No Rosetta Stone for the Language of Home.

"To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.” ~ Pema Chödrön

My final oral Spanish exam in college was spent mostly in the bathroom.  Technically, I kept my partner and professor waiting because I was dry heaving.  Contrary to popular belief, I don't talk well under pressure.  And yes, I can now say some of my favorite conversations have been with people who neither of us shared a common language--gestures, shouting single words, lots of hand movement, barely using grammar and always our faces for inflection.  But it's our faces, our consoling nods, even tears and of course the infectious state of laughter--is the sort language I don't shy away from learning.  It's when I feel I have to have the exact words, I freeze.

I passed that Spanish exam thanks to the young Barcalonian professor with a good sense of humor.  My partner was a pre-med student riding her grades with a focused hunger.  She had no interest in the subjunctive.  She merely wanted the exam to be perfect.  Why she selected me for her partner still baffles me, perhaps because I kept quiet while all the other pre-somethings shouted to be first.  Maybe because my homework was perfect.  I just never spoke.

Years later while sitting on a bus headed to the remote mountains in southern Poland did I realize why I once had a fear of a foreign language.  I really just like to listen.  I like time to take in the inflections, the slurs of z's of Polish, the nasal of French, the sing song to Italian--words in rhythm.  Frankly, it's poetry of people with their mouths open when you cannot know every word.  It's notes hanging in the air.  It's song when you finally learn enough to speak back.

Once while sitting next to a nun on a train, which could have been any train at any time of the day or night in Poland, I heard this word through the walls of another cabin being said with force.  I had only been in Poland a few short days and spent my first weekend exploring a small walled city.  It was dusk.  I had just been to Sandomierz, which is a city I say with fondness both in sound and knowing of its beauty.  But that night with all of us quiet in the cabin which is common practice when sharing a car with a holy person, I learned a new word.

At the beginning of learning Polish, I would just mouth the words or try to, when you are dealing with a language whose basic expression for sorry is prezprasham, it takes awhile.  But that word I heard through the walls was not sorry nor was it sandwich, it bellowed out into the silence with anger.  I thought part of the word was night, nods, so I tried mouthing it silently at first and then tried putting sound to it.  As soon as I said it out loud, the nun, looking straight up at me--eyes wide and and cold--did three hail marys and went back to her rosary beads.  I later learned the word was neither an expression for night or shoot.  Let's say the word involves the act of having sex with one's mother.

I would later hear that word being shouted at an airport in Amsterdam by a man who didn't have the right paperwork to travel to the US for Christmas, heard that word in alleys from men who sat there all day and only talked to dogs and silence and later would I find myself yelling it at a ticket taker on a bus when he claimed I was using the wrong ticket, a man who was using physical force with me to pay him 100 zloty.  But before that moment, I struggled with Polish.

I had come to Poland with the hope of getting a Fulbright to work on translations of Polish poetry.  Thought I might need to learn Polish first to do this.  I had a tutor who spoke perfect English, German and Russian and for two years I took lessons twice a week, only took public transportation and listened to Polish music in the mornings before teaching.  I thought I was a shoe-in for the scholarship.  Needless to say, the Fulbright was granted that year I applied to another University of Michigan grad whose name was Margozha, a Polish American who spoke perfect Polish.

A few days before I rode that bus where I was harassed by a ticket taker, I found out that I didn't get the scholarship and felt really depressed and sank into a state of sadness similar to the kind of sadness I had that morning of my oral exam for Spanish, frozen fear.  Textbooks claim people have flight or fight when faced with adversity.  Me, I just freeze.  I sink in a quiet space of total immersion in a state of hopelessness which is perhaps why  I am so fond of the Poles.  Polish, as you might imagine, have many expressions for ones soul being lost, ones sense of hope being grayed by an impossible future.
Yet what I also adore is the spirit that lies within these states of fielded grief.  Some bright poppy that rises from under the tank tracks dirt.  Hope in Polish is just as powerful as the word soul.

And maybe that's what happened that day, the day I was on a bus and punched my ticket after visiting my Polish tutor for the last time.  I was moved by hope.  I clutched my bag of grammar books and wondered if I would ever use them again and what was I going to do with my dream of translating, looking at the bus window of spring awakening, when suddenly, I was pushed.  Now being pushed isn't odd or startling in Poland, it's actually the norm in large crowds, but the bus had been empty.  This man already snarling pushed me again and told me I had the wrong ticket.  Shouting he told me to pay money in cash, now.  I didn't even budge.  I looked at my ticket and then up to his face and said, this is the right ticket, I'm not going to pay you.  He pushed again.  Shouted closer in my face, telling me I needed to pay.  And maybe this is when my instincts kicked in, when that fight arose.  But I didn't use physical force.  In perfect Polish, I said, go fuck yourself and your mother and stop yelling, stop pushing me.  Stop thinking because I am foreign it doesn't mean t don't understand rude.  He backed off.

I got off the bus shaking.  As I walked back to my apartment, I started to laugh.  Maybe out of relief or as a release, but mostly because I had done what I would never have been asked to do in a university setting, no poem would ask of me to shout back to a man with angry hands, no language tape would teach me to tell someone to fuck off with such clarity.  Such perfect pitch.

And maybe that's why this fall I felt lost the way I felt so lost when I first went to Poland.  I just didn't know the language, I don't speak home.  I felt I would return every day from work to a country whose language I didn't speak.  You cannot buy a Rosetta Stone for the language of home.  But I am learning.  The kick of the furnace in the cold morning, my footsteps on the newly laid wood floor and my view out my bathroom window after I ride my bike in the dark and how I can outline my leaf filled yard, slowly by visual memory as I look out from my shower in the dark.  This new country, my home I know has a language.  I keep telling myself, it's like Polish--a language people never expect someone to learn let alone become fluent.  Why take on something so difficult.  But I remind myself that this language of house is made up of words and it will take time to put into sentences.  Grout, molding and joist are to name a few.  A few I now put into sentences.

