I spent forty beautiful minutes at Lake Bonnie Park, reading Mary Oliver and Robert Hoss.

While I was reading Hoss’ poem, I just kept thinking about the astounding similarities and defining differences between the two’s world view. Even more than Mary Oliver’s poetry, though, I kept bringing it back to Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself.

Robert Hoss looks at the world and is wowed. Not being able to sustain wonder, he says, is an evolutionary coping mechanism to getting us out of worshiping nature and onto more productive ventures. If we could be as amazed at everything as we were the first time we saw it, or experienced it, “we’d have never gotten off of our knees.”

Clearly being amazed by the world is something deeply personal.

Walt Whitman, in the same way, is always delving into nature. (Oliver, too. I keep leaving her out like the redheaded stepchild.) He’s amazed by the texture of grass and the scent of the woods and wet moss, and the perfume of the world and the call of the birds, the toads, the wild cats. He is always talking about replying to the call of the wild.

Mary Oliver, in the same way, references nature in a glorious, gorgeous simplicity. The common ground between all of them is their reverence of nature. Between Oliver and Whitman, though, in their natural world, God is never far off.

Walt Whitman says that the grass is like a handkerchief, dropped by God, so that people can explore it and prod at it and ask who it belongs to, and they will find his signature in the corner.

Hoss looks at the grass and comments on how inexplicable the evolution of the world into something this diverse and beautiful was. Where Whitman sees God, Hoss sees “cells dividing” and multiplying in complex ways. His eyes are open, much more than anyone I know, but his heart seems to be closed.

i.

I fall onto the earth,
heavy like the wave against the coast,
and just as naturally.
my hipbones were made to dig into the earth
as defined as shovels,
to anchor me into the grass.

ii.

The suns rays are like golden liquid today,
and they greet me like an old friend;
I get the sense that they have travelled
a thousand miles to nudge me with warm fingers.

I feel swallowed by their heat,
my heart patting a happy rhythm through my shirt,
digging itself a burrow,
half in my rib cage,
half-escaped into the soil.

iii.

Whitman says that this grass
is a handkerchief dropped by God,
so that we can search every inch.
And maybe he meant God, of Israel,
or maybe god, a literary device
that means something to old poets,
a kind of textured idea that sits in place of
love or justice or maybe condemnation
but I have my face pressed into the grass,
and I can feel capital-G-God's signature against my face,
as flamboyant as any John Hancock.

In my head, I can't help but smirk as I wonder,
"Whose?"

iv.

My philosophy is mind over matter,
so today I am nourished not by food,
but by photosynthesis,
and instead of the heat swallowing me whole,
I will swallow it:
absorb it through my leafy arms,
breath it in, hold my breath to wring every
drop of sunlight from the air.
It is summer
and my body is limitless.

v.

When I look at nature,
I use mostly my heart and my eyes a bit,
and leave my glasses at home,
so that I can see it face to face.
The edges blur, but the color is more than real.

vi.

A girl thinking about the near-nudity
of deep summer
told me she relies on water, lately,
and asked if I was doing the same.
Determined today to soak up only the sun,
I can't help but think about her.
The oak tree, maybe he's embarrassed
about the size of his roots, but I have my doubts.
I, though... I told her no.
I explained that the dimensions of my hips,
they didn't have anything to do with the
dimensions of my heart,
and that my legs could take me past ten miles of asphalt
if I put one foot in front of the other.

"Nature" and "human" are not such dissimilar ideas.
"Art" is not so far off, either.

If you took a blueprint of my body, or yours,
you would see how perfectly the joints fit,
how gloriously functional every chamber is.
A portrait of my crooked heart would show
that one of the doors opens and directs traffic
the wrong way
down a one way corridor.
Still, it's beaten a million times,
to bring me here,
to right here,
to right now.
So that I could swallow the sun on a steamy afternoon.

vii.

When I get up,
I comb bits of tree-debris and dry grass from
my hair, that too, wind tangled,
a modern day Rip Van Winkle,
and the world is different.
Darker now, and cooler,
the remnants of a summer afternoon's heat
still soaked into the grass,
my shirt,
my skin, warm to the touch.

I kiss the grass goodbye.
I know whose.

viii.

dear world,
my heart is an empty room.
come set up camp.

