Impossible Child

X Crib  (1987),  Robert Gober

What's conceived bears only a faint resemblance to what's born.  I mean, literally.  A spot of jelly :  a tangle of contradictory impulses, desires, accidents, tendencies, intentions.  A bloody mess.
                                                                              *
Sculptor Anne Truitt, in her memoir, Daybook, speaks of  "events assimilated with such difficulty that they made permanent plastic changes."  Becoming a mother, she says, is a matter of inviting incompatible realities into one's life.

And here is the sentence she wrote that got me pregnant:  I chose to become a mother because I didn't want to remain unbroken.  I sometimes wonder about that-- that desire to be shattered.  How strong it can be.
I read Daybook the winter I fell madly in love with Tom. We finished grad school, and moved back to the city to work and live.  We stockpiled teeny-tiny clothes.  I quit my despicable office job as soon as I had secured some health insurance for myself, and started staring in-ward for long periods of time.  I folded and unfolded and refolded clothing of surreal proportions.  How could a sleeve be four inches long?  There was an amazing blizzard.  I stared down into the silenced city streets, from eleven stories up. I went into labor.  
I gave birth to a complete stranger, with a funny misshapen head, and there were times that freakishly warm June, I think, when Tom and I both looked at Baby #1 and silently wondered how far apart we'd have grown by the time he was ready to leave us.  There was nothing but him for a while.  Sting's '80s hit about obsessive desire might have been about new motherhood-- every move you make, every breath you take, I'll be watching you.  
                                                                                   *

It escalates.  Everything.

You make space in your life to receive Baby #2, whom you've wanted, you've imagined.  But when he arrives, he doesn't fit.  This is the famous amnesia at play.  Imagination and desire keep setting in place these next-to-useless frameworks.  Purpose built never to accommodate anything that lives.
Stare at a light source, then switch it off.  Following intense focus, a kind of after-image.  The wanted, the imagined-- so concretely projected-- lingers.  There are two babies in the brand new crib. One's a ghost, one's a last-second addition.  Look again, there are three.  Four.  One's your own childhood's ghost. There's a whole nest of them.  Right, then.  You gotta do something about that nest you got there . . . . 

                                                                                    *

In the ghost stories I used to like to scare myself with, an act of violence, a buried secret, or injustice has trapped the dead one's soul, like a fly in amber.  Now the living get to know exactly how unknowable a phantom is. It doesn't explain itself, but it doesn't shut up.  It neither reveals itself nor disappears. And there's no one to blame. All a ghost can do is drift about elusively.  All matter is unresolved.  Doors slam.  Weeping is heard.

Ok, sometimes a persistent ghost is only trying to warn you that something terrible will happen, but do you listen?

We made a nest for our dream-baby, and an entirely different creature looked up at us from out of the shadows.

Actually, we inherited a crib, and no one I gave birth to would consent to sleep in it.

                                                                                      *

You don't want to hear it again.  Do you want to hear it again?  It's hard to be an artist and a mother.  And, less reiteratively, it's hard to be an artist/father.

Tom and I have both had difficulty.  Hah!  That's such a sterile word for it!  We've died and been resuscitated. We've been zombified.

We've tried to art and do love. For years.  To do art and live in servitude to love.  To earn our keep and the keep of our child, to not sleep but do art, to think endlessly and all the time about our child, our keep, our love, and do art.  

What we might write, what we might make, what we imagine ourselves creating--what we haven't made and written from among all that we've imagined.  Can a laptop be haunted?  I have a giant basket of empty, half-empty, still-wrapped, unwrapped and unopened, opened and half-filled notebooks and sketchbooks of all colors and sizes.  Sometimes I go through them-- so many aborted impulses.  Does art have to try to be haunted?

Things have been complicating.  A weird and sometimes distasteful kind of fermentation.  Biological, domestic, anaerobic.  Warm-- oh, overly warm.  And the lighting, too subdued.  You could sleep forever.  If only they'd stop doing what they do.  But it's never, never, never going to happen.  Everything they do they do incessantly.  And everything they do requires a response from you.

