Facing the Muse

Nothing like a string of cloudy November days to bring on the poetry. Some weird combination of memory and melancholy gets evoked for me every year about this time. Here is a poem I wrote a few years ago after a prairie walk in the UW Arboretum.

FACING THE MUSE

At sunset wind rises
stirring tall grass the hiss
a murmur of childhood

a story a dream lost
in bittersweet colors
heavy metal November sky
trees going bare at winter's

breathy insinuations
so the bodies refuse
to stay underground
and the rumbling night train
calls me from sleep
run away run away run away

on the prairie at dawn
cold cheeks wet nose
wild asters periwinkle
at the edge of a swamp
it never ends
here never ends
lips moving the fingers
beginning to twitch

--RZC

Hooray for Taxes?

It really should not come as a surprise that the healthiest states (excellent public health, low rates of obesity, smoking, cancer death, and higher numbers of doctors per capita) would be largely blue states. Likewise that the least healthy are mainly red states in the south. Check out the survey published by Forbes for the breakdown.

I think there should be a campaign on the order of Ladybird Johnson's Clean-Up America in the sixties to bring people back around to the idea that taking care of each other as a community (i.e., paying taxes to fund education, public health, health care for all, etc.) is actually the best way to take care of ourselves and our country's future. Let's put Madison Avenue on it. Seriously. I remember a time before it became shameful to just dump the garbage from your car on the street. I know it still happens, but nowadays, it is shocking, like watching a pregnant woman smoking a cigarette and drinking a martini.

Imagine a campaign to encourage people to enjoy paying taxes and the societal improvements that come from that.

Just a Touch of Chaos

As of today I will have no stove, which was, I must remind myself, my choice. Next week we have to figure out how to get the refrigerator into the dining room, so that the week after, my carpenter can begin deconstructing the kitchen.

In the planning stages, this all had seemed like such a good idea -- get the carpenter in quickly after the move and get the kitchen in shape in time for the Christmas cooking. Now, of course, I'm asking myself why I didn't consider giving myself more breathing space before I turned my abode to (semi) chaos again. I don't like to think too much about the fact that the older I get, the more recovery time I want from every sort of change that comes my way. Even the good stuff.

My carpenter promises that he will be dedicated (his word, kind of lovely, I thought) to my job. I think what he meant was that he wouldn't be juggling me with another project for the space of our remodel. But the counter people and the electrician have given no such assurances.

What we're doing here is actually pretty simple. We love the old, original cabinets and we're keeping them. Mainly we're just moving things around to create better working space, bringing in appliances that better fit the scale of the kitchen and countertops that can stand up to a lot of messy Italian cooking. Okay, simpler than gutting the place and starting from scratch.

I suppose it is best to just get this over with. Sort of like couples who decide to have the second child before the first is out of diapers because might as well get it all over with up front. But I have enjoyed my -- so far -- one week of peace and quiet, with our things organized enough to begin to feel like home. I know where to find all my clothes and most of my shoes. We're getting the rhythm of trash removal here and everyone's laundry schedules. During the week, the students are mostly pretty quiet and we don't hear as much on the weekends as we thought we might. We've begun to sleep very well in our new place. I still need a good book to read, but other than that, the last 10 days have been pretty sweet.

I'm going to need a very good book to read.

Ave Atque Vale

I love the way Billy Collins can wring so much humanity from a commonplace experience. This poem stopped me this morning. A touching and dignified eulogy to road kill.

AVE ATQUE VALE

Even though I managed to swerve around the lump
of groundhog lying on its back on the road,
he traveled with me for miles,

a quiet passenger
who passed the time looking out the window
enjoying this new view of the woods

he once hobbled around in,
sleeping all day and foraging at night,
rising sometimes to consult the wind with his snout.

Last night he must have wandered
into the road, hoping to slip
behind the curtain of soft ferns on the other side.

I see these forms every day
and always hope the next one up ahead
is a shredded tire, a discarded brown coat,

but there they are, assuming
every imaginable pose for death's portrait.
This one I speak of, for example,

the one who rode with me for miles,
reminded me of a small Roman citizen,
with his prosperous belly,

his faint smile,
and one stiff forearm raised
as if her were still alive, still hailing Caesar.

--Billy Collins

Just a Touch of Hypochondria

I woke up this morning in my new bedroom, which now has curtains and walls in Andover Cream. Some of my favorite pictures are perched on dressers, waiting to be hung over the weekend. As I lay in bed I began to hear the slightly atonal song of the radiators coming to life and the hiss of plumbing from upstairs. None of these sounds were too loud -- they wouldn't have wakened me. But they made me remember that I am surrounded by people now, by other lives being lived in the other apartments around me and it made feel glad to be alive.

This gladness, of course, may be influenced by the fact that I fell asleep last night wondering if I might be having a heart attack and consigning myself to whatever powers may be. The life of a hypochondriac is ever complicated because every ache or pain suggests a myriad of horrible diseases and outcomes that almost always turn out to be nothing. I was half asleep when I felt a sharpish pain in my left chest that seemed -- I don't think it was my imagination -- to radiate into my left arm. I waited for it to get worse or for some other symptoms to appear. I considered the possibility that it was merely gas or some muscular thing trying to work itself out. I took my pulse, which aside from being slightly fast, seemed normal as ever. I noticed that I had no trouble breathing.

