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.

Rivers Cannot Run Frozen

Ice-fishing is in my blood.  Sure, I won't claim to be a savant at it and frankly, I am not even sure if one can call it a sport--basically it has a skill set of sitting, staring into a holed-watery darkness and forgetting about wind while exposed to bitter temperatures.  And what keeps you there? The simple hope a sleepy pike will surface on your baited-iced metal hook.  Regardless if it is a true sport or not, I do know this--ice fishing is not for the faint at heart.  And speaking of hearts, ice fishing represents everything I believe about love, a mix of slow-baited calculated luck with the capacity to believe in what you cannot always see.

My father and I would ice fish in mid-February when the ice would turn cerulean blue. We would talk about the ice of December and January as if we knew the temptations of first freezes. Early ice would draw us in, perfectly smooth and begging to be ice-skated on and explored under a fat-full moon shining deep into the bottom of School Lake.  Even as a kid, I knew that kind of ice was risky, that kind of quick perfection easily breaks.  The sort of love that comes up on you so fast and glossy, you forget about any sense of danger.  The kind of love that can leave you on a street in a foreign country, outside a tram with no ticket, so you find yourself walking all the way back, home.  Trying to forget the perfect French he spoke.

And even late March and early April ice has risks as well.  The kind of ice that has been layered, broken, reformed and then layered again and what remains is only white. A shade of white for so long you have forgotten about the color green.  When you live where you can ice fish, you likely live where winter lasts for more than half a year, long enough for one to only faintly remember the taste of a fresh cherry, a summered peach.  Late winter ice is different in risks, but still not ideal.  Sure, it has had more time to build, or endure but the cracks run deeper.  The way love that has been broken for too long cannot hold, bad habits formed into patterns make it so much harder to re-build, the risks so much greater to take.  Need I give an example, or how about two words? bitter break-up. Or one, divorce.

And perhaps the worst sort of ice of all is aptly called, winterkill.  Winterkill occurs during especially long, harsh winters.  Fish will die in late winter, but may not be noticed until a month after the ice leaves the lake because the dead fish are temporarily preserved by the cold water.  Fish will actually suffocate from lack of dissolved oxygen and float to the surface under a thin layer of ice.  The kind of love that goes deep into your skin, beyond your rational mind and further into your murky kept soul.  That kind of love that you surface from months later wondering where you have been and found outstretched in your bed sideways.  Mouth open and breathless.  You awake in the dark of night wondering what parts of yourself you have compromised, gave up on and maybe even froze?  The kind of love some people don't ever really recover from.  Love that only leaves loss.

But February ice when winter is still fresh in our cheeks and more light slowly begins and ends our days is the ideal month for ice fishing.  A great time for love.  For someone like myself who finds herself attracted to men born above the 45th parallel, I need a man who loves winter.  Winter is a time to be outside bundled, active in snow and exposed to all that can remind us of being more animal than mind.

Plus, ice fishing is about dressing warm and being practical, no one really has stylish outfits for the "sport", unless you think dressing in a full-bodied Carhartt is sexy.  (Personally, my dad always looked like a teddy bear, which is endearing for sure.)  You sit on white buckets, use tools that look and sound more Inuit than anything, auger and gaff, and more time is spent waiting and being still than being crafty and calculated.  And, you have no idea if the fish are even there.  You have to just wait. You have to have enough hope in something that you cannot even see or even know if it will arrive.

So really, aren't those better tips for finding love than dressing yourself up and crafting yourself into someone you're not? Calculating risks and putting yourself to the whims of okcupid.com, POF.com (plenty of fish) for the logarithms of love? (True story, a good friend of mine recently went ice fishing with her boyfriend and came back engaged.)  Don't under estimate the romance in the sport.

I must admit, it has been too long since I have been ice-fishing.  Perhaps I am too shy to ask anyone to go with me.  Maybe I am just out of practice.  But this past weekend, I went with two couples skate skiing and while driving up to Seeley Lake, I caught a glimpse of some ice fisherman on an early morning Sunday, already seated by their tip-ups and waiting with faces in the morning sun.  Later after skiing, we went to a bar named Trixie's in a town called Ovando.  I thought I had fallen in love, with Montana yet again.  Late bright sun coming through the bar's windows, fries on a plate, elk on the walls and Merle Haggard on the jukebox.  Ms. Pac-man in the corner wasn't even dusty, the whiskey with ginger tasted just cold enough and the overweight dog smiling for scrapes inside leaned into my legs.