                                                                                       *

Children of a certain age-- they're like army ants.  I had that thought, and it seemed like a very important realization:

If you stop moving, they will climb all over you, and you will feel yourself being eaten up.  It's not an enjoyable feeling when this happens.  It's not nursing an infant.  It's not nesting.  It's being metabolized, transformed.


                                                                                        *

Part 2:  Twenty-Five Years Later.... coming soon....
                                                                                    

For Nature, Say Weather: On Alice Oswald

"through a blade of grass / I watch the weather...."

(Alice Oswald, Sea Sonnet)

Photo:  Miranda Field.  Delhi, NY. 2021    

"Her poems embody a more-than-human intensity of presence, and she speaks of her writing as an ongoing “attempt to encounter something that’s not myself and that’s not like myself.”   Rather than “nature poet,” I would call her a phenomenological poet..."  

•     Read the rest of the essay here, in Interim :  For Nature Say Weather.  

MEM

(An excerpt from my young-person's novel-in-progress)

West 86th Street, Miranda Field, 2013

[ In the first part of the book, we’ve learned that following a long illness— and a lot of time out of school and away from friends— Mem has fallen out of the habit of being around other people.  Pretty soon after she discovers him in the garden shed of her new home, Trug— a little white rat—  becomes more than a pet to her— he becomes a friend, even a teacher.  Gradually we learn that Trug has been looking for a human he can trust, a human with whom he can communicate.  There’s trouble brewing in the “Wild Place"— a stretch of uninhabited, weedy, overgrown land behind Mem’s family’s property— and Trug needs Mem’s help.  Just before this exerpt begins, Trug has given a speech to convince the  animals of the backyard world that Mem is trustworthy.  He has convinced the smaller ground-dwellers and other flightless creatures that Mem is a human to be trusted, but the birds continued to eye her with suspicion.  Finally, in what seems to be a vote of confidence, Mem is invited to sit in on the birds' annual Congregation of the Mid-Summer Morning:]                                                                      


