Documentary Poetry course for UNO low-res program in Edinburgh, Scotland

Syllabus [click for info]

Susan M. Schultz
smsteaching@gmail.com
tinfisheditor.blogspot.com


DOCUMENTARY POETRY

We will be reading and constructing documentary poems in this workshop. These are poems that combine the virtues of lyric, journalism, history, and eye-witness accounts to create work that is at once intimate and public. I will make time to meet with students to discuss poems they are already in process of writing, but our class periods will be devoted to the documentary projects.

Readings:

Allison Cobb, Green-wood, Factory School, 2010 [a cemetery in Brooklyn provides the focal point for this book]

Craig Santos Perez, from unincorporated territory [saina], Omnidawn, 2010 [second in a prospective series of books on Guam]

Kaia Sand, Remember to Wave, Tinfish Press, 2010 [the hidden histories of North Portland, Oregon]

William Carlos Williams, Book One of Paterson, 1946, New Directions [WCW's muse was Paterson, New Jersey]

CD Wright, One Big Self, Copper Canyon, 2007 [poems about Louisiana prisons, prisoners]

(Strongly) Recommended Readings:

Muriel Rukeyser, Book of the Dead, 1938 [On a mining disaster in West Virginia]

Susan Howe, Singularities, Wesleyan UP, 1990 [on the Puritan settlements in New England]

Claudia Rankine, Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Graywolf Press, 2004 [response to 9/11]

Kristin Prevallet, I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time, Essay Press, 2007 [about her father's suicide, in public context]

Susan M. Schultz, Dementia Blog, Singing Horse Press, 2008 [about the fall of the author's mother into Alzheimer's] More recent entries can be found here: search under key words "dementia blog" and "Alzheimer's" to find these entries.

Mark Nowak, Shut Up, Shut Down. Coffee House Press, 2004; Coal Mountain Elementary, 2009 [collaged poems on union busting, coal mining disasters, and more]

Joseph Harrington, Things Come On, An Amneoir, Wesleyan UP, 2011 [a book about the author's death and the resignation of Richard Nixon on the same day]

This list is hardly exhaustive!

Items to bring with you

--photocopies of documents that are important to you: birth-certificate, passport, marriage or divorce certificates, college transcript—anything related to your life that is also an official document.

--book/article/websites about a historical event that is important to you; bring photocopies or pdfs.

--materials on a place important to you, your home town, a school, a house, blueprints, a feature of the land, topo maps, bird-watching or fish-watching manual, etc.

--photographs of any of these items.

--a copy of a good dictionary (again, on-line is fine), preferably something really good, like the OED, which can be accessed through university libraries.

--any other materials (written or otherwise) that relate to you and to which you are attached, however miniscule.


Requirements

--Attendance: unless you have a valid excuse, come to all meetings of the workshop. It's there we will do a great deal of our work and have a great deal of our fun.

--Blogging: write to the blog five days a week. On two of those days, write a detailed response to the readings and/or to issues that are raised by the class. On the other three days, do a poetry experiment (see the "calesthenics" page). You may adapt these experiments to suit your own purposes, if you wish, or simply do them.

--Readings: have them done at the beginning of the week, so that we can see each work as a whole, as well as a series of parts. Bring the day's reading to class, so that we can read closely.

--Workshops: not all of our meetings will be devoted to workshopping your poems, but some will be. Come prepared to talk about each other's work, not as writing that you like or dislike, but as work that can become more effective. Questions to be asked will include: What are the demands that the work is making on us? What are its ambitions? How can it better address and meet those ambitions? The readings will provide us with a toolkit for talking about each other's work. So as you read the books, think consciously about what each poet is trying to accomplish and what techniques they are using toward their ideas, their expressions of feeling, and so on. Get your work in on time!

--I will write you comments and send them via email. I'm also available for one on one consultations and conversations about your work and about poetry, publishing, whatever you want or need to discuss. I will also chime in on the blog, making suggestions for readings and research.

