Robyn Ryle's Blog, page 6

National Poetry Month: Day 2

Of course, Wendell Berry is wise enough to understand that a marriage is a kind of place, home made flesh and walking about the earth.

 

The Country of Marriage

I.

I dream of you walking at night along the streams

of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs

of birds opening around you as you walk.

You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.

II.

This comes after silence. Was it something I said

that bound me to you, some mere promise

or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?

A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood

still and said nothing. And then there rose in me,

like the earth’s empowering brew rising

in root and branch, the words of a dream of you

I did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer

who feels the solace of his native land

under his feet again and moving in his blood.

I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped

my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss

that lay before me, but only the level ground.

III.

Sometimes our life reminds me

of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing

and in that opening a house,

an orchard and garden,

comfortable shades, and flowers

red and yellow in the sun, a pattern

made in the light for the light to return to.

The forest is mostly dark, its ways

to be made anew day after day, the dark

richer than the light and more blessed,

provided we stay brave

enough to keep on going in.

 

IV.

 

How many times have I come to you out of my head

with joy, if ever a man was,

for to approach you I have given up the light

and all directions. I come to you

lost, wholly trusting as a man who goes

into the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend

slowly earthward out of the air. I rest in peace

in you, when I arrive at last.

 

V.

 

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange

of my love and work for yours, so much for so much

of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are–

that puts us in the dark. We are more together

than we know, how else could we keep on discovering

we are more together than we thought?

You are the known way leading always to the unknown,

and you are the known place to which the unknown is always

leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,

I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing

not belittled by my saying that I possess it.

Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing

a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only

accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light

enough to live, and then accepts the dark,

passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I

have fallen time and again from the great strength

of my desire, helpless, into your arms.

 

VI.

 

What I am learning to give you is my death

to set you free of me, and me from myself

into the dark and the new light. Like the water

of a deep stream, love is always too much. We

did not make it. Though we drink till we burst

we cannot have it all, or want it all.

In its abundance it survives our thirst.

In the evening we come down to the shore

to drink our fill, and sleep, while it

flows through the regions of the dark.

It does not hold us, except we keep returning

to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,

willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

 

VII.

 

I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,

containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.

I give you the life I have let live for the love of you:

a clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road,

the young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life

that we have planted in the ground, as I

have planted mine in you. I give you my love for all

beautiful and honest women that you gather to yourself

again and again, and satisfy–and this poem,

no more mine than any man’s who has loved a woman.

National Poetry Month: Day One

Every year or so, I resolve to post a poem a day for National Poetry Month. Mostly, I fail, but I am a persistent starter.

Here’s day one, from Limericking:

Mike Pence, an adult who is grown,

Cannot sit with women alone.

However, he can

Stand by an old man

Whose fondness for groping is known.

 

Madison Monday: sleeping with the windows open

It really shouldn’t be warm enough in March to sleep with the windows open, but it is. Over the winter, you get used to hearing nothing more than the soft whooshing noise the heating system makes when it kicks on. In the winter, we live sealed off from the world. The cold seeps in through every opening. Being able to push the windows up and let in the world feels like a victory. Then the noise comes in.

First, the laments of the mourning doves. They’re here earlier than they should be, too, and don’t start singing until the morning. They remind me of being in Florida, which is where I heard them growing up. They like urban places, so there weren’t any out in the country when I was a kid. They sound sad, but make me think of mornings full of sunshine and sand.

Then the cars and their radios. Some of the songs are familiar and I wonder about the person inside—the intersections of the soundtracks of our lives. Where are they headed? Is this their favorite song? Are they singing along? Other times, the bass booms so loudly it shakes the foundations of our house in a way no natural phenomenon ever has.

There are loud mufflers and screeching brakes and all manner of failing combustion on the streets below. The beeping of a large vehicle moving backward. The crash of recycling bins being dumped into the truck.

