On tuesday nights I close the cafe.
Usually I am accomplice to the amazingly youthful, impressively moustachioed Weston, whom 4 out of 5 randomly polled folks agree looks like he sprung from the frame of a 1920's silent film. Tonight was no different.
Usually, I get the job done just in time to miss the 9:30 train from north station and spend an hour and ten minutes hanging around with all the other vagrants, vagabonds and vigilantes waiting for the next one.
Tonight there was a guy who sat on the bench across from me and wept for a while.
Three little girls, dressed like different flavors of bubblegum and speaking spanish really really fast crowded onto the bench beside me and tittered and squealed for a minute or so before one leaned forward and asked the man why he was crying.
He told this long story about how a year ago today his girlfriend overdosed on drugs and died, taking with her his unborn twins. He talked about how he was trying to get home to vermont and he had thirty two of the fifty one dollars needed for a greyhound ticket. He talked about his mom and how he used to be a boxer and how he never cries and he has too many bags and he talked and talked and talked.
One of the girls began crying too.
Another lent him her cell phone to call his mother.
The third brought him a soda from dunkin donuts and handed it and twenty dollars to him.
The girls blessed him and told him god had a plan, and then went right back to teasing each other and giggling.
He hugged them.
I am still not sure if he was telling the truth. Sometimes, there's a lilt in the voice of a liar...a willingness to elaborate too easily...a gushiness to the story or the repetition of a few facts over and over. All these, and a nasty feeling in my stomach told me that the three sweet girls were being had.
But what can I do?
They deserve to keep the kindness within them which allowed for such generosity.
It's more than anybody else in that train station would have done.
I came home, and walking through the silent streets of salem, the snow thickly muffled the air, the trees, the buildings, and lay white and unspoiled in the streets.
It let me have a moment of calm in my wretched brain, and it made me glad, that, even though overnight it will be shoveled and plowed and sullied and salted and soiled and irreversibly filthied, for now, in this moment, it is pure, and it made me better.
Like those girls.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Saturday, February 9, 2008
St.Francis and Sow
When I was in one of the "famous" poet Wes McNair's poetry workshops, he demanded each of his students commit a number of poems to memory. A long, self gratifying diatribe punctuated by references to feuds, publications and personal accomplishments he attributed solely to his prowess of mastering other master's masterworks was his explanation.
So I leafed through a few books and was struck, for various reasons, by Galway Kinnell's St Francis and the Sow.
I wrote it down a dozen times, each time covering up more of the text so I had to retain the lines. I scrawled it in blue marker on a few giant sheets of paper and pasted them on the door of my closet in my tiny single on the first floor of Stone Hall. At night before I went to sleep, I aligned my body with the last line of the poem:
"the long, perfect loveliness of sow." and read it over and over.
At night, my broken blind allowed the tender glow of the street lamp to lull me into sleep, and in the morning it tore open my dreams with the gyrating, blinding, crackling rays of the rising sun.
Winking furiously after the painfully brief amount of sleep I survived on back then, the first line of text I read every day was Kinnell's praise of the pig.
I never managed to get the whole thing memorized, and muddled through the oration in front of McNair and my classmates without much trouble, knowing, the professor really didn't give a shit about our regurgitation skills. I think he was more concerned with how many, if any, of the students would pick one of his works.
After my cauterized graduation, and skipping the country to find my fortune, however, the last line of Kinnell's poem continued to pop into my head at odd moments of mental quiet.
Especially first thing in the morning.
The other day, while in the shower, pondering nothing in particular, I glanced down at my side, to check if my tattoo had fallen off. This is routine. When I was little my sisters and I compared notes in the bathtub as to whether certain birthmarks, scars or other abrasions were like scabs, and if, after prolonged wear, they just shriveled up and dropped off. After I got my tattoo, I simply totted it into the roster of things to check on, while rinsing soap off.
Anyway, after verifying that yes, my waist does in fact still read disappear here the line from that long ago forgotten poem popped into my head, and I have not been able to shake it ever since.
I am beginning this blog in an attempt to regain my previous literary productivity.
Once upon a time, I wrote all day every day, and itched when I wasn't putting pen to page.
It's been almost a year since I got anything down other than a scritched out journal entry on the fly.
I am aligning myself again with the last line of this poem, putting my faith into its resurfacing in my consciousness as an omen that there is something asleep inside me which needs awakening. A hand needs to touch the forehead of my muse and remind what it is that makes her beautiful.
Here's the inspiration. I hope it helps you as well, solitary reader.
St. Francis and the Sow
The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of
self blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers from within, of self blessing;
as St Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering, all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl
of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and
shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths
sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
Galway Kinnell
So I leafed through a few books and was struck, for various reasons, by Galway Kinnell's St Francis and the Sow.
I wrote it down a dozen times, each time covering up more of the text so I had to retain the lines. I scrawled it in blue marker on a few giant sheets of paper and pasted them on the door of my closet in my tiny single on the first floor of Stone Hall. At night before I went to sleep, I aligned my body with the last line of the poem:
"the long, perfect loveliness of sow." and read it over and over.
At night, my broken blind allowed the tender glow of the street lamp to lull me into sleep, and in the morning it tore open my dreams with the gyrating, blinding, crackling rays of the rising sun.
Winking furiously after the painfully brief amount of sleep I survived on back then, the first line of text I read every day was Kinnell's praise of the pig.
I never managed to get the whole thing memorized, and muddled through the oration in front of McNair and my classmates without much trouble, knowing, the professor really didn't give a shit about our regurgitation skills. I think he was more concerned with how many, if any, of the students would pick one of his works.
After my cauterized graduation, and skipping the country to find my fortune, however, the last line of Kinnell's poem continued to pop into my head at odd moments of mental quiet.
Especially first thing in the morning.
The other day, while in the shower, pondering nothing in particular, I glanced down at my side, to check if my tattoo had fallen off. This is routine. When I was little my sisters and I compared notes in the bathtub as to whether certain birthmarks, scars or other abrasions were like scabs, and if, after prolonged wear, they just shriveled up and dropped off. After I got my tattoo, I simply totted it into the roster of things to check on, while rinsing soap off.
Anyway, after verifying that yes, my waist does in fact still read disappear here the line from that long ago forgotten poem popped into my head, and I have not been able to shake it ever since.
I am beginning this blog in an attempt to regain my previous literary productivity.
Once upon a time, I wrote all day every day, and itched when I wasn't putting pen to page.
It's been almost a year since I got anything down other than a scritched out journal entry on the fly.
I am aligning myself again with the last line of this poem, putting my faith into its resurfacing in my consciousness as an omen that there is something asleep inside me which needs awakening. A hand needs to touch the forehead of my muse and remind what it is that makes her beautiful.
Here's the inspiration. I hope it helps you as well, solitary reader.
St. Francis and the Sow
The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of
self blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers from within, of self blessing;
as St Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering, all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl
of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and
shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths
sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
Galway Kinnell
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