Now, I don't travel much unless it's to Home Depot or Lowe's.  But I think of it like a town in this new country, where I need to bring the right guide book along, make sure I have some idea of what I am looking for before I go, maybe I take a tour of say, light fixtures since I now know how to re-wire and install lights.

I remind myself that learning a new language like anything that is worth doing well, takes more time than you could ever imagine dedicating yourself giving.  Giving not because you expect something in return or a scholarship or award, because learning it is the act of being present.  The way learning another language helps you feel close to people so unlike you in history, but so close in spirit.  To try and get close enough.  Present enough to learn a new song, a swear word which might be just the right word at the right time.  Like in the crawl space with spiders and dust, I found myself, as might have imagined, cursing in Polish.  Cursing and smiling all at the same time to the silence of this new land,
this new nest.

My House is Built on Words

October arrives to Montana without the stark color changes and shift in winds as it does in Michigan.  But it comes.  Arrives with a crisp chill in the morning, wet rains that flirt with snow in the late evening and the scent of leaves (even though they aren't the hardwoods of my home) still smell the same.  And my favorite part, biking to work and seeing the peaks dusted white overnight.  October is such a full word, the shape of your mouth saying it--O c t o b e r--is so open like all the o's the word holds.  Open to so much change, so much shifting.

A curious fact about October is that more poems have been written during this month than any other.  Not too surprising since it is the month of shorter days and dramatic sun breaks away from the grey brings great relief.  Maybe since poetry has a way of slowing our thoughts down as does this month when we turn to our beds for longer hours of refuge, cook soups made of squash and drink tea to warm the chill do we have time to reflect.  More time for quiet.

I have a lot of quiet in my home.  Sometimes too much.  I hadn't noticed all this silence during the first few months of painting, grouting and yes I am proud to say even electrical installing of lights.  Bed was the only option after exhaustion.  Sleep a mere respite and then silence filled me.  I hadn't noticed the echo from all the absence of sound until I had to close my windows.  It can be an odd hum, silence, and a great welcome to the other sounds too often overlooked, the clock in another room, the shift of your weight in a chair and even the sound of your feet walking in socks on a wood floor and then the echo of trains passing behind muffled glass.

At night,  silence is the loudest and the least welcome.  I have been filling my days with new activities such as cyclo cross, starting a 30-day yoga challenge and taking a break from house projects.  Trying to fill my days with new sounds in order to find a new sense of myself in this familiar town.  But I must admit, it just feels like noise.  I really adore it all, especially the cyclo cross which exhausts me and asks more of my body than any other activity I have yet to try, but then I come home and hear the shift in sound to my refrigerator, my borrowed cat yawns and it is just the metal of my mailbox opening in hopes of word from afar and then closing that feels a bit empty.  A train calls out and leaves as if reminding me, I don't have to stay.

And so even now in the newly painted walls of my own home, the deed somewhere with my full name rests signed in black pen, I still return to what has comforted me when all I owned was a backpack and a quick smile, I return to words.  Words borrowed, written, asked out loud to all this silence and sometimes even begged in the darkness.  Words I don't know I look up, words that I banned myself  to use I say sometimes when I want to throw up on a hill during cyclo cross.  I try to spit those words out and other words I dare risk to use I whisper to the late night glow of my alarm clock.  I practice. I practice with words because I cannot seem to stop feeling.  And I have a pretty good guess that the feelings aren't going anywhere fast.  Maybe they'll just change to different ones.   I am just going to work at finding better words instead of "better" feelings.  No matter how much work I fill my days with or how hard I sweat and spit out my past, I know if I keep working, I can find new words.  For words are the soft touch to a worried head the cool wash cloth at rest on a collapsed heart.

I wish I could tell you my first word was something monumental, like illuminate or even turtle, it was hot.  One syllable and not even very visual.  Once I dated a man who told me his first word was hedgehog, to which I replied, pretty good, but that's no porcupine.  And so a poem comes from all this silence in hopes to find a new way to look at what lies ahead and what rests.  And what I hope to write.


The Porcupine

We walked out into the night
walked along the road without lights,
summer still on our skin, wind in oaks
caught the dim hum of stars.

Maybe I knew our bodies
were fading into autumn by the scent
no longer sweet in late evening, just earth
cold as night dew.

We held hands and didn't speak.
Gravel under our flip-flopped feet,
our hearts somewhere ahead
of us in October.  Fallen.

Out walked a porcupine
straight down the center of the road
long claws, heading straight,
grunting with each step.

We stopped, hands squeezed, breath
held and stood back to let the rodent
pass.  Squinting to find light, grey glow
of needles at rest, passed.

I tucked my hands in my pocket,
a warm breeze came up and I looked
to the east, not doubting the sun would come
again.  And loss is just a word
for what no longer comforts.

(The) Potential (of No)

Over two months ago, I bought a house.  Within the first ten minutes of holding the keys in my hand, I ripped up the shag carpeting whose musky scent of stale lives lingered for days long after I swept up the particle board.  I pulled up nails, tacks and ripped out trim and that was just in the entry way.  For the first two weeks of home ownership, I slept at my apartment and would drive boxes of my belongings over early in the morning, unpack, scrub, clean, disinfect and then return to my apartment to shower and get ready for work.  I did this everyday for two weeks.  I lived in some kind of episode of Ground Hog day--a continual state of repetition.  And yet each morning, I would wake excited like I was in some kind of new relationship.  And I was.  The summer of 2013 will be the love affair with Defoe.  628 Defoe to be exact.  My new potential home.

What I can honestly tell you is that I never dreamed of owning my own home.  As I said to my father, an architect and confidant, "My ego isn't driven to buy a house, it just doesn't need that kind of ownership." But really in my mind or rather my heart, I didn't want to consider the idea of buying a home, alone.  Homes were places for families, married people or for investments.  The only thing I had remotely of any value was a small budding sense of integrity and I certainly didn't need a home for that to grow.

