One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one of the masked executioners said to them, "Any Catholics among you, step out here". As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don't move, we'll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA.

- From Seamus Heaney's Nobel Prize acceptance speech

Where we go when we die

To come back to where we go when we die. I have two thoughts. When I’m trying to sleep or very down and laid up in bed I often return to them. 

One is when we die from hurt. Whether it’s a bullet to the stomach or some sadness. I imagine myself stumbling on and on until I crumple in a heap, and my tears flow into the ground under me until I grow roots and dissolve and turn into a tree. Live out the rest of my lifespan as a big tall tree. Lots of leaves, no feelings. Just sunlight and the companionship of neighboring trees all rustling together in the wind. Then one day when the pain is all gone because so much time has passed, the tree dies and the person wakes up. But there’s no memory of who they were or what was wrong and who they loved. The person starts all over again and maybe even meets someone who knows them from the last life - but they can’t remember and it means nothing to them.

The other one is just dying. You can feel the urge coming on for a long time before hand and tell everyone it won’t be long. Then one day during breakfast or lunch with your family you just suddenly say it’s time, and then get up and walk out toward a body of water. Most people live next to a lake or a pond or the sea, and they follow behind you. When you stumble into the water you start to dissolve from the tips of your fingers and toes like a bath bomb, until, completely submerged, you fizzle away.  Someone who loves you follows you into the water crying and trying to hold on to you but there’s nothing to hold on to.

But the water contains everyone who’s ever dissolved into it. If you miss someone you can go for a swim and feel them holding you. If you talk to the water you hear it murmuring things back.

Most families have a lake where everyone goes and the water is friendly and kids can swim and play there on their own and nothing bad can happen to them. If your people are in the water, you see a shimmer on the surface in the night. Sometimes immigrants or orphans are surprised to find some body of water in some foreign place that recognizes them, and calls out to them when it’s dark.

A lot of people go into the sea so the sea is friendly to everyone. Water evaporates and comes back as rain so that’s friendly too. Even the shower or the coffee is friendly, in a nice stranger who smiles at you at the bus stop kind of way. 

So actually no one is really ever alone.

On being a badly bound book

Recently I had a pretty bad spell of anxiety and depression for no apparent reason. One part may be the fact that while I was in Taiwan I had to always be present and correct when shit hits the fan, and perhaps that’s left me with less resources than I would normally be able to scrape together. Whatever the reason, it’s  always like juggling on a alpine mountainside in winter, where one dropped ball launches an avalanche and all of a sudden I remember how much stuff I have to be sad about, if I ever took the time. 

Back in the little basement flat in Toronto when I cried over books full of photos of Audrey Hepburn and promised myself that my life would be beautiful one day, I didn’t foresee that when I got there, I would have trouble believing in it. Now everything is good but I’m worried that there’s a something just around the corner, beyond the next blind-spot, which is waiting to shove me to the ground. 

Fortunately for me when I tell this to them, they let me cry and shield me and tell me that the things I fear will never come to pass. A sat on the sofa, face full of compassion, while I cried in my old high-back chair, trying and failing to pull myself together. N put his arms around me and let me sob into the collar of his linen shirt, while trains whizzed past us in the garden. S wrote with book recommendations and words of encouragement, responding in detail to my long rambling account of every last weird thought that’s ever crossed my mind (Nothing is actually wrong but the persistent and intense anticipation of what could go wrong and remembering what has gone wrong in the past makes me howl with tears all the time. Sometimes I feel like my chronology is messed up so that things which went bad in chapter 4 makes another appearance in chapter 36 as though I am a bookbinder’s mistake). 

J held me all night while I cried and J rushed home to make sure that I was ok. When I tensely pulled a sponge cake out of the oven and declared that it was a-okay, T asked me if I was happy and I unthinkingly replied yes. He smiled and said good, because that’s what we want. 

It’s a funny thing because T is really… wimpy. Prefers to be soft and cuddly, whines about me being mean when I pan his favorite novels, and is scared of having his blood drawn. In comparison I feel tough as nails. But he suddenly pointed out that it’s just a coping mechanism because I’m anticipating yet another thing that I must survive.Turns out I’m not very tough after all just hoping to fake it till I make it.

I have all the good fortune and everything that is required to make me happy. All I need to do is take possession of it. Believe that it happened because me. Because we wanted it, and we built it. It seems that while I’ve stopped worrying about how things should be, I am still working on enjoying how things are. 

The other day on the phone with F he suddenly said but what if things go right? I’m trying to hold onto that all the time. 


Another thing that’s been playing on my mind is intrinsic vs. relative worth. It seems to me that I’ve been conditioned to equate my self worth with my productivity, academic achievement, appearance, and comparison to my peers, among other things.  

One day T and I were on the phone and he said are you ok you look tired? I was like yes it's PMS and this is how I look and how I will look for a while - old and tired, because I am. Then I apologized and he was like what the fuck for? Then I realized that I see being attractive as one of my core competencies and if I'm failing on that front I should be sorry. It's not how I would think of friends or lovers but it's how I think of myself like what the fuck is wrong with me. 

