BECOMING A WALRUS
Blagoveshchensk, Russia
2003, 2011
In Russia, they call the people who dunk themselves in icy rivers morzhei, “walruses.” When I scampered up the ladder through the hole in the foot-thick ice on the Zeya after a swift immersion, I was christened Morzhishka, which I like to translate as “Dear Little Walrus.”
I don’t like getting wet or cold, but I needed to do something significant. The heirs to the KGB had confiscated my passport for “Illegal Journalism,” and expelled me from the country I had called home for a year and a half. I was trying to view this as an inconvenience and not a catastrophe.
It’s magical thinking, of course, but when they reconsidered and let me stay, it crossed my mind that this was a fair trade for making a commitment to do something I was sure I wouldn’t like one bit.
Strangest of all, I ended up liking it a lot. Not only those few seconds when I was submerged, but also the fuss of three Russian matrons getting me dry and dressed warmly, and the thermos of tea on the ride home, and telling this story to so many amazed listeners, and writing it just now for you.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
30 March
FORECAST
1996, 1997, 2011
Wind blows cold
through a crack
beneath the door.
It’s only a matter
of time.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
29 March
THE BORROWED DAYS
1999, 2009, 2011
Greedy March, says legend,
begged generous April
for a loan of three fine days,
changed their weather dreadful,
and never returned them
to their rightful owner.
This is a perilous stretch
between the seasons,
when ice glistens with schemes
of melting, and wool coats
undo their buttons.
Dangerous days these are,
ripped from jealous Winter’s clutch,
resting in the cupped hands
of tender Spring, for now.
Beware.
1999, 2009, 2011
Greedy March, says legend,
begged generous April
for a loan of three fine days,
changed their weather dreadful,
and never returned them
to their rightful owner.
This is a perilous stretch
between the seasons,
when ice glistens with schemes
of melting, and wool coats
undo their buttons.
Dangerous days these are,
ripped from jealous Winter’s clutch,
resting in the cupped hands
of tender Spring, for now.
Beware.
Monday, March 28, 2011
28 March
I DON’T WANT TO BE ALL RIGHT JUST YET
1986, 2000, 2011
for Margaret
I don’t care if I am
behaving like a three-year old spoiled brat,
now and then I need some time when I don’t have to be all right.
Go on: cajole, entreat, beg, threaten. It won’t work.
I’m where I want to be. Exactly. Not all right just yet.
Feel free to say you’re sorry - you owe a few apologies -
but don’t expect immediate results. You could just go away,
I wouldn’t mind. I don’t require a witness to my little snit.
In fact, I’d just as soon you occupy
a different room, a separate floor, a building
in another city. And it’s not about you, either.
It’s not your business, not your fault,
not yours to fix, not rocket science.
I’m not all right, and I don’t wish to be.
I choose to fuss, weep, mutter, stomp my foot,
kick this dumb cardboard box down the basement stairs.
If it goes well, I may not be all right for quite a while.
You’d best be making plans for your own upkeep until
further notice. And file for future reference:
this is what tending to my upkeep
looks like.
1986, 2000, 2011
for Margaret
I don’t care if I am
behaving like a three-year old spoiled brat,
now and then I need some time when I don’t have to be all right.
Go on: cajole, entreat, beg, threaten. It won’t work.
I’m where I want to be. Exactly. Not all right just yet.
Feel free to say you’re sorry - you owe a few apologies -
but don’t expect immediate results. You could just go away,
I wouldn’t mind. I don’t require a witness to my little snit.
In fact, I’d just as soon you occupy
a different room, a separate floor, a building
in another city. And it’s not about you, either.
It’s not your business, not your fault,
not yours to fix, not rocket science.
I’m not all right, and I don’t wish to be.
I choose to fuss, weep, mutter, stomp my foot,
kick this dumb cardboard box down the basement stairs.
If it goes well, I may not be all right for quite a while.
You’d best be making plans for your own upkeep until
further notice. And file for future reference:
this is what tending to my upkeep
looks like.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
27 March
BUTTON, BUTTON, BUTTON
1994 I admired the insight that people push his button largely because there’s a big red circle in the middle of his chest marked “Button.”
2010 Years ago I made a game without rules for a friend: blue and rust-colored flannel squares sewn together checkerboard-fashion, and several sets of buttons, whose shapes and colors I sadly can’t recall. I do remember we liked moving the buttons around on the squares, piling them up, arranging them into patterns. I need more buttons in my life.
2011 There are odd words I learn early in whatever new language I’m acquiring, and “button” is one of them. When one of my students in Poland introduced herself, she said that her last name meant “button.” I told her I would never forget, and three years later there it was in my brain’s storage unit, gleaming like a shiny little button: Guzyk.
1994 I admired the insight that people push his button largely because there’s a big red circle in the middle of his chest marked “Button.”
2010 Years ago I made a game without rules for a friend: blue and rust-colored flannel squares sewn together checkerboard-fashion, and several sets of buttons, whose shapes and colors I sadly can’t recall. I do remember we liked moving the buttons around on the squares, piling them up, arranging them into patterns. I need more buttons in my life.
