freshman angst

So often, and especially as the end of the semester approaches, students come to my office near tears, and not the making-excuses-for-late-papers kind of tears (well, maybe sometimes), but the my-life-feels-like-it's-spinning-out-of-control kind of tears. They lose friends to accidents or violence, find out they're pregnant, learn that a parent has lost a job and might need them to come home. Or they just realize that decisions they made earlier in the semester weren't as inconsequential as they anticipated. I don't accept excuses very often, but I can't withhold sympathy. And I always wish I had something better to say to them.

So, freshman year (sorry...."your first year of college") can suck. It can suck really quite badly, for reasons that I don’t need to outline here because you are living them. It can also, of course, be wonderful and amazing and magical. I don’t mean to dismiss that; it’s just that at this point in the semester, the suckiness tends to outweigh the magicalness by a significant amount.

Some of you are probably finding that college is much harder than you expected it to be. This makes me mad because it tells me that educators—maybe on the high school end, maybe on the college end, maybe both—aren’t doing their jobs well. Forgive me for saying it—I don’t mean to insult anyone—but having taught high school for a few years, I saw how much the average high school falls short from giving students what they need and deserve. I’ll bet that many of you not only got straight As and Bs in high school, but got them without breaking a sweat. Now you’re taking college chemistry or calculus or whatever and you feel like you’re drowning just to pass with a D. You probably turned in first drafts for As in high school, and now you’re having to write and rewrite just to barely get a C. That’s not right, because it means that you weren’t pushed to work to your potential in high school. It means you were allowed to skate by, and led to expect that education was easy.

The same was true for me. I had never worked very hard in school, and suddenly, in my freshman year, I was getting up early to study and staying up late to write papers and still barely making it in some of my classes. It got better—much better; better to the point of being more enjoyable than it was painful. The same will be true for you. Depending on how hard the semester has been for you, that might sound completely hollow and meaningless, but I hope you’ll take my word for it. It will get easier. I need to add ONE qualification to that: while my roommates let off stress by enjoying various intoxicating crops and beverages, I studied. It didn’t get better for my roommates. (This is not a “say no to drugs” message, I just don’t want you to come back in two years and tell me “it didn’t get better” in between hiccups as I recoil from the smell of Night Train on your breath. My former roommates are, for the most part, successful and happy people now. They’re just not college graduates). The point is: barring poor prioritizing or errors in judgment on your part, it will get better.

Another thing that still baffles me a little: you all are not a normal class. You weren’t specially selected or anything, but somehow your group ended up being different from the usual freshman writing class in some interesting ways. What I’ve seen in your writing is a kind of humor and style and playfulness that is, in my opinion, the mark of solid intellect. I’m not saying your essays were mind-blowing all the time, but I am saying that even when they were weak, they still had that mark. I don’t think I got a single one of what most writing instructors complain about, the dry and lifeless 5-paragraph essay that is grammatically flawless but says absolutely nothing. Your writing—and the mind that produced it—has substance. If I were in charge of admissions at a university, that would be my #1 criteria because that is what’s going to make your college education meaningful. All the skills--like how to use a semicolon or how to…jeez, I can’t even think of an example for chemistry…all I remember is making soap in the lab--can be learned by anyone. To be able to use the skills in a meaningful way, that’s something that (in my opinion), you either know or you don’t, and you all are in the first category.

Here’s the rub: that quality—intellect—is also going to make your college education challenging and perhaps painful at times. It took me a very long time to realize this, and even longer to accept it, but learning is painful. I don’t mean just painfully boring—it hurts. It’s like growing pains. Your worldview is expanding, your perspective is stretching, your capacity for abstract thinking (which, by the way, isn’t fully developed until age 30!) is being pushed beyond its old boundaries. It’s just like pre-season workouts for whatever sport you might’ve played: they hurt, and they suck, they give you blisters and make you throw up and you can’t wait for them to be over. That’s what the first semester of freshman year is like. You’re getting in shape for college, and it’s punishing. And though it will get better, it should never be totally comfortable. After a really good class, I’ve realized, I’m often exhausted. I think that’s because learning something really meaningful does a couple of things. It shakes your foundation by showing you that something you’d always taken for granted is much, much more complicated than you ever realized, and it sets off a chain reaction in your brain. Here’s a very basic example from my freshman year. In a class called “semiotics” we started by talking about how language is basically arbitrary. The only reason that the letters “t-r-e-e” mean the wooden, leafy thing outside the window is because we all agree on it. If everyone who spoke English agreed to it, we could start calling that thing “e-r-t” and it work work every bit as well as “tree.” The more I thought about it, the more I realized how many things that we take for granted—I mean, ever since I was a kid I just assumed that t-r-e-e was somehow logically linked to a tree—were just made up, arbitrary, random. It’s fascinating and it’s exciting, but if you really think about it, it also hurts your brain and shakes up your worldview a little bit.

