And tremblingly, we’ve all partook.
The only question’s whether
we’re cannibals or communicants.
Either way, we eat her
grave cave crisp papery skin,
we suck her red homunculus
right off our own chapped lips.
We do it again and again.
The only way to know
if, instead of gruesome, all is holy,
(but all is both), is when we’re done,
we can’t be, she can’t be,
not one single living word can be
diminished. None.
_____
So, once again, I agree with Chuck Rybak. We do suck Sylvia. 🙂
My anxious thoughts do woo me like Don John,
with wild tales of catastrophe, with shame,
and I play stupid Claudio each and every time.
I fall for lies. I forget everything I’ve known.
Up next the betrayed Hero inside me dies.
Not really dead, but a bad-ass swoon, or worse–
the split-second wish that everything would end
if this building, choking, chewing panic can’t.
Only Beatrice says it can. I always lose
when I argue with myself. I am a mess.
Only Benedick, in pill form, thus,
can hush me, with his little medicated kiss.
_____
That Joss Whedon. I tell you what. I loved, loved, loved his Much Ado About Nothing.
Having been swamped a bit with anxiety lately, I’ve been thinking on it, and am concluding that anxiety is a big, fat liar. But sneaky, and seductive.
Today’s wisdom, thus: if the sneaky liar is as cute as Sean Maher playing Don John, no wonder I keep falling for it.
Sean Maher
taken by Gage Skidmore
And, fortunately, all’s well that ends well, right? (Because in this case, Beatrice is right–the panic never lasts. Also note: I’m so sorry to repeat the structure of Shakespeare here in my sonnet, giving Benedick the last word. I just tell myself he must be an awesome kisser in that last scene, if she stops talking entirely.)
But wouldn’t it be lovely, if my inner Claudio developed his shit-detector a wee bit more?
And if my inner Hero freaking stood up for herself instead of swooning?
Well. One does what one can to line one’s psychological ducks up*, and then one hopes the duck poop doesn’t give everyone swimmer’s itch.
_____
*including the appropriate and authorized use of anti-anxiety meds, thank you very much
(Image of Sean Maher available through Creative Commons license on Flickr.)
Objects in Motion
I’m so glad dance is part of my son’s education.
Sometimes, sure, an object at rest remains at rest,
But tonight an object in motion continued in motion—
A whole school of molecules kept dancing,
From slow solid to wavy liquid to hyper gas.
I’m so glad dance is part of my son’s education,
unlike mine. When I dance I’m like a squirrel on the ocean.
My grade school almost never danced—toomany Baptists.
Just like the law that keeps all those objects in motion,
he’ll continue to feel what he’s learned, not just emotion—
it’s embodied learning at its cellular best.
I’m so glad dance is part of my son’s education,
not just text and audio, not just construction
paper, more than dioramas, more than tests.
The law says an object in motion continues in motion,
and here’s proof. Still dancing, past bedtime, way past.
Those filthy feet look like a month of dirt amassed.
I’m so glad dance is part of my son’s education.
An object in motion continues in motion.
At least every quarter, the River Valley Elementary Studio Schoolin Spring Green has what is called a “culminating event,” where students display what they’ve learned in the previous unit. We’ve seen art galleries, tableaux, singing and now dance. Students worked with local professional dancers, along with their regular teachers, to choreograph the states of matter and the laws of motion, and at the end of February, we got to see them dance to “Solid Liquid Gas” by the band They Might Be Giants (as well as more classical works).It’s not just what you learn—it’s how you learn it, where you learn it, and how you demonstrate it. All of it matters.
Or, as one of my former students said recently, “You don’t break with your arms. You break with your butt.” He had just executed the most authoritative break I have ever seen. The pool table in the UW-Richland student center always has a mix of some of our most and least diligent students. This particular student has not had the most straightforward path through our traditionally-takes-two-years Associates Degree, but he has some solid momentum going now. It has been interesting, and encouraging, to watch him at rest, in motion, and exerting force—not necessarily in that order.
There are so many ways, and so many places, to learn the laws of motion.
On the other side of burnout
there is rest, there is a place
where even my incompetence
has a bucket it fits into.
As I compost all my bitterness,
my misplaced hopefulness,
my misspent hours,
I watch the steam
rise up from what’s rotten.
