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1. Hummingbirds have discovered my hummingbird feeder, and also the red trumpet vine climbing up the pillar on my back porch. They hover and hum and buzz off like bullets.
2. Katie Gray is a my great good friend, and her visit reminded me. It’s hard to find a friend, but you keep hoping and looking because when it comes to you, it comes like the first days of spring, or the first days of fall. We’ve only been friends for a few years, but already we have grown beyond the women we were, and are now the women we are, together. I’m rich beyond words.
3. The garden is dying back, and I’ve killed Marshall’s rosemary, the one I was babysitting. Eff. But this means that the back yard is in transition, and it’s kind of exciting to think about what its life will be through the fall and winter … return of the fire-pit?
4. Jordan said we couldn’t talk about a wedding until we were engaged, but I don’t know! I want to talk about things like, where it would be, if it were to happen! And who exactly would be involved! And what kind of wine exactly we should get!
5. The little white bird chimes that Katie J. brought me from Colombia are so lovely in the breeze. Chinkling and tinging and falling in so perfectly with all the other small & thrilled sounds that are settling on the day.
6. I’m playing tennis, now, and riding bikes, and making a quilt. And fighting powerful urges to tell everyone about how awesome I am at these things. (Succumbed!)
7. Seven is the mystical number. I’m meeting the changes of the season with a lot of excitement, and a little anxiety. My older sister is getting married, a younger sister is starting college, and another younger sister is considering moving to California for a while. In an effort to get reins on the changes, I’ve written lists, hoping each bulleted entry will tie it to a more solid ground. I make goals, I check off goals, I journal and write poems and run through the days with each unremembered and unrecorded possibility flowing behind me like smoke. After a long spring and summer of false starts and aborted attempts, it feels like a bridge is unrolling before me.
8. And eight is divisible by four, which is the number of days Marshall and I will be camping out in Winfield, listening to bluegrass and Irish folk and flatpicker-virtuosos, in a few days. We got a blow-up sleeping pad for me yesterday, and with that dazzlingly luxuriant possession we are launching ourselves into the heart of camping weather, into the Smokies and the Blue Ridge Mountains and a cramped campsite in the center of the Walnut Valley Festival land-rush.
I found the notebook I took on the Out-West Roadtrip of 2008. Someone (seems like it was a professor, Dana or Matt) had challenged me to write in these three weeks of adventure, and I tried to write quite a bit of poetry as well as prose. I remember feeling like all the poems I wrote on the road were these pathetic gimps who should never see the light of day, but as I was flipping through this notebook, the sights and sounds of that time came flooding back, as of course they would. This was the freefalling time between college graduation and the crashing-in of plan destroying events. At this time, streaking across Death Valley, wandering among southwestern petroglyphs, rising and falling across the Cascades and the plains, I was both carrying a cancerous tumor and walking unknowingly toward a man named Marshall.
At any rate, this is a poem I wrote in Portland, both having to do with a particular lost relationship and with lost investments in general. It seemed fit, and still seems fit.
. . . . .
I am concerned with waste.
What, for example
has become of the paper birds, folded
from my birth certificate and the first and last
pages of the journal of my travels?
Where went every cotton heart
sewn with my hair and stuffed with down,
what became of the tiny terrariums
made of medicine bottles, mosses, rooting
maple sprouts and real toads
from the wet places in my yard?
I sent every one away
to a safe deposit box
that I suddenly discover has been burned
in its bank, and is filled
with ashes.
I’m sitting in a summer dress on my tiny back porch, flowers in pots surrounding me and my garden spreading neat across the yard like it was always meant to be there, and here comes Amanda walking to the garbage cans at the alley, and walking back, smiling to herself and shaking her head slightly in disbelief, saying as she passes me, “Great! It’s a great Wednesday!” She dusted and cleaned and loved doing it, I said I weeded and watered and loved doing it. Great. It’s a great Wednesday.
Hours at my caretaking gig are decimated, so I’m considering calling That Lawyer who needed someone one day a week, I’m considering filling out an application at Magpie’s (local cake bakery), I’m considering (for once) not worrying but instead walking in song. If God got me through 2009, He can sure as hell get me through 2010. That’s saying something. Which reminds me — I got an itemized bill from Baptist Hospital West yesterday, two pages of entries like SET CONT FLW MNIFLD W/CHK VALV ($29.84) and HCG QL ($81.00). Some are a little more English-like: Sufenta Amp 2ML ($150.17), Morphine 10MG Syringe (who knew I had morphine? wow), and Surgineedle ($159.51). Others are comprehensible, sobering, like Anes General 2.25 hrs ($1550.00), OR Major IP 2.25 hrs ($8287.00), Recovery Room 1.25 hrs ($702.67), and all the sutures, sterile jelly, Percocet, drapes, towels, trays, tubing, sensors, binders, so on. The final bill was $16,070.82. Isn’t it amazing. Again, if I can rise from 2009 with joy, the same can happen for this year.