The decision to buy a house was not made quickly or impulsively.  Thankfully, our economy has tanked to the point that most people cannot buy homes like a new tent for a trip.  Thankfully, I took time to come to this decision and most importantly, I didn't tell anyone I was even considering it.  You see the power with potential doesn't just lie in saying what you are going to do, the power in potential is also finding out what you aren't going to accept.

Let me explain.  This past January I found myself wanting to be single and wanting to leave Missoula.  I had been here for over five years and it had been hard--my husband broke his neck two months after we had married, we lost a good friend in an avalanche and then divorce.  Needless to say, Missoula has been a brutally humbling time in my life.  I felt like I was ready to seek the potential of another phase, to create another view of myself.  To leave this valley behind me.

And so I decided to take an adventure every month under the guise of getting out, exploring towns I had always wanted to visit or re-visit and most importantly connecting with friends I missed--and only in my mind was I keenly searching for a new home.  This route I took for five months included Bozeman, Santa Fe, Bend and with hints of Seattle and San Francisco.  Now the concept of moving someplace new is a lot more comforting to me than staying put.  I would go so far as to say, I am really good at seeking the solace in potential.  Since we are being honest, I would admit I have a lot more experience in only thinking about the future than I do in committing to the present. I am a pro at reinvention.

Every new town I would visit, I would immediately visualize my potential new life--riding my bike to an office at a college under the sun of Santa Fe, skiing volcanos in Oregon, drinking cups of coffee in Seattle with a great new haircut, going out to dinner with all my new hip friends in San Francisco and the easiest to imagine was hanging out in Bend with my bestie sipping tea and talking, finally again in the same town.  But these were all just dreams, potential dreams.

And when the airplane would land back in Missoula and I would gather my bag, text my mom that I had made it and call to the friend I had just left that I missed them, I would find myself in a valleyed shadow of Missoula.  Hearing I-90 again as I stood outside the air port terminal, I would look up at the hills and ask myself Home? Here? As if in that brief moment when you are not in time or place thanks to modern travel, when your soul hasn't caught up with you, you just have your ego to ask.  Which I'm pretty confident isn't the right person for important questions.

Not too long after my trip to Bend for my 39th birthday I was riding my bike to work, missing my friend Emmy and all the ease of being together, was when I asked myself what is it that I am really searching for? What am I wanting from a potential new place? Maybe I should just move back to Michigan to family where I can be Emily Walter only and only that again.  And sure enough, it finally occurred to me while pedaling to the rhythm of a three syllable word.  I wanted security.  I just wanted to feel placed with a purpose.  The potential security of what I thought a marriage would hold, a home shared and of course a future based on a commitment.  And given that I am not married anymore, I simply said, so what if I did this for myself.  What if, I gave security to me.

Now don't get me wrong, I have heard of ceremonies where people marry themselves, but I wasn't about to be that literal. Remember, I am a poet behind all this prose.  And the idea of seeking security in a new place was something I learned in my twenties from all my travels.  I knew I didn't want to start again in a new town when I already had a good job, I pedaled under Missoula sun to a new office, hell, I even had a great new haircut.  So I basically decided to do what most Americans do with abstract desires such as love, security and safety--they buy it.  And so I bought house.  I bought security.  Or so I thought.    

It's really too soon to know exactly what I have done, but this is what I know today. I decided to take all that wanting to be something else, somewhere else and to just be, here.  I decided to say no to potential.  I decided to believe that saying no to someplace else, could be a yes.  A yes to myself.  And to be here, here in the reality of old windows, asbestos in the attic, particle board under shag carpeting and the still lingered scent of lives lived past, is ugly.  The scent of it all can be down right overwhelming and no pun intended, a potential disaster.

But for one of the first times in my life, I can say, I am not dreaming of what could be or could be different.  I am not focused on the asbestos.  I am simply putting on work clothes, painting trim, grateful for the videos off of You Tube on grouting windows and starting with what is here.  And here's what the particle board has become.  Here's my new sense of potential materialized.  Here's my home.

I look forward to writing poems here.  I look forward to committing to what I have been wanting to be ever since I can recall the concept of wanting, which is to be a poet. To be present enough to what I can create here and not to dream of someplace else, the potential of someplace better.  Life is not elsewhere.  But maybe, just maybe I can accept life is good, here.

Safe(ty): An Inside Job

Today Missoula rests under a thick film of smoke.  Each morning I rise and I cannot read the sky.  Each day I listen to the radio for reports which I don't understand as if I feel like I am marooned on some ashened island.  So I have been staring at this photo taken only a week ago along the shores of Lake Michigan while visiting, Leelanau, the land of delight.  Everyday since returning to Missoula, I look at this photo--the sky, the water and in some place in my heart I can hear waves on sand and wind warmed by sun.  It was in Leelanau where I learned to read the wind, sail on this Great Lake for months and swim in its waters regardless of season.  And despite my deep love for this tiny peninsula, I have decided to call Missoula home, for now. This past July I purchased a home, or some land as I like to think of it, in this valleyed city ceilinged by smoke.

This is the longest I have been in one place since my childhood home.  In my twenties, I lived in over four countries and had more change of addresses than I care to list.  I was in a state of travel and transition.  Yet every August except one, which was spent on the island of Sardinia, I have returned to Leelanau.  I returned for the light, the warmth of the water, my family and the opportunity to spend time on a tiny spit on land surrounded by a massive lake.  To swim in an unsalted sea.  To learn how to read the wind. To sail.

And one August, I found myself not wanting to leave.  It was late summer in 2002 when I met Dennis Clarke.  Dennis wore pink flip flops if he wore any shoes at all.  An avid skier, surfer and all things involving wind, water and extreme elements--most of his life pursuits revolved around pushing limits, boundaries and oddly enough rarely did we wear shoes.  For example, he either wore flip flops or ski boots mostly, even while roofing, Tevas were the shoe of choice.