--Guests: please prepare to meet our guests: I'm assuming they will include Hank Lazer, Adam Aitken, and Dorothy Alexander, though again, scheduling is fluid. Look them up on-line, read some of their work, come ready to ask questions and to tell them about your own projects.

--Final projects: you will make a chapbook of your project, one long documentary piece (10 pages or so) or several sections written toward a longer sequence. You'll need to give evidence that you've revised poems you wrote for the workshop, and that you've conceptualized your work as a whole, or a sequence, rather than a series of discrete poems. Note off the Wikipedia entry the following:

• The National Library of Scotland holds a large collection of Scottish chapbooks; approximately 4,000 of an estimated total of 15,000 published. Records for most Scottish chapbooks have been catalogued online.

Also find here instructions on how to make a chapbook (there are other such sites on-line). There are lots of publishers who make chapbooks, including my Tinfish Press. See here for details on our series.

Here's the official calendar, subject to frequent and constant changes.

NOTE: we will also have visitors, so some of what follows may become "homework." At that point, use the blog to communicate with the rest of us, and feel free to see me outside class.


Week One

Reading: WCW, Paterson, Book One

Assignment: Take one of the documents you've brought to Edinburgh and write a poem off of it. In other words, don't touch the document itself, but put it in contact with a poem. Experiment with writing a poem that is either very close to the subject of the document, or seemingly far away. Think of yourself as creating a channel in which the reader can operate as mediator, interpreter, actor, fellow composer of the poem/document.

July 4: Introductions, exercises, close-reading from WCW.

July 5: Discuss in detail how WCW uses documentation in relation to more lyrical passages of poetry. What happens in the interstices between poem and document? Think in terms of spatial relations as well as those composed of meaning or language only. Take the larger view, too. What is Paterson? Why Paterson, New Jersey? What are the poem's ambitions, its effects? What would you like to emulate in WCW's work? What might you rather avoid?


July 6: First workshop: exchange work with other students in a round-robin; read and critique each other's poems after we set up a series of questions, expectations, values. Once we've finished looking at each other's poems, we'll have a more global discussion of issues raised among you. Also come to class prepared to talk about the project you've chosen to work on this month. (It's damn quick, I know.)


Week Two


Reading: Kaia Sand's Remember to Wave & Craig Santos Perez's from unincorporated territory [saina] Photographs of Sand's walk can be found here (among other sillies): http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150199594483662.375032.654553661&l=887418b9c1

Assignment: Take one of the documents you have with you and compose a poem on or with the document. Use the document's language, use its space, appropriate it for your own purposes.

July 11: Talk about the ways in which Sand uses documents in her work. How does she construct a kind of narrative out of these discrete documents (as if to create linearity out of syncopation)? What is her work's ambition? What would you like to take from her example? What might you rather leave behind?


July 12: Talk about Santos Perez's argument, how he makes that argument through documentation, use of space, research? What is the process you learn that makes it possible to read this book (and Sand's, WCW's)? How does the book teach you to read it, in other words?



July 13: Second Workshop. See July 6 for the workshop plan. If you have concerns about your own work that you would like to have addressed by the group, please note those on the blog in preparation for the workshop.


Week Three


Reading: finish Sand, Perez, & read Allison Cobb's Green-Wood

Assignment: Do some research on your subject. Use whatever resources you have at hand, mostly the internet, but anything else you can find or remember (memory is always an excellent resource). Build a poem/section out of the building blocks of research, using Cobb as a model.


July 18: Talk about the claim Cobb's book makes on its reader, and then about the form she uses to convey information & meaning to you. Concentrate your attentions on a section of the book, and be prepared to walk us through it in class. How does the poem work, formally and conceptually?


July 19: Think about the poems in the text, found and composed by the poet. What is their purpose? Why are they placed where they're placed? Think about the notes. Why include them? (If you hate them, say so, but also say why.) Think about the poet's use of italics. Think about the empty spaces between paragraphs, poems. Think about the white space.


