A New Poem I'm Working On

Fuck Mary Oliver!

My unfinished masterpiece
with the great opening line

They’ll shout it on NPR
and ask me how
I’m so honest,
so hate and spite full,
jealous and angry,
fucking brilliant!

Fuck Mary Oliver!

Poet
Saint

I spit at her feet
marble feet of the virgin
worn hermit boots
reading glasses
dead muse
cableknit New England sweaters
foxes, bears, geese, sunflowers

I sprout welts from grass
hives from cats
burn from sun
cramp from crouching

Fuck Mary Oliver!

Poems that held me.
Tea stained, bath wet,
dog eared, yellow

Like sycamore leaves
fallen cold in a black pond
in the fading light of a clearing
on the last day of November

Fuck her!
I mean it.
Meeting deer at dawn?
Hearing grasshoppers scratching?
Sleeping in an old truck tire?
Channeling a dying fox?

I have sandwiches to create:
Mayonnaise, whole wheat,
smoked turkey, salami.
Mustard maybe.

Deadlines.
A job.
A home.
A plan.
No time to lose.
No dew spackled pretties.
No deep, no hungry.
No trouble.
No messy.

Raw and real: too beautiful for me

Family Meeting

At dinner with friends who don’t have children, my partner and I were talking about the family meeting we’d held earlier that day. The meeting had been fairly productive, and had not disintegrated too quickly into name calling and stomping out of the room. We were pleased, overall.

Our friends thought this was quite amusing. A family meeting?

“You’re joking, right?” asked one of our companions.

“Oh yes, it’s funny alright,” my spouse said, “The only family meeting we ever had growing up were the ones where the back of my dad’s hand met our face.”

My own parents never hit me without making a formal announcement of my impending spanking.  It was never heat of the moment. But I recall so many painful "family meetings" from my childhood.

One sprang to mind: All of us gathered around the Buick parked in my grandparents' Florida driveway.  It was early morning, a couple of days after Christmas.  Dad threw a protracted cuss-word-filled tantrum over how the suitcases wouldn’t fit in the trunk because we'd packed too much stuff and we were greedy ungrateful children with too many goddam presents.

Is it more evolved to sit down with one’s children and offer everyone a chance to have their say? Or is it better to lay down the law, back it up with some shouting, be prepared to pull off your belt?

I was walking home from the grocery store today and as I rounded the corner I heard a child crying full out.

“You hurt my feelings!” she wailed, as her mother leaned over to see what was the matter, “You hurt my feelings bad!”

“I’m sorry,” the mother began, kneeling, “Tell me, honey.  What did I say that hurt your feelings?”

I continued walking, happy that this child's mom was trying a gentler way. So often, when I witness a kid pitching a fit, I cringe as I watch the parent jerk her arm, or pluck her up and drag her outside, or slap her right there in the doorway to Best Buy:

“Quit your crying right now. Quit it. Or I’ll…”

photo courtesy of Flickr, author Crimfants

There but for the Grace…

We decide that, thirteen and entering 7th grade, he’s plenty old enough to ride the bus by himself.

So, we arm him with a cell phone and instruct him to call upon reaching the bus stop three blocks from school and upon exiting the bus three blocks from his tutoring appointment.

I force myself not to ask for him to check in upon leaving school, upon embarking on the bus, upon disembarking from the bus, upon reaching the math tutor’s, upon leaving the math tutor’s to walk the five blocks home. Don’t want to worry the kid unnecessarily.

I come home. So does the dad. The big brother drags in from high school. It’s Friday afternoon and we’re – uncharacteristically – sitting in the living room chit chatting. We’re speculating about how the younger son is doing with his bus trip.

I’m checking the Chronicle’s website for a movie listing. And there’s the blazing headline:

A boy's horror on his

first solo Muni ride

Sure enough, a darling eleven year-old boy – riding the bus alone for the first time – was stabbed by a crazy man. The kid was on his way home from baseball practice.

According to the report, the boy’s mother “made sure her son repeatedly called her from his cell phone to give progress reports on his ride home.”

“Oh my god,” I choke, “Can you believe this?” I read the lead paragraph.

The dad has the bad taste to ask if it’s our son in the paper. I can’t help but almost laugh.

There’d be no almost-laughing if Hatim, the sixth grader who was attacked, hadn’t undergone surgery and wasn’t now listed in good condition at the hospital.

“It was like something you see on TV – only it was in this life with my child,” the mother was quoted as saying.

I hugged my boy extra tight when he got home.

They haven’t caught the creep who did it yet, and the surveillance tape on the bus came out blank.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/matierandross/detail?blogid=61&entry_id=46939

Moon Rings

He never said so emphatically

but I knew just the same

that he didn’t love me and never would.

I was still determined to love him

and the moon lit up that night with

a ring around it confirming the sad truth.

So many moons,

and rings

and nights washed by waiting

If you’re reading this

don’t think you’re him:
You’re not.

image A 22 degree halo around the moon, as seen from Boulder, Colorado by Hustvedt

It's a Jungle Out There

Adrian Monk. Hottie. We love him. Quirky, lovable, detestable, strange. We’ve watched – or at least my sons have watched – nearly all the episodes of the tv show Monk.

Obsessive compulsive disorder. That’s what the character “Monk” and one of my sons have in common.