To tell you of how I first met Dennis would be a novella in itself, a short story of happenstance and luck, which I would like to think are the main ingredients for most love affairs, but what I want you to know about Dennis is how he breathed.  He would take deep calming breaths and quietly exhale and for some reason it made my body feel so warm, so relaxed.  As if all the wind he followed, sailed in and rode he could hold and then release through his strong solid frame.  Basically, I felt safe.

I first met the midwest Steve McQueen look alike after I had just returned from Rome and had just finished the six year stint of living and teaching abroad.  Life had never been so open, so full of possibilities and I had also never been so blonde.  I came back from Italy with a strong sense of ease and a real interest in my looks which surprised most people who had known me for my entire life.  Vanity had been something for other girls, especially the ones who found themselves with a lot of attention and offers ranging from being pushed on the swings to being asked to multiple proms.

But that summer post-Italy, people asked me, "what happened? Em, you look," long pause in between followed by a look away from my eyes, "you look, so different, so good?" At the time I thought it was just being blond and the all of 98 pounds I weighted thanks to my charming habit of smoking cigarettes instead of dinner.  But I thought being gamine was the new game.  But really, it was the sense of freedom that gave my frame a glow.

And it was that same glint of light and ease in Dennis, who I had officially met 10 years prior while he still had Jesus in his cheeks at a Polka festival, that I found so attractive.  Dennis appeared older and more weathered, more Westernized, American Westernized with a straw cowboy hat,  surf trunks and a body only found in the likes of Laird Hamiliton and of course, pink flip flops.  And that summer we met, he asked me on a date, to his "place" on Omigisi Trail , a very short dirt road at the very end of Leelanau Peninsula--a few short miles from where this photo was taken.

Now, I may have been out of the country for six years, but I knew exactly where Omigisi Trail was based on high school parties in the summers when we (the local kids) if lucky to be invited to the summer home of some kid whose father owned Firestone tires or Ball Jars--then we got to see how the other summered half lived.  Oddly enough Leelanau is old money, if any money at all.

So when Dennis gave me directions, I was confused by this man who lived mostly out of truck and in a wet suit. And the date? Windsurfing and a hot tub at his "home".  Ideal, right?  Fumbling with his address, I finally located his truck, but could not find a house and while heading toward the beach, I passed what any person or young child would call, a tree fort.  I found Dennis stoking a fire under an old metal cherry box filled with water.  Smiling, he said, "Welcome to my home, want to take a dip?"  Pointing to the metal box. "it might just be warm enough."

And really from there on out, it was a go.  As if the winds were up and in the right direction for over four years where in that period of time not a single adventure was unlike the beginning.  From sailing around Lake Michigan for weeks with a 12 year old dog and a young cat without GPS and a naive sense of following the stars for directions, we managed to island hop and see parts of our homeland from a new angle.  We spent winters in southeastern Colorado and we also cooked a lot together in the confines of a galley kitchen of a boat or in the back of a beat up pick up truck.  When I wasn't teaching, we were out exploring.  And Dennis, no matter the season, followed the wind.

As long as we were adventuring, we were loving.  But coop us up in an apartment, and neither of us were at our best.  Neither of us knew how to be settled.  And neither of us knew how to keep our relationship stable enough to create a home.  And really there is as long of a novella about why we parted as how we fell in love.  And in the late summer of 2006, we parted.

To say I have been haunted by this thought of why we couldn't keep love as an adventure is an understatement.  To try and put your finger on why something didn't work out between two people is about as simple as trying to understand why you have green or blue eyes.  Sure, there's genetics as a guide, but there is also grace and happenstance. The same unknowns which help you fall in love can be the same components of what causes the fall, the winds to just change.

As the winds rise today in Missoula, I don't get excited or think about which direction to move or sail, I think about fire.  The fires that hang and haunt so many of us who live here.  But before the winds and the fire arrived, I moved into my new house--when the air was clear and I had views of the hills that surround North Missoula.  During the first week on Defoe street, I was working an average of nine hours at the cooking school and five hours at home--cleaning, scrubbing, painting and then doing it all over again.  One night I was on the floor pulling up tacks from carpet I had pulled and I was getting angry.  I had had a great day at work and now I was enjoying Zenning out at home.  What was my problem? I went through the rolodex of the day and had no complaints--was I lonely, no. was I tired, sure but not exhausted, was I sad, nope.  But I was still annoyed.  Finally, I just decided to give my brain and body a break and go to bed.  Showered, I climbed into bed and felt my anger was still around as if I could taste it like I can taste the smoke as I write these words.

I tried to just focus on my breath the way Dennis had taught me years ago--to focus even in the midst of raging winds and people yelling to return to breath, your breath as a place of refuge.  As I was exhaling, I heard myself gasp and suddenly my body turned warm, turned calm.  And heard this sentence fall out of mind, I feel safe.  I am safe.

What surfaced was as simple as the change in direction of wind.  What surfaced was an awareness of myself alone in my new home.  I don't think I am any different from anyone else when I say we have relationships for a lot of obvious reasons, companionship, conversation, sex, humor and adventure, but if we are really honest, we have someone in our intimate lives to feel safe.  To feel like our back is watched, our nights are kept guarded by the ears of a dog, the snore of man and the knowledge that we can relax and unwind in the nightlight of someone else's love.  But at the end of the day, a long day, I think we realize that safety is an inside job.  No one can give it to you, design a well built home, locked truck or well lighted cabin without you feeling it first.

Maybe other people figure this out long ago, maybe other people don't have to travel around the world to finally purchase a home by themselves to understand the gift of giving safety to your self first.  Me, I am a slow learner, a sailor and finally someone with an address I can call home, my safe place even in this sea of smoke.  I feel safe, I feel placed.



