The page turner

My hermanita who is on a mission in Argentina, after reading my last poem (see previous post,) asked me if I would write her a "Christmas poem" or "a poem about our (it's a family trait that has been refined in said sister and myself) inability to leave the past alone". Something about that request was really daunting for me.

I could have written something oozing with nostalgia. We are kinda good at that (see previous paragraph) but I didn't want a more angst-ridden version of my last poem and I also didn't want to make her too homesick. The Sunday before Christmas I was sitting during a Christmas program and something kind of unrelated struck me. I think the resulting words here are more like a New Years poem, in fact, than a Christmas one.

You know me, I am a sucker for definites. Beginnings and endings especially, framed by days and hours and concrete moments. I think I feel deeper in these moments, or awareness makes me feel as though I do. But this year I am especially grateful that things begin and that they end and that we have markers by which to measure the joys, the pains, the laughter, and the tears. I am glad for excuses to pause and reflect. And to hope. I am more grateful for this past year than I, yes I, could put into words. But I am perhaps even more grateful for the year before me. For every day before me. For every opportunity for growth, even if (and it usually does) come at the expense of comfort, that comes in the form of new years, new months, new weeks, days, even minutes. That it is never to late to become more than you were just before and to give more and love more and feel more. I am grateful for the days that have shaped me and grateful that sometimes I have to leave them behind.

And so: adieu, 2012; 2013, you have a stinking lot to live up to.

The Page Turner


My fingers know the white and black of keys
on the old piano in the cold front room,
know the whites that are chipped
and the blacks that sometimes stick.
They slip, like hands to gloves, into the memories
of melodies hovering over the ivories, waiting.

There are so many pages and notes I've learned by heart,
that with familiarity I could play without tiring;
but with the years, the pieces get longer,
impossible to memorize and my hands feel so small.
There are songs I would not choose to play,
were it not for the Master setting the pages before me.

"Play on", He whispers as he keeps time with a gentle tapping
while my fingers fumble to learn the notes as I go.
Sometimes I spend hours on a page, a line,
until my fingers rediscover their deftness,
and sometimes I have to play on, unrehearsed,
but always His hands turn the pages that mine can't.

At the end of each page: play on.
When my fingers get in the way: play on.
When I want to skip to the end: play on.
When this movement feels like home : play on.

When the words "the glory be thine",
when angelic host proclaimed,
when carpenter's hands healed,
when with the bitter cup: "play on",

whispers the author and finisher
of every masterpiece I will ever play,
my Master keeping time:
        the watchful page-turner.




In passing... I know this blog hasn't seen a proper posting in months. Other than poetry, I mean. But I kinda feel okay about that. I remember talking to a friend who had been to see a fortune teller. Honest to goodness. She was telling me all about the experience and some advice the fortune teller told her stood out to me. That was years ago, and I can barely remember it. But it was something to the tune of being in a place and with people that make us want to create because we are closer to divinity when we are creating. Not bad for someone who makes a living focused on lines in people's hands.  President Uchtdorf  has said something similar. Anyway, I have kind of used that advice as a measuring stick of sorts. Not necessarily of my spirituality, but of balance in my life. And so three poems in the last few months would seem to testify that I've stuck some kind of right cord, despite the hours I spend researching which you would think to be the epitome of non-creative work. I'd like to think that poetry's re-entry into my life bespeaks in some sort of concrete, recordable form, to how great this year has been. That's all.

My harvest song

I started writing this at my kitchen table with a spoon in my hand. At a time I should have been attacking lists and homework, I felt the unflagging and urgent need to figure out all of life's problems. Or rather, all of my own, which are, truth be told, blessedly few.

