—a found poem: Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
I feel the bruised cry of birds in my body
when I wake.
Thinness rushes my pink imperfect heart
and I am cast down at another day—
hands and feet and body.
Here is idleness, brown water, disgrace.
The sun is yellow and laughing
leaves stir and patter across the lawn
and I long for darkness and sleep—
its brass thud, its pirouetting slam.
I lie here and watch the bedroom
harden into night.
There are so many ways to describe
the fact that we die and are reborn
countless times: the New Year’s resolution list,
the myth of a phoenix rising from ashes,
the box of hair dye and the scissors, the poets:
dying is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
But no one ever talks about the ghosts.
The dead ones that that turn your bones
into a creaky, old haunted mansion.
And no one talks about how frequently girls die
in a lifetime. Girl after girl after girl after girl.
Some of them are mischievous and hopeful,
frolicking in your ribcage like a child who thinks
everything will turn out all right.
Yet some of them are screaming.
And when you hear the way she cried out,
again, it keeps you up at night. You don’t know
how to escape her, banish her,
remove her like a threatening mass. But some of them
you encounter in the night like lost strangers.
That girl that walked the pier barefoot
in a fluorescent bikini with other girls,
that girl who hated herself so much
she had no understanding of the power
of her body. But the water’s rhythm, hungrily
tonguing the sand, spoke its subliminal language:
the eros that promised it would erupt in waves
within her body underneath a boy’s body. So that
when the boys came along, sunned and shirtless
in their glistening madness, and told the girls
to jump off the ledge, chanting, do it, just do it,
don’t think about it, and the idea of drowning
passed briefly overhead like the shadow of a seagull,
she leapt in. And the boys laughed, caught it all on film.
And you know she made it to the surface again,
gasping life more forcefully than ever,
and the water droplets on her body
were proof of her glittering courage,
toweled off a beat too slowly by the boys,
and you know it was fine—it was, yes, it was fine—
she survived, she giggled, she gave the boys her number,
so who then is this young girl that just coughed
salted sand onto your poem with seaweed in her hair?
“Two people who know they do not understand each other, breeding children whom they do not understand and who will never understand them.” —T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party
My parents met in a nightclub on Catalina Island. My mother was 28, my father 26. My father was on the island with a group of friends, childhood buddies from Ohio who had all moved to southern California together after WWII. My mother, born and raised in Los Angeles, was visiting with her best friend. The story goes that my dad begged her to dance. Later, when my mother refused to go back to his hotel with him, he called her a prude. She vowed that anyone who called her a prude would have to marry her, and six months later, that’s exactly what happened. Growing up, I never understood what one thing had to do with the other, and when I asked, they simply answered “Cocktails.”
—
It’s widely accepted that the creator of cocktail parties is Mrs. Julius Walsh of St. Louis, Missouri. In May 1917, The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that Mrs. Walsh invited fifty guests to her house on a Sunday at high noon for a one-hour gathering. The event was an instant hit, and within weeks cocktail parties became a St. Louis institution. The first known cocktail party in England was held seven years later, in 1924. In T.S. Eliot’s dark comic play, The Cocktail Party, a wife leaves her husband just as they are about to host a cocktail party in their London home. The husband must devise an explanation for her absence to keep up with social appearances. The wife returns with a mysterious guest, a psychologist who counsels the couple individually. As the play progresses, husband and wife come to realize the ways they have been deceiving themselves. Two years later, and better adjusted, they host another cocktail party.
—
Things I hated growing up: My parents’ fights. Rain. The letdown after Christmas. Cocktail parties.
—
By 1960, my parents had traded the San Fernando Valley for the small town of Thousand Oaks, a place where everybody knew everybody. Our house sat on a small street with one house next door and three across the street. One end poured into a winding avenue with rounded cul-de-sacs full of one- and two-story houses with bikes and dolls and skateboards littering their yards. The other end opened to a main road with a round hills beyond it.
