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You Are Here
Hold your finger on the star. You are here, it says. In the Hall of Ocean Life. In the Museum of Natural History. New York City. You are here. Look up, and see the blue whale replica. You cannot see it all at once; it is too big. You must stretch your neck back and then scan slowly, from right to left, tail to mouth. While you are in the middle, in that vast blue nothing, you might forget what you are looking at. You might forget whale and think plain, prairie, nothing. But only if you are from the Midwest will you think these things.
All around, there are frozen boxes. One of them is dark and holds a sperm whale with a squid forever clinging to its mouth. Men-of-war stinging little fish. Fish suspended in front of backgrounds made to look like water. There is no water in the Hall of Ocean Life. Here, you circumambulate the whale, peering in at all the frozen boxes. Everything seems bigger than it should be, but you’ve never been underwater very long, so you wouldn’t know how big a squid is supposed to be anyway. You hold out your arm to measure it against your body.
There is no way of scaling the blue whale. It is too high up to measure with your arm span. Though the placard tells you it is as long as three school buses, you never took the bus to school. It tells you a human could stand inside the blood vessel, and you think of the current of blood railing against you, how it would be warm and how it would be like standing in a tunnel with no light or in a river with no light. And when you cut yourself out of the whale, you would leave a big red X on the side, right in the middle of that plain. You are here, it would say. And if someone laid a map over the whale, the red X would fall on Illinois and the insides of the whale would spill out over the prairie.
River
In my mind, all rivers are the Mississippi River. I have crossed it infinite times in the backseats of cars, looking down at the muddy water and straining my eyes for the arch in the St. Louis skyline. I know that I found fish on the banks of the lake behind my grandmother’s house and watched my friends prod their fish eyes with sticks, but somehow I conflate all half-formed memories with the Mississippi, so it happens there when I remember it. As if the river is a keeping grounds for everything almost let go, but held onto at the last moment. As if some gracious current keeps spitting memory back at me.
The first poem I wrote that I really loved was set on the banks of the Mississippi. I had just been reading Richard Siken’s Crush, so all the characters in my mind were amorous and violent and tracked mud in the house with their boots. I sent a boy like this and a girl like this down to the riverbanks to fall for each other and rip each other apart. The poem ends with the boy taken by the river and the girl laying down in the thistles, stitches running like train tracks across their bodies.
Girl says to Boy: Darling, I’m not trying to wash you off my legs / in this river, I’m just standing / in the current because I want to be inside / something I can’t see the end of. I have never wanted to see the Gulf of Mexico. I think it would be sad to watch the water that carried steamboats down from Illinois dissipate into the ocean. I prefer St. Louis and the way that the middle holds everything together. There, you cannot imagine that the river will ever begin or end. The river will go on and on in every direction.
Often, the local news has stories of boys playing too close to the river, playing too close to trains. What a river and a train have in common is that both with drag you for miles. And when the authorities come to recover your body, you will have mud in your mouth.
Mother
My mother lives alone in a house that was meant to hold a family. She tells me sometimes she wishes it would burn down, so she wouldn’t be tied down by everything inside it. She used to have stacks of old newspapers all around the house. She didn’t want to throw them away before she read them and cut out the important articles, which were usually obituaries. I would come downstairs and find her surrounded by stacks, asleep with a newspaper crumpled over her face.
As I child, I spent hours in her bedroom, taking inventory of the items on her dresser. The two bottles of perfume—one for Sundays, one rarely used. Crafts I had made for her, bearing my love in unruly handwriting. Small jars that held delicate gold chains and extra buttons. Piles of receipts. Spare change. Newspaper clippings. To this day, my mother sends me newspaper clippings in the mail. Sometimes just for the headline.
In my family, stories repeat themselves. My grandfather had a stroke when my mother was a teenager and my grandmother worked several jobs to keep everyone fed. Everyone says my grandfather was never the same, that his humor had gone out of him. Everyone says that my grandmother was just tired. After my father left us, my mother worked a job she hated for eleven years. We saved up pennies in a piggy bank to go to the drive-in theater. My father started wearing leather jackets. My mother worked and worked and made boxes of mac and cheese. I never realized until later how tired she was.
Every year, my mother took my sister and me on a road trip. First, we went to Colorado, where we went white water rafting and cooked spaghetti on a grill. Later, we drove to New York City, where we couldn’t stop looking up. People from our hometown thought she was crazy to bring two girls into the big bad city. She told them she wanted us to see as much as we could, father or no father.
When my mother was younger, she bought a horse. It was a stubborn, good-for-nothing horse she says. Once, she tells me, he spooked and took off running through an apple orchard with her still clinging to the saddle. Sometimes I think of my mother like this: her face buried in the horse’s mane, and apples falling all around. The brave kind of holding on.
