Great responsibility

"Please don't fart. If you fart, it's bad, but then I have to return fire, and that opens up hell.

It's not fair! I can't do the same thing! You're like America, and I'm like... I dunno, some pissy country with only one bomb. So if you bomb me, I'll have to be like, 'Okay, I guess I have to return fire now,' but if you bomb me then everything will explode!

Do you see how that's not fair?"

Free Write- taking it back

A true mark of shame for me is that amid the chaos of this past semester, I disposed of a habit I developed as an everyday (or night, rather) occurence at The Brook. Freewriting-- which became my primary method of processing and debriefing in a very mentally volatile environment-- circled up and vanished like the dust of a windstorm. A vital leak in my mind for jumbled, confused thoughts was plugged. I didn't notice.

I'm taking it back.

I am the only person within a 50' radius right now who can pee standing up. Do you think that might have an effect on how I act? It's strange to think about the baby making noises that isn't crying it's something I've had to get used to like being the only person on the unit who grows hair on their face. And the baby noises are making me miss my nephew who I've never met and that makes me regret that there are people who desperately want to be involved in the kid's life, and he'll never meet them. He'll know them from Christmas cards and Thanksgiving "oh that's who brought the awesome beans" but he'll never know me-- and I'm arrogant enough to believe I'm blameless enough to be a role model-- but I just want some information. Feedback that I did all right. Can I live without it? This kid makes me want to pack up and leave sometimes-- they all have. And I convince myself that it's worth it to have started a new life in a new place away from them but I admit it hurts a lot somethings to hear about my brother having a beer without me or a baby wondering aloud where his uncle is

Elegy for My Daughter (3rd draft)

** This is absolutely not yet a finished product. I hope that anyone who reads this will be willing to provide insight/suggestions. Any feedback-- constructive or no, rational or no-- will be accepted and appreciated. **

And Jephthah made a vow to the LORD: “If you give the Ammonites into my hands, whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites will be the LORD’s, and I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering.”
- Judges 11:30-31

Stone of my stones underneath my feet,
beneath the victors of the sounding
gravel-run drums for thousands
coming home. Altar-brown eyes
greet me, from down low, shame.
Warp and shackle me, thoughtless march,
I forgot the Philistine word for "daughter"
immediately, because
I thought it was too close to our word for "charcoal"--
worry mother for the rough burn
crack, I peal and plea-- for your forgiveness.

Like a virgin song at a long ago river,
singing, inhaled and let me watch,
your dark hair and light music on my wrinkly ears
I remember--
now play the tambourine
again. again. play it please
bring on, the flowing notes, the altar-brown eyes.
My Gd-winning hand on your shoulder
is too violent, too crushing harmony;
your hair still singing, exhaled.

"What did you see," my grandson
calls me from down low, my hair underneath
my feet, blood of my blood on the same edge.
"What did it teach you," he calls again
and I reply with laughter-- am I mad
for that Lord; shock, blaze, for God's sake.
A bushel of grain from that dream onward, but
just a wisp of your tambourine on the wind.
Salt of my salt underneath my feet,
bar me from returning again.

On "The Strength of Fields" by James Dickey

James Dickey, when we first met (as in, when I first discovered his work), seemed to have it in for me. A legend of a half-sheep stillborn in a museum preservation jar-- yeah, that was cool. Then, the book, which became a movie, which became an instantly referential banjo tune of the most unmentionable canoe trip ever. Which I've never read, by the way, and probably won't, either.

Not best friends, or similar thinkers, even. He writes in a style that blows the tops off my atria, and makes my cerebrum sick, and I don't like it.

But he writes so well. He is that player on the other team that I hate just because he doesn't play for my team. He is that general I despise when he beats me fair and square. He is that driver who silently reminds me of the fact that I never had the right of way. And then he says this to me,

"Moth-force a small town always has,   

          Given the night.

                                           What field-forms can be,

         Outlying the small civic light-decisions over

               A man walking near home?

                                                         Men are not where he is   

      Exactly now, but they are around him    around him like the strength

Of fields.    The solar system floats on

    Above him in town-moths.

                                             Tell me, train-sound,

    With all your long-lost grief,

                                             what I can give.   

    Dear Lord of all the fields

                                             what am I going to do?

                                        Street-lights, blue-force and frail

As the homes of men, tell me how to do it    how

    To withdraw    how to penetrate and find the source   

      Of the power you always had

                                             light as a moth, and rising

       With the level and moonlit expansion

    Of the fields around, and the sleep of hoping men.

       You?    I?    What difference is there?    We can all be saved

       By a secret blooming. Now as I walk

The night    and you walk with me    we know simplicity   

   Is close to the source that sleeping men

       Search for in their home-deep beds.

