 
Some days, you are down below the frost line, down at the foundation only just dug, cramming blocks against the cold mud and plastering them into place. You are following the plumb line. You haven’t seen the sun in days.
 
You do not need to look up. It is still there. Trust me. It will be there again. But now, you are building a floor. You are making your shelter. You are climbing towards the sky.
 
Some days, happy is not.
 
And yet, you still find a box full of tools right there at your feet, and your hands are still at work, and the ground still holds.
 
Some days, the evidence suggests otherwise. But yes. The ground holds.
 

Friends, Poetry

Good People: An Elegy for Chris

smirkpretty

He did not grow out of the cultivated earth of a literary tradition. He was Texas dirt, sunburnt and scarred. He banged into poetry sometime in his twenties and instead of slinking back and skittering away, he grafted it onto his body and sprouted there, all new.
 
He was not a particularly good writer when I met him. It did not matter. He drove his pen into the page, hammered those rough words out on a stage, and decided to be a poet. Bukowski and Ginsberg and Ferlighetti elbowed out the last of the complacency. He wrote of dark stink and revolution. He riffed off the speeches of great leaders with only a vague notion about how to organize a movement. Something more, something growling, pulsed through him, throbbing, feeding his voice.
 
He was so young.
 
We wrote together. In Dallas, on the cracked vinyl of diner booths, we wrote and wrote and wrote. One of us would suggest a prompt. We would write frantically for 10 minutes, read aloud without commenting, then write for 12, read aloud, write for 20. We could pass hours this way, whole lifetimes, galaxies dying off and starting again, no sense anymore of where one story birthed the next, one theme then the next, the rhythm of impulse moving in synchronicity over lukewarm Dr. Pepper and tattered pages.
 
For three months, maybe four, we were this toothed pair, fighting about everything and nothing. On Friday nights well past bedtime, we drove down I-75 to the slam in Deep Ellum at the Blind Lemon next to the auto glass dealer. We competed against our own team-mates and our own demon for the coveted perfect 30. He would get up there and hiss and hum his fury for that cash prize, barely enough to pay for two drinks. On Tuesdays, we went to Insomnia and took the mic just for the hell of it. On Sunday afternoons, we holed up in a windowless bar and team-wrote with a scruffy menagerie of rockers and poets and screenplay writers under a low shroud of smoke.
 
He was up for anything. He jumped at the chance to walk through the Dallas Museum of Art. He would pull over at a techno club well past midnight to dance among the goth teens. When his car was towed, we passed two hours in line at the flickering mausoleum of the impound lot, coming up with characters and laughing with our whole bellies. He discovered German barbecue places off the interstate, tried alligator tail at the cajun place, and introduced me to a proper Texas cheeseburger. We drove to Austin and crashed on a friend’s couch. He meandered wide-eyed through the State House, a place he had never visited in the lost years. He tracked down his state representative to ask her about road projects in poor communities.
 
I loved him a little and he loved me wild. His run-down pad off Walnut Hill had posters of Limp Bizkit on the wall and a full Nintendo game system he could barely afford. He had a twin bed. A sour couch. No savings. No degree. No plan. No pedigree.
 
But on that day my grandmother had the ladies over for bridge and he swung by to pick me up, he tapped some source of sugared light I had only just begun to sense.  Never has a group of octogenarians so quickly puddled into fits of giggles.
 
He was complete already, and I didn’t know it. Neither did he.
 
He wanted to plan Big Things. Community-wide bilingual free poetry shows. Demonstrations in the park for funding for arts in the schools. He was firing on all cylinders with no direction of travel.
 
Except for one: Poetry.
 
He dreamed writing. He woke writing. When I urged him to slow down, to read, the practice the craft, I could see his jaw tense with the effort. He did not want to measure his pace. He did, though, because all suggestions were fair game.  Then he would return to just writing writing writing. He got better and better.
 
He treated every other uncertain artist exactly as he treated his own self. “Get up there. You’ve got something to say.” He never let anyone sit in the back and play it safe. He did not wait for perfection or an invitation. He crashed the party. He grabbed everyone within reach and carried them with him.
 
“I believe the world is beautiful,” wrote Roque Dalton. “And that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.” Christopher Ya’ir Lane lived this.
 
Alas, no journey unfolds without flat tires and black smoke. Back then, a dozen years ago in the Dallas night, there were lies and drugs and there was another woman. I was leaving anyway to head back to Vermont to help a friend with a baby. So, the heat burned to embers and then ash. Sometime later, I heard that he had stumbled down the rabbit hole. The details were vague. He moved to Arizona. His siblings were involved. Who knows? I failed to reach out. Bruises, even if only to the ego, can make a heart cold.
 
I found him again virtually, years later after I was gone and back and gone again a few times around. He had his own beautiful family. A wife, a baby in his arms, then another. In the intervening decade, he had not stopped writing.
 
What did I say? He was not a good writer?
 
Now I have to admit that I didn’t understand the first thing about good writing. Chris had something to teach me I am only just now starting to wrap my mind around. Good is only this:
 
Doing it.
 
Just doing it, over and over, then doing it some more. He did not stop, from what I can tell, for longer than half a breath during that time. He had become a great poet. And what’s more, he had let that fire and fury carry him into projects that would make the Espada and Angeolou and even Roque Dalton proud. He put together youth slams. He became an organizer for the Alzheimer’s poetry project. He bridged the gap between rural and urban artists. He wrote and wrote, but he did not just do it from the back of the cave. He was a people’s poet. He shared, learned to make things happen, turned that charm into currency that could open the door to the ones for whom a closed door, or no door, is standard fare.
 
Christopher Ya’ir Lane was a far better writer and man than I gave him credit for. He never stopped. I wish I had known him later, that I had gotten over the small peevishness of our parting and welcomed him as a friend and as the gifted teacher he became. That is my great regret. But I am thankful that he inhabits a small moment in time and a living corner of my heart.
 
It is hard to know how to honor someone when the loss is so fresh. I can only say that this man’s life work is both humbling and inspiring. He did not wait around for the world to tell him he was good enough. He simply decided to love something, to make it multiply, and to cast the seeds of it far and wide.
 
So, for Chris, who shared that burning moment with me, I make this commitment:
 
I aim to crack open my rigid perceptions about what makes a piece, a project, or a person worth consideration. I aim to be impatient, to open my throat, to have the courage to believe in ink and voice to carry the art to life even if my doubt would surely sink it. I am to urge everyone I meet to follow their own bright pulse, blow past the doubts and the critics, and burn big, and burn loud.
 
Christopher Ya’ir was the best writing companion a girl could have during a fit of Dallas fever. I am grateful he unfurled his passion in my presence and showed me how it’s done. I ache for a world without him, and my heart goes out to his two beautiful little ones and to the wife who carried him over.
 
Goodbye, Chris. Your voice is with me, splitting open now in this turned soil, reaching for my own roots and feeding me the heat I did not even know I lacked. You live forever.