Should I move? Should I stay? Who can know the answers to these questions, if not me?
But the week is half over, and I’m going to make rent if I have to sell my body, because I want to live in this house as much as I have ever wanted to live anywhere, right now. If I move, it will have to be after the season, because I have a garden here, and my neighbors are kind. Also the birds are kind, cardinals, sparrows, pigeons (new, rather unwelcome addition), doves, grackles, jays, robins. Next year I may be somewhere else, but now I am here, on my back porch snug and lovely, in a dress. A dress, no less. I haven’t been wearing dresses because (fill in the blank — I don’t know), but today I put one on and its faded white flower pattern is growing inside my ribs with the patience of a morning glory vine.
I’m going through old poems (& choking on the dust & remembering what it used to be like, in those past days) so I can send a missile of about fifteen of the best to some dear friends who will tell me which ones they think are the strongest. I guess the above parenthetical statement is what I really wanted to say, in this post. There are so many, so many awful ones about Ye Olde Unrequited Love, so many And Here I Quote From Ye Olde Holy Scriptures, and so many that are maturing in the Dominican, in Nashville, in grief, in rebirths of consciousness, in paradigm shifts. Several have made me cry. I’m finding my voice, and finding my way through life.
There’s nothing like looking back and seeing that you’ve come so far. Sometimes it is so clear that living is freighted with eternity.
I’m rebinding books today, and binding some that haven’t yet been bound. all this on the porch, where the mosquitoes are still taking their midday nap and I’m kind of watching, just watching things happen. there was this awful, terrible stray cat who was having a crouch-off with the little homey striped grey cat that lives across the street, and I had to run over and chase it away. it was yowling in the weirdest way, like a baby crying, and I kept having the dreadful feeling that a cat-rape was about to happen. but now the homey cat is safe. (for now … the terrible cat will live & prowl forever.) so this is what it’s like living in the city…
most days I’m home alone all day, but today I went to KC Leatherwerks and Jerry’s Artarama to get stuff I needed for rebinding Randy’s bible and Liesl’s novel. the rest of the day is falling down like a flight of stairs; those steps there are about working on Katie Gray & Emily’s Box of Treasure, those there are about working on Liesl & Rosa’s World Lit syllabus, and those right there are me checking my Global Seeds email to see if grant stuff is moving along. last year I imagined I would be where Claire (my roommate) is, almost, working on my master’s at UT, money in money out, sometimes writing papers and sometimes writing poems, lots of times writing letters to friends about how I’m doing great, everything’s so great, I love school. I think yesterday and today, all of it, from beginning to end, is about letting God write my life.
you throw the worst fits in times like these, because you feel you’re being treated so unjustly. and God is about justice, so there’s such a chasm of thought that can’t be bridged, how to get from the injustice of your life to the justice of God creating your life.
and the two best moments in this entire week of alternately throwing hate mail down the chasm and trying to act like I could care less about the chasm were these: the moment after I quit throwing the Big Tantrum yesterday, which was me letting God be the author of my life, and the moment last night when it was very still and oil-lamplit and I told Marshall about it. because sometimes it’s as horrid for him as it is for me, when I’m feeling horrid & unwilling to let go of my sense of fairness. and it’s nicer than anyone can say, to lean on someone’s shoulder and tell them about a moment of peace.
the memory of which is v. v. good, right now. Christ will bring opportunities, open doors that I can recognize and unsteadily go through, and my life has never been like this before. so I can have mercy on myself, a little, too.
and still have fifty-one minutes before I’m timed out of this computer on the main floor of the Lawson-McGee Library, I will write. today has been almost only false starts, so far, and they include: driving to Fountain City…where the library was closed and where I discovered I’d left my debit card at home after parking at Advance Auto Parts to buy oil. So no oil. Then I get home and give up on autos and decide to ride my bike to the downtown library, then realize my bike is still locked up on Samantha’s porch. I walk to Samantha’s porch in shoes that only gave me blisters in the last half-mile or so. I have a theory about all this. a theory about how things going wrong is mostly only things going right. I’m not exploding, I’m here, I’m cognizant. I’m sensing some grace.