A Draft

I know a man who seduces me with winds,
not words. He takes me for weeks with compass
and charts to follow the flight of cormorants,
the caws of gulls. At night, we wrap
our bodies in damp air. Stars hum.
Listen, he tells me, my mother only
let me raise pigeons. I taught myself to sail
with only bags of wind. I’m a failure
with twenty-twenty vision. I believe him.
I hear grapes in autumn, wait for fawns
to sneeze. In this hut of my heart,
I am certain of the grace of hurricanes.
A breath inhaled today, a gust
tomorrow. Wind takes what cannot stay.

Waiting on a Train

From the winter of 1996 to the summer of 2001, I lived in Europe.  Two work visas, one student visa and an endless amount of hours waiting, sitting, reading, sleeping, arguing, hiding and even plain ole watching was spent on trains crossing borders and countries.  I miss train travel terribly, but feel lucky enough to have the reminder of their passing echo off these hills in Missoula.

When Jaime and I came up with this idea to both post photos and write about waiting on a train, I unearthed some old photographs which I have loosely identified. I truly wish I had photos of all of you who I spent hours with in between all this waiting.  Here's a very small collection of a cross section of those six years.

It's dangerous at times, this box of photos.  I often think of it as my own personal Pandora.  Or in other words, I believe nostalgia is hope's more complicated sister.  They both have their dark and light.  They both can leave you lost in your own present life.  Believe me, I know. Above all, be patient with your waiting. 

A sweet man who hails from the town Fish, poetry.

(Ryba, Poland, 1997)

Dark soot in my handkerchief, Krakow will shadow my soul. 

(Kielce to Krakow, Poland 1998)

They sound of thunderstorms mostly, trains through meadows or cobblestones.

(Bieszczady, South Eastern Poland, 1997)

Filled with so much youth, no stale taste of loneliness.

(Dirt Road Bus Stop, Spiez, Poland, 1999)

We jumped trains late one night, followed domed springed daffodils.

(Tatra Mountains, Poland 1999)

My brother, French Alps tracks, we skied like a TGV. 

(Grenoble, France 2000)

There is beauty in missing a train, an unearthed stone.

(Orange, France, 2000)

We are all salt drying on the sea, smiling back.

(Italy, 2001)

One of my fondest-missed pastimes, waiting with the best.

(Ali Campbell, me, Brad & Ryan Campbell, Italy, 2001)

A new year in deep winter, it all begins somewhere.

(New Years Day, Bratislava, Slovakia, 1996)

My Essence was Lost in the Mail

Every day as a child, I waited for my dad by our mailbox.  Barefoot in myrtle, squinting as I still do every time I smile, I waited for the sounds of the lone car heading up to the very end of Old Mission Peninsula--some 20 miles due north of Traverse City, Michigan.  We lived in a farm house which had previously been occupied by migrant workers who came as far as Southern Mexico to harvest the cherries that surrounded our modest home.  Everyday, even in the winter, I would wait by the mailbox for my dad, to sing my name and laugh, "Em-i-leee" as he got out of his Oldsmobile.

When I was in graduate school working on a collection of poems, so many images from the era of my bucolic youth, isolation, cherry blossoms and the scent of woodsmoke on wool scarves surfaced.  Plus, I was writing on the shores of Lake Superior after years of living abroad and it felt like I was returning to my youth, all birch beech forest, buffered by a cold deep lake and so much quiet.  One night a fellow poet and I were out at a Sports Bar, drunk on cheap pitchered beer and watched other people play pool, when he said, "Your youth is just too poetic pretty, just too....pretty.  You really shouldn't write poems about it, it's too cliche Emily."

I wish I could tell you I had some quick reply, some retort along the lines of "not every poet is wounded by Saginaw and loss and just so you know, being sensitive isn't the only prerequisite for writing verse.  I can say this because my name IS Emily."  But I didn't.  I think I tried to say something funny and act like it didn't bother me.  But I've carried the comment for years like some shoe box labelled "photographs" of my past I only look at alone.

Ironically, I am drawn to the "uglier" moments in writing--the neglected dogs of Detroit, ice cream stands outside of Auschwitz, dust bowled towns in Eastern Montana where a handwritten sign from some fourth grader scribbled, "say no to meth," men crying at bus stops while you just say sorry in their language, gas stations in Nevada filled with keno machines where people the color of ash sit with so much hope under neon. But when I see these moments, I hear Yeats in my head, "the terrible beauty is born."  And wonder what delight can be risked in seeing these scenes not as merely ugly, but terribly beautiful.  An irony that gets you closer to some truth.

After that night in the Sports Bar in Ishpeming, I took my fellow writer friend's word to heart and tried for weeks to write of anorexia, men who smelled of bad meat and beat their wives behind the thin walls in Poland, our family Collie being overrun with maggots and the man in a Budapest train station with no arms or legs, placed on a piece of wet worn cardboard with just an empty bowl.  I tried for ugly.  And sitting in my thesis director's office after reading my attempt to write about my beyond thin roommate eat handfuls of sugar naked in a kitchen, he looked at me and calmly said, "Emily, you have to love something to write about it, you have to find what you love about anorexia to write it well.  You must love this world, really love it so much to write poems.  Even at its ugliest, it is still love."

And I believe him.  I still do even after all these years of my book being short-listed for publication, my fumbling attempts after years of rejection, I believe love is at the root of writing poems.  I also believe him because for the past few years I have not written a single poem, not even a haiku.  Until recently.  It might have more to do with my obsessive interest in reading every web page and blog on divorce, reading late night articles on "starting over in your thirties", "joys of not having a family", "10 reasons why being single is rewarding" and too many articles loosely titled, "finding yourself after grief" written by a woman in L.A. who is a life coach with perfect bleached teeth and realizing the life coach speaks in steps, adages and programs. Speaks in terms of liner reason. I do not.  I understand metaphor, stories and color. It has taken me awhile to see the towering collection of non-fiction books next to my bed might have curbed my motivation to write poems.  It could also be, I didn't really love anything.  In other words, I had lost my essence in the mail.