A wisp of a moist gray ghost,
a sign of moving on,
a sweet portent
there and gone.
What’s done
is done.
Posted in Bloem or Pog, Burnout, Daring Greatly, Poetry, Searching, Sustainable Chaos, Teaching, Work Life
“O beautiful, for spacious skies
But now those skies are threatening”
“The End of the Innocence”
Taking the secret detour, the one the natives use,
I fly down Highway T to Z,
past the Cates family farm but really,
it’s the dips and swales and curves
and hills and valleys and long slopes up
and ridge roads that feel impossibly high
for Wisconsin that let me know I’m in a zone
where fiction could happen and also perhaps
some magic but for me, partly panic–
I get agoraphobic on some of these rises
where all you can see past the crest
is the sky. It reminds me of Eastern Montana
a little (except for more trees on both sides),
where I once drove up a long brown hill for so long,
for an hour, forever, I stopped believing in Canada.
I couldn’t imagine anything north of where I was.
Nothing but a sheer drop-off to Hell, maybe,
over the top, nothingness, a crevasse, the crimp-
edge of the known world, no ditch, just–
The trip up, the torture, doesn’t last that long here.
Just when I’m wanting to pull over,
figure out how to turn around or back up,
which is impossible–the road’s too narrow,
the curve’s too sharp, the hill’s too steep–
well, there we are, around the bend
finally, a stretch of open road, another red barn.
Another falling-down house tucked in behind
a mess of blooming lilacs, under which,
if this really is a David Cates novel, someone’s having sex
RIGHT THIS MOMENT, and probably with someone they shouldn’t.
And later the woman, or maybe she’s a girl,
would take a dandelion and say “make a wish”
as she blew the white seeds everywhere at which point
the man, or maybe he’s still a boy,
would think “tampopo” but not say it, not wanting
the girl to feel bad for not knowing Japanese,
and he might also think, but not say,
some racy, clever thing using the word “blow.”
What he probably would say would be “Great.
Now there are more weeds everywhere,”
but then regret having said anything at all.
Because you have to remember, the moment you think
“Anything can happen,” that something bad could.
Just because it’s almost June and everything’s green,
every shade of green, just because the blue sky
is paint-chip sky-blue right overhead, even when
you’ve got Don Henley cranked on the radio,
you can glance in your rear view mirror and see
how the bright blue turns to pale blue and then haze
and then gray along the horizon.
You can see farms you can’t get to on Highway Z.
The people who live there are happy or sad.
But you’ll never get there. You’ll never know.
Coming home, you’ll stop at the T of Highway T and 23
and you’ll see Frank Lloyd Wright’s wind mill
and it won’t impress you this time. Not at all.
_____
I left Southern Illinois to go to graduate school in Missoula, Montana, and there met David Cates, who’d come from Spring Green, Wisconsin, where I live now.
Freaky.
His latest book is odd and beautiful and haunting and two trips to Dodgeville recently I really have felt as though I entered some sort of parallel universe. If you read the book now, there’s probably a silver station wagon taking a curve a little too fast. I’ll be waving.
The latest novel by David Cates (wonderful to read, odd to drive in)
The actor playing him this summer’s there,
I mean to say. He likes to memorize
while hiking, where the purple quartzite shines
and the T-Rex headed vultures soar.
The rock he’s on is so much older than
the play he’s in. They’re metamorphic mirrors–
hard things from Shakespeare and tectonic shifting–
still shiny, still showing us us after years
and years, hundreds, and millions, a billion years.
It is time and timelessness. And time is time,
not out of joint, not yet, still gracious here.
He is morphing, but the actor is still Matt,
and this Prince of Denmark loves his dog.
(If only poor Ophelia’d had a cat.)
_____
Oh! I can’t wait to see Hamlet this summer–great fun to be had and heartache to be felt and always, always interesting to see a new actor take on the old speeches and give them to us new.
Which reminds me–I need to get all my tickets figured out! To the box office with me, anon!
If you haven’t already made your own plans, you really oughta go to American Players Theatre.