                                                     *                                *                               *


          Following Trug down the stone steps into the garden’s lower level, moments before sunrise, It was almost impossible for Mem to keep an endless stream of questions from bubbling out. The bench stood on a patio littered with dry seed-pods that crunched under her sandals as she crossed the flagstones.  It was the morning of the real summer equinox –a day earlier than the official turn of the season marked on the human calendar.  Mem must appreciate the great honor the birds had extended her, Trug was saying.  No human had ever before been invited to attend the opening ceremony of this most significant of mornings. 
         “Hush,” he whispered, before she could even open her mouth.  A soft rush of wings, first in the apple trees behind the Greenhouse, then high in the poplars by the east wall, and in all the trees around the garden, indicated the birds were taking their places, preparing to begin.  “You’ll hear the Robins of Tullis Valley  first,” whispered Trug.  “They’ll start with a short musical recitation.”  Mem listened.  Nothing happened for the longest time, but the morning was cool, the air golden with pollen, and the silence was spellbinding.  Then, at last, one high, clear, flute-like note from the north side of the garden.  A moment later, a flurry of trilling notes from a tall oak was answered with the same from another.  
          “Notice the complex arrangements of rhymes,” Trug said.   Mem listened hard, tried to really listen, listen with her whole body, as Miss Reilly at St.Brigit’s always said.  But she all she coud hear was somethign that— at least a few weeks ago— she’d have described as “Tweet-tweet.”“I can’t hear it,” she said.  “Yes you can,” whispered Trug.  “Listen.  What is it your ears are picking up?”  Mem quieted her blood, opened her ears, willed herself to hear.   But what she heard sounded like eetaloo, ooti, ooti, eetaloo . . . “I hear, but I don’t understand,” she said.  By now, other calls were joining the Robins’, from the crowns of the highest trees.   From the old Callary pear, fip-fip-fip-fip-fip. . .  and from the tall yew, fee-ee bee fee-ee bay . . . “I don’t understand,” Mem repeated, her throat tightening.  
          “Mem,” said Trug (no longer whispering – no need:  the air was awash with sound), “there’s no creature on earth who doesn’t understand this.”  Mem felt her cheeks burning.  Then—“Oh, wait a minute,” she said.  “I know that one!  Old Sam Peabody Peabody Peabody . . . That’s the White-Throated Sparrow, we learned that one in school!”  Trug hopped onto her lap, draped his warm, silken tail across her knee.“No need to translate,” he said, “just listen.”  But what Mem heard when she listened said nothing, there was no message in all the babbling sound that made anything like sense to her.  Hot tears welled up her eyes.  She blinked them back, angrily.  The whole garden, every treetop, was twittering and trilling.  Pip-pip-pip-pip, and chip-chip seedle-seedle . . .  And now and then Mem thought she heard a phrase she recognized from her Guide to Northeastern Birds– Madge-Madge-Madge, put-on-your-tea-kettle-ettle-ettle, and Sweet Sweet Canada Canada Canada, but immediately she felt embarrassed by the silliness of those human words.  She tried to open her listening, ‘soften’ her eardrums (another of miss Reilly’s instructions) and pretty soon the songs of all the different birds seemed to lose distinction.   It was— beautiful though.  It made Mem think of fireworks – not the booms and cracks and loud fizzes and bangs that made you want to clap your hands over your ears, but the sound-equivalent of light.  Geysers of light, fountains, trickles, bubbles, mists in every color.   
          “Mem.”  Trug’s voice snapped her out of her revery.  He was sitting upright in her lap, his body tensed, his tail wrapped around her wrist, claws scratchy on the bare skin of her knees.  “Did you hear that?” he said. “Yes— It was magical,” Mem said, “it was amazing, it—”“Yes,” Trug said— a little impatiently—  “they certainly know their prosody,” Trug said,  “and harmony and syncopation, and counterpoint, and many of the devices of art,” he said, “ but the recitation’s over.  Listen closer now.  The Raven’s speaking.”  Mem heard the Raven’s cries cut through the distance. “This is important.  This is the Calling of News,” Trug whispered.  A deep, hollow waark-waark-waark rang out from the eves “There’s been a robbery,” Trug said.   “Some sparrow’s eggs are missing from a drainage gutter near . . .”  Mem nodded automatically, to show she was following what he said, though she wasn’t.“An elderberry bush, seven miles north-north east of the bell tower is early in fruit . . . a bad weather front coming from the west . . . in Reims Field three elms lost to harsh winds . . .”  Mem was in a deep, deep well of embarrassment and shame, she was in it alone, and Trug’s simultaneous interpretation of the Raven’s messages barely reached her.“A struggle among the hummingbirds…” he rambled on,            “. . . Berry-time approaches fast, and weeks of rain have set a mildew spreading through the fields. . . poor nest-building, a number of barns burnt . . . the spraying of mosquitoes taxes swallows severely, forcing them to extend dusk feedings well past moonrise. . .”  Then he stopped, sat silently, and completely still, while the Raven continued, waark-waark, harsh and croaking and monotonous, but it seemed to Mem the whole of the rest of the garden grew still, too.  And there was something in the stillness that made her uneasy.“What’s he saying now?” she whispered. But the Raven stopped talking, and now the crows took up, with their Caw-caws spearing the air, criss-crossing from all directions. 
