lycanthropia

Things I want to be different
• not to be wearing an underwire bra (update: all taken care of)
• for just one year in which I only take classes and don’t have to teach
• for Obama not to have to run against Romney
• for Jeremy to be alive again
• that everyone should somehow be okay
• for there to be 18 students per section, not 27
• to be teaching lit or women’s studies not comp
• to have an achieved poetry ms that someone wants to publish this year
• for my rent to be $200 less than it is
• that I’m always behind on email
• not to have missed the poetry reading at Poison Girl last night because I was suddenly, inexplicably, too depressed to move from the sofa

Things I want to be the way they are
• little white box containing fried chicken and a biscuit for lunch
• LaCroix sparkling coconut water
• it’s Friday
• Pyewacket acting all hysterical and greedy about the chicken
• I’m reading Almanac of the Dead
• next time I do go out, I’m totally ordering an amaretto sour
• the neighbor is being all kind and affectionate and thoughtful and for no particular reason I can divine bought me a book I wanted
• we’re splitting a Netflix queue and have two movies coming on Saturday
• the wart on the bottom of my foot, which I’ve had since the breakup and which I named after my ex, spontaneously went away
• after the slush meeting tonight I don’t have to be anywhere besides yoga until Monday at 11 am
• somehow I am going to talk myself into taking a bubble bath tonight, which I realize should actually be a good thing but I get phobic about bathing when I’m depressed, so I have to wheedle myself into it by using fancy soap
• I have an adequate supply of fancy soap
• did I mention it’s Friday
• also, it’s Friday

Ash Ode

When I saw you ahead I ran two blocks
shouting your name then realizing it wasn’t
you but some alarmed pretender, I went on
running, shouting now into the sky,
continuing your fame and luster. Since I’ve
been incinerated, I’ve oft returned to this thought,
that all things loved are pursued and never caught,
even as you slept beside me you were flying off.
At least what’s never had can’t be lost, the sieve
of self stuck with just some larger chunks, jawbone,
wedding ring, a single repeated dream,
a lullaby in every elegy, descriptions
of the sea written in the desert, your broken
umbrella, me claiming I could fix it.

Dean Young

I was leaning across your chest;
Like a marble-smith, I made pencilmarks over
Its vanilla skin, its young man’s skin,
Refreshing as the pleasure page in a daily newspaper.
I sniffed you to quench my thirst,
As one sniffs in the sky huge, damp sheets of lightning
That bring down the chablis, hocks, moselles,
And tear cold, watery holes,
Those soaking wet chords from Brahms (…their overflow,
On which you could float a canoe)
Are not more refreshing! Nor is the fragrant gin-fizz
From the glass joint of a rod of grass.

My life cries out for water!
Haughty sheets of newsprint, lightning, music, skin!
Haughty bathrooms where the lukewarm swimmer
In his water-colour coat of soap is king.

I understand you, frightful epoch,
With your jampots, brothels, paranoias,
And your genius for fear, you can’t stop shuddering.
Discothèques, I drown among your husky, broken sentences.

I know that to get through to you, my epoch,
I must take a diamond and scratch
On your junkie’s green glass skin, my message
And my joy—sober, piercing, twilit.

In the hotel where you live, my Kurdish epoch,
Your opera of typewriters and taperecorders
Boils the hotel with sumptous oompah!
…(…as my heavy-drinking diamond writes)

Boils it! And loosens the bread-grey crusts
Of stucco from the 19th century…with an opera
Of broken, twilit poetry
Built from your dust-drowned underworld of sighs.

Epoch, we are lonely. For we follow hotel berbers
Of the past, those who drift in corridors, whose tents
An those derisive manuscripts are dipped in marble
By your backward glance.

Criminal, you took a great piece of my life,
And you took it under false pretences,
That piece of time
—In the clear muscles of my brain
I have the lens and jug of it!
Books, thoughts, meals, days, and houses,
Half Europe, spent like a coarse banknote,
You took it—leaving mud and cabbage stumps.

