June 2012
1 post
3 tags
revolutions per minute
I wake in the night to the sound of my son crying. Big, heavy sobs. Moments later, I hear his footsteps and his head appears by the bed. I hold out my arms. He climbs up and curls himself against me. I lie there, awake now, watch the blades of the ceiling fan spin. He is restless. He rolls over on to his back. With his eyes still closed, he lifts his arm, waves it around, conducting an imaginary...
May 2012
14 posts
2 tags
praise the mutilated world
In my dream, I am standing in a small room with stone walls, like a prison cell, except for the bright white light. The room has been flooded with water. The water comes up almost to my knees.
In the morning, the loud calls of birds. Jackhammers in the distance.
—
The bruises on my arms are fading. The claw marks from the strange rash. But new ones appear in different places. A purple...
3 tags
the price you pay
We drive to the beach in the late afternoon. The skies are overcast, but we are cheerful. In the car, one minute I am chattering and the next, I am dreaming of fields of lavender in bloom. When I awake, we are nearly there.
At the water’s edge, the air is cool and damp and there is a light gray mist hanging over us. The boys dig wide, deep holes in the sand, bury themselves. I sit watching,...
1 tag
the heart is a furious muscle
My daughter nurses so voraciously, small white blisters erupt on her lip. In the early days, I cry, my skin so tender. The flesh cracks and tears, but she persists, driven by her hunger and I lay my head back, close my eyes, tears running down my cheeks until finally, she drifts to sleep. Even in sleep, her tiny jaws and mouth continue their rhythmic motions. She dreams of milk.
I watch her...
2 tags
a small, wounded thing
One summer, I work behind the counter of a cafe, where men in suits and power ties come in and chat with me as they do with young girls of a certain disposition. I am offered a job. Not far from the cafe, in an office in the basement of an old house. I file papers. Maintain mailing lists. Type letters and documents from his handwritten notes. I spend hours there alone, surrounded by file boxes and...
3 tags
all that the body remembers
Opal —Dean Young
It’s not that Monet cared that much about stacks of hay.
Your feelings will never change, you’ll just stop paying so much attention.
A whole summer’s songs go by, the whole house turns blue.
A friend will need some help carrying boxes to the curb.
So slowly you’ll reach into the pond’s reflection of your own face - as if reaching into your face! - the tiny fishes will...
3 tags
mercury in retrograde
We drive over to the neighborhood where we used to live to go to the restaurant we used to walk to from our tiny purple house. It is crowded so we sit at the bar. The bartender looks familiar but I can’t remember exactly from where. “It’s great to see you guys,” she says. “We heard you moved away.”
We laugh. “Not that far,” we say, “we just don’t get back here very often.”
“Well it’s great to...
2 tags
sword of damocles
These days, we all sleep lightly, it seems. Before sunrise, there is stirring. Late spring - a time of transitions for us all. We lie alert in our beds, waiting.
—
Over breakfast, I enumerate my anxieties and M. listens with the patience of the beleaguered.
“You’ve got the Sword of Damocles hanging over you,” he says, when I finally pause for breath.
“What happens, in the end, to...
4 tags
lucky
“Sooner or later, luck runs out.” This is what my friend says to me, as we are sitting on a park bench, facing the bike path.
Here is the thing: I am having trouble these days, accepting what I have. I feel too fortunate, too undeserving. It makes me uneasy, anxious. Like I am always about to lose it all.
“What I mean is, in your life, you’ve been lucky but you’ve also been unlucky. It’s not...
4 tags
hummingbird heart
In high school, my friend and I developed a secret alphabet for sending each other notes about the wide range of topics that we could not bear to see written down in plain language. We used it to write about the things you might expect us to be concerned with - our confusion about our bodies and our desires, the fears we had about the future, the envy of the girls for whom moving through the days...
4 tags
lament of the privileged class
After everyone goes to bed, I stand in front of the refrigerator with the door open, poking around, seeking solace in its chilled contents. I close the door, open it again, walk back into the living room, put my feet up on the couch. Within moments, I am back in the kitchen, pacing.
—
When the revolution comes, I hope that it is me and this stupid refrigerator full of uneaten food that...
4 tags
maybe washing parsley
Finally, a break in the clouds. After so many days of rain, after so much darkness, light.
The heart lifts. The head tilts skyward.
—
I meet my friend in the parking lot of the restaurant but when I find her, she is talking on the phone. She waves her hand at me, but keeps talking. She gestures that we walk. I follow her from the parking lot down the block. She walks slowly so I hover...