That, my friends, is why not everybody wants a college education. Not everybody is willing to submit their worldview to questioning and shaking up and expansion through torturous exercises. Watching the cartoon network and drinking milkshakes is much more comfortable. If this were easy, everyone would do it. It’s not, so here we are, suffering and sweating it out at the end of the semester.

And of course, life doesn’t stop in order to give you four years to focus on expanding your knowledge. If only it did. Lots of things happen that change your life and threaten to push education out of its spot at the top of your priority list. It’s a struggle to keep it there; it’s never as simple as just reminding yourself that “education is important.” But the fact is, for folks like you, it is. Because you’re the folks who are going to (I know, I know, here she goes with “the children are our future”) go back into high schools and say “it’s not good enough” to give kids busywork and make them take standardized tests once a year. And, well, you might want to straighten out a really messed up economy, do something about climate change, and bring about world peace. Most of all, though, you’re going to need to find a niche for yourself, a role that you want to play in the world, one that you find fulfilling. My grandfather was a typist for 35 years—for eight hours a day, five days a week, for 35 years, he typed. He made decent money and got a great retirement plan and was a happy, wonderful man who found his fulfillment outside of work. The thing is, if he’d had what you all have—the intellectual substance I’ve seen in your writing--he would have gone postal in that job. I’m not saying he was dumb. He wasn’t; he was simply more of an action-guy than a thinker. Y’all may be action people, too, but you’re definitely thinkers. Although you could quit school any time and get a job as a typist, I would guess that you wouldn’t find a whole lot of fulfillment there. I suspect that in order to be satisfied, you need something that is available to college graduates.

All of that is to say, don’t give up. Ask for help. When you screw up, be nice to yourself about it. And most of all, remember that no matter what happens, three weeks from today you will be able to lie on the couch, watch cartoon network, and drink milkshakes all day.
I can’t believe you’re still reading. You should go study for finals or something.

Very best,
Laura

some lessons i learned during hurricane gustav

.
1. There is a limit to the number of household repairs that can be made with candle wax and bandannas.

2. It is best to let fighting dogs figure things out for themselves.

3. A laptop battery runs out at the climax of any given film.

4. The desire for free ice and water is a metaphysical desire; FEMA is the unattainable Other.

5. There is such a thing as battery-powered fans. Elsewhere.

6. The kindness-and-togetherness-during-trying-times thing runs out after 3 hot days without power.*

7. Everybody loves Boggle.

8. Canola oil works great as starter fluid.**

9. Curfew is for real.

10. Generators are much louder than the people who use them (sitting inside with the TV blaring) probably realize.

*this rule, fortunately, does not apply in Spanish Town, where kindness and togetherness are virtually bottomless.
**thanks to DeWitt Brinson for this lesson.

for matt and sara's wedding

It's rare that I genuinely enjoy a wedding. But it's rare that I enjoy people as much as I do these two. You should look at Sara's impressive wedding blog.

Beyond What
Alice Walker

We reach for destinies beyond
what we have come to know
and in the romantic hush
of promises
perceive each
the other's life
as known mystery.
Shared. But inviolate.
No melting. No squeezing
into One.
We swing our eyes around
as well as side to side
to see the world.

To choose, renounce,
this, or that --
call it a council between equals
call it love.

I love this poem for the way it departs from one convention of weddings. There is a moment in most ceremonies that leaves me a little mournful: the one when it's pronounced that two amazing individuals, each of whom I love separately, have become One. It makes it seem as if love's ultimate effect is to reduce by half the number of wonderful people in the world, and I'm pretty sure that we can't spare them. I prefer to think of it as a pooling of resources; a collaboration that will allow each of you to better reach for destinies beyond what we have come to know.