These were the years punctuated by my parents’ fights. Although I knew from the sitcoms we watched on television that this was not considered the normal behavior of a married couple, it was all I knew from my mother and father. After the move to Thousand Oaks, my dad had close to an hour drive to and from Los Angeles every day for work, and when he was late, it was easy to blame the traffic. My mother suspected otherwise. She resorted to all the stereotypical tricks of jealous women: scouring through his jacket pockets, demanding to know what happened to his missing cufflink, why it took him three goddamn hours to get home.
“And don’t tell me traffic. Your secretary said you haven’t been in the office all afternoon. Where were you? Who is she? I can smell her sleazy perfume all over you, you sonofabitch.”
My dad ignored her as best he could. Because of his easygoing nature, it seemed to the three of us kids that she was the one always picking a fight. Their arguments grew worse before a holiday, birthday party, or vacation, when it seemed like my mother held on to any insecurities or suspicions for as long as she could, erupting into a tirade threatening to disrupt even the most rock-solid plans. More than once my mother blamed my dad as she called off our plans. We’d go to bed, anxious and disappointed, only to be roused early in the morning with instructions to “Get up. Get dressed. We’re going.”
The morning of my tenth birthday party, after a particularly horrible argument broke out, my mother accusing my dad of yet another affair, she threw her hands in the air and said, “That’s it! Call your friends and tell them you’re not having a party because your father can’t keep it in his pants!”
My dad, trying his best to console me through my tears as well as reason with my mother, fought back. “Leave her and the kids out of it. Look what you’re doing!”
“You’re doing this! I’m not doing a thing!”
I had made most of the phone calls, claiming a sudden stomachache, when my mother, subdued and placated, told me to call my friends back. I was going to have my party, after all.
—
The cocktail parties began around the time I was in the third grade and ended by the time I finished sixth. My mother chose early January for their annual shindig, allowing for the Christmas rush to abate but for the tree and decorations to remain in full display.
My parents’ loud arguments intensified right before a cocktail party, tapering off just long enough to get through the night, only to resurface again the next day. My mother yelled at my dad for the attention he gave or that was given to him by their female guests. “I saw the way you looked at that hussy!” or “Joanna was hanging all over you!”
My dad’s friends were another source of aggravation. A tight-knit group, they were party regulars. My mother couldn’t stand them. An extrovert, my father became louder and sillier among his friends, their talk always revolving around wild teenage shenanigans, like when my dad was eighteen and followed an older married woman from Ohio to Texas, or the foray into a whorehouse at fifteen. There were so many of them, stories as well as friends. Jim, a dark-haired painter, and his wife Millie, a brassy blonde with a wide smile. Cat and Fat, twins with their respective spouses. Louie, a loud Italian with a big heart, accompanied by his current lady of the season. Bill with the ready laugh was on his second marriage to Carolyn, a younger, pretty brunette with aspirations of becoming a pilot. My mother liked Carolyn, and I did, too. She and Bill had no children together and would divorce before having any of their own, but not before Carolyn learned to fly.
Our neighbors came too, couples whose wives my mother met through work and parents of friends of mine and my siblings. This last group never ceased to amaze me, the eagerness with which they reached for their drinks, their voices rising with each glass. My best friend Lauren’s mother—glum Mrs. Stenson, who barely said a word when I was at their house—became radiant after a glass or two. Henry and Deidre Hand lived directly across the street. Henry was British with bad teeth, Deidre a feisty Irish redhead. She had a reputation in the neighborhood for watering her front yard wearing a one-piece bathing suit, bending over low to the ground as she maneuvered the hose over every crack in the driveway.
My parents paraded my brother and sister and me around to prove or disprove claims of inches grown or braces that worked wonders. I felt like the holiday lights or the rosebud-trimmed china: something brought out once a year. We always wore the new flannel pajamas we received at Christmas, Bobby in something boyish and blue, Kathy and I in pink and green flowers.