4 tags
come to your senses
M. returns from Austin with the Dean Young book of poems and I’m all aflutter, swoony. I am late to this, I know, but look:
Delphiniums in a Window Box
Every sunrise, even strangers’ eyes. Not necessarily swans, even crows, even the evening fusillade of bats. That place where the creek goes underground, how many weeks before I see you again? Stacks of books, every page, characters’ rages and...
3 tags
freefall
My friend returns from a weekend in New York and we meet up late, at the restaurant across from the park, to catch up.
“I was glad to be there, but I am so glad to be back,” she says. “That’s good, right? That I feel like this is home?”
She has moved back, not too long ago, after several years in the city. She tells me of the places she went, the galleries, the concert halls. The brunches with...
3 tags
this chill
The week has been long, dreary. I find myself, in the rare moments of stillness, staring out windows onto gray, wet landscapes. At home, at my desk, the Japanese maple tree is full now, and its branches and leaves frame my view of the gray street, gray sidewalk, gray highway below. In my office, I look out just past the gray parking lot to the buildings that rise up from the river - itself a...
April 2012
12 posts
4 tags
glowing, but not burning
Even early, even before the light, there is birdsong.
Morning breaks.
—
M. spends the weekend at his childhood home, readying it to be sold. The enormity of the project overwhelms. He spends the day with his siblings, sifting through the stuff of a fifty-year marriage and a family of nine. They work first on the barn behind the house. They fill dumpsters. They are at it for hours. He sends me...
4 tags
incident report
I am thinking about transitions. Then I find this:
Lucifer — Dean Young
You can read almost anything about angels, how they bite off the heads first, copulate with tigers, tortured Miles Davis until he stuck a mute in his trumpet to torture them back. The pornographic magazines ported into the redwoods. The sweetened breath of the starving. The prize livestock rolls over on her larval...
5 tags
midnight rage
In the morning, I come out to the driveway and see all the trash that had been piled in front of our house has been moved. It is stacked neatly in front of the neighbor’s house, the spilled contents of the open bags and boxes now concealed.
“Did you move the trash?” I ask M.
“Yes,” he says, “in a midnight rage.”
I imagine him out there in the night, the street lamps from the highway throwing...
3 tags
my own mind is a tenement
A woman who lived in the house next door has passed away. We learn this - rather, we deduce it - from a few strange happenings. First, wooden boards are nailed to the windows on the first floor. On the concrete beneath the kitchen window, now boarded shut, someone has written in “R.I.P.” in green chalk. The woman’s mail - a few utility bills, a catalog from the community college, a postcard from...
3 tags
I won't leave until we figure this out
I do something thoughtless, unintentionally hurtful to my friend and she calls me out on it gently but firmly. I apologize but worry it is insufficient. A few days later, I call. We meet. I apologize again, try to explain. She is warm, effusive - the best version of herself. I am relieved - more so than I had anticipated. One gift of aging, I recognize, is this: an understanding that life is long,...
4 tags
memento mori
There is a funeral procession on the highway. Dozens of cars moving slowly in the far right lane, lights blinking. From the passing lane, I follow it for miles. Finally, the hearse – the sober memento mori. I slow down involuntarily.
Do we regret, in the end, the things we did not do? Or the things we did that we wish we had not?
On the morning my mother dies, we call the hospice nurse. She comes...
4 tags
a line uninterrupted by compromise
I’m looking through old notebooks. I find a pink slip of paper in one, on which I have written:
Sometimes, men talk to me as if the world were only possibility – a line uninterrupted by compromise.
Surely, it meant something to me at the time I wrote it, but I can’t recall what would have prompted it.
—
The story I am about to tell is not entirely true, but it could have been. It is not...
4 tags
I want to feed the sparrow in your heart
My friend is planning for a weekend trip with her not-yet-divorced man. She tells me about it, seeking – I think – my approval.
“Do you think it’s a terrible idea?” she asks me over coffee, although the plans have already been made.
I shrug. “It doesn’t really matter what I think,” I say, but then I go on to tell her what I think.
“I worry about you,” I say. “I think you make it too easy for him...
3 tags
I was calling and calling for you but you didn't...
For the weekend, we stay in the beach house of a friend. The drive over the bridge – onto the island that juts out into the Narragansett Bay – leaves me breathless. The white sailboats tethered, the shimmering surface of the water in the morning light spread out before me, as if arranged there only for my pleasure.
And the quiet. The house is so quiet – no noise from the highway, just the...
4 tags
do not sit
It has been a season of false starts. The heat comes too early. It cannot last, but it forces the trees into bloom and they are left vulnerable, unprotected when the frost returns. Frost on the forsythia blossoms. Frost on the hyacinth, the daffodils. On the foliage of the columbines. Visible even on the slender fronds of lavender. On the tight buds of rose bushes.
