Tight Place Dairy

The B&H man kept calling us "sweetie," and I didn't even care.

 After work, after picking my kid up on our designated corner, I convinced her to go to B&H Dairy with me, a tight place of a restaurant on 2nd Avenue in the East Village.  You can't get flesh there: no burgers, no meat.  In the tradition of kosher restaurants, the "meat" restaurant is across the street (and there you won't find any butter, can't ask for a glass of milk).

We go because I love the cold borscht and my kid loves the matzah ball soup.  We both tear through the huge hunks of challah they chop off for us, slathered with butter--because, Lara, there is a lot of butter here, which cracks me up, because B&H stands for . . . "Better Health."

If the counter stools are taken, if the tables lining the wall are filled, you have to angle your body to get in.  We did, laden with packs, and got the last two counter seats.  We know what we want without menus, and we got our soups in 30 seconds. The server put it down with such haste, it sloshed.  Everything was messy and good--and cheap.

There are walk-in closets bigger than this.

So fascinated by this "Kosher Certifications" even after 17 years in NYC

On the way back from escorting another kid somewhere, I insisted of getting out of my mental tight place--feeling so circumscribed, Lara--but kid obligation, that I decided to try and find Thoreau in my local used bookstore.

This edition carries an inscription from 1971.  It sounds like the receiver was headed for some kind of peripatetic world tour.  So jealous (unlike Thoreau who refused all invites to Europe).  But having the Dairy around kind of makes me feel like I'm living a little.

Why I don't want a Kindle.

circles

new round glasses, new round pearl ring, old earrings with circle cut-outs, beautiful round onion rings (is there a tastier food?)

certain motifs keep reappearing this week: visual, thematic, sounds, etc.  maybe i've been paying closer attention?

1.  circles.  i love the look of circles.  my new round sunglasses, chosen for me at target by ingrid, these beautiful onion rings we ate tonight on our date at timp freeze in midway, new round pearl (not real for heaven's sake) ring,  earrings with the cut out circle in the middle, and this tiny adorable cake from cakes de fleur we picked up at the store in midway after dinner.  we'll eat it later tonight when the ice cream i made in the new ice cream maker hardens (i think i successfully recreated snelgroves' burnt almond fudge.)

six-inch buttermilk cake from cakes de fleur.  adorable.  no preservatives.  whole ingredients.  it's hard to buy a good cake in utah.

and, finally, "o" for "om."

whereas we used to each eat an entire order like this, we now share.  we both feel reborn after too many years of not feeling good.

2. transitions.  tonight lula went to her first dance.  sob! which means. . . i can't even think about what it means, so i'll focus on the practical implications: we need a new date night babysitter.  we are all on the cusp of the new school year, and eva is transitioning into her new life in salt lake.  it's exciting, and a little terrifying, too.

since i can't think about lula liking boys, i'll think about finding a new date-night sitter.  hey.  timp freeze in midway's a great hangout spot.

3. transformations.  i've been longing for some major change or breakthrough, the moment where i feel, yes!  this is what i was after. this week i felt a little discouraged about how many years i've felt stuck (maybe eight?).  tonight i had a little boost of encouragement while we were eating dinner.  c. and i were looking at our order, which we were splitting, and talking about how bad our health was a few years ago, before we both lost a significant amount of weight.  we were laughing (and crying a little, too) about how, in the old days, we each would have eaten one of these meals, plus a couple of shakes, no problem.  we've both changed a lot over the past few years.  i remembered tonight, looking at my greasy box of onion rings, that i can change, and have changed, but it sometimes takes a while.

so patience and more patience is in order.

sadhguru of isha yoga is my meditation teacher's guru.  she claims meditation totally transformed her.  i met someone in nyc in may who told me the same thing.  can't hurt to try it.  i promise i'll never quote deepak chopra.

4.  meditation.  i went to a workshop today and got an overview of some basic meditation practices.  i decided for the next forty days to try a morning meditation of ten sun saluations, a few hip openers, and 21 oms.  this seems simple enough that i actually might do it. i'll let you know how it feels, and if i can stick with it.

my inspiration for listening was this book, another meditative text that changed my life.