“Oh, aren’t you just the spitting image of your mother,” I heard over and over as I glanced at my mother, refusing to see any resemblance at all. My dad put his hands on my brother’s shoulders, steering him into the thick of his childhood buddies, where he was greeted by elbow nudges and “Hey, Bobbo!” Kathy worked the crowd with an innate flair, her long golden ponytail bouncing up and down. When the show was over, it was off to bed with orders to keep doors shut and no getting up for water. Shy and introverted, I welcomed our bedroom banishment. My stomach twisted with each ring of the doorbell, flip-flopped as I witnessed my parents shapeshift into characters I didn’t recognize. My outgoing dad upped his enthusiasm, greeted everyone exuberantly, entertained with dancing and jokes, and made sure everyone had a fresh drink in hand. My mother, naturally quieter, with just a few friends she considered close and always critical of everyone and everything, revamped into a chirpy, playful hostess: “Oh Bill, no one tells that story like you do” and “Louie, your spaghetti sauce is divine. I must have the recipe. Don’t go holding out on me now.”
It was impossible to reconcile these two revelers with my parents.
—
Once my sister and I had retreated into our room, I lay awake worried that someone would open the door by accident, thinking it was the bathroom. I worried that someone might stray where they didn’t belong.
It happened once. I was nine, ten, eleven; I don’t quite remember. After a few whispered minutes, my sister fell asleep, leaving me to listen to the muted sounds of the party slip under our closed bedroom door.
I heard the doorknob turn before I noticed its slow circular motion. A man, my dad, stood in the doorway, checking in on me and my sister. I sat up in bed, happy to see him.
“Daddy!”
Only he wasn’t my dad. My bedroom was dark. The only light came in from the hallway, dim from the lamps lit in the living room. His features were shadowed, the light at his back, becoming clearer as he stumbled into my room.
Things I noticed: The clock showing 11:20. Frank and Nancy Sinatra’s “Something Stupid” playing on the stereo. A woman’s raucous laughter from the living room, followed by male bellowing. My fear. Henry Hand approaching.
The overbearing smell of alcohol clung to him like a stale second skin. I glanced at my sister, asleep in her bed, hoping he wouldn’t see her.
I lay back in bed, clutching the blankets closer.
“Hullo. Still awake are you?” He walked farther into my room and softly laughed. “Oh, you thought I was your daddy?”
I may have nodded, may have said yes. I wanted to yell, wanted to call for my parents, wanted to tell him my dad would be right back, wanted my dad to be right back, wanted to be anything but a terrified girl.
He peered over the side of my bed. The smell of alcohol was sticky, clung to his speech, slurring his accent. “Do you like me? Are you afraid of me?”
I might have said yes. I might have stayed silent.
He sat down on the edge of my bed.
“Of course you like me. There’s nothing to be scared of, love.” He traced his fingers along my arm. “I like you, too.”
I shut my eyes as I began to feel outside of my body. I pulled the blankets over my head, scooting away from him as I felt his weight lean over the bed. He might have squeezed my leg before getting up from my bed, or he might have grazed his hand over my body, lingering toward my thighs before walking out, closing the door behind him.
The next morning I scanned the living room, noticing traces of the night before, from the half-empty glasses scattered across tables in the living room to the sleep deprivation in my mother’s green eyes. As she complained of the mess, I told her that Henry Hand had come into my bedroom.
She hesitated before answering, and I noticed the briefest flicker of alarm rise in her eyes. “You must have had a bad dream.”
“No, I was still awake. I couldn’t sleep with all the noise.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that loud. I’m sure it was just a dream.”
“No, it wasn’t a dream. I would know if it was a dream. He came into my room and—”
“You don’t need to worry, lots of dreams seem real.”
—
A handful of black-and-white Polaroid photographs remain as evidence of my parents’ cocktail parties. The women are adorned in their cocktail dresses and Colgate smiles, the men more casual in their attire but every bit as dazzling in their charm. Hemlines were longer than hairstyles, as women favored the short, bouffant style trendy at the time, except Carolyn, who was the first of the group to wear a miniskirt, and she wore it proud.
