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

The Narrative of a Still Life

My first exposure to famous artists and their paintings was through a board game.  Yes, my grandmother gave me the ever so popular Masterpiece for Christmas in the early 80s and needless to say, you may not have played this game of bluffing and negotiations while buying and selling famous works of art and I am guessing you might not have ever heard of it either.  As the youngest of three by five and seven years,  I had to begin negotiations early with trying to get my brother and sister to play any game with me let alone, Masterpiece.  

Needless to say, I learned to play quite well alone.  But mostly, I would pull out the game, spread out the heavy papered replicas of Van Gogh, El Greco, Monet and study them.  Study might be a stretch for a five year old, let's say stare.  Rarely would I even read their titles, just look at color.  Years later while showing slides for Art History classes during my undergrad, I often had a faint sense of deja vu while focusing on some Dutch master hadn't I seen this before?

Oddly enough my favorite paintings as a child were mostly Dutch masters and especially still lives.  The open table with an apple, a melon and a candlestick seemed odd and unfitting but balanced and serene.  Perhaps a childhood spent mostly in the woods walking the quiet dales of Northern Michigan tend to lead to an aesthetic of Northern European minimalism.  Symbolism is something you find in your backyard of orchard, moss and barbed wire instead of a book preaching you of some sky of God.

I recently returned to the cold woods of Northern Michigan for Thanksgiving.  Late November in Leelanau county can be flat light, incessant winds and boarded up summer homes.  As if life is put on pause.  The view all around was a monochromatic still life.  And really while I was home for a long weekend, I stayed pretty close.  Walked a lot in the cold wind, went for runs along the lake and spent a drizzled afternoon with my parents searching for Petoskey stones dodging the waves coming in strong off of wintered Canada.  If the scene were painted, the palette would be a variation on grey.

Yet regardless of the flat light and rain flirting into snow, it was such a calming time.  I did not question every action or analyze my mental state.  I merely walked into a still life with the backdrop of barren trees, muted leaves under snow and the faint hint of evergreen on hills.  For the first time returning home I had an absence of looking for some piece to myself in the portrait of my past.  Many of us do this, look to our past selves or place and try to make sense of what we've become.  Isn't there some image or memory that will unlock this state of absence, longing or loss?

But that is the trap of nostalgia--to believe your past holds more weight or power than your present.  I prefer a progressive verb, such as we are all becoming.  Our bodies house our hearts which travel around with us.  Why keep it in the drawers of your youth, the closets of your past? Or at least this is what I am trying to do.  Unearth a heart and know it is already home.  In me.  And it's hard.  It's hard to change a lifetime of practiced images or views of yourself.  But maybe like an artist or traveler the key lies in changing the angle of perspective.   It's amazing how just moving your underwear from back pack to dresser drawer can give you a sense of being placed, or being home.  To be able to see your home in November as vacation.  To see yourself not broken, but becoming.  No matter what still life you thought you would see yourself placed in.

Enjoy your place today.

Elegy for a Stone Unskipped

It is a cool morning where I imagine him

laying in bed. The first light is the only thing

he cannot name.  Unlike wisteria, its scent a clock

that ticks and wakes him with the wind

as the mourning dove, whose song

coos young Carl out of bed for chores. 

Head full of flowers instead of milking cows 

or prayers. Petals are nothing

but bed curtains for young lovers, shaming

his father working verbs into rows 

of repent, weed, and preach.

He leaves the farm, alone in a city

with nothing but inked drawings of aster,

otter and toad.  Wakes each day

to the dumb dove, he wants to claim

as pigeon. He sees himself perched 

as bird, muted grey and begins

to label himself a vagrant species.

Linnaeus knows language is not a song

for birds, warbles eludes him all day

like the scent of his mother’s hair.

Sunday he walks to the sandy shores

of the Oresund, rests on a rock, tries not 

to notice or name the algae or mollusk 

washed by the tide, takes a stone 

to feel his own weight

in his palm. To hold the holding

of his father’s voice calling him back

for lunch. He rests the rock on his desk,

dried and dulled on a pile of papers

where it remains. Nameless, even to the sun.

Serenity is the Hallway Hero

I kept a list of student names and spellings from the classes I used to substitute teach when I first moved to Missoula.  Brock, Brodee, Cody, Elmira, Camas and Willow were some of my favorites.  Characters from a Larry McMurtry novel, small towns found in the wilds of Wyoming or abstract concepts revived by the now grandparents of the 60's.  Only West of the Mississippi would you consistently have a roll call with a boy named Earl.  And a girl named Serenity can be a hallway hero.

