Whyta keepa
man na for himselfa
down in da holey waterwith da
name in da whole of
da with you
edge skip
ing along pulled
tight
against da man's face
we skate and trace
over
the outline of da man's face
a weirdy weird weird man i found
cheek
you found
bottom
oh brother where art thou nose
to breathe
i think you are an accordion
with stape stape staples
song a staple song a stable song

dazzle you glitter beard

mashed potato waves

stop saying the word nymph

blanketed apostrophes

thoughts in a song

thoughts in an apple

thoughts of the big apple ro ro ro rhododendron rugs saffron a big toe sat on a big to

you belong with me whaaaaaaaaaat

o toward to his each own the meat of a nut
the meat of a nut

im glad you call it the meat of a nut

the way
ur fingers

press press into the bones in my back, searching to be    there

an ancient trade
and
god knows im meant for a dirty basket or two

swing low sweet baloney we're a match made in heaven oscar

a funky funny in an elbow crook belonged to a little age on your teeth

a little age on my face

a little age does nicely a dabll doya da man

wit da glue

whoda say so whoda tot

Rumi and O'Keefe

"for there is more gold in one leaf of a cottonwood tree than in all the chapels of Rome"

gratitude art - day 12

practicing gratitude ~ day 11

Today I'm grateful for:

Binx fell asleep on my chest

Ben Howard

mushrooms and rice and chicken noodle soup

my mom

Savannah telling me what we always suspected, Jackson from Hannah Montanna is played by a 35 year old actor

15 min yoga

nakedness

sharing my dad's computer

the way washing your face at night feels really nice

Nathaniel Branden and "The Six Pillars of Self Esteem"

mirrors of all kinds

nice emails from professors

Thanksgiving coming soon

practicing gratitude ~ day 10

I'm grateful for shrimp with cajun seasoning I'm grateful for my brother having a lucky lucky lucky break I'm grateful for my dad being here I'm grateful for learning how to fix a sink I'm grateful for swing dance and youtube

practicing gratitude ~ day 9

I'm grateful for laugh laugh laughing with Calvin I'm grateful that he said we're all in "cool relationship phases" I'm grateful for goofing off and laughing after I fart

I'm grateful for the opposite of loneliness and for cereal with berry filling

I'm grateful for being a grown up

I'm grateful for creating something that means something

practicing gratitude ~ day 8

grateful for waking up to trickling water
grateful for ferocity and for tenderness together. a ferocious tenderness
grateful for dance that makes you feel something when you watch it. Pina Bausch.
grateful for happy kids on halloween
grateful for Mary
grateful for hot drinks pressed in your lap or your chest
grateful that bad dreams are only bad dreams
grateful that I can go to college and take classes on playwriting
grateful that my English major friends know that to be an English major does not mean you love grammar (seriously, who loves grammar for the sake of grammar??)
grateful for soft, beginning light

practicing gratitude ~ day 7

I'm grateful that I didn't catch the kitchen on fire that one time I almost caught the kitchen on fire

I'm grateful for exaggerated enthusiasm and the people that make a big deal when they see you again. 

I'm grateful for people who aren't afraid to have loud voices.

I'm grateful for a virus free computer

I'm grateful for pandora

I'm grateful for getting a job as a barista

I'm grateful for deep breaths

I'm grateful for really smart people that also like to go to bars and have fun and fake trash talk to their friends

I'm grateful for that awesome salad at Carolina Alehouse

I'm grateful for laughing with Savannah

I'm grateful for celebrations

practicing gratitude ~ day 6

I'm grateful for books that explain things

I'm grateful for opening doors

I'm grateful for nakedness

I'm grateful for psychotherapists

I'm grateful for being twenty years old

I'm grateful for not being alone, for family and friends

I'm grateful to be home

I'm grateful for big beautiful windows and snowfalls

I'm grateful that I have feet

I'm grateful that I can go on long runs 

I'm grateful for the way my Dad's dog, Dakota, looks up at you with a big wide breathtakingly genuine and beautiful smile while you run with her

