He dips, smacks
fist against bag,
growl and clash,
Joe Strummer splits
seams, drop
ceiling shrieks
in protest against
shuddering brace and groaning
beam, crimson everlast
swinging, spine
hunched, gloves up, slits
for eyes, he spits
as bristling
lips clench
jagged like razors
ragged like teeth
wet with stink
slick heat
bell at 3
he scowls, steps
back, steeps
in his own steam, salt
licking his neck
Tag: power
Love Lettering
Who will receive this next
ink ribbon folded back on itself, tucking
the pulp heart of the matter
into its own layered belly like an origami crane?
As if for peace
offerings and platonic love, I write to him
(or is it you?) yet contemporaries of Plato knew
that Mercury conceived the alphabet
from the sight of those wings V-cutting the sky
and words are nothing more than traces of hollow
bone and feathered vein, the page
a leaf stirred to flight.
Pen nib, beak, and paper’s razor edge.
Perhaps it takes on a power of its own, this letting
into letters a promise I fancy
a vial drawn from Delphi and ferried
in talon to brush his trembling lips
(or yours)
with prophecy,
with Us.
Alas.
When he (or you) unfurl the knot
of scratchings here, neither gods
nor philosophers tumble out,
no. Not even a waterbird
for all this trouble. Just abracadabra and alaka-zam,
a spatter of angles and curlicues casting
untested home-cooked spells.
This tattered plea calls not on him
but you,
(yes, you)
to fold back the edges, to smooth open
the wrinkled sheet. I beg
your mercy. Use your hands. Clear a place. Let divination
spread itself
across the waiting acre
of us.
The Power Elite
Our house is among the 80,000 in Virginia still without power. The number is down from one million, so we are headed in the right direction. We sit in a pocket of about twenty unlit homes surrounded by humming air conditioners and flickering televisions. Virginia Dominion crews work alongside hired tree services under unrelenting sun to saw through and haul away a giant oak that toppled lines on the road bordering our neighborhood.
“Power, power, power,” Bug sighs as we sit in the back yard. “All anyone ever talks about around here is power.”
We are eating our way through a spoiled-food banquet at a steady clip, trying to stay several paces ahead of the e.coli. As a mother, I suppose I should be more risk averse. We grill the last of the thawing cow from the deep freeze, playing infarction roulette by devouring steaks the size of catcher’s mitts. Bug and I together plow through half a leftover birthday cake. The rest of it lands in the dumpster. We body-bag the the limp boxes of popsicles, dripping Costco pork chops that had been neatly re-packaged into family-sized ziplocks (sorry, Mom), all the salad dressing and pickles and yogurt, and one entire 10×13 pan of homemade lasagna (really sorry, Mom).
Bug and I read books by candlelight in our living room encampment. We sing songs. He strips off his shirt. “It’s too hot,” he moans. The night finally cools down enough to open a window, but we cannot conjure up a cross-breeze from the sedentary air. I keep reminding Bug to be still and to try not to let anything upset him. Hot tempers make hot bodies. I stroke his back with the tips of my fingernails. He shivers, his giggles a low moan.
In the morning, Bug walks out with me through the garage. “Mommy,” he chokes. “It smells really bad in here.”
It is no small blessing that the garbage service is operational. Today is trash day, and I am thanking the gods of infrastructure for this gift. Our provisions are now down to a single cooler plus one bin in the freezer. My father has taken on the role of ice hunter. Last night, he had to travel to three stores, but he did return to camp lugging two giant bags. I can keep Bug’s Amoxicillin cold for a couple more days. The lunchmeat, the mayo, and at least four Yuenglings might hold out, too. These events have a way of clarifying priorities.
I see the pinched expressions all around me. Several of my co-workers are also spending their nights stranded on islands of foul heat surrounded by oceans of restored power. Even those who have electricity grumble about being tired and about the slow pace of restoration. No one in the whole of the region had a restful weekend. One friend reported that her childhood bedroom was gutted by a downed tree for the second time in a year. The desire to help fights against the pull to lay low and conserve energy.
Even such minor tragedies narrow the gaze. The work on our to-do lists languishes on our desks. We are in the middle of something else for the moment. I’m not sure what it is, but it feels a little bit frantic. Primal, even. We talk and talk of people we know whose houses suffered damage, of trying to find fresh milk or a patch of shade. We take turns being cranky. We map out our routes home past supermarkets or gas stations offering the supplies we need to carry us through another night. Sometimes we are all ornery at exactly the same moment, and we retreat to the safety of our offices.