In one shot, my dad, Jim and Millie, Bill and Carolyn, and an unidentified couple sit scattered on our cream-colored sofa. Maybe my mother took the picture, as she’s nowhere in the frame. Everyone is smiling, some looking at the camera, others looking at each other. In another picture, Millie turns to Carolyn, Carolyn’s head thrown back in laughter. My mother sits off to the side, in conversation with a woman I don’t recognize. In another, my dad sits in the middle of our small sofa, Louie and Fat flanking either side. My dad’s blue eyes are closed, his hands outstretched and his mouth open, as if in the middle of a song. I’m struck by how young he looks, how young they all look, much younger than in my memories of them. All of them younger than I am now. It’s easy to see how things could get past them.
In Oregon once, the acolytes in saffron
sweatshirts and idolatrous medallions
made a vow to grow roots and change
address, to elect the man with the sunset
sport coat to serve as mayor and recast
community codes, to pull a nail here,
an ordinance there, the streets signs
of their Christian neighbors taken down
to make way for the Sanskrit of their master.
At last, the real estate of consciousness
was growing. Less in communal rapture
and rage that climaxed in bewildered tears
than the watchful stillness that came after.
Surely there was nobility in this.
The lotus of their suffering flush, effulgent.
Somewhere a ribcage cools in a field,
stoned on love, that kind that lifts the fog
above its place on earth, but after that,
what? The new human, the archetype
their teacher promised, what they were hoping
to become, what they feared the locals
in hunting gear and office would destroy?
And can you blame them. Say a torch
broke the glass of your hotel in Portland
or a long sleeve poisoned the salad bars
of your town cafés. Who would not feel
some shadow of their partisan nature fall
into the arms of your frightened kind.
I have been that child, that prideful victim
of my own outrage. Call it the fitful
cleansing of a birthmark, the forever
failed extradition of histories of abuse.
Call it shell-shock; or war; or call it
what it is, salmonella and kerosene
and the scarlet seam of the unclean
lesion breaking, but do not call it new.
Puritans of permission raise their cries
as Christ does at the altar, disseminating
wine with a bitter summons to forgive.
Submission and refusal. How better
to survive the next ice age or spiritual
contagion: a thicker coat, warmer meal,
a feast day between tribes; how better to live
and let live than deep inside a system
of guards to wave friends and family through.
The body of the chosen is a body
after all, and so in need of water, harbor,
seasonal fire and the couriers of sleep.
It shrouds itself in skin, as Bibles do,
and great redwoods, and the new human
laid beneath their limbs, a child of heaven
awakened from a scare to find herself,
transfixed, in a crystal of estrangement,
christened in the amber of dusk and dawn.
The holier the stone the more like stone
the power and resolve that laid it, there,
in the heart of the contested common.
The last of the temple King Solomon built.
So say the faithful in their signature black
though doubtless they understand: to build
a wall is no king’s work, but that of servants
who will go nameless, and if another god
claims his prophet hitched here his horse
with wings, there is little to say to make
a god recant, revise, or otherwise move,
to abandon a place like that. The prayer
whispered or tucked into a hole in stone
might be, in installments, one long prayer,
incanted under the breath, and if it helps,
it helps, it mortars, mends, transmogrifies
the dullness of loss that makes a stone a stone,
a holy land a calf whose gold is blood.
*
Every comic dies now and then, but then,
if called, they rise, and folks remember best
the deeply wounded ones who made them
laugh like friends. I am thinking of you,
Greg Giraldo, who told Joan Rivers once,
You used to look your age, now you don’t
even look your species. And then her face—
wounded, tightened, paralyzed, stitched,
healed and babied with the finest lotions—
gave way, and I saw a little white light in
her teeth, a bit of joy, however nervously
touched, beyond the scalpel of this affront
or that desire to be young, I saw her death
in the arms of your addiction, the one
that took you too damn soon, to sit in heaven
and roast God, as your best friend put it,
as if nothing were sacred where everything is,
and each cold mask crumbles into laughter.