Heart
After years of writing poems to people who were not here, I was exhausted. I wanted, simply, to write about what was here, what was close. While reading Richard Jackson’s Resonance, I admired the way he talked about loving people around the world and how impossible it is to carry all of it. But loving here—now that is something we can all do.
When I was first learning how to meditate, the instructor asked us to pay attention to where our minds wandered most. Most often, I got distracted because I was thinking about the other people in the room, wondering what kind of experience they were having, where their minds were wandering. It took me a long time to get myself to stop this.
Empathy is an art of the imagination, Kwame Dawes said in his Honnold Lecture at Knox. He said that even if we feel distanced from another human being, we must try to imagine what their life is like. We must attempt empathy. I think of the way he moved from place to place, gathering local stories from anyone who would sit down a while with him. I think of the way he valued the here, but also what was other, what he did not know and could only repeat. No matter where he was, the voices of those around him permeated his poems. In Wisteria, these voices are the elderly African American women of South Carolina, whom Dawes interviewed. I am a tornado child, one says. Another: when you see me coming read me.
There are so many stories I know that are not mine. Stories of children with methed-out parents on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. Stories from these same children about the goat-man they swear lives in the forest and will come out at night to eat you. I know the stories of my sister, who works as a nurse and sees how we are so fragile. I know stories of the nights my friend sunk so low he tried to kill himself. In India, I sat down in shop after shop, drinking chai with the owner and listening to the always-impossible stories of how he made it in the world. In Springfield, I taught poetry workshops for teenage girls and heard about their every heartbreak. In Chicago, I sat on a lawn with John Rybicki as he told me a story I already knew from reading his book: how his wife Julie had died of cancer and how he thought for sure that love could save us and how he knew now that it breaks us just as much.
Seoul
The first time I left the country without my family, I traveled to Seoul, South Korea with my best friend from high school. It was the first time I felt completely out of place, too-white and unable to understand more than a few words of Korean. I loved being there, taking in the city, but it was exhausting and lonely too. In the mornings, we would eat persimmons still cold from the screened-in porch. I thought of the Li-Young Lee poem “Persimmons”: swelled, heavy as sadness / sweet as love. I wondered if the couple we were staying with loved persimmons the way Lee does. But, of course, I could not ask them. S. was my only link to the world, and I tried not to use her for a translator more than was needed.
I spent many meals staring down at my rice, trying to eat slowly to make up for my silence. I still finished before everyone else. Later, I would hear a brief summary of what had been said at dinner. Sometimes, it was about me. How my skin was so white and beautiful. How I was thin for an American. I never quite understood where these comments came from.
At Namsan Tower, there is a fence covered in padlocks. S. explained to me that it was popular for couples to come to this site and place a lock on the fence to signify their commitment to one another. Then, they throw the key down the mountain. Running my fingers along the locks, I wondered what happens to the couples who break up, if they wish they could get that key back. Perhaps they forget about the lock altogether, and it each year it belongs more and more to the tourists who visit the site than the lovers. A private promise turned public monument. Perhaps this is a gracious surrender.
In Seoul, I wanted to be public property. The longer I stayed, the more I dressed like a Korean. I began wearing my glasses and wrapping my scarf high up on my face. On the subway, I was almost glad when the cars got packed with people, because then no one could stare at me. I remember once being sardined between the doors and a man in a tweed jacket with his back turned against me. I wanted more than anything to tilt my forehead the inch it would take to rest against his shoulder.
On another subway on another day, a man spoke to me in English. He was an old businessman, small in his black suit. He asked me where my home was. I told him America. Illinois. Right in the middle, somewhere near Chicago. He nodded and smiled, and I was never sure if he knew where any of that was. My favorite part of the conversation was that few around us could understand what we were saying. A private moment, just me and my stranger friend.
India
This past fall, I studied abroad in India, where I lived in a small Buddhist monastery in Bodh Gaya. I would wake up at 4:30 in the morning to go pray on the roof as the sun was rising. You could see the river in the distance, which was dried up and didn’t have a name anyone used. It was simply the riverbed. The place where the holy sadu and his wife lived, where cremations took place. Where the local elephant could be found wandering among the reeds. I remember mornings where I could make out the shapes of people walking in the river. Women cutting bales of reeds. Men building a fire to burn their dead.
Before arriving in India, our program director tried to explain how life would be different there. It will seem like there are no rules, he said, but only because you cannot understand what rules there are. He told us our bodies were like walking oceans, and that Indian life would take too much water and salt out of us. We would need to find ways to keep the sea inside in balance.
There was something about the chaos of the markets and the cities, the feeling of being constantly swallowed up, that made writing a necessity for staying afloat. There, I learned how to write about disaster and how vulnerable it makes us. Through power-outages and weeks of Diwali fireworks, I became acutely aware of light and darkness and how the two rely on each other. I grew accustomed to having my senses overloaded while still being able to pick out the distinct notes of sandalwood.
