Truman Builds Houses

 The inspiration for this poem is Truman's months-long obsession with houses. What are you drawing, Truman? House. What are you building, Truman? House. He's two and our home probably feels like his whole world. But I can make a metaphor out of anything so it also feels like the genius of childhood, recognizing how essential feeling "at home" is for our happiness, and how innate the craving for home in our understanding of love, of God. Making our house Truman and Johanna's home continues to be the joy of a lifetime.

Sometimes his blocks are unsteady, built for speed

but even the tower in Pisa began its days straight.

It was one of his first perfectly-formed words - House

His voice confident, powerful, small, and yet, great.

He builds slowly when it suits him, when the day feels easy

When the ground is solid, the air warm, houses are pure joy.

Sometimes it is daddy's house, mama's house, rarely sister's

He is an architect, an explorer, a destroyer, a little boy.

What shape a house takes when its creation is delight

When the beams lean against the hips of a mother

What comfort warps itself into these spaces, these sturdy and less sturdy walls

When the hand that shapes them crafts only life, only love, only color.

What a gorgeous, Godly world it could be if he built it

All passion, joy, hilarity, and the "watch Mama" yelled loud

How lovely a seat for Jesus, for Esther, for David, for Mary

All welcome, all laboring, all celebrating, all marveling in Truman's house.

A Roof

Several weeks ago I lost two people, my uncle and  my baby. The losses are married in my gut because they happened so closely in time, days apart.  It's hard to unwind where one pain ends and the other begins, if the tears are for one or both or all or everything. I remember saying to my mom at some point in the process of both losses, "it's too much." She agreed, of course, it is entirely too much. On their own, each loss would have felt unbearable, but the two together feel as if I've broken some internal meter for fortitude.

The last few weeks have blurred, smiles and laughter and warm meals with friends a welcome balm.  But I still feel bizarrely scooped out, like the strongest, worthiest, most-myself-est pieces have been removed for maintenance and I am just a roof, pulled taut over the remaining bits and pieces that make me a person.

I have many in my life who pray for me. My family, friends. And I would never dismiss the desire loved ones have to bring the heartaches of their dearest companions to God.  I'm thankful for prayer, for the messy attempt we humans make of offering comfort when comfort feels impossible, but the underlying faith necessary to believe in the helpfulness of prayer these days is pretty thin.  And that spiritual shakiness is what makes me ache for my uncle. No stranger to pain, especially over the last five years of his cancer struggle, he always ended his health updates with "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away/Blessed be the name of the Lord." It could have been a casual email signature to some, but to him it was the greatest of truths.  I miss having that bone deep belief in my life, that smiling assurance that no depth of sorrow was without hope.

There wasn't anything to bury when we lost the baby. Too soon, too small, too fast. So we wrapped the petals of flowers given to us by friends and family in a remnant of my wedding gown and buried the hope of our babe at my husband's mom's grave. By that time, Uncle Buck had left us, too, and so the prayers I threw into the clouds were directed to him, not to God, "Show him around, Uncle Buck. Take care of him until I get there." Childish perhaps, but speaking to my uncle is easier than speaking to God these days, and so I do.  I hear his "darlin," his "sweetheart" when I cry and I hear the refrain he repeated throughout the course of his treatment, "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away/Blessed be the name of the Lord." I read my poems to him and pretend he's with me in the car when I listen to political podcasts. On the days that it is difficult for me to believe in a good and loving God, I am thankful for my unshakable belief in the communion of saints. While God may feel far away, Uncle Buck does not, and someday perhaps I'll acknowledge that that's God, too.

I am a Roof Now, Empty and Protective

The hurt stretched, pulled thin against some immovable plane.

I picture ancient warrior women, all hands and sweep of hair, rolling out some mammoth hide and 

pulling it taut. 

That's what I am now, for now, 

my hurt some wet, bloody roof to our home. 

The sweat and crush of it has passed but the shade remains, 

the shade and the protection from all this rain.

