Where Car Lights Fade into Spirit Light

The joke around here is that I get tremendously alert whenever we take a ride to Montauk. Mark's take is that parts of Montauk resembles the Jersey Shore of my childhood. He might have a point: the Japanese black pines, alternately stunted or umbrella-shaped; the flat sandy reach of Napeague: a dead ringer for 1970s Long Beach Island, before trophy homes. I think it's that, and more: the hybridity of the landscape, moor, dune, ranchland, salt marsh, bog, holly forest, moraine; grand development schemes (Carl Fisher's "Miami Beach of the North") gone awry; disrespected Montaukett burial grounds beneath the Tudor hotel on the hill. A general sense of ghostliness in the atmosphere, the stoned, staggering kids in the supermarket last night, who might have leapt out of the druggy well of a Doors song, even though it was only Pat Benatar on the speakers.

Montauk Point
Robert Long
from Blue

The magic starts
where the road unwinds into space
like the final dive from a barstool
and the lighthouse throws its arms
past the quiet confetti of mainland.

What looks good in headlights
turns to dust under the sun.
Almost home, the car swallows the stripe.

The dipper handle points
to the end of land, where car lights fade
into spirit light,
a mass of wet granules that drop
mote-like to the sea:
black, gray, white.

It's Very Difficult to Draw the Line Between the Past and the Present

Yesterday, it felt like a minor achievement that I was able to write on the two-week anniversary of my mother's death without mentioning it. At the same time, a nagging awareness of betraying her memory, betraying some pact, even as I know how foolish that is. The mind needs to move. There's enough going on in this head, which wants to conjure her up again and again, in the unlikeliest moments. As I write this, I'm thinking of the two tiny bright-red moles beside her right eyebrow, which were were strangely interesting to me when I was young, in the way that the flaws of all adult bodies are strangely interesting to the young. Then there was the roughness of her left elbow, and the damaged second toe of her right foot. "Too-tight shoes," she used to say, though I'm not sure I ever believed that explanation.

I'm sure there's an allure of turning into her right now, which is how people grieve, I suppose, though the term grieving strikes me as inadequate to what goes on in the wake of any mother's death. My mother talked about her own mother incessantly during the last two years of her life. Even then I knew she wasn't just mourning her mother, who had died in 1960, but mourning her lost memory, mourning the mother she'd been, mourning herself as a child, and who knows what else.

A funny thing this morning: I was talking to a neighbor who had wandered into our garden. I was surprised by how at ease I was with her. None of my usual wariness. Or holding back that need to get on to the next thing. What was it? That accent, those inflections. Edie Beale. Edie, who knew a thing or two about mothers. Someone whom my mother might have become if she hadn't gotten the nerve to leave her own mother's house behind. So while we were talking inch worms and ticks, peonies and bullfrogs, I was also talking to my mother and to Edie herself, and my neighbor never knew a thing, which I think was just fine by all concerned.

Stenciling (Or: Congratulations!)

Sometime last week--Friday?--I got word from On-Line University Reviews that this site was chosen as one of their Top 100 Poetry Blogs. Though I'm honored and happy to have made the list, I've also been aware that this site has been concerned with another matter of late. (When was the last time I even posted a poem? The beginning of the month? Ah, May 17th. Anne Carson's "Appendix to Ordinary Time.") Well, this blog has been many things since I started it last September; it's a place where, I hope, poetry can sit beside prose--not to mention music and sometimes film, architecture, and painting. And animals. The end of detente. Or no boundaries--though it sometimes seems as if my poet friends are better read in fiction than vice-versa. In any case, good cause to return to poetry today: congratulations to Mark and to James Allen Hall for winning the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Men's Poetry last night! It couldn't be better that they're joint winners of the prize. Teacher and student: how often does something like that happen? (Though it seems silly to apply the term student to James, or to his brilliant, accomplished work.) I only wish I'd made it into the city for the ceremony; I'm still settling down, burrowing in, after the events of the last two weeks. So here's my congratulations page instead: a poem from Mark, a poem from James. I like the way these two pieces talk to each other.

[If the above two photos look familiar, it's because I've posted them before; they come from a reading that Mark, James, and Austin LaGrone did at Teachers and Writers Collaborative in New York City in November 08. Mark, James, and fellow Poetry Finalist Jericho Brown appear in the first photo. Mark, Austin, and James appear in the second. (And who's that turkey in the green sweater?)]