When my little guy was first diagnosed I would never ever ever have shown him an episode of Monk, which – if you’re not familiar – chronicles the comical life of a San Francisco detective who has a severe case of OCD.

Yet somehow, one day, when I wasn’t thinking clearly, when I was tired, when I was hungry, when I was just trying to get home, when I was trying not to rent another action or fantasy dvd ala Lord of the Rings or Iron Man or Alien vs. Predator, I grabbed a box of Monk.

Granted, my son had his OCD relatively under control at that point. But still: Here’s a guy who had been paralyzed with having to put his jacket on a certain way, having to sit in his desk a certain way, having to look under the bed a certain number of times before going to sleep at night. Here’s that same guy laughing his head off at a fellow who touches parking meters as he walks down the street, who wishes for square-shaped tomatoes for his BLT sandiwches, who needs an assistant to stand by and supply him with hand wipes so he can get through a normal day.

After regular visits with Adrian Monk – and a bunch of cognitive behavioral therapy – my son can laugh at Monk and himself. And he notices when I group my M & Ms into symmetrical piles of three. No three with the same color. All of them arranged like three-leaf clovers in my palm. Eaten only in threes. Eaten only after inspection and proper disbursement.

Hmmm. Wonder where he got that OCD?

Cat Bath

I’m about to bring out a new condo listing and I’ve offered my client a little extra help because he’s a man living on his own without a helpmate and he’s out of state at the moment helping his father who is also a man living on his own without a helpmate.

A helpmate wipes down the kitchen counter, gathers the recycling, notices the PG&E bill is late, reattaches the dryer hose, takes the car to be washed, talks to the neighbors about the clanging gate, goes to the hardware store for a new toilet flange, empties the dishwasher, sweeps the soot from the front stairs.

The helpmate performs these tasks while you strain penne pasta, remove the dripping compost, balance the checkbook, procure washable placemats, clean the chocolate from around the cabinet handles, hang the delicates to dry, write a thank -you note, toss the moldy strawberries, scrub the floor of the shower.

I’ve been helping my bachelor client by having keys made and meeting the housecleaner and letting the technician in to reverse the handle on the new fridge door. As a matter of fact, at this moment, I’m sitting on the living room sofa in my new listing enjoying a summer-grey view of Ashbury Heights, while the window washer washes the windows. I’m hearing squeegee squeaks, water dripping and the thunk of a bucket on the floor.

There’s a cat in the window across the street. Actually, I’m not sure it’s a cat because I can’t quite see it, but its movements suggest a cat. Some flicks and flashes, languorous stretching, burst of orange fur. Or is it someone washing their hands at the sink? Yes. Someone is at the sink. Someone washing a cat?

Before I sat down here on the couch I peeled the blue plastic off the new stainless refrigerator and stove in the kitchen. I’m sitting because it was exhausting! I swear it took 30 minutes of carefully distributing the weight of my fingers on the edge of the film and then pulling – slowly, evenly and firmly. It was a lot like removing the barcode label from the glass front of a picture frame. One false move and you’re hosed. If it comes off clean, you’re a hero.

I need to remember to bring over some WD40 later, in order to clean up the fingerprints on the stainless surface. Never, ever buy stainless appliances is my advice: Unless you can afford to hire a full-time stainless cleaner or unless you appreciate that quaint smudgy spattered look. Then again, you could just leave the factory plastic wrap in place. It’s actually rather striking, reminiscent of a robins-egg-blue Frigidaire.

Now, back to the window across the way: Is he really washing a cat?

Dermatological

On the way to my son’s dermatology appointment he said “She’ll just shrug when she sees me and she’ll say it’s not so bad.”

His acne, that is, and I knew he was right. The doctor was going to say it was improving and that patience was required. My son would probably be disappointed, because he wanted the bomb, the cure, the magic. Like back when there were no STDs – just VD and it could be taken care of with a pill.

I sat in the waiting room wondering what skin conditions had brought those people to the dermatologist. Their faces looked fine. A bad rash? Scabies? The heartbreak of psoriasis? Bumps, scars, fissures, pits, scrapes, nits, protrusions, cysts, melanoma? One of those ghastly conditions pictured in a medical book? Every time I get an itch I consult that book so I’m well acquainted with the photographs.

I’ve had my share of skin problems. Acne. Contact dermatitis. Poison ivy. Rosacea. Hives after a night of adventure when I was 18: I woke up writhing, with welts all over my body for the first and only time in my life. I was sure it was brought on by doing it with a boy I’d just met at a bar, or using a fake i.d. to get into the bar, or drinking mass quantities of alcohol at the bar. This is the punishment I deserve, I decided, for screwing strangers and guzzling Singapore Slings.

The doctor prescribed some new cream for my boy and we walked to the pharmacy, where I looked around and wondered exactly what had brought all these people to the drug store. What, I considered, were their stories? Would I really want to know? Or would it be too upsetting?

After the little box of balm was paid for, we stepped into the sunshine. My son was blinking and looking up at the blue sky day. I was pretty sure he wished he didn’t have to go to school.

“You know, here I am worrying about my acne, just a normal part of life,” he said, “and there were all those other people coming in for their problems. They probably had worse problems than me. It makes you think, huh?”

He smiled and that cute little dimple of his appeared among the zits. I thought to myself (but didn’t say), “Gosh, you are a handsome young man!”