Widow

Fall 2009

“But the widow who lives for pleasure is dead even while she lives.”
- 1 Timothy 5:6

I am removed
from everyone who could tell you my name and
I am transparent
to the eyes in the room.
It isn’t that they see through some rough exterior
to the poor hurting thing inside, or that they have a deeper
understanding of me at all.
They just don’t see me.

There are children and men and women, and birds,
all too distracted
by their agendas and terribly mundane lives
to look up at a girl in a brown sweater
who is watching them
intently.

They don’t know that my hair is thinning
or that my father just discarded some marvelous shred of hope.
They would never imagine that
I am contemplating
their actions, because they do not imagine
anything.
They are imagine-less, thinking that they should’ve had
lunch at home, instead of picking up fast food
because they don’t have money to waste
on filler meals.
The man with the waist-length hair doesn’t know
that he’s wearing my friend’s favorite sweater and
the high school boy to my right doesn’t know that I
just listened to one of his favorite songs,
or maybe I didn’t.

None of them know that my whole world
is happening all at once as I sit here,
even though I haven’t spoken a word yet today.
I feel like a Saturday morning suicide that goes
unnoticed ‘til night, or even Monday at nine
when someone sees an empty desk,
and makes a bad joke, not realizing that
poor, bullied soul is no more.
I feel like I wrote a one-hit wonder,
like I am a widowed Mrs. Cellophane.
I took notice of the invisible,
then found myself alone.

The silent boy behind me doesn’t know
that I just saw him looking at my hair, and not
the mountains ahead of us.
It didn’t occur to him that, when he leans into the sun,
his reflection off the window is more
real and vivid than he is.
He doesn’t know that I just realized I am not the
only gazer in this box of silence, and
that in the moment I felt myself in his thoughts,
he changed my view
of life outside this window.

But then, he left, and he didn’t know
that I watched him walk away
or that the words he saw me write
were about—inspired by—him.
He doesn’t know that I am alone,
and that he just shattered me by not
turning, even just to see if I saw his last steps.
I would have. I would have turned.

We Knew Time (and a note)

Inspired by a summer's sleep with Kurt Vonnegut and Jack Kerouac

I had hummingbirds and refracted light for birthdays.
Life was miracles and moments that floated on whirs of backward wings.
At their beats, your beauty swept in me, and pulled webs from atrial corners
with straw bristles that pricked up through my chest to you.

I desired the endless; you asked who could say anything of us.
The stars! I cried: The stars who fall and our wishes
answer pleas for tomorrow, for more days, time.
To the stars, the birds, the colors! Magic and wonder—
Love, I was a child again on logs over streams
in mosquitoless, thin air beside you.

Those June hours ambled along like we knew time, though
it laughed us off—whimsies on the road with some dead language.
I told stories of beauty without pain, of flesh off bone,
and lost my own speech to questions novels asked: If this isn’t nice, what is?

There was Independence pumpkin pie on the bridge, on a night without pops in the sky
because the rain soaked the fuses of all the men in our towns.
We had Broadway bookstores, their paperbacks for our change and
I gorged myself on the scribble of a dream—a world where the rain kept coming.
But it slowed. And the days shortened so the cinematic light
ushered us to darkness on plazas and porches.

Without cover, we watched shooting stars in backseats and coffee shops
with fewer words between us, yet ever more beneath us.
On broken color and falling light, I wished for more time—which you spent with
ignorance of the short season we pretended to enjoy, or did—maybe.

There had been days rich with rain and walks in soggy denim
on Friday nights when I—with dripping hair—would ask you why.
Then there was Tuesday outside the speckled library windows
when the books stayed shelved: out of our hands, dry from the air.

But under hot blues, words of the published men in our eyes went out my mouth
and in your ears as July cried in the dry heat, while we sat poolside and silent.
The heat came on with hurricane breath and desert air,
then we shriveled as sprinklers spat and the backwards birds kissed us goodbye.