They got me young and now it’s a reflex I can’t work myself loose from. I’m lucky in that my partners really don’t seem to think that way. When we went for a walk together after my first ersatz birthday party (Sunday afternoon at the old airfield), none of them were thinking about why I held someone's hand more often, and if that means they are more important to me. Someone asked me whose hand I held during the walk there and back and when I asked them, they were like… it depends on who was talking to whom? Like why is that even a question. 

If their needs are met, they don’t wonder if someone else is better. I wish I were like that, but I cling to the illusory crutch that I am comparatively, relatively better, in some tangible way (as a giraffe would say - taller). Everyone has received the memo that this useful lie is to be kept up at all times. Luckily they don’t seem to find it an issue. 

Though N did ask me whether there isn’t something that I bring to the table that is uniquely mine. I hesitated and said… money? He was like, uh, no. Perhaps it’s one clue to solving the problem - like how I never compare myself to trans girls because I literally couldn’t grow a dick if I tried so why bother? (T suggested that I simply must find the dick in everyone else so I stop comparing). We are lovely and different creatures. Maybe one day I’ll see everyone like that - no more tallying up points. Like how when Katarina told Ben that her six year old can cycle 30 km in one day, Ben asked yeah but he can play the lute?

I'd like to feel sure of my intrinsic worth because rationally I think I'm very worthy of love. Even though just writing that makes me doubt myself a little, in the way that birthday parties make me wonder why I'm even worth celebrating.

So next year on my ersatz birthday I'll go all out and get party decorations. I'll send invites well ahead of time and let people know it's my birthday. 

The Mower

The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence   
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind   
While there is still time.

- Philip Larkin

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

- Maggie Smith (the other one)

The Visitor

 A neighborhood tuxedo cat’s walking the fence line

and the dogs are going bonkers in the early morning.

The louder they bark, the more their vexation grows,

the less the cat seems to care. She’s behind my raised

beds now, no doubt looking for the family of field mice

I’ve been leaving be because, why not? The cat’s

dressed up for this occasion of trespass, black tie

attire for the canine taunting, but the whole clamor

is making me uneasy. This might be what growing

older is. My problem: I see all the angles of what

could go wrong so I never know what side to be on.

Save the mice, shoo the cat, quiet the dogs? Let

the cat have at it? Let the dogs have at it? Instead,

I do what I do best: nothing. I watch the cat

leap into the drainage ditch, dew-wet fur against

the day lilies, and disappear. The dogs go quiet

again, and the mice are safe in their caves, and

I’m here waiting for something to happen to me

Ada Limón

Futility

 Move him into the sun— 

Gently its touch awoke him once, 

At home, whispering of fields half-sown. 

Always it woke him, even in France, 

Until this morning and this snow. 

If anything might rouse him now 

The kind old sun will know. 

Think how it wakes the seeds— 

Woke once the clays of a cold star.

Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides 

Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir? 

Was it for this the clay grew tall? 

—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil 

To break earth's sleep at all?

Wilfred Owen

My candle burns at both ends

 MY candle burns at both ends;

  It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends–

  It gives a lovely light!

Edna st Vincent Millay

Happiness

Why, Dot asks, stuck in the back

seat of her sister’s two-door, her freckled hand

feeling the roof for the right spot

to pull her wide self up onto her left,

the unarthritic, ankle – why

does her sister, coaching outside on her cane,

have to make her laugh so, she flops

back just as she was, though now

looking wistfully out through the restaurant

reflected in her back window, she seems bigger,

and couldn’t possibly mean we should go

ahead in without her, she’ll be all right, and so

when you finally place the pillow behind her back

and lift her right out into the sunshine,

all four of us are happy, none more

than she, who straightens the blossoms

on her blouse, says how nice it is to get out

once in awhile, and then goes in to eat

with the greatest delicacy (oh

I could never finish all that) and aplomb

the complete roast beef dinner with apple crisp

and ice cream, just a small scoop.

- Wesley McNair

Saki

 “While the Shepherds watched their flocks by night / All seated on the ground / A high-explosive shell came down / And mutton rained around.”

The Lantern Bearers (Maxfield Parrish, 1908)

 

Poetry and Documentaries

 Last night we went to bed early and lay there each doing our thing. I found Good Poems on my Kindle and giggled at the biographies of the anthologized poets (he stabbed Marlowe just to watch him die). Then I found out that Wallace Stevens was an executive at an insurance firm and wrote poems during his commute. I had to read you The House Was Quiet and the World was Calm. Then I had to read you To His Coy Mistress. Then you asked me about the Metaphysical Poets so I had to read you A Valediction Forbidding Mourning. Then you showed me one of your favorite BBC nature documentaries about South America. It's the kind of evening that makes me grateful for every bit of my Boring Little Life (trademark pending). 

Love is Not All (Sonnet XXX)

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 –1950)

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; 

Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink 

And rise and sink and rise and sink again; 

Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, 

Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; 

Yet many a man is making friends with death 

Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. 

It well may be that in a difficult hour, 

Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, 

Or nagged by want past resolution’s power, 

I might be driven to sell your love for peace, 

Or trade the memory of this night for food. 

It well may be. I do not think I would. 

my new office hours

 

Zelda