Christmas Day

I spoke to my father on Christmas Day. He remembered who I was. He doesn't always. But he seemed puzzled to hear that it was Christmas Day. He said, "Is it really Christmas? It can't be. None of the kids came up to see me. Not even Alan." I asked about Christmas decorations, and he said he hadn't noticed any. I asked about what he had for Christmas dinner and he said he didn't remember, it wasn't anything special. He lives in a very nice nursing home and I know that the staff will have tried hard to make the holidays festive for the residents. I'm sure there were decorations and a good dinner. My Dad just didn't notice any of that. "None of the kids came up to see me," he said again. "Not even Alan."

My husband pointed out, not unkindly, that people may have gone up to see him, but my Dad hadn't remembered they were there. I hope that's true, although the thought carries its own kind of sadness.

I wasn't there. But I remembered to call.

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses good-bye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of you spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Billy Collins

Strike Dispair into the Heart

Geraldine Brooks wrote a wonderful review about "The Jewel of Medina" by Sherry Brooks. I read it recently in the Washington Post Book World. The book itself sounds dreadful, but the review was a riot, and it reminded me of some of my daughter's reviews of books and television shows. The review starts out:

It's shocking that Random House got cold feet about Muslim reaction and refused to publish Sherry Jones's The Jewel of Medina. But what's even more shocking is that they paid good money to acquire such a dreadful novel in the first place.

And it ends up:

Not everyone has responded to this book negatively. Some respected Muslim feminists such as Irshad Manji and Asra Nomani have written in support of The Jewel of Medina. So perhaps the fairest thing is to let the book speak for itself. Aisha's crush, Safwan, is described as: "Tall, handsome Safwan, with the chiseled face of a purebred steed and hair as thick and glossy as a horse's mane." There are words that strike despair into the heart of a reader. "Steed" is one of them. "Loins" another: "Desire burned like a fire in Muhammad's loins, unquenchable in one night, or two, or three." On almost every page, similes jostle each other for room: "Terror snatched at my throat like the teeth of a crazed dog and hammered the city like a hailstorm." And words strain for meaning in sentences such as this: "Outside, a vulture's cry impaled my waning hopes."

Finally, there's the matter of Aisha's vital signs. Her pulse does some very odd things: "My pulse raced like that galloping horse I'd dreamt so often of riding on with him." "My pulse reared like a spooked horse." "I ignored the whirling of my pulse." "My pulse clipping my throat. . . ." "My pulse surged." "My pulse sped." "I willed my fluttering pulse to calm down." Someone clearly needs to find that girl a cardiologist. Given the other anachronisms in this book, I wouldn't have been surprised had one turned up.

My daughter will remember that I once stopped reading a novel about the childhood of King Arthur's Guinevere because the author kept referring to her as a "fosterling".

And there is that memorable sentence in one of the last "Clan of the Cave Bear" books that says, "Jondalar awoke with a desire to make some tools". I seem to remember some "loins" and "steeds" in those books, too. By her second book, Jean Auel was sadly in need of an editor.

Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

My youngest sister got a tattoo. She used a quote from an Emily Dickinson poem the says "It's all I have to bring today, this and my heart besides" along with a small heart and a clover. You can't go wrong with Emily Dickson, she says. She likes that poem because she puts her heart into everything she does. So her tattoo represents how she sees herself, and how others know her to be.

This got me thinking about what poem I might use if I decided to get a tattoo. My favorite Emily Dickinson poem starts out "It was not death, for I stood up" and that's not exactly what I would want to put on my shoulder blade.

I love Emily Dickinson, but my favorite poem may be "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot. My mother read that poem to us kids when I was about 12 years old, and I've loved it ever since. The poem starts with "Let us go then, you and I" and this is a phrase that my husband and I have used repeatedly to each other since our first date. At the start of that date, one of us said "Let us go then" and the other responded "You and I" and I was hooked. Here was guy who actually read poetry! Awesome. We still say that to each other when we are leaving the house. So I could have that tattooed on my body, or better yet my husband and I could each have half of the phrase immortalized on our flesh.