I worry that they are too...
4 tags
a rocket, already in space
Yesterday, the man at the bus stop across the street from my house turned his head away as we pulled out of the driveway. I was perplexed. For months now, this ritual: I back out of my driveway, pull alongside the curb next to him, he waves, I wave back, and then I head down the street on my way. But yesterday, I’m alongside the curb and he has turned away, looking down toward the highway where...
5 tags
dangerous propinquity
My aunt writes to tell me about a fire in the apartment complex she lives in:
The fire was on the second floor and the smoke just kept rising. At first those of us with balconies were told to go out and stay there. Then it kept getting worse and at one point I could not see my front door from the balcony door.
Then because my neighbor is away, they broke her door to get in and inspect the...
March 2012
13 posts
4 tags
one long argument
Another gray morning. The boy is up early and from the kitchen, we can hear the sound of his footsteps on the stairs. He is scowling. He announces his grievances – the difficulty he had putting on his shirt, how the cat ruined the game he was trying to play, his too-small socks. M. attempts to redirect his attention by ushering him over to the doorway, where we have marked, over the years, his...
4 tags
better now than later
On the night before her wedding, my mother doubted. She had drawn a bath. “I remember sitting there in the tub,” she tells me once, “and I couldn’t explain it, but I just felt tears running down my face. I didn’t feel sad really,” she says. “I didn’t really feel much of anything.”
We are sitting at the round table in the kitchen, the fake tiffany lampshade over our heads. There is a...
4 tags
if everything goes according to my plan
I wake ravenous this morning, which is not, typically, a good sign. Too much hunger too early in the day suggests a day of disappointments.
Yesterday, a day of indulgences – late brunch with L. at a restaurant we both love. There is a wait, of course, and we squeeze into a bench by the bar and sip coffees. It’s been a while since we’ve spent time together. She’s walked the three miles from her...
3 tags
the fire people
I am making some changes – leaving the place I have worked for the last five years for a new one. For the last five years, I have thought of myself in a certain way. Soon, I will begin thinking of myself in another.
We are always reinventing ourselves though, aren’t we? Our sense of self – evolving all the time? In the small and the large ways. In spring and early summer, I am a gardener. As the...
4 tags
spring, pink dress, bus ticket
Over the weekend, I stay in bed so late that it is disorienting – accustomed as I have become to waking before the light. The sun is already bright and high when I rise, make my way down the hall to ready myself for the day. Despite the relative lateness of the hour, I do not feel rested. My body feels heavy, leaden. I try to think of lightness – think of the invisible thread running through my...
4 tags
small fires
Together, we open a bottle of wine, K. and I, and toast to the men we have loved and lost. “To the bullets we have dodged,” she says and we raise our glasses, laughing. I am sitting in her apartment, facing the water. Through the window, I can see lights on the bay – the boats there, the bridges.
“I think I am too nice,” she says, and we laugh again, as if that has ever been a reason for anything....
4 tags
white birch tree, thread moss
Beautiful K. is dumped unceremoniously by email – email! – and I call him terrible names before she calms me. “He’s just confused,” she says, but I mutter a few more choice terms under my breath. Her divorce proceedings limp along, the negotiations casting no one in his (or her) best light. “He’s dating,” she says of the dumper. I am not sure exactly why I am so angry with him, or why this hits me...
5 tags
everyone forgets that Icarus also flew
We land to rain, the sky a monochromatic gray. I appreciate the somber welcome after several days of giddy, unmoored play. Like sleepwalkers, we drag our bags silently from the gate to the baggage claim. From baggage claim to the parking lot. Up and down the rows of parked cars. The gray baggage carousels. The gray parking lot. The gray concrete.
Just past the exit from the airport parking lot,...
4 tags
travelogue, san francisco: oh, this is the best...
At the diner, the boy feigns illness, pawing at his neck, mouthing the words, “I feel a little sick.” His cheeks are pink and his eyes a little glassy and I immediately envision the ride to the hospital in the ambulance, holding his tiny hand, our hearts racing.
On the night of his first birthday, we find him sitting up in the bed of the house we are renting for our beach vacation, a red angry...
travelogue, san francisco: the sidewalk sparkles
I am drinking terrible coffee in the lobby of the hotel in the early morning. Upstairs, my family sleeps. We are all still a bit confused with the change in tome zone. We have traveled so long and so far to be here. And yet, there is a familiarity to the place that comforts, calms.