The first things that struck me about this poem:

1. This poem was s full of casual name-dropping allusions.

2. This poem is very aware of itself as a poem, and as literature, commenting constantly on poetry and literature.

3. The amount of science dropped just as casually into a poem is much more unusual to find than allusions. Allusions are commonplace, but for some reason (I think because of the distinictons we make between right-brained and left-brained and asking people to identify themselves as one or the other…) we assume that people interested in science and people interested in literature are exclusive audience, and that one reads Nation Geographic and the other reads The New England Review.

4. State of the Planet has such a fundamental curiosity about life and the world around it, while (and this ties into numero tres) also being deeply connected to literature and beauty and unanswerable, doubt churning questions. (“Cells that divided and reproduced. From where? Why?”)

5. The subject of this poem, for the first few sections, comes back to a girl. She’s running and it’s raining and she’s observing the beauty of the world and nature. In her bag, is a book, dog eared (well read / well loved) with a title “like” Getting to Know Your Planet, but then the subject of the poem seems to be the world itself; its beauty; its majesty; its history. But it keeps coming back to this girl. She understands the accidents of the universe, because she had an accident spilling milk that morning; and it comes back to her, her hair wet, and windshield wipers clearing her view out of the car.

6. So much geology, along with science and evolution and literary allusions.

7. Some of the imagery and lines were so unexpected. The rest of this will be about my favorites and what I got from them.

A. Section 1: “One of the six billion of her hungry and curious kind.” I love the image of this girl, running in the rain, (I privately imagine her laughing) to get to her car, her bag thump-thumping against her bag, filled with a dog eared book. This image seems to be a set up for the entire poem: with the human hungry and curious about the world around her, and experiencing the beauty of it both cognitively read-this-book-a-thousand-times and in a practical, feet-squishing against wet grass sort of way.

B. Section 1: “… that this was something we’ve done quite accidentally, which she can understand, not having meant this morning to have spilled the milk.” The two things I love about this line are that, one, the author uses the typical spilled-milk regret, (something that, as the saying goes, there is literally no use for) to draw a parallel with global warming / temperature change, and two, that a girl can sympathize with an entire planet’s mistake because she spilled a liquid. (Or an everyman object for her failures.)

C. Section 2: “Pacific Salmon nosing against dams … in a rage to breed.” Salmon literally jump up waterfalls to get upriver to breed each year, so the image of them confused and unable to pass a man made structure was really evocative, to me, and pretty much defines the entire theme of this poem.

D. Section 3: “… their bodies must be so strange to them. An artist in Chicago – thinking of a great trading city in Dacia or Thracia – has asked to learn the method so he can sell people dogs that glow in the dark.” Man is always using nature to direct him, getting ideas from it, imitating it. This is unnerving in the most satisfying way.

I love ambiguities in characters. Not only was This Blessed House gorgeous in terms of storytelling and prose, but also the characters. I was totally charmed by perky Twinkle and gruff Sanjeev.

Twinkle and Sanjeev’s characters were revealed bit by bit on practically ever page, even in moments I didn’t expect. One simple action (like when Sanjeev is alphabetizing his library of engineering books) at first glance didn’t mean anything, but on further reflection, represented somehow the totality of Sanjeev. That was just so him. I found myself smiling. “Of course Sanjeev is alphabetizing his library.”

One of the best parts of this whole story, however, was the ending. Throughout the entire story, tension seems to be building between the two because of their differing ideas about the religious trinkets they keep finding. Twinkle is beyond tickled; wants to display them, put them on the counters and point them out. Sanjeev is not amused. He keeps having to point out to her that they are by no means Christians.

Sanjeev seems to keep giving in because he loves her, but at the same time, continues to become more and more frustrated. During the party, where Twinkle is enjoying herself and giving the guests tours of their home, complete with all kinds of Christian paraphernalia, Sanjeev is busy tending to the guests and their practical needs, food and drink and taking their coats.

In the end, Twinkle finds the crown jewel of all of the miscellaneous relics she and Sanjeev have discovered – a bust of Jesus Christ, and Sanjeev (reluctantly) carries it down to where she wants it. This decision, though, doesn’t explain his thought process. It seems to mme that there are two main ways he could be thinking. The first, is that he decides that his love for Twinkle conquers his embarrassment of his eccentricities and quirks.

We’re prone to assume this thought because we fall in love with Twinkle, and can see that he loves her.

The other is that Sanjeev has given in, but for all we know, is simply resigned in a bitter situation he is tired of making consolations in. For all we know, he is thinking about next week’s divorce.

