Alison McGhee's Blog, page 42

Poem of the Week, by Mary Szybist

Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle

- Mary Szybist

Are you sure this blue is the same as the

blue over there? This wall's like the

bottom of a pool, its

color I mean. I need a

darker two-piece this summer, the kind with

elastic at the waist so it actually

fits. I can't

find her hands. Where does this gold

go? It's like the angel's giving

her a little piece of honeycomb to eat.

I don't see why God doesn't

just come down and

kiss her himself. This is the red of that

lipstick we saw at the

mall. This piece of her

neck could fit into the light part

of the sky. I think this is a

piece of water. What kind of

queen? You mean

right here? And are we supposed to believe

she can suddenly

talk angel? Who thought this stuff

up? I wish I had a

velvet bikini. That flower's the color of the

veins in my grandmother's hands. I

wish we could

walk into that garden and pick an

X-ray to float on.

Yeah. I do too. I'd say a

zillion yeses to anyone for that.


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For more information on Mary Szybist, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/mary-szybist

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Add your name to the hat!

Greetings, friends, neighbors and farflung fellow citizens of this enormous world,

I'm giving away three copies of my just-about-to-be-published picture book, "Making a Friend." Yes, it's that pretty blue snowman book right over there. Written by me, illustrated by the wondrous Marc Rosenthal.

In order to have your name added to the hat, first click "Like" on my Facebook author page 

- and then add your name to the comments list underneath the "Making a Friend" post.

If you're already a member of the author page, just add your name to the post.

Spread the word to your friends! Everyone who clicks "like" and then posts her/his name to the comments list will be added to the hat. The drawing will be held this Sunday night, October 2, and I'll ship the books out next week.

 

Poem of the Week (excerpt), by Albert Goldbarth

Liquid (excerpt from)

- Albert Goldbarth

"All told, the moon's water—locked away in rocks

under the surface—equals "about two and a half times

the volume of the great lakes."

                         —The Week, July 2-9, 2010

What other things, what other conditions, are locked away

improbably in rock—in an inhuman hardness?

Moses … doesn't the story go he smote

a rock in the wilderness with his staff and, lo,

therefrom the waters poured? And Mrs. Sommerson,

the Great Stone Face my mother called her,

regent of the Eighth-Grade Algebra Kingdom, she

who pity's violin strings couldn't move a quarter inch

from her unyielding scowl and decimal-pointed grade book …

when one evening I was late in leaving,

and quietly making my passage

down those eerily untenanted halls, I saw

her home room door was opened just enough to show her

at her desk, in tears, her head held in her hands

with such an autonomous weight, she cradled it

as if trying to rock into comfort a terrorized infant.


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For more information about Albert Goldbarth, please click here: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1295

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". . . and I heard my name as if for the first time. . ."

Unlike your sisters Oatie and Robert John, you had no nickname growing up. People, including your family, called you Alison.

You can remember your father, the bestower of nicknames, studying you one day and then trying out the nickname "Champ." That lasted for about a day, whereas Oatie and Robert John still answer to their nicknames.

It seemed as if, from the get-go, you were not the nickname type. Which was all right, because you always liked your name. Alison. You still do. You like its one-l-instead of two-l-ness, its three-syllableness. You used to write it over and over in notebooks, in loopy middle-school script, when you got bored in class.

You drew the line at dotting the i with a heart, star or flower, though. (Is that evidence of a Puritanical streak? Did the Puritans dislike nicknames?)

Your nicknameless childhood passed and you went off to college, up there in the mountains, and life expanded in all directions. You met your best friend the day you arrived. Within days she was calling you Allie. That was your first real nickname. She is still your best friend, and she still calls you Allie. Sometimes she says "Alison" in a certain tone of voice if she needs you to listen up, and you listen up. You have nicknames for her too: El, or EBHBSP.

Some people find it almost impossible to call a person by their given name, their proper, legal name. This sort of person bestows nicknames instantly and without thinking. You work with such a person at the university where you teach in the fall. She is one of the reasons why you love teaching there.