2011 There are odd words I learn early in whatever new language I’m acquiring, and “button” is one of them. When one of my students in Poland introduced herself, she said that her last name meant “button.” I told her I would never forget, and three years later there it was in my brain’s storage unit, gleaming like a shiny little button: Guzyk.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
26 March
DATA
1992 I don’t know for sure what I’m avoiding, but I’m getting ready to know.
1993 It sounds as if I’m trying to decide something I’ve already decided.
1994 He wrapped his arms around me as he dozed and I rubbed my knuckles back and forth across his forearm, whispering, “I am running my cup across the bars of my jail. I am trying to erase you.”
1995 We had agreed to stay together for as long as we were good for each other, but we never took data or interpreted any data we stumbled over.
1996 “If you put it out there, it comes back to you,” he said the last time we spoke. He must have been thinking of the best things he put out there. I was listening to sirens wailing in the distance.
1997 One last letter, and then we’ll be strangers.
1992 I don’t know for sure what I’m avoiding, but I’m getting ready to know.
1993 It sounds as if I’m trying to decide something I’ve already decided.
1994 He wrapped his arms around me as he dozed and I rubbed my knuckles back and forth across his forearm, whispering, “I am running my cup across the bars of my jail. I am trying to erase you.”
1995 We had agreed to stay together for as long as we were good for each other, but we never took data or interpreted any data we stumbled over.
1996 “If you put it out there, it comes back to you,” he said the last time we spoke. He must have been thinking of the best things he put out there. I was listening to sirens wailing in the distance.
1997 One last letter, and then we’ll be strangers.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
24 March
DRUNK TRIPTYCH
2000, USA
Two men with the same name, from the same city in Eastern Europe where they were professionals in the same field, living now in the same city in the United States, have a problem. The first calls the second only when he’s drunk and the second doesn’t like it.
2002, Russia
On the second day of Marina’s wedding, after two hours of trying to persuade me, her relatives finally persisted just a second longer than I did. I took a tiny sip of vodka na posashok, which translates something like “for the walking stick,” an early, less lethal equivalent of “for the road.” Do dna, the guys chorused, “bottoms up.” I summoned the most devastating twinkle in my eye and replied in English, “Don’t push your luck.”
2009, Poland
I ended up sitting across the aisle from a drunk on the train. Benevolent enough, but the slurred speech and forced merriment were unsettling, as was my empathy for the boy traveling with him. You can get used to just about anything, I suppose, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. I may have imagined the sweet, stale, nauseating smell, but it was getting stronger as the train approached my station, and I was ever so glad to disembark.
2000, USA
Two men with the same name, from the same city in Eastern Europe where they were professionals in the same field, living now in the same city in the United States, have a problem. The first calls the second only when he’s drunk and the second doesn’t like it.
2002, Russia
On the second day of Marina’s wedding, after two hours of trying to persuade me, her relatives finally persisted just a second longer than I did. I took a tiny sip of vodka na posashok, which translates something like “for the walking stick,” an early, less lethal equivalent of “for the road.” Do dna, the guys chorused, “bottoms up.” I summoned the most devastating twinkle in my eye and replied in English, “Don’t push your luck.”
2009, Poland
I ended up sitting across the aisle from a drunk on the train. Benevolent enough, but the slurred speech and forced merriment were unsettling, as was my empathy for the boy traveling with him. You can get used to just about anything, I suppose, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. I may have imagined the sweet, stale, nauseating smell, but it was getting stronger as the train approached my station, and I was ever so glad to disembark.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
22 March
TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT
No Junk, Please
I chanced a shocking but polite reply
to a compliment on the sinuous berry-red blouse
that may have been the brief, uneasy past
of a woman just my size:
"Thank you," I answered. "I got it at the dump."
I could construct a life around items gleaned
from the Leverett Transfer Station.
I could read last year's best-sellers.
My conversations' center of gravity could become
what everybody else was just beginning to forget.
I could store my second-hand laundry
in a spotlessly clean white wicker hamper.
I could write the story of my alternate life in a journal with kittens on the cover,
the first few pages ripped out, the rest left tantalizingly blank.
I could divine my alter ego’s future with a Mystifying Oracle Ouija Board.
I could assess my prospects in modern-day alchemy
with an Erlenmeyer flask and a collection of experiments for children
published the year before I was born.
There is plenty of wear left in my neighbors' cast-offs,
a multitude of gently used identities to take or leave.
No Junk, Please
I chanced a shocking but polite reply
to a compliment on the sinuous berry-red blouse
that may have been the brief, uneasy past
of a woman just my size:
"Thank you," I answered. "I got it at the dump."
I could construct a life around items gleaned
from the Leverett Transfer Station.
I could read last year's best-sellers.
My conversations' center of gravity could become
what everybody else was just beginning to forget.
I could store my second-hand laundry
in a spotlessly clean white wicker hamper.
I could write the story of my alternate life in a journal with kittens on the cover,
the first few pages ripped out, the rest left tantalizingly blank.