Short Story: The Sunflower, the Seed, and the Scarecrow

NOTE: I'm a part of a livejournal community called Runaway Tales, which is a community for original fiction challeges. We have "flavors" (lists of word or phrase prompts, usually in groups of 30) and "toppings/extras" (things like different mediums, focusing a story on the villian, 5,000+ words, and less than 100 words.) We call anything less than 100 words a "pocky." I decided to write this story in a format we call a "pocy chain."

Each one of these scenes is literally EXACTLY 100 words. (There is no "or less" in a PC.) Getting things down to 100 words really makes you think about which ones are important. I hope you enjoy. I realize I'm not sure which character the focus is on here. I hope they both have layers.

Voila.

----------------------------------------------

There’s nothing sane or normal about Rylie Somewhere. She’s got caged animal eyes, and there’s something almost feral in her slinky posture.

Where she’s neon signs and cigarette smoke curled around her face like vapid quotation marks, he’s origami flowers and promises of better days and smells like flannel and sunshine.

There’s nothing well-adjusted or wholesome about the crook of her smile, or the twists of her labyrinth thoughts, but he can’t help but get tangled up in her anyway, in the threads of her insane life.

When they met, she was a gypsy with a fifty in both shoes.

&&&

He’s got this best friend who is all those things Rylie isn’t; sweet and teasing and well-adjusted. Her name is Zia and mostly she shies from calling Rylie by name.

She does this by not talking about her at all, but occasionally she can’t avoid it, and calls her “the problem child.”

When Nolan asks her about it, half offended and half amused, she tells him that one of them have to be the sane one, and he’s not stepping up to the plate.

She makes sense, but sometimes she wears that black dress and he forgets how to breathe.

&&&

In December, she cuts him out of her life, because he wants to be her knight in shining armor, her Hosea, and she’s never been comfortable being anybody’s anything.

If life is a game, Rylie’s a perpetual cheater, and if feelings were a draft, Rylie moves to Canada every time they get remotely close.

But she’s a botched abortion, so when life deals her a bad hand (two little lines on a stick she paid eleven dollars for) she thinks that it’s maybe she can let him be her rescue one more time.

She doesn’t know what else to do.

&&&

The first night she stops by, needing a place to stay, and scratching at her wrists like she’s tweaking, he hasn’t seen her in seven months.

He’s not even sure how she got his new address. Nolan shoves everything out of the guest bedroom that he uses as a library while she sleeps, regardless.

He tells Zia in an email, because she’ll find out soon enough, and she responds in all caps, with no punctuation. WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ARE YOU STUPID SHE’S BASICALLY EVIL, etc.

Thanks for your support, he writes, amused. She’ll be there at the welcome party.

&&&

She decides she’ll only stay for eight months, let him keep her in his little narrow yellow house until then, when she gives it away and it becomes someone else’s squirmy problem.

Anything more than that would be selfish.

She hadn’t expected for him to treat her like glass, to hold her in his hands like a butterfly-perch, careful not to make her uneasy about where she stood.

She’s a planner, logos with no pathos. She doesn’t have to account for feelings, other than how they factor into how other people react. Except, he’s throwing a wrench into her cogs.

&&&

She doesn’t know any other currency to use after he makes so many adjustments for her to move into his life, so after he throws her a housewarming party, like some kind of newlyweds, she crawls into his bed, attaching her mouth to his, and down his jaw, jugular…

“What are you doing?” he splutters, pushing her away.

She’s confused, because hello isn’t it obvious, and he’s a guy, so instead of taking his question at face value, she asks, flippantly, “Why not?”

“It wouldn’t be the same for you,” he says, and she has trouble getting warm all night.

&&&

She’s got a “killer” last name, just made to be written in lights or on CD covers, but Rylie’s only a Somewhere because her mom thought her stripper name would make a great real name, and so when she tells her friend Delia that she thinks about changing it, she gives her a blank look.

“Are you crazy?”

She gets lost in her head for a moment, because Delia sounds just like Him, all teasing terms of endearment and amused glances.

She thinks about the parasite she didn’t evict from her stomach, smirks hatefully at herself. “I guess I am.”

&&&

He leans over her stomach sometimes to talk to her unborn spawn. It makes her feel something like heartburn but with an added uncomfortable dimension.

“What are you doing?” she snapped, the first time. Soft emotions, soft words, all they do is make her itchy.

“Don’t you think she gets bored in there?” He asked her, big eyes wide, and mouth twisted around a friendly smile, no irony.