Divorce isn't just about changing your name, your address and your route home after work--divorce is about divorcing yourself from yourself. In the terms of foundation, divorce is the great demolition of your spirit.  Despite it's popularity and frequency, let's face it, people understand the complexities of death more than divorce, we all die and yet some of us can remain married.  And given I live in a small town, I was able to develop a new level of empathy for the Scarlet Letter and wear my own cursived lettered D around town.  Sure, this might all sound melodramatic, but this is what I know, even the ugliest divorces still have beauty, somewhere.  Or as Jack Gilbert said in his seminal poem, A Brief For The Defense

We must risk delight.  We can do without pleasure,

but not delight.  Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world.  To make injustice the only

measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,

we should give that that the end had magnitude.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.

And like my thesis director, I believe the old poet's words to be true.  Most people get to have families and build homes in their lives trajectory of maturation, for those of us lucky enough to get divorced, we get to really learn what it means to risk delight, to loose everything you thought you knew about yourself and figure out what lies beyond.  We get to sniff out our essence.  Before I go any farther, let me make something clear, I do not, I repeat I do not recommend divorce to anyone as a means to go deeper into yourself.  We all know there is no label on a marriage certificate listing the possible affects, side effects and symptoms brought on by divorce.  But if you find yourself with a bad case of loss and hopelessness, you have options.  You can choose to either stay with others coined the un-evolved in some modern limboed hell complaining how life treated you poorly and how the locomotive actually ran you down.  Or, you get to figure out what you really value and want for yourself.  Let me also say, option B, is a very long and slow process with a lot less glory, fun and people to hang out with.  Option B is usually pretty solitary and lonely. 

But thankfully for me, I had a very solitary beginning.  Back in the days of waiting for my dad to come home after spending hours in the woods exploring, I didn't know any different.  I didn't know other people had playmates and buddies all day.  I didn't miss what I didn't ever have.  And here lies the crux of divorce, you once had someone to eat dinner with on a Wednesday, you once shared a tent with someone during a snow storm, you once had inside jokes and above all, you once had the belief in love.  But when you had something once, thankfully, you will know how to have it again.  Or in the terms of food, once you've eaten fresh calamari from the shores of a Greek island, you will remember what fresh calamari tastes like--you can hold the essence of its beauty in your mind and try to recreate it, travel for it, revere it and really know something sublime exists.  You can believe there is still love after love.  There is still music despite everything.  There are still poems.

Speaking of, after all these years, here's a new one.

Finding Lubricant After the Divorce

In a drawer you keep old jewelry 
given mostly by your mother,
you mistake the tube for silver polish.  
The gel paled to faint pink, 
labeled, I. D. Moments has no smell,
no sugary musk sticks to the air.  Unlike 
the geraniums, red-filled confident scents 
your apartment with bold color, 
the same shade of lipstick 
you no longer risk to wear.
You count months born from the divorce 
baby you carry, careful not to over-feed 
or nurse in public.  You hide it like some teen 
who lives with an aunt for awhile. Grows fat
and quiet in another town.  Returns with just new hair.
Thankfully, there is no essence to loss, no perfume
to linger on an old shirt, sheets and underwear.

Internal West

Internal West

Most days, you wake to trains

announce arrival to valleyed town,

bedded tracks cross and end

in your ears.  You hear the ease

in carrying weight you cannot

comprehend. The body of an airplane passes

in pieces, empty thorax of jet, one lone wing

rides in dry wind on its side. But out here 

in hollowed out prairie and dust 

bowled side streets, trains call 

out and sound no different in Spain

or Poland. They sound of thunderstorms,

mostly.  But your heart, the locomotive

of loss moves against tracks, is thirsty 

for song from some lost accordion, some love 

you cannot stop leaving. To make tea

from absence, dandelions and ash.

Learning to Paint at Thirty-Eight

Betsy Johnson never wanted to teach elementary art.  Instead of the glued Cheerio pictures for refrigerators, Mrs. Johnson taught us about negative space, shadowing and perspective in the first grade.  I recall one winter day we noticed a film projector plugged in and reels ready.  We watched a movie on Japanese aesthetics and the philosophy of transience.  In just a 15 minute film the narrator used terms such as asperity, loneliness in nature, Buddhism and phrases such as "wisdom in natural simplicity."  We were a quiet class of 12, but I would imagine we cocked our heads a lot in blank confusion while the sorrowful back-ground guitar played slightly out of tune.  But we didn't complain, we got to watch a movie.  Regardless of the advanced terminology, what we could grasp (because we were still stumbling with how to even hold a paint brush) was another term in Japanese aesthetic, imperfection.

I recall really liking the large art room forever scented with wet clay, tempera on dried paper and bins of chalk pastels.  But mostly, I liked the wall of windows poorly blocking the bitter winds off Lake Michigan.  Those windows were so valuable in a land where winter lasts more than six months, brings walls of white, and rarely if ever, brings the cold sun.  But the day we watched a film on Japanese art, we huddled in a dark corner while the reels projected tea bowls, flower arrangements and gardens of rock, gravel and enlarged goldfish on the grey concrete wall.  Thankfully there wasn't a Q and A after the movie, again we were six, we probably would have preferred to watch Harold and the Magic Crayon.

After the movie, Mrs. Johnson brought out a narrow rolled-up piece of paper.  Pulling the rolls away like some scroll, she held a painted bouquet and pointed to a flower, misshapen and blurred, "this" pointing with purpose,"this" she said, "this is wabi sabi, see how it isn't as pretty, it looks like a mistake.  But it isn't, it makes the others look prettier because it isn't perfect." And it isn't an exaggeration to say those words have stayed within my heart and head ever since, it looks like a mistake.  But it isn't.  And so has this, "wabi sabi nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect."