5.  listening.  every morning this week i've gone on the back patio to write my morning pages and eat breakfast.  i've been spending  a few minutes each morning listening to the city start to waken.  there's a whipporwill who lives in our back yard, a neighbor who gets up early to work on his backyard pizza oven every day, and construction a few blocks over.   there's also a really beautiful sounding train, clear on the west side of our valley, that passes in the morning.  because of the high mountains, these sounds are soft but audible, echoing off the tall rocky walls that stand sentinel next to our house.

listening has brought a lot of peace to my morning.  i don't know why.  give it a try, if you want.

moonlight also leaks

dinner with baby sister

i just returned, under a nearly full moon, from a great early birthday dinner with my baby sis and her husband, both uber-cool human beings.  we ate at my favorite provo restaurant, you know, communal.  

highlights of communal's dinner for me were the cheese platter with honeycomb and cherry preserves and the kale spinach salad.  the butterscotch pudding in the mason jar was so festive and celebratory. kyle and christian went nuts over the corn with queso and christian was trying to drink the remains of the whiskey brown sugar sauce that the carrots were cooked with from the ramekin.

my baby sister valorie had arrived in the middle of the night from arizona after passing by a huge fire in fillmore, utah, the original capital of utah.  the air is heavy with ash and smoke in provo, a couple hours north of fillmore, blowing in from the six wildfires all around us.  our eyes and lungs are burning, and there's an unsettling feeling in the valley.

valorie said at dinner, "kyle was driving and i was sleeping when i woke up in fillmore at  2 a.m. and saw the fire.  if it wasn't so terrible, it would have been really beautiful."

then i came home to read izumi shikibu's poem "although the wind." valorie's statement and izumi's poem were synchronous.  or maybe valorie's poem and izumi's statement?

both utterances point to what, on the eve of our blog's six month anniversary, has been so beneficial about writing down daily observances.  there is terrible and there is beautiful.  

sometimes they co-exist.  

i've gotten markedly better, even since january, at understanding this, and realizing that you have to let them happen together if they need to.  it's been really good for me to consciously look for the beautiful in every day.  

or whatever you want to call it.  

the significant.  

the observance.  

bloggers and poets both get accused of sometimes picking experiences to have because they will make good fodder for writing.  this can be a danger, the danger of not being able to live the poem and write it, both, as thoreau said.  

but so far the daily writing and observing has made me more grateful, more observant, and more deliberate about the experiences i have every day.  i know it's a little self-indulgent (a lot?), but maybe it's not so bad to live well so you can write about it?

at any rate, thank you for indulging me.  

and thank you for the moon tonight.

“Although the wind ...”

BY IZUMI SHIKIBU

TRANSLATED BY JANE HIRSHFIELD AND MARIKO ARATANI

Although the wind

blows terribly here,

the moonlight also leaks

between the roof planks

of this ruined house.

change is a miracle?

my baby moses 6.5 years ago--is this change miraculous or heartbreaking?

i'm working on grading for an online class today.  last semester,  i thought i had the grading system all figured out (finally), then the platform changed to a new and improved platform, which was good, but all the stuff i had worked so hard to figure out washed away and i had to adjust, & figure new stuff out.

this kind of thing is frustrating, no? especially when you've spent a lifetime seeking stasis, & then you finally realize stasis is not a) possible or b) desireable.  you need to do some big work to deal with this realization.

driving home yesterday i listened to chapter one of walden pond.  aside from hdt's weirdness about "savages" and "hindoos", and a few other questionable stances, he's got some pretty cool ideas (some even borrowed from the "hindoos" themselves), like this one:

“All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.” 

today i'm thinking:  really?  ALL change?  even the sudden fail of my online gradebook?  even the impingement in my left shoulder?  even--well,

you don't wanna hear about THAT.


even though today i'm so frustrated i want to punch a wall, i'm trying to step back and test thoreau's hypothesis--really?  all change is miraculous?  why and how?

here's what another poet says:


Trying to Name What Doesn't Change
 
By Naomi Shihab Nye b. 1952
 

Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change   

is train tracks. She’s sure of it.

The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery   

by the side, but not the tracks.

I’ve watched one for three years, she says,

and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow.

Peter isn’t sure. He saw an abandoned track

near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train   

is a changed track. The metal wasn’t shiny anymore.   

The wood was split and some of the ties were gone.

Every Tuesday on Morales Street

butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens.   

The widow in the tilted house

spices her soup with cinnamon.

Ask her what doesn’t change.

Stars explode.

The rose curls up as if there is fire in the petals.   

The cat who knew me is buried under the bush.

The train whistle still wails its ancient sound   

but when it goes away, shrinking back

from the walls of the brain,

it takes something different with it every time.

& here's a little thing to make you (& me)  feel a little more patient via c.:

poet, scholar & gentleman nathan hauke: our first boy guest blogger

first boy blogger nathan hauke

 editor's note:  i met nathan in poetry workshop.  we were surrounded by uber-talented poets, but even in that crowd, his work stood out to me as having a particular soulfulness.  and believe me, this was a crowd in which it was tough to stand out.  we also took an uber-painful french for grad students class together one dark, cold salt lake winter with another poet friend.  on our break we had a little poets'  huddle that was strangely comforting to me.  kinda like nathan's poetry, the presence of poet-friends assured me, as his work will assure you, that everything's gonna be okay.  enjoy his beautiful post!