*
When I think of idols that have died,
I think of the toy my father saved from
his childhood, how it reddened his shelf.
Beside his picture with the governor,
a small truck with no one in it. It served
as proof of the boy I never met, never
understood. He had so little child
in him, let alone the sentimental kind.
You should always keep one reminder,
he said. I always did, always thought
he loved me better when I was small.
Look at me, said all the rusted places.
And when he left us, they said it again,
look, but what they revealed remained
an empty promise. But I could see it,
touch it. It had wheels. Hollow places.
When I think of death, I think of this.
And it flew into walls and drove right through.
Everything That Rises by Joseph Stroud
Copper Canyon Press, 2019
Paperback. 159 pages. $14.00
Stroud is remarkable, having both lyric and prose gifts, a reverence for nature, and a willingness to face up to hard truths. His craft allows him to write necessary poems with immediacy, yet maintain a certain distance in a plain, powerful voice. W. S. Merwin said, “The authority of Joseph Stroud’s poetry is startling . . . it is the recurring revelations that poetry brings to us, the crystal of our ordinary days. Stroud’s poetry comes from the clear source.”
Everything That Rises is an ambitious collection with seven sections, including masterful translations of Tu Fu, Catullus, Neruda, and others. Stroud moves back and forth between lyricism and his more classical distance with ease.
In “The Perfection of Craft,” Stroud gives us a sample of what he does best. The speaker takes us on the hunt with a great blue heron who “stalks among the reeds,” halting to snare his meal. The bird “stabs its beak, flings, into the air a roiling snake, and catches it / tosses it again, . . . / still alive, slithering down the heron’s throat.” He treats his meal as if it’s a game. While the imagery stands out, this poem is really about craft. Is the poet like the heron, and the poem is the snake? The ideas and point of view are complex, the images vivid—a signature Stroud six-liner.
His previous book, Of This World: New and Selected Poems, contained many brilliant poems like this one in the book’s opening section, “Suite For The Common.” And again, in this new collection, with “The Tarantula,” he takes us to a place “below Solomon Ridge,” where this arachnid “the size of my hand” rears up, “feels the air with its front legs / its body covered in silky hair.” The speaker kneels down, and it follows the shadow of his hand, “a little dance before pouncing on the twig I hold before it.” The Theraphosidae is curious, intelligent; then “its fangs click open,” and the speaker stands, takes a step back.
It watches, unmoving,
waiting inside its own arachnid time,
before continuing on,
touching the ground delicately
with each tip of its eight legs,
heading out into the Mojave,
A powerful nature poem, like D.H Lawrence’s snake poem, this tarantula, “walking like a hand,” seems like one of the lords of life, “disappearing into a world where we cannot go.”
Mortality is the undertone and undertow in this book. At the end of Stroud’s first section, we get “Remember This, Sappho Said,” where a nameless shade from the underworld tells the speaker, “remember that / among the living you were once offered love— / you, with your great pride and haughty disdain, / remember, love was once offered, and you refrained,” setting the tone for the scenes of death that follow.
In “Heart Attack in An Oregon Forest,” an anonymous “you” directs a sheriff by cell phone to a remote river where the speaker waits, hearing this stranger on the phone, “his voice calling your name, / asking directions from the dead.”
In “Homage to the Water Ouzel,” Stroud begins, “Times you get so down into pain . . .” but then the speaker thinks of the water ouzel, “into / this aching cold water the little bird plunges / and walks the bottom just trying to stay alive. Imagine that. Jesus Christ. Try to imagine that.” What’s striking is the speaker’s detachment at first, and then the immediacy.