My mind was oscillating between the fury of T.S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,

(Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions)

which is an old favorite and makes me readily imagine Eliot as a fine friend of Andrew Bird's, and the sometimes trite words of J.R.R. Tolkien (Not all those who wander are lost) and a dozen other half-formed thoughts, while my suitcase heart was ruminating in the forthcoming joys and gratitude of the Thanksgiving season, which is my favorite holiday. One submission deadline later, this emerged. A not-so and yet so-very Thanksgiving poem:

North

the distant howling of a train and

faint rumbling lull me to sleep each night,

the sound like an a old pipe or hesitant faucet,

that comes, instead, from my bedroom window

on which i've drawn a map of the world

superimposed over my view of the neighbor's 

closeted patches of grass

or of the stars, depending on the angle.

with my dry erase marker i start to draw cities

and arrows that spread over years,

and charts to calculate weight;

i was never one to travel light, least of all now.

in my youth i would lean my head 

against the cool of the window 

in the backseat of the station wagon 

as we drove south for the winter,

for pies and pine trees 

and piles of people asleep on the floor.

i should have more memories; 

should remember smells, voices, faces.

but i only remember the cold of that window 

that rendered me mute with contentement,

arms clasped around my knees, hands

almost twitching, wanting to throw my arms back 

and grab this whole world and hold it tight,

that warmth in my throat:

the joy of inbetween,

of north to south and south to north.

my bedroom window is cool beneath my fingertips.

the cities aren't looking right.

or maybe the calculations. 

so with a paper towel i clumsily lift the layer of almost-ink

to start again. 

what if?

a story,

no calcultions.

happiness,

not where i want to find it.

the truth,

unslanted.

the distant howling of a train and

faint rumbling pull me from sleep each morning,

the sound like an a old pipe or hesitant faucet,

that comes, instead, from my bedroom window

on which i've drawn a map of the world i've learned by heart:

a muteness impossible to transcribe except for

pies and pine trees and piles of people,

asleep on the floor,

in the nooks of armchairs, holding books,

crowded around the card table, 

who leave 

a place by the window for me,

my bags, and a few more. 

a clothesline summer

The mornings have gotten chilly and the nights undeniably cozy. Not to mention the turning of the leaves. I guess this means my fabulous summer is really, truly over.

I wrote this a few weeks back, in a matter of minutes, actually (more rare than not). When summer was still lingering and homework was looming over my head. More a result of procrastination than creative genius, there were a few words that still needed tweaking. The ushering in of fall helped me put in the final touches. One day, I wil write poems in French. The humming of my summer isn't complete without French sounds.       But.  That day is not today.

And so. An ode; or a eulogy, if you will.

a clothesline summer
minutes like postcard stamps
hung out to fly
then passed from hand to hand
in warmth not quite
cold nights not quietly
we danced on toes
we crossed out bridges
on pages, over seas

how can one know
without the swelling of the wind
makes windows call
gives voice to cracks and alleys thin
that doorknobs do
that from dark keyholes sing
the peace of home
a bed for backs so wearily

those dog-eared maps
which from the folds we found
like unwound twine
foreign knots to mark our feet
or rather where
and from beneath our skin
we carved out stone
and there stopped our searching


to understand
to live forgetfully
in ink that fades
according to the rain
in vacancies
left by what once words did fill
our mouths without
in teeming streets
from which a certain humming sounds

Regret...? Now that's a foreign sentiment.

Remember how I usually travel and then blog about it?

Yeah, well this summer was the summer that I forgot about the blogging part. I was too busy with emails and skyping. Two words: big mistake.

I came home from my time abroad to realize that I was supposed to be keeping a journal. For 6 weeks. And then turn it in for a grade.

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTT?

That was my reaction. Plus a whole lot of less nice words, mostly aimed at inanimate objects but some at my professor for not spelling it out for the space-cadet that is me and some aimed at said space-cadet.

 So I have made up for the last 2 years of failed blogging by writing 30+ pages of this travel journal. Which, if it were in paper form, I would want to set fire to, I'm so sick of it. The writing is horrible while some of the sentiments seek for sincerity. But I think my chief difficulty is that I didn't write it in the moment and I know that something is lost. And that I have a deadline and can't give it the nostalgic embellishments that I would like to.

Part of it may end up published, nonetheless. They might even get nice little pictures with caption.

But in the meantime, a word of advice:
Pulling together a daily journal months after the fact = la galère. So just don't do it. Especially if you go to France and it changes your life. Which, is gonna happen. Obviously. 