       We know that the sun is away    we know that the sun can be conquered   

   By moths, in blue home-town air.

          The stars splinter, pointed and wild. The dead lie under

The pastures.    They look on and help.    Tell me, freight-train,

                            When there is no one else

   To hear. Tell me in a voice the sea

         Would have, if it had not a better one: as it lifts,

          Hundreds of miles away, its fumbling, deep-structured roar

               Like the profound, unstoppable craving

            Of nations for their wish.

                                                      Hunger, time and the moon:

         The moon lying on the brain

                                                    as on the excited sea    as on

          The strength of fields. Lord, let me shake   

         With purpose.    Wild hope can always spring   

         From tended strength.    Everything is in that.

            That and nothing but kindness.    More kindness, dear Lord

Of the renewing green.    That is where it all has to start:

         With the simplest things. More kindness will do nothing less

             Than save every sleeping one

             And night-walking one

         Of us.

                   My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can."

 

And though my ribs curl with truth, I thrash around in my loud cocoon, and tell him he'll never be right.

What good will that do, my feet say, to walk where there isn't a sidewalk?

I step outside, and I curse under my breath when he shows me how obvious it is.


(p.s.-- That poem is by an American legend named James Dickey. it's called "The Strength of Fields", and it is just a bit of his amazing work. Just so we're clear, Estate of James Dickey, that I didn't write that.)

Status quo in the abdominal cavity

This was a joy. Total, electrifying, relentless joy. Darrin worked all the time, of course, but never like this, not in a long time. Too long, he though, as he grinned broadly. With every push, lightness, freedom. With ever pull, exhilarating influxes of raw, pore-filling energy. Of course, none of the others would have disagreed. Those in the legs hadn't been pushed this hard in decades; the massive strength of effort from their withering bodies was inspiring. Every once in a while, one of them would start complaining to his coach. But she would continue to prod him onward. His coach told him that he was becoming greater, to the benefit of everyone else around.
Darrin looked at his coach and smiled. He long, slight body weaved across his vision. Abrupt pulses of light over her pastel yellow clasps gave her a lovely tint of light blue. He felt himself keeping time with the flashes of her figure: flash, pull, flash, push...
His concentration was interrupted. The sound of a persistent whine began to grow in his ears. "Come on, please! I needed that! I'm even running out!" moaned Dom. Takers were walking off with a few generously sloshing jugs of essence, water as Old Boris called it, and dumping them into the River. Darrin noticed that the river was teeming with red Carriers, inflated and beaming bright with life gas.
It was enough of a chuckle to watch Dom's face when they made off with a small pile of gold earlier: payment to get the legs moving. His greasy fingers greedily squeezed the last gold piece as the Taker plucked it and tossed it into the River. Dom looked comically desperate to retrieve it, as if he had forgotten the astonishing, rolling hoard of gold he had accumulated over the years. (In all fairness, Darrin thought, most Movers had gathered more that their needed share of gold; but Dom's landmark of a gold mound was undoubtedly the largest.) Unlike before, however, Dom wore a face of pain, not resentment. His eyes watered as he watched what used to be his essence float away in the River. He grabbed a red cordon, sobbing, and pulled it. He was quitting.
Darrin scoffed as the whole Mover effort halted. He filled his eyes with black judgment and mustered the most contemptuous glare he could stand to make, then pointed his face at weeping, oily ball of sloth that was Dom. Tears were streaking down over his bulging chin and darkening his red dress shirt. His huge gut bobbled as he sniffed, wiping his eyes to meet Darrin's hateful look. "Oh, stop. Fine, I don't care. Stare. Laugh. No one works as hard as Darrin, who only stops to rub his gung-ho bullshit in my face," Dom seethed. He pointed downriver, where Big Glenn was making sure all the Movers had their traps out to catch clay in the stream. "You never look at them like that," added Dom, indignant.
"I don't think they complain half as much as you, Dom. Old Boris won't be happy when he finds out you pulled the cord for his 'jog' idea."
"Well, guess what! He already knows. And I submit, with the utmost golden confidence, that he'll never try it again."

Impart

She peeked over her shoulder, shuddered, and kept walking as fast as she could.

A slimy, pale hand grabbed her wrist, just tight enough to feel her vapid pulse.

Crunched his nose with her remaining clog, slammed apart the sloppy hand with a reluctant, thundering door.


She said yes to the salesman's first offer so quickly that he appeared puzzled, perhaps thinking she was capable of car theft.


The thought of driving even another five minutes, staring down at where those ruddy, deathly fingers reached up for her-- yearning, clawing, sweating-- she didn't tell him she would have given it away.