if some grace were to come, I would want to be able to recognize it, so I want nothing but to have all eyes and ears open to see it when it comes. so far: three tomatoes were suddenly red this morning. I have a job to apply for, and which I may be qualified to get. this morning Mom emailed me photos of British libraries, which pulled on my soul a bit. I had surgery a long time ago and only the scar and the bills remind me of that, what could potentially have happened.
and then there are the graces that don’t have anything to do with me, that just are, that live independently of me and all my ideas of them, like the grey, stooped librarians who are bustling around all busines-like, and like the world of books. after I do other things today, I’m going to read more Moby-Dick, which is only alright so far, but which is accelerating. I find myself thinking of Nantucket, of Lowell, and of whales, twisting with the silence of space, spattered with the miscellany of the sea and the sun somehow piercing the surface and falling like gauze curtains in the breeze. whales, I think sometimes, might be my secret muses. I never dream about them but always wanted to, and I have never understood why a person can see a whale (drawing of, film of, photo of, outline of) and not be suddenly stilled because this is something we don’t understand. or, I don’t understand. how an animal the size of a building can be suspended in the sea, how we can see fish and say they’re swimming, not flying, because they’re obviously flying; the medium is only denser. the whales are flying, maybe that’s why I don’t understand them.
but now I’m going to fill out the application and resume, since I’ve printed them just now and feel like I should go to a quiet corner to write in things like my expected salary ($0/hr), my college and degree, my references, whether I’ve been convicted of a felony. and then, I shall saunter over to Union Street, where a hundred years ago the ladies walked in bustles and parasols underneath the clouds of smog, wondering what their lives meant. I could do with a parasol, I think, on my way to the coffee shop, where I will do important things, like wonder what my life means. on paper. because I’ve suddenly got back all my desire to write and I have been writing like my house is on fire & a word will hoist out the window what it names and set it on the ground, unburned. guh. I wish I was better at everything.
what if God knew what He was doing, me not doing a hundred things I thought I would be doing, doing a hundred things a didn’t think I would do? anyway the day is leaving the foyer, it’s walking down the hall, turning the lights off on its way. I want to be somewhere else, like in this picture I found on one of those Tumblr blogs, of a girl who is extraordinary like I want to be, of a field of desire. I watched Big Fish and remembered eternity in the last scenes, when the old father is carried through a crowd of everyone he ever loved, everyone who ever loved him, and is coming to know that everything he did mattered, every word he said and gesture of his eyes or hand in a conversation.
Calvin (of Bill Watterson) said once that he didn’t know which would be more terrifying, to find out that everything mattered, or that nothing did. the thought that there’s a possibility that nothing matters terrifies me, but the thought that all the things I lost or left or couldn’t defend are waiting somewhere … it’s the thought of space, an expansion that includes, it pulls the lungs down with the force of something greater than gravity and draws the air in. and it’s only when I’m stuck in rooms with no windows that I realize the windows are in my mind, that I can remember eternity without that help. I need something beautiful, today. I need to someway catch the day, walk with the day down the hall and turn off the lights myself.
there is a speed that is only imaginary; life is not running away from me if I start the evening with it and keep it close to me, on purpose. life is not something you wanted, or the printed page of all your conflicting desires … it’s encased in your body, and you bring it where you are. I will bring my life with me where I go now and it will assume my colors, not the other way round, and this is something God is saying. just to say.
I woke up this morning to sun & muffled birdsong, which is normal except that it’s been raining and grey for days and days, out here. I felt so relaxed and wondered why, since I’ve been anxious about work and money and relationships and everything else every morning for a long time. Turns out my 7:54 a.m. alarm didn’t go off so I had slept till 9:45, maybe since I had just taken a shower at midnight and was sleeping on these extremely soft sheets I just got washed. Maybe also the vitamin D sifting through the shingles and attic rafters, and having been in Nashville over the weekend with such dear friends, such gifted people, such gifts. I forget how much I’m loved, a lot. I forget how much I love a lot, too. Not today, though, with so much sun and piercing birdsong, with me getting up with hair pinned up, with tea in one hand and watering can in the other, watering the three baby Rutgers tomatoes, the big new rosemary, the basil and echinacea shoots, the Ox-Heart and cayenne seeds, waiting for their first big push.