We bury you (just petals really because you had nothing else to give us when you left)

beside your Granma, not far from a lake, 

That's where I am now, for now,

the loss of you so quick, your daddy dug a hole with a tiny stick.

I wonder if grass is cool or green or itchy, slim and sharp or soft and wide

In that other place you've bloomed without the protection of my animal hide.

The sun will dry this skin in pieces, patches, and the rain won't soak us through.

But you're still out there beneath a tree and I am still a mama with no baby

That's who I am now, for now,

Hands smoothing the stretch of me, pulled tight to the ground as music wafts from somewhere

I protect some part of you still, beneath this roof of flesh and blood

And you grow somewhere new, God's garden, God's flood

The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.  Blessed be the name of the Lord. 

Kind of Poem

We've been home from our honeymoon for nearly a month.  All the bags are unpacked and we've settled into a rhythm of going to work, coming home, making dinner, tending to the garden, daydreaming. I used to write more about my trips, more detailed accounts perhaps, but with this trip I never expected to provide any kind of retelling of our road trip around the perimeter of Iceland. It feels a bit too holy to reduce to an itinerary.  But as is my habit, I did let little poems and snippets burrow into my skin.

He is a watcher out of windows,
a soul adding wonder to rocks and trees and earth
He is a wanderer of the purest sort,
walking without the burden of calculated exertion
but carrying only the questions of who walked here first, whether it might rain

We're very different people. He taps my forehead sometimes and makes a typewriter noise, his signal that he can see my brain racing, calculating, adjusting, weighing any number of combinations of cause and effect. He adds friction to that momentum in the best possible way, turns a spiral into an arrow, sometimes a pillow.

All my life I've written poems and missives in my head. Sometimes they're not even sentences, just snips of language that describe a moment. The description has always been important to me, as if a moment isn't quite real, quite concrete, unless I can put words to it. Words unpack me better than pictures or gestures or actions. And I think that's why I've found writing in the context of marriage so reorienting.  He makes my heart see pictures that I will never be able to describe and I find myself replacing poems with images in response. Not camera images, not snapshots of his head tilting out of the rain of a waterfall, not the way his eyes squint when he makes me laugh, but images of what love and care and hope feel like.

He was seated at our window this morning as I worked from home.  They're taking down an enormous tree across the street and he described what they were doing, the ropes among the branches, the fall of larger limbs. It had no comparison to Iceland, but it reminded me of our standing on a boat in some Northern fjord, poised and hopeful as we waited to spot the splash of a humpback whale. He was behind me then, his hand occasionally on my shoulder.  But the same picture came to me, my hands reaching into his chest and holding his heart, gently, like I was holding a kitten, a precious stone, a bomb.

I'll hold your heart forever, whatever the world around you provides, and whatever shape your heart takes. And I'll leave the descriptions to the rest of our lives, and trust that holding your heart can be its own kind of poem, written in heartbeats.

Next

There is no bravery in a love that knows what's next
How easy it would be to love
to linger
if we knew the bend and flex
of life's course

The prettiest of loves would crumble beside a hospital bed
had it not the courage of leaping
tear-stained and hopeful
from cozy field of flowers into the dark red
bloom of each delicate human pulse

The guts are never wrung for mere affection
No God-blessed desire checks its watch
counts the minutes
anticipates the reaction
with the comfort of a fortune teller

Love never knows how love will deepen
how easy it would be to love
to linger
if the depth of it did not so often cause the weeping
of tired eyes

Before we walked, love walked before us
wept in our footsteps
and promised us nothing but itself,
no plan, no fortune, but victorious
what is next

Dedicated to a dear friend who is spending time nursing her sister in the hospital. 

Godmother

I became godmother to Ava Ruth, my newest niece, a little over a week ago.  Baptists don't know much about godmothers so I will admit that my picture of such things was colored as much by Cinderella as it was by any understanding of the religious significance.