To the Engraver of My Skin
Mark Doty
from Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems
originally from Source

I understand the pact is mortal,
agree to bear this permanence,

I contract with limitation, I say
no and no then yes to you, and sign

--here, on the dotted line--
for whatever comes, I do: our time,

our outline, the filling-in of our details
(it's density that hurts, always,

not the original scheme). I'm here
for revision, discoloration, here to fade

and last, ineradicable, blue. Write me!
This ink lasts longer than I do.


Naming the End
James Allen Hall
from Now You're the Enemy

I love you either begins the lecture on ancient torture
or reveals the way back to Eve, who spends her last night
naming the flora, stenciling their anatomies
on her husband's somnolent skin. The husband is a god.

At daybreak, they abandon the garden. He carries into the world
the only diagram we'll ever have for devotion. In the dark
interrupted by sirens, I plant words you'll never know
you carry on your back. At dawn, you open your eyes

to the light in which you'll leave me. You rinse that other world
of steam and whisper from your skin. Son, you're filling
your dented black car with all your clothes, all your records
and books and love. When you leave, you skin repeats: I love you.

Gods never sleep and terrible fates await us.
You get to choose. Once.

Die for Mister Jensen, Kids!

I've been thinking a lot about John Cassavetes lately, so I finally broke open the plastic wrap around the boxed set of Cassavetes films Mark gave to me last Christmas. I didn't expect to wait this long to break open the plastic wrap, but it's not an unfamiliar pattern. I have a knack for keeping new novels on the shelf for years. I won't even crack open a book until I have a gut feeling I'm in the right state to take it in, and I'm usually right about matching book to mood.

As far as Cassavetes: the fascination with faces, eruptions, moments of public embarrassment, people who won't (or can't) adjust to societal expectations. Life off the grid. I watched his first film, Shadows, last night. It's as mesmerizing as a poem, the signs of 1959 Manhattan--Fascination! Howard Johnsons Thom McCann--burning like suns over the night streets. The whole city as interior state: glamorous, depraved, a little sickening, but not hopeless exactly: interesting that such a dark movie could turn toward possibility, or at least ongoingness, in its final minutes without giving in to sentimentality. Tonight I can't decide whether I'm going to go in sequence, or skip ahead to the sublime A Woman Under the Influence. Below I've embedded the Shadows trailer--the music, by the way, is by Charlie Mingus--and Gena Rowlands' Swan Lake scene from A Woman.

It's only starting to dawn on me that the short pieces I've been writing over the last two years have been an attempt to think into my mother's dementia, through form. Even when I haven't been writing about it directly. The disruptions, the abrupt shifts in tone, the fluid identity, the nonlinearity. I might have known this intellectually, but in the days since her death--can it really be almost two weeks now?--I've recognized it on a deeper level. The clarity that the death of a loved one can bring. This morning, I already have the sensation that I'm not going to be writing the way I've been writing from here on out. I know it's not going to happen overnight, just the way it felt like we were still in the 90s until 2001. And have we really left the Bush years behind?

Famous Chop Suey

I just said to Mark, "I don't know what to write this morning." Which translates to, I don't know what I'm feeling. Or: I'm queasy. Then I had an idea, and then a batch of photos came in from my brother Michael, including a scan of her recipe for her famous chop suey, which I believe we ate every third night of my childhood. "Pretty minimalist," Mark said, upon looking it over. "I always hated that chop suey," said Michael, laughing, after the funeral. I looked at him, bewildered, as if he'd said, I'd always hated that Holy Communion. I guess I never thought so much about whether I liked it or not; it was what my mother made, thousands of times over the course of a life: a staple dish of the sixties. I like seeing the recipe in her neat, compact printing, which never changed over the course of her life, until it got wobbly.

Also included in Michael's mailing was a receipt for what could only be sanitary napkins (Knapkins?) from the long defunct Lit Brothers department store in Atlantic City. I know why Michael sent it to me: he's an expert on long defunct department stores--he's writing a book about the late days of Hutzler's, the Baltimore store--and it must have pleased him to think of my mother shopping at Lit Brothers, with its cursive "L" logo, the same "L" I associate with the logos of Levitt and Sons, Lucky Supermarkets, and I Love Lucy. (Was that it? Were all these logos meant to suggest Lucy?) When Mark saw the receipt, he said, "Oh, she wouldn't want you to put that up!" True. (Probably. But why was she keeping such a thing?) Then again she would have thought it was funny: she had a high appreciation for absurdity, especially when it came to the stuff of social norms. She liked to laugh at her own propensity for embarrassment. She seemed to want to be embarrassed, as if it gave her reason to laugh at herself--or more likely the side of herself that took the rules too seriously. I think she passed that on to us.