And today I found two quotes from Lewis’ The Weight of Glory that reminded me of the significance of my desires, how they are more important that many things I devote brain-space to. One is: “Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.” I hefted my big wooden chair with purple kusson onto my tiny romantic back porch to do this, to read my desires from the sermon on the mount, seeing the tall grass and beating greens all waving, with my desires. Trees taking over the backyard, opening leaves like a hundred thousand ladies’ fans over a hundred thousand ladies’ faces. I need significance to keep me alive: nothing else can do that well enough. Hearing someone tell me I’m beautiful, that my eyes aren’t enough seen, twists something in me and pure wonder’s wrung out but more than this I need words from God, who invests with meaning. I feel tall, I feel strong, I feel the seam on my stomach and feel like I can meet things as they’re coming, like I can meet anything or anyone, go anywhere … and it’s so hard to see no entrances anywhere, right now. I’m sitting on my porch underneath those thousands of opened fans wanting Christ to be near enough.
I read something else this morning about the Holy Spirit, the Walker-Alongside, the witness of Christ, paraclete etc., that Christ didn’t leave taking everyone with Him because for fuck’s sake shouldn’t history be over by now … He left and sent back this holy ghost to walk with us, which ought to be a sign to us that life, the walking of it, the length, is holy. The interminableness of it must somehow be holy. I’ve heard so many people say this and I’m trying to work it out for myself this morning, in my freckled skin, behind my hazel eyes, on my wooden back porch. I’ve been in awe of the Beatitudes for weeks and have been thinking and saying the words like Billy Collins was saying the haiku about the moth and the temple bell. The merciful, the mourning, the meek, those who hunger & thirst for righteousness which I somehow do even though I don’t say ‘righteous’ to myself, ever; these are promised their desires, and are promised time of absence of their desires. It is incredible to be honored while mourning with a promise of comfort. Incredible to be recognized as hungry and thirsty with a promise of being filled. I’ve seen how much more profound comfort is as it comes slowly, by walking interminably, walking in silence, walking with God whom I’ve hardly begun to understand. Persevering can’t be purposeless, then, and must therefore be purposeful. I must be signing on to a Purpose, by persevering. This means somehow so much to me this morning.
1.
Day 113 of My Life as an Unemployed Person dawned lovely (I only know this because it was clear and piercing when I woke up, late, to the nice but repetitive song of a bird in one of the many trees overshadowing our backyard), it dawned lovely and I didn’t get out of the house and on my way till noon, after conferring at length with myself, my closet (which is a cupboard, currently), and my mirror (in that order) on proper attire, unlocked my bike, and was off! to Coffee & Chocolate.
Coffee & Chocolate may be my favorite Knoxville coffee shop, partly because its windows look out on monstrous Bradford pears, maples and dogwoods (which several trees are collectively called “Krutch Park”), partly because I don’t see anyone I know (or have met) here and that reminds me of some of my most intensely good hours, at coffee shops in Nashville. I grew up, to a certain extent, in Nashville, where I lived solitary much of the time, and would jump on my bike when I needed to get away and be alone and go to a coffee shop. Whether Fido or J-J’s, I opened the door flushed and flustered from the ride, stepped in and became ensconced in a private garden of thoughts and wonderings. Once they even played The Innocence Mission for an hour at J-J’s.
As a child, I would go lose myself in the woods, or take a walk down silent country streets, sky tall and branches, always everywhere, like personal ambulatories. When I was in Nashville for school, I didn’t venture into unknown country … or rarely, at least. So Fido, Bongo Java, J-J’s — each came home in me and I knew them and their different personalities. Since moving back to Knoxville I’ve ignorantly despaired of finding coffee places to come home to and then actually had the guts to call them and see what they were doing, and now we hang out and this one, Coffee & Chocolate, on the corner of Market Square, far enough away from both it and Gay Street, glass cases of enormous haystacks, truffles, gourmet s’mores, Nipples of Venus, I love. Even the baristas here seem a safe distance from Gay Street, Market Square, even the Old City, which I’m more thankful for all the time.
So here I am, a cool spring day, with so much to think about, so much to process. The wind is ruffling everyone so rowdily, but they’re all so full of light they don’t mind. Spring is here, and if we don’t hope for rebirths and resurrections, then what on earth? So we do. And besides, the trees are throwing petals at our feet.
2.
Day 113 is unfolding almost without creases, hour by hour. As I read Behind the Scenes at the Museum (which I left at Marshall’s last night and am absolutely wroth that I’m not reading the last twenty pages of right now) I see something coming through the shadowy back of yet another page of my palimpsest heart. Which is the point, and I feel very conflicted at times about finding myself coming round to an author’s point (thank you Foucault), but I can’t argue with this. This book has to do with wit, of course, but also memory, or what may happen when the complex and badly-repaired soul is shown an actual event, when the memory and thousand intricate adjustments of the years have written a subjective history over it. And the subjective histories are so important, no matter how different from the Actual Events of our living (which are…?) … how shocking, how dizzying to see blooming from behind the outlines of a lost memory. Why is there so much grief, there? Are all lost memories waiting to be called, are all lost moments, lost people? This idea in Behind the Scenes of a metaphysical Lost-and-Found at the back of eternity is compelling for the same reason Hopkins’ promise in the Leaden & Golden Echo is (“kept far with fonder a care”). And I don’t need to explain that, to anyone.