And the conversations. Mumbled and barely audible sometimes. Or at midnight and shouted. One night, I lay in bed not sleeping and listen to the sound of the argument coming from blocks away. It’s impossible to tell what it’s about. Only snippets drift up. Something about cigarettes. A promise to tell or not to tell. The volume never fades and mostly I am amazed at the ability to be angry for the distance of so many city blocks. Even after they’re gone, I imagine I can still hear the rhythmic sound of their shouting in the distance.

As spring creeps closer, there’s the spring chorus before the sun has even risen. A symphony of birds in the dark, too impatient to wait for the sun to rise.

The peeper frogs after a rain. They’re never as loud as they would be out in the country, but they’re out there all the same.

When you open the windows, you can’t control what comes in. Your world becomes porous. Or you remember that it was all along.

Whatever It Takes

You read a lot of writers who talk about the need to write every day. At first you don’t believe them. At least I didn’t. Every day? Writing isn’t supposed to be a chore. It’s something you do for fun. It’s art. Inspiration. Blah, blah, blah.

Writing is a practice. At least for me, it has to be done over and over again, on a regular basis, or it all falls apart. Every day or week in which I don’t write makes it harder and harder to come back to it. The very idea of writing becomes vast and unmanageable, like a monster hiding under the bed. You make up all kinds of stories about why the monster is too scary to face. You can’t do it anymore. Everything you write is crap. Blah, blah, blah.

Last fall was a hard time for writing. The class schedule at the college where I teach changed; we went from 50-minute classes to 70-minute classes, which meant a lot more of my day was spent teaching. I didn’t finish teaching until 2:30 in the afternoon, and by the time I came home, it seemed too hard to make myself sit down and write.

Also, there was the election. That’s all that really needs to be said about that.

Something had to change.

I’ve done National Novel Writing Month a couple times in the past. My favorite part of the whole experience is the little graph on the website that allows you track your daily word count. I love seeing those little bars go up. I love the visual record of my progress. I would write an extra 500 words just to watch that little bar crawl upward. I tried a similar kind of thing using Excel, but it wasn’t as satisfying. It wasn’t as pretty.

I saw a friend on Facebook who was tracking her progress toward a walking goal by coloring in squares on graph paper. It was like creating your own system of gold stars. My inner kindergartener was bouncing up and down with excitement.

So over the break I bought myself a notebook with graph paper and some colored pencils. I drew lines for the month of January. I devised a system—green for every day I meditate and blue for each 20-minute writing block.

I don’t know what to say about my new system except it’s a little sad that it took me until the age of 42 to figure out how motivated I am by filling in colored sqares on graph paper. Here’s how my thinking goes some days—“I don’t really want to write today. I hate writing. My writing is crap. But if I don’t write today, they’ll be a blank spot on my calendar. No pretty blue at all. It’ll stare back at me at the end of the month, an island of white in all that blue and green.” So, I sit down and write.

You can see in January, this worked pretty well. I was revising a novel, so it didn’t really make sense to measure progress by word count. I only missed four days. Two because I was sick. One because I spent the whole day following the Women’s March on social media. One because it was Day 6 of the new regime and my soul was too thoroughly crushed for writing.

I still hate writing some days. I still dread sitting down in front of the computer. But I think of those little blue squares. And I find if I can make myself sit for 20 minutes of pure, uninterrupted writing, the rest comes easier. Getting started is always the hard part.

We are the sleeping giant

It’s Day Eleven of the new world. We’re still here. It still snows and we are all delighted. There’s still music and food and the river and Joe Biden memes and friends. We are scared and our fears are more than justified. There have been at least 71 documented hate crimes in these past eleven days and it’s fair to call that an epidemic. For now, we can still say whatever we want and here are some things I want to say.

To paraphrase the late Dennis Green, Trump and Pence are who we thought they were. We weren’t mistaken. They weren’t bluffing. They are going to attempt to do all the most horrible things they said they would. They will most likely invent some new ones in the next four years we haven’t thought of yet.