I'm grateful that my mom is home safe

I'm grateful that I have an interview tomorrow

I'm grateful for authenticity, and for knowing that it's more important than approval and acceptance

I'm grateful for the smell of coffee

I'm grateful for how dark early morning is right before daylight savings time

I'm grateful for relaxing a bit with my choice of major

I'm grateful for community

I'm grateful for funny youtube videos

I'm grateful for my Dad's sense of humor

I'm grateful that my Dad isn't alone

I'm grateful for teachers that taught me to think critically, read critically, and write critically

I'm grateful for not believing so much in certainty

I'm grateful for uncertainty

I'm grateful for time

practicing gratitude ~ day 5

I'm grateful for,

Dakota panting on my floor - she kinda blends in with the rug

big picture lenses and tiny pieces

getting an interview at Starbucks

late night chats

truth telling

holding hands with Grandma

clean, crisp, thick paper

the nice man on the dam

early mornings

coffee

all my teeth

practicing gratitude ~ day 4

Changed the lay out of my blog today. I was starting to feel like I had to write about really serious stuff. So I added lots more color to unsettle things a bit and get a little uncomfortable. New types of posts to come!

today I'm grateful for . . .

a feeling I got when I was finishing reading another chapter of "The Gifts of Imperfection" - a feeling where I felt really grounded in the fact that this is my life right now, where I am is my life right now, here with my Dad and Latrelle and Dakota, and it's really different from college but it doesn't mean that my life starts when I get back to school my life is happening right now and at first I feel like there's not stuff happening here because college life is so much crazier and at first I thought, full? but that's not it, it's different, but my life here is full too, and if it's not full enough I can make it that way I think and maybe look at things differently

grandma doesn't have to go off her blood thinners to get her tooth fixed

spinach and tomato pizza

sticking to my plan to lay off sugar for a while

feeling safe

practicing gratitude ~ day 3

Today, I'm grateful for . . . 

• beautiful, rolling dirt roads in SC
• feeling vulnerable and not freaking out (completely)
• guitar
• Mom who doesn't understand but leaves a nice card anyways
• the way my Dad wears PJ's all Sunday long and bounces to music with his spatula in his hand
• Etta James
• my sister calling me - gonna visit her soon! 
• swing dance
• Brene Brown
• asking a question to a group of strangers
• Internet
• the way fall clears the air
• the way it's eighty degrees and fall ( SC :) )
• best girl friends and talking for over two hours getting caught up
• being able to watch a good friend change and grow, and getting to talk about that with her
• being able to grow
• self help sections in a secondhand book stores (there are gems! but no way I'm buying "The Secret")
• having a roommate in the spring complete with a cat!
• using exclamation points
• finding two cool places that are hiring - 2nd&Charles and Starbucks
• having access to a car today

home

"You do not support the root; the root supports you." (Barbara Kingsolver)

What is being grounded ?

First, I think toughness. A certain grit and grunt. Pull on your bootstraps and stand.
I was a pretty sensitive kid. Blown every which way. I'd endorse anything the least bit inspirational.

Once we had a preacher that would fall down on his knees. Sometimes cry. Sometimes make jokes. Kinda like T.V. People clapped at the end.

Our bulletins had note taking spaces where a few key sentences from the sermon were printed out with blanks for some of the words - you got to fill them in with the right words as the sermon went along. It was an intoxicating combination for a young, impressionable, idealistic, things are only black and white perfectionist list-maker (Going to church meant I could make sense of things with a fill in the blanks notecard?! yes, please). The only thing better would be if they also gave me a highlighter and an agenda book.

And so at eleven years old I began my crusade: bent on saving my siblings, my dad, my mom, and also the world.

It was a messy, ugly time for my family. I needed to believe in clean lines. But that meant I couldn't embrace the messiness of what it means to be a human. Couldn't accept it, couldn't love it; could only be scared of it because it didn't fit into the shape I had cut out for it (I studied my fill in the blank notecards).