But, there is another line from Prufrock that I like even better. If you've never read the poem, I need to explain. Prufrock is going to make a visit to someone, and his intentions are to speak out, probably to a young woman, maybe make some kind of declaration. He wants to change his life, but he's afraid he will be misunderstood. He's afraid people will laugh at him. I get the feeling his life is not necessarily happy, but it's comfortable. He wants to change things, but he's frightened. He says "Do I dare disturb the universe?" Later comes one of the saddest lines in poetry - "And would it have been worth it after all?" and you know that Prufrock has chickened out. His moment has passed. He's not going to speak. He's going to get old and be alone because he didn't dare disturb the universe.

So the line I would get on a tattoo is "disturb the universe" - a statement, not a question. It doesn't necessarily represent who I am, but who I want to be. I want to be a person who is not afraid to take a chance. I want to be willing to disturb the universe.

Will I get a tattoo? Maybe some day. So far, I'm still afraid.

By Emily Dickinson

It's all I have to bring today--
This, and my heart beside--
This, and my heart, and all the fields--
And all the meadows wide--
Be sure you count -- should I forget
Some one the sum could tell--
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.


From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"


And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

Don't Ever Wink at Me Again

To me the most telling moment of the Vice Presidential debate came when Biden talked about being a single parent after his wife and daughter died in a car accident that also severely injured his two young sons. I've twice ridden in an ambulance with a child of mine, so when Biden choked up, I started to choke up, too.

How did Palin react? She didn't. No murmur of sympathy, no kind look, not even a respectful moment of silence. She launched pertly right into her favorite talking point: "...and John McCain is a maverick..."

So, a poem for Biden, and for those who care.

Rispetti: On the Death of a Child

I thought I heard a knock on the door,
And I jumped up as if you were here again,
Speaking to me, as you so often did,
In a coaxing tone; “Daddy, may I come in?”

When at eventide I walked along the steep seashore
I felt your small hand quite warm in mine.

And where the tide had rolled up stones,
I said aloud; “Look out that you don’t fall!”

Paul Heyes

Work

I found a part of this poem in the Washington Post Book World a couple of weeks ago.

Both of my children will some day be rain salesmen. It is probably too late for me.

by John Engman

WORK

I wanted to be a rain salesman,
because rain makes the flowers grow,
but because of certain diversions and exhaustions,
certain limitations and refusals and runnings low,
because of chills and pressures, shaky prisms, big blows,
and apes climbing down from banana trees, and dinosaurs
weeping openly by glacial shores, and sunlight warming
the backsides of Adam and Eve in Eden ...
I am paid
to make the screen of my computer glow, radioactive
leakage bearing the song of the smart money muse:
this little bleep went to market, this little clunk has none.

The woman who works the cubicle beside me has pretty knees
and smells of wild blossoms, but I am paid to work
my fingers up and down the keys, an almost sexy rhythm,
king of the chimpanzees picking fleas from his beloved.
I wanted to be a rain salesman , but that's a memory
I keep returning to my childhood for minor repairs:
the green sky cracking, then rain, and after,
those flowers growing faster than I can name them,
those flowers that fix me and make me stare.

I wanted to be a rain salesman,
carrying my satchel full of rain from door to door,
selling thunder, selling the way air feels after a downpour,
but there were no openings in the rain department,
and so they left me dying behind this desk—adding bleeps,
subtracting clunks—and I would give a bowl of wild blossoms,
some rain, and two shakes of my fist at the sky to be living.
Above my desk, lounging in a bed of brushstrokes flowers,
a woman beckons from my cheap Modigliani print, and I know
by the way she gazes that she sees something beautiful
in me. She has green eyes. I am paid to ignore her.

I Learned the Truth at Seventeen

Hillary Clinton is an enormously intelligent and hard-working woman. She is a very capable Senator. She is knowledgeable about foreign policy and economics. She ran a good, hard campaign and lost fairly against an opponent whose time had come.