It was the kind of place you find close to a frozen lake for ice fishing.  A bar that serves good food and appears run down just enough, potentially forgotten and not locatable on anyone's i-phone.  Which seems like the best kind of place to think about love.  To think about no matter how run down, how much wintering your heart has had or been exposed to, you have to believe in what you cannot see.  Believe that bar in the middle of nowhere by a frozen lake full of pike is just where you need to be. Just where you need to be to believe in love, after love.

Enjoy.

Tits and Fish                                                                                                           

I envy the leaves, anything that dies

with the shade of vermillion on its skin.

The color of shorts you swim in

every summer at Pelican lake, the lake

rusting rocks and lichen. You scramble up

granite, naked enough, your toes clutched

to the edge before you release and fall, a half flap

in your weightlessness. The weight I used to feel

on me as we lay on my wood floor,

our lips hooked in the early hours of a day

we never wished to rise. Our bodies, flat

and floatless under water, nestled like large mouth

bass in tire shade and weed bed. We’d sleep

out the heat, hide until caddis hatch circled

and surfaced, to mate and leave, full enough

of each other to die. You wait for these flies

at dusk to know where the bronzeback

will bite in the early morning, alone in your metal boated

Minnesota, the state I see as holed

from an airplane. Minnesota is just a word

that sinks in my mouth and sits stale like alewive

belly up in a bucket. I remember you forgot

to put the minnows in water

and the father yelled “tits up” at breakfast.

But each dawn, I am under you

in water, my mouth wide and hiding

in shade. I am the stillness in morning

you search for, diving, without breathing.

Resourceful Loneliness in a Polish Kitchen

Lake Superior is a deep cobalt meadow, an inland field, an unsalted sea.  For four years as a writing fellow and than as an adjunct professor, I lived within an earshot and short walk from the expansive sandy shores of this lake often frozen for more than half a year. Even when this coast was cragged with ice, granite glass-slick impassible, it continued to move.  Never slept.  Yet most of the Upper Peninsula was quiet year round.  Beautifully quiet.  But never the lake.  Marquette, Michigan was where I wrote a book-length worth of poems and where I also really learned to cook from not just memory as much as from my heart.  

The memories I sourced for food weren't from childhood.  Living in Marquette was a re-invented childhood, collecting chanterelles, blueberries filled in Nalgene bottles after a long run in late July, bike rides with head lamps in pitch October cold followed by chili and corn bread from scratch.  I cooked from travels where winter also plays a major seasonal role--I mostly cooked from the two years I lived in Poland.  Sure, the land of fields and war wept history might not be the culinary epoch of Paris you'd expect to conjure moments of longing with a spoon in hand.  I certainly had days of standing in soup kitchens slurping borcht with men who pissed standing up.  (Yup, true story.) But what Poland taught me about cooking has been far more invaluable than any side street in Rome, no matter where you live you want to eat well, but you have to be resourceful.

Who better to teach me this than Tomaz Bomba, a son of a devoted Communist and Catholic.  Pani Bomba, Tomaz's mother, had kicked out her drunk abusive husband when Tomaz was only two.  Raised him on the food from the garden she grew and her own chanterelles she'd forage--food was a serious business to a mother of one who stood in lines for wilted cabbage--never really knowing if there would be enough or even some. But by 1997, when I first moved to Poland to teach at a British School, lines were still being stood in at cold city squares, but also German supermarkets set up a starch shop of disco music, yet whole pheasants with feathers still intake placed could be sourced from an open freezer.

Tomaz Bomba, whose name literally translates as Tom the Bomb, learned most of his English by reading Henry James novels.  His English was both stilted, antiquated and way too British than any of my fellow English teachers could even understand.  But what Tomaz and I did share in common was the belief we could make fresh flavored food even in wintered Poland.  And we did.  Thanks to a trip Tomaz had made a few years previously to London, where he bought Julia Child's seminal book Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  

We'd begin at a bus stop on Wednesday mornings (my day off) and pick a recipe from the well worn book while waiting for a bus we'd never really know if it would show up.  Mornings were spent sourcing, foraging through mudfilled winter markets of tarps and dejected looking turnips and beets.  At first, Tomaz did all the arguing--the sound of Polish even in civil negotiations sound like threats.  Close body space, slinging z-filled words all harsh consonants back and forth for a few carrots.  At first it seemed totally absurd.  Only at first.  Later once my Polish improved, I'd sling z-filled words with fist cupped hands with the best of them.  But regardless of overpriced potatoes, we would fill our bags and return to my shared apartment, my British vegetarian roommate who by mid-February, thanks to our dinners and constant fumes of braised pork shoulder, turned carnivore. 

