When I was wondering what created the mountains that seemed to uniformly end in long broad plateaus, Larry said, “They ran into height restrictions in the building code.”

Later we were talking about how hard it is to make a living as any kind of artist, and Larry noted “Poets are lucky because they know up front that it’s hopeless.”

The scenery around Sedona is really amazing, rust red cliffs of magical shapes. Canyons and rock walls everywhere, but still green areas around the rivers. The town itself, though was almost exclusively tourist dreck of the worst sort, with an odd penchant for larger than life statues of animals, birds, and insects. Many of these were in blown glass or colorful metal. Larry wondered what the archeologists of the future would make of the two-foot mosquitos.

And finally, after an evening that featured Beatles songs on guitar as cocktail music, Larry said, “Can you imagine the reputation of the Beatles today if they’d all died in a plane crash in the mid-70′s.  What wonderful things we would have thought they would go on to do…”

On Walking Backwards

My mother  forbad  us to walk backwards.  That
is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did
she get  this idea?  Perhaps from a  bad  transla-
tion.  The dead, after all, do not walk backwards
but they do walk behind us.  They have no lungs
and  cannot  call  out but  would  love  for  us  to
turn  around.  They are victims of love,  many of
them.

I really didn’t know what to make of her work, so before the reading, I asked a few students (this was at Stanford), whether they were studying her, and how they approached her work. The said their professor had said to be open to the work and take what you can from it. So I sat with open ears in the audience. Ken Fields gave a marvelous and very laudatory introduction, including students’ reaction to NOX, an elegy for the author’s brother, based on an elegy by Catullus, including photos, memorabilia, etc. and released as an accordion sheet of paper in a box (a box of NOX, Dr. Seuss might observe). Ken quoted several of Carson’s zingy one liners, like this one from Red Doc, her latest book: ““You could take the entirety of the common sense of humans and put it in the palm of your hand and still have room for your dick.”

Carson read a couple of her Short Talks. and then said she had just finished reading Proust in French and would read 59 numbered paragraphs about Albertine, the love interest in the novel. She said she numbered the paragraphs for two reasons; I remember one: to give the listener hope. I found the reading interesting, but would have been very satisfied with 19 numbered paragraphs about Albertine, and a lot more hopeful.

Introducshin

This is My Diary
in every few years this will
seem silly.
c                               End

I was happy win I
wrote this I had a leaf and
put it in clas 1A, Oct. 5 1955 .
Meryl Barbara Natchez
Mary 4, 19457

last night I wrote a pome:

Spring is here now finly

xxx 
I still remember how that poem started:

Spring is here now finally,
Spring is here to stay.
Spring will be here until
Summer comes our way…

There was a stanza for every season. What’s remarkable to me is that I was self-conscious from the first entry on, something that still plagues my writing. Also, I never could spell, and it’s been a very long time since I thought of myself as Meryl Barbara Natchez.

front garden

Labyrinth 5-13

back garden

lettuce & peas

beans

berries & bees

wildflowers

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Wordpress Slideshow

2.1.17

It’s hard to be indoors at all…

“Once this thought crossed my mind: every time an author dies, out of respect a word should also pass out of being. A word the author loved and used repeatedly in writing–that word should be theirs and die with them. Nabokov: quiddity. But who should decide? The one who passes or the one who is left bereft? And who is the real widow? It is language herself, and her decision is clear: she does not want one of her children to throw herself in to the grave pit of an old man. Quiddity: the essence of a thing; also a trifling point, a trivial, inessential thing.”

Although, before Nabokov, George Herbert titled a short poem about poetry, “The Quiddity,” You can look it up if you’re interested…  What would happen to that if we threw the word into Nabokov’s grave? And I like that Ruefle has the compassion to define quiddity for us, as opposed to sending us to the dictionary. But isn’t it odd that the word also seems to mean its opposite?

Rite of Passage

As the guests arrive at my son’s party
they gather in the living room–
short men, men in first grade
with smooth jaws and chins.
Hands in pockets, they stand around
jostling, jockeying for place, small fights
breaking out and calming. One says to another
How old are you? Six. I’m seven. So?
They eye each other, seeing themselves
tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their throats
a lot, a room of small bankers,
they fold their arms and frown. I could beat you
up, a seven says to a six,
the dark cake, round and heavy as a
turret, behind them on the table. My son,
freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks,
chest narrow as the balsa keel of a
model boat, long hands
cool and thin as the day they guided him
out of me, speaks up as a host
for the sake of the group.
We could easily kill a two-year-old,
he says in his clear voice. The other
men agree, they clear their throats
like Generals, they relax and get down to
playing war, celebrating my son’s life.

*             *              *              *

The One Girl at the Boys’ Party

When I take my girl to the swimming party
I set her down among the boys. They tower and
bristle, she stands there smooth and sleek,
her math scores unfolding in the air around her.
They will strip to their suits, her body hard and
indivisible as a prime number,
they’ll plunge in the deep end, she’ll subtract
her height from ten feet, divide it into
hundreds of gallons of water, the numbers
bouncing in her mind like molecules of chlorine
in the bright blue pool. When they climb out,
her ponytail will hang its pencil lead
down her back, her narrow silk suit
with hamburgers and french fries printed on it
will glisten in the brilliant air, and they will
see her sweet face, solemn and
sealed, a factor of one, and she will
see their eyes, two each,
their legs, two each, and the curves of their sexes,
one each, and in her head she’ll be doing her
wild multiplying, as the drops
sparkle and fall to the power of a thousand from her body.

