Clareified

We all want something beautiful…I wish I was beautiful. — Counting Crows

I had such a weird day yesterday. One of those days where the universe seems to be telling you one thing at noon and then by midnight you’re pouring out of a rocking Madison Square Garden after your New York Rangers laid down the smack on the division leaders (including your goalie stepping *OUT OF THE NET* to punch a dude in the face; and yes, it costs us a goal, but it was totally worth it!) and it’s like the universe is telling you a different something altogether.

I used to go on these car trips with my best friend in high school and while I don’t think we got lost often, when we did, I was always anxious and impatient and wanted to either be where we were going OR certain that we were on the right path to get there.

“Dawn,” he would say in his aggravatingly calm way, “it’s about the journey. We’ll get there.”

I would glare and say “easy for you, the white guy is NEVER the first one stabbed to death.”

Alas, I relent. Let the universe send it’s conflicting cacophony. I’m here. I’m listening.

Don’t Go Back to Sleep - Rumi

the breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
don’t go back to sleep.

you must ask for what you really want.
don’t go back to sleep.

people are going back and forth between the
doorsill where the two worlds touch.
the door is round and open.

don’t go back to sleep.

I just finished Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf – a movie based on a choreopoem by Ntozake Shange.

It’s a good movie with some amazing performances, but it also reminded me of some rather great poetry. I starred in a production of this when I was 13. It occurs to me now, that may have been an inappropriate choice for our merry band of teenagers, but our director was a larger than life dramatist who believed we could own whatever work if we believed in ourselves and the art. Yes, that’s how she talked.

All the time.

Ms. Wade can we go to McDonald’s after rehearsal?

Um…okay, but really, I guess what I was asking, more specifically, is will you give us the money to go to McDonald’s after rehearsal?

She and her husband Adam would write afro-centric one act plays for us and we’d rehearse in their one bedroom apartment in Harlem. I googled their names. But nothing came up.

Anyway.

I was a smart alecky, prudish Uber catholic girl at the time, (pretty much me now, but without the back pain), so Shange’s work made me very uncomfortable. The subject matter, the syntax, the sharing the stage with other girls (I AM A STAR, WOMAN!); I just didn’t get it.

I did it and owned it and ate my McDonald’s afterwards.

But I was happy when we moved back to comedies. And fancy Shakespearan monologues that made me feel clever and sophisticated.

I read For Colored Girls again in college and I liked it more then and got more of “it,” than I had six years earlier, but rereading some of these poems tonight, well, I was so blown away by the truth…the raw clarity of her words, that I had to reprise my poetry posting for a moment.

And on a Wednesday at that!

I struggled between picking this poem and a Lady in Green Poem “Somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff” (These poems are somewhat easier understood heard.) But ultimately, I chose this one because it touches on the issues from that poem — losing too much of yourself to people who could not care less about your stuff — but also the unique struggles of women who don’t want to be bitches, but also don’t want to be trod upon. And of colored girls who cdnt stand bein sorry & colored at the same time/it’s so redundant in the modern world.

Word.

lady in Orange

ever since i realized there waz someone callt
a colored girl an evil woman a bitch or a nag
i been tryin not to be that & leave bitterness
in somebody else’s cup/ come to somebody to love me
without deep & nasty smellin scald from lye or bein
left screamin in a street fulla lunatics/ whisperin
slut bitch bitch niggah/ get outta here wit alla that/
i didnt have any of that for you/ i brought you what joy
i found & i found joy/ honest fingers round my face/ with
dead musicians on 78′s from cuba/ or live musicians of five
dollar lp’s from chicago/ where i have never been/ & i love
willie colon & arsenio rodriquez/ especially cuz i can make
the music loud enuf/ so there is no me but dance/ & when
i can dance like that/ there’s nothin cd hurt me/ but
i get tired & i haveta come offa the floor & then there’s
that womna who hurt you/ who you left/ three of four times/
& just went back/ after you put my heart in the bottom of
yr shoe/ you just walked back to where you hurt/ & i didnt
have nothin/ so i went to where somebody had somethin for me/
but he waznt you/ & i waz on the way back from her house
in the bottom of yr shoe/ so this is not a love poem/ cuz there
are only memorial albums available/ & even charlie mingus
wanted desperately to be a pimp/ & i wont be able to see eddie
palmieri for months/ so this is a requium for myself/ cuz i
have died in a real way/ not wid aqua coffins & du-wop cadillacs/
i used to joke abt when i was messin round/ but a real dead
lovin is here for you now/ cuz i dont know anymore/ how
to avoid my own face wet wit tears/ cuz i had convinced
myself colored girls had no right to sorrow/ & i lived
& loved that way & kept sorrow on the curb/ allegedly
for you/ but i know i did it for myself/
i cdnt stand it
i cdnt stand bein sorry & colored at the same time
it’s so redundant in the modern world

When I started doing regular poetry Wednesdays, it was always my intention to end the series with this poem. Of course, it was also my intention to only do it for one year and I managed to keep it going for almost two.