I am low on fairy dust, Ava Ru. I never had a godmother, so forgive me if I'm clumsy.

The night before I flew down to see you, I read the following in a book I'm reading (The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything): "Seek grace in the smallest things, and you will also find grace to accomplish, to believe in, and to hope for the greatest things." It's a quote attributed to one of the first Jesuits. But it reminded me of a scratchy poem I wrote the first time I held you a few months ago.  We met on the family mountain, you'll grow up there, in pieces, and now seems as good a time as any to write it down.

Someday, when she is young but feeling old, I will tell her
I came to this mountain, our family mountain, laid her on my lap to look deep into her eyes, asked her for advice.
And I felt every itch and sway of my life in the pool of time,
wrapped in arms that carried me as a child.
I will tell her that I can wish no greater wish for her,
that when she lives in the curve of a question mark, she be steadied and windblown by
this blood,
that her fear be lessened by the gut deep din of these trees, these rocking chairs,
and that in her confusion
she find the flicker of a grill's hot coal, the warm weight of a baby,
a wink from God.
My blood is her blood
and these mountains know both of us.
We are mountains, both of us.

You're a gift, Ava Ru.  You are too young to express love, to provide encouragement, to lend a hand with the cooking. But you were everything I needed that day on the mountain. In a small, happy moment when you squirmed against my chest, threw up on my shoulder, your face was how God communicated grace to me. God is good, little love, and enormous. He is the mountain beneath us and the familiar creak of stairs and the blanket we reach for when the wind picks up. You can find him everywhere and you are loved, everywhere. As your godmother, I will do my best to show you how very big and very present he is, and I have no doubt you'll do the same for me.

"Seek grace in the smallest things, and you will also find grace to accomplish, to believe in, and to hope for the greatest things."

Mid-Whisk

I was mid-whisk in a batch of pralines when I got a call that someone I love dearly was in the hospital. My head and heart did a dance, my head commenting on the price of pecans, how silly it would be to ruin another batch, my heart highlighting how easy it would be to curl up on my kitchen floor and worry, worry, worry, pralines be damned.

The pralines survived, a decent showing.  A few of the pecans were a touch dark, a bite or two may have had a hint of scorch under all that sugar and buttermilk. But I heard no complaints, I was likely the only one noticing the consequences of that mid-stir long pause.

The crisis resolved, loved one restored, pralines devoured, that moment mid-whisk has come back to me several times. It's not just that moment of worry, but the moment of peace that followed I remember. Hence, a poem.

Mid-whisk in the second batch of pralines, a call comes
Fingers sticky, bend a knuckle to swipe right, "hello?"
That voice is always calm, sad, but calm, for these moments
Always says, ..."just wanted  you to know..."

Speaker phone crackles, match each stir with a pause
Candies are delicate, need a swift, constant flutter
Smell the sugar as it heats, just shy of burning
"We'll know more soon," as I drop the butter

Remove from heat and pour in the pecans
Think, if I cry, I should cry on the floor
Or tilt my head to the side, for fear of the salt
But I don't cry, I just stir, stir some more

Dropped bit by bit on a long piece of wax,
Fingertips burned by sugared foam
Smile as each clouds, hardens, dares for a bite
Hear him always, mid-prayer, mid-whisk, in my home.

Cabinets

Now that I've painted the cabinets Ultra White and the the walls varying shades of French Pastry, Pumpkin Cream, Porpoise, and Gentle Rain, I can fess up. While I'd debated buying a house for several months, I pulled the trigger for only one reason. My heart was hurting and I needed something new and big into which I could channel all my angst. I needed to do something on my own to remind myself that I could be happy doing such a thing, just in case that's what the rest of my life looks like.

I don't recommend Buying A House as a form of post-breakup retail therapy. It's mildly irresponsible (maybe super irresponsible but I'm cutting myself some slack) and a lot more work than buying, say, an inappropriately priced pair of heels. That being said, while the timing of my decision may have been inspired by heartache, the result has been invigorating.  The work has not eliminated the sadness, but it has put it into context. I have been sad before. This time, I get to be sad in a house with Things To Do.