Sharon Olds

Perhaps this is why this extraordinary poem by Brigit Pegeen Kelley that appears just to tell a story is so powerful. I say “appears” because this may be real or may not, but in either case is enhanced by the language of the telling:

The Dragon

The bees came out of the junipers, two small swarms
The size of melons; and golden, too, like melons.
They hung next to each other, at the height of a deer’s breast,
Above the wet black compost. And because
The light was very bright it was hard to see them,
And harder still to see what hung between them.
A snake hung between them. The bees held up a snake,
Lifting each side of his narrow neck, just below
The pointed head, and in this way, very slowly,
They carried the snake through the garden.
The snake’s long body hanging down, its tail dragging
The ground, as if the creature were a criminal
Being escorted to execution or a child king
To the throne. I kept thinking the snake
Might be a hose, held by two ghostly hands,
But the snake was a snake, his body green as the grass
His tail divided, his skin oiled, the way the male member
Is oiled by the female’s juices, the greenness overbright,
The bees gold, the winged serpent moving silently
Through the air. There was something deadly in it,
Or already dead. Something beyond the report
Of beauty. I laid my face against my arm, and there
It stayed for the length of time it takes two swarms
Of bees to carry a snake through a wide garden,
Past a sleeping swan, past the dead roses nailed
To the wall, past the small pond. And when
I looked up the bees and the snake were gone,
But the garden smelled of broken fruit, and across
The grass a shadow lay for which there was no source,
A narrow plinth dividing the garden, and the air
Was like the air after a fire, or the air before a storm,
Ungodly still, but full of dark shapes turning.

Brigit Pegeen Kelley

Here’s a scene from later that evening:

As it turns out, nothing gets better from here. But because the writing is so good, I gobbled the book like candy. It didn’t even last the whole pane ride home; I couldn’t ration myself. Now I’ve checked out her earlier novels from the library.  What a lucky find.

At the same time, I was encouraged to compete in the annual science fair. My biology teacher, Mr. Davis, suggested an experiment with Triboleum Confusum, the common flour beetle. When populations of this beetle reach a certain density, they stop reproducing. He suggested I use jars of flour and beetles to test if the PH of the flour changes with the density of the population; the crowded beetles might emit some acidity-changing substance that affects their ability to reproduce. Although my mother wasn’t thrilled with inviting flour beetles into her kitchen, she wasn’t one to stand in the way of a budding scientist, and for months a corner of the kitchen was taken up with jars, flour, beetles, strips of litmus paper and my science notebook. 

I was entranced by the process of the experiment, and dutiful about checking the various environments every day. I still remember the thrill when the litmus paper began to change color. Now I imagine that Mr Davis knew the result before suggesting the experiment; he must have sensed how the drama of seeing and documenting a real scientific event unfold would motivate me.

As the weeks went by, and my I began making the poster-board charts that explained my process and results, I was called back for the cheerleading finals, even though I definitely wasn’t in the cheerleading clique. I traded some English paper editing for some cheerleader coaching, and practiced the routines, smiles, and flourishes as diligently as I recorded the slightly morphing colors of my litmus strips. I also got some unsolicited clothing advice; I began choosing my own clothes.

Perhaps because of my new relationship with the in crowd, I also acquired my first boyfriend, Ronnie Osachs. I went with him to the amusement park, the bowling alley, had hamburgers at the diner and my first kiss. Ronnie was a smart but uneven student, excelling in what interested him, but just getting by in other subjects. He was working on a science project too–building a rocket.

The day of the Science Fair arrived, and we set up our tables in the school gym. My mother was thrilled to see jars of beetles leaving her kitchen. Mr. Davis helped me arrange my posters. Ronnie’s rocket looked impressive and he had done a great job showing the stages of the process. Ronnie and I left the gym arm and arm to hang around with his crowd of friends who were beginning to be my friends. The next night the whole school was in the gym, looking at the projects, waiting to hear about the prizes. This was the year we had all watched a black and white TV suspended from the ceiling of the same room as Ranger 4 landed on the moon, matching the earlier moon landing by Russia. As yet no one had set foot on the moon, but Kennedy had committed our country to doing just that–a feat that seemed barely possible. Science was big.

As it happened, my flour beetle experiment won first prize. Ronnie’s rocket came in second. The look he gave me as we stood to receive our ribbons, mine blue, his red, made it clear that our romance was over. I ended up sobbing in the girls’ bathroom. I didn’t go on to compete at the state competition, despite Mr. Davis’ encouragement.

To everyone’s surprise, I actually made the cheerleading team. I remember overhearing someone on the squad say something like, “I guess they wanted a different type.” But I had already been accepted at the boarding school where I would spend the next three years. I remember my friends’ astonishment that I would abandon public school now that I’d made the cheerleading team. No one seemed surprised in the least that I’d abandoned my brief career as a research scientist. Just as there was no censure for my love of words–literature was perfectly acceptable for girls. And because my new high school had “new math,” I was forced to repeat geometry. The oppressive boredom of that year scuttled my infatuation with math. I became, for better or worse, a fuzzy, not a techie. I never took another science course, opting for Geology to fill my science requirement in college. Looking back, I see that until my teens, it could have gone either way; I had the aptitude and curiosity for either path.

If you wonder at the paucity of women of my generation in science and math, I’m sure you would find countless variations on this theme. Or perhaps some young woman is out there counting them for a dissertation in social science. I hope today’s science fair winners experience a different social environment–but I wonder.