Today, in my mind, rather than melting, rather than squeezing into one, your vow is to forever amplify one another's unique capacity to live well, to engender beauty, to nurture justice, to generate love. Thinking of it this way allows me to celebrate without reserve this most inspiring and joyful council between equals. My wish is that the destinies for which you together reach will enrich your own lives and spirits and immensely as they already do ours, you beautiful two.

big bang

or: between the lines of text messages.

u r nowhere close 2 Forgiven

unfolding your message
like the map it is not,
i translate:
u r hopelessly lost.

unforgiven and aimless,
i'll buck against the straps of
your grudge.

as i chafe, you'll bruise;
i'll be
sorrier.

rampantly
sorrier.

i'll stomp
every wrong i've done
into the shit and mud and straw.

i'll snap and bound and
vault like a brahma;
u r still just a jackass.

i'll rage
against this stasis.

bellowing
my humanity,
i'll absolve
my own damn self.

here:
is my guilt,
cast off, undigested, shining
pearl of
you-were-right.

forgive me
or don't--
your anger is tiny
against stars.

it is a firefly
in a universe
born of mistakes.

you
are right

and i
am infinite.

uncapped

maybe a little too syrupy-sweet & sentimental...if you have a sensitive gag reflex that is triggered by Precious Moments figurines and the like, proceed with caution.

Amongst the faded school portraits, off-center snapshots and blurred Polaroids in our family album is a series of noticeably sharper photos of me, my brother, and my uncle Randy in the forest. I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but just as the pictures are more vivid, so are my memories of the moments they captured. Evidence, perhaps, against the belief that snapping a picture steals a bit of the moment or the subject; maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe it enhances the moment and the subject’s memory of it, but the memory is only as sharp as the picture. That would explain why my memories of my teen years are so fuzzy. And why celebrities don’t seem to get Alzheimer’s.

Randy was by far my youngest uncle, and I adored him. At some point, he and his girlfriend were amateur photographers—as everyone is required to be at some point in their young lives—and they asked my brother and me to be their subjects. They envisioned some sort of heartwarming children-in-nature photo shoot, I suppose, fall colors being very much in sync with the palette of late-‘70s fashion. I knew nothing of fashion or hackneyed themes, but the proposition of a walk in the forest with Randy was worth jumping at. He let us go as slow as we wanted, never seeming to mind when we’d squat over a patch of clover to look for one with four leaves, or become otherwise fascinated and still. He never forced us to talk, and when he did speak, it was in a soft voice, using words that I could understand. Too, he talked to me and my brother separately. Most adults treated us as a unit, asking us questions that seemed to require a single answer from the both of us. On our walks, I could count on Randy walking beside me for a ways, saying one or two things, not minding when I only nodded in response.

I wore my poofy orange coat, my beloved orange coat. Ryan and Randy were in navy blue—baseball- and poofy- style, respectively. We walked along the train tracks, my favorite route. I couldn’t tell you what the trees looked like, or the sunlight filtering through them, or the sky: I kept my eyes on the ground. That’s where the magic is, especially in a Rhode Island autumn, and especially when you’re five. It’s a particularly enthralling kind of beauty that you see in a bright yellow leaf at precisely the same moment that you stomp on it.

At some point, Randy stopped our wanderings and sat us down under an oak tree. He posed us, backs against the tree, next to each other, closer than we normally cared to be. My eyes were on the ground, still; my fingers raked through the dry grass and oak-tree debris. I picked up an acorn, cupped it in my palm, and looked at the acorn cap in my other hand. Here's the epiphany: I realized that they were supposed to be together; that they used to be together; that each acorn had one, single cap that would fit it perfectly. The cap in my fingers didn’t fit the acorn in my palm. I tried another, and another, and, unfazed, others. I knew, somewhere in my mind, that I would try every cap on every acorn in Rhode Island until I found the one that fit. I kept my back against the tree and my shoulder touching Ryan’s--as we had been posed--but I had sunken into fascination.

At some point, my brother craned his neck to see what I was doing. He watched for a moment before twisting back around (his back still against the tree, his shoulder touching mine), picking up an acorn and some caps. He put them in his lap to be examined and sorted; I continued my piles on the ground.

All the while, there was a faint noise in the background, one that barely entered my consciousness. “Laurie, would you look up for just a minute? Into the camera?—Okay, um, Ryan? You too, buddy. Look over there!” Randy’s voice remained gentle as he repeated the request thousands of times and I remained hunched over, oblivious. Eventually tuning in, I might have been a little annoyed with this distraction; I don’t remember. I looked up, but my hands continued to feel the ground for another cap, to try it on the acorn, to add it to the misfit pile. It must not have been long before my gaze was pulled back to the ground, and I’d hear Randy’s voice again. It was like being at the dentist—you can never open your mouth wide enough, long enough, for him. You want to, and you feel bad that he has to constantly remind you, but somehow you’ve lost a little bit of control over your mouth, which keeps involuntarily closing. So did my head keep drifting down, my eyes insisting on getting a better view of the task at hand.