& if you want to read more, here's a link so you can order his chapbook, in the living room.

nathan's chapbook

NO PLOT SO NARROW

Here
I am.  There
You are.

—R Creeley

Just trying to be at home, that’s the whole plot.

    —R Blaser

During the school year, I am often, of necessity, a creature of habit.  I have to move deliberately with a real sense of precision in order to “get ‘er done” and I often have to buckle myself down to work against my nature to do it.  Whenever I start to feel trapped—anchored to my routine, bills, teaching responsibilities, I return to R Creeley’s Pieces to remember the refreshing fact that locations are dynamic and expansive. In my experience, feeling trapped often manifests itself as a desire to be elsewhere.  I feel a momentum building that I will have step out of to grade papers (again) or respond to emails (again)…  There’s another book I’d rather be reading, but I have to prep a talk on Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, etc.   (Which I love, but I’d rather be reading that other book…)  I’d rather be playing ball with Franklin, walking with Kirsten, talking to my brother on the phone, watching TV—Something else.  I have to work against my nature to turn away.

Creeley rewrites the whole of J Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained in three lines in Pieces: “Here/ I am.  There/ You are.”  He knows that we read at the edge of ecstasy as our attachment to the patterns we identify with, however brief, severs us from the process of becoming.  We stop to read ourselves, to point to where we’ve been, and we realize that we’re gone: “I am.  There.”

Existence locked in self-sight is an existence apart.  This is the most devastating fact that Adam and Eve face as they are escorted out of Eden, minds “darkened by experience”:

They, looking back, all th’ eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand; the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms.
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

(Paradise Lost)

As a recovering Baptist kid, reading Thoreau, I started to approach the fall as a parable about presence.  The fall is a failure of attention—it’s a break with process.  Like J Cage says, “Music is permanent; only listening is intermittent” (Themes & Variations).

Watching bursts of icy wind rack the shattered plastic wading pool leaning up against our neighbor’s trailer, I inevitably find I’m elsewhere.  I’m anxious.  I’m hungry.   I’m thinking about a class I have to prep or I look away to write this down.  One way or anther, the current is broken.  It’s impossible to stay with the moment because our attention is imperfect.  Angels step in front of the gate with flaming swords.  Eden is over.  (Elsewhere in Creeley’s Pieces, “Man thinks./  Ugh.”)  There’s no going back.  Never is.  At the edge of one circumstance, our faces twist in pain like wrenched branches.

JESU is in my heart, his sacred name
Is deeply carved there: but th’ other week
A great affliction broke the little frame,
Ev’n all to pieces: which I went to seek:
And first I found the corner, where was J,
After, where ES, and next where U was graved.

(G Herbert, “JESU”).

I think we often suffer pains of attachment to patterns because they allow us to imagine that we are static, but cleaving to old forms is devastating because perspectives have limits.  G Stein acknowledges the disintegration of perspectives singled apart from the activity underway in The Making of Americans when she claims, “Every living one becomes a dead one.” Thoreau sets Walden apart in Walden and that place is over, changed irrevocably by visiting tourists and cold water swimmers who make pilgrimages there.  Our perspectives are limits.  Romance and nostalgia are crippling; they make my head feel foggy.  Like A Marvell says in “The Garden,” an oak is an oak; it’s never going to say “Laura,” etc.  Identifying with process is a realization that our nature is much more dynamic.  Thoreau: “A savage name is perchance recorded somewhere as ours” (“Walking”).  As Milton asserts in Paradise Lost, true freedom is always, finally, a matter of submission to higher laws. 

Creeley’s meditation on counting throughout Pieces is also instructive as it calls to both the isolation of experience and the ecstasy of merger.  On the one hand, “One by/ itself divided or multiplied/ produces one” because “No one lives in/ the life of another—/ no one knows.”  On the other, Creeley asserts that a wider realization of presence draws us into a grand harmony beyond thinking: “This time, this/ place, this/ one.”

One plus one = one.  Our paradise is solitary and it will remain so.  We are saved and fallen: one and one.  Here a few beats and gone the next.  We are all, finally, a species of one.  The way we come down on this in the moments we are given is a matter of perspective.  Creeley advises: “Love one./ Kiss two” (Pieces).

