Haircut Fail

So, my new haircut was supposed to look like this:


It does not.



Granted, I'm not so waifish and adorable as our subject here, but I've had short hair before. It's worked. I even brought in the picture.


On the up side, I'm on Spring Break, so I don't have to face a classroom of students for another week--maybe it will somehow miraculously grow and fix itself?

For now, however, I'm locked in my room watching Sinead O'Connor videos and looking at chocolate-based recipes online and trying to make myself feel better.

Making the rounds

Sunset

Listen.

My great happiness
is the sound your voice makes
calling to me even in despair; my sorrow
that I cannot answer you
in speech you accept as mine.

You have no faith in your own language.
So you invest
authority in signs
you cannot read with any accuracy.

And yet your voice reaches me always.
And I answer constantly,
my anger passing
as winter passes. My tenderness
should be apparent to you
in the breeze of summer evening
and in the words that become
your own response.

--Louise Gluck


(It helps to know that God is speaking. I may have cried a little.)

April is National Poetry Month! Because it is the cruelest, mayhap?

I'm posting another poem, and I don't feel bad about it. This is one of my favorites from Best American Poetry a couple of years ago.

It features one very flagrant four-letter word (which I actually think works beautifully with the poem, so am only apologetic insofar as some of my readers' sensibilities may be shocked). You've been warned. :)

RHETORICAL FIGURES

Tom Christopher

When a sentence is composed of two independent
clauses, the second being weaker than the first,
it is called One-Legged Man Standing. If it
purposefully obscures meaning, it's called Ring
Dropped in Muddy Creek, or if elegant composed,
Wasp Fucking Orchid. There are words behind words,
and half the time our thoughts spraying out like water
from a hose, half the time banging inside ou rheads
like a wren in a house. When a sentence ends
unexpectedly because someone has punched
the speaker in the face, it's Avalanche Sudden.
When instead the speaker is stopped with sloppy
kisses, it's Dripping Cloud. Not to be confused
with Dripping Cone, when someone overturns
the table, or Bird Pecking the Mountain, when
the sentence goes on for an hour and a half and ends
in a shaking death. If the speaker lies in the driveway
so drunk on cheap wine that one listening cannot
get close to the meaning and thus runs away again,
claiming, "For the last time," it's Pregnant Dog
Cooked in Sun. If the speaker sells everything for
an old convertible and drives out into the desert
with untintelligible shouting to the pissed-off stars:
Aching Stones Laughing. Forced incongruent words
are Fishes on Fire, and are beautiful but bring us
no closer to the Truth or the Cosmos or the All,
so either we tour Europe looking for the bodies
of saints or drink all night playing Johnny Cash LPs.
Everything we have said, we have said all our lives.
Same for what we haven't said. Learning the terms
doesn't help, we're still filled over the rim with longing.
Already in the poem there is Clamshell Moon, Barn
House Burning, Cow Lowing the Field, One Hundred
Village Bells, Moth Flurry. Somewhere above, a Torn
Shirt, a Peasant Girl Crying, a Baby Dropped Through
Smoke to Voices Shouting. Not much further a Cat
in Heat, a Wailing Street, and in the end Tree Frogs
Blazing Reeds with Sound.

fron Haydens Ferry Review

Poem Again

9. Spring

NOTHING is so beautiful as spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Tonight Mr. Hopkins is bringing tears. I love and am so grateful for language. It traps us and ruins us and is laden with imperfection (wears man's smudge and shares man's smell) and isolates us, whose only deepest desire is connection and understanding; but when it works, and in practiced hands, what a glorious thing.

Also for spring. Even under snow, I'm feeling stirrings again that I thought I'd grown out of. Hope again.

Also making me cry:
1.
2.

(I haven't watched the videos, just listened to the songs real loud repeatedly.) (#2 is pretty awful. Just listen.)

Poet After Mine Own Heart

We Who Are Your Closest Friends
~Phillip Lopate

We who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting,
as a group,
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift.
Your analyst is
in on it,
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband;
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us.
In announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves.
But since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community
of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center,
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your disastrous personality
then for the good of the collective.


a) The fact that this poem exists is all kinds of comfort. Ian Frazier said that literature makes us feel less freakish and alone. Thanks Mr. Frazier, for putting that into words. Thanks Mr. Lopate, for reading my soul.

b) What do you do when relationships with best friends have died and you're pretty sure they're doing the right thing (and maybe you are too) and all you're left with is a vague nauseous emptiness?

c) Yesterday I napped on the grass in the sun. Granted, today it was snowing and is cold and kind of awful, but yesterday I napped in the sun.

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG!!!

If I could watch any movie in the entire world right-this-minute it would be this.

Wishlist

So, I have this mental wishlist running through my brain--laptop, InDesign, Istanbul--pretty insistently. And of course the longing and coveting is doing nothing for my quality of life. So to mediate the effects of discontent, a list of things I have:

a) a ridiculously cool and well dressed and funny and smart and supportive family. Including nieces and nephews who consistently and delightfully crack me up ("Actually, my dad usually chases me before I go to bed"), a gourmand of a mother, and siblings that magically know when to call or what to have ready to eat or what I'm thinking.

b) amazing friends. Friends I brag about and travel with and who make me laugh and laugh and laugh.

c) the clumsy but good-natured tail end of winter. I have historically been much more antagonistic toward March, but am convinced lately that she's just a little harried and air-headed and forgets occasionally to, like, do her hair or however is best to metaphorically represent late-March snow flurries.

d) a functioning and spunky little car.

e) an oasis of a bedroom in a house I love walking up to. Tall and clean open space and books and a comfy bed.

f) God. Doesn't put up with my game-playing. Loves me insistently.

g) Books. In response to Rachel's request: artists satisfy, capriciously or no, man's urge for immortality because they let us live as many lives as we have time books to read. Because the artist functions as a guide to our creation of worlds numbered, again, only by our time restraints. Because when we read about Odysseus (or Joyce, Lenin, and Tzara) we are in the company of immortals, and we do stand enriched.

h) I work with amazing people (again smart, again hilarious, and breath-takingly supportive).

i) Sometimes my students are geniuses.

j) I have plans! I'm putting together my life in preparation for next year and I'm really excited to see where and how it goes.

k) the pot of soup in my fridge (my powers undiminished by disuse: chicken, bacon, parsnip, potato, sweet potato, carrot, zuchini, rainbow chard, black bean. Hardy and delicious.)

l) um, Google Reader? I suddenly have hundreds of beautiful things at my fingertips. Amy Scott, I don't know you well, but your internet skills have changed my life.

I could go on. I know. Good start. Thanks you all anyway.