The summer drought sucked the color and give of our skin, which
left us to watch as it flaked and burned.
We knew time like the touch of arid rainbows,
ruby-throated, and almost alive.

Hey all, this piece was going to wait to see the blog until summertime, but today felt like an appropriate day to post it. I just hit 1,400 views, and I'm pretty excited about it. Thanks for reading and supporting me. And now I have a favor to ask: share me with someone you know. There are about 50 of you who consistently read when I post, and if each of you share this poem with a friend who you think might enjoy my type of writing, it'll make a huge difference for me. If you didn't know, I started this blog in hopes of establishing a readership to help me get published in the next year or two, and now it's time to move past having only people who know me as followers. Again, I'm so grateful that you have all been reading, and I'm humbled by the numbers.
Easy option to be a huge help: share the link on Facebook. I can't even tell you all how big it would be for me if you each got one more person to start checking back here consistently. SO big!

Let's make it happen. Have a great day everybody. Let's get to 1,500 by tomorrow!

It's Contagious

I wrote "Love Well" last week, and now I'm thinking about doing, aging, living.

I think this might be what realizing you're middle-aged feels like on the worst days.

They made a statue of us. (Click and listen.)

The kids I grew up with, my parochial school friends, my high school classmates, and my first college roommates and neighbors: we're mostly waiting to graduate in May.

Some of us, I think, have been looking back at the last four years, the last twenty-some years (yes, our whole lives), and wondering how different we could've been.

If we had made relationships work.

If we picked different schools.

If I kept playing basketball.

If I hadn't gone on the stage.

If someone else had picked me up from the airport.

If I hadn't gone to Sonic on a Saturday afternoon last Spring, and if I hadn't missed that last class with Elaine. If Tom had started the car. If grandmothers were always caught when they were falling.

They'll name a city after us and later say it's all our fault.

And if we weren't so jealous. If we cried in our laughter.

If we made different homes, were given different homes.

If I never wrote a poem.

If we couldn't dream about the things we didn't ever do.

How different things would be.

All those ifs...

They've got years of experience.

I fell in love with some music a couple times, and made men's faces the mask of those sounds. It was never really love.

And I made close friends--the best friends-- even the ones that weren't very good at it. And I wonder what it would be like if somebody in an office had thought that I'd fit better in a different room when I was 18 and in a new place.

What wouldn't have happened. The laughter, pictures, car rides, kisses, drinks, tears, poems: the adventure.

The life I wouldn't have had. I think there's a plan. I believe there's a plan, always.

I was meant to unlace my shoes and give Coach my uniform back.

I had to wear that flannel dress with rustled hair on the old LHS stage before the remodel and be kissed by John Proctor--his Elizabeth.

I made enough bad choices to get out of town--a spring break preview of life away from my life, then first to camp on a chance. (The girl had a fear of small boats. These things happen.)

And I learned what summer romance was. It was beautiful for a little while.

Then came Fall and there I went--to university Septembers and Colorado mornings. And it all came together.

And it's contagious.

A year isn't so really so long. You don't realize that when you're young, until somebody tells you. I had no idea until my mom said so at Christmas, but now I think I get it a little bit.

When you're twenty, a year is five percent of your life. When you're eighty, five percent is four years. That's almost as long as I've been out here. In sixty years, college will seem so small, like the years are starting to now.

So a year's not so long. And four of them like this--it sure was something.

We fit life into them.

We're living in a den of thieves, rummaging for answers in the pages.

We're looking for something bigger than the things we've done and the things we didn't do.

Where we are right now isn't just about what lives we've lived or what choices we didn't make, which are really choices we chose not to make.

We're looking for answers of who we've proven ourselves to be and what comes next.

If there will be statues of us.

If the relationships we missed come back around.

If we'll be in these places together later on, or ever.

If we'll remember the road trips and sleepovers and one-liners and movies and mistakes and summers and papers and answers.

If they'll know our names, our legacies. Because we all leave one.