Wasn't grounded in the reality of people and their tangled spectrums.
I had planted my feet in holy water and the cold made my toenail beds turn pink then purple then gray and the colors slid across my whole foot and chunked it into cement - too still and cold and hard to be alive and luckily I still remembered what it was like to be warm and pulsing. Luckily still wanted to be warm and pulsing. I stuck a tentative foot out and dried off and sat on the bank for a while with Huck just thinking.

"It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

'All right, then, I'll GO to hell' -- and tore it up." (Mark Twain)


Later,
-new people and place and I figured out that I stepped in that cold water because I mixed up Heaven and Hell - and maybe lots of people do,
new people and place and I figured out some people's holy water can be warm



I think being grounded is laughing at the mushrooms in your yard when you see them in the morning with perfect little chunks bitten out of them by the deer and then sometimes the whole top is bitten off and all that's left is a dorky white chomped on stem that's sticking bravely straight up in the air with little bits of mushroom around the base that probably fell out of the deer's mouth

"When St. Francis looked deeply at an almond tree in winter and asked it to speak to him about God, the tree was instantly covered with blossoms." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

wanna be so grounded that the toes I planted can taste the soil - creek water, mama's smile, blue eyes of sisters and brothers, Dad looks just like Robin Williams in Hook, children lock eyes with each other, easy smiles, and now a new place where I feel spindly woody roots growing like gnarled flowers on the side of a mountain - Boone      >>> these are the things I hope to keep my feet in, the things I hope to   come   from   when   I   be

be be be
              be  ing       very very very very very close to that edge - that edge that's defining - the only one

"this life cannot be lived apart from what it must forgive" (R Creeley)  richness in knowing you are of what is, and you are conscious of that and you're the

"universe's way of looking at itself"(Alan Watts)

being grounded --->   to be in the know that,   for our split second of here , when we can make the soil warm,                            the lightest of scrimmy veils is the difference between being alive and not being alive. Having time to spend and not having time to spend.

Awake Awake Awake (William Blake)

practicing gratitude - Day 2

Today I'm grateful for . . .

having a sister to fight with
watching my little brother fall in love
having a soft bed to lay down in, even if I think my Dad's cat might have peed somewhere nearby
drawing a line for myself and sticking to it, even if it means other people are disappointed



having places that are very hard to leave



                                                  you're         very dear Dear

practicing gratitude - DAY 1

I'm grateful for the way I could talk to my family on the phone today. Mel put it on speaker phone and it was her, my brother, and my mom in the car on the way home from visiting Grandma. We talked about Doug coming to visit and the silly nicknames that they had come up with for him.

My mom has this weird thing about making up nicknames for any of her children's significant others.
I get sincerely impressed with her creativity. The nicknames are most likely to be a hodgepodge of something or someone from her favorite soap opera, Days of Our Lives, combined with a physical trait of the boyfriend/girlfriend. Like it has become a veritable talent for her. She gets these really intense eyes  - squinty and teal and far away - when she's coming up with something because she's thinking so hard. She's a lot of fun.

I'm grateful for somebody telling me to lean in harder because there's no protecting yourself from the terrible feelings that happen when you lose someone, really lose someone (I think that feeling might be the most real feeling cuz it's the most "there's a bottom line" feeling) - soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into

coax a toe in and keep saying it

what the roots of the word "courage" actually mean: share your whole story with your whole self

"dress rehearsing tragedy doesn't protect you" - Brene Brown

Complicated relationships I used to think felt like a lack of wholeness. But that's not it. A lack of perfection yeah. But nobody wants perfection. Show me a perfectionist and I'll show you loneliness.

We want to sit across from each other and say honestly, yeah me too - and then smile, making our face skin swim with wrinkles and sagging -       maybe why we're here?  to be with each other

ser - to be - I am - here - to be - here- I am -     in now with you   >>>   woah

grateful for language - grateful for knowing that language doesn't cut it -

slow it down Angie come back to bed rest your arms and /rest/ /your/ legs/ (Lumineers)

My           thoughts           have been        Slinkies

 lately.