          “They’re talking about the sickness,” said Trug at last, “the bird sickness rising from Asia.  It’s crossing the seas.” 
         “The birds are sick?” 
         “The birds are falling sick in droves, and the humans are keeping watch.” 
         “What do you mean?” 
         “The humans are starting to fear the birds, so the birds are watching the humans.”
         “Wait—who’s watching who?” Mem said.
         “Who’s watching Whom.” Trug corrected.  Mem blushed as he continued. 
         “Nothing simple about the watching, Mem.  Lines of watching run every which ways.” Mem felt a trembling begin in the backs of her knees, then spread all the way up and under her ribs. 
          “Something we’ve no experience of is coming—fast,”  Trug said quietly, almost to himself, “approaching unseen, from all directions.  Everyone’s jumpy.  Hard to say which is worse—the keeping watch or the feeling of always being watched.  Naturally, that’s ever the way in the animal world.  The human, too.  But this is different.  This is something new in our life-times, Mem.”
         “Why are we watching if what we’re watching for can’t even be seen?” 
         “That’s a clever question, Mem, and it’s all the clever questions human’s ask and spend their lives finding answers to that make humans so important—in the human realm.  But so— how shall I put this— so completely oblivious in the animal.  Mem, be careful when you go to the Wild Place.  When you go to the Wild Place, it’s those clever questions that muffle instinct.  Accidents happen that way.  And not only accidents. . .”  he stopped mid-thought.  The trees and all the sky around them were silent now.  Mem hadn’t noticed the flocks of birds lift and dissolve in the brightening morning, but they were gone.  Trug slipped from her lap and scampered to where a few strands of chickweed pushed up between flagstones, then “There are those who’d trick you,” he said, sniffing the tips of the weeds.  “They’d trip you up quite intentionally.  Yes, there are those who enjoy nothing more than to make a sport of human weakness.  And I can’t say I altogether blame them, though I don’t condone their methods.  These are the creatures humans treat like—like chaff.”
         “But I don’t—” Mem protested.
         “Think about it Mem.  You love animals. Most creatures you mother and shepherd and protect.  You rescue, you feed, you observe.  Of a human like you, other humans say: She wouldn’t hurt a       fly . . .” (it  stung Mem to hear Trug mimic the manner of human speech.)  “But wouldn’t you, Mem?  Wouldn’t you hurt a fly?”   
         “Gil says every time you— you wash your hands or brush your teeth you’re killing a million invisible microbes. . .,” Mem blurted. 
         “It’s true, Mem.  Now and then you have to hurt a fly.”  His voice had grown gentle again.  “Creatures are living and dying all around us, Mem.  Gil’s right. Didn’t Mr. Lockley cut down that broken Hawthorn limb hanging over  Main Street last week?”  he said.  Mem nodded.   For several months, ever since the storm that cracked the tree’s highest limb, she’d had to cross to the other side of the street on her walks to the library, to avoid passing under it.  But Trug tensed again  “Listen,” he said, “hear that?”   Mem heard nothing at first, then in a moment the sound of cicadas in the trees filled her ears.   She thought of the old hawthorn, the caterpillars making their soft gauzy tents in its limbs, the spiders setting their cathedral-window webs to glisten among the flowering branches.   “Help ever, harm never” she murmured.  This was written on the yellow rubber wristband she always wore.  They were the opening words of the creed she’d had to memorize to earn her first camp badge that last summer before the accident. “Take a single step in any direction,” Trug said, “and you’ve crossed some creature’s territory.  Lift up a log, and you’ve uprooted numberless settlements.  But this fact . . .”
         “Life’s most indelible conditions . . . ” Mem interrupted, quoting something she heard on the radio the other day, though she couldn’t remember what it was— 
         “Exactly, yes, very well put.  Yes, but life’s conditions, as you say, never excuse cruelty or thoughtlessness or unjust dominion.   They demand of all living beings a certain kind of conscience that’s fluid and supple and runs through the nerves—  and it cannot be legislated.”  Mem said nothing.  She wasn’t sure she understood anything Trug had just said.  She wasn’t sure what “legislated” meant, or “dominion,” or half the words he’d used.  And she’d already embarrassed herself too many times to ask, failing to grasp things, misunderstanding.  But Trug was done with talking anyway.  He rose on his haunches and sniffed the air, whiskers twitching wildly.  Then he turned tail and hopped off the edge of the patio, toward a tuft of clover sticking out from the grass.  And there he happily settled down to nibbling again, as if they’d never had this conversation. 