If we'll know what love is outside a song.

If someday all the minutes we spent in each other's lives will begin to make sense. If we'll see why we were brought together in some peculiar combination of Star Wars and basketball and Midwesterners and locals and snowboards and Kahlua and brothers and Boulder and transfers and camouflage. We're a wily bunch. And we wonder if we'll ever understand how lucky we were together inside the plan.

All those ifs...

We're curious, and it's contagious.

The Van

October 2010

For my siblings

We cleaned the old family van today:
the carpets are now more brown—less gray—
and wrappers of twelve different gum brands
were stuffed in the backseat cupholders.

The waxy printed paper tells of
rides home on Sundays after church breakfasts
when each belt was stretched over the hipbones
of a child—one in each of the benches and buckets.
We went altogether and with filled seats:
in one place, at one time.

We sucked dirt from a dozen states or more—
and as many years—from when we gobbled
the Midwest and jumped to coasts in summers
when we children drove alone, all learning, all leaving.
The sand of seven beaches came up and out
with football pads and baseball bags,
record players and poems scribbled on those wrappers
and napkins that wiped all of our faces
of foreign filth and the sin of thoughtless travesties.

We had left our childhood skins in the upholstery
with engagement rings, teenage things
who we were, and how our family exhaled.

Love Well.

I don't think I believe that you can love too much. But I wonder if a person can love someone wrong.

There's not a lot of people left around. Who knows now? (Listen and read.)

There are some of us who get attached to people pretty quickly and we get blinded by our needs. Relationships turn themselves inside-out and the veins and muscles are uncontainable.

The bloodlines cross and run and burst open. You get gossip. You get broken airways.

And the muscles tear.

Maybe that's what that feeling is when it burns a little to think about someone we miss, or somebody we hurt: it's the muscles of our ties turning themselves inside-out.

I keep my eyes fixed on the sun.

I think I love people wrong pretty often.

Like maybe we don't recognize enough of what's going on to see how to love them fully--or lightly--enough.

Yesterday Trevor said this: "Our fundamental problem is that we never spend enough time in anyone else's life to find out where they're at."

I think he's right.

This is all a little repetitive of the ideas in a post from a couple weeks ago, but I guess I'm saying it all again because it just means so much to me, and maybe I keep forgetting it.

There are some days that seem to pull our whole lives in to just a couple hours and we're born and twelve and married and dying all between breakfast and dinner without ever stopping for lunch or air. Parents get diagnosed or siblings are killed in car accidents or friends forget who they are. And we're living a little bit of every part of our lives all at once.

Even on a cloudy day. Even on a cloudy day.

But we don't spend enough time.

We don't pull ourselves in to see that some people get stifled and scared by love.

We don't slow down long enough to know how to love right, how to give best.

We try to be true to ourselves and we stunt the ability of people in our lives.

We cut the muscles. We live all our days at once. We breathe and choke and sleep and scream.

We stitch the cut veins, and swallow the thread through our skin, along with the scars. We tie white balloons. No flags. We celebrate. We love wrong.

Cowardice and surrender; Bravery and sacrifice. They're not mutually exclusive. And the pairs don't always go together.

Sometimes the best way to love is to surrender, and that is sacrifice, and that is beautiful.

And sometimes we think we're loving and helping, but we're tearing down the people we love.

I hear too much of that. Another story this week with the masked motive of "I just love you so much that I have to tell you that you're wrong and this is awful." Yeah, sometimes that's what love looks like. But sometimes, the best way to love is to accept that we're wrong, even when we don't know how to believe it.

Even on a cloudy day, I keep my eyes fixed on the sun.

I think we love people wrong, and I think it's a bad, bad thing.

Sometimes, we hurt people, and the best thing to do is to not go back to them. To not bite at the stitches. Sometimes we need the scars.

And some of us can't love people back, or love people well. Some advice?

Don't be in love with someone who won't love well.

Someone who won't love well is a dangerous thing.