I lived in India only four months, but have never been so affected by a place. The poems that came shortly afterward were a strange mixture of chaos and cultural transgression. I found myself trying to grapple with the claustrophobia of daily life in India. Fathoming a distance that was never enough. Simultaneously, my instincts were to get closer, to bring the Midwest and India together somehow, to make sense of those long plane rides. I wanted to bring the people of Bodh Gaya to Galesburg. I wanted to repeat their stories again and again, bringing them closer.
Seatbelt
In Dharamsala, India, I spent a month interviewing Tibetan poets living in exile. My friend Tenzin wanted to go home so badly, he illegally crossed the border into Tibet and was beaten and imprisoned. Later, he climbed fourteen stories of scaffolding on a hotel in Mumbai, to unfurl a ‘Free Tibet’ sign when the Chinese president came to India. When asked why he writes poems he says, I write because I have to, because my hands are small and my voice goes hoarse most of the time. Another poet Bhuchung told me, I have to write; it’s a safety belt. I imagined the Himalayas opening up below him, his body suspended over the gulf, held up by words in English, by words in Tibetan.
When I was in Dharamsala I wrote to my mother, a small-town girl from Illinois should not be reading Tibetan poetry on a mountainside in India. When it comes to writing, I would probably say the same thing. A small-town girl from Illinois has no business writing poetry. I know plenty of girls just as smart as me who never left Springfield. They went to community college or got a job or got married. But somehow I ended up here, carried by some current that has always been carrying me. Call it hard work, call it pure dumb luck, call it mercy. But what the Tibetan poets taught me is that you don’t throw any opportunity away. Even if one person reads your poem, it is one more person who knows your story. One more person who opened themselves long enough to hear your voice.
When I teach poetry to teen girls in my hometown, I tell them that no one else could write the poem they are about to write. And that is reason enough to want to write it. Your voice doesn’t sound like anyone else’s voice, I tell them. It’s an excavation, not a magic trick. We aren’t making something out of nothing. We’re making something out of everything inside you.
One day, I laid out paintings of women on a table and asked each girl to pick one and write a poem from it. I was surprised when the girls picked paintings that looked completely unlike them, yet wrote poems that hit a deeper truth about themselves. One girl chose a painting of a geisha and wrote a poem about being more than a surface. Another chose a surrealist painting where a girl is either floating or drowning in red watercolor. This girl wrote about her blood.
I cannot imagine myself not writing. I go through periods where I don’t want to write as much, but I still feel the need. The problem is that I keep living with my eyes open so I keep seeing things and reading things and having things happen to me. I encounter others daily. And all of those things make me want to write. Perhaps it is because I feel the world swallowing me up and writing is the only seatbelt I have, tethering me to little moments, raw bites I can handle.
On and On
Lately, I have been on trains. I have slept on trains, been delayed for hours, drank the bad coffee. In India, I lay feverish on the top bunk for three days, thinking of the mountains I was leaving and thinking of the way my friend said, rock me to sleep, mother train. I drew the blue curtain across my bunk, boxing myself into this body-sized space. Not even body-sized, really: my knees had to be bent. But there I was, alone in my box, surrounded by strangers, all inside this shaky beast. And we were all leaving together. Pushing on and on toward not here.
On some trains, they leave the doors between the cars wide open. My friends and I would stick out heads out of the train to watch the sunset. You don’t realize how much light gets lost inside a train until you dare to stand near the opening. You don’t realize how lost you are, how useless your beginner Hindi is for reading signs flying by at 80 km/hr, and how you must depend on the generosity of others to tell you when to get off. They will push you out from the inside, with your backpacks and your confusion. There, the crowd will push you toward the taxis, and the taxi drivers will push you into their cars, and they will drive on any side of the road to get you to where you are going as fast as they can. When you arrive, you won’t remember how you got there. Your last memory will be of the opening in the side of the train, and you may imagine that the train itself spit you out, perhaps while it was still moving. You will look for bruises on your ribs, where you must have rolled in the dirt. You may even imagine that the train was sent by God to carry you here, and that your body was the prophecy it was holding so long, and that it could not possibly have held you any longer. If so, you will do what any prophecy does: you will wander across the land and you will speak in a voice that is not your own, a voice that comes to you in dreams and visions. Eventually, your memory will slip away from the details, so you will only remember a period of darkness followed by a period of light. You will tell people that a whale swallowed you up, that you lay inside the beast for three days, that it spit you out on land. You will look for a river, to wash the whale blood out of your pockets.
Enjoyed reading the portions of your portfolio that you posted. You definitely have a gift for writing. Keep it up. Love, Grandma Mac
ReplyDeleteBeautiful. Both your writing and the story that God's telling.
ReplyDeleteLove you...