One may wonder why I did not wake the husband or call 911, but I have seen up close and in detail too many times what happens when a person goes to the emergency room complaining of anything that might be heart related. Honestly, I would prefer to be really dying before I put myself through that. So I waited. I got up, took some ibuprofen (note to self: keep some aspirin in the house for possible heart attack symptoms) and noticed that I did not feel weak or sick.

I went back to bed and decided to wait it out a while longer. The next thing I knew was the music of an apartment building preparing to meet the day. Life is good.

My Kingdom for a Book

I'm between books right now and I'm annoyed at how difficult it appears to be, deciding what to read next. After I finished An Echo in the Bone, the seventh and most recent installment in Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, I toyed with the idea of starting the whole saga over from the first book. I enjoyed this most recent outing of the series (there were a couple of semi-dead ones in the middle) and I wanted to hang on to Gabaldon's fictional world a while longer. It's always that way with the good books. You never want them to end. I get almost the same feeling coming home from a great vacation. I am not ready to come back to real life.

Then I read Michelle Wildgen's book which was so good and so satisfying, and I remembered how much I feel nourished by really good literary novels. I pulled Sarah Waters's The Night Watch from the shelf. Again. I've started that book twice before in the last year. I love her writing, and her earlier books, Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet are favorites. The thing is, the book is one of those time backwards plots -- combining, as in her earlier works, elements of history and thriller -- starting in post-world War II London. The sort of lonely, bombed-out picture she recreates in the first chapter just made me think of all the suffering yet to get through, and I put it down again. I really truly will read that book, and when I do I will no doubt love and admire it. But at the moment, I just can't seem to face going through it.

I've considered re-reading Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles. On the plus side, she has created a flawed and enigmatic hero moving around in the fascinating, historical world of 16th-century Europe. On the negative side, I have read through this series twice before, and ditto the suffering.

In his marvelous little book The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot, Charles Baxter speculates that the reason we mainly see people in airports reading escape fiction -- romance, thrillers and the like -- is that the stress and anxiety of travel is enough challenge for most of us. We want something formulaic. We do not want difficulty or suffering unless we can be sure things will work out and the world will be returned to order at the end of the story.

Our whole lives seem stressful enough these days, with all the uncertainties of the economy, the long drawn out battle over health care and climate change and the conduct of our government in two wars and its schizophrenic approach to social justice. An uncertain future is certainly the background noise of our lives today in a way it was not 10 years ago. Add the various, unavoidable and stressful events of your own life to that, and escape fiction starts to look pretty good.

I'm happy to report that actually, I don't want to read something plainly formulaic. I'd like some good writing, an element of surprise. It's just the suffering I would prefer not to live through -- vicariously, as we do when we read good fiction. At least right now.

So, where does that leave me? Anyone out there got a suggestion of a satisfying, well-written novel that won't drag me through hell? I would be very grateful.

Laundry: Who Knew?

Today is supposed to be laundry day, and I'm nervous as hell about it. That was embarrassing to admit -- even to myself -- but I have been planning for the last week that this would be the day and here it is, and I'm scared to go downstairs.

Let me back up. One of the reasons I fell for this building, the clincher, perhaps, after seeing the apartment itself and realizing it had a lot of potential, was the laundry room in the basement. The room is large, neat and orderly, with a high ceiling and windows set high up on two walls that look out to the south and west sides of the building. I first saw it on a sunny, summery day, with light streaming over the washers -- 4 of them, in fact. There are also three dryers, and gleaming stainless steel tables for sorting and folding. And then there are the laundry chutes that originate in each apartment and terminate above one of the tables. Unlatch the little door at the bottom and your clothes are meant to slide out. I haven't tested this yet. It is charming and magical and also part of what scares me.

I don't know the routines here yet. I walked through a wave of humid, fabric softened air on my way out the building yesterday morning. So, someone does their laundry on Monday. I'll admit, I feel intimidated by the possibility of having to compete for the machines. And the thought of anyone witnessing the sorting of my dirty laundry. Many years ago, when Frank and I first were dating, he suggested we do our laundry together at the laundromat down the street. He was all about how practical money-saving it would be to combine loads. I had to swallow hard at the image of our dirty underthings thrashing around together in a public machine. Were we ready for that yet?

I am in most ways one of the least private people I know, but there is something incredibly intimate about laundry, and I'm used to keeping mine to myself. I must have heard too many times the adage about airing one's dirty laundry in public. I understood it was meant as a metaphor, but it always grabbed me. No, we do not want that.

There are rules here at the co-op about what times you can do your laundry -- not too late, not too early -- but I can't remember them right now and I can't seem to find the stack of papers in which the co-op rules are hidden. I don't know yet, either, whether I need to worry about using up too much hot water, particularly now in the morning, when people might need to take showers and get ready for their day.

Oh, hell. It's just laundry, for crying out loud.