It’s been a rewarding exercise. I had almost forgotten how much I loved poetry and poem analysis. What can I say? I’m a word nerd. Ooh, I should get that on a T-shirt! Alas, I have honestly long run out of poems that I really wanted to write about. Though I managed to find to some wonderful new poems from google searches and all my fantastic guest bloggers, I can no longer sustain a weekly poetry post. But the space remains open for anyone who wants to contribute them and I’ll readily publish any new interesting poems I come across.

All that administrative stuff out of the way, let’s talk about Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening.

There are a handful of poems I can still recite by heart after being forced to learn the words in school, and this is one of them. Pearatty, I think, told me once that Frost, in an interview, shunned attempts to assign any deep meaning to this poem. “It’s just about a snowy night.” That story makes me laugh because I love this poem because not only is it very short and simple, but it’s also twisted and dark. The image of this lone rider *reluctantly* making his way back to town out of a snowstorm even on the darkest night of the year…well, it’s quite a grim assesment of his life, isn’t it?

He wants to stay out here. Forever, possibly. But he has promises to keep. And things to do and so he trudges on.

I’m writing this post from the warm comfort of my dining room table, but a few inches away, I can see the snow drift resting heavy on my balcony door. I watched Sunday night’s precipitation slowly cling to my railings and fill up the flower pots. I recalled watching storms from my bedroom window, as a kid, and delighting in how the fire escapes in the back of the building slowly turned from black to white. Snowfall can be a seductively hypnotic phenomena. So maybe the poem is just about a snowy nighht. Or maybe it’s about all the things that can suddenly catch us unawares, capturing our attention. All those shiny distractions which tempt us away from responsibility and obligation.

If we’re lucky, something will gently shake a bell or tap us on the shoulder and remind us to get going. If we’re not, well, there’s always the spring thaw.

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
By Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Did you ever love a song so much that you played it over and over and felt that it really spoke to your soul…until you finally looked up the lyrics and were like “wtf is this crap?”

(When I write my book based on Dawn’s life, there will be a chapter filled with the lines she overuses. Here would be where she’d say “umm no? Me neither. ‘Whistles’)

(Another thing about Dawn…If I had forgotten to write the poetry-Wednesday that I volunteered for, she NEVER would have reminded me. Because it would be, oh, so much more devastating if I remembered on my own days later and said OMG.)

(The book will be titled “Scrutable.”)

This poem was something like that for me (the WTF part, not the crap part).

Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

When I was younger, I must have heard the snippet “I am ozymandias king of kings, look on my works ye mighty and despair” and thought it was a bad-ass statement. I even said it to others once in a while when I wanted to be particularly bad-ass.

But as I learnt when I finally read the poem…I had it backwards.
The “colossal wreck” is all bark and no bite.

So what’s the lesson?

We’re all tiny tiny specks in a tiny tiny part of the universe and no one will remember any of us in a hundred years, let alone a thousand or ten.

But isn’t that such a relief?
Nothing we do or don’t do really matters, because we’re nobody. We’re all nobodies.
Yay.

(Except for the fact that Ozymandias is immortalized not only by this poem but by the bible too, as supposedly he is the king of the Egyptians that wouldn’t let Moses go…ten plagues…yada yada…So maybe what we do does matter?)

Of course, this whole argument about nothing mattering because we’re so small and fleeting, goes on the assumption that that would be the measure of what matters. If instead we judge based on the affect we have on others during our lifetime, then it’s a good time to spread some holiday comfort and joy.

Happy holidays!

When I was younger, like 6 or 7, the mirror was my best friend.

I would stare into the glass for hours; I practiced to cry, studied what my face looked like when I laughed or yelled or frowned. With my mirror, I doubled my GI Joe combat forces in order to successfully capture the smurfs and destroy their village. Oh, how the mirror and I laughed and laughed as Papa smurf pleaded for mercy.

The mirror and I had serious conversations too. Spelling was hard. Ms. Bilboul was mean. Where is our right glove?

Frankly, I blame Snow White. Not the girl, the movie.

I assumed that everyone talked to mirrors.

My mother would ask who I was talking to and I would answer “the mirror,” and carry on as I were.

To her credit, my mother never said anything else.

Or…um…to her complete and utter failing as a parent. I can’t decide.

Anyway, I guess I stopped actually conversing with the mirror in my early teens (or by nine…whatever age is perfectly normal for one to stop conversing with mirrors. Cause I am normal. Nothing’s wrong with me. Get away from me with your white coats!) That is, assuming that rehearsing my monologues and speeches don’t count.

And then, one day, I was either 18 or 19, I was staring into the mirror and I saw a grey hair in my head.