A variation on the theme of solidarity

I know I already wrote about the idea of solidarity. I defined it as the elderly French would. I defined it by what it wasn't. 

But I have to say my piece. 

Perhaps their definition of solidarity is dead. Perhaps solidarity needs to be redefined, or perhaps in order to be found it needs to be actively, humbly sought out. 

Here is why I believe that solidarity is not as dead as some Parisiens would have me believe. Here is why I believe that all those stories you hear about Pariesiens unwilling to talk to you, help you, look at you, are misunderstood. (And before I begin, as a disclaimer, I do realize that being able to actually speak French is the golden open-sesame here.  But I still believe that if you expect solidarity, you will find it. And visa-versa.)

So, remember how, 3 years ago when I came to Paris I was on this 'independent women' kick that I failed miserably at? Well, this time around, I'm welcoming that failure with open arms. Perhaps it is because I have undoubtedly had that experience abroad where I had to sink or swim and I have, by now, more or less learned to swim. In the past, I lived alone, without cell phones, without the internet. I couldn't understand half of what people said to me and communicated much less than that. I had to figure out a lot of stuff by trial and error. I got lost almost constantly.  

This time around, I don't need to not need people. I have been thinking about all the people I've asked for direction in the past 2 weeks. I've had people draw me maps and miss their bus to see that I was well on my way. All the people whose advice I've solicited about my tourist adventures. The people who have helped me with my bags, who knew my name before I even got here, who have prevented me from slipping in puddles as I get off the metro because I am too busy minding the gap. The people who try to save me from gluten in my food, who want to go shopping, to cafés, lunch and dinner when we have only just met. 

I don't know about solidarity, but I do know that this time around, I love traveling because it reminds me that man is not an island. And while I don't like how much I sometimes feel like a child because that means that I'm less fit to give to others when I'm so busy recieving, I am glad for these moments that I am forced to remember how much we need each other. 

I guess to wrap things up I'll share one more thing: today my old-acquaintance-turned-new-friend Emily who happens to be in Paris this summer as well (more later on just how small this world really is) and I went to le cimetière du Père-Lachaise, Paris's largest and world famous cemetery. We only had two hours which was not nearly enough time and will probably be making it a Sunday afternoon ritual. It's hard to describe in words how enchanting it is. It's like a mini city, a curious skyline. It is ironic, perhaps, that after all my thoughts on family and community I should find myself here. Maybe that is why I have always loved cemetaries: in their own sombre way, they bring people together in love. 

This cemetary is full of gorgeous sculptures (more than any other cemetary I've been in), which, it should be known, are the things I spend all my time looking at when I'm at the Louvre, I can't get enough of them.

Basically, I saw this. And it was beautiful. 

I'll do my best to translate though it is essential to know that bruler les étapes means literally to burn through the steps, to skip ahead, to jump the gun, put the horse before the cart. But the verb burn is kind of essential for the juxtaposition of temperature in the imagery:

did i skip 
over any steps
one single 
step 
did i shine
with a thousand
burning stars
and already cold
did i only
live
as a water
which runs
and goes by 
without knowing
that it will return
for your thirst
and my thirst

I tried to translate it on the spot for Emily and we tried to interpret it as we were getting kicked out of the cemetery. We said it reminded us of other poems we knew, me of Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice"

Some say the world will end in fire; 
Some say in ice. 
From what I've tasted of desire 
I hold with those who favor fire. 
But if it had to perish twice, 
I think I know enough of hate 
To say that for destruction ice 
Is also great 
And would suffice.

And her of one of Oscar Wilde's (who is also buried there but who we have yet to find). She wasn't sure which poem, and maybe it was actually the same one as me. But maybe it's this one, Panthea:

Nay, let us walk from fire unto fire,
From passionate pain to deadlier delight,--
I am too young to live without desire,
Too young art thou to waste this summer night
Asking those idle questions which of old
Man sought of seer and oracle, and no reply was told.
.....
(there is more. somuchmore)

So there you have it, some beautiful thoughts to wrap up the day.

One more look before at the Eiffel Tour outside my window. Ahhh, Paris.