The misery here baffles me. We have so very much. I can’t fathom why a few days of heat is so upsetting to those of us who live out in the suburbs and have access to cool amenities just blocks away. Unlike the crews up on cherry pickers re-hanging utility lines at high noon, my co-workers and I pass our eight-hour workday in an office with air conditioning, an ice maker, and internet. Unlike tens of thousands of others, the utility crews and my team are all bringing home paychecks.
This is more than manageable. This is luxury.
Attend to the absence, and the sense of loss become a loss of control.
I keep my mouth shut, though. Nothing worsens a mood more than hearing someone say, “Lighten up. At least you’re not in Colorado Springs. Or Syria.” Each of us has a unique yardstick for comfort. The precise texture of our suffering is based on a corrosion of that comfort. The location of one’s security is not fixed, however. Experience a deprivations or two, and all things rattle into a novel arrangement. Upheaval is a lot like Boggle. Shake, and the familiar text disappears. A new vocabulary materializes before your eyes.
I have to be honest here, though. I can appreciate the vaguely prickling comfort of complaint. It is a little like Bug’s shivers when I run my fingernails down his back. The sensation can become addictive.
When my marriage and camp life unraveled, I exceeded my quota of self-pity. There was a time in the not-too-distant past when I was reeling from a sense of such profound displacement that I felt homeless. The divorce pulled the floor out from under me. I’m sure anyone around me could have said, “Homeless? Who are you kidding? You’re not living under a blue tarp in a refugee camp.” No one cut me with that particular glinting truth, though they would have been right to do so. I am grateful for the friends who endured my relentless moaning.
Now, I have a safe place, a path, a voice, a name of my own. I can live with the unknowns. My son is well. My mind is clearing.
So, it is not entirely fair for me to say, “I can’t understand what everyone’s bitching about. Things are not really so bad.” I have to remember to listen with an open heart and keep my attitude to myself. Privately, I am pleased to notice that riding out this power outage is not nearly as hard as I thought it might be. The lights have been out for a few days, but a few other things are also true.
- The shops have cold drinks, produce, fresh meat. Shipments have already arrived. The restaurants are hopping. The kitchens are busy. The kegs are tapped.
- I do not have facebook on my blackberry, landlines are down, and the DVD player has no juice. Bug and I play legos without interruption. He has gotten back into puzzles. He pulled out blocks for the first time in months.
- The postal service is operational and the Washington Post is waiting for us in its dewy sleeve every morning. My own mail-order medication arrived yesterday and today’s news is fresh.
- The tap water is safe to drink.
- My house has a pool. Its chemicals are balanced, more or less. We are perfectly capable of ignoring the debris carpeting the bottom.
- My rec center has a shower.
- Giovanni has offered up his washing machine, fridge, and air conditioning for when I reach the end of my tether. Or, maybe so I don’t reach it.
- Tomorrow is a holiday. A friend has invited me to a picnic. Since I will not be able to prepare the corn-and-bean salad, I will dip into my sufficiently stocked pocketbook and purchase a pre-fab something-or-other from the supermarket.
- Bears are not eating our garbage. Locusts are not eating our crops. The hospitals have beds and antibiotics. The Supreme Court seems to retain some vestige of democratic principles.
- I can get to my house, and it is still standing.
I quietly reserve the right to maintain a Pollyanna attitude in the face of DC Storm 2012. It is not pretense to acknowledge that this is not the apocalypse. I actually am thankful for what I have. I am even thankful for the fact that my house is one of the few still in the dark. Without a little struggle, how do we know our strength? When we wake up to find that we are Syria, how else will we know that we can survive? How else will we discover that we have the power to overcome cataclysm, even despotism?
Power, power, power. All anyone ever talks about around here is power.
Practice is good. We need to know we can continue to look with fresh eyes and seek new vocabularies no matter how rattled the foundation, no matter how prickling the heat or the fear. It is good to know how to live without power of one sort so we can tap a greater reserve of the stuff when the time comes. The time will come. It always does.
Cessation
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
-Marianne Williamson
When he was eighteen, Giovanni’s father offered him $1000 to quit smoking. The kid refused. “I didn’t want to quit,” he says with a shrug.