I always read (and write, but nobody's seeing that!) poetry when I'm sad.  And there are a handful of poets that I reread in certain moods.  Emily Dickinson's A Not Admitting to the Wound is a pretty fantastic I'm-sad poem, in part because I get a bit Dickinson-esque in such moments. I want nothing better than to sit in some corner with my tea and my notebook, pencil scratches the only sound in my head. My extroverted, optimistic self turns inside out, all exposed nerves and skepticism. But this poem doesn't just feed the sadness, it builds a room for it, nails it in, reminds me that God sees it, loves it, and will, eventually, make use of the scar.

A not admitting of the wound (1188)

BY: EMILY DICKINSON

A not admitting of the wound

Until it grew so wide

That all my Life had entered it

And there were troughs beside -

A closing of the simple lid that opened to the sun

Until the tender Carpenter

Perpetual nail it down

I've read that poem a thousand times in my life. It sounds like a slow, steady heartbeat to me, in the midst of moments where my own heart feels shaky, prone to skips and jumps. And as I drilled holes in my wall to attach a bookcase, or reattached cabinet doors one painful screw at a time, I heard the "tender Carpenter" so often, encasing that heartache in a sturdy box, gently asking me to hand it over. And in so many small moments of joy, minor victories of home ownership, I wondered if maybe, irresponsible purchasing decision or not, this might have all been part of His plan. He knew about the heartache, and he knew I'd need a house, a hammer, some cabinets in need of attention. This house. These cabinets. Emily. And a tender Carpenter, always.

Quiet

This blog has been gathering dust recently, but not for want of things to write. And not for a lack of desire to sum up my world in neat little packages of blog posts and creative pieces.  After some difficult family news in early autumn, I thought often about things I wanted to write here, or somewhere.  I drafted a few posts that will never see the light of blog day.  I wrote some weepy prose that only I and God should have to suffer through reading (sorry, God).

After a wonderful friend-filled trip to England and Scotland I struggled again with the right moment to encapsulate, the day I wanted to enshrine for posterity.  I sketched a shaky poem on the back of an Edinburgh postcard while sitting alone on a rock, staring across town, and I thought perhaps I'd work on it when I got home.  The postcard is tucked away on my bookshelf, likely to get stuck between the pages of a book I won't crack open for years.

My blogging has been mostly experiential, housed on The Minneapolite, detailing restaurants and things. The more creative exercises have felt tired, and even when inspired, my posts to this particular blog (old and dear though it is) have felt like a chore.  To add insult to injury, my poetry muscle is weak these days, and teenage in its tendencies. I used to draft poems for no reason at all, just to capture something.  But now I've reverted to my teenage poetic self, scratching out verses only when I'm hurting, the only element missing is the Tori Amos soundtrack wailing in the background.  I at least have the decency now to let Bon Iver provide my depressive ambiance.

This isn't to say that I've been unhappy, only that for some reason my creative writing has been limited to poetry and that poetry has only flowed on the days he has chemo, or the days work bores and exhausts me, or the days I'm just tired of this specific moment in my life.  I rebound quickly and maybe the poetry helps, even if it is melancholy and not worth sharing. Maybe everyone has creative seasons where the creation is a means of comfort, not expression. I'm also going to take a moment here to blame the damn Minnesotan cold.

It seemed for awhile that my creative writing was moving in some sort of publishable direction. Stories. Poems. Essays. Fits and starts of interesting things, most of which I abandoned. I even sent a couple stories to a small press and their rejection didn't bother me, at least not much. I was writing often and well, excited by my own ideas and toying with the idea that maybe I should share them.  Maybe others would read this stuff. Maybe I could be a writer.

But sometime this fall that all just stopped and I cannot pinpoint the hurdle.