                                                      
                                                       *                                  *                              *


[I would love to know what you think.  email:  mirmot@aol.com.  Thanks!]

Who's There?

Study (2012) Miranda Field

      My friend, K, took me to see her house, an old, once-grand, four story building in Washington Heights, in her husband's family for several generations.  Since her mother-in-law's death last winter K has been sole effectual caretaker.  Her husband has been unwilling, or unable, to perform any of the small gestures required to ward off decay in a building.  Not only that, but he's been filling the untenanted upper rooms with junk, to the point where the doors can barely be opened. It's an utterly haunted house.  

    K's husband slept on a pallet on the floor next to his mother's bed all the many, many months of her final decline.  After she died, he stayed there a while, on his pallet, on the floor.  You have to get him out of there, a friend warned her.  This friend told her his own brother had done the same thing-- stayed in the house they grew up in, and in which their mother eventually died.  He had stayed, he'd turned a little strange, and it didn't seem he'd ever leave now.  

    The house is big, old--  high ceilings, massive bannisters, tall, wavy-glassed windows, softly undulating, mildewed plaster walls:  it's a Manhattan developer's dream, but only because of the space it takes up-- the plot of pure gold real estate.  I imagine K wishes she could somehow uproot it, lift it away from the place on the map that gives it its magical dollar value.  If she could put it in a field, in the middle of nowhere--.  Oh, maybe not.  The loneliness of the house, stuck on this island of a million-and-a-half souls, stranded on a major drug block, filled with all its different shades of eerie late-afternoon light, is palpable.  It's still in the family, and the family isn't letting go.  But it's an otherworldly family, that clings to this structure on this property worth god knows how much, and lives poor.

    The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, which, at least in my sketchy Western understanding of it, sums up the mood that engulfed us as we stood just inside the front door of K's house.  An esthetic response woken up by the acute awareness that nothing lasts, that everything-- including yourself-- is subject to disappearance, decay.  We both go silent a minute, then K unlocks another, inner door. 

Ingress (2012) 

     Clearly K's house overwhelms her.  It has suffered decades of neglect.  "Neglect" is what we call it when something's left unprotected from the effects of time, and starts to show signs that it won't last, that it's subject to disappearance, decay. It's neglect, that is, if someone who should have didn't raise a hand to resist time's habit of eating away at things.  K used to think she and her husband would move into the middle two floors and have a life.  But their marriage, since this house became theirs, has become a grey area.  

     Growing up in a haunted house my sisters and I were ever hopeful that the adults-- moody, self-absorbed, busy with their art and their books and their troubles-- might step in, stop everything from falling apart, getting lost, becoming non-functional.  Now that we are the adults--  hah--  moody, troubled, out of our depths, what are our children are waiting for us to do?

     Things break down in time. Sometimes entropy is unconsciously assisted. Sometimes things are intentionally smashed.  Windowpanes are replaced with corrugated cardboard.  My father had a colleague at the art school where he taught whose own father, when another and another crack would appear in a wall, would drag himself up out of his chair with a sigh, and tack another and another shed snakeskin over the crack.  The chill breath of  the damp, moldy basement of K's house might have come directly from my own childhood across the Atlantic.    

                                                                                      *

 

His Grandmother's Furniture (2012) Miranda Field

     So many of my closest friends go through life dragging their haunted houses behind them.  I've wondered about that.  Maybe it's how I recognize these people when I meet them.  But K, in standing on the top stair of her giant cracked and leaking house with all its junk and all its broken, beautiful, mottled treasures, she seems  hitched to a particularly heavy weight.  "For the last few years," she writes me, in an email, "I have felt like I am the old lady in the house alone."