_____
(Apologies for the sprung rhyme scheme above. Once I’d thought of “If only poor Ophelia’d had a cat,” I couldn’t let it go. Fortunately “cat” rhymes with “Matt.” But “dog” is just hanging out there, not rhyming with anything. Yet. I might revise. In any case, I know Matt will take care of his dog. And dogs mostly don’t care about rhymes. Thanks, Matt, for letting me share the pics–especially the puppy one. How could anyone look at that picture and not smile?)
____
Matt Schwader, appearing this summer in Hamlet.
Posted in American Players Theatre, Bloem or Pog, Car Sonnets, On Wisconsin, Poetry, Spring Green, Uncategorized
Tagged American Players Theatre, Hamlet, Quartzite
for a friend whose battles are more private than mine
I know it’s not the same.
I’m not saying it’s the same.
It’s just I wear my shame.
It’s a fat suit I can’t take off.
Can’t seem to take off.
Have put back on, after taking off.
And oh, my house–it’s a mess.
In some ways glorious, in all ways,
or almost always, still a mess.
Skinny women with clean houses
are not (necessarily) full up on bliss.
In my head, I know this.
And a woman round as me
who is also a clutter-monkey
might not be a mess like me
inside her head.
She might not dread
the things I dread.
I know what you’re going through is different.
But if it helps, please take this offering
of what I couldn’t if I wanted to keep private.
_____
Ecclesiastes 9:11 “Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favour to the skilful; but time and chance happen to them all.”
Being as I am not particularly swift, not lifting weights regularly at the moment, not as wise as I’d like, not using my intelligence every time I ought, not using the skill-set I do have, lacking the skill-set I need…well then, by golly–this verse sounds like terrific news today.
It got to where I couldn’t see a way
ahead except for dying. So I went.
So here I am. Just where, I couldn’t say.
It’s odd. Some kind of grass, or cane, all bent
this a way and that, slick at the root,
and spiky sharp half the time, black as coal,
but soft enough to lie down in, some spots.
I’d a slept more, but my dreams is full
of nasty animals and dead presidents.
I got attacked by a whole fleet of armadillos
in a river. An armada. Is that what you call it?
Abraham Lincoln himself chopping wood. “Hello
Mr. Penny Man,” I said. He spoke not a word.
But this ain’t Hell. Of that I am assured.
_____
This was a challenge poem–I wanted to write a poem JUST FOR my reading tonight at UW-Manitowoc (which was terrific–thanks, Jessica!). So the Manti folks suggested I write about Boyd Crowder’s hair, Abraham Lincoln chopping wood, and an armada or armadillos.
I’m imagining Mags Bennett’s voice here. Might write some more of these.
When a marriage makes a baby,
no one is surprised.
When a marriage makes a mess,
well, likewise.
When a marriage makes a record,
it is some kind of sign.
When a marriage makes a book,
that book, that marriage–they’re mine.
____
nath doing the hand-sewing
old school
This. Feels. Amazing.
_____
40 years ago, I put together a collection of some of my own poems along with outright thefty poems cobbled from Beatles lyrics & birthday cards. It was made of typing paper, bound with construction paper and yarn. This was in order to get out of trouble in 3rd grade (having been squirrelly in math class).
I still hope, eventually, to publish a collection of poems through conventional channels, but how lovely it is to have a husband who can take a manuscript of my poems related to teaching, and make of it…a book.
Posted in Bloem or Pog, Creativity Workshops, NaPoWriMo, Poetry, Publishing, Teaching, Uncategorized, Writing
On seeing pictures of bombing suspects, I thought
how very much they looked just like my students.
And now on hearing that “they’re not from here,”
I’m worried about my students, who are from everywhere.
I want to say my students, to the world, to God,
How much I love them. They’re why I do this job
(however well or badly I end up doing it).
I love all my students, damn it.
I love my Muslim students. Christians, also,
of course, and atheists, and everything else, too,
But today it’s Islam someone might be using
as an excuse to beat up a much-loved student.
We come to God so many different ways.
Or not at all. Let’s go where we find more love,
let’s offer hopes and wishes, good thoughts and prayers,
let’s be for each other what we all need more of.
Posted in Bloem or Pog, God Stuff, NaPoWriMo, Poetry, Teaching, Uncategorized
Tagged NaPoWriMo
marniere 