Wide-awake, we find the shattered edge of our small perspective (limit) melts into the stream; we always kiss two because we are alone with God.   Solitude blossoms when we are most essentially ourselves.  Stripped to the bone, we find the polis is lonely and expansive.  Thank God for A Marvell who reminds me to step back whenever I waver under the despair that accompanies a crushing workload and lures me into feeling cut off from that which is most primary: “To wander solitary there:/ Two paradises ‘twere in one/ To live in paradise alone” (“The Garden”).
Watching her brother William carve the t of her name in the trunk of a living tree with their dear friend Coleridge’s penknife, Dorothy Wordsworth sees that writing, friendship, organic growth, and transcendence are inextricably bound together: “We parted from Coleridge at Sara’s Crag after having looked at the Letters which C. carved in the morning.  I kissed them all.  Wm deepened the T with C.’s penknife” (Journals).  Writing is always elegiac; it leaves one behind even as it inaugurates a new one.  Our names will leave us behind because salvation speeds towards the wreckage of salvation.  

Next to Walden and HD Thoreau’s Journals, Pieces is the book that I spend the most time with and I am increasingly certain that these lines tell our most essential story.
………………….

Nathan blogs at Blue Rags Stitched Together By Crows:

Here’s a link to his poem “Color is Worse Than Eternity” at Real Poetik.

Here’s a link to Ark Press (where you can now access the Ark Press Audio Archive).
_________________________

What do you want to get done this year?

Not so much get done as enjoy… 
My partner, Kirsten and I, are getting organized to have a wedding reception...  We rented an old apple barn in Valle Crucis, NC, and we’re planning to string up some Christmas lights and dance to soul music with friends and family all night there in June.  We’re also getting ready to print our first Ark Press chapbook.  My first book, IN THE MARBLE OF YOUR ANIMAL EYES, is forthcoming from Publication Studio and I’m really grateful and excited about that. 

I’m looking forward to sitting down with friends’ books over spring break this week: Hank Lazer’s new book N18 (Singing Horse 2012), Brenda Sieczkowski’s Wonder Girl in Monster Land (Dancing Girl 2012), and a chapbook manuscript that Pepper Luboff just mailed us.

Apart from this, I think I would actually like to try to get less done this year…  We’ve been busy and it takes time to break into blossom.

What inspires you?

Company!  Friends and family, books, and conversations with my students.  River-life, dog walks, music, buds on branches.

What is your favorite legwear?

I’ve been shuffling around the house in some grey thermal socks that my dad gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago all winter.  Thanks Pop!

p.s. let's not pretend that tights are as cool as those tube socks, but they're at least on the spectrum of radness.  up your rad factor but entering our 3rd tights giveaway.

org--vibrations

the organ, that leviathanical instrument, at libby gardner hall

last night i heard an organ concert in libby gardner hall on the university of utah campus put on by the salty cricket composer's collective.

c. had two fantastic pieces on the show, including a beautiful toccata and a haunting conductus.  i was really moved by the conductus, with it's long pedal point and the simple, expressive chant line over top, and the organist, haruhito miyagi, told me afterwards that the phrase agnus dei looped through his mind during the whole movement.

it was weird, but i had the same words in my mind as he played.

then miyagi played his own ultra-tight composition, franciscan flour ("a sonic sketch depicting the organ in the grand liszt ference hall at the debreceni egyetem, conservatory of music in debrecen, hungary"), and at the end of the first movement, he turned off the organ while maintaining the pedals (i think that's what he was doing!)  and as the sound from the huge pipes decayed, it was the sense of dying wind, or far off chimes, and it reminded me of thoreau

i found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them. . . .

miyagi also played a bold and dissonant piece by crystal young-otterstrom, who is a rad impresario/composer/activist. her piece was thick with walls of sound and built towards the louder second set of pieces.

in the last half of the concert, neil thornock, one of c's colleagues, a composer and a virtuosic organist, played a second c. piece, org,  and an earth shaking piece thornock composed on a wallace stevens poem called restless iteration ("inspired by the bizarre, unstable forms of italian baroque toccata"). this piece was full-blast open pipes and thornock was bouncing while he played from the physicality of the work.  i listened with my eyes closed and started seeing ahab on the ocean, so very near to the white whale, about to close in on his prey.  the piece stayed in that climactic place for a long, long time.  in fact, one might say it got there and it never left.

i love the bone shaking bombast of the organ, the way it takes over a space--all the air, all your body, and makes even your teeth vibrate.  you can't really get anything close to this experience in a recording of organ music.  you have to be in the room with this leviathan of an instrument.  and if you haven't heard a really good organ in a really good space, then put that on your list.

it will rearrange the all cells in your body and you'll be a better person from then on out, if you let the vibrations do their work.  amen.

legwear:  black tights

inspiration:  really loud music

looking forward:  iron chef, yoga with eva, being done grading midterms