For two years, we'd cook our Wednesday night meals for new teachers, visitors and of course Tomaz's mother.  Despite all the meals, one dinner stands out.  It was a warm April morning and Tomaz and I had a few months of suppers under our belts when he announced, "Emilka, do you fancy yourself a proper curry?" Again, I tried to loosen the British from Tomaz, but he preferred to sound like he was straight up early 19th century. Like some diplomat visiting Downton Abbey.  I went along.  Now there were certain cuisines that seemed impossible, meaning anything with complicated spice blends and anything that required tropical fruit.  The most exotic food we'd ever encountered was at our local Chinese restaurant where Anna, my roommate, ordered fried ice cream, but it arrived with a side of pineapple.  We gathered around her plate wide eyed, beginning sentences like, That cannot be? Is it? No, you taste it first? Yes, it was indeed pineapple. Paled and canned, but still pineapple.

So when Tomaz asked me if I wanted to make not only a curry, but a coconut curry, I thought, impossible.  Just weeks previously, my Polish teacher, a woman of 30  and fluent in German, French and English told me, while looking at a collection of fruit, This does not exist, it must be a wrong colored lemon while looking at a green watercolored lime.  So, I thought this game of hunting for ingredients would come to end until Tomaz said he saw something he thought might be a coconut.  And there in the center window off a side street in town with all its fine tropical hair awkwardly messed up and leaning into a bottle of carrot juice and beets, was yes, a coconut.

How it found itself in Kielce, an industrious town aka The Knife City two hours north of Krakow, we didn't ask.  But hours later with a hammer and a bowl, we bled that coconut and chewed on the firm white flesh saving pieces for our friends.  Coconut curry came together in a large bubbling mass thanks also to the rich raw milk Tomaz got from his mother--thick white frothy milk carried in a jar from farm to bus to cinderblock house.  And yes, I had a few limes that I had purchased weeks previously from a market in a neighboring town, to prove to my Polish teacher that limes do exist and aren't just mis-colored lemons.

We sat with a collection of friends on the floor eating bowlfuls of green coconut curry until the last of the sauce and sweet milk was gone.  So proud of ourselves in being able to create the impossible, flavors we had only remembered or read about right there in the shoebox of our kitchen.  And now, so many years later, maybe it isn't so strange that I run a cooking school.  People ask where I went to culinary school.  I say, laughing, I have my MFA in poetry and traveled a lot and simply tried everything I could, but have no training, none other than a lot of skilled eating. 

And really, that is all I have, a long love story of eating everything I could find while living in Europe.  But thankfully, I didn't stop with stories or moments of meals past.  Nope, alone in all that cold and silence in Marquette, Michigan I decided to really learn how to make something, make something real.  I made fresh pasta that failed from the desire to taste chestnut penne from a wintered lunch in Spoleto, yogurt salad that was too sour but remembered fondly from a trip to Crete and of course, strawberry pierogies from Tomaz's mother's who picked them on the side of the road on her walk home will most likely never taste as good.  Mine fell apart into doughed masses.

Sure, this all sounds romantic, but what I have learned is that real love comes from the efforts of failure.  Not the fact that you failed as much as your efforts to try.  From wanting to figure out how to make it again, sourcing ingredients, learning the science and or course, being open to the fact that you have to figure out each step.  And even then, it still might fail.  Yes, failing is the hardest part, but I also know it is where you learn the most.  And this is what I love about food, even in the meals of mediocre flavor, it is your chance to improve.  Try again, and what else is there? But a chance to recreate and even rewrite your recipe, your heart.  

So Marquette is far from Missoula as was Poland, but thankfully, I still have a kitchen. I still have my blind desire to feed myself and those I love.  This poem has come up so often lately that it truly feels like the best recipe poem to share with you.

Enjoy.

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here.  Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who know you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit.  Feast on your life.