Speaking of embarrassment: here are some of the photos Michael sent, most taken at various relatives' houses in Allentown. There I am in my glasses, in all my high nurd glory, an era that my brothers graciously call my "leukemia period." (No, I didn't have leukemia.) The woman with the dark hair is my godmother, my late Aunt Goldie, who walks in and out of Famous Builder. This was before Goldie's Jackie O period.

Nurds (2006 Remastered Album Version) - The Roches

Southern Point (Or: To Cartagena)

My father, brother Bobby, and Aunt Catherine arrived in Cartagena yesterday, a surprise trip in the wake of the funeral. A part of me thinks this might be evidence of family insanity. Another part of me thinks that stimulus and motion might make sense right now. Besides, it’s cheap and easy to fly to Colombia from Miami-Fort Lauderdale.

A photographic book of Cartagena was passed around at the condo Saturday evening, provoking sounds of much delight and wonder. My aunt Catherine said, “Now why couldn’t Grammy have lived in Cartagena instead of Allentown?” (Grammy, being my father’s mother, who came here from Bratislava.) The plaintive quality of her voice both startled and interested me, as I’d always assumed Catherine loved Allentown as if it were a person. “Because it looks exactly like Bratislava!” Bobby cried, making everybody laugh.

I, on the other hand, am relieved to be back home, where I can more or less stay put for a while. (Well, a week. More on that later.) We got here Saturday night, and it was startling to find out that we actually live in a place where on Memorial Day people don’t blast their pool speakers or scream woo-hoo on cue every two seconds. The world certainly needs people who are having fun; I just don’t want to live next door to them any more. Stocking up seems to be in order, which is why we took a detour to Stony Brook on Saturday, where we bought two carts' worth of groceries from Trader Joe’s and as many plants from Lowe’s as we could fit in the back seat.

A few pictures from my bike ride yesterday. And one of the garden outside my study. Note cold-hardy needle palm: the first time we’ve planted a palm this far north.

Also, beyond that, “Southern Point” from Grizzly Bear’s most excellent Veckatimest, which just came out today.

Southern Point - Grizzly Bear

Notebook, Memorial Day

1. Yesterday, breakfast with Tracy and Tina at the Village Den. A few bites into my bagel, I was aware of talking more, laughing more, than I've talked and laughed in days. (Weeks?) Maybe that was Tracy and Tina, whom it’s always great to see.

2. My bullshit detector seems to be extra refined right now. As unsentimental as a teenager, I keep thinking. Or: Exposed on a high ledge in full light, as Anne Carson says. How long will it last? In Manhattan the other night an actory bearded guy in a V-neck T strutted toward us on the crosswalk. In any other state, I'd have enjoyed the way he was chomping away on his gum, performing himself as if he were a sexy electrician from Ronkonkoma (that's Long Island) and not another Chelsea boy.

(At the same time my eyes filled up yesterday upon hearing a concert version of Laura Nyro's "To a Child," a song I'd always dismissed as indulgent.)

3. The sky above the funeral home on the night of my mother's viewing.

Afterward, for some reason, I bought a picture frame at Walgreens.

4. This from my friend Denise this morning:
I had a dream about you last night but I can't remember the details,
only that it was midsummer, very hot and we took your mom to the
boardwalk. I ate a piece of pizza which she told me I shouldn't if I
was going on the Tilt-A-Whirl. Did I listen? No. You, your mom and I
got on the Tilt-A-Whirl. We screamed. I threw up after we got off.
She said, "See?" It was a great dream!!!!

5. A picture my brother Michael found over the weekend. (That's Michael in her arms.) When did she ever look like this?

6. On Memorial Day of--04? 05?--I'd made plans to meet my parents at the old summerhouse on the Jersey Shore, near Ocean City. I showed up at Port Authority and the lines to the Atlantic City buses were dozens deep--and rowdy. I went instead to Penn Station, where I caught the first train to Bay Head, an hour and a half from the house. I knew it was going to be an effort for my parents to get to Bay Head. They weren't familiar with that part of the shore, and besides, the traffic on the Garden State Parkway would likely be at a standstill. Still, they made it to the station, if only a little late. I still see the dark green minivan creeping toward me as it turned the corner.

At a certain point I'd vowed never to travel on Memorial Day again.