My own parents never ponied up cash to entice me to kick the habit. Maybe if I had grown some cojones and smoked in the open, they might have given bribery a whirl. I have no doubt I would have rejected their offer. It was not until I was in my twenties and weary from the merry-go-round of quitting and starting that I finally found whatever storehouse of desire I needed to be ready to stop.
A pregnancy scare accelerated my readiness. The moment I had even a crumb of suspicion I might be carrying a child, I quit. This was before any confirmation the crumb was an it or even if I would keep said it should it come to fruition. The details were irrelevant. My sense of responsibility for giving that little being its best chance trumped all my self-deluded chatter about dependence and ill-gotten pleasure. I stubbed out the smokes, flat and hard, and tossed the pack.
A week or so later, my body sent a clear signal that the phantom child was never more than a slip of the clockworks. I could have launched an America’s Cup contender with the force of my exhalation. As I made haste to the corner store and stood outside lighting up that next cigarette, I considered the object in my yellowed grip. Sure, I was no longer – in fact, never had been – carrying a child. Did that change anything? If not that life, what of this one? What was I to do with the pesky problem of the beloved being in my care, still me?
The sudden arrival of a sense of duty for the small, mighty force living in my skin was most inconvenient. Also, I had been able to forego the smokes without a moment’s hesitation. That pesky fact was a hungry dog that kept following me home.
I puffed away feebly and with an increasing sense of dissonance for a few weeks until I realized I could not stomach the dithering. Was I a smoker or not? A choice had to be made. I could either return to the fiction that nicotine is both more valuable and more powerful than I am, or I could give it up.
The terrible truth was that I loved life more than that cigarette. The mind games came to an end. For too long, I had been singing that stale refrain, “Oh, I would love to reach a point where I could just enjoy a cigarette at a party from time to time.” Forget it. One becomes ten, and I am back at a pack a day. Even if I could just light up here or there, the gratification would not be worth the price. I knew as plain as day that I did not want anything to hold that kind of sway over my mind and body. Lasting pleasure is never so easy. Vices are gingerbread houses. They get you every time.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
– Alice Walker
So, that was it. When I crushed out that last American Sprit fourteen years ago, I said, “I will never smoke another cigarette again as long as I live.” It was a commitment between me and my very own juicy, living self. I have never once faltered. Why would I? It has been so much simpler than I ever imagined it would be. This, I have come to understand, is how such things work. When the path ahead becomes clear, confusion falls away. The only hard part is in willing oneself to lurch up out of paralysis and begin walking.
What do we grasp? Since dispensing with cigarettes and television, what I notice is that the conceptions I lug around are a greater drain than any single behavior. I see myself as only just so brave, only just so capable, only just so energetic. Or worse, that I deserve special treatment and that the normal rules do not apply to me. I fool myself into thinking these ways have laid claim to me, even imprisoned me, when I am the one with my arms threaded through the bars. The reward is $1000. The reward is $100,000. The reward is a treasure chest inlaid with golden beetles and inhabited by a family of genies. I refuse to open my grip. The reward is my own full and electrified power, and still I hesitate. What can possibly be the compulsion? What hold does this thing I keep pressed between my stained fingers have over me, even after the satisfaction has burnt away, even when the Everything is right there for the taking?
I picture Aron Ralston again, sawing away when it became clear his attachment to his own arm was killing him. He cut off a part of his own body. He did this unimaginable thing, just for piddly ol’ life. No one offered him a dime.
Of course, kicking a habit only gets you so far. Sustained practice writes the epic story. Letting go is just a clearing of the clutter and an opening of the blank page. The joyous discipline that follows makes it possible to ink into being the scholar, painter, athlete, nurse.
Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.
– Audre Lorde
We all know it, though. Deep down, I know it, and you do, too. Nothing is more precious than the next glorious incarnation waiting on the other side of the abyss.
No one among us is innocent. No one has more than a brief, long-forgotten visit to the garden before crashing into the first of many nauseating, bottom-dropping-out transitions. Every time through, you learn your power. You become fuller, and your vision sharpens. Like a stone cut and cut again into impossible brilliance, the in-between chisels you into an ever more distinctively patterned version of yourself.
It beckons. That other self over there, it calls. Drop that banged up old satchel. There is nothing in there you need. Set it down, and leap!
Giovanni was onto something at eighteen. Rewards mean nothing if you do not want what comes next. Once you arrive at the lip of the cliff, rewards still mean nothing. Only the wanting matters. Only the courage to want will lift your foot and send you over that edge.
Shannon E. Williams 