This dark undertone continues in the next section of the book. In “The End of Romanticism,” Stroud gives us a college teacher’s talk to his students at the end of a course on Romanticism. In this powerful prose poem, the teacher talks about Charles Lamb, whom they have not studied, who took care of his mentally ill sister after she had to be confined in Bedlam, “a hospital worse than prison,” for stabbing their mother to death. Later released into Lamb’s care, she and Lamb wrote Tales from Shakespeare. When her illness recurred—and they had learned the signs— “they knew she had no defense.” “All semester,” says the speaker, “we’ve been discussing Romanticism, The Sublime, the articulation of Personal Emotion, and the power of Imagination. Now imagine this. Holding each other, carrying the restraining straps with them, Mary and Lamb, sobbing, walked the long road back to Bedlam.”
In “The Bridge of Change,” the suicide of Stroud’s teacher and mentor, John Logan, is the subject. We see Logan at the No Name Bar in Sausalito in the 1960s, drinking and holding forth about a boy who witnessed his mother’s death—jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge—as he and his father watched, helpless. Logan offers insight by telling his own theory of poetry,
the poem as a bridge
connecting me to you,
you to me, poetry
in whose healing music we might trace
how to forgive, how to cross over,
making our long difficult way
into grace.
Stroud renders the death of his own parents with restraint in “Campfire.” The speaker remembers a night with his father in the Tehachapis, “How ghostlike his image / appears to me now, how he seems almost a stranger, / and the boy sitting next to him, staring / into the flame, unable to make anything of it, / what do I make of him, / what would I tell him that he should know, / comforted as he is by the warmth of the fire / and the presence of his father sitting next to him / within the deep fatherless night surrounding him.” The speaker’s distance makes this moment universal.
A lot can be learned from Stroud regarding craft. He builds vivid imagery, much like with the blue heron, in “Imagining (Poetry).” Young Stroud and his twin brother hook up a walkie-talkie with tin cans and tell each other secrets, intimate words connected by a string, “hearing at each end only what we might imagine.” And in “Oppen / Praxis” Stroud instructs, “Say what happened in a way that makes it happen again . . . Clarity and accuracy honor the reader. / Don’t muddy the waters. Do rock the boat.”
Stroud has traveled the world searching for poems, novelty—and possibly grace. He’s looked in dangerous places— “somewhere out past Swat, near the Korkorams, no road into it, Westerners forbidden. It was important to me that it be secluded, that to get to it I would have to leave my whole life behind. What was it I so yearned to find?” In the section, “Convergence,” we get a persona poem of a young Incan girl chosen to be sacrificed to the god. In his notes, Stroud says he was haunted by this image for years. He continues this section with omens and religious touchstones, as if the poet is “shoring fragments against his ruins.”
Everything That Rises has no simple arc from grief to redemption. The deaths of family, friends, the coming extinctions in nature, his own mortality, his pain due to the nature of this violent world are all real, but he asks, “Who was it that said / in some long-ago poem / this world is all we have / of Paradise?” Stroud’s instinct is praise.
Winner of many awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Lamont Foundation, Stroud gives us poems of nature’s abundance with craft folded around absence. In “My Diamond Sutra,” Stroud mentions “dragon boats of poems, set on fire, pushed into the stream.” In this way, he balances light and dark, showing one man’s search for transcendence. His work deserves a wider audience—not only poetry readers. Stroud’s poems do rock the boat.
Later that week I found it in my right side
pocket. It had begun to bloom, blue. Tissuey soft.
To the bottle of carbolic acid went your father.
To brain plaque, the weed of forgetfulness,
went your mother. Still you felt a fondness
for the natural thing, you loved even the mulch,
and the flower of the mallow family, hollyhock.
Come in, you said. From one specimen of the garden
you cut me a sprig, which I pocketed. Banished
from light, from you, from its princedom, a small
Gautama. Then I forgot it was there, down
there in the dark, doing its precise work anyway.