Je t'aime. 

sol·i·dar·i·ty /ˌsäləˈde(ə)ritē/

I've been thinking a lot about this theme of solidarity. It's a word I've heard probably five times since I've been here and I doubt that I've heard the last of it. Mostly when I hear the word it is in the context of that which is lacking. I hope I can get a better grasp on the situation so that I can write more on it. 

If memory serves me well, Madame Marechal mentioned it first. She had fallen in her appartement building and was crying for help. For hours. No one came to help her (though I wonder if in fact anyone actually heard her). If it wasn't for her femme de ménage, she might have died from such a fall. 

In telling me the story, her eyes welled up. Not quite out of sorrow, no. Though this is is a woman who had a difficult childhood and has seen her share of sorrows, real or imagined.  

Most of the people we visit seem to have similar pain in looking too far back. And yet they are forever looking back. It makes me wonder about our tendency to hold onto the difficulties in our past, to immortalize and martyrize, to define ourselves by the scars we carry so that we can also boast of the strength that now animates our limbs. Can there be any joy in strength if it was not won with some difficulty? Is this the price we pay for opposition, that we risk losing ourselves to those scars? People all bear their scars differently: some quietly, some defiantly, and others with a vendetta that turns upon itself. Some manage to be matter of fact. In the narration they cast of their lives, those scars are facts, events: proof that they have lived. Not axes on which their whole lives turn.

Madame M. was unloved by her father and resents her mother's lack of backbone, which undoubtedly explains her very dominant personality . Madame C. was abandoned from what I understand, to be later taken in by a family who beat her, the father especially. When we talk to her, there is almost nothing that interests her now or that interested her ever. Nothing to distract her from that cankerous past. Monsieur B's father disowned him when he wanted to leave for Paris to be an actor. When he got a divorce, he gave his wife everything but she took more. And his only daughter has never forgiven him. Madame F doesn't want to talk about her life. She can't walk anymore and is, in her own words, waiting to die. She has been waiting a long time. Madame CB is 102 and is loosing her sight. She is the most spritely of them all, always glowing. But she can't help to hide the disappointment she feels that after everyone she took care of, visited with, or was just aware of, it is astonishing to her how forgotten she is and how she must deal with things on her own. 

Still, I think it is telling that some, even most of these people here, prefer looking to their tragic pasts rather than in the present and even less to the future. Is aging really so horrible that people would prefer to reliving, again and again, the wrongs that have been done them as a way to distract themselves from the reality of their current situation? Why not relive the positive? The beautiful? Why are they the moments that are harder, that take more work, to hold onto. Ironically, I feel as though sometimes the latter brings more pain. Because all those wonderful memories are tied up in people, places, moments that are irrevocably gone.


But, I digress. I want to paint for you what I mean, what the French mean by 'solidarity'. Back to Madame M. This is a woman wins people over, herself included, with a fiery sense of humor. She is opinionated and anything but mild. Like me, tears come when emotions are high: any emotion. But as she was talking to me, these were tears of frustration and something stronger. Because she is a raw ball of passion, her hands were clenched as she said to me, her face tightened by desperation nearing rage, that solidarity in France is dead. 

She has too many examples, though she names a few.  The things that solidarity is not: being ignorant about who your neighbors are, not looking  after others or picking up after yourself, not letting the elderly have the seats on the buses or metro, not caring to get to know them, walking around with headphones on, making a person ask for help, which is perhaps only slightly less worse than ignoring that cry for help because it is someone else's problem.

I suppose it could be my ignorance or it could be a result of having been raised in the church, but this pain of aging, and especially the crushing solitude, is a foreign concept to me. I don't want to undermine the reality of this pain in trying to figure out to what extent this portrait of aging is accurate but unappreciated and unknown by those too young to live it and to what extent it is a cultural phenomenon. I can't help but think that the death of solidarity came with the death of general religious belief in Europe. Because the people I work with from Africa of muslin background or other, they still have that solidarity, though perhaps not to the extent they experience it back in their homeland. Not to mention that the fear of death is partnered with a peace in the hope of an afterlife.

If I could put their plight succinctly, this lack of solidarity is most likely due to a lack of family, and a need for community-the kind that you don't age out of. 