Like the way when you hook a slinky in a circle and then pull on it and the energy makes the coils just keep going around and around and it's stuck in a loop that you don't realize is a loop because you can't see the whole slinky and today you're only as big as       a        dust     that's sitting on one of the metal coils and all you can see both ways are spirals and spirals of silver that look so complicated and hard until something happens in your life that makes your eyes ten times bigger (for just a moment and then SNAP back but there's a different taste in your mouth this time) and all of a sudden you can see the whole damn slinky and the little electric energies/edges of individual thoughts that are sparking around and around and around and used to blind you but are actually just winks and you didn't realize how sick you felt until you got off the ride.

"Of what use is genius . . . if the web is too finely woven, too irritable by pleasure and pain, so that life stagnates from too much reception, without due outlet?"

"Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere. Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. It's chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find without question." (Emerson, Experience)

somesomesomesomesomesome       body      convinces you, whether you realize it or not, to just stop. Just stop digging and sit in the dark for a while. And then you're actually able to see that you're in a hole. And it's still dark and you know you'll probably be here for a while but you might as well start to make friends with yourself and your loneliness and ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I like to think critically. Have been encouraged to think critically. Have accomplished things by thinking critically. I had a professor who liked to talk about the life of the mind. About dedicating yourself to academic exploration. Which certainly has its fruits.  But excess makes you stick your head in the sand. And when your eyes have adjusted to the darkness and you see the dirt in front of you, you think I've got to keep digging deeper, that's how I'll get out of this. Think think think think think. And then you start wondering about the meaning of life. And then you start realizing that everything is subjective perspective. It's all persesubjunctivity. Which isn't a word. Which means it's not real. Except there are no real words. Just assumption tied to sound. SIGNIFICANCE. Say it out loud and feel the way the word begins by first hissing through your lips and then moving straight to the back of your throat with the hard G. Bite your lip for the F. It pops out of your teeth with the I. Hiss back to the front for the last syllable. That's all. What's real? Cue existential crisis. Unravel. Dig deeper dig darker.

Thank god Colleen laughed at me and invited me to swing dance. She's got a great smile and knows how to laugh at things. she promises that later we can have some tea and belt out Adele on my dinky keyboard (only known cure for angst) and be really indulgent because when we sing Adele we get to own relationship suffering that's not even ours ( track: Someone like you ) for a good hour and then leave it and go to sleep next to the mountains

Another day another dizzy and

                               



                                           Just                                                        stop





My bones finally had room to speak. Hungry and I fed them.
                                                                                           with putting my gut into things
                                                                                            with being bad at dancing
                                                                                           with less reflections      (mirrors and more)
                                                                                            with a plane ticket





~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Still not oriented. But it feels like up. Like lighter-ness     still muggy muddle but it's different than when digging straight downandonly (different taste in the mouth this time) still not oriented. Not going to be oriented this       t      i m     e            a     r o u n d  .

But moving    (!)

Tuesday, July 22 2014

Dusk. A little humidity but it keeps me warm. The ducks are eyeing me, inching closer, thinking I have food for them. When I don't throw anything they full out waddle towards me. Impatient and shaking their big hips. Sassy mommas.

Mist still hanging around in the pockets of these hills - stubborn eraser marks against a clear deepening blue.

Feathers and reflections of light poles like snakes in the water.

Monday, July 21 2014

It's been one of those three day stretches of grey and rain in Boone. I welcomed it. My sleeping schedule has been pretty erratic, and I'm likely to be taking a nap at any point in the day. Fading in and out of consciousness while rain comes and goes - thrush against pavement - fine and delicate. It makes the sound of wind in overripe dogwood trees.
                 Then spatterings. Sleep. Car wheels make tiny wakes in the road and I wake up.

all this rain makes me depressed is the topic of a lot of small talk. It used to be a bad habit of mine to use that template ( all this _____ makes me ______) as a reason to be less whole than was real.