July 20: Third Workshop. By now the method should be clear, and we should have tweaked it to our own purposes.



Week Four


Reading: C.D. Wright's One Big Self
Assignment: Write a poem/section based on an image, video, photograph, painting. Be sure it's related to your topic, but use the image however you wish.



July 25: Talk about Wright's use of photographs (there are more in the original edition, but this is what we've got). Also think about how she uses voices, how she makes sure they sound local, how she works to avoid appropriating persons into art. (OR: is that a problem? OR: how do we negotiate the seeming divide between art and life, between other people and our own work as poets?)


July 26: Fourth Workshop: This will cover your poem on an image, as well as your final projects, so expect to be busy today!


July 27: Final session. Bring your chapbooks to class and be prepared to read, perform, present them. You don't have to do a formal reading: you may also do a power point or a performance using someone else in the class as another voice. Whatever works. Then we'll adjourn for lunch, drinks, whatevaz.

Farewell to Dementia Blog

Dementia Blog began August 1, 2006 with this:

--Shown a photograph of herself and Sangha (2 or 3 years ago), she doesn't recognize herself. That's my mother, she says.

It has ended with the contents of her drawer at Arden Courts of Fair Oaks in Fairfax, mainly photographs she could not identify by name, place, or time. There were lyrics to songs she did not sing, part of a novel she doubtless did not read.