What. The. Fuck?

I brushed it furiously with my hand. Clearly I had had some kind of flour mishap. This could not be real.

It was. I yanked it out of my head and washed it down the sink.

I stared accusingly into the reflexive surface.

“How DARE you? After all we’ve been through.” I turned away from that backstabbing mirror and never looked back.

I spent the rest of college in mirror less rooms, my apartment in law school only had a mirror on the medicine cabinet. I certainly didn’t carry one with me. Ever.

My former confidante was now a turncoat tattletale.

“There’s a hair sticking out of your chin!”

“Laugh line? Ha! Ten years ago maybe, ya wrinkled crone!”

“You’re so fat!”

Oh, mirror, I hate you so very much!

And then, the other day, I stumbled across this poem and I literally laughed out loud.

First, because it so exactly hits the nail on the head, but also because it’s by Sylvia Plath and I usually hate her!

So, as we speed toward the close of another year, let’s take a moment to reflect on our common enemy.

Reflect. Heh. See what I did there?

You’re welcome.

Mirror
By Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful-
The eye of the little god, four cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Pearatty was supposed to do poetry Wednesday today. However, I think she’s trying to teach me a lesson about liking people even though they’re not perfect.

She clearly hasn’t read my tweet about what kind of student I am.

Anyway, in a pinch, I provide you with a little Robert Frost. This opens the new-to-DVD movie Twilight: Eclipse. And I love it. The poem, not the movie. NEVER watch that movie.

I think the answer is ice.

In my experience as long as there is fire: whether from passion or anger, there is feeling. Emotion. Life. When that dies out. There’s nothing. And that’s the end.

Fire and Ice
by Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

My mother decided to take in my teenage cousin, Kue, rather than let the girl end up in a foster home.

Kue probably doesn’t remember this, but it’s the second time she has lived with my mother. She was no more than seven months old the last time. I was away at college and my aunt had thrown her, her four-year-old sister and her mother out of the house in the middle of December upon discovering she was once again pregnant. This would be her fourth child in five years.

My mother let the three of them stay in my room until I returned for Winter break.

Kue and my mother butted heads from the very beginning. She wasn’t doing her homework, she wanted to leave at 10 pm to go to parties on a Wednesday, she has a 40 year old “boyfriend,” who may or may not be her pimp… yeah, no bueno. But my mother tried to make her feel comfortable. She got the computer in her room fixed, stocked the house with her favorite foods, bought her a new winter coat.

But the whole arrangement was just supposed to be temporary. Kue’s court date was on Monday and she would likely be returned to her mother’s custody. Last Wednesday, her “boyfriend” called to say he was taking her upstate for the holidays. My mother informed him that trip would probably be uncomfortable with her foot up his ass and suggested he never call her house again if he enjoyed chewing solid foods.

Kue threw a temper tantrum, but my mother placated her by deciding to have an impromptu Thanksgiving dinner – complete with a whole turkey, which Kue said she’d never seen in real life. (It was thusly, I ended up eating two Thanksgiving dinners on Thursday and pleading for a swift death on Thursday night.) Everything seemed fine. They were in the home stretch and nobody had gotten stabbed! And then, on Friday, Kue left to go to her “uncle’s house.” And never returned.

By Saturday night, my mom was calling the police to report her missing. On Sunday, Kue called from her “boyfriend’s” number to say she was fine and my mother “better not call any fucking cops or else.” On Monday, she showed up with a posse of teens and threatened to kill my mother. Neighbors called the police. Kue and her friends ran.

Ironically, I had spent much of the weekend thinking about whether I was an ungrateful person. I’m not quite sure I had come to a definitive conclusion before talking to my mom about Kue last night. I’ll tell you where I got stuck: If someone is kind to you for a month and cruel for a week, are you still to be grateful? The good is never undone, but now that bad has been done, what are your options? I don’t have it in me to be this guy. But I couldn’t quite figure out where the line was. I suppose Kue felt justified attacking my mother once she felt cornered… still makes her ungrateful, doesn’t it?

Is that simply a function of how close in time my mother’s kindness was to Kue’s hostility? I don’t know.

Anyway, the whole train of thought reminded me of a poem I read in college… shortly before I abandoned the English portion of my double major in political science and English.

I can’t believe I’ve been doing poetry Wednesdays for about two years and not yet done a Shakespeare poem. Crazypants! Well, with four weeks to go, I remedy that oversight. All hail El Bardo.

Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind
William Shakespeare

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho! the holly!
This life is most jolly.

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
Thou dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remember’d not.
Heigh-ho! sing heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho! the holly!
This life is most jolly.

It’s the day before Thanksgiving!

This wretched year is almost over.

I get to see my beloved Patriots on my big screen TV ftomorrow for the second time in five days!