My niece is named Wren and I adore her and her name.  It seems to be rather onomatopoetic when you say it for it easily flies out of your mouth and you find yourself smiling when you say her name.  Despite our distance and lack of time spent hanging out on a daily basis, Wren and I are rather fond of each other.  Perhaps it might be because we have a similar sense of spirit.  Perhaps it might be because she has a friend named Emily she likes who lives near by.  

What I do know is that last Valentine's day Wren and her mom were in the post office sending off Valentines' to friends and family when Wren said, 
"I want to send Emily a card."  
"Emily who?" asked her mom.
"Emily Montana." (which sounds pretty darn cool, like some struggling country western singer who spends too much time not singing.)  And so, Wren put together a card for me, which this picture does not do justice, but is framed and hung in my bathroom.  It felt too artful and alive to just be left on my fridge to fold or fade into the year placed under some magnet.  I wanted to hold that spirit all year long.  I wanted to feel in the random St. Patrick stickers, smily faces, reindeer and pieces of cake a sense of love and joy.  Placed just so with so much well, spirit and such a sense of unabashed delight. 

Last Valentine's day for me was not a memorable day in the state of romantic love.  Perhaps what was memorable was it was so full of almost every other type of love: familial, hopeful, renewal, longing and of course, loss of love.  I'm confident if you wikipediaed love, you would find plenty of more types, but what resonated with me with this card was a specific type of love.  A love that comes from a personal place in our hearts, regardless of how old we are,  let's just call it a love of light.  Call it lightness of being, call it joy, call it whatever you want, but hopefully you call it.  I believe we all possess this love or are capable of being surprised by where we might find it.  For me, it is a card thickly coated with every holiday of the year stickers, placed in a manner of a four year old's artful mind.

I only recently framed this card out of the desire to remind myself of being able to bring light, or delight into my daily life.  November can hang heavy.  Can make you forget about the sun.  And it is during these dark hallways of days that you need a torch, need some sort of light regardless of how faint to follow.  It is during these days I have needed this card the most.  I am sure all of us have some totem of joy we follow. And most of the time for me it is art or poetry.  It is the poetry of Jack Gilbert that I turn to for cerebral joy when I feel heavy in my heart.

Last night, thanks to the post by fellow poets on Facebook, I found out Jack Gilbert died.  (Again, I just think we should all it Face It.)  If you don't know Jack Gilbert, please google him.  No, google his poetry.  Even better yet, google videos where you can hear his voice break almost in every poem he reads, as if his words were so heavy with emotion but so giving with light.  

He had won the prized Yale Younger Poets award in 1962, thought to be this next handsome man of yes, literary fame if there is such a thing, but Jack chose to live in Europe.  Chose to write a book of poems every ten years, chose to live more than he taught.  Wrote more about the terrible beauties of this world not under the guise of shame or darkness, but rather delight.  Or as the article in the New York Times said of his work yesterday, "..and their (his poems) embrace of life as a big, messy possibility, his poems were for many readers both serious and accessible, connecting to their own feelings of having to endure in a often cruel, unfair world."

But there is more there in his work.  In the poetry of Jack Gilbert, suffering was not something to endure, but to accept with a smile.  He loved this world so much, maybe too much for our rational minds to understand. Here are a few lines from his poem, "A Brief for the Defense" found in his book, Refusing Heaven,  

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of  their deprivation.

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 thanks that the end had  magnitude.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.

And I believe to risk knowing there is sorrow, but to risk holding delight despite it all allows us to live with our hearts as much as our minds.  To risk our ability to have delight and joy is to risk love.  And the greatest risk is truly believing we are worth it.  To hear our names as the hallway heros of love.  To be happy with our sorrow and give thanks that our hearts can still bring joy.  Despite everything.  Despite losing Jack we have gained his words. 

Here's a poem from the same book, Refusing Heaven. 

Enjoy.

The Reinvention of Happiness

I remember how I'd lie on my roof

listening to the fat violinist

below in the sleeping village

play Schubert so badly, so well.

Little Big Birds

There are few places on this earth where the names of towns carry the weight of abandonless hope.  Here in Montana, Wisdom, Opportunity, Sunburst and even Big Timber conjure up the sense of our internal West.  The idea that life is elsewhere and that elsewhere is where you have arrived.  There's even the main street of Helena, that illustrates this perfectly: Last Chance Gulch.  History claims four men from Georgia had travelled all over Western Montana in search of gold, finding nothing, they decided to take one last chance on a small stream which runs down the main street of this state's capitol.  And sure enough, they found gold.