"Hey, Allie," she said the second time she ever saw you, her brown eyes full of fun. "You don't mind if I call you Allie, do you?"

Nope. You didn't. And don't, as long as she and your best friend and your sister Oatie are the ones calling you Allie.

She has nicknames for all your other friends there at the university too. Some she calls only by their last names, others by shortened first names, and still others by nicknames which last only a day, or an hour. She's a Jersey girl; talk and laughter come easily to her. Maybe that makes a nicknaming difference.

To this day, almost everyone calls you by your full first name. Because you're not a Jersey girl? Because you give off a don't-mess-with-my-name vibe? Because you never dotted the i in Alison with a heart or star or flower?

There is one nickname, though, that a very few people who know you very well use around you. This nickname seems to arise in each of them spontaneously, and each, over the years, began using it without asking first –"hey, do you mind if I call you _______?"– or even seeming to think about it.

This nickname crosses many years and much geography and is confined, again, to a very few.

When others who don't know you well use this nickname, having heard those others use it, your entire body tenses. No. You have no right. Outwardly, you might smile politely, but inwardly, you bristle and fling up walls against the invasion.

From the original users, though, the ones who spontaneously arose with the nickname, it sounds exactly right. They don't ask if they can use it, you barely notice (but you do notice) when they first do, and something inside you shifts.

There must be something more to nicknames than you consciously know. There is so much in a name, after all; the same must be true or truer for a nickname.

The truth is that everyone who begins to call you by this nickname is someone you adore, someone who loves you back. This nickname is a name you didn't choose and wouldn't, in any other circumstance, like. But here? It means that you have been seen. You are known. You can let down your guard.

Sometimes it seems as if, on some level, you walk through life waiting to hear this name.

Poem of the Week, by Miller Williams

A Poem for Emily

- Miller Williams

Small fact and fingers and farthest one from me,

a hand's width and two generations away,

in this still present I am fifty-three.

You are not yet a full day.

When I am sixty-three, when you are ten,

and you are neither closer nor as far,

your arms will fill with what you know by then,

the arithmetic and love we do and are.

When I by blood and luck am eighty-six

and you are someplace else and thirty-three

believing in sex and God and politics

with children who look not at all like me,

sometime I know you will have read them this

so they will know I love them and say so

and love their mother. Child, whatever is

is always or never was. Long ago

a day I watched awhile beside your bed,

I wrote this down, a thing that might be kept

awhile, to tell you what I would have said

when you were who knows what and I was dead

which is I stood and loved you while you slept.


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For more information on Miller Williams, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/miller-williams

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Poem of the Week, by James Wright

Autumn Begins in Martin's Ferry, Ohio

- James Wright



In the Shreve High football stadium,

I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,

And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,

And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,

Dreaming of heroes.   



All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.

Their women cluck like starved pullets,

Dying for love.



Therefore,

Their sons grow suicidally beautiful

At the beginning of October,

And gallop terribly against each others' bodies.



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For more information on James Wright, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/james-wright

Poem of the Week, by Rosanna Warren

From New Hampshire

- Rosanna Warren

It's not your mountain

but I almost expect

to meet you here

I think you have taken a long late evening walk

Your heavy shoes glisten with dew

I hear your footsteps pause on the dirt road

and I know you are picking out

the dark mass of the sleeping

mountain from the dark

mass of night and testing the heaviness of each

Your hands are small but they know weights and measures

You are a connoisseur of boundaries

You loved the bears

because they pass between

leaving their stories

in fat pudding turds on the grass

Here it's raspberries they're after not our

sour Vermont apples     No matter     You will find them

When they hoot in courtship

you always hoot back

more owl than bear

They don't mind     They always answer you

And tonight I imagine you're out waiting up for them

by the berries, which is why you don't cross

the dew-sopped lawn

don't press open the

warped screen door

of the kitchen where I sit late     by a single glowing bulb

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For more information on Rosanna Warren, please click here:

Why you love Mississauga, Ontario, and by extension, all of Canada and everyone who lives there

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This was a few years ago, and you and your companion were on a road trip from Minneapolis to Vermont by way of Canada. Yes, that's right, by way of Canada. Back roads. Chip stands. Poutine. Canadians with that beautiful "eh" on the end of their questions.