And, Criminal, I damn you for it (very softly).
My spirit broke her fast on you. And, Turk,
You fed her with the breath of your neck
—In my brain’s clear retina
I have the stolen love-behaviour.
Your heart, greedy and tepid, brothel-meat,
Gulped it like a flunkey with erotica.
And very softly, Criminal, I damn you for it.

Thinking we were safe—insanity!
We went in to make love. All the same
Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom.
Then in the gloom…
…And who does not know that pair of shutters
With the awkward hook on them
All screeching whispers? Very well then, in the gloom
We set about aquiring one another
Urgently! But on a temporary basis
Only as guests—just guests of one another’s senses.

But idiots to feel so safe you hold back nothing
Because the bed of cold, electric linen
Happens to be illicit…
To make love as well as that is ruinous.
Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us
That without permanent intentions
You have absolutely no protection
—If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous
The concurring deep love of the heart
Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.

I feel flat and blank and stupid and contented. I have just eaten a tray of salmon maki from the grocery store, and a box of strawberry Pocky, and tidied my desk ruthlessly (oh HELLO $3 REI dividend) (also: Nancy Drew notecard from F! Little marvelous paintings from M!) (in addition to just indescribable chaos and masses and masses of papers, most of which got shoved willynilly into the filing cabinet and not actually so much filed) and done a bunch of teaching-admin busywork and emailed students about this and that and set up my separate color-coded course folders for the spring semester and finally set up the sewing machine/table and washed all the bed linens and am drying and folding them and putting them away and starting on the mountain of dirty clothes, and watching videos of David Tennant (recent celebrity fixation), and the neighbor texts me how’s my reading going and do I want a Lucky Burger, and I text him back I haven’t started yet, and thanks but no; and there is SO MUCH reading this semester, and I’m putting the recycling in a brown paper bag when it hits me: I am just so completely, to the bones, moronically contented, and I LOVE my carriage house. Love it. I never want to move out of here, ever, not ever in a million years. Love. It. I wish I could buy it, live here for the rest of my days.

And while I am doing all this I randomly remember a conversation my ex and I had maybe a few months after we had combined our finances, where I was all “how much do we agree it’s okay to spend without consulting the other person—like, anything over a hundred bucks, or just anything that’s not joint, or what do you think?” and he was all casual about it “well I’d be fine with you spending a couple hundred without checking with me, so” and I was all accommodating and that sounds fine darling, and of course now I realize that since it set him back about that much every time he paid for—

—but I am totally disinterested in this kind of memory, it actually thoroughly bores me now, I am much more anxious about teaching rhetoric for the fourth spring semester in the last five years, and how will I make that shit even remotely interesting to me much less them, and am I going to spend the night at the neighbor’s or go to bed early and lie in the dark watching Sherlock with the cat, and should I eat ALL the maki or save some for later? and I need to buy organic bacon to season the cast-iron pan, etc.

And oh man I love my house. I am so crushed out on it. It is so small and snug and perfect for me, and has a pink sofa, and my turquoise-striped Mexican blanket, and pink-and-red Our Lady of Guadalupe pillows, and multicolored Mexican candles, and the little red armchair no one sits in but Pyewacket, and I arranged all my books finally on the shelves over New Year’s, with the neighbor writing code on the sofa and occasionally expressing polite interest when I would show him Wittgenstein, and Pye playing in the empty cardboard boxes, and those books haven’t been in order since I left Santa Fe, no joke, I never had time to sort them even in Tempe. And in my desk I find a bunch of envelopes with our old street address written on them and I shove them without even looking in the big brown envelope which contains various scraps of my life with my ex, and which I’m sending to J. in October so she can put it inside Zozobra for me, to be burned up into ashy nothingness. The blessings are huge, right now. Everything seems so survivable, where this time last year it really did not, and I don’t know how I made it through all that, those mornings of waking up and my first eye-filling thought being Oh Shit, It’s Still All This Again, I Have to Do Everything Without Him. That I could not wake up without immediately swimming in tears. How I had to set up gmail so that if he emailed me it would forward to the other J, in Portland, so she could intercept it (breakup buddies, we did this for each other).