We had a nice weekend. We went to a Chinese restaurant. We might have taken a ride to look at our old beach. We bought strawberries. We watched the boats going by from the front deck. When it was time to leave the next day, however, my mother hugged me on the back step. She started crying, then holding me harder. I felt myself freeze. "What's wrong?" I probably said, but she shook her head briskly; her hand made a flapping motion. Her face screwed up, as if she'd been sucking on a piece of lemon. Then she recovered herself. I hadn't yet known that she was losing parts of her memory by then; out of shame, she'd kept it from us until she couldn't anymore. What was she forgetting? My name? Where she'd left her scissors? Her brush? But maybe it was just that the house needed painting. My father was already climbing the ladder to the roof, and there was still a whole summer ahead for her.

Transparent Head

Back in New York tonight. A little melancholy, a lot worn out, but relieved, as if a whole group of us had passed a test. I mean all the clumsiness of private grief bumping up against public ritual. Somehow, to our surprise, yesterday's funeral mass ended up taking on a life of its own. I read a piece I'd written about my mother; one of her nurses, a sweet Jamaican woman named Susie, told stories. And though the priest hadn't known my mother personally, he knew enough about her to make it feel as if he did. And neither "Be Not Afraid" nor "On Eagles' Wings" ever issued from the cantor's lips!

Afterward a group of us gathered at Sea Watch, a restaurant on the beach. Outside, rain battened down the sea grapes. The lights went on inside; thunder rolled. I liked sitting next to my Aunt Catherine, my father's sister, whom I hadn't seen since the 90s. Across the table Mark and Jordan, my nine-year old niece, studied the screen of Mark's IPhone, watching a video of a deep sea fish with a transparent head.

I had one too many glasses of red wine for the middle of the day.

Later, over at the condo, my brother Michael handed me a bar of special soap that my mother had been saving since--the 60s? Knowing her, I'm sure she thought it was too good to use, and the longer she held onto it, the harder it was to take off its wrapper. We couldn't help but laugh, a little sadly, that that dumb bar of soap could still be around in the world.

Middle C

There might be too much on my mind to write a coherent post. Besides, we're leaving for Florida in an hour or two, and the idea of packing seems overwhelming right now. Instead, I thought I'd pass on this short passage from Famous Builder. It takes place in my musician days, in the wake of a huge disappointment in the recording studio. I must have been twenty here.

Thanks, once again, to everyone for the good wishes.

from Famous Builder

One day, on her way out the door to Clover, my mother buttons her wool, gray-green coat and stops by the piano. I dust the lower rungs of the love seat across the room. She stretches her hand across the keyboard and tentatively plays a note. Then plays it again, more crisply this time. Middle C: sturdy meridian. Its coherence and elemental optimism reverberate through the room. It mocks whatever it is I'm feeling. "Would you like to go to the store?"

I stand and stretch my arms with an involuntary squeal. "I'm going outside to weed."

"It's the dead of winter."

"There's weeds out by the Lennoxes. I noticed them last night."

She presses her finger to the key again. "You haven't played the piano in two weeks."

I spot a single spruce needle on the carpet. I lean over, pinch it between my fingernails, and drop it into my pocket. "I'm just taking a break."

She turns her back to me and plays. "What note is this?"

"C."

"Which C?"

"Middle C."

"This was my mother's piano."

"I know."

And although her eyes are glossed with the slightest sheen of tears, she smiles, as if my ability to name random notes on the piano gives her the answer to what she's looking for.

The Mind Wants to Move

What was I dreaming last night?

I woke up this morning remembering what I hadn’t remembered in a while: a phone message from a few years back, in which she was hoping I’d come and stay with her for a while. Her voice was cheerful, almost youthful, and it was clear after a minute that she thought she was talking to her twin brother, Paul, who had died in a car accident twenty years before I was born. A month later, another phone message in which she was weeping, calling to tell me that “Mother” had died. Meaning, her mother. Again, she thought she was talking to the other Paul, and some impulse in her brain made her think that the mother who had died in 1960 had died all over again. This was 2006, and I was still capable back then of being struck silent by what dementia was doing to her, though we didn't yet know enough to call it that. I remember lying down after both occasions, too stunned to feel anything like sadness, my heart pounding on and on.

I guess I’m thinking of the funeral Friday, and my fixation of the moment: why the black of my sportcoat doesn't exactly match the black of my pants. Not that I've even tried on the pants, which is provoking another worry. The next blog post: Too Fat for His Funeral Pants! (And we haven’t even talked about ties.) This morning it makes sense to me that Jewish people bury their dead right away. The mind wants to move.