And now comes John McCain, who chooses an inexperienced, right-wing-extremist, former-beauty-queen female as his running mate so that he can attract Hillary supporters. He really doesn't get it, does he?

So, for all the women who, like me, learned the truth at seventeen that women will always be judged first by their looks, and second by their qualifications:

ARTIST: Janis Ian
TITLE: At Seventeen

I learned the truth at seventeen
That love was meant for beauty queens
And high school girls with clear skinned smiles
Who married young and then retired
The valentines I never knew
The Friday night charades of youth
Were spent on one more beautiful
At seventeen I learned the truth

And those of us with ravaged faces
Lacking in the social graces
Desperately remained at home
Inventing lovers on the phone
Who called to say, "come dance with me"
And murmur vague obscenities
It isn't all it seems at seventeen

A brown eyed girl in hand-me-downs
Whose name I never could pronounce said
Pity, please, the ones who serve
They only get what they deserve
The rich-relationed home-town queen
Marries into what she needs
With a guarantee of company and haven for the elderly

Remember those who win the game
Lose the love they sought to gain
In debentures of quality
And dubious integrity
Their small town eyes will gape at you in
Dull surprise when payment due
Exceeds accounts received at seventeen

To those of us who knew the pain
Of valentines that never came
And those whose names were never called
When choosing sides for basketball
It was long ago and far away
The world was younger than today
And dreams were all they gave for free
To ugly duckling girls like me

We all play the game and when we dare
To cheat ourselves at solitaire
Inventing lovers on the phone
Repenting other lives unknown
That call and say, "come dance with me"
And murmur vague obscenities
At ugly girls like me, at seventeen

I'm Sorry

When I made a tricky turn out of the Home Depot parking lot this morning, I pulled in front of a speeding minivan. She honked at me, of course, to inform me of her displeasure at having to slow down. I honked back and waved to let her know I was sorry, but somehow I think she may have misinterpreted what I was trying to say.

Why don't we have a quick and easy hand signal to say "I'm sorry"? We have a signal to say "Go screw yourself, you're an idiot anyhow", why not a signal to say "I'm sorry that my actions inconvenienced you, but I didn't mean to be hurtful and I won't do it again"? It might stop some road rage.

Dogs hide their tail between their legs and rub their heads on the ground when they are sorry. This keeps the rest of the pack from tearing them apart.

If cats have a signal to say they're sorry, I've never seen it.


Here is a poem by Stevie Smith about forgiveness, which doesn't have a lot to do with driving sins, but I like it.

Forgive me, forgive me

Forgive me forgive me my heart is my own
And not to be given for any man’s frown
Yet would I not keep it for ever alone.

Forgive me forgive me I thought that I loved
My fancy betrayed me my heart was unmoved
My fancy too often has carelessly roved.

Forgive me forgive me for here where I stand
There is no friend beside me no lover at hand
No footstep by mine in my desert of sand.

Stevie Smith

The State of the Nation

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you

e.e.cummings


The puzzled ones, the Americans, go through their lives
Buying what they are told to buy,
Pursuing their love affairs with the automobile,

Baseball and football, romance and beauty,
Enthusiastic as trained seals, going into debt, struggling —
True believers in liberty, and also security,

And of course sex — cheating on each other
For the most part only a little, mostly avoiding violence
Except at a vast blue distance, as between bombsight and earth,

Or on the violent screen, which they adore.
Those who are not Americans think Americans are happy
Because they are so filthy rich, but not so.

They are mostly puzzled and at a loss
As if someone pulled the floor out from under them,
They'd like to believe in God, or something, and they do try.