I could divine my alter ego’s future with a Mystifying Oracle Ouija Board.
I could assess my prospects in modern-day alchemy
with an Erlenmeyer flask and a collection of experiments for children
published the year before I was born.
There is plenty of wear left in my neighbors' cast-offs,
a multitude of gently used identities to take or leave.
Monday, March 21, 2011
21 March
1995, 2010, 2011
The garbage truck lunges into the parking lot across the street, lurches to a halt, beeps the first three notes of “Für Elise,” and backs up. It huffs and shudders as it hulks in a corner dancing with the dumpster, flinging its awkward partner high into the air, into an instant of motionlessness at the zenith, then down again with a thud. I’m thinking of a friend who has been using the words “writing” and “dumpster” in the same sentence lately, marveling that there is only one act in my life I regret: gently placing the journals that kept me company through my teenage turmoil into another dumpster, watching out another window as another garbage truck spirited them away, nearly forty years ago. I’m just as glad when the dance ends and the truck hurtles off in search of its next partner, and I turn back to today’s words.
The garbage truck lunges into the parking lot across the street, lurches to a halt, beeps the first three notes of “Für Elise,” and backs up. It huffs and shudders as it hulks in a corner dancing with the dumpster, flinging its awkward partner high into the air, into an instant of motionlessness at the zenith, then down again with a thud. I’m thinking of a friend who has been using the words “writing” and “dumpster” in the same sentence lately, marveling that there is only one act in my life I regret: gently placing the journals that kept me company through my teenage turmoil into another dumpster, watching out another window as another garbage truck spirited them away, nearly forty years ago. I’m just as glad when the dance ends and the truck hurtles off in search of its next partner, and I turn back to today’s words.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
19 March
Bandon, Oregon, USA 1985: Whatever road I take from here, it will be a new road.
Luang Prabang, Laos 2010: It will be a river.
Luang Prabang, Laos 2010: It will be a river.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
10 March
Policy and procedure
Waldport - The New Carissa’s stormy two-day
sea tow ended on a sandy stretch of coast that
looks much like the Coos Bay beach where
the ship first went aground one month ago.
- The Oregonian, March 4, 1999
On the same two days they finally towed
most of our local shipwreck
out to sea in a hurricane
and she ran aground again up north,
my sister was hit broadside
by an old guy running a red light,
and the elders of the church announced
that her fourth marriage didn’t count,
and until she got herself out of it
she wasn’t welcome to visit God.
It’s established policy, standard
operating procedure to prevent implying
to the other members of the flock:
“Go on, have at it, marry and divorce
any old time you like.” That weekend,
while my sister tried to shake the flu
and muck out the flooded garage
of the place she’d just moved into,
I was mostly listening.
She’s managed through all this
to stay off booze and crank
and she doesn’t even seem
to have a bone to pick with God.
All my sisters, all their husbands
and grown children know exactly
what I think, but that didn’t stop me listening,
as I did years ago when I was taught
the story of Job and silently lost the faith
that they hold fast to even now.
It’s late winter, but not late enough.
Blossoms crowd the ornamental
cherries, too early. All I know
to do with suffering is ease it.
When the mud settles I’m going to help
clean a few oiled gulls, seeing as God
apparently has more pressing matters
to attend to.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
6 March
All these years, all these musings on the future, all the while the tornado was just beginning to show itself over the horizon, behind my back.
1988, 1996, 1997, 2007, 2011
1988, 1996, 1997, 2007, 2011
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
2 March
This journey is nearly over now
though we talk of the next trip whenever
we are travelling, whenever we are not.
These hands that grip the steering wheel
are restless to create, to find the stone hidden
in the matrix, to give words to the quality of morning
light through a thin fog on all the colors of ice plants.
These hands that grip the steering wheel ache
to grip a drill, a pen, and that is why we eventually return
to the place where the solder is, where the envelopes are,
where we have a chance at a decent night’s sleep.
Like the planet our wheels are travelling over,
we are hurtling through the dark in circles,
around and around some idea of home
we never reach.
1994 (Highway 101)
Getting restless
1996 (Coos Bay, Oregon) I feel so fortunate, so ready to be surprised. I even considered Texas briefly this morning as a place where desert and ocean are close together.
2009 (Tarnow, Poland) Is there a university in Galveston?
2010 (Kep, Cambodia) Heck, there are three universities in Kampot. Could I do a Ph.D. in the field?
Unsettled
2011 (Siem Reap, Cambodia) This time around I have to go before I am restless, before I am quite ready. People here call the place where I am going “home,” thinking that the United States means the same to me that Kampuchea means to them. Western Massachusetts, where I am going, does mean something to me, something good, but it is also where, eight and a half years ago, fresh from Asian Russia and its shifting shortages, I stood in front of 22 varieties of hummus – I counted – and could not choose.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
1 March
LOVE IN A SHOTGUN SHACK
1997
Tonight in the liberty
of darkness, help me forget
tomorrow, daylight,
when we’ll be tilling
someone else’s fields.
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