Okay, let's back up a bit.  This scene might seem too idyllic to believe.  Too much like a Wes Anderson film where the kids perform their written one act plays including amazing set designs.  Sure, as much as I want to see my life as The Royal Tenenbaums, including the soundtrack, it just wasn't.  I'll give you another version of this era.  Why not give you another view of my learned aesthetics at age six.  Let's start with my mother.  Perhaps my mother's greatest maxims for raising her daughters were, "There will always be someone better looking, thiner or with a better nose.  Get over yourself."  Now, given this maxim in the mind of someone with a healthy dose of self-confidence and wit, you see the realism: Work with what you have.  Given this same maxim in the mind where all you see are thick glasses, wiry hair and your short and slightly awkward frame despite your panache even in first grade to put together an outfit, you hear those words differently.  Those words rest as weights.  Those words you hear as someone is and always will be better than you.  You just cannot grasp the use of wabi sabi for all the moles on your face.

But thankfully with a few decades under my belt alone in front of a mirror, good therapists, a better sense of humor and years in Italy where women learn to truly work confidence into the genetics they inherit, you learn to hear those words as you think they were intended to mean, accept your imperfections, no one and nothing is perfect.  I will be honest, I forget this a lot.  Some days I only see a reflection of unintended imperfections.  Thank god for Lena Dunham. God, I love her and all her imperfections she so effortlessly exposes.

But back to Mrs. Johnson's hard work at treating us as adults gracing us with all of her exposure to art theory.  Despite her films, I never really developed as a visual artist.  I have had my stints at attempting.  My favorite job in college was showing slides for Art History classes, four years of "audited" art history is a great place to start.  But like first grade, it was all theory.  One summer after a semester of showing hours of Rothkos on a wall in and out of focus, I thought I would attempt to paint.  I spent hours with colored pencils first, then tempera on thick paper before paint on canvas.  Once while finishing a "piece" of three colored squares on a large canvas outside, (truth be known, squares were truly all I could really draw), my father honestly and astutely said, "Well," while watching me finish the last corner, "it's a good thing you like to paint what you can."  Agreeing with him, I thought I might try collage.

I spent an entire month before heading to teach in Rome in my parent's basement with a razor, aerosol can of glue and a stack of discarded art magazines and old children's dictionaries.  For one month straight, I only listened to Radiohead's "Kid A" and made endless amounts of "still life" scenes with torn definitions and phrases.  I even made a color wheel of monochromatic shades of each color, postcards to send from Rome, and a Christmas card with a poem on the back.  Seriously, I think the card had three squares of color and a Christmas tree.  Again, work with what you have.  Which is why, I prefer to paint with words.  I have a lot of them.

Regardless of my varied personal attempts to be a visual artist, it hasn't truly been my dream.  My dream has been to be a poet.  And like my other fellow writer friends without books published, we sometimes question our dream.  I recently had the fortunate opportunity to spend a wonderful week with a good friend who has been finishing her first book.  I am so proud of her.  She is also 38 and she too has had the dream of being a writer since, like me, we first put together sentences or stanzas on a page. (Follow her progress and insight at her own blog, http://jaimestathis.wordpress.com)

Jaime has been living in a small cabin with a wood stove outside the mountains of Taos, New Mexico for three cold months. Writing.  Writing everyday and finishing her book, so we had a lot to talk about.  But after days of talking about our writing, our goals and going for walks into the cold winds under all that sky, all that amazing light the sky in Taos holds, we wanted to head to town.  So we decided to head to Santa Fe to see Georgia O'Keeffe's museum.  Truth be known, we thought we would just head to the large flowers and find some calming pastel spring.  But instead, we found ourselves in a dark corner, just like so many years ago in art class, watching a video on Georgia and her life.  While hearing the voice of Gene Hackman give the biography of places and schools Georgia attended, an early painting by her was shown of ill-shaped lighthouses with a thick muted sky.  It was all Wisconsin in scene and place, but what I could not stop thinking was: it's so bad.  In my head, I said, Georgia O'Keeffe wasn't very good? All I could see were imperfections.  Gene Hackman's voice continued and dates were thrown around and Jaime and I kept looking at each other with wide eyes and fingers counting as we did the math, Wait, Georgia was our age when she was getting serious about her art. Wait, we said, she was old. (okay, older when she started to really work at art.)

Walking around the museum, I didn't see the flowers.  I saw lighthouses shadowed by large massive petals and stark skies with adobes grounding the scene.  Every picture I turned to see was once a lighthouse, once something misshapen and re-worked into something balanced and beautiful.  Years of work, years of dedication and years of finding a place in nature that spoke to her gave Georgia her voice in paint.  She didn't seem to let the lighthouses of her youth keep her from painting large canvases of poppies.  Or to use her own words, "I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do."

And I can tell you this, for the first time, I could really understand those words I heard so long ago in art class on wabi sabi, "nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect."  The imperfection in those lighthouses were so beautiful to me because Georgia didn't stop there.  She didn't stop painting because she wasn't very good at first, she kept painting because it was her dream.  And sure, the flowers of O'Keefe might seem about as perfect in visual imagery as anything we have had the pleasure to gaze upon outside of nature.  But now, I keep thinking of those lighthouses in each flower.  Those awkward beacons of light of her schooled still lifes in Chicago when Georgia was practicing to paint what she saw in her head.  To get it right.  To get close enough to making what she saw in her head real to others.  And thankfully for us, what she saw and learned to create was really beautiful.

Interestingly enough, Georgia O'Keefe wasn't really fond of poetry, except Japanese haiku poets.  I don't have a lot of haiku to share with you in honor of O'Keefe, but what I do have is a poem about loving imperfections.

Enjoy.


Astro in the Skyline

At first he picked me up in what his wife
left him.  My fate to fall for a man who drives
a mini-van.  At least he didn't chew
his words, smell of olives and sawdust
like the last guy.  He arrived right on time,
but when he tried to unlock the door,
it stuck.  He swore it was already funny
when he dove up looking like a carpet cleaner,
tired, but shaven.  And sometimes it's that easy,
the awkward sexy moment when a man offers
his gloves in a hail storm, you fall
for him, his ill-fitting sweater, uneasy pause
before speaking, the way one person might see
you like the capital of Nepal, or an island in Japan.