I think that probably of all the takeaways from this time abroad, this awareness will be the biggest for me. We are all part of families and we can all take an active or passive role within that family. The same thing goes for communities.  Sometimes I think I take for granted having people around me that I can "need from" and people that need me. I just hope I learn to hear the silent pleas for help of those around me, or, even better, to learn to give before the asking words have even been spoken. 

Forever is composed of nows: Part II

Things that I have "learned" about Paris:

I know that Rennes, where I spent 5 months in 2004, is no metropolitan. I know this. And that is why I love it and want to go back. All the same-and I can't help but to compare-I am so surprised by the presence of English in Paris. I hear it ALL the time. I see Brits and Yanks right and left. It is tourist season, yes. I am aware of that. But this impression began in Switzerland even. I couldn't believe being able to get along without honestly knowing a lick of German. To be honest, it is kind of sad. 

When I lived in Rennes, I spent 5 quite silent months amongst anyone who wasn't a foreign, English speaking student. I had to. There were a few Frenchies who had done studies abroad to England or the States, but it was mostly Americans and Irish that I hung around if I wanted to communicate at all. One in ten of us had a cell phone. Internet only existed in the campus library and at internet cafés. It may be unfair of me to compare a Rennes of 8 years ago to a Paris of today, but I can't help but feeling as though I have been witness to a huge cultural shifting. Globalization through the internet and the media has happened, right before my eyes. Of course kids still learn English at school as they have been for the past 30 something years. But I think it is safe to say that in the last 10 years or so, everything has changed. And is still.changing. Culturally, linguistically. It's kind of sad. I come to France to experience a culture and a history that is different from my own. That gap between French and American mentality, so impassive, I wonder if it will always remain that way. I don't want our cultures to understand one another simply because one has obliterated the other. Perhaps that is dramatic. Perhaps we'll give it another 10 years and see.

My internship here entails two kinds of work: setting up visits with old people who are lonely and need the company or someone to accompany them on little outings, and biweekly meetings with a group who have come from hard times and few means and have made a sort of family for themselves amongst others like them. I'll be talking a lot more about my work, schedule, visits, and of course, the people, for the rest of my stay here. For the sake of this topic however, I'm gonna just limit myself to one anecdote.

Three days of the week I spend my afternoons doing visits with Carin. You will likely hear much more about her. She is, I believe, somewhere in her 60's, from the Netherlands, and a French Professor. She has come here for 3 weeks, leaving behind her husband as she has done the past 3 years to come here and renew her French. She is fiercely independant, gets around on a bike, goes to concerts almost nightly, has a beautiful singing voice and a way with the people here. Perhaps needless to say, she is already likely to be one of my heroes. In any case, we had a visit Friday. The woman we visited, Mme Marechal, collected books of French culture, mostly about impressionism. She knew so much but the craziest thing is she has never traveled. Ever! Anyway, she uses art as a kind of therapy to help her deal with the solitude, but, most especially, the lack of solidarity she feels and the changes in the country. The city she grew up in and has lived in most of her life is such a different place. It has evolved, not just with the effects of time on her culture, but by other cultures on her culture. In case you aren't aware, immigration is a huge phenomenon in Europe. I should google some statistics but I'm feeling lazy. What I do know is that 8.1% of the French population are immigrants. What I also suppose is that most of these immigrants live in the larger cities: donc, Paris et Marseille. 

I think the best way to summarize is using Carin's words, which she used to help me understand Mme. M's distress. Carin watched after her mother, who recently passed, go through a similar struggle: in the Netherlands, there are entire neighborhoods which are now entirely full of immigrants. Natives no longer live there. But all this has happened only over the past 20 years or so. Which translates a lot of change in only a short amount of time. And the older generation, the ones who shaped the cities as we have them today in many ways, are too old to move away out of such neighborhoods. Or it doesn't make sense for them to. But it takes so much energy for them to live, that tackling this unfamiliar is a daunting task. And so they live further isolated, not just by age but by culture. 

So in summary, I am beginning to see how Paris, this city that I love for its age and richness of history, is also a city that encapsulates change. It's a striking juxtaposition.