Growing up - growing out - growing into -    shed         reworking our gumbee selves and trying to climb out of ovens that we stayed too long in and now we're hard and we have to twist and painfully crack our crusts so we can remember how to let things pass through us again

The hardest time of growing up (thus far) was when Melanie was 17, Savannah was 15, me 13, and Calvin 11. Three teenage girls, each with hormones that, when interacting, disrupted the earth's magnetic field. At one point, when we were all PMSing at the same time, my mom got so frustrated with our high pitched bickering that she tied all of our long ponytails together.

Blond, brown, and strawberry-blond curls wrapped and knotted.  We couldn't believe she actually did it, so we just stood still for a minute with our backs to each other, a thick mass of hair in the middle. My mom couldn't believe that she just did what she had always jokingly threatened. She covered her mouth with a hand to hide her smile.

Then our anger caught up with us again and we reached our hands back and yanked at each other. We were rotating in a tight circle, our heads jerking and bucking. But it worked. By the time we had figured out how to get our long, curly hair untangled, we were all friends again and laughing.

Poor, poor, poor, poor, poor Calvin.

Although, he is so far beyond his years in understanding girls. Your welcome, brother. And yes, I too am glad that the hellish fever dream of puberty is over.

Friday, July 11 2014

At work yesterday I was digitizing some old cassette tapes as part of the "Cratis Williams" collection. The warm, cantankerous, wavering voice of an old Appalachian woman sung out a Scotch irish ballad into a hand held recorder made in the seventies.  I imagined the hands that held the recorder to have swollen knuckles and splotchy red pink tan skin. The foamy headphones warmed my ears and I folded my legs under my long skirt. It's a great job, being a research assistant in Special Collections. The Cratis Williams collection has been an interesting one to curate. Williams used to be the dean of the graduate school here at App, and most of the collection are recordings of his own lectures or talks he gave on radio shows. His voice is really kind and rumply and he travels the country to talk about how special Appalachia is. I like it because after a few hours of listening to the Appalachian accent, my bias and instinctual reaction (one of dislike and inferiority, and I'm ashamed to admit it) goes away and you start hearing the poetry and rhythm and style of these people who drop the hard g's that I grew up with.

But the latest cassettes have been recordings of mountain folk singing their old old ballads. These Appalachian ballads are sung by old people living in hollows and valleys who I am certain have warm, crinkly kind eyes and richly lined faces and smile lines. But the ballads themselves remind me a lot of Grimm's fairy tales. Meant to teach something moral in a horrifying way. But the latest one was about a man who stuck pins and needles into babies and then drowned them in bath tubs. Not clear what was being taught there.

About seven minutes into the tape,  the scream of a little girl cut through the recording. I jumped in my chair, my cross-legged knees banging into the desk.The old woman stopped singing.

"Whachu cryn fer?"

Mumbled, muffled noise. I didn't hear the little girl speak.

More shuffling and the screaming stopped. The old woman began her ballad where she left off. A minute later, the little girl started screaming again. There weren't any giggles. A loud old man voice started shouting. Twenty five minutes of the woman's creepy ballad sung against a backdrop of a child's screams and an old man's shouts.

It was a really eerie thing. I still feel a bit unsettled about it. Listening to that recording reminds me of the weird, contradictory energy of the Appalachians.

The way a fierce, tight brutality runs in these people. It's un-rippable and it's coiling through stone and it's about making a home in an inhospitable place. The same way the relentless whip of the winter wind here scrapes and smacks everything into hard, bent shapes            - -

         - -   these people have roots.

And then there's a summer night like tonight. Walking down King Street. That mountain. The way the light hits the green is incredible and soft. Old people in lawn chairs at the Jones House. Most of them don't have an expression on their face but they clap loudly and holler when the song ends. Their jaws hang open slightly cuz they don't care to stop what their bodies want to do anymore. The air tastes like laurel. Sweet, pressing harmonies that strain, rising for fifteen seconds and then finally finally rubbing up against each other. They make you smile and cock your head and then nod and you say, "damn" in a fragile way. 