The Best Boyfriend I Never Dated

Never underestimate the joy in dating someone who doesn't speak English.  Especially if you don't speak their language very well.  You rely on gestures, mostly speak in the present tense, intonation becomes musical and when referring to complicated concepts you try to choose definitions as if you were looking up a word in a children's dictionary.  You opt for simple, direct and the desire for clarity.  As if just to be understood is the goal more than hoping to be thought of as smart and witty.  And really isn't this more important in matters of the heart? 

I would argue some of the best practice I have had with my own heart has not been with the men I've dated, but boyfriends I never even tried dating.  I am lucky that I have had some great male role models.  My brother, who once took me to school as his show and tell, placed me on top of a chair and asked me questions in front of his second grade class.  My father has been the one person I will call from a locked bathroom from any location, in any existential state.  Recently my closest best non-dating boyfriend and I play a game called first text rodeo, where we see who can send hellos to each other the earliest.  Every morning.  Every morning I am lucky to be reminded that even though I am not married, I still love men.

My first non-dating boyfriend, Art Chiaravalli, hails from a family that comes from the same Italian village as Ovid.  Italian heritage with poetic sensibilities with a soul all Motown is a good way to describe Art, who was born in East Lansing, Michigan.  But let's get something straight from the beginning: Art and I never kissed.  But what we did do was--wrote music for our band called Beige is the Color of Love circa 1995, fed homeless people in our dorm room in bitter Ann Arbor winters, wrote letters to each other when you used stamps, made a series of movies based on our childhood fantasies, crashed fraternity parties by slipping in Beastie Boys and danced to Ill Communication as if we were waltzing.  We never once considered we weren't in love.  But we never even considered kissing.  Seriously, Art was the best boyfriend I never dated.

I am hoping most of you have an Art in your lives--someone you once met at tennis camp, young and awkward, where you a tween spent more time staring at the stronger more athletic types playing soccer between the fence while you and Art volleyed a tennis ball--making each other laugh so hard you had to stop.  Too shy at the end of the week to exchange phone numbers or addresses, you escaped the awkward good-bye by running away to your respective mini-vans.  Years later, you found yourself in a college poetry class and the kid across from you wearing an East Lansing High School tennis sweatshirt looked slightly familiar.  Weeks passed and both of you waiting outside Professor Goldstein's office, when you finally introduced yourself, "Hey, I'm Emily. I think we're in Poetry 210 together?" Suddenly, you both saw who each other really was--no longer short haired gamine in all black and the other no longer small chested, argumentative with constant open book syndrome, but somehow in each of you, the pre-teen surfaced.  You were just Art and Emily.  For the rest of your college career, you were simply this each other, really young and really in love.

Sure, you might be wondering if I ever searched for Art.  The early years post-college I was in Europe and Art was in religion.  We wrote letters a bit, but we faded away, time passed and recently, I did look Art up.  Thanks to the google I found him, his wife and their six children in middle of Michigan where Art teaches high school English and loves it.  When reading about his life and family on his school's website, I felt so proud, so happy.  Really, if I were to try to explain this to someone in Swedish, I would gesture with my hands around my heart showing it grew, I would smile broadly while nodding, I would say so happy for good friend.  And I would mean it.

Sometimes we want our hearts to be a linear story.  No, truth be known, many times I want my heart to be linear as if sadness and heartache could be cashed in for happiness and love when we find it.  Our hearts are just some cards we keep shuffling, keep gambling away on hope and luck.  But like my boy friend I am currently not dating whose arms are covered in tattoos told me while I was crying in a park late last summer, "Regret....regret Emily?" while rolling up his sleeves to point out an almost nude inked nurse holding a needle in her hand, "this is regret, Emily. This is what regret looks like."  Did I tell you who much I adore him?

And really, it's the practice of loving what we cannot have or hold which I feel prepares us for knowing how to finally keep love.  The homeless dog you find, but later the owners come to claim, the boy you sit next to on an airplane who tells you about his love of the clarinet, the pilot who gives you a ride through a snowstorm in a rented Buick, the skinny boy in graduate school whose father is a plumber and teaches you more about line breaks than anyone else and who eats plate after plate of enchiladas you made, dropping his fork he puts both palms up to the sky and claims your food from some God. These are the men you lean into.  These are also the men you let go because they are not yours to have, not yours to keep.  You don't date them.  Not because you don't love them, but because you learn about love from them.  And you also learn how to let them go.  And maybe it is the letting go that allows you to see them, really see them as they are as men in themselves and not in reflection of you. 

This poem is the first poem I ever published.  I wrote this poem in honor for another boy I never dated, Stevie Flowers.  He's in the Art category of awkward turned awe-inspiring.  I heard through friends that Stevie is a pilot, has a family and I would imagine be someone who would drive a young girl safely home in a snow storm.  So if you have any Arts or Stevies in your lives, give them thanks.  Take them to a movie.  Bake them cookies.  For the ones who send you hellos from the other side of town are as important to your silver lining, as the ones you want to roll over next to day after day.  And thankfully, the best boyfriends never dated help you learn how to rewrite your own playbook of a heart when you don't want to even pick up a pen.

Enjoy.

In the Public Garden

Every gym class, Stevie Flowers pissed

his corduroys. He hated dodge ball,

stood in the corner or hid

from the bigger boys who broke

anything or anyone small.

He read Make Way For Ducklings,

sat on his knees with Buddha’s

slow smile. I knew even then

he would be the one who loved me.

I still remember the metallic

taste of the bat that summer

we played softball. He cupped my face

while my nose bled, told me later 

he’d tape my glasses.

But later it was others who stood

outside my window, holding

a book of Yeats, fly open

with a half drunk grin.

It’s always a simple request

at first.

In the Boston Commons, I pause

at the ducklings in bronze, still

like the boy who read to me.

Somewhere there’s a man

I’d never think to run from.