The tongue hangs fat to lick the air,
gray and dry as a gag. Your whole life
you panted after whojustcameherenow,
a bone over there you could smell before
you could see, the wide patch of yard
and a figure of a hart darting in a feral
blur through trees. The joy when some
hand behind you lets go and sends you
running down the open snowy road,
and you are yourself again or for the first
time. Though now what use is there
to tense the metal leash. Now to learn
to work the new trick: one who waits.
It was long ago you learned to stand
off. You learned to stand for nothing.
That was the beginning of your training.
That was when the sky was your whole head.
Now to go on. And to go on. To become
the sick mule, the tagged skin, gnawed bone.
To learn the first art with more willingness,
and then to sit, lie down.
These are pages from a book I have been working on from 2003 to the present. This work has slowly revealed itself to be about water, rising water, and human impact on the planet and is part of a larger project called The Sea Museum. The found book that I am altering to make these photomontages was about destroying icebergs, the problem of icebergs, and appears to have been made for children’s education (Danger! Icebergs Ahead! by Lynn Poole and Gray Johnson Poole, Random House, 1961). I’ve always been interested in the absurd, and was feeling a homage to Hanna Hoch, the great Dada artist. I began adding water and related images. I wasn’t working consciously in the beginning, just covering the pages with water. The subject matter feels prescient now, fifteen years in, and I am still altering the book. Like the oceans, this project continues to exist and change.
When I’m low, I hang out
with the slugs and sugar ants,
I ignore the emails, You will run out
of storage in the cloud.
The clouds
will always make space for me,
I already live in a fog
and there’s always room for more
photos, a virtual bookcase.
As much as I love
being able to type my sadness
to a stranger, my screen sometimes
reaches out and puts its hands
on my hips—stay here a little longer.
I know I’m brave
when I leave my earbuds on the table
next to my cat. And when my stomach
knots, it’s because I’ve hit reply all
and now Dick knows he’s living
out his name like a job description.
This is when I know
I need to stand up and stop
being another head without body, a mind
plus fingers typing. Sometimes
when I’m walking down the street
a neighbor runs up to me to tell me
how Crossfit is working for her,
I press Skip ad until I see the real-time video
of Max, the dog who lives three doors down
and is dealing with depression
because his owner just died.
This is when I reach down
and wipe the goo from Max’s eyes,
and realize how much happier I am
when I sit in the middle of empty road
under an unlimited sky
holding a dog who has no idea
why his owner isn’t coming home.
Global warming is more than me leaving
the heat on 80 degrees in the guest room.
There’s a shadow on our planet’s lung
and the narrow road is what we drive now
because half of it has slid into the ocean.
We are living longer, but we’re doing it with less
sex and friends. The view from here is gorgeous,
but who to share it with? I am watching the world
turn, all my children becomes all my adults.
I try to count our steps to the grave—5, 100,
1000? More? I’m less than optimistic.
I’m the character who is drinking wine
at noon in her nightgown. The soap operas
are failed decisions and mistakes are real life
choices. Global warming makes my cheeks
flush. Climate change is another way
to introduce myself, to undress and dive
into the ocean that wants to swallow me.
Let me cry dramatically before the scene ends,
let the director drag me to the shore.
Tonight a neighbor told me how climate change
was a hoax as we stood under an orange sky
from the smoke of wildfires and when he coughed
because the air quality was not good enough
for his lungs I said, It hasn’t rained for years
and when the birds started falling from the sky
he said, That happens sometimes, it’s cyclical.
God bless the confused, I said to the waves
reaching over into our yards, to the oceans
so warm the icebergs are the ice cubes
the barista places into our lattes, this should
cool it. And at night when I walk home
in a tank top because what was once a winter
is a mild spring, I lean back and watch the bats
circle and eat up whatever insects we have
too many of and I think my god, we fucked this up
so quickly, as I admire the moon that almost winks
at me, as if it knows how many years we have left.
1Title from a line by Kim Rashidi.
