At First Blush

Twin poems born many years apart fell from my archives last week, landed at my feet, and stared blankly back at me expecting resolution.

Lyric Postmodernisms on Sunday, September 4, 2011 at 9:50am

i made coffee nervous
(electric quick-sharp sour stomach explosive aches behind my eyes),
Tongue-tied,
Skinned-alive.
 
I know:
I’ll argue with 
you in my head,
then abandon 
it midstreamofconsciousness.
 
Breathing, 
slowly,
I sit outside (in)
On a trunk (out)
We found (in)
In your garage (out)
And stare (in)
At the Park (out)
And listen (in):
the wind in 
the trees in 
the chimes in.

Dark-lensed duck-
ling following along.
“Do you need help?”
Yes, I
sd. I’m al-
ways wrong.

Between dump runs and our Goodwill, 
We listen.
I hear Anitha came as dirt and came as its price 
Drifting through social network loops loops loops
now abandoned for Xanax to 
balance you 
out,
And you laugh and say 
Oh yeah,
I remember. 
Do you?
 
Again: words, freefloating freeway words.
MONEY CAN'T BUY HAPPINESS, BUT A BANK CAN HELP
Help what I ask you and you say your money 
duh 
and we wince off our recession’s cage is a cage is a cage. 
 
Across the Valley Kiln we tour
The Outer Kingdoms of California:
Buttonwillow, King City, Kingsburg,
On a king’s ransom.
In The Swedish Horse of Places I've 
Never Been But Seen
I get aphasic, 
lose word 
meaning 
they
drib-
ble ou nd 
spl 
witha 
thd.
 
Over calmer coffee 
I tell you all my hopelessness
and you sigh me Yeah with a half-smile
that sugars your sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea,
Susie Asado.
"Before we were bitter / Before we let our sadness litter the streets."

And I've lost count of dump runs
(all we own will end up 
there us, too, we two).
And I can't tell you
How much gas we've pumped or
How many times I've seen
The tailgate amputate my thumbs
As punishment for living this American life.




Baggage

a torn-up post-it told me
from the rotten garage floor 
If you’re going 
through hell, 
keep going.
H kept

asking,
“Do you want this packed?”
instigating an indecision crisis.
“Yeah? Maybe?
Maybe? I dunno.”
To be trapped in that non-space
of non-deciding both / and
Is this going or staying?
Yes.

Do you use this?
No, what is it?
I don’t know; toss it.
No! It’s very expensive!
But you don’t even know what it is!
Well I USED to use it before he died!



silence, but 


the TVs keep screaming
someone’s won something. 
The hired hand packing 
all your shit snickered,
     caught himself,
          and just kept packing.

See, you keep saying ‘hoarder’.
She’s a collector.

Honest,
I can’t make this up.

Your ghost greets me
in each room.
We pause together,
admiring the detritus 
your girls left behind.
Half-smashed smiles look up from
Sharpie drawings like petroglyphs
some child clawed into the wall. 
PAYton in dull black lines.
Your girls made them
at age 3
at age 5
at what age do you know better?
We never painted over them.
We never cleaned up carpet stains
from all your Coca Coca Cola.
We never made that wall white again 
after you sleep-wedged yourself against it
leaving dead parts of you like a snake shedding her skin.
We never stopped bottles of shoyu from leaking,
so they left us shapes to guess at
like cloud-gazing in an oil spill.

Every day of living here 
is still living here
on every surface.
How does one dust 
the mess of life 
off of things?
I mean:
How does one dust
the mess of things
off of life?

So she can’t conceive 
of not accumulating 
like a cancer
her birth sign
stars aligned
for eating eating eating
bone-shelled, foam-mouthed
eating without revealing
that soft white salt
tissue trapped within.

a dozen almost-empty bottles—save ‘em, it’s as expensive as a child-sized guitar—the good one, don’t toss it, we can use a shard of turquoise—my uncle had a turquoise mine in Arizona once, he was a very educated man, we still own the land, my sister’s not sure what to do with a commemorative coin from the Sydney 2000 Olympics—oh, I remember that, lemme see the take-away menu for Pizza Hut in Swedish—Huh. That’s funny. Lemme see.



This is the price of belonging to you 
as we keep going through stuff.

Teachers atop some unremembered mountain outside of Busan.

---

“Lyric Postmodernisms” was among the first poems I ever wrote as an adult. I have an uneasy relationship to it. And, truth be told, in both of these pieces is a tinge of self-cringe that permeates. But I’m trying to listen to Didion and keep on nodding with myself:

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. (from “On Keeping a Notebook” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968)

In both of these poems, I can see someone playing with words and sounds and devices and feelings and imagery and meaning. Playing is the thing here: this is the practice session. These are the exercises the painter undertakes not to create beauty but to study How Things Work, and maybe some glimmers of beauty will be revealed. This is me playing in my sandbox with language trying to save myself.

In 2011, I was 24 and had just moved back to the US from Korea where I had been teaching. In one version of the truth, everything fell apart when that was over. In the free-fall, the only thing I could grasp (and not immediately) was language. Building an understanding of the complexities I was experiencing and what I was trying to have thoughts about could only happen with words. It could only have happened because I kept trying to find the right ones and put them in the right order¹. Sometimes the poems from this period were about anything: the violent movement of traffic, the endless consumption of America, and the distance between what I wanted and what I had. All very sordid, confessional juvenilia (which should not suggest, dear Reader, that I am somehow beyond the sordid and the confessional in these days of my adumbrative wisdom).