The band on the corner of Anna Banana's.
We drop our packs because they're doing a folksy version of "Thrift Shop" by Macklemore and somebody has bongos and the weirdness has a great beat. We almost start swing dancing but then the song ends. We thumbs up them and keep walking. Cut through hilly alleyways. A guy on a motorcycle almost runs us over. Speeds up when he sees us. Rudest guy in Boone. But we pushed to opposite sides of the street and laughed and for the next fifteen minutes you lamented that you didn't pull out your camera quicker. Would've made for a great picture. Hell, with this light everything would be a great picture.

We make it to the old venue across from char. Live big band and everything. Swing dance is one of the best things that's ever happened to me. To keep up, there's no room for self consciousness or thoughts. Body wisdom talks to your body wisdom and you kick your heels up and the smoothness is like the rush when you drop real quick on a roller coaster except more fun. It's a boh oh oh oh own thing.

Shuffle and stomp and toss your hair over a shoulder. Ponies. Eventually our hands get so sweaty that we lose our grip but it's okay we'll both just keep spinning and reaching out for each other.

Saxophones and trumpets and a classy lady voice cooes into the mic.

We dance and laugh when we try to make it sexy, try to match that sax that gets in through your toenails and works its way up up up.

Coffee ice cream and lots of water to wash down a really dizzy and stylish night.

Things hold on so tight here that sometimes you forget that a moment and a moment and a moment just happened until you don't. 

Connor, Sam, Doug, Emily. good company.

this is about holding hands.

riversummerboone

This is my first summer in Boone. Summers that aren't summers spent at home in South Carolina are still disorienting to me. Sometimes I miss the crawling heat of sticky air up my spine, under my clothes, the tops of my arms burnt and freckling.

Before I ever thought about my dirty glass eyes, I looked through them in earnest.

I see eight adults and twelve kids packed into a tiny shack that sits contentedly on the edge of the Chechessee river. I see them all dancing in a moonlit spring tide. The dock is under three feet of water on this one night of the year. They can't see the end of it and laugh when one more step is a soft dark plunge into the river. Surprised by the lack of impact, their knees tingle.

The kids try to see who can touch the bottom first, digging up pluff mud with their hands to prove it. The adults hate this. There was a boy who drowned last year. He dove to the bottom and sunk his feet into the ambiguous brown. When he pushed his arms up and down he didn't go anywhere. His feet got suctioned to the bottom.

Pluff. A good name. An onomatopoeia for the sound of anything that touches the bottom of salt-water rivers.

It is day and I see them catch stingrays off the dock. It is evening and the sun hits the marshes from behind. Yellow green reflections and an undulating orange sun fills the landscape. It wavers and persists, suspended. They take a johnboat out to catch dinner. My dirty glass eyes watch my brother cast a shrimp net. He stands on the bow of the boat. His feet are maps of sophisticated oyster cuts. They sting a little. His red curls are pushed to one side by the wind. He bites an edge of the net in his teeth the way my uncle taught us. The tiny lead weights threaded around the bottom of the net taste smooth and salty in his mouth. He spreads his arms wide and grabs the farthest ends of the net he can. His burnt shoulders flex. One. Lean. Two. Lean. Three. Lean. His arms swing through the air. They never stop adjusting for the shifting weight of the net. They never stop calculating. When he is taut and long and at his most reaching he releases. The net flies high, no longer a part of him but he still leans with it. It spins and takes a fuller shape as it drops.

It’s about to touch the surface of the water and it's an impressive circle. The weights make the ends snaggletoothed but the net itself puffs up beautifully for just a moment before it races through the water, following the lead.

Sink sink sink sink. Plastic line runs through his fingers. Chink. Lead weight hits bottom. Pluff. Calvin leans back, pulling the line up. He grabs the bright blue bunched top that's green in the brackish water. He shakes it out on the floor of the johnboat. Shrimp fall with shivering plunks. We all race to pick them up by their tails and put them in the cooler.

We ride back home and wait in line to shower with the hose outside. Seven of us wait with shampoo in our hair while Melanie washes it out first. We laugh and spike our hair up until each of our heads is a foamy white hershey kiss. It's dinnertime. Buttery grits and shrimp leak through paper plates and make our laps warm and damp.

