14 February

Ferocious Kind of Love

Tarnow, Poland, 2009

It’s February 14th and all those fuzzy and shiny symmetrical hearts remind me of my friend who’s going to have valve-replacement surgery in a couple of days. We’re nine time zones apart, which doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference. We’ve always talked on the phone, even when I could bicycle to his house.

When I called him yesterday, he said, “It’s a pig valve.” It wasn’t a statement I was expecting to hear, perhaps not a statement anyone is ever expecting to hear.

“A what?”

I may have been a little sluggish on the uptake, but he wasn’t. He said “pig” again in English, then repeated “pig” in Russian. I knew he was going to ask me how to say pig in Polish. I remembered how to say “pork,” but not pig. My students get the English mixed up, too, they assured me when I asked them later.

When I heard the expression, “Free as a wild pig,” in Polish, I pictured the emancipated swine flapping unlikely wings and getting effectively, if perhaps not gracefully, airborne, waving goodbye to whatever ties pigs down.

Another of Poland’s porcine residents is known as dzik. Everyone I’ve spoken to here can recite a children’s rhyme about the dzik’s bad disposition and sharp tusks, and the strategy of climbing a tree should one have the misfortune to encounter the beast on an otherwise pleasant outing.

I renamed Valentine’s Day “Javelina Day” a while back. The words aren’t quite anagrams, but they’re sneaking up on it. I doubted that the creature also known as a peccary had ever appeared on a greeting card associated with affection. But the nearsighted, diffident javelina may soon be winding up its stint as the antidote to Valentine’s Day.

Suddenly, I’m picturing a dzik with little lacy hearts impaled on its fearsome tusks as it rampages through displays of chocolates and champagne. Lately, it’s a ferocious kind of love I’m looking for.

13 February

Comparison and contrast

2006

Fifteen years ago

it was a drizzly

February,

my first night

in my new place,

exactly like

this time around.

Back then

it was a garage

apartment coiling

out room by room

from a triangular

closet in the center.

This time

it's a second-storey

corner studio

in an apartment building

that was once

a church.

Fifteen years ago

it was a beer I wanted

more than anything,

and my new house key

was the only means of ingress.

I don't remember if I got

the bottle open,

but I didn't need stitches.

This time around

it was dilly beans

I craved.

I tried boiling water,

the back of a knife,

a sharp rap upside-down

on the counter,

but that jar might as well

have been a fortress.

What the orange

rubber gloves

were doing

hanging on the trap

under the sink,

or why it crossed my mind

to look there,

I may never know,

but I'm hoping

it's a trend.

12 February

Damage Control

2006

I don't recall her name.

I do remember I admired her

as much for inviting her best girlfriends

to the corner table at the Alibi

at eleven in the morning,

where she kept the pitchers coming

while we match serial numbers

and taped the torn pieces back together,

as for ripping up all the twenty-dollars bills

he tried to bribe her with

the night before while he looked on

in queasy disbelief.

29 January

Daulatabad Fort, India, 2010.

21 January

Get used to it


The salmon is chilly
by the time it’s traveled
all the way across the town
from the rally at the union hall
to the downpour on this picket line,
but it tastes like freedom,
and I swallow its stubborn flesh,
suck its determined bones,

then stumble from the brief warmth
of the strike trailer
into the shock of sudden night,
the dissonance of three
big brilliant picket umbrellas
pitched like circus tents
on the long blackness
of asphalt glittering
beneath the only streetlight.

Under the rain I begin to compose
the photograph I cannot capture,
I say the words out quiet:
“Remember, remember everything,”
then dive beneath
the startling blue and white
pie slices of Al’s umbrella.
“It’s a nice picture,”
I tell him, by way of explanation.
“Well, get used to it,” he says.

Twenty years ago today in Hoquiam, Washington, USA, the Association of Western Pulp and Paper Workers’ strike for equal pay for equal work against ITT Rayonier was ending in defeat. I had taken comfort on that picket line for the long months of my mother’s illness and on the night of her death. I knew it was time to go when we burned the furniture from the picket shack at the Ontario Street gate, then tore that rude structure down, but I wasn’t ready. I could still taste the chilly salmon, still see those umbrellas against the asphalt in the rain. I had gotten used to it, then it was gone.

19 January

Rhinos far and near

The Khmer word for rhinoceros – sounds like romias – was the first word I learned to sound out in my new language without ever having heard it spoken. It was one of those moments when everything stops for an instant, and I thought of another rhino far away.

I used to carry a grey plastic toy rhinoceros with me everywhere I lived: from various places on the South Coast of Oregon to a bungalow in that state’s biggest city to Asian Russia to Nicaragua to the southeastern corner of Poland.