I’m actually almost kinda somewhat feeling optimistic. And optimism always makes me think of grass and outdoors and Americana and… da da da Walt Whitman.

I actually had to write about this poem in AP English in High School. It’s always tricky remembering poems I studied in school because it’s hard to separate what I really thought about it from what would get me an A.

But I do love this poem.

The fierce way the speaker is fighting for someone that has, apparently, given up on themselves. My favorite line from my “To You” essay is “The protagonist insists on paying full price, even when his love tries to sell herself short.”

I was awesome!

Sigh, would that spinning a turn of phrase reap such dividends in my current life.

Anyway, I wish you all a great Thanksgiving and despite my Debbie Downer post on my other blog, I do hold you all in the utmost esteem. Not you, you literally suck balls.

Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard!
These shows of the east and west are tame, compared to you;
These immense meadows–these interminable rivers–you are immense and
interminable as they;

Happy Turkey Day!

TO YOU

by Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman To You

O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!
You have not known what you are–you have slumber’d upon yourself all
your life;
Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time;
What you have done returns already in mockeries;
(Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries,
what is their return?)

The mockeries are not you;
Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk;
I pursue you where none else has pursued you;
Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom’d
routine, if these conceal you from others, or from yourself,
they do not conceal you from me;
The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these
balk others, they do not balk me,
The pert apparel, the deform’d attitude, drunkenness, greed,
premature death, all these I part aside.

There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you;
There is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in
you;
No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you;
No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.

As for me, I give nothing to any one, except I give the like
carefully to you;
I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing
the songs of the glory of you.

Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard!
These shows of the east and west are tame, compared to you;
These immense meadows–these interminable rivers–you are immense and
interminable as they;
These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent
dissolution–you are he or she who is master or mistress over
them,
Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain,
passion, dissolution.

The hopples fall from your ankles–you find an unfailing sufficiency;
Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest,
whatever you are promulges itself;
Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing
is scanted;
Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are
picks its way.

given that I am dying of coveting:

Hunger by Emily Dickinson

I had been hungry all the years;
My noon had come, to dine;
I, trembling, drew the table near,
And touched the curious wine.

‘T was this on tables I had seen,
When turning, hungry, lone,
I looked in windows, for the wealth
I could not hope to own.

I did not know the ample bread,
‘T was so unlike the crumb
The birds and I had often shared
In Nature’s dining-room.

The plenty hurt me, ‘t was so new,
Myself felt ill and odd,
As berry of a mountain bush
Transplanted to the road.

Nor was I hungry; so I found
That hunger was a way
Of persons outside windows,
The entering takes away.

I don’t handle change well. And I’m not just talking about the bucket full of quarters, nickels and pennies weighing down my favorite handbag because there is a tear in the fabric and coins always manage to slip through. I’m talking about the fact that I am so irrationally attached to that bag that won’t give it up, even though it weighs a ton and takes FOREVER to get through airport security.

Every morning, in the weeks following the end of Daylight Savings time, I squint at the sunlight streaming through the window, peer quizzically at the clock and then realize “oh, yeah. It’s really 8:28, now. Not 7:28.” Then, I pull the covers over my head.

Except, it’s not. It *IS* 7:28 now. But if it were 8:28, I am very very late for work and why on earth am I going back to sleep?! Reason #1,567,896 Dawn Summers fails at life.

It’s been a very “time to accept change” few weeks in the Summersverse.

I found my usually stoic emotionally detached self knocked on my ass and discovered a number of amazing things. A girl, who just a couple of years ago was only one of my “invisible internet friends,” has become a really good “IRL friend.” A guy I wanted to stab in the throat at the poker table because he was mean to me, really is one of the sweetest people I know.

Sadly, I also realized that a few of the people I thought would be forever and evers have somehow slipped into the realm of I wonder what happened to.

I will never pretend to understand how these things work. There are people to whom I couldn’t have been more cold and disinterested, but for some reason they stay and it’s good and I’m glad. There are people to whom I couldn’t have been kinder and more generous, yet they kicked in me the face till my teeth fell out in shattered pieces. And they’re gone, but that’s good too and I’m glad.

But the key, and the part I struggle against every day — sometimes hourly — is recognizing the change. Accept the new shoulder to cry on; avoid the boot heading for your face, familiar though it may be.

Remove the covers. Get out of bed. It’s a new day. It’s a new Dawn. And I’m feeling fine.

Trouble With Love
Miguel Pinero

There are things that never change
And we are not one of them my dear,
Trouble with our love is here

The trouble with our love is around
When you can’t look me in the eye, and lie
When you run so far away,
That you forget where to go back …
Now, you are what you never want to be,
Go ahead,
blame me …

There are things that never change
Now we are two strangers with a past
And a future,that ain’t gonna last
And that is a trouble with our love,
Last night we saw things like we never did,
We both went our way, and hid …