“She?”

“I’ve got a feeling,” he said, winking.

She put a hand to her stomach, not yet bulging, but something and shrugged. Her tone was lifeless when she scoffed. “I doubt it.”

&&&

Mama Somewhere used to put her on the porch with a coloring book and a half-circle of mosquito candles when she had clients inside, and Aunt Lucy couldn’t babysit, for hours at a time. Sometimes, she was exhausted and forgot about her.

Rylie learned how to pop her bedroom window by the time she was seven, just in case.

She told him that once, to hurt him when he was being all precious and stupid, and kind of regretted it, in a vague, practical sense. He pulled her into a hug, silently.

She still can’t stand the scent of Citronella.

&&&

By the time her stomach is finally beginning to get round, stretching her t-shirts and forcing her sweaters open like curtains framing her tummy, Nolan accidentally calls her baby a “she” at least three times a day.

Rylie’s still firmly using “it” so she thinks maybe he’s attempting to humanize it.

He says he has a feeling, shrugging apologetically when she glares at him after ever instance.

She knows, though, that it’s a boy. She tells him that and he raises an eyebrow. “Maybe,” he concedes, with a doubtful look.

It has to be. It’s hard to break a boy.

&&&

“I just need her for a few hours,” he finds himself pleading into his phone.

Zia sighs. “No way, Retard,” she jibes affectionately. “I wouldn’t even trust her with a flour baby. Think of the mess.”

“Zeeeee,” he drags out. “She’s pregnant! She probably has … instincts.”

Zia laughed. “Nolan, are you trying to test that out?”

He drummed his fingers against the kitchen table, waiting for her arrival. He lowers his voice to a hush. “She’s not keeping her.”

“You’re trying to change her mind,” Zia breathed. “This can not end well.”

&&&

“This is Zia’s niece,” he tells her, when she comes through the door.

“Ew,” is al she says, a reflexively. Hopefully he’ll think she’s joking.

He laughs, so he must.

“You want to hold her?”

“No,” she says, but she finds the thing pressed into her arms anyways.

“… She’s like a little person.”

Nolan’s amused. “She is a little person.”

She proceeds to spit up on her shoulder.

“Will you get me a clean shirt from the top drawer?” she asks, definitely not freaking out, and he can’t help but think that this is kind of a big deal.

&&&

“Would you hate her any less if she wasn’t so gorgeous?” Delia asks her, and Zia has a fleeting urge to smother her with a pillow.

“You mean if she wasn’t a vile seductress?” Zia corrected, and got serious. “You’re not supposed to be the level-headed one, D.”

Delia arched a perfectly sculpted eyebrow.

“Yes, yes, don’t be stupid. Whether she’s hot or not, she’s still an incubus. Succubus?”

“Incubi are men,” Delia confirmed absently.

“Right. When did you get smart?”

“Hey,” she scoffed, “I’m more than a pretty face. Give her a chance, and she might be, too.”

&&&

Zia brings pizza as a piece offering, one night, after Nolan tells her about the Baby Incident.

She doesn’t invite Delia, because for some reason she actually likes Rylie, in an unrestrained isn’t life peachy kind of way, instead of the way Zia tolerates her for Nolan’s sake.

He is going to get his heart broken, and someone has to pick up the pieces.

Except, there are moments in the middle when she witnesses them playing rock-paper-scissors to decide who’s doing the dishes, or playing these stupid games that Nolan made up, like fingershooting, that she almost doesn’t mind her.

&&&

“Let me keep her.”

He startles her so badly – in the middle of breakfast, no less! – that she almost falls out of her chair. He freaks out for a few minutes, before she assures him that she’s just fine, and so is her unborn.

“Number one: totally a boy. Number two: are you insane!?!?”

Nolan keeps staring at her, pretty lucid for being a crazy person.

“I –” he swallows, hard, “I think I’d be a good dad.”

“I know you would,” she says, and her throat feels shredded, like she’s talking around shards of glass. “That’s not the problem.”

&&&

She hasn’t wanted to know the entire pregnancy the gender of her baby (and she’s not an it anymore) because of this feeling.

She can’t give away a girl.

They’re fragile and so easily screwed up, with actions or with words or with looks.

“Your maternal instincts are better than mine, I guess,” she tells him, dark curls plastered to her sweaty face, from a hospital bed.

Rylie can’t get her to latch on and they might both burst into tears at any moment.