M. came here for a conference and we followed him out, not wanting, I think, for him to have too many pleasures...
4 tags
tune in tomorrow
When I come back from the shower, I hear M. and the boy engaged in some elaborate game to which I have no real point of entry. There are whole, complicated narratives at work that span days. Characters are introduced, imperiled, and rescued. Seemingly innocent figures turn villainous, to later redeem themselves. Choices are made. Fortunes turn.
I hear my son say with a certain solemnity in his...
3 tags
what all the best athletes know
M. tells our son about the trip we are taking out west. In the car, on the way into school, he asks: How many days until we get to San Francisco? I count out the days for him, explain the things that we will need to do before then, and the things that we will do when we are there. Later, back at home, I show him a map of the country, trace the path we will take, all the states we will fly over....
5 tags
this will be the year
So much longing, so visible, is unseemly. This is the idea that follows me around whenever I think about the Korean television show. I try to explain this to the people who ask. It is one thing to exchange documents, queries. These are simple, contained things. I send my request: I would like a name or a photograph, or a story of one sort or another – and in return, perhaps I receive a note or two...
February 2012
11 posts
4 tags
this is it
I say yes to the Korean television show and Shinhye sends me another form. This one has fourteen questions. Each of the fourteen is frustrating, baffling in its own way:
Question #4: “Write any information or memory about your birth family and how you got them.”
Question #7: “What’s your opinion of Korea?”
Question #9: “If you had any difficulties that you faced in life, please tell us in details....
4 tags
all the advice we give goes unheeded
My friend is angry at a friend of hers and so she paces my kitchen, fuming. Her friend has been living abroad for four years, not making much money, dabbling in illicit substances, and crying all the time. “She’s got to move back here, get a job, stop taking money from her parents and get her shit together.”
I have never seen her so upset. She goes on, “I mean, she’s not twenty-five any more....
5 tags
I miss that person
I take my son to the playground on another unseasonably warm afternoon and as we cross the parking lot, he takes my hand, pulls at me, says, “Let’s run.” When we are at the sidewalk, I tell him, “Go ahead, you run,” and he takes off. I follow him – his red coat – for only a moment or two and then he is lost to the swirl of jackets and hats and sweatshirts clustered and clamoring – around the rock...
5 tags
briefly introduce yourself
My friends come over and we open a bottle of wine, but barely, among the three of us, make it through. I perch on the coffee table to sit close enough to them, both on the small couch by the window, to whisper when need be. There is no one else in the house, at the beginning, but there are some things that we discuss that require a level of discretion.
The work, our jobs. We always talk about them...
5 tags
written on the body
Temperatures dropped overnight and despite my body’s protestations, I throw myself into the cold before the rest of the house begins stirring. I know the route so well, have worn this path into the rhythms of my heart, my breath: the broken pavement in front of the transition home, the honeysuckle now dormant, the bathtub madonnas majestic, the loose gravel at the corner across from the skate...
3 tags
tell us what you would like us to do
For as long as I can remember, I have carried with me the names of the two women who facilitated my adoption – one in Korea and one in New York. The other day, I found the New York woman in a search that, according to google, took all of 28 seconds. A brief note of introduction composed and in minutes I had done something that I had chosen not to do, all this time.
Within an hour, a warm response....
3 tags
we keep each other company
In the morning, it is just the boy and me and I wake to his silhouette, standing in the middle of the bed. A tuft of his hair sticks straight up. We are both very still, listen to the trucks speeding by on the highway, the unmistakable sound of the weight of them, hurtling past in the dark.
—
I tell my friends that I have seen a car on fire. That on the highway, as I drove past in the pitch...
4 tags
v-formation
In sleep, I clench my jaw so tightly that by morning I ache. I wake early. I consider rising from the soft cocoon of my bed, starting the day with a walk in the brisk morning air, but decide instead to lie awake, let my eyes adjust to the darkness.
I remember anxious dreams – appointments missed, tasks forgotten, the dozens of ways in which what I have done has fallen short of what I had hoped to...
6 tags
sniff test
My friend is convinced that it’s all about smell. “Didn’t you read that article,” she asks, “about how for women, chemistry is all based on how a man smells?” I admit that I did not.
The smell of the man she’s in love with – the one she meets in hotels against her better judgment – she finds enthralling. She says: “I went up to him and I just put my face right up to his shoulder and inhaled.” She...
5 tags
all of this is reaching
I am up early this morning – finally, after weeks of interruptions to my routine. My knees ache, so that “running” has become an even more generous term for what I do. It is still dark. My time is short, but I wait as long as I can before leaving the house, hoping for light. When I can’t delay a minute more, I step out into the darkness, braced for the cold, head down toward the stadium. In the...