Now Pye is trying to get into the air conditioning vent, seemingly not remembering that last night she was shut up in the car for an unconscionable FOUR HOURS because she wanted to play in the front seat for some reason and the wind blew the door shut and I was drinking beer and reading Michelle Tea and wondered where she was but forgot about her playing in the car. She was so happy when I remembered and let her out, so purry and overjoyed. She’s ridiculous. I’m ridiculous. We’re ridiculous together. It’s the weekend and apparently ridiculous and contented and kind of unintelligent and not a lot of intellectually sophisticated is what we do.

When the alarm went off and I dressed and went downstairs, Pyewacket seemed to know that the days of sleeping in together were over, and immediately began demanding the treat she knows she gets whenever I leave the house for the day (a saucer with about three droplets of a certain forbidden dairy product). I packed up books, laptop, and delicious bento (cosponsored by the neighbor’s salmon and rice) and was at school by nine. Parking wasn’t an issue; neither was walking across a road made recently treacherous by construction (no, seriously, I mean treacherous); there was even a traffic cop there to facilitate our safe passage. The sun shone. The birds tweeted. I was remarkably unterrified. Hm.

Once in my office, I made some minor syllabus adjustments and printed it out, along with my rosters. Made fifty copies and pleasant small-talk with colleagues, waiting for the terror to kick in. Waiting. Waiting. Finally walked over to my classroom, got all set up, found out it was someone else’s classroom, walked two doors down to the right classroom, taught. Kept them too long and was myself four minutes late to my next class.

But here’s the awesome, awesome part: BOTH CLASSROOMS ARE PARTIALLY MEDIATED. Meaning, I have a computer/projector. I don’t have to order in a battered PC laptop that refuses to connect to the wireless network for an entire semester! I don’t have to beg my students to bring speakers from home so we can actually hear, because there’s no audio! I can show as many clips of The Daily Show as I want mouahahahahaha.

(Then there was the part where, about 45 minutes into the second class, we were still doing introductions and one guy said apologetically, “I’m X…but I’m not in your class.” Me, bewildered, scanning roster: “Wait—what’s your last name?” X: “No, I’m really not in your class.” Friend of X, interrupting: “He just came with me today, and he thought you looked cute and decided to stay.” X nods sheepishly. I stare at him. “But where are you supposed to be, X? Are you even enrolled here? I mean, this is a legal liability issue for the university—what if a desk falls on your head?” We establish that X is an official university student and by then there’s only a few minutes left in class anyway but I tell him sternly he may not return.)

Then I went to the library, back to my office for some hasty Blackboard maintenance and aforementioned delicious bento, then to Dickinson seminar, where we read, among others, the fair copy (with variants) of “I could not live with You” and somehow by the end I was blind with tears, they were spattered down all over the paper, and when we got to the triple variance of “and that White Sustenance [privilege/exercise] – / Despair – ” it undid me completely and I actually had to leave the classroom because I was full-out crying. But that’s okay. That’s just Dickinson and me. We have an understanding. (Even just now, looking up the poem to find a link for you, I started tearing up again. I just, yeah. I know where she lives.)

Otherwise, I can’t handle the whole Mabel Todd Loomis era of Dickinsonian editorial intervention and pretty much had to tune out that whole part, mostly by entertaining myself with my imaginary screenplay, Emily & Susan. The idea came to me from this still of Jane Adams in an otherwise completely awful movie called Songcatcher. Adams plays the prissy schoolmarm who turns out to be this unbridled Sapphist and I know in my bones she was born to play Dickinson. I still don’t know who should play Susan (Gilbert Dickinson, married to Emily’s older brother Austin), or her sister Lavinia; but we’ve got the Emily casting sorted out. The film would open with the ugly bowdlerized picture of “Miss Emily” melting away into the original daguerrotype, which would then come to life in a puff of smoke as Dickinson is having her picture taken, which I know is COMPLETELY CHEESY and that’s why it’s my fantasy movie dammit.