This was in the time of the medium-size white car, the one that you bought used, the one that always gave you problems. Then again, all your cars give you problems. Mayhap you're the problem?

At any rate, you and your companion had made it to the outskirts of Mississauga, Ontario, where you stopped at a Tim Horton's (Canada's equally ubiquitous but oh-so-much-better alternative to McDonald's) to purchase a couple of Always Fresh sandwiches. Ham and swiss, as you recall.

You and your companion and the dog were sitting on the curb by the Tim Horton's, enjoying the Always Fresh sandwiches, when you noticed that your front passenger tire was bulging. Seriously bulging. A big bump, as if it were a pregnant tire.

A bulging tire. BULGING. This was terrible, right?

Knowing little about the white car other than that a) it was white, b) it had four doors, c) it was problematic, and d) that it was paid off (paid off! paid off! beautiful phrase), this was the sequence of thoughts that ran through your mind: Bulging tire = bulging can of corn = botulism/explosion = certain death.

The tire must be changed immediately. That was clear. You and your companion unloaded all the road-trip contents of the trunk. You retrieved the flimsy-looking little spare tire, the jack, the lug wrench. Your companion, a brawny big-muscled man who had changed many a tire in his day, could not remove the lug nuts. (Lug wrench, lug nuts, what great words those are.)

You, being an idiot, can't remember what the exact problem was. Was the lug wrench not the right size? Something like that. A Canadian emerged from the Tim Horton's and saw you and your companion stymied.

"Tire problem, eh?"

Tire problem.

The Canadian, as it happened, was a tire salesman! He retrieved his own lug wrench and gave it a go. Nothing. Whatever the lug problem was, it was severe.

"Do you think it's okay to drive the car to a repair shop?" you asked the Canadian.

He shook his head sadly.

"I wouldn't drive it more than two miles," he said. "You'd be risking your lives."

Confirmation from a tire man himself: Bulging tire = certain death. What were you going to do?

It was at that point that a brown station wagon pulled up.

"Tire problem, eh?" said the driver, a Canadian man with a smiling Canadian wife next to him and three obviously tired Canadian children in the back seat.

You pointed to the sinister tire. The jack, the faulty lug wrenches, the spare tire, the duffels and backpacks and various road trip detritus were strewn around the car. The tire man and your companion explained the situation.

"Stay right here!" said the driver of the brown station wagon. "I've got a friend with the right tools. He's about thirty minutes away. I'll go get him and we'll be back."

Thirty minutes away? An hour round trip? The obviously tired children, the patient and smiling wife, the driver telling you just to stay put?

You were strangers to these people. Strangers from a strange land, trying to get away from the hellish traffic of your own country, sitting on the curb at a Tim Horton's eating a couple of Always Fresh sandwiches. You protested. No, it was too far. No, you would figure something out. Please.

He waved you away. The brown station wagon took off. You and your companion and the dog sat beside the white car, the bulging tire, the detritus. It was getting late. No shops would be open, and you couldn't get to one anyway. You saw your future: a tow truck. A cab. A motel. The weekend spent waiting for a repair shop to open on Monday. Days lost.

An hour later, the Canadian in the brown station wagon was back, minus the wife, minus the tired children, plus a friend with lots of tools. Out they leapt. You stood holding the leash of the dog while the two of them and your companion set to work.

Filthy hands. Smudged clothes. Various attempts with various tools. Much chatter and laughter. Half an hour later, the spare was on.

"All set now, eh?"

You tried to give the Canadian and his friend some money. They laughed and waved it off. You thanked them. They laughed. They jumped in the brown station wagon and drove off.

Two hours of time. Sixty or seventy miles round trip, with gas at $4/gallon. The tired children, the patient wife. All for strangers from a strange land, stuck at a Tim Horton's with a problematic white car.