On a late October day, I found myself in need of some hope too.  So I took myself on a one day road trip.  A solo road trip.  When the mountains aren't snow-ski ready and trails drench with cold mud, the warmth of a car seems almost like a vacation.  Rolodexing through my mind for things I enjoy, I decided to head to Helena to see the Holter Art Museum, but maybe also because Boulder Hot Springs is just a mere 30 more miles away.  The day was grey, washed out by intermittent rain squalls, but with sudden bursts of golden sun.  The larch gleamed.  My car played and re-played Cat Power's latest CD, Sun.  And when I arrived in Helena, all I wanted to do was take photos of sky, afternoon light on brick and get lost in the fact I could stand in front of a de Kooning brought out on a train from New York by a family who wanted to ranch.  It was titled Woman and full of the same muddled mustard of the late October larch I had passed for over a hundred miles.

I had not been on a solo road trip in over five years, the last being when I drove into Missoula with my car full, two bikes and a cat, late one Tuesday night just a week before Halloween.  Ironically, it had been almost five years to the date, so my solo road trip to see art and soak, was a bit of an anniversary.  But what was I celebrating, really?  Independence, which really wasn't what I wanted at 38.  Freedom, which is thrilling and all my married friends with toddlers tell me how lucky I am, but after a divorce, I've learned it pays a heavy price.  As I let my body float and watch the last of the light fade into the Continental Divide, I settled on a word to celebrate: hope.  

But hope is tricky.  Sure, we recall hope was also in Pandora's box, which according to myth contained all the evils of the world.  Despair, grief and anger to name a few seemed to have scrunched themselves tightly in the corner wrapped with hope until they were all released.  And here's the thing: When you go in search of hope, the odd part is, you have to have enough of it already to believe there is more.  As if hope is gold for the soul.  But furthermore, you cannot believe hope is only one-sided, either just evil or just good.  Again, tricky.  So why would I want to celebrate hope, if it isn't something to have or hold?

While I was floating in the pool, I watched the late autumn clouds move quickly across the sky.  A couple maybe in their 60's perhaps not married, but close, sat in the pool holding their bodies up in the water with neon colored noodles.  They spoke of the election.  They had different opinions.  But they listened to each other, carefully.  The spoke of music. Music they liked to play passionately.  They didn't interrupt each other and enough laughter surfaced between them to keep their conversation light, but intimate.  

I went and dressed and poured myself a cup of coffee from my thermos.  Still hot.  I sat in my car and kept waiting for some shade of loneliness to set in, a full day not talking to anyone, I thought some sense of dusk would rise to elude me.  But it didn't.  And I didn't want it.  I wanted to see the day in more than one shade.  Simply, I had hope that I could keep the darkness on the outside of the car while I headed west for Missoula.  And for the most part I did, until I merged along the same stretch of road I recalled coming back on late one June after eloping, so full of hope and future.  I let the memory pass.  Not with tears, nor with anger, or remorse, not even a whiff of judgement or a shadow of pure loss.  Nope.  I just let it pass.  Because hope, thankfully, isn't something to hold, but to understand as impermanent.  

As Emily Dickinson claimed, "Hope" is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul/ And sings the tune without the words/ and never stops--at all--.  As if hope can come and go, can fly to leave or arrive, but regardless of direction, the bird continually sings.  It is not the bird we need, but the knowing of the song.  And maybe, our hearts are the little big birds full of noise we can choose to hear as song.  Enjoy.  Another revised poem/ song

Hymn of the Pigeon

She finds a pigeon, dead

on her way home.  She's drunk,

swears the stars can lead her

to her front door.

Feet curled, taut with it's eyes gone, 

laying outside a drug store.

She picks up the still body

covered in gravel and warm.

Cupping the chest, she feels

an echo of a pulse, a pebble skipped

into a shallow pool.  Finds a box,

and nestles the blind bird with rosemary,

not knowing what to do with anything

born-again.  She feeds it oatmeal,

drops of water and waits

for it to do something.  Fly,

coo or shit, but it just rocks

back and forth like this boy

with dark glasses she watched

on a bus, who sang in perfect pitch.

Now she hears the song

of a meadowlark, far from her home

in fields of burnt grass, without

asking the world its name.