There is one tiny TV in the house and nobody uses it except sometimes for jeopardy. Grayson (we called him MayDay) crawls into my lap when we watch it. I scratch his head and smell his little boy smell. Apples and laughing. All twenty of us shout the answers and argue good-naturedly and we take dance breaks if our favorite soul music comes on. Bare feet on cool, sandy linoleum twist to ain’t no mountain hiiiiiiiiiiiiigh enough ain’t no river wiiiiiiiiiide enough.

The first person to wake up woke everyone up with coffee smell and unsuccessful attempts to not trip over all the leaky air mattresses and soft bodies molded to the hardwood floor. If you pressed your cheek to the dark brown floorboards and closed your eyes and did a big inhale you'd smell the rich, dark, sweet soil that lives next to the river where raccoons run up palm trees and fiddler crabs lift their claws at you and you believe a little bit in the Gullah voodoo.

Something about the way Spanish Moss hangs like old people hair.

Weeknights we watch the big shrimp boat next door come in every evening and after they tie it up they let us jump off the bow. Savannah takes pictures in black and white.

Grayson frozen in the air, his brown body a sharp, triumphant outline against the sky.

By the end of the summer, the sun has crisped our faces and made a harder line between our bodies and the rest of the world. We know our shapes better.

It's a different heartbeat in the mountains. Somebody showed me how to look at my dirty glass eyes. Sometimes I don’t remember how to look through them. I’m in college and always trying to think my way towards something. I'm trying to peel away the gum and the crust, and squeeze a hard pit in my palm. If I'm not careful, I'll forget about the wisdom in those softer bits. The cartilage and flesh that make up everyday experience. The feeling of sand on cool linoleum floors.

 I don't want to be consumed in my truth seeking. I don't even want to always have the big picture in mind. Excelsior and all that. I'm not the whole trembling mosaic of place. I'm a tremble part.
My ego just flew away on the tail of a Marvin Gaye song. It will come back. This is a good scab to pick at. It's a good hurt to feel again and again. Everything’s much fresher underneath.

On Language

Elegies and Vacations

from Hank Lazer's Elegies and Vacations (pg. 49)

if i call you
every day
if i call you
every hour
i can get down to
an increment of time
in which change
cannot take place

that anti
epiphanic space
the im
perceptible
modulation
of current circumstance

not repetition
but as stein
had it
minute
differences in
insistence

and somehow
everyone comes to be
an old one

and when we
look closely
very closely

"it is a very
difficult thing
to know anything
of the being
in any one"


Pema Chodron insists that there is no solid ground. That we will fall through anything we thought was bottom. That nothing lasts, that the beloved will, given enough time, become unrecognizable.

And Lazer asks, what if I refuse to look away? Even for a moment. What if I call you every day/ call you every hour. What if I pay close enough heed to each passing moment that change cannot  take place.

Yet, even if one could bend down and collect each moment as it falls, explanation does not erase the distance between "then" and "now."

My mom likes to tell a story about my older sister, Savannah. When Savannah was four, she knocked a glass of water off the table. My mom handed her a dishrag. Savannah got down on all fours, soaked up all the mess, proudly smiled, and, seeing that her rag was full, wrung it out. The water poured back onto the floor. Savannah mopped it back up. And when she saw that her rag was again too wet to soak up any more water, she squeezed it back out on the floor. Several times this happened before my mom stopped her.

(stagnate) 
1. to cease to run or flow, as water, air
2. to stop developing, growing, progressing, or advancing

When our actions don't create space, when we wring the wet towel out onto the floor over and over, when our perspective rusts the gears and constricts the throat of potential, we are made stagnant.

Lazer recognizes the futility in resisting movement. somehow/ everyone comes to be/ an old one

And finally, it is a very/ difficult thing/ to know anything/ of the being/ in any one . When we do look closely enough, we recognize that different things
have/are/will
passed/passing/will pass
through you and I, and "keeping up," looking down, breaking your back to pick up a never-ending trail of somebody else's moments, is to be made stagnant.