Now and Then He Makes an Effort

                                                 

               *

                                                   
"Knock-Knock," one of my favorite joke goes,
"Who's there?"
"Death"
"Death wh--."

                                                                                             *

     Oh god (a memory, from nowhere) suddenly I remember there was a large suitcase in our cellar, into which one of our cats had crawled to give birth, unbeknown to us, just before we left for a 6-week vacation. When my mother locked everything up for the summer, she unknowingly separated the cat from her kittens.  By the time we returned, the newborn litter was nothing but a mess of mummified pelts stuck to the case's lining. I was haunted by the suitcase in the basement for the rest of my childhood.  It was a terrible scenario to imagine-- the frantic cat, the dying kittens--  but what made the impression so indelible for me was the fact that no one (as far as I know) ever got around to cleaning the terrible residue up.  

                                                                                    *

      My dear friend, C, says, over breakfast at our diner, over coffee mugs heavy as plumbing fixtures:  "My blood is elegy."  She's thinking it would be good for her to take a comedy improv class.  I can't think of anyone less intended for a life in comedy.  Unless it's K.  But, actually, K was, back in the day, an actor, though I know no details of that phase of her life.  One of those stunning women slated from the beginning to pay for her stunning younger self's genetic good fortune with her older self's debilitatingly anxious self doubt and self-denial, she never accepts even the tiniest edible thing I offer her. I've never been able to persuade K to eat at my table.   After we've seen her house, we walk up Broadway to 165th, and wander into the Shabazz Center, to see if we can catch a glimpse of the Audubon Ballroom.   The ballroom has been renovated-- sheet-rocked and track-lighted-- into a slick, soulless little conference room (no vaulted ceiling, no tangible residue of history), but a ghostly photo of Malcolm X is housed in a glass case on the section of the original wood floor where his body fell.  

    Somewhere in the apartment K lives in with her husband, son and daughter (a few blocks away from the house, in little Dominica) there's a box of old photos she rescued from one of her husband's tangles of unfaceable things.  In it there's a photo of his parents-- K's mother-in-law, whose death was a long, slow sinking into physical and mental breakdown, is young, gorgeous, smiling her thousand-watt smile -- wearing her sassy but elegant dance dress, at the Audubon, ten years before Malcolm X's assassination.

Malcolm X                                                                                                                                                                                                     

     "Sometimes I feel so ungrateful," K says.  We've returned to her building, I having had a sandwich, K a cup of tea, at a cafe next to Shabazz.  We're standing in the back yard of her building, looking up at the walls, great cracks running down them, and electrical wires of all types and vintages draped like seriously ancient, knotted veins and arteries.  This part of the house died long ago, it seems.  But that doesn't stop it breathing.  The yard exhales that rich, fecund, just-past-summer breath of unloved back-of-building spaces I remember from the years when I lived on the lawless Lower East Side, back in the mid-eighties.  K and I both lived there then, though we didn't know each other.  

     Sometime in the mid-eighties I lived in a squat for a few years-- an "urban homestead"-- on 13th and B.  The building had been named:"Lucky Thirteen." We-- the whole displaced, conflicted association of us: anarchists, artists, losers, lost souls, "anti-capitalist" speculators and neurasthenic, grunge, gen-x-ers -- were working with our scavenged materials and tools to bring the building "up to code." Hah!  how far from that we were, for every step toward it, we took three back, at least --  believing we stood a chance of possessing the building legitimately one day. We were waiting for the city to give up and turn the lease over to us.  But instead they bulldozed the lot right out from under us.

                                                 "Lucky Thirteen"-- View from Back Window (1986)  Miranda Field

         "I mean," K continues, "we own this house.  How lucky is that?  I will never be homeless." 

Broken Open

133 Hadley Road (1959) John Field

From The Shot, by Elena Schvarts:                                                                     

                                             Today when I awoke my body seemed so light,

                                             as if I'd shot myself last night

                                             with a cherry pit . . . .