There is no need to treat these men with deference. There is no need to give them the benefit of the doubt. Nothing about the way we normally treat a presidency applies here.  This is not normal and we absolutely have to keep reminding ourselves of that. Every day like a mantra—THIS. IS. NOT. NORMAL.

We should be outraged, but we should not be shocked, simply because it wastes our energy, and our energy is precious now. Yes, Trump’s behavior for the next four years is going to be deplorable and disgusting. That’s a given. That we think his behavior is disgusting and deplorable doesn’t matter to him or his posse of thugs. He doesn’t care. Our disgust doesn’t affect him. He will go on being disgusting. We need to accept that and move on. We need to ask ourselves, so what now?

I still don’t have all the answers to that question. I know we all have to learn how to live in this world and our answers won’t all be the same. But we have to go on living. Even before Election Day, I found myself wondering about the effects on our collective mental health. This presidency is a leaden lump in the pit of my stomach. It is finding it hard to concentrate. It is waking up every morning into a world that’s a little harder to be in. We have to figure out how to be strong without destroying ourselves. They want us debilitated. We have to find a way not to be.

We have to find humor and hope. We have to gather together with people we love and who love us. We have to remember that most of the country didn’t want this. We have to find comfort in art and stories. We have to keep speaking through our art and stories.

For the next four years, we have to do our best to form a shield around the most vulnerable among us. If Muslim-Americans have to register, we must all be Muslims. If illegal immigrants are deported, we must all be illegal. If the rights of the LGBT community are taken away, we must all be LGBT. We must all be women and black and disabled. We were asleep but now we are awake. We must become a new giant.

The unimaginable

It’s day three in our new American nightmare. The thing we could not possibly imagine has happened. Again this morning I woke up and let the reality settle in. Yes, we did this. We elected him. This is happening. This is real.

This is not a hot take. Today I am thinking about going slow.

My comfort food

On Day Three, I’m eating okay again. There was a startling moment on Tuesday night when I realized I hadn’t really been eating much for the last week or so. On Tuesday night, I looked at the perfectly lovely meal my husband had made and thought it would take every ounce of willpower I had to take another bite. I love eating and I tend to over-eat when I’m anxious. Whole bags of potato chips have disappeared in an hour. This was new. And scary. But on Day Three, I can say that my appetite has survived.

I’m thinking a lot about anger. I’m angry. People on Twitter are angry. My students are angry. We have good reasons to be angry. But I’m also thinking about how corrosive anger is. It eats away at you. It turns you into something you don’t really want to be. It doesn’t hurt the people you’re angry at. They don’t care or they enjoy our anger. Our anger hurts us and yet, it is real. It is natural. What do we do with it now?

On Day Three, being white has never felt more gross.

I’m listening to Hamilton. In fact, I don’t really have to listen to Hamilton anymore. It’s in my head constantly. All the time. When I’m writing on the board in class, Hamilton is in my head. When I’m going to bed at night. When I’m walking. I’m hearing voices all the time. Leslie Odom Jr.’s voice. Lin Manuel-Miranda’s voice. They are with me.

On Day Three, I’m trying to make sure everyone around me is okay. I’m checking in. I’m keeping a tally.

I’m taking comfort in my students. They are sad and angry and scared. They are also strong and fearless and in many ways, smarter than me. I am trying to listen to them—to really hear them. I am trying in the smallest way possible to help them figure out how to be now and what to do. I am making sure they know that I don’t have the answers.

I am thinking about what comes next.  I need to do something now. Something more than I’ve done in the past. I’m not sure what it is and I don’t think rushing into the answer is a good idea. I am taking my time. I’m thinking it through.

On Day Three, I am not a very friendly person. A white woman in town passes and says hello to me. I don’t answer. I don’t make eye contact with white people I don’t know.  I live in Trumpland. I feel surrounded by the enemy. I want to stop people and shake them and say, “Did you do this to us? Did you bring this into being? Why?” I am made more nervous than ever by the sound of white men laughing together.