The pictures are beautiful—rich colors, sharp details—much more professional than anything else in our photo album. Our small figures at the base of the tree are vivid orange and deep blue, and it’s nice to be able to see that sunlight-filtered-by-branches thing that I had overlooked. They look kind of like the picture that comes in a frame when you buy it. It’s pretty, but the people are anonymous. The fact that these photos, these records of my first realization about the world, don’t contain my face is my own fault, of course. Personally, I think it’s perfect: this image of the tops of our little heads, as uncapped as acorns.

burning buildings

Been trying to write this for years...finally got a first draft. Sure it needs lots of revision, and equally sure my memory has embellished some details and glossed over others.

You covered my mouth and forced me to listen. The crackling sounds from the other room defied explanation: crackling so loud that we could hear it through the thick, century-old walls. You and I crouched by the door to listen more closely. We crouched the way my brother and I used to, at the top of the stairs, listening to our parents argue. I can’t imagine what you and I were thinking in the moment between hearing the sound and realizing what it was, but I don’t think we realized that we were each going to lose the resolve that had brought us to this impasse.

Sitting in the back room with you, I was exasperated. It was your roommate’s bedroom; an odd place for us to be, I guess. I had probably refused to go into yours; to be fair, maybe you refused to invite me. I’d grown used to your opacity and wasn’t trying to figure out what you might have been thinking. I knew that this was going to be our last conversation. I knew that you weren’t going to let it happen any easier than you’d let anything else happen. You were being deliberately obtuse (so I called it. I believe you termed it “inquisitive”): changing the subject, twisting words, and generally trying to stretch things out by denying me any possibility of closure. Closure. Another word that made me realize what a psychobabbling American I was. Still, that’s what I wanted, and that’s what, among other things, you withheld. When you asked me to listen for a strange sound in the next room, I thought it was another ruse.

“Seriously. Do you hear that crackling sound?”

“Shut up. Please just shut up a minute, for fuck’s sake, and let me do this.” Or something over-dramatic like that.

“Jesus, Laura! Just listen!”

I don’t know how long we listened, crouching at that door, before opening it to see the fire. We must have exclaimed something, probably obscene, upon seeing it, but I remember only the sight of it: the couch on fire looked unreal. The division between couch and flame was so clear, so well-defined, it was like a kid’s drawing. It looked exactly like you would expect a couch on fire to look. You don’t think things like that will look ordinary. You’d think the actual sight of them would be so dramatic, so new, that your preconceived mental pictures of them would be blown away. Mine weren’t. The couch was on fire, and I saw no visions in the flames. Just flames.

I don’t remember getting past the fire and out the door. Standing there in the dark, you talked like a maniac about the fire brigade. Even at that point, I was detached enough to note the amusing difference between your English and mine. I’d never said the word “brigade” in all my life, probably never heard it spoken, either. You hated it when I called attention to your way of saying things, yet you felt entitled to compare my speech patterns, repeatedly, to those of the characters on Beverly Hills 90210.

“Listen! Say that again, Laura. She sounds just like Brenda! Say it again!” All Americans sounded alike to you, you loved to say, as you asked me to repeat my pronunciation of “neither” or of “shut the hell up.” You didn’t intend to make me feel like a trained monkey, of course. Besides, I’ve never been one to turn down a bit of attention. But it seemed to happen most frequently whenever I tried to say anything remotely serious, and so it was one of the reasons that you were getting dumped that evening.

All of this was, of course, beside the point as you said “fire brigade” repeatedly. Even that--your infuriating way of derailing serious conversations, a defense so impenetrable that I couldn’t even call attention to it without getting mocked--was burning away.

“Okay. Fuck. Fire brigade. Jaysis. Got to call fire brigade. Fire. Brigade…fuck…fuck! Alex passed out! Fire bri—fuckin’ hell! I’ll go call. You get her. Ah, fuck!