Even if that someone doesn't know it.

Usually that someone won't know it.

And do your best not to be that someone, because you'll hurt the people who love you because they can't help but love you. Because people will love you. People do love you, even if they're not doing it well.

Find love in blanket forts and on beaches and in lanterns and in your hands. Find love and hold it well, share it well.

If you didn't listen to the link above, do. And if you did listen, now go watch.

Sometimes we live our whole lives at once. Sometimes we lose ourselves in sleep...

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Flight of the Tripod

Fall 2010

I shouldn’t tell a story that ends this way,
but it seems I ought to,
since the faces on these films don’t know
about the sand on our shoes,
which says I gave you the script of
the words I cannot say.

There are photos—of me, and not you,
my eyes open and green—
which you ought to frame with glass and sturdy sand.
The image is this:
We exist, even when once you’re gone.
But, it seems that you might wish to wall us up,
as if we’re to stand still and framed,
not acting at all when you’re away.

Once you’ve gone far and long enough,
we’ll tell the story on the frames—
though it’s one we’d rather ignore.
You were holding the camera, reeling the film,
and shouting the director’s commentary.
You were outside the frames,
boxing us with ungloved hands,
holding us still and silent,
suspended as you set the tripod.
Without you here, we say action,
and the camera still sees it as it was:
us without you.

Words the Way I Do

Oh Blogland, I scarcely have hours in the day for you this week. So I sacrifice the sleep I won't be getting later.

Usually when I start these things, I don't know where I'm going with them, but I at least have an idea of a point or two that I want to make.

This isn't a diary for me to recount the events of my day to you. It's about the words. Here's a thought (and yeah, it'll sound pretty shallow at a first read, but stay with me until I get to what I'm thinking). I have a feeling there will be some degree of irony in the lack of making a point in a post about the meaning of words. But maybe that itself will make a point. Anyway...

Not everybody uses words the way I do. (Shock and awe, right? Not at all.)

Here's the thing: I'm wordy and comfortable with my voice, with being heard. I'm not afraid to say disagreeable things if I believe them to be true--granted I'd say I don't have many philosophies that contradict large numbers of people in my life.

If you know me at all, which at this point I think nearly all of you wonderful readers do, you've probably noticed to some extent that I'm fairly outspoken and don't really have much of a filter.

Not everybody uses words the way I do.

Last night, I got upset with a friend because of a fleeting comment about working and the real world. He didn't intend to hurt my feelings, but I got angry. I make inferences, I read into things and more than anything else, I freak out.

Because I put so much stock in words and the ways people say things, I psych myself out, and then use words to make people feel like I do, and it's a dangerous thing.

I got mad, and I called that friend out for upsetting me; he had no idea what his words had done inside my head.

Another friend heard my account of the story, and was bewildered by the fluidity of language that flows out of my mouth.

Not everybody uses words the way I do.

But let me tell you this: That is a very good thing.

My words can be dangerous, and I forget that pretty often. I've been sick for the last week and sentences have been jumping out of my mouth into the air and stabbing flesh on the way down. Ok, that was dramatic. I haven't talked any one to blood this week (or ever, that I'm aware of). But my point is that sometimes I'm reckless with my language, and that's inconsistent with who I want to be.

I don't want to make passive aggressive comments out of frustration. I don't want to gossip or nitpick. I don't want to talk about trifling, frivolous things.

I want intentional conversations that build and don't break. I want my words to mean what I feel.

There are different theories about the degree of meaning a word actually carries, and really, outside of a set construct of a language, a word doesn't mean much at all. To an English speaker with no experience with Spanish whatsoever, the word "pollo" means nothing. But it is a word nonetheless. That's not really what I'm trying to say here though.

What I mean is that I want to say things and mean them; I want to be a responsible participant in the exchange of words.

Not everybody uses words the way I do.

And I want to stop using words the way I have in the past. I've been irresponsible.

Here's to growing up, or something like that. Cheers, and thanks for reading.