I’m reading. I’m trying to write but it’s hard; there’s not much room left for words inside my head. I’m making lists of books and art to save us. I’m thinking of stories as weapons to arm ourselves with.

I’m mostly staying away from Facebook and Twitter. It is not helping me. I am creating some healthy path between not-knowing and doing what I can. I don’t know if it’s possible. I don’t know how to get there. Each step is hard to make. I lift my foot. I wait. I think. I cry. I go slow. I take a step

What I love about Stranger Things

Jeff and I finished watching the new Netflix series, Stranger Things, on Thursday night, giving me plenty of time to reflect on the show and mourn that it’s over (at least for now). Here’s a list of some of the things I loved about this show:

The music, of course. Who didn’t get a big grin on their face when the first episode ended with Toto’s “Africa”? Who hadn’t forgotten The Bangles’ cover of “Hazy Shade of Winter,” hidden in the long shadow cast by “Walk Like an Egyptian”? There’s 80s music that’s played so much that it loses its 80s veneer altogether, becoming just the generic soundtrack of commercials and sporting events. Then there’s the music that fell through the cracks. The songs that you haven’t heard in years and so have the magical power to take you right back there. The ones you sang alone to by yourself in your bedroom. That 80s music. And watching the kids interact with it, you remember how much the music meant. How cool it was to be able to listen to The Clash on a boombox. A boombox, folks. Back when you had to work for your music. Back when you really would just sit on your bed listening to “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”
What did you do before the internet when you wanted to know something? You called your high school science teacher at ten o’clock at night to ask him about sensory deprivation chambers. Duh.
The phone, etc. Not the phone that Will uses to communicate with his mom. I don’t remember whose phone it was in the show, but there was a moment when someone picked up a phone and all I could think was, “I had that phone! I remember that phone!” And it was a cool phone at the time, a step up from the rotary phones that my grandma still had on her desk in the hall. The buttons glowed! And I remember when my sister and I got our own phone, in our own room. It looked like that phone and perhaps everything else in my life has been downhill from the moment when we got our own phone. You get the idea, but the phone is just one example of all the wonderful, nostalgic stuff that populates the show.
The resonance with every great 80s movie ever made. My list keeps getting longer, but…Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Goonies, Sixteen Candles, War Games, Poltergeist, Stand By Me. And more I’m sure I’m missing.

This phone, only ours was more of a beige color.

Was it just me, or was the font they used for the title and the chapter titles the same font you saw on all the choose-your-own-adventure books?
The meta-moment in the last episode. The boys are playing Dungeons and Dragons and frustrated at all the unfinished story lines from their game, which mirror the unanswered questions in the series itself. I love when shows make fun of themselves a little bit–it was part of what I loved about Buffy.
Scary! This show is scary as shit, on top of everything else. Scary is hard in today’s world of blood and gore and CGI. Old-fashioned scary is still the best scary, though.
Great story-telling. This may because we just came off watching Vikings, which is not good story-telling. But when Hopper stands at the top of the quarry and tells the story about how you can’t survive the fall from there, and then later, that story he told becomes important? As a writer, you just breath a contented little sigh in those moments. Oh, look how they did that. They knew where they were going. They planned ahead so that when we came to that moment with Mike standing in the same spot, we would know everything we needed to know. We are in good story-telling hands here, and thank goodness for that. So hard to do. So important. So satisfying.
Indiana! It was set in Indiana. It actually looked like Indiana, too! There was a quarry! There are lots of quarries in Indiana! It looked like Indiana, unlike, say Justified, which is supposed to be in Harlan, Kentucky, only there are bouganvillea hedges, which don’t grow in Kentucky. And scrub and California mountains, and don’t get me started on it. I believed they might really be in Indiana and unlike, say, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the point of being in Indiana was not to make fun of the backward-nesss of people who don’t live in New York.
The consistent veer toward goodness. There were so many moments in this show when I thought to myself, “Ah, I know who this character is.” Hopper was going to be that drunken, n’er-do-well, vaguely bully-like small-town cop. Nope. He’s a smart, wounded and compassionate guy. Steve, Nancy’s boyfriend, is going to be the living reincarnation of every bully/asshole guy in every John Hughes movie, only worse, because even in those movies, the bully/asshole had his issues. Nope. Steve, like so many of the characters, will veer toward goodness in the end. The boys–Mike, Dustin and Lucas–will only ever be mean to each other for short bursts. In the end, they’ll do what’s right. They’ll forgive each other. They’ll shake on it. I guess it says something about the world we’re living in that the veer toward goodness is the unexpected plot move. It made Stranger Things refreshing and real, like a sweet tonic in an ugly and sometimes scary world.