I remember in college I said something to a dear professor and friend, something about wanting to be a poet. He is a poet himself, and I know that he was kind in his encouragement, even though I shudder at the thought of the poems I shared with him. I penned them in a tiny journal with a tough, almost wooden, exterior that was secured with ribbon. There were little Shakespearean quotes on the corners of each page. He picked out phrases he liked, descriptions I'd made, or rhymes he thought particularly smooth or lovely. He was specific in his praise and gentle in his comment that time and practice would be beneficial.

So I'm chalking up these last few months of dull-as-dirt, self-indulgent poetic drivel to a season of "practice" that will yield something noisy and fruitful someday. My creative pen has never been silent for this long. But I like to think that exciting things may be developed in the quiet spaces, maybe there's a shy story in there somewhere that needs a bit of coaxing before she starts making her own tap-tap-tap on the keyboard. Maybe she likes Bon Iver.

A Poem To End 2011

*I started working on this poem in 2010, and as is my habit, I doubt it's actually finished. It is one of the only poems I've ever written whose backbone (in my mind) was a song.  I don't write lyrics, I'm not enough of a musician for that.  But this poem always felt like a country song.  No refrain really.  And while the music of it isn't obvious, there was a distinctive tune in my head when I wrote it.  Even if it doesn't feel complete, it's finished enough for today, the last day of this year, the day that always reminds you of the things you failed to finish.  Here's to new days and new trees and finishing more poems in 2012.


I need a tree



Great-Granddaddy bought that house just shy of the Depression
In a small town in East Tennessee.

Raised their children tucked into the mountains,

Tucked into the roots of oak trees.

Initials were carved into cement,

Promising sidewalks don’t die.

New trees were planted as kids moved away,

Slow and steady grew straight for the sky.



I rode a bike at my grandparents’ place,

Tree-covered South Carolina.

Sunday sermons and Sunday suppers,

Beneath trees that knew how to find ya.

Secret neighborhood kisses sitting in leaves,

Listening for Grandmother’s holler.

The cover of treetops hides all childhood sin,

As you pray to be older, a bit taller.



My folks bought a house at the top of a hill

On a street by the name of Old Pine.

They planted a willow in the front yard

And I thought that the shade was all mine.

The oak in the backyard was thick as a boxcar,

And my dog dug a hole near her base.

Hours were spent casting spells and pretending

That that tree was a castle, a spaceship, a library on cloudier days.



The homes of my childhood were littered with trees,

With the leaves and long branches of growth.

And I was a child looking up, touching heaven,

Tucked into daydreams below.

And now I wander, questions pinned to my brow,

Wondering who else I should be.

And in my tiny, poorly-shaded apartment,

I realize, I first need a tree.

A tree with a long, old, steady, hard trunk,

And leaves worth a raking, leaves to crunch under snow

I need a tree to point me to heaven,

So I know which direction to grow.

Heaney and Definition

Earlier this week I had a double dose of Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize-winning poet, thanks to an In Conversation program at the Guthrie on Monday and a showing of his Antigone adaptation, The Burial at Thebes, on Tuesday. (Caveat: I'm vaguely aware of an FTC law that requires bloggers to note when they've received goods or been paid by an entity that they review, but I believe that only matters if the entity requires a review, which the Guthrie has not.  That being said, I submitted my blog address to the Guthrie when they invited bloggers to do so, I got a couple free tickets to Thebes, that was that. I bought the tickets to see Heaney myself. Feel free to read the following comments with all that unnecessary exposition in mind, or, kindly dispose of it given its superfluousness)

Heaney was introduced to me by a dear friend whose first role in my life was that of favorite professor, Dabney Stuart, who's a poet and letter-writer and sender of books.  I'm sure Dabney has become some romanticized image of Brilliance in my head, but he always counted me as a romantic so I won't apologize for that on his account.  We exchange letters sporadically, and occasionally when I'm stumbling over my own attempts at verses or when I just want to talk to someone about a book, I'll wonder if he thinks of me sometimes, aside from in those letters.

Dabney taught a poetry class at my alma mater and while I remember several of the poets and poems we went through, Heaney's "Digging" lodged in me soundly and never loosened.  Heaney's "Digging" and "Oysters", Yeats's "No Second Troy" and "An Irish Airmen Foresees His Death" together, sing to me better than any musician.  So to hear Heaney himself (who I'd always imagined as sort of an aloof, painful jerk) speaking of his boyhood, Belfast, death, and growing old, I felt like a mesh of all my poets, my favorites, were speaking to me from no less than 15 yards away.  When he was asked what poetry "meant," what good poetry's purpose must be, he just sighed and laughed and thought a minute.  He didn't have a polished answer, and in between other questions and thoughts, he'd come back to that one and try to tackle it again.  He settled on the subject with a comment that poetry should, simply, be more than what it is.  He worded it differently a dozen times.  It should be bigger.  Deeper.  More palpable.  Wiser.  Than what each single word alone could possibly mean if each were added together like an equation.  All of it, together, should be more.  And in the end, he was unsatisfied by that definition.

Antigone is one of those classic plays that I must imagine would be hell to be invited to adapt.  What can be done to make Antigone fresh?  Its import lies in how heavily universal its concepts of self-sacrifice and morality and government oppression are, its merit is pertinence despite age.  It has been told and retold and Antigone has been dragged out of her cave a million times as a feminist ideal and champion, so anyway, I wouldn't envy a poet/playwright for retelling such a myth.  How do you retell a story that is effectively its own metaphor?

But Heaney's struggle with defining the import and power of poetry echoed with me as I watched Thebes.  Because that struggle was perfect on stage, the way "Oysters" is perfect on paper.  Thebes works because it balances the heavy history of a play regurgitated for every power struggle, every argument of might vs. right, with the requirement of telling Antigone's sad, sad story in a way that feels important for the 90 minutes it lasts.  You can't watch 90 minutes of metaphor.  I don't care how cool an English major you are or were, 90 minutes of symbolism will suck the joy out of any soul.  So the story itself still has to feel like the characters are alive, aching, and their end is something the audience should care about.

The scene between Creon and Haemon has always haunted me but I think this production was the first time I had any heartache for Creon (and I almost feel guilty admitting it).  Haemon is beautifully done in this work, emphatic in his love for Antigone, and smooth in his attempt to cajole his father into freeing her, making Dad see reason.  There was a hint of "you will regret this moment" streaming from his lips in his final words to his father, and memories of that shouting match invariably resurface as Creon later crumbles over the body of his beloved son.  Heaney's adaptation allows a deeper vulnerability in the ironclad Creon of other productions.  While Antigone's demise lives the loudest in current vernacular, called up as a symbol for lost, valiant causes, in this production it is Creon's sorrow that is the scariest.  Antigone, after all, dies knowing she did what she must.  Creon lives on, knowing his blind governance and disregard for inherent morality (the morality of the gods), slaughtered innocents, including his son and his wife.  That continued life seems the most tragic.  Creon's burden wrecks me.  What "rules" do I insist on that are contrary to my faith or the tenets of my God? How often do I let blind ambition cloud my judgement, block my ears from reason? How dangerous is my pride? 

I think most people hope they would be Antigone.  But I think the power of Heaney's play rests in how often we tremble with worry that in a moment of truth we will be Creon.  And, like poetry, the last words, the individual moments, grow to mean more than the sum of their parts.  It isn't just an old Greek play with some new vocabulary.  It's the train wreck of pride we watch in ourselves, and the palatable fear that we will realize, too late, that pride will surely strip us of those we love most. 

Powerful stuff, poetry.

Last Gasp

The last half-mile of my run this evening was accompanied by a blustery last gasp of winter in the form of small spitwads of snow.  There was nothing flake-esque about these morsels.  They were snowballs valiantly fighting the urge to be a commonplace raindrop.  I cheer their effort, and I cheer their eminent failure.

Thin layers of snow-clay glaze the sidewalk cracks that guide me home,
wet, brown reminders of last week's ice.
Bashful hints of green tease a handful of tree limbs, tiny specks of promise amidst a sea of
dirt, salt, grime.
Not a pretty season.
But a welcome one.

Lipstick

On my thirtieth birthday I wore red:

red reminiscent of skinned knees

and four-eyed eyelids puckered by November allergies.

A red sweatshirt I wore in the third grade,

A yellow star in the center and rhinestoned clouds weeping rhinestone tears.

Thirty years and a sweatshirt still lingers.  And the smell of dirt beside a Southern jungle gym, red sweatshirt ripped at the shoulder by some ill-timed leap.

Red hair is less red against Red Diva lipliner.

The red I never wear crept into a plastic bag, clutched by my mother as she searched for her own mother's perfect shade.

Only grownups wear red lipstick.

Only daughters search for perfect reds for perfect mothers as they valiantly embrace age from hospital beds.

Not too orangey.

Not the pink-tinted one.

The Revlon with a touch of blood in it, of earth, of grownups and children and warm, Sunday mornings spent in churches without fans.

Reds with a touch of Texas in them, Arkansas, or Minnesota, or Tennessee, a splash of a few months toasting sisters in Times Square or South Korea or all-the-sisters-sound-the-same-on-the-phone

  Reds bought and lost and kept in a million handbags in a million places beside a million men, many of whom never matter at all.

Reds of childhood sweatshirts hanging from monkey bars too far apart, and of Mamaw's lips, soft and loveworn, pretty for the World,

Sticks to the wine glass

And the cup of sweet tea

Both sipped in loved company,

Both moments made perfect by their color.

River

My family makes a familiar drive this week to Arkansas. It's remarkable only in its sameness, its Americana-drenched stereotype of road trips and gas stations and kids ignoring Dads, noses buried in books.

But the drives I've made criss-crossing the Midwest and the Central South, remind me constantly of how tied my family is to this deep, darling trench carved by the Mississippi. I have lived in Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, and Minnesota, four states equally beholden to the might of that river. I felt it least, perhaps, in Arkansas, as I was a child and largely remember smaller rivers and streams.

In Missouri and Louisiana, however, it was a powerful, destructive, glorious force. Not long after moving to St. Louis, I remember volunteering with dad to sandbag areas threatened by the Great Flood. I remember that dark, gloomy water creeping up to the topmost steps of the Arch grounds, remember the newscasters and their shock at 100 year water levels. But in most instances the Mississippi in St. Louis was a sleeping giant. A river that loved the Cardinals, and lovingly reflected the blues and greens and reds of fireworks at the VP Fair.

The river in New Orleans was more than a river. More than a highway. It was sister to an ocean that threatened us. Sister to a Lake that flooded us. In every request for directions, it was a landmark, a true North. "Drive toward the river. Drive toward the lake." By the time she reaches New Orleans, the river is so strictly corseted by levees, one can hardly fault her for impertinence. Her deadly, hurricane-laden anger. But in her peaceful moments, she was a beautiful silver thing. And when I watched her spill into the Gulf, watched that brown bleed into blue, it seemed like the world was made correctly, with no flaws, that God knew how to make water, knew how to build land with tiny, tiny, tiny pinpricks of sand, knew how to return it all to the sea.

I have lived away from this river and I have loved the years I spent away from her. But there is something haunting and tempting and simply home-like in driving through the farmland and cities she built. It is land she carried and created, like some happy alchemist, depositing promises of fertility in dark dirt. I feel at home in many places. In the mountains of East Tennessee. In Jackson Square in New Orleans. On top of the Sindi Sud in Marrakech. Climbing those blasted rocks on Pinnacle Mountain. But there is a familiarity and warmth in simply living and traveling and building a life in this cradle of the Mississippi. And that was a five paragraph title for the following poem:

I leave the river often, freedom knit to my brow
And I am strong and unkind to memories of her mud
Wrapped round my ankles, cushioning my falls
I leave and she is worthless in her beautiful flood.