                                             What's more, the pit hit its mark,

                                             (despite the dark)— 

                                             in the red earth,  a blizzard of petals,

                                             it landed on fertile ground.

                                                       Not on a footpath it fell,

                                             and not onto rock or thorns

                                             and it waves its white arms

                                             and its snowy blossoms

                                                       In fact (hardly worthy of note!)

                                             something white flowered in my heart— 

                                             it was a sakura blossoming.

                                            All of me— every tiniest droplet of blood— 

                                            growing faint, marveled at this new thing . . . .
                          

                                                                                    *

My father painted the view from an upstairs window of the house in a North London suburb where, as a young art student, he lived with my mother, a musician, a few years before I was born....

to read the rest of this post, please click on the link: 

http://wearekin.org/author/mfield/broken_open

                                     

Sleepless

from Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (Graphic Narrative in progress), Miranda Field, 2011

            I Do Not Sleep For Sleep Is Like The Wind 
              And Trees Amazed

                             


                           Not sleep for sleep is like the wind and trees amazed

                           By sleep's persuasive gaze

                             
                           And germinates

                           Inside cicada cochlea—

                            
                           Do not you sleep, like me, do not you sleep?— then eats these 

                           Seedlings up, unseen.

                             
                           In glistening jelly themes hollower than Appalachian mines, among pines,

                           Praise, applause, themes—my subtle worms—combine

                             
                           When moon a world-dividing language sings,

                           Above the hook-and-ladder's dipthonged, drunken,  ruby fountain sounds . . . 

                             
                           Such is my state, my stateless mind—

                           Widowed turtle, green mother in some shady grove,

                             
                            Lost in her native tongue. 






              Arnica / Ambien / Absolution

                              
                           Who ever learns to go to sleep definitively? 

                           No mortal— animal or vegetable— 

                           intentionally sinks his vehicle in so soundless a lake.  

                           To put myself to sleep, I let rise to the surface of my mind the bodies in the 
                                       reservoir 

                           this moment painstakingly changing from opaque to phosphorescent.  

                           All the while the whole night sky assists, the weather

                           adds catalysts drop by drop to time’s carefully calibrated experiments.   

                           I take a half pill, a sign ignites—a V A C A N C Y

                           in rain.  I take a whole, one-and-a-quarter—

                           the flame’s a flicker.  No sense 

                           asking who I am then.  Caught on a twig 

                           in the tree, the aura-like cocoon’s lit up by winter sun—

                           the least of its worries the worm.









I Do Not Sleep For Sleep Is Like The Wind And Trees Amazed was first published in Bomb; reprinted in the anthology Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts & Affections, University of Iowa Press.


Arnica / Absolution / Ambien first published in Columbia Journal.

Creepy Victorian

     We house-hunted in the months following 9/11.  The first Century 21 agent who drove us around as we looked thought us naive, lacking capital—urban babes-in-the-wood.  He eventually dropped us, skeptical of the disparity between our requirements (an old house with lots of sky above it, with breathing space between it and its neighbors, a working fireplace) and our budget.  We'd also seemed to him, I'm sure, annoyingly nostalgic.  He would show us immaculate (though tiny), spic-and-span, baseboard-heated houses with brand new wall-to-wall carpeting, and we would point to all the creepy, pointy-roofed, turreted things in the listings. We wanted something conceived before the World Wars.  We wanted layers and layers of wallpaper to scrape away or uncover, wood floors to sand or paint.  It was obvious he thought our dream was, well, a dream.  Then the lovely Peggy Muller took over as buyer's agent, and she understood.  I think she saw right through us too, but I think it was an earlier self she saw.  Peggy had moved up from the city's outer boroughs decades earlier, to raise her two daughters, who, she said, turned out never to play outdoors, fearful of the bugs and earthworms in the yard she'd longed to give them.  