You can see it in their white faces at the supermarket and the gas station
— Not the immigrant faces, they know what they want,
Not the blacks, whose faces are hurt and proud —

The white faces, lipsticked, shaven, we do try
To keep smiling, for when we're smiling, the whole world
Smiles with us, but we feel we've lost

That loving feeling. Clouds ride by above us,
Rivers flow, toilets work, traffic lights work, barring floods, fires
And earthquakes, houses and streets appear stable

So what is it, this moon-shaped blankness?
What the hell is it? America is perplexed.
We would fix it if we knew what was broken.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker

A Poem for Eliot Spitzer

Another politician has been caught with his pants down. I read somewhere that the same qualities that make a man a good politician, also make him more likely to be a philanderer. I suppose it's a power thing. But, it's nothing new and I find it hard to be shocked.


Authorship

King David and King Solomon
Led merry, merry lives,
With many, many lady friends
And many, many wives;
But when old age crept over them,
With many, many qualms,
King Solomon wrote the Proverbs
And King David wrote the Psalms.


James B. Naylor

What a Fool Believes

Ralph Nader is running for president again.

His name on the ballot in Florida in 2000 probably led us to 8 years of George W. Bush, but Mr. Nader is unrepentant. He said last Sunday "If the Democrats can't win by a landslide this year, they don't deserve to govern." Well, that's one way to look at it.

Mr. Nader apparently believes that his is the only voice in America speaking about poverty, the environment or universal health care, and that running for president is the only way to be heard.

I struggled to find a poem to express my feelings about Ralph Nader, and finally came up with song lyrics written by Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins:

What a Fool Believes

He came from somewhere back in her long ago
The sentimental fool dont see
Tryin hard to recreate
What had yet to be created once in her life

She musters a smile
For his nostalgic tale
Never coming near what he wanted to say
Only to realize
It never really was

She had a place in his life
He never made her think twice
As he rises to her apology
Anybody else would surely know
Hes watching her go

But what a fool believes he sees
No wise man has the power to reason away
What seems to be
Is always better than nothing
And nothing at all keeps sending him...

Somewhere back in her long ago
Where he can still believe theres a place in her life
Someday, somewhere, she will return

She had a place in his life
He never made her think twice
As he rises to her apology
Anybody else would surely know
Hes watching her go

But what a fool believes he sees
No wise man has the power to reason away
What seems to be
Is always better than nothing
Theres nothing at all
But what a fool believes he sees...

Possibilities

One of the secretaries at work loves Obama. She says his speeches are so fine, they show her the possibilities. And I think that may be his appeal to a lot of people.


As Emily Dickinson said:

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of Eye –
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

A Poem for McCain

I won't vote for McCain. He's a conservative, and I'm not, and that's the end of it. I respect him as an opponent, however, which is more than I can say for some of the other Republicans.

Here is a poem by Lewis Carroll that reminds me of McCain:

Father William

"You are old, Father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white,
And yet you incessantly stand on your head -
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"
"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."

"You are old, "said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door -
Pray, what is the reason of that?"
"In my youth, "said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment - one shilling the box -
Allow me to sell you a couple?"

"You are old, " said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak -
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"
"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my Jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life."

"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose -
What made you so awfully clever?"
"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father; "don't give yourself airs!
Do you think l can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off or I'll kick you down stairs!"

More Politics

New Hamphire has spoken, and in the interests of fairness, a poem for Obama:

by Edna St Vincent Millay

Thursday

And If I loved you Wednesday,
Well, what is that to you?
I do not love you Thursday—
So much is true.

And why you come complaining
Is more than I can see.
I loved you Wednesday,--yes-- but what
Is that to me?

Politics

I love the political process. It would be a better game than football if there wasn't so much at stake. Poor Hilary. The media had crowned her invincible and inevitable, but now that Iowa has spoken, they are writing her off as finished. Neither bit of hype is true. And what about Huckabee? As someone said on TV this morning, all the Republican pundits in the the country are looking around saying "What the Huck happened?" Huckabee is pretty much an idiot in my book. His views on taxation alone are enough to show he doesn't know what he's doing. I've had enough prayer in the White House. Let's elect someone who is competent.

Any of the Democrats would do.

And now, a poem for Hilary:

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day.
You little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.