A walk along the river in July, or things that are real

This July, I can’t get up early enough to beat the heat for my morning walk. Well, I guess I could, but this morning, I didn’t. I got down to the river around 8:30 and the fog hadn’t quite burnt off. It was one of those mornings when the water is so still, it’s like the river is wishing itself into something else–a mountain lake or an overgrown puddle. I was too early for the Pokemon Go hunters I’ve seen the last few days. Instead, a man parked his car along the sidewalk and sat down on a bench with a fiddle. The sound of a fiddle being played out in the open along the Ohio River balances out whatever might be lacking in skill; he sounded perfect, as if this were the exact melody the river had been waiting for all along.

It’s always a relief to pass out of the sun into the shade at the beginning of the Heritage Trail, running along the railroad tracks. I recently discovered the dirt path that runs parallel to the sidewalk, closer to the river. Passing down onto this trail is like a delightful gift I give to myself in the morning. The street and the sidewalk disappear. The river peaks out from between the trees like a shy but friendly animal. The loudest sound is a bird moving through the trees. I look down at the water and think of flatboats. Bears and bison. Women on horseback or women on bare feet. Indians and settlers and the timeless passage of humans moving along in the shadows. I wrap up our moment–the river and I–and take it with me.

When I head back, the fog is gone. There’s a light breeze rippling across the water. The river is already someone different. It has moved on because this is what it does. It moves on and moves on. Right before I turn back up towards home, I see a great blue heron standing in the shallows. He’s not fishing, but preening. Carefully arranging his feathers and keeping an eye on a vulture down the bank. A fish breaks the surface of the water.

Far away, there’s the echo of other things happening. The rumble of a truck on the bridge. The sound of someone’s television I’ll hear through a screen door. Circuses so fantastic it’s hard to believe they’re real. Maybe they are. Maybe they’re not. But the river’s real, too, and the sound of the fiddle. I didn’t imagine that.

 

The Great Macaron Experiment: Prologue

So there’s life before you’ve tasted a macaron and life after you’ve tasted a macaron. I discovered this last November in Savannah, which seems an entirely appropriate place to cross the great macaron divide. I had heard talk of macarons, mostly from folks in big cities like New York and mostly on Twitter. I was confused by macarons. Why was everyone so excited and why were they spelling it wrong?

Macaroons–these look much better than they actually taste, in my opinion

Where I come from, it’s always been a macaroon. A macaroon is made mostly of coconut, it looks like those little white balls over there, and, I’m sorry to say, there’s really nothing exciting about it. In fact, if you’ve tasted a coconut macaroon, you can understand why I was so very confused by all the ecstatic macaron exchanges.

But like the good Twitter-lurker I am, I studied the feeds and deduced that this had to be something different than a coconut macaroon. It was also something that I was unlikely to ever encounter in southern Indiana. But as the Vikings would say (or maybe not, but according The History Channel version, which my husband and I have been binge-watching for the past month or so, totally what they would say), my fate was written. Our hotel in Savannah was less than a block away from a macaron store. A whole store, my friends, devoted to macarons. “Hey, let’s go in there,” I said to my husband. And my life forever changed.