__________

My mother's dementia preceded the blog, and my memories of her will postdate it. But the blog was a place of paradoxes, an obsessively-kept record that memorialized her forgetting. What it did not call forth was a woman who told wonderful stories about her adventures in North Africa and Europe during WWII, who married late, who became a mother later than that, tried hard not to replicate the patterns of her own growing up (succeeding, failing). It did not offer evidence of her wry wit, her sarcasm ("if this plane goes down, all the fish in the sea will be drunk" she said before one trans-Atlantic flight; "you'd have to be awfully sober to find your house in this neighborhood," she said of a suburban cookie-cutter community). It did not tell the story of her childhood in an alcoholic family (hence the jokes). It did not tell of her work for the rich old woman in Meadville, Pennsylvania, Mrs. Kidder, or of the black man named Lincoln who sang about the caged bird. It did not tell of her M.A. in Speech and Drama from the University of Iowa ("Oh, I do a little Speech," she would tell people, lest they think her one of those students). It did not tell of her work at Grinnell College for a stern older dean, where she hid students' illegal animals--pig, chicken--in a basement until they all got busted. It did not tell of her time at Northern Michigan, where the president of the college had hair dryers installed in the women's bathroom six feet off the ground, where only he could use them. It did not tell of her adventures in north Africa, where she worked for the Red Cross and ducked in a ditch to avoid a bombing raid, where she saw a dead body stuffed in a trash can in Algiers. It did not tell how she invaded Italy with the US Army (in her function as administrator of entertainment to US troops), how she witnessed battles, met men who never came back from their own bombing raids, got a pair of small combat boots from one of the "Neecy boys" of the 442nd. It did not tell of her experience of the Battle of the Bulge, or of how she was at Dachau when it was liberated, of how it took her several days to even know what she had seen--all the bodies on the train cars, bodies everywhere, men in pajamas making shelters for themselves out of anything they found around them. It did not tell of how she chanted "war is hell" the one time (she says) she got drunk, in Bad Neuheim, Germany, where she told them either to fix her dripping toilet or take it away, so they took it away, or of how she danced naked in the moonlight in north Africa after drinking spiked wine, had to be restrained by several grown men. It did not tell of how a soldier greeted her every day with "when will you marry me?" til she got the chaplain to come along; when the soldier asked next, she said, "how about now?" and that was the end of that. It did not tell how she almost told stories about her friends' abortions. It did not tell of how she met my father and pretty much tackled him, of how a psychic had told her years before who he would be, or of the hearts she broke before she met him. It did not tell of the rainbow she saw as she drove over the Scottish border once, which made her happy she did not have a camera because then she could really see it, the green grass and the sheep. It did not tell how fierce a mother she was, protective and sometimes vicious. It did not tell how she would get angry and withdraw, sometimes for days, refusing to speak to her daughter, or of how she would mysteriously reappear, softening over hours. It did not tell how that happened at Lenin's Tomb in 1981. It did not tell of how we would sometimes lie in bed and giggle hysterically. It did not tell of the pianist she'd seen at a concert once with enormous sleeves, who swoooped and swoooped over the keys like a huge bird. It did not tell how she would eavesdrop on conversations and then repeat them better than they'd happened, or how she met a Swiss woman in a cafe in Basel (?) and, without any shared language, learned the story of the woman's son. It did not tell how she had survived amoebic dysentery in north Africa (was it?) only after a doctor suggested she use mineral oil, or how she demanded mineral oil when she got sick on a trip in Norway. It did not tell how she communicated her need for tissues by vividly pretending to blow her nose outside a shop. It did not tell how she settled in to suburban life, filling her houses with bad furniture and art. It did not tell how she told me to listen when Martin Luther King came on the large wooden radio because he used English so well. It did not tell how she would recite part of "Captain, My Captain" or the poem about being master of your fate and captain, as if it were possible. It did not tell about how she promised herself at age five that she would never be hurt again, and tried to live by that idea for decades too long. It did not tell about how she suffered anxiety, worried silly, arriving at meetings early, fretting over every detail. It did not tell about how much she wanted control. It did not tell about how she drove to New Haven when I said I thought there was something wrong in my head, then took to her hotel bed. It did not tell about her oddly charged relationships with my friends, or with neighbors, how she took people in and disowned them with the same passion. It did not tell about how she cancelled her subscription to Time when they published photographs from Last Tango in Paris, of how she resented the condescension of their reply. It did not tell about how we drove the Pennsylvania Turnpike in a snowstorm in search of colleges, how the rental car agency wouldn't rent her the car because she didn't have a job. It did not tell how she and my father withdrew behind a closed door to eat peanuts because I am so allergic to them. It did not tell how she tried to learn to play the piano, Christmas carols in August, but got no better than first or second year. It did not tell how she did a needlepoint on her grandmother's pillow. It did not tell how her grandmother, Mama, died in her arms in her late 80s, as she and Martha and her brother Joe laughed over dinner. It did not tell how Mama wanted to be a conductor, made large motions with her arms to the radio. It did not tell how she said she would never care for a grandchild of her own, and then how she offered to watch Sangha when we knew she could not. It did not tell how her life was woven in with historical time, how one woman wandered through wars and kitchen appliances and rights movements and elections. It did not tell how they named their cars Marfred and Heidi and TJ. It did not tell how she and her classmates were allowed to get up and look out the window when an airplane flew past. It did not tell how she loved to do crossword puzzles with her neighbor, Ernie, until he died and her mind escaped. It did not tell about how angry she was that everyone had wanted her to act, be artistic, when she should have been an accountant. It did not tell how lovingly she kept her books, down to the penny. It did not tell how she made monkey faces (yes, it did!), or how the acting teacher at her college said he had just the part for her--a monkey on Noah's Ark. It did not tell of how, as the smallest student in the class, she had her feet radiated over and again on the x-ray machine. It did not tell of how she used to smoke, until she married. It did not tell of her encounters with Al Jolson or with Marlene Dietrich. It did not tell how she showed the latter a tent in a field where she could stay and how Dietrich swept her hand forward and said, "I vill go on to Berlin!" It did not tell how she could not grieve when her husband died. It did not tell how she grieved for a Navy officer who killed himself, because he too was short, "like Fred." It did not tell how she resented her own family, her husband's family, but wanted one for her daughter. It did not tell how she was bitten by a raccoon in her own house, how she said "it just does you in" of the rabies shot she had to have, of how it got in the local newspaper. It did not tell how she asked questions like, "why do you like Modern Art?" or "do you write only for other poets?" It did not tell how she'd adored George Bernard Shaw, how she went to see the Bronte's house and Shelley's "grave." It did not tell of the set of Shakespeare Mrs. Kidder gave her that she got rid of when my father died, along with his clothes, his gold watch, his shoes, her decorative Nazi sword. It did not tell about the big pieces of pie she cut, or how she refused to borrow money or take on mortgages in Monopoly. It did not tell about the wavy brown hair she grew down to her waist, wrapped up in a bun with bobby pins. It did not tell about how, when my father died, and the young doctor entered the room she said, "I trust you're not going to ask me how I am." It did not tell how much she loved hotdogs and ice cream sandwiches, or how she ate a hamburger in Frankfurt and a frankfurter in Hamburg. It did not tell how she sat down one day to write her friends to say she was not Smokey any more, she was Marty.

