I think it wants to be written. The veins of inspiration are two-fold: first, it snowed here, again. And a Richmonder acquaintance told me last spring that I simply MUST see the Japanese Gardens in the snow, because it made him nostalgic for Japan. Therefore, it is making me nostalgic for Japan. Only I’ve never been there. . . not really. The one time I can ’say’ I’ve been to Japan, I was in the airport in Tokyo, having one of a series of my “first” panic attacks, on my way home from Beijing (three-and-a-half years ago). Inspiration number two comes in the form of a story my grandmother has told me a few times about a business trip in which she accompanied my grandfather to Tokyo, sometime in the 50’s (can’t you just see the clothes– gorgeous). During the trip she ruptured a disc in her spine, and flew the entire way home on her knees (in the aisle of the plane?).
So far, I have one page of yellow legal paper scrawled on in two different directions, trying to write this poem. I hit up against a dilemma that I frequently have in my writing: the family audience. I fictionalize family memories, and I get them wrong, whether purposefully or not. I shamelessly co-opt them as a kind of shared narrative, a collective history, from which I am privy to draw as I see fit. But these people, my family, own their memories more than I can, surely. So it is a violation of their own remembrances, their lives. But, of course, there doesn’t exist a memory that is not a fiction. It is fictionalized by every series of recollections and retellings. The author Amy Benson, talks about this in her memoir The Sparkling-Eyed Boy:
“we all want to be loved, but some of us are willing to gut our lives of secrets, their moist insides stiffening and cracking in the sun, then look, like a dog, for approval. some of us are willing never to live a moment again until we’ve inked it on the page. some of us don’t know how else to live.”
I hold onto this quote like a talisman; it reveals that what I am is an abhorrent memory-thief and an artist. Both are true. So I press on, in the only way I know how: write what you know, and what has been handed to you. So, a very rough draft, and a fragment of another:
“Tokyo”
Someone told me once
to visit the Japanese gardens
in the snow. I’ve built nostalgia
for the scene, for the island
nation I’ve never truly seen.
Replace the view of a clean
hall, lined in clear plastic tulip-chairs.
My body stretched across, my face
tucked in a crumpled paper bag,
breathing cardboard fibers, eating
dried wasabi peas, wishing this was not
my Tokyo. Wishing Tokyo was the maples
in snow, like it should be.
“Amazon”
My mother is an Amazon,
disfigured for the war, by the war,
doubly– once to fight, once to regain
the symmetry each body is owed.
When it twists through the crystal doorknobs
and casts rainbows on the posters
my mother gave me, from her room
in Andrews, I know that winter fails me.
The light is short-lived, the purposeless
forgetting to sleep early enough,
forgetting the light will rise without them tomorrow.
The new books I’m reading. . .
“Winterizing the Porch”
In early November, after the four-day-rain
that had been Ida, you spent a day
taking the pots down from their perches.
You raked the dark earth, with it’s rootlets,
and cobwebs of mold into bags, feeling
out the bulbs for inspection.
The sacks of spent earth you carried,
door to door to stairs, through the house.
The pots up-turned and stacked,
pinks and yellows and rusted blues,
along the railings and splitting planks.
And so completed what I could not,
in one version–
the winnowing, and hollowing out of winter.
. . . like a squirrel. The World Series is blaring in the den, competing with the soft clicking of saliva that is the sound of a cat washing himself. I feel desperate. Winter is upon us. The studio is decorated for Christmas. That means only one thing: sixty hour work weeks, no free time, exhaustion, and the onslaught of poor health. Physically, mentally, spiritually, intellectually I am trying to fortify myself. Frantically, I stuff my brain with books, flit around without committing to anything, while I feel the aching need to write, the fear of not properly digesting the few afternoons I get to be outside. It’s coming, my brain says. It’s coming, it’s coming, it’s coming.
I have a poem about St. Gertrude knocking about in the back of my brain (the companion piece to this one about St. Benedict. . . I know I could easily write a whole series of poems about saints. . . they fascinate me.), and one about the Moro Reflex.
I am swallowing Julia Cameron’s memoir, Floor Sample, in gulps. She makes the writing life sound so. . . doable. The way that I know it when I am not so estranged from it. She writes Morning Pages. I want to write Morning Pages. I wish I didn’t need sleep, for this very purpose.
In the meantime, I took a trip home to the Carolinas weekend before last, and a walk around our neighborhood a few days ago. Here are some pictures, and here are some more.
Black Hand Coffee Shop
The walls peeling, sunburned plaster
giving way its whitewashed foreskin.
metal gauzed flesh to hold the holes in place.
Pipes vein with termites–
The cats are sleeping (fatter than before)
but that, at least, has not changed.
The dregs of summer are doodled across
a chalkboard in weak sunshine, and coffee rings
swimming across tables. Men talk
about cars between their navy blue polos, stamped
over the heart with logos of pledged companies.
Machine-white, the stitching more orderly
than lane painting on the streets.
They drive black and burgundy cars
to fraternize with the coffee shop boy’s tattoos,
talk of shows he plays instead of sleeping.
We’re closing up, killer. I’ll have to bring the table inside.
St. Francis
In this city, St. Francis can
exist in so many places at once,
unafraid of the scissoring ferns
gliding along his throat and through
his arms. Unaware of the greyhounds’
lifting legs at his feet.
The Chinese Girl
Three or four, she follows
her mother down Park from the restaurant
to their apartment. Always there, with the cheap
booths and faded picture-menu of meats.
Her whole life, these four blocks.
Walking, balancing, a book, a toy, trailing
twenty feet behind her mother’s panted, sandaled feet.
Her mother, a back she rides, same straight black bowl cut hair.
Her father, soy-scented, constant as the empty
fish tank on the counter. Signs about how much to spend
to use a credit card or a check. The blinking red-lighted
corner, the smells; will these be her memories
when she’s twenty-something, and with a man.
Acorns
The september squirrels are fatter,
more violent- pitching oblong shells
down the tin roof. Everywhere there
are thatched tops from the nuts, like tiny
chinese rice farmer’s hats. They are not brown
all-over, as one thinks, but bear a bowl
of dusty, minted green. Sometimes left uncracked,
having been shaken loose by mistake and sent down
to lie with the gravel and dirt, the mushrooms
and grass that scraggles under clover, paper leaves.
The earliest parachutes of late August.
Dancing Woman
A woman dances when I get to the park.
For her dogs, red-faced, bulky head-phones
blinking silver with the dying sun.
She twists through first one hula-hoop
and then another. In passing cars others dogs bark.
A woman walks a spotted hound
and a new baby, arms and legs suspended
from the papoose held around her throat.
I WANT TO LIVE INSIDE THIS WOMAN’S PHOTOS:
Just look at her Affair With Coffee.
Cindy Loughridge has such an incredible sensitivity to light and color. What else is there in great photographs? Except maybe her love of the common drama.