And then it was five o’clock and I came home. I was so sped up from the day’s happy events that Pyewacket and I danced in the kitchen (me: dancing, Pye: staring) to the Diana Krall in my head, snapping and spinning (no cares for me I’m happy / as I can be I’ve learned to / love and to live devil-may-care) until, inevitably, I pushed it too hard, bouncing around the house taking out the trash, putting away the dishes, putting on a pretty skirt to go calling on the neighbor, and then suddenly worst cramps in months and there I was facedown on the sofa panting, hot water bottle doing nothing, bleeding through my skirt, paralyzed with pain. Two arthritis-strength Tylenol and blessed unconsciousness. But as someone said pragmatically later, at least that didn’t happen while you were at school, and that is REAL TALK.

she who is wise never tries to revise
what’s past and gone
live love today let come tomorrow what may

Oh, and I took my turns in my word games and my brain was sparkling, I was making 6- and 7-letter words with ease; and I read my portfolio review from my workshop instructor from last semester, and steeled myself quite thoroughly before opening the envelope, actually rehearsing the comments I was certain to receive so they wouldn’t sting or surprise me; and then instead there was this perfectly fair-minded, even-handed, level-headed set of comments which were probably if anything decidedly too generous and almost flattering. So that also inspired the dancing. However much I later regretted it.

I realize by the way that these are not the most thrilling entries so far this year. I keep thinking of Kate Z. calling this my “blog of the quotidian” and then I have to laugh; and there’s quotidian and there’s just plain pedestrian and I’ve been too guilty of the latter. But as usual there’s a lot I feel I can’t write about except in some encoded lyric fashion, and I now have exactly fifty students and how am I going to find time/energy to wax all distorted and non-narrative? I’m sure I will. But right now I have to read three introductions/chapter ones, from three different texts, for fem theory; and start some laundry; and you know just like that the semester is off and running and has me in its grinning teeth.

But from where I’m sitting I can see dandelions blooming in the yard and the grass is green and Pyewacket is out there picking her way through the slips of the new banana plants, and the spring semester is always, always easier, I don’t know why but it is, and maybe I will write a good poem or two in workshop, and write two 25-page research papers, and somehow learn 50 people’s names, and read and grade all their essays, since it always somehow all gets done, always, so far, every single time.

Curled up on the sofa half-working on my syllabus, eating organic cheesy poofs, listening to Sigur Rós and The Orb and Brothomstates, because that’s the kind of speed we’re at here, after a month of deep householding peace. The house is quiet and the world is calm. Just now Pyewacket was playing with a ribbon from A’s Christmas present (an enormous box of fancy black and green tea pyramid teabags) and got it looped around her neck, and I had to liberate her, as she staggered bewildered on top of all my shoes lined up by the door. A single ribbon throws off her whole proprioception, she’s all bigeyed OMGZ WHAT IS DIS, and she can’t function.

Really trying not to be the same way about school starting tomorrow. Trying to just be very chill. Aiding in this effort are a) the horrendous menstrual period I just had, which made it nearly impossible to care about anything other than When Do I Get More Drugs Again, and b) the neighbor, who has been screening back-to-back episodes of The IT Crowd and Doctor Who and feeding me salmon fried rice with egg and maitakes. We are about to stirfry more of this same salmon with some baby bok choy, and I’m not sure how much more I have to say than that.

Chill. Relaxed. I’ve done this a zillion times. Tomorrow begins my sixteenth semester of teaching. I’ll wake up relatively late if I want (8 am? 8:30?), put on jeans, go to school. No makeup, no fancy, no. Using the textbook which has been conveniently stashed in my office all break (so that I could, you know, access it easily), I’ll put some finishing touches on my syllabus (like, um, adding the actual paper descriptions and semester schedule)—then print out 51 copies, and meet my two classes from 11-12 and 12-1. Some kind of lunch, then Dickinson seminar from 2:30 to 5:30, and that’s my first day of school. Easy. Simple. Ain’t no thang.