Somehow I’ve lost memories of my childhood, and high school is losing itself like days, except by bunches, months at a time. All the time my sister and I could have had together, stolen or lost and my pages of Nashville memories with her are being inexorably written over, letter by letter, I can’t stop it. Where are the years I missed of little sisters, growing up? Why are memories of grandparents only coming through at edges, indecipherable, incapable of being made into words? Where is Grace Hoomes?
And I say the words in my head, “Why does life have to be about loss,” but then I know that it’s not about loss—it is loss; it’s about recovery. I believe this so firmly I feel like Nike of Samothrace (plus head and arms) for the blink of an eye. The drawing of a breath, beating of the heart. If there’s something that’s about food, it’s hunger, and I’m compelled.
3.
Now I’m reading Mark Jarman’s Epistles again. What is my writing style? I read Atkinson (Mitford, etc.) and write with a terse British clip … Jarman and I lengthen sentences with commas and saturated nouns … Woolf and I try to make long swathes of silk that change into water and back into silk.
Moments of magic somehow aren’t doing it for me today. It’s been one of those days that’s filled with nonsense, with me being very sad and not interested in distracting myself. So I just end up existing as a sad person. Which has its beauties and runs so deep in my person that I meet it like I meet the first days of winter, the last days of fall: seasons swing through and I can’t skip any of them. They have to be lived.
I wish I had a digital camera, because then you could see the aviator’s map lampshade shining with pin-pricks, the long branches of spring touching the curtains and the corner of the window. I made a cupped hand once at a contemplative retreat at a monastery in Cullman and had it fired … it is one of the symbols of the length of my life, passing seasons, always this open hand. I often put a candle in the palm and that always gives me something to say to God. I’ve been saying lots of things to God, today, things having to do with what it means that Franz Wright wrote in The Only Animal “though your own heart condemn you / I do not condemn you” and that’s an echo or repetition of Paul’s words, I mean God’s. For some reason it means everything in the world to try and believe today that I’m alright in the world. With God. That it’s possible I may be a delight to the creator of the universe.
The room I’ve moved into has water pipes part-way over one wall and I hear the running of water when the sink or toilet drains … I fit in this little blue garrett like a mouse in its nest … I’ve hung things, typed things, set things, arranged things, brought in things. But mostly I now have windows, can now see green things growing, hedges growing with birds inside them. Right now I’m realizing with some very real awkwardness that it never has to take a whole day for me to meet God.
It’s so weird to be this complex sort of person, the sort who lives by words – lives with them or on them or somehow almost because of them — but is forever in a strange world that resists description, to the final moment, the last degree. How incredible that we can’t know ourselves, that I can be wet with crying and not know why, except that the world is wrong. This is why I’ll never get married, I think, because poor guy who would have to deal with this every day. I’m trying to deal the weight of my universe out into sentences or at least phrases or at least words, mostly totally failing, and this is confusing enough for one person, let alone two. Although I will say that I’ve had (and have) women friends who shock me with their ability to put up with me. (You know who you are.) Emily talks some real sense & sanity to me about men, sometimes, how it could be an ok idea for me to just give it a try, but mostly I’m not sure it wouldn’t turn into an unravellable knot. And I’m a coward where the heart is concerned.
The big blue paper bag of Tetley from the small store in Belfast is almost gone, and this makes me think of the small store in Belfast, of the cafes, of the bookstores, of my current paralysis as far as travel goes. I wish I could go again, somewhere, like Belfast or Montellano, I wish I would inherit a million jillion and could wander here and there, carrying my books with me, my camera. I love my garrett but … or, maybe what I’m really wanting is Jesus Christ, “the blazing reality,” the tallest of my perceptions and most real of all realities, most bright of all lights. I believe He’s the Son of God, Messiah, and that the dead will be raised and sick healed at the last day. I used to SCORN poor Martha, because I’d never had my body broken or future stolen. Now I understand. And I believe the dead are being raised now … all I have to do is walk there in my long black dress with long white slip, ring I found on the floor (saying “Series IV Kodak Skylight Filter Made in U.S.A.”) on my finger (Natalie? yours?) (can I have it??), mirrors in my head draped with densely-woven fabric, ears to hear to hear, eyes to see to see.