__________

Search "dementia blog" and "Alzheimer's" to find the rest of Dementia Blog on-line, or rather the sections of it that came after the book was published in 2008.

Tinfish Retro Chapbook #4, by Kenny Tanemura

MAO'S PEARS

In Kenny Tanemura's rendering of him, Mao is hardly an all-powerful leader, or icon. Instead, he walks down the street, encounters the poet in his kitchen, offers a friend romantic advice, thinks about Filipino literature, suffers from indigestion. He is muse to a poet who thinks about many of the same things, who reports on conversations with Mao as if they were as ordinary as pears. An assemblage more than an historical figure, his figure shadows everything that happens in this collection. Tanemura writes with a deft wit, in whimsical but pointed verse.

from "Requiem for Mao":

Mao walked by me on North Street,
the sleeve of his shirt brushed against mine.
While I was working at the computer,
Mao roller-skated around my kitchen,

knocked on the wall with his knuckle.
He let me figure it out slowly:
why he wanted a homeland
and a mother tongue to keep

his adolescence in a perpetual
state of calculation. But Mao knows
that the checkbook on his desk,
and the honeysuckle on the side-street

around the corner from my place
are more than a reflection. The basket
on the tabletop and the anemones
are on the same plane, winners and losers

both play with a racket.

Former member of the Junior Young Buddhist Association and the Palo Alto Buddhist Temple, 2.5 generation Japanese American, ex-Obon Festival volunteer, Dharma School educated, West Coast writer. Tanemura is a graduate of the MFA program at Purdue University. His poems have appeared in Volt, The Sonora Review, Xconnect, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, and elsewhere.

You can purchase this chapbook for $3 at Tinfishpress.com; there's still time to order all 12 for $36. Designed, like all of the Retro chaps, by Eric Butler.

The contents of my mother's drawer

At the end of her life, my mother had hardly any possessions--some clothes, an ancient television, a couple of pieces of furniture (were those even hers?). But she did have the contents of a bed-side drawer, where I found all of these items except a photo of my dad, which was perched on a ledge above her. It appeared to have been folded and injured, probably by her: one of her neighbors is infamous for destroying family photos unless they're contained in the sealed box outside her door. There are photos we sent her of the kids; a Ph.D. graduation photo; some birthday cards, the most recent of which was 2007 or so; there are lyrics to religious songs, including "Mansion Just Over the Hilltop," which begins: "I'm satisfied with just a cottage below, / A little silver and a little gold; / But in that city where the ransomed will shine, / I want a gold one that's silver lined." Finally, there's a small ripped out section of a novel that belonged to another resident, namely Hobgoblin by John Coyne. (This resident turns out to be one of the lovebirds.) The first page of this copy, which is page 277 of the book, has quite a sex scene on it; at the bottom, etched into the page from an earlier one, can be found seven question marks.

A shadow-talk with Roland Barthes on mourning

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard.


RB's mother died 10/25/1977, which was my mother's 60th birthday. I found his mourning diary at Bridge Street Books today. Many entries do not resonate for me, but some do quite profoundly. He wrote his notes on index cards; they were only published in 2009 in France, and in 2010 in the US. I want to talk back (the belated talking to, when one party is unable to speak in the present) to him about many of his notes.

So, RB like this, SMS like this. We're at a cafe somewhere, calling and responding.


--I don't want to talk about it, for fear of making literature out of it--or without being sure of not doing so--although as a matter of fact literature originates within these truths. 10/31

The strange phrase here is "without being sure of not doing so," but more so because the full sentence turns on that pivot between the fear of literature and acknowledgment that this is what it's made of. Why the fear of literature in the face of death? Or is it the too-sudden emergence of literature, before the mourning period makes it somehow appropriate? When I began my blog, I had no idea it would record her death in some near-present tense; had I thought toward the moment . . .


--A strange new acuity, seeing (in the street) people's ugliness or their beauty. 10/31

This rhymes with my experience, though usually without the suffix of "ugliness or beauty." I simply notice them more, when I notice something other than my thoughts--not distractions, except when I'm driving (or riding my bike). Altered states are not states so much as wobbles, the inside of a balloon as the air comes in and then exits, quickly. Pfffft.


--What's remarkable about these notes is a devastated subject being the victim of presence of mind. 11/2

Again, I don't think that the word "victim" sings to me, but the rest of the sentence does. During her last hour, her hand seemed to be melting, mottles into skin, skin into nails, fingers into fingers. When my urgency was not to save her, but to send her on as well as I could.


--henceforth and forever I am my own mother. 11/4 (which was the day of my father's death in 1992)

And henceforth this writing about my mother will be writing about me. And that is some of what makes me feel nervous, awkward. Until now, I was not the story, the story was my mother's dementia, that of her colleagues at the Alzheimer's home, the story of care, of pain, of memory jostled, necessary, in the face of forgetfulness. To what extent can writing about grief be about the person who is gone? Or are we now left with ourselves as subject, object, verb? During dementia, there were losses but there was not Loss. Grief is official now. But whose is it? Hers, mine, that of the cloud in which our information is stored?


--Struck by the abstract nature of absence . . . Which allows me to understand abstraction somewhat better; it is absence and pain, the pain of absence--perhaps therefore love? 11/10

Abstraction used to feel like a place of refuge. Like the place you could go when the kapu was broken, and you'd be safe. Now it is not only a spirit (instead of material person) but a spirit that is moving away. Not public transport, nor private, but transport nonetheless, and not (necessarily) solitary. I must follow the track of the Tibetan Book. I lost it on Tuesday. Bard, bardo. A soul in search of her next incarnation. One hopes she's not in northern Virginia's traffic pattern, blocked arteries on a Saturday afternoon.


--Mourning: a cruel country where I am no longer afraid. 11/17

The mind softens, the Buddhists say. Every blow makes us more pliable, more liable to adjust, not to duck but to face forward, absorb punishment as something more loving than that. When Barthes writes of not being afraid, he means that he has suffered until he knows how. It's not alleviation of suffering, at least not at first, but the promise it will at once go and be our guide. In the middle of the woods and all that.

and especially:


--[Status confusion]. For months, I have been her mother. It is as if I had lost my daughter (a greater grief than that? It had never occurred to me.) 11/19

She was neither mother nor daughter at the end. I have a daughter, who is not powerless, says what she means to say. But she was not my mother, either, except as the living memory of her. The body is memory, even after the mind checks out (extended stay is not home). She was like the spirit in Beloved, at once a person and a ghost. But those who stop visiting Alzheimer's patients think ghost, not person. Person is there to be seen.


--What I find utterly terrifying is mourning's discontinuous character.

In my stupor today I watched golf on television. There is a new golfer; he's Irish. He was wearing a baby blue shirt, an ad on his white cap. But to watch golf is not to know where you are in time or place. It's not on a field you can take in, the players all in the same space, time. Instead, the game discontinues, from hole to hole, frontwards and then back. It's grief without the affect, merely the motion of grieving, the arcs that are not yet circles, the holes that have not yet been filled with flags (mom died on Flag Day at the home). It's important to die at home, they told me.


After that point, Barthes' entries replay themselves, a circling that fails--that does not try--to close. Love for mother becomes love for grieving over her (perhaps). He's not reached mourning; he's at the many stations of melancholia. At some point in late 1978, when he is still taking these notes, I attended one of his talks at the Sorbonne. I remember nothing of it, except a solitary man sitting in front of our semi-circle of seats, audience rapt in its devotion for him.

'The key is in the sunlight at the window in the bars the key is in the sunlight.'

--Your mother was in the common room after dinner on Tuesday, wasn't she? I was surprised to see her there, says the new resident's relative. The new resident is Io, who screamed help! the day my mother died.

--No, she died at 6 p.m. She couldn't move.

--My mother always asked why her husband never visited after he died. She had psychic powers. She worked on them. I have them, too, but I'm scared to push; you can get to the dark side so quickly. Your mom was sitting in that chair. She would usually greet me, if only with her eyes. But this time there was no response.

--I don't usually tell people, she adds, so they don't think I'm loony.


--I left deliberately, says the gentlest caregiver. I pray for you, you know. You're always here alone. Be strong. Yes, I heard the story from R. about your father's voice. He told me.


The lawyer says it doesn't matter about the will if you're an only child. There's some hierarchy, her assistant tells me, before she arrives. Marriage, children, unless you remarry and there are more children, or earlier ones. I get lost in the possibles.


--No, there's no funeral, I tell the cook, who asks about a bewing. She gave her body to science, and then I'll get the ashes. Never wanted a funeral anyway.

--I can see that! I'd love to have my remains spread in the ocean waters.

--Let me do it for you. We have lots of ocean.


She will rest in peace, the old neighbor writes from his Android. Everything an ad, an alert, a pointer toward. The lawyer says her niece, the one going to Vandy, loves Walmart. Let me tell you, she said to her niece. How you spend your money.


I always get lost in Arlington. I plot out my route, and I follow it. Up to a point. The Washington Monument appears and it's not what I want. Circle back, find the lawyer. Are you lost, too? asks S, when I say good-bye to her. She carries two purses, full of apples, oranges. No, not this time, I say.


I say good-bye to Mrs. L, to whom I gave mom's orange dog, the one with alien eyes. I kept the rabbit she held when she died. Mrs. L. looks at me and laughs. I say good-bye again. She laughs.


I say good-bye to F, the woman who talks, even if sentences are not plotted against a graph of sense. I'm tired, she tells me. So droopy. She was fighting the caregivers the other day, didn't want the girls to have to help her in the bathroom. Her white narrow-cabled sweater has a stain on the front, like my mom's when I left it in her room to be given away.


I thank T for her kindness. She says her daughter brought her here, holds out her hand, as if her daughter were seven or eight years old. She turns the wrong way. G. says they haven't served lunch. Only a cracker. Only cheese and a cracker. She's hungry. Walks to the clock in the right corridor, where I've led them. Two hours until they feed us!


M practices telling time over dinner, looks at the hands, the every other number on her father's watch. Her brother walks us through his trilogy. Templars, an Academy, children being misused to violent purpose. He and a friend infiltrating to save them. A hole in the wall that's meant to look like a hole in the wall, though it isn't.


I say good-bye to them, too. There's no reason to return, if you take family as the baseline, "blood relation" as trump card, though blood thins. That's odd, her pulse is normal, just weak, said the nurse, a minute before mom passed.


She fought so hard to stay alive. It was time, L tells me.

Amazing how they know when it's time to die, says E. Shook her head. No food. No more. Willed it.


"Strange to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the pavement of Greenwich Village."


Whom to believe, the one who saw her struggle to live, or the one who saw her choose her exit? She was in her bed when she was in the chair after dinner. She was a ball of light in my hotel room. She was whatever was intended.

__________

Two lines of poetry from Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish and Related Poems (1959-1960) from his Collected Poems.

Thank you to Josh & Gini, Sam & Meera, to Kyle, Pia, & Esben, & to Steve, Ellen & Max for three mind-lifting evenings of good & loving company this week. To Jerry, who gave me back my father's voice so soon after my mother died. To Elizabeth Wildhack, Esq. & the adroit accountant, Arlene Millican. And to everyone who called, wrote, facebooked, emailed, took time. Thank you to the caregivers, the hospice workers, the doctor (Hermes!) who arrived at mom's door the very moment she died, the compassionate people who populate this world that I leave, for now, & to which return is required, but not always to be feared.

June 14, 2011: After the Hyphen

An hour's sleep & then my thumb pulls the peel off a ball of light.


Panic attack without panic. Hours & days before the end, I read in the brochure that hospice left, the dying person experiences surges of energy. I saw none in her, but now in me a rivered string of lights is coming down the street, house by house, as it did after a power outage in what, 1968?


An hour before she died, her breath kept catching, as if her body forgot intake out take intake & out. Then habit returned effort to her open mouth.


Dying is a verb.


T wanders in and out of this. She was my mother's neighbor on Country Lane, hair dyed black, jacket checked black & white, slacks black, arthritic fingers painted off-red. What's going on, she asked at Martha's door, yesterday, which is now the day before. My mother's sleeping, I said. She'll be ok. No, she's not, T replied, reaching a hand out to mom's forehead, shaking it back and forth. Tried to pour water into mom's mouth before I said no, they did that with the sponge.


After mom died at 6 pm, E teased R he'd need a new girlfriend. He was the one who, when he told my mother to get up for dinner, she did. E got her elbow in the ribs. Not R, the tall man. She always did like men, I said. T, standing next to E, called out, Yes she did!


Ellen took me home with her and Steve. They & Max asked about my father. I offered history: Michigan farm, auto plant, air force (when it integrated, he knew Tuskegee airmen), IBM, Western Union. Ellen said, Jerry Lawler. Jerry Lawler! My father's Irish friend, office roommate of Col. Dudley Stevenson, Tuskegee airman. Steve called Jerry; we explained the coincidence. He darted off to find a letter. Please, do you mind? I'm looking. Dear Jerry, the letter read. My father's voice, Irished. Jerry, you never put yourself above others, gave credit to them & did not take it. The experience of an Irish immigrant. Martha & Susan join me in wishing you a long & enjoyable retirement.


Ellen's family in the concentration camps. Mom there when Dachau was liberated. Her memory was stronger than the first impression. Men in striped pajamas making shelters out of anything they could find.


C & R wash mom's body. Suddenly, from C's phone, the voice of a child singing in Tagalog. My niece, she's three years old. The only Tagalog she knows is what she sings.


The day I left Hawai'i I took my usual bike ride. Was side-swiped by a silver pickup truck that didn't stop. As I tried the bike, a man called out from down the road, asking if I needed a ride. Should have gotten the plate number, he said. He was a windmill worker from Pahala, living in Hau'ula, who picked up my bike, put it in his truck, drove me home. I tended to the bleeding elbows, later found a deep bruise on my right hip. Only when I arrived in Virginia did I feel the heart bruise, blue circle embedded near the center of my left breast.


R dressed mom in navy blue pants, & a blue & white striped shirt. When I came back to walk her to the black SUV with flashing lights (give my body to science, she always said, and we did), a man in sun glasses attached a tag to her big marbled toe. Check the spelling, he said. E had already witnessed the act.


Om mane padme hung.