What happened at this point is the part I can’t figure out how to tell. It makes me miss you, because you told it well. You found a way to tell it that didn’t leave me feeling ridiculous. My version makes me ridiculous in two ways: first, for being such a complete lackey that I didn’t even question your absurd division of labor: “I’ll go dial a phone number, you go into a burning house and drag a drunk person out of it.” Are you kidding? I like to think that I would have gone in without orders from your highness, but I’ll never know. So I just feel stupid for being so obedient. Ridiculous, also, because really, who has the gall to tell a story about themselves running into a burning building? It’s like saying, “Throw me a parade! I’m a fuckin’ hero!” And that breaks the hero’s rules of recognition somehow. This idea of heroism, the one that we’ve been groomed to crave since Odysseus sneaks into the telling of every story in some way, I think. I don’t know what to do with it in this one, because while I, like most of us, have always dreamt of doing something like pushing a toddler out of the way of a bus, or taking a bullet for a president we respect, or running into a burning building to pull out a drunk girl, I also know that one of the rules is that people don’t tell their own stories. Those tales are supposed to be picked up by a blind bard or something, sung through the ages, sung in the third person. So it’s you who ought to be telling this story, really. Maybe you are. You’ve been out of earshot for over a decade now, so I wouldn't know. Still, if you were, I don't think the story would be bursting out of my memory so insistently and with such disregard for the rules of its telling. Maybe you’ve forgotten all about it. Or maybe I’m the victor, here, and my prize is writing its history to suit me: a non-transferable prize from a dubious victory. Lovely. A story that insists upon being told by a teller whose fate is to come off ridiculous. Sing in me, muse.

Here’s how you told it: “So I come back from the neighbor’s and there’s Laura, black with soot, coughing like a bollocks. Next to her is Alex, stark naked, lying in the road, legs spread, pissed out of her mind. No idea what was happening. Nearly died and the eejit kept telling Laura to go back in for her coat. Jaysis, Alex.”

At this point, if Alex was in the room, you’d hit her, and she’d look sheepish. Still, you couldn’t describe what it was like inside the house (you gallant dialer of telephones, you), and I never told you. So that's what's left to be done.

In the moments during which you were saying and I was thinking about the word “brigade,” the fire spread to the curtains and, I really think, the walls. It truly looked like the walls were on fire, and I guess that’s not unreasonable, but it’s hard to imagine it being true. It’s not like a couch on fire; I had never thought to form a mental picture of what walls on fire might look like. The stairs were not yet burning as I climbed them, or I very well might not have gone up. There were no flames upstairs, but the smoke was unbelievable—another thing I had never thought to imagine. People describe smoke as “acrid.” It’s more than that. I mean, breathing this smoke was like breathing maple syrup. It was thick and so sweet I gagged. It had texture in my nose and mouth, like something I could grab hold of. I remember being shocked mostly by the sweetness of it.

As a little kid, I used to dip my finger in cocoa powder while I waited for my hot chocolate to heat up. Once, I put a spoonful of the powder in my mouth. It choked me as I involuntarily inhaled some of it; it was so overly sweet it burned. I panicked and spit what wasn’t already stuck to my teeth and tongue into the garbage. Breathing the smoke was surprisingly similar to that, except there was no spitting out to be done.

At the top of the stairs I half-lunged towards the bed and ended up crawling the rest of the way. I couldn’t see anything up there. I hit the bed where I thought Alex would be. I couldn’t form any words—I kept trying to say her name and only managed the first syllable and some coughing. When my hand found her, I pulled at her arms and tried to roll her over, onto the floor. She didn’t stir at first, and when she did, she shook me off like I was her mother waking her up for the first day of school. She was incredibly stubborn and oblivious, which doesn’t surprise you, I’m sure. I tried a few more times until, exhausted from coughing up sweet smoke and bile, I stopped, fell back to the ground, and tried to think. This is one moment that I can remember with total clarity: I felt sure that I had no more than a few seconds left before I would pass out. Then maybe the fire brigade would get both of us out, but maybe not. I decided I had enough time to try to get Alex once more, and if she still wouldn’t budge, I would have to leave without her. I never told either of you that part; that I had made up my mind to leave her in there and save myself. How would a thing like that sound?

This is where the adrenalin kicks in, and memory fails. I remember Alex groping for the window, through which a toddler could maybe have squeezed, and both of us ultimately getting out: me with clothes and face stained by smoke; her with nakedness not very well disguised by the thin layer of dark gray that coated her entire body. Stumbling out of the house, I remember thinking that I was probably burned, that my skin was probably peeling off in horrible ways. I was terrified by the idea of spending the rest of my life scarred and disfigured. Then I thought for a minute that I still might die—only now it would be in a hospital, half my body covered in gauze stuck to bloody tissue where skin used to be, taking insane amounts of morphine intravenously. I tried to steel myself for the pain that would wash over me once the shock wore off, and I looked for reaction in the faces of the gathered onlookers. I think I asked someone for a mirror, which must have sounded bizarre.