    I was born in the bedroom of an old semi-detached in North London, as were my sisters.  The midwife who attended my mother at each of her four daughters' births wrapped our placentas up in newspaper afterwards, and buried them under the flowering almond tree in the back garden. Through the windows, the tree wavered behind the warped, distorting glass.  The stairs creaked, bats flew out from under the eves at dusk and circled the garden, and for some reason I was certain there were foxes in the upstairs airing cupboard.  The house had what some like to call a "soul."  


     Tom and I had both grown up in old houses, but our two children were born in a birthing center near our Upper West Side rental.  As they grew, so I grew more and more obsessed with the idea of finding a house.  It wasn't really a matter of space— we're lucky to have a pretty large rent-stabilized apartment.  Was it then that I wanted to be sure my children, after they'd grown up, would never entirely be able to shrug off the spaces of their childhoods, would always be haunted by them?

     In the familiar fairy story, the pregnant mother of Rapunzel is possessed by longing.  Gazing from her high castle window, she spies rampion (or radishes, in some translations) growing in her neighbor's — the wicked witch's— garden, and is so besotted she grows weak.  Finally, she offers to sell her unborn child to the witch in return for a basket of the vegetables.  This seemed like madness to me when I read the story as a child, but it's the one detail of the story that still remains with me.  Such longings— for what lies over there (wherever you aren't), beyond reach— is so basic to our animal spirit whole religions blossom out from it. 


      At the center of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world, said Simone Weil.  Is it just the wishful thinking of ascetics and saints, this true and virtuous root beneath the brambles of all our material desires?  I don't know, but isn't it true that the things we've longed for are inevitably less beautiful, less satisfying— less desirable—  the closer we get to them? 

    Our dream house, which I know is a projection, like a ghostly 8mm home movie frame of my childhood house, has just such an elusive and contingent quality.  Our first night in the house, I dreamed I stood watching from the far shore of the Hudson as the house was erased before my eyes—  by a sandstorm of all things!  A dream house undergoes a perpetual process of erosion as a real house replaces it, lath by lath.   

     Cobwebs and mouse droppings hold the ricketiest parts of the house together, and plywood and ugly anaglypta papers.  We spent all the money we had for renovations on a pair of glass doors, and it was worth it.  You can see the Hudson River through the east facing side of the house, where a cat-pee smelling, astro-turfed mudroom used to be.  But, slowly, a little ham-handedly, we've ripped up the green shag-pile carpets, and the plywood underneath, gotten rid of some of the styrofoam ceiling tiles, taken a crow bar to the composite “wood” panel boarding, banished the scottie-dog light switches, the “Tiffany” Coca Cola hanging lamp in the vestibule. And we've painted over the ominous stain— dark rust-colored— from some incident that, long ago, caused something to drip between the floorboards of the bedroom upstairs, through the dining room ceiling, under the picture rail and down the plaster.  Light from the river ripples endlessly across the walls, stains or no stains.  I can sit and stare for hours at the shifting patterns light and tree shadows make on the walls in the course of a day.

     A house has a spirit, too.  Maybe it's not intrinsic to the house.  Maybe it's the product of a reaction between occupant and space.   I sometimes think our house, it's seemingly active and independent-of-us spirit, the mood I sense when I walk into it, is like one of those fortune telling party favors— the red cellophane fish you hold in the palm of your hand. If the fish curls at the edges, you're happy; if just the tail curls, you're in love; if both sides curl in—  I don't remember what that means (do any of its gestures mean gloomy, lonely, bored, exhausted?).  If it flips over altogether, you're fickle.  


     We've had trouble travelling to and from the house. We've had trouble keeping the necessary car in the city, where our jobs are. The house has seemed a drain on our energy (and, oh my god, finances) and many times we've thought about selling it.  Then we've kept it.  And the economy's crashed, and  houses all around us are in foreclosure.  And still the light ripples over the walls, and we're tenuously hanging on to our jobs, and we're thankful to have this.