Derek Walcott








  

Entre Chien et Loup (Between Dog & Wolf)

Winter blooms.  Solstice passes and the days are finally inching towards more light.  Snow has arrived and stayed in the valley and thankfully keeps coming.  For me with all this white even before the sun rises--the days glow.  If you live in Missoula, Montana or have only visited you might disagree with my sense of brightness with all the grey and valleyed clouds heavy on a blurred horizon.  Yes, it is true, Missoula is not known for it's winter light-filled weather but thankfully, all you have to do is climb out and up to the mountains, to get closer to the sun, even if it is numb.

This picture is taken at such a place.  Snowbowl, Missoula's local hill, is where I go as often as I can. Even if this photo is five years old, it still captures how I feel about it today: a respite from the heaviness and hanging grey.  This photo was taken during my first winter in Missoula, a ski I remember fondly with the rising moon and the diminishing light just out of bounds at Snowbowl, where I thought I would be for just a season to ski.  Yes, I was 33 and wanted to live the dream of a ski bum.  Call me a late bloomer.  Call me simple.   With two degrees and too much teaching experience and a carload of belongings strapped together with an abundance of naivety, I landed in this city where I had only visited for a total of four days and knew one friend.  It was late October, 2007.

And somehow my semester at ski manifested into a home.  A lot has happened in these last five years.  So much has happened and changed, but these hills budding into mountains dusting with snow are where I return with the same intention I carried with me five years ago: to seek exercise, to speed under downy white conifers, but mostly to seek the light in my heart.  Sure, this certainly sounds poetic and perhaps even downright indulgent, the ability to ski all day or at least a few days a week and still hold down a full-time enjoyable job with benefits?   

I must be living the dream, right?  I am.  Simply because it is my dream.  And yet, I am only now, five years later seeing this choice and dream as also a responsibility.  The responsibility we must all face with the choices we make, even if it is as simple as putting skis on a Thursday morning before going to work for some fresh air and exercise.  And while I ski and seek the quiet, I let my mind go.  I would love to be so Zen that I just breathe and not think, but lately I have been thinking about what our dreams cost us as much as our failures.  And what I can say I have found with hours in the cold and wind? Really, they cost the same.  It's only when we judge ourselves for either does it change the shade.

The choice in how I see my life these days as a new year dawns can get downright grey if I were only to see negatives.  And sometimes I do only see the negatives and forget there is a sun behind inversion and grey.  And when I forget, I put on my shoes, boots rather, and continue to ski to feel a sense of blooming.  Sure, some days even while skiing I stumble on negative views, worry I will hit a tree and fail to see all the endless powder in front of me.  Somedays I stand at the top of the hill, so afraid of taking a risky route while the daylight quickly passes, I hamlet myself under down and fear.  I get stuck. Limboed in my own mind, blurred by my far-sighted vision, avalanched by worry, I get cold.  But at this point, I remember my feet.  How under all the plastic and wool, they are there, bare.  No matter where we go or what we wear, there we are, bare even to a numb sun.  Somewhere in us no matter how buried is our spirit, our sun. 

Maybe people who live above the 45th parallel become obsessed with light and can get downright depressed longing for it.  We mole ourselves in the grey dulled days.  We long to see the light, dream of languid greens and cherry blossoms from some orcharded youth.  During these times of longing, I look to other languages to say what I cannot seem to define.  Leave it to the French to have a phrase to talk about this blurred vision, this waning of light.  As a way to explain this desire to differentiate between the familiar and unknown,  l'heure entre chien et loup, the hour between dog and wolf, that is, dusk, when the two cannot be distinguished from each other.  The hour in which--and it's a space rather than a time-- every being becomes its own shadow, and thus other than himself, maybe more wild and more dynamic.   I'd like to call it the hour of metamorphoses, when people, half hope, half fear that a dog will become a wolf, something mythical and graceful transforms. This hour comes down to us, when we must change.  When we must use our grace as much as our fear to find our spirit, our self. 

I won't claim to know how to transform.  But I do know to get closer to the unknowns, you start with what you do know.  Me, I like to ski.  I also know that five years ago, I could get down a hill, well sort of, but certainly not with grace.  And no one did it for me.  That's the beauty of transformation, you have do it yourself using your own fears, failures, triumphs, dreams, feet and of course, spirit. And really to transform the self on two fat sticks being graced down an immovable mass, is the closest I have felt to being whole with agility and grace.  Smiling even as the light fades. 

Here's one of my favorite sonnets on light, grace and transformation.

Enjoy.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit.  And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, not turned to low,

gleams in all its power.  Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you.  You must change your life.

--From the Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke