Son

It’s looking like Carol’s son, age 12, will be staying in Minnesota with a couple we found there who wants to take care of him. They are well-off and kind and active and have a nice house near a lake with good schools and a skate park nearby. They also have older sons, so they’ve been to that show, as it were. And he’ll have brothers, which is great.

After one of the neighbors found out that he was going to be living there, they rounded up all the neighborhood kids at once and showed up at the house to meet him, sort of an impromptu getting-to-know-you party. I think the attention did him good. He made friends with a 13-year-old boy right away.

He hadn’t had much to say about his mom since it all went down. But after a few days of living with this couple, he showed up at their room in the night, tapped on the door, and told them that he missed his mom. He cried and talked, for the first time. They told him he could come and talk whenever he felt that way. I’m so grateful to know that he’s capable of attaching like that, that everything he’s been through hasn’t left him to fiercely independent at too young an age, as the adult sphere of his world has–at times–been so dark and frightening, here today, gone tomorrow. It would have been easy for him to turn out differently. But he hasn’t.

Sometimes

I get rewarded for being like I am, all sloppy and lovey-like.

We went to California for my sister-in-law Angel’s high school graduation. Most of the week we also spent with her boyfriend, who seems to spend most days hanging out with A and the family. I like that. My boyfriends were always dragging me off someplace; many of them never met my family.

He came to Ben’s birthday party on the beach. He had his graduation party at the house in conjunction with Angel’s. Most of their time together seems to be spent with the family. He hangs out. He pitches in. He helps. He talks when called upon, and he’s quiet and tranquil, too. He won me over in about the first five minutes and then kept growin’ on me. I told everyone who’d listen, including his girlfriend (kitchen, me: drunk on tequila, middle of the night) how much I thought of him.

I found out he had been nervous to meet me and Ben, and I was actually nervous to meet him, too (me? Nervous to meet an eighteen-year-old boy?). At the graduation party, after knowing him about a week, he thanked me for the card and few dollars me and B had given him. I gave him a hug and told him, without thinking first, “I love you, Omar,” as if I’d known him all my life, and immediately thought, Now, why did you say that? He’s gonna think you’re weird, and that’s ’cause you are!

But he responded, casual-like, without missing a beat: “I love you, too.”

Now, how do you like that?

Destruction

I just found out that someone else I know is getting separated from her husband. She just moved into her own place clear on the other side of town and everything. How many couples my age does that make? Three? Four? No, five, maybe. Six! I’m losing count. And I’m not even thirty yet.

There was a time, like maybe two years ago, when this would have given me a little threatening needle-prick, this would’ve gotten my hackles up. You know, as a married person who publicly is so sure of herself, and her rock-solid marriage. But since then I’ve seen that being married isn’t about being rock-solid at all. I’m not still married because I’m good at it.

Now I’m just sad. I don’t feel separate, like just like my friends are splitting up; I feel like a cookie being eaten. I wonder if my friends and family are a representative sample. I wonder if half of the people I know who get married will split up,

like America.

here’s that poem I told you about.

I haven’t written a poem in a while. This is a first draft, so I invite your comments.

***

Sex is a glass of water
the first glass of water set out in the morning for me to drink
in the thirsty morning and I'm woken up late and rushing past
and the glass drips
and halfway out the door I have time for only one gulp
and Holy God
it is the best water ever
but it is not enough

Arriving home
late
the glass is still there
warmed by the room
dusted and staled
I might drink it down
dust and all    faintly metallic

or I might let it sit    and evaporate
and I evaporate a little too
shrinking under my skin like a raisin
because somehow
it's hard to drink a glass of water
when you finally have time to drink it

One of those Sundays…mm, mm, mm.

Sunday was one of those days. It was one of those Sundays.

Let me start a little further back: when my wedding was approaching, people were really excited about my wedding night. I mean REALLY EXCITED. Almost as excited as me. They’d get all flushed and dewy-eyed talking about our first time. Which was also my first time. Intercourse, anyway. I was one of those “technical virgins” you’ve heard about. Roaming through this wilderness.

These were often the same people who, after I got married, would regularly interrogate me about the frequency and quality of our intimacies. Don’t get me wrong, I’m always up for a good sex talk, especially if it involves dispelling the INFURIATING misconception that after marriage sex suddenly dries up, or, like for instance, that married people don’t have oral sex (WOO girrrl), or that sex between married people is some kind of sterile, floaty affair (whoops, I used the word “affair”), involving a lot of gazing and interlaced fingers. Face-holding. Eye contact. And, of course, beds. And babies, too. As if sex outside of marriage is somehow less procreative.

So, back to Sunday. Well, almost…back to a few weeks and months past, as Ben’s been putting together his portfolio and his application, as we’ve been missing each other by millimeters, feeling each other’s breath on the back of each other’s necks as we pass, prickling with frustration, as he’s wanted me most at the crack of dawn (when I want nothing of the kind), and I want him most when I’m walking out the door to go to work. There’s a point when sex happens like breathing–and almost as often–and there’s a point when it still happens, but it involves a little more work and preparation…you have to prepare to not be prepared. Make space to unexpectedly be swept away. Tomorrow I’ll post a poem I wrote about this feeling. It’s not a feeling of a lack of desire, but a lack of space for it, a lack of time. Of stolen hours, some stillborn minutes.

So, Sunday. Can you tell what I’m getting at yet? We’ve been married for three years now, and people often ask me what it’s like, air their worries about the idea of being with one person for a lifetime. I suspect that they’re curious about our sex life, I think, because there are a lot of people who don’t spend a year and a half in a relationship (the length of time Ben and I were together before we were married), without having intercourse. They may or may not be the majority, but it’s at least perceived that way. I’m not bragging or touting some kind of victory here, I’m just making an observation.

I was tempted to characterize Sunday as the return to some kind of honeymoon mentality, but there it is again: a singleist way of looking at sex, that the only exciting sex life is the sex life closest to the fire of singlehood. What really happened? We spent time together. We rested in stillness for a while. We gave ourselves the space to catch each other by surprise. We did the work of loving each other, and the play happened on its own…which is its own kind of work. But the best kind.

Fragments

“Jesus calls us, planks and all, to do some great work.”

*

I already miss you. I already crave the place where we will never be parted. But it brings no comfort to us yet.

*

If you can’t speak it, can you write it? Paint it? Paint me? Can you draw it to me? Can you draw me to it? Please.
Please.

*

“I have to admit, this is my first intercultural worship experience. And I felt at home.”
“I know what you mean!You being here is like, before I was eating some really great chili, and I was like, man, this is some fucking great chili, but now you’re here, and it’s like someone put some cheese on the chili, and now I’m like, SHIT, I’m never eating chili without cheese again!”
“Well, I think you all were pretty cheesy before I got here.”

*

The teakettle whistled. Then the doorbell buzzed. Then the wind blew something over and it smashed. Each time you jumped up to take care of it. As the rest of us talked, I heard you sweeping up shards of glass in the bathroom, and I felt like you were sweeping up shards of me, toenails, snips and balls of hair, peels of skin, broken pieces of me turned to glass, and I thought, My goodness, is it always going to be like this? I wonder when he’s going to get tired of it?

*

Needing to take your own advice. Needing to hear the truth you speak to other people. Are you starting to see it yet? Are you starting to see the beauty growing in you, the beautiful you growing?
He is growing it.
It is being done. He said so; do you believe him?

A heaven worth while.

*

You say you can’t have me missing you.
Who would I be if I didn’t miss you?
Who would I be if I didn’t cry?

*

“Daddy, if I wasn’t me, who would I be?”
“Well, you’d be someone else.”

*

“If I could show you anything,
I would show you what you do for your friends.”

*

I went to bed and burrowed into you, and you folded over me, and I pushed deeper into your warm spice like I was looking for something, like I could hide myself in you, like the onion-layers of heaven.

familiar routes

Drove home to Detroit this weekend, separate from benjyman (he drove the truck, and I drove the car, so that we could leave the truck in Michigan with my dad to get sold, where trucks are better loved and not ticketed and taxed more for just existing). The sun dropped amazingly fast. I took my secret route, LSD past all the museums, down to 41, all the way down to Indiana before I got onto the 90. I know I just posted an entry asking for new music suggestions, but fall (fall, fotw, fall) is a time when I cycle through the few things I know by heart, and just let them go back to track 1. “Left and Leaving” by The Weakerthans. Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I just found this in-between spot in my voice, kind of an undiscovered vocal cord, where I can yell real high where I couldn’t before like Karen O in that one song, “Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick time you take IT!”

I listened to “Seven’s Travels” by Atmosphere because I thought it would wake me up, and when it didn’t–it never does–I called E instead, deciding that talking on the phone was slightly less dangerous than the risk of falling asleep on the road. And talking is the best way to keep me awake. He was at the LAN center killin’ Nazis, but laid down arms for a li’l bit to talk to me. Being on the road, I ended up talking about getting out of Dodge, about these weird flashes of fantasy I get sometimes of getting in the car, buying a ticket and vanishing, and how in certain moments that idea is so overpoweringly seductive. And how hard I find it to explain that it has nothing to do with wanting to leave B, you see. It’s an impulse that I get from time to time for a split second, and I can’t explain it. It’s just that sometimes a picture flashes in my mind of myself in a foreign marketplace, in some landscape, and that thought liberates and excites me so deeply, and my next thought (like the moment when a dream becomes a nightmare), is noticing that I am alone in that place.

E pointed out to me that the only time I’ve traveled abroad was when I was alone, when I was single. Now I have benjyman, now is the time to make a new picture, a new memory. And he’s right, and I do; I want to see everything, I want to do everything, and I want to do it with B. I have a hard time not feeling guilty for panicking sometimes, for the solitude I crave and call by other names. I felt a lot better. I laughed so much, I laughed so much.

I passed Kalamazoo and wondered if it would feel like it did. It did.

We hung up, and I started to get sleepy again almost immediately. I called C, and silently thanked God that I can talk to Memphis or Chicago or fucking whomever I want while I’m blazing down I-94 in the dark. Can’t wait until B has a phone. He was out at a show. We talked about the entry where I wrote about Jesus and someone like me talking on a back porch. He said he’d wanted to comment, but felt it would have trivialized the subject matter, something like, “I think it’s really cool that Jesus says, ‘dude.’” I told him that would have been the perfect comment, and that that interchange was the seed of the whole piece, and that I realized that I was trying to get at the humanity of Jesus, that Jesus got tired, Jesus got thirsty, Jesus needed time to himself. The part of him that crouched on the beach and cooked fish for his disciples (with nail-scars on his hands) who were pulling their boat up on the shore bewildered and frightened, who didn’t know what to expect after his death, and now here he was alive, and then they sat around the fire and ate together, and that was the first thing they did. The man who was also God, the expressed word of God, this eternal force, who had just been killed and resurrected from the dead, saw eating a meal together with his friends as a priority. This might be my favorite scene ever. If I could be present for any event, it might be this one.

I also told him that the voice and personality of Jesus in this poem was maybe 40% inspired by him, and conversations we’d had during his last visit. He responded, “I saw that, but I didn’t want to presume.”

There was pumpkin pie in the fridge when I got in. When B arrived, I put a bite of pie in his mouth and me in his arms. This man. This man.

some more retreat

Have you ever read “Adam and Eve” by Tony Hoagland? Some of you have. It’s from his book “Donkey Gospel.” He might be the most honest poet I’ve ever read. This particular poem talks about an episode with a woman. I’d tell you the main line, but you should open the book and look at it yourself, get the impact. Suffice it to say, he confronts his own ugliness, male ugliness, the bliss of power over weakness.

It’s hard shit. He “interrogates” this confession, as Di put it. She had us write five things we’ve thought or wanted to say over the last year that are totally inappropriate, that might have no place in the real world. She said that sometimes there are things that are true, or that were true for a moment, that you can never say to a person, because “they’d tear too big a hole.” However, they’re true, and as Hoagland said in this poem, “Until we can say the truth, there can be no tenderness.” I think that’s what he said.

My first five were about work. We’ve had a lot of people quit in the last year, and a lot of stress in general. The first three are about co-workers who quit. KT is my boss.

I was glad that EO left.
I was glad that EG left.
I was glad that CS left.
I am so sick of KT’s worried face.
I wanted to disappear and abandon everyone.

I didn’t like ‘em, so I wrote these:

I loved it when the Cuban man told me,
When I dance with you,
I suffer! He’s about my mom’s age.

I dance because you don’t have to talk
to anyone when you’re dancing. You don’t
even have to have a name.

Every time I got out of the car during
an argument, every time I cried
with frustration, I did it to hurt him.

I want him to fix my life.

When I’m dancing, I miss him,
and I enjoy missing him.

Now that I look at it, I’m not sure of the truth of this, now that I realize I’m putting my supposedly completely inappropriate feelings on the internet. Maybe I get some kinda thrill out of it. I think my greatest fears are either that I’m completely nuts or completely normal, but that sounds like something I’d say in high school. It’s not even really a poem. She told us we could choose our favorite one and “interrogate it” in a poem, like Hoagland did. I’d like to do that, I think. I wonder if I have the guts.

A couple years ago, Lucille Clifton read one of my poems and said, “You need to be a little bit braver.” She’d prefaced this comment by saying, “You know I love you, right?” “Ye-s,” I lied.

I wrote this shortly after we were married

The Cost

It’s so easy now.
Like a baby:
whenever he’s out of my sightlines
I imagine him gone

or going. I conjure a hospital
bed, I conjure years, smells and wasting,
long sickness, his life clinging
and letting go,

drunk drivers, battalions
of drunk drivers,
his body tumbling like a dummy
at sickening angles
on the freeway shoulder
where his car had broken down,

or crushed against the overpass
like a sandwich in foil,
or burned
down to the crowns on his teeth
and the pins in his knee.

Some stray bullet.
Some old story, his face pasted.
Some scrap of video.

From the window where I sit,
I roll my already grieving body
through the sweetness
drunk on the almost-certainty
that I will see him soon.
I will probably see him soon.

I see myself getting up from the couch
on repeat,
rewound and replayed,
picking up the various calls:
“Mrs. Javellana?…
It’s about your husband.”

i’m the lucky one

We were waiting to board our flight back to Chicago. All the chairs were full and I was sitting on the floor with a carne asada burrito and the queasy weakness I get from taking my migraine pills, which was so strong that morning that Ben insisted on carrying all the heavy stuff and I didn’t have the energy to protest. It was then that I remembered that my manual camera was packed with my clothes, full of possibly gorgeous pictures that got more gorgeous as I realized that my luggage would be scanned and my photos probably wiped out.

Can I tell you something? I cried. Right there in front of everybody. It was quiet with my hands over my face. I think people probably thought that somebody died. I also pretty much blamed B, which was an awful thing to do; I didn’t say it, but I looked it, and even if I hadn’t he still would’ve been sitting there not being able to stand seeing me sad, and wishing to God he would’ve just remembered to grab my camera with his big strong hands.