Elegy, Manuscript, Trying:

This has resisted organization. This has come together and fallen apart numerous times— there are pages and pages of poetry begging to fit to one another. Some argue that when writing elegy, the poet’s thoughts break down because grief shatters the mind and contraries coherence. My memory has broken down, fragmented. Pieces halved and quartered to other pieces. I have a pile of memories translated to poetry. Scrapped, folded, and stained on my bedroom floor in a wooden crate. I placed too much meaning into objects, put too much stock in location. I treated my dreams too much like reality. I tried to fit a story together that is too vast and tangled a web to be navigated. I aspired to understand everything. I expected every realization to be the realization. I prayed to some non-god for epiphanies. I prayed to the universe to reveal itself, for the multiverse to map itself, for the stars to constellate in some way that might lend the sky to a meaning that I could record in the pages of my notebook. My handwriting has deteriorated tremendously. There is a story for that too. Everything I see and touch I can bring back around to my father, to death, to mortality, to the eye in the sky that we feel staring or blinking when two giant circles become concentric and arrive us at meant-to-be moments. There are things I will tell. There are things I will not tell. There are realities I have run from for many months now. I never confronted fully the story I wished to tell because I considered it rather as a condition. Now I see that the two are part of some hybridized one. Our condition is that we are our story and our story is the story of others. When a person takes on the responsibility of documenting truth, or truth as he or she might understand it, that person takes on more than the truth of one story. The truth of one story is the truth of hundreds or millions of others. We drift and overlap like autumn leaves, we carry and fall off the wind like dandelion fuzz. Some of us are swept into the same pile and left for the season. Some of us push up from the wet spring earth with the same stories to tell about someone we knew so long ago that the name sounds foreign on the tongue. In the fragmentation there is a great connectivity that cannot be restructured. Pieces fall across state lines, they drift to sea.

Sightings and Signs

The summer after my father died, my mother took me to the optometrist to get a new pair of glasses. They dilated my pupils during the examination and I felt as if my eyes were bulging out of their sockets. When we left the office, the afternoon blinded me and I spent the rest of the day squinting and shielding my eyes from the sun. In the months following, I regarded my poor eyesight as an advantage rather than a disability. In supermarkets or in crowds, I would take off my glasses and let the world recede into blurred imbalance. Without the detail in faces, every tall dark haired man could be my father, perusing the frozen foods section or buying a movie theater ticket.

The fall after my father died, my mother was jogging through the park near our house in New Jersey. When she came home there was an orange cat following her. She told me that it started following her while she was running and when it looked at her she felt as if it was my father. I thought it ran like a lion, my sister started calling it by my father’s name, Seth. It stayed on our porch for a few days. I rejected the possibility that it was my father, because I was sure there was no way he could have been reincarnated into a cat that had certainly been alive longer than the four or five months since his death. The cat eventually disappeared to stray on somewhere else and we never saw it again.

During my first year of school after my father died, I had a collection of tiny vases that I kept on my windowsill. Whenever I was completely alone, I would arrange them in a circle on the middle of my floor and try to summon ghosts in our house. For me, everything was a sign or omen and so I regarded any creak or draft as a reason to attempt a meeting with the spirits. I never asked for my father specifically for fear that he would come, and for fear that he would not. After many failed attempts, one of my séances resulted in a mysterious knock that I swore came from inside the wall of my room opposite the windowsill. I decided it was my father that had knocked, and that I would never again use my vases in such a way.

I substituted a part of something for the whole, but the effort was foiled when I realized that every stapler was broken. So I was forced to fasten this with string and I wove it together sloppily, albeit gently and with love and I pretended I was a Cherokee woman tying a rock to a stick and creating a sacred and beautiful weapon for battle. How I long for some kind of antiquity. How I wish that I could trace my ancestors back to their huddled masses and then before that to the warm country side of Italy eating olives or maybe Austria, wearing heavy coats.

Things In My Room and In My Mind

thank-you, Odetta.

Twelve pounds of laundry
Sit soft in a paper bag—
You, and great intrigue.

CAMELS: a haiku

How the camels drink
They trek across the desert
Have two humps, two humps