Which we have been doing in our way. Last night I ended up unpacking six or seven boxes of books. I don’t think I’ve ever said much about consolidation in relation to our new house. For the first time I have a study in which I have room for all my books. So many have been packed away in storage units, basements, closets for so long that it’s a veritable wonder to see them all out. My Houston books (with their grey spray of mildew) next to dogeared books from grad school. So many layers of time, in one space. And the titles: The Interloper, Mariette in Ecstacy, This Book Will Save Your Life, Shamp of the City-Solo, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Light in August, A Fan's Notes, Good Deeds, Don’t Cry, A Seahorse Year, Radical Love, In Awe…

UPDATE: Pants fit fine.

Tuesday

1. As of last night, there was a 30% probability that the zone of unsettled weather off the Florida peninsula would develop into a tropical storm. I’m not sure whether that’s still the case, but if the storm does grow, the National Weather Service would call it Tropical Storm Ana, and it would arrive just in time for the funeral.

My mother’s name? Anne.

2. Did I mention that I’m speaking at the funeral? As much as I’d wanted to write a tribute to my mother, the task ahead of me felt like carrying a ladder on my back. How does one compress a life into three pages? I went to the gym before dinner, ran and ran on the treadmill. I wrote it when I got home. I looked it over before I went to bed, lay down on the sofa with my arms folded, rigid. It wasn’t her. I took it out again this morning and worked on it some more.

3. This remix of Bjork’s “I See Who You Are,” especially past the 3:11 mark.

I See Who You Are (Riverus Version) - Björk

4. Mark got home just before 11 this morning. The day so scrubbed and bright we had to take the bikes out. This was the first day we took the bikes out in our new neighborhood, after they’d been collecting grime and dust in the basement of our building in Manhattan for years. They’re clean again, hard new tires. We went to Louse Point. We went to the Springs General Store, where the store cat, who’s 23, crawled out from under the porch and sat with us for a while.


5. Before that, though, I walked out to the pond out back. I looked down and the frog was two feet from my shoes, looking up at me in the sun. Slippery, alive, blue-green. Almost visceral. Usually he jumps when sees me coming, but this time I was the one who almost jumped. I sat down on the bench and looked at him. He looked at me. This went on for fifteen minutes. The underside of his throat was mottled, dark brown patches over pale banana: it palpitated. I said, My mother died. A few minutes later he made a few quiet frog sounds that sounded like snoring.

The Beauty! The Beauty!

The title is a quote from Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: one of the books I’ve been thankful for. Spark, motion, cadence, wit: I don’t exactly know how else I could have spent that night coming home from Florida. In line in the jetway, in line for coffee, on the train ride home. Three hours on the train and I’d barely lifted my head from the book. And I was Beli in the cane field, and my mother in the cane field—Oscar too. And the creature who spoke to them. And what about the man without a face? I’d put up that passage right now if I hadn’t lent the book to Mark, who’s in Chicago overnight, for two readings and a workshop, where I hope the sponsors aren’t wearing him out!

(Uh oh: Tact Monitor, calling Mr. Tact Monitor!)

Putting up these posts has been necessary.

“Down in the dumps” weather: my mother’s phrase. The week of Memorial Day (her funeral on Memorial Day weekend: that just occurred to me now): radiators huffing heat, cold rain sliding down the windowpanes, and there’s a frost advisory on for tonight. The plants and flowers. Crap!

(God of weather, we deserve better!)

Every so often I look at these two pictures from a few days ago. I was eating at a restaurant with my father—and just a few minutes before I’d just seen my mother alive for the last time. I took a picture of the seagrapes on the beach through the open window. Then my father took a picture of me. I took a picture of him. I look at us now and I can see the trying on our faces, the waiting.


Then I think: we’re different now.

That’s what I thought when I woke up this morning. Well, it took a minute or so to come to me. I’m a person who doesn’t have a mother. I said it to myself with a fascinated detachment, a little surreal. Much younger, say, ten or so, I used to test myself to see what it might be like to imagine the other side of that, and I couldn’t bear the thought of it: the world turning in on itself, and pulling everything down inside that lightless hole. And yet I'm here. Okay--probably? (Possibly?) And I do still have a mother, even though she’s a finite set of exchanges, impressions. Or not even that: the lift of her mouth, her quickness to laugh, the placement of her voice, the smell of her hand lotion: won’t she keep changing in memory, as I change?

Already the young, fun mother is coming back.

Then, of course, I can't find her.

Here’s a song for her. I’m not sure exactly how this stays alive and fresh after so many listens, but it does that for me—and every time it comes on, I have to put everything down. Glamour and holiness and charm: how does he manage that?

Os Povos (The People) - Milton Nascimento