This is why you love that Canadian tire man, the Canadian driver of the brown station wagon and his Canadian wife, his Canadian children and his Canadian friend, Canadian Tim Hortons, Canadian lug wrenches, Mississauga, Ontario, and by extension, all of Canada and everyone who lives there.

 

Poem of the Week, by Alison McGhee

BARGAIN

The newspaper reports that at twilight tonight

Venus and Jupiter will conjoin

in the southwestern sky,

a fist and a half above the horizon.

They won't come together again for seventeen years.

What the article does not say is that Mercury, the

dark planet, will also be on hand.

He'll hover low, nearly invisible in a darkened sky.

I stare out the kitchen window toward the sunset.

Seventeen years from now, where

will I be?

Mercury, Roman god of commerce and luck,

let me propose a trade:

Auburn hair, muscles that don't ache, and a seven-minute mile.

Here's what I'll give you in return:

My recipe for Brazilian seafood stew, a talent for

French-braiding, an excellent sense of smell and

the memory of having once kissed Sam W.

Then I see my girl across the room.

She stands on a stool at the sink,

washing her toy dishes and

swaying to a whispered song,

her dark curls a nimbus in the lamplight.

The planets are coming together now.

Minute by minute the time draws nigh for me to watch.

Minute by minute my child wipes dry her red

plastic knife, her miniature blue bowls.

Mercury, here's another offer, a real one:

Let her be.

You can have it all in return,

the salty stew, the braids, the excellent sense of smell

and the softness of Sam's mouth on mine.

And my life. That too.

All of it I give for this child, that seventeen years hence

she will stand in a distant kitchen, washing dishes

I cannot see, humming a tune I cannot hear.

 

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Cut doors and windows for a room

Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub; it is the center hole that makes it useful. Shape clay into a vessel; It is the space within that makes it useful. Cut doors and windows for a room; it is the holes that make it useful. Therefore profit comes from what it is there; usefulness from what is not there. – Lao-Tse

She asks can you possibly fold her laundry while she's gone, she won't be back for a couple of days and there are at least twenty loads that need to be done before she leaves for college.

Yes, you say.

But will you do a good job? she says. Will you take them out of the dryer and fold them right away?

You promise that you will.

Because I'm very fussy about my laundry, she says.

"Usefulness comes from what is not there."

You stand at the laundry folding table, installed at a you-size height, meaning that you don't have to hunch over to sort and fold. You think about this usefulness quote. It makes sense when you think about vessels, and windows, and spokes on a wheel.

It must apply here, too, but how?

Flick. On goes NPR on the giant black boombox that no longer plays cd's or tapes. It's a radio-only giant black boombox. A man with a deep, mellifluous voice is on, murmuring on about a made-up place that may have been patterned after a once-real town in this big state in which you live, but which no longer has any resemblance to the original.

That way of life is long gone. Flick. Off you go, man with the mellifluous voice, into a pretend church basement of which you seem to be fond.

You leave the laundry room and its machines, obediently doing that which they were designed to do.

"Usefulness comes from what is not there."

For the next few hours you zip up and downstairs to switch the loads from washer to dryer to folding table. You fold immediately, just as you promised her you would. There's a pile of jeans and sweatpants and shorts, a pile of t-shirts and shirts, a pile of sweatshirts, a pile of underwear and socks. There's a pile of sheets and blankets.

In her absence, you hold up each shirt and give it a shake before folding. You smooth out the jeans before folding them. The dresses you hang on hangers. Wow, this girl has a lot of scarves. She must have inherited that from you. Here is the lavender one you have been missing lo these many months. You smooth it, fold it, debate: do you put it in her pile or do you whisk it away to your own closet? Who does it really belong to now, you or her?

There's some kind of lesson to be learned here, in the folding of all this laundry just days before their inhabitant departs. A thousand miles away she will unpack these piles into a bureau and closet you haven't seen.

A sundress, wisp of yellow cotton against a blue wall, sways on a hanger. Piles and piles of neatly folded clothes are stacked on the folding table.  What is not here is the girl whose body gives these clothes form and shape. Lao-tse is never wrong, so surely her absence to you, or yours to her, must somehow be useful. You will think on this for a while.