When people ask me whether I believe in God, the view in that mirror—intact, unscathed—is one of the moments that come to mind.

We stood there and watched the house burn: it collapsed in on itself. Did you write something on Alex’s stomach with your finger, wiping away the soot to spell out “pissed” or “whore”? I might have imagined that. She asked a fireman for a light, giggling with a fag dangling from her lips. I thought it was kind of pitiful, but I laughed—probably just for the sake of laughing. I remember looking at the stars and laughing hard, standing next to the truck on the slant of the road.

The firemen—brigade—had arrived before the adjoining houses were badly damaged, but yours was a ruin. The outer walls were intact up to the first story, but the second story was gone. The stairs were mostly still there, but they led to nothing but dark sky. Everything inside was black, crackled-looking, like it had been given a very bad faux finish by a creatively stifled housewife. I found my glasses. Only one lens was shattered and I considered wearing them for the remaining good lens. You talked me out of it and I learned to get by without seeing very well.

How could I, after all that, go through with dumping you? You were homeless, and your only money had been in the cupboard (which you called the press), protected by nothing but a rubber band. You called yourself lots of unkind names for not having kept it in a safer place, and I wondered if you had ever heard of a bank—and if you had, what charming name you might have for such a place.

When I told you, a few days later, that I had been trying to break up with you that night, you said this: clearly, the fairies had intervened. They burned the house in order to keep us together. You nearly convinced me. You also nearly convinced me that we should not only get married, but have a cowboy-themed wedding. I guess I was exhausted, too tired to argue or resist, and so went along with it for a while. This is the part I can’t tell, the part where fatigue seemed to lead to something real. Something that still won’t entirely leave me alone, that makes me feel like I lost my bard, like I’m doomed to shout my own pointless story into empty space for all time. Maybe it was the fucking fairies. I don’t know. Whatever it was, it was no match for the expired visa that sent me home. After that, it wasn’t long before I dumped you over the phone.

.:.

If there is an opposite to “running into a burning building” it must be “breaking up over the phone.” These acts would work well as prototypes for heroism and cowardice, respectively, the two extremes of a spectrum. You pointed that out, in fact, during our last conversation. Not in so many words, but however you said it, you were right.

See, here’s the thing: it's not a matter of being a hero or not. To call a person that, to expect oneself to be that, is a fallacy. Odysseus wins the war and defeats monsters only to come home and slaughter the unarmed suitors in an unfair fight. Heroism isn't a personality trait like being outgoing or thoughtful; it’s not something that you consistently are. Maybe you feel like it for an instant, a moment, an occasion that you happen to rise to, followed by another occasion to rise to or not, then another, then another. Nobody is heroic at every opportunity, and anybody can get lucky by choosing the right moment in a million, the one that people might notice and remember. I guess I didn’t realize that in my old dreams of parades and keys to the city. I would have been thrilled to know that, one day, I would run into a burning building. I would feel vindicated, in a way, like in a single deed I held undeniable proof of a simple fact that I wanted people to recognize: that I was a decent person. It’s clear to me now, though, that this version of heroism is kind of a sham—or at least that it’s the easier of the two options. The harder option, the one at which I regularly fail, is to rise to the occasion of each day, to live it with kindness and integrity and patience. And to let go of the desire to be recognized for it. I know people who do that, and they astound me. You and I really ought to find ourselves some people like that, love.

dialect poem

the language of my fathers
wouldn't cover your toes in the bed,

wool shrunken
in numbing northatlantic saltwater,

fibers condensed into platitudes,
stiffened into the shapes
of my slumbering missionary ancestors.

this puritan tongue
knows Better,
chastens with euphemism,
distills to etiquette,
absolves itself of filth and fluid,
thanking Death when he kindly stops.

this language is no quilt.
it's a veil.
it's lipless:
wrap your mouth around
its
brittle as eggshell
words;
hold them there.

this language
enacts
the limits of vocabulary,
leaves depths
unuttered.
my people can
stretch silence across oceans.

my father's language
is no quilt,
no comfort--
merely a foil
for the universal
quiet.