Sometimes I run, breathless in my escape
Fingers stretched wide on the wheel, heel to the road
You are a bitch, you River, you destroyer of cities,
You burn, you break, and you carry me home.

Sometimes I wander, eyes cast on some distant parade
Of adventures and dreams and dark, riverless nights.
I forget the river, her slow, steady explosion
And weave ribbons instead of water into my riverless life.

But always I return, feet, heart, head
Glued to this open, cupped palm of a river
This open wound of a river, itching for new blood
Always I stray, and always I return
Into and away, beyond and beholden
To my sly, angry, precious Mississippi mud.

The Things I Do Not Finish

I'm not a quitter, per se. In fact, I would say I probably lean to the other extreme and have a hard time dropping things that I should. I'm not a big believer in lost causes and feel like everything can be accomplished eventually, with just a wee bit more time, a tweak of perspective, a smidge of blind will. One of my favorite quotes is, "Everything is possible. Impossible just takes longer."

That being said, I continuously quit one thing that I love. Routinely. I begin and quit more short stories and poems and essays than I can count. I start off strong, overcome with the itch that is inspiration. I write beautiful, winding paragraphs that lead nowhere. I create characters that have no purpose other than to be created and then left to rot. I find a rhythm in a poem that sings and hiccups perfectly, only to find my last line stifled by boredom or annoyance.

I was not always this way. Some part of me hesitates to blame law school and my career because I recognize that the failure to stick to a story is my fault, not the fault of my education. But I feel like law school rewired my brain in a way that makes creative writing trickier. Where once I allowed myself the freedom to be overly romantic or silly or dramatic, now I chastise myself for using too many adjectives. Not sticking to the facts. In some ways I think law school has made me a much stronger writer in that I am able to hone in more precisely on an idea and not get lost in the "fluff" that used to cushion my older poems. But that fluff is still important. That excellent, inspired fluff has been replaced by concrete, no room to stretch and weave and coddle whatever poetic seed I am nursing. I feel sorry for my creative ideas now, they must be so bruised, with nothing but concrete to embrace.

This is the only poem I've finished in the last six months. The rest are skeletons. Fitting, I think, that it's a poem of Arkansas in the summer. I always write better in the heat.

Insect

The hum of mosquitoes has a dirty smell,
thick with middle-aged sweat, gasoline, and honeysuckle.
Each step up, each slide, each shimmy, each lazy sit-down
has the pulse of insects, the soft drum beat of
slammed screens and an unfastened buckle.

Lemonade smells of Off! and wax paper cups,
and my tongue licks bug spray and sugar in one heavy glide.
The slap, “got ‘em”, one second too late and the hazy show-down
between my hand and their millions begins with
Tiny welts, tiny carcasses on a tiny red tide.

“Sweet blood,” says Momma, cigarette on her lip
And I wonder how sweet my blood would be to drink, how cool.
Blood seems warm, seems to steam, but today, with the breeze of sweat
I am sure my blood is iced, lemons, sugar
Licking bug spray and blood off my arm, it feels cool.

Poem of the Day

Famous
by Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

Poemetry

A little blip I wrote after I saw my apartment in New Orleans:

The heat of this place leaves nothing to be wished for. Ever. Hopes float like lead in air that cannot be broken with rain.
And I will not pass this way again.
Not this crack, not this bend with these shoes with this blister against this passion punch painted toe nail. Ever.
I will walk, perhaps. Or skip as I do on some morning when the trees are moving. But I will be faster, maybe, or I’ll be sick and fevered and slow.
I will pass this way again
but not this way. Not this method of motion.
I thought that I should document it, set down for posterity the way my body made its way along this way this morning.
But it’s evening now, and the way is gone, the move is gone. It floated away.