What can I say about macarons? I’m not particularly a sweets person. I like fruit. I love fruit. Cake, cupcakes, cookies–meh. I can take ’em or leave ’em. Macarons are in a whole other category. They transcend all categories.

You know you want to eat all of these, RIGHT NOW!!!

First, they are beautiful. Bright and neat and perfect. Look at them, people! They look like candy, and I am something of a candy person. They’re like giant Sweet-tarts all perfectly arranged. Or Easter eggs. They are like your bedspread when you were a little girl or the color of all your favorite childhood toys. Heaven looks like this. Be honest, even if they tasted like crap at this point, you’d probably still want one.

BUT, they DON’T taste like crap!!! They are all light and fluffy dancing in your mouth. Not like an Oreo, where really you want to ditch the cookie part to get right to the filling. Not like a Twinkie, where really you want to ditch the cake part to get to the filling. Not like everything you want to ditch to just get to the damn filling. No, the cookie part is like eating air. You will sigh and moan and close your eyes. You will tell yourself, I have just eaten a cloud. Clearly, I am now an angle.

And then there will be the filling with fruity stuff or buttery stuff, or really, who knows what the stuff is, but it’s so good, too. You will have crossed that great macaron divide. You will want more and more. You will buy some extras to take home to your daughter, but you will steal into the bag and eat them for yourself on the plane ride home because THESE ARE MACARONS THEY ARE ALL FOR ME!

There are no places to buy macarons in southern Indiana. The nearest macaron is an HOUR away! But as my friend points out, the nice thing about living in a place with no macarons…or artisan bread…or cheese…etc….is that it creates the incentive to make it yourself. So begins the Great Macaron Adventure.

There is a video. A recipe. Equipment is winging its way to our house even as we speak. Making macarons, my friend, is no laughing matter. I don’t own icing tips or gel food coloring or almond flour. I’ve never even successfully made a meringue. For me, this is like scaling Mt. Everest. But if there were macarons at the top of Mt. Everest, I’d go all Sherpa on that in a heartbeat. Stay tuned. I here there’s a macaron store opening in Louisville this summer, but I’ve already waited too long for my next fix.

There will be macarons.

Things I love: my desk

Sometimes the world seems like an eternal crap-storm and there’s absolutely nothing we can do to make it better. Sometimes the days stretch out empty and you have no idea how to fill them. Sometimes you can glimpse happiness around the corner, like it’s playing hide and seek with you, but happiness is one of those annoying little kids who will stay in her hiding place all day and then afterward, never tell you where it is.

Sometimes it’s good to just focus really hard on the things you love. It’s okay to start small.

I love the tree outside our bedroom window. Our neighbors planted it just four or five years ago now. I don’t know what kind of tree it is, but it grew fast. When I look out my window in the summer, I see it there–green against blue. When the wind blows, it dances. It’s a flowing and flexible tree. Sometimes I feel like it’s trying to tell me something.

I love the little hematite rock that sits on my desk. It feels smooth in my hand and reflects the world back at me like a miniature version of the bean sculpture in Chicago. It was given to me by a friend at a yoga and writing retreat to absorb all the sadness that’s generated sometimes when you’re writing. It’s my sadness sponge.

I love the mug I bought at Ditto’s, a store in downtown Madison. It is a small and beautiful thing. As much as possible surround yourself with beautiful things.

I love the piece of wood a writer friend sent me. It smells delicious–clean and deep. The scent doesn’t fade.

I love the bright blue lamp that came from my grandmother’s house and her desk that it sits on. The desk sat in a corner of the hallway with one of those big calendar blotters on top and the phone. The drawer on the bottom left side is worn and I wonder why. What did my grandmother keep there? She didn’t spend much time sitting at this desk because that wasn’t the kind of life she had. But in her house, the desk and its corner felt like a cool and secret place. Once, I could fit myself into the space underneath and hide.