The litttle rhino distinguished the place where I wrote from the first day in the 80s when it appeared in my writing room, a surprise from a housemate I’ve lost track of. Twelve years ago I took note of the shadow it cast on my computer in a different writing room, and one year ago, reading about that shadow in a different country, I found myself in a minor panic, scouring my tiny apartment, wondering where the rhino could possibly have gotten itself to.

I comforted myself, as I often do, by recalling what I had written about the missing item, in this case a prose poem:

Passive Resistance

A rhinoceros has come to stand on my writing desk, between the pencils and the paper clips. One of its ears is nothing but a ragged edge of leather; sand and pebbles chafe inside the loose folds of its skin. It looks at me with dull, unblinking eyes, the mute reproach of a wronged, uncomprehending creature.

It will not say why it is here; it thinks I know.

It will not go away; it thinks I can assuage its pain.

What will I feed it? Should I shoot it? What if it dies? Where will I put it?

It neither threatens me nor cowers from me. It is as patient as a stone in my skull. Whatever it wants, it will wait for. It is good at waiting: grey, heavy, sullen waiting. It will wait as long as it needs to. It is waiting now.

I remembered that the housemate who surprised me with the rhinoceros didn’t like the poem because he couldn’t imagine me shooting anything. It’s still a point of pride for me that there’s nothing I can’t imagine.

I thought I was lucky indeed the next summer when I found the toy rhino on my writing desk in the basement apartment where my worldly goods wait for me while I live everywhere else. Unwilling to risk losing something that’s been following me for twenty-five years, I didn’t bring it to Cambodia, but there was apparently a rhino-shaped hole in my life that the universe swiftly moved in to fill. There on the flash card for the consonant ro was a drawing of my favorite odd-toed ungulate.

My new, two-dimensional rhinoceros looks young, strong and peaceful, as if it has never endured a single misfortune. It stands in a field of grass against a pale blue sky, contemplating something mildly interesting in the distance. I don’t think it has noticed I’m watching it. I expect it will travel well.

30 December

Three years ago yesterday I attended Khmer Heritage Night in Portland, Oregon, USA. I was feeling blue and I didn’t really want to go, but I had a story to write, so I picked myself up by my bootstraps. I was, and I am, ever so glad I did. The people at my table on that chilly, rainy night – so different from Cambodia’s delicious December weather – taught me my first word of their language, and I ended the article I wrote about the event with that word – ah goon - which means “Thank you.”

“I think Cambodia is one of my twenty countries now,” I wrote in my journal. “For all they’ve been through, the Khmer are just about the nicest people in the world. I’ve never felt so welcomed.”

I followed through on that intention three years ago. I’ve been living in Cambodia and studying the Khmer language for three months now, and my impression that the people of Cambodia are the nicest in the world has only deepened.

Yesterday evening I recited a rhyme in Khmer for my students. I’m nearing the end of my first-grade reader, and this rhyme was my first group of lofty, not to mention cohesive, thoughts, after pages and pages of letters, then words, then simple yet excruciating sentences. I have always loved learning to read, and here again it is one of my life’s joys to tentatively sound out squiggles and realize I already know their sounds and their meanings. (The first word I discovered this way was the Khmer word for “language.”)

My students are generally as polite and attentive as can be expected of twenty teenage girls at the end of their school day, but when I read that rhyme to them, they were rapt. Afterward, they burst into the kind of applause usually reserved for rock stars. They insisted on two encores. “Can I read it tomorrow?” I asked, intending to convey by implication instead of again today. “You can read it every day!” one student squealed.

Among the privileges of my nomadic life is the opportunity to observe people’s ferocious and tender love, all over the world, for their first languages. Far from inciting xenophobia, this love seems to me to predispose people to love second languages, and third, and on and on.

Khmer is my fifth language. With the exceptions of long-distance running and stone carving – neither of which I have any natural talent for – it is the most challenging project I have ever undertaken. It has 33 consonants, 32 of which have separate subscript forms, 25 dependent vowels, 15 independent vowels, and at least three diacritical marks. The majority of these neither look nor sound like anything remotely familiar to me, and many of them look and/or sound a great deal like each other. The consonants change their appearance and the vowels change their sounds depending upon their attachments to each other. Vowel sounds also change based upon a number of other conditions that I, at this point, can only take on faith and repeat as corrected.

I am unlikely to achieve anything commonly thought of as fluency, especially as I plan to be here only two more months. Khmer is not a widely spoken language. Why, I ask myself when my head swims, am I doing this? It’s not a rhetorical question. I am doing this because I can’t think of anything else I have ever done that has made so many people so happy.

Here is my translation of the rhyme, which, as they left the classroom, a number of my students were reciting:

We are children; we go to school to learn.

We learn to see, we learn to read, we learn to draw and write.

We are good at it, but not really good. We can practice sport.

Well-being.