He picks her up, tickling her baby cheek with his finger. She sucks on it immediately.

&&&

She leaves her firstborn child in his arms and buys a train ticket.

It’s bee a month and she’s no good at this and she can’t ever make her shut up.

She can’t stay. And she can’t leave. And her heart wants her to do the things that will be the hardest for her, and so she does what she always does: she dodges the draft.

Except, he’s been her center of gravity for far too long.

At the first stop, she buys a ticket back with the emergency fifty she’s kept in her shoe since she was a kid.

&&&

She breezes back into his house past midnight, and only realizes when she’s halfway to her room that the door isn’t locked.

He’s asleep at a kitchen chair, little Norah resting against his shoulder, a bottle still in his hand.

“Hey,” she murmurs, pulling him gently from sleep.

“Hey,” he says, before he’s even got his eyes open – like responding to her is second nature to him now. Then,

with his eyes blinking away sleep, “Hey!”

He looks down at the sleeping bundle in his arms, a sleepy grin on his face. “Mommy’s home.”

Maybe she’s ready for this war.

1. Gorgeous. A poem that reads like a song and echoes in your mind like the ocean in a seashell. This poem drew me in and made me fall in love with it, even with phrases that turned me on my head.

2. This poem feels so dated in the best way. I thought at first its tone was so very fifties - sixties - seventies because it was written then, but by the end of the poem, it’s apparent that the subject is dated, or at least, is talking about (and the narrator is thinking about) the past. Perfect blend.

3. I love the sense of well-rounded, well-read worldliness that comes from this poem. Madame Descartes is clearly very sharp, even in her old age, dropping the names of famous photographers casually, on a friend – basis, and talking about cameras and her famous photographs and quoting her reviewers with her tongue planted firmly in her cheek, and referencing St. Lawrence.

4. Some really gorgeous lines: “not tea, but her usual sequence of afternoon aperitifs, in slender glasses” … “the late novel that embarrassed several continents.” … “sea-blue eyes that’d commandeered both men and newspapers for forty years.”

5. I love when figurative and metaphorical language is mixed. The last line, I realized that the man had come to talk to or interview Madame Descartes, and she leaves him stunned and awestruck of how self-possessed and clever she is, enraptured in her stories, and feeling self – conscious; (metaphorically) turning the tables that he is (quite literally) ripping like a small child.

6. All of the language of her eye made the “nearly opaque” line, about her eyes, pop out at me on a reread. A famous photographer for years, and now at this lunch, she makes it obvious that going blind or not, she still sees much of what the world does not care to.

While reading Sonny’s Blues, the language of it struck me before anything else. The author uses rapid-fire literary devices piled on top of each other delicately, like stacking dominoes on top of each other, each one shifted a little bit like a staircase. A few times, a metaphor would build on another, and I’d have to go back to the first and reread the chain reaction to realize what the sentence was talking about.

The first really interesting one comes early on – in the second paragraph, “a great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting … sending trickles of ice water up and down my veins.” He uses metaphors and similes and figures of speech with the same regularity that other authors commonly use nouns, or adjectives.
Each one made me think. They say that the difference between an artists brain and someone who isn’t particularly creative’s is the unlikely connections that creative people make. While reading this, I kept seeing what I’d call and unlikely connection metaphor and realize that it makes perfect sense, but that it was not something I’d ever think of.

“… the baby brother I’d never known looked out from the depth of his private life, like an animal waiting to be coaxed into the light.” This simile, like many of the authors, is not just a throw-away; it follow through logically in its other implications; without spelling it out, it made me think of how his brother probably could have been his close confidante during childhood if his older brother had every tried patiently to “coax him” out of the “darkness” instead of fighting with him all of the time.

He also uses a device several times that Navakov frequently employed: ending a figurative sentence literally or semi-literally, and vice versa. (IE ‘She fell out of the chair and into love.’) “walking barefoot through hot coals and arriving at wisdom.” “and when light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness.” “the car kept on a-going and it ain’t stopped till this day.”

This story emotionally affected me on another level, because I have an older brother dealing (or .. not dealing) with addictions to both drugs and pills, and so many of these lines made my heart spasm, describing the urge to look through his brother’s room but not having the courage, and the fact that he suppressed details of his brother to keep himself from going crazy with grief, and Sonny talking about people doing more drugs “In order to keep them from shaking to pieces.” But I can’t talk about that. I would like to say that I was impressed with the theme and emotions dealt with in this story, besides the language, though.