One of my friends challenged me to write about squirrels. Here goes.
Squirrel Stew
Last year a squirrel with a freakishly long tail, thin as a branch, made it his mission to molest as many animals in the backyard as possible. He chased the other littermates up trees and along wires, ran point blank at a flabbergasted rabbit, swung his tail at crows and finches, and camped in the cedar waiting for new victims. This year I don’t see him. Perhaps he served as a hawk snack, or met his end under an SUV. Bagheera waits on the window sill, hoping for the trickster’s return, the flash of his flexible whip tail like a propeller by the side of the house. In his vigil, Bagheera evokes Kitty and Circe, all suffering cats imported to Michigan from Arizona, along with an infant Lizzie, pets who — after years of desert freedom — all at once found themselves prisoners in a third floor apartment, watching overfed squirrels waddle up from the balcony below to taunt them from behind the safety of the slider. One climbed the screen and presented his round belly, grinning with curved yellow teeth. At night the squirrels’ kits scraped and chittered in our thin walls, nesting in the building’s cheap innards. Our downstairs neighbors, a bitter pair of retirees, fed the rodents handfuls of seed, banged on our ceiling and knocked on our door, ordered us to keep Lizzie from walking over their ancient heads. Kitty began to die. The building across from ours caught on fire, smoldered for an afternoon. Our squirrel feeding neighbors complained about Lizzie’s running overhead. We moved away, at last, and landed here, where only mice found their way into our house, and that building we once lived in, that paper apartment over the chewing squirrels and their withered guardians, burned to the ground.
or paperless, as we call it, what has happened to the humble paperclip?
I don't know about you, but I slide them on as stitch markers when I'm knitting in my office (which is all the time lately).
I suppose we could unbend them a bit and fiddle with the locks, pick open closed doors, uncover secrets printed long ago on yellowing reams abandoned in file cabinets and desks.
I could wear a few in my sagging ear holes. Clip them together to make an industrial necklace or impromptu pair of handcuffs. String them down from my doorway in a shimmering curtain you'll have to part like water if you want to see me, or loop a chain around our potted pine for Christmas in July.
You could have one for a cheap money clip. Stab a few into the dusty cork board instead of the missing push pins.
Or I could just collect a mountain of them, call it a monument to lost papers and concrete connections.
Two more weeks of classes until the end of the semester.
In my next stage of life, I will not grade a goddamn thing.
Remembered Heat
In Tucson the sky stretched for miles and sunsets poured over mountains in purple and red, like spilled wine, and even late at night dragon breath baked the houses into stunned stupor
Thorns, needles, stones, thunder, pock pock pock of woodpeckers drilling nests into saguaro, a bolt of lightning, its crackle electrifying the nostrils -- anticipation, anxiety
The August air, tense with insect scream, dove cries, dry leaf rustles, the soft skid of yellow dust and blazing wind, sucked the sweat out of our skins before it could bead up to provide any thought of relief
The flower of "first love," we planted two of the small lilac trees along the back fence, a chain link short fence dividing our yard from Ruby's, our patchy lawn and Snow on the Mountain excesses from her tended tulips and daffodils, her compost bin and serious yard intentions. One of the bushes thrived and grew well past the top of the fence. The other withered and rotted like some message about the quality of our soil.
Our bush doesn't give the light purple blossoms and heady smell of the legendary hedges of Dave's Connecticut childhood. It's upright and somewhat stingy, its panicles a darker purple with smaller flowers, some Asian variation long lost to my memory.
The lilac's leaves are heart-shaped, an observation I have yet to make with my own eyes. To be honest, there's not a lot of my love lost in that backyard.
The female cardinal has arrived to be wooed. She's a greeny brown that complements the bark of the lilac's still bare branches. She sits now, in the metal fence, waiting for that promised love to begin --
or, wait, that's not her at all, but a shivering winter leaf, brown and curled, dead to this Spring world --
As someone who spent a summer waiting tables at a pizza joint in Baltimore, I can’t think that tipping less is a good idea. People who work as wait staff get paid less than minimum wage (I got paid $1.99 an hour in 1987) and depend on tips for their “living” wage. The job is relentless, hectic, and demanding. Customers (who are always “right”) can be kind but more often it seems they get off on being heartless, entitled bastards. When you add in sports (we were in line for the stadium), booze, and the typical -isms that seem to script people’s behaviors toward strangers, getting a shit tip is like a slap in the face, insult AND injury.
Don’t Forget to Tip
It's come to my attention that Americans are now tipping less and less. What's up with that, people? Do you think the job of bringing food to your table, of getting your drink order right, of putting up with your condescending off color jokes and wink wink nudge nudge behavior is a treat? Do you suppose the piles of wet towels you threw all over the hotel room floor or the vomit you spewed over the bathroom tiles is but a blip in the story of that housekeeper's crushing afternoon? And is the caddy who hikes your expensive bag of clubs from hole to hole unworthy of a true gift at the end of the weary course simply because he's only fifteen? I would end this screed with a stern admonition about caring for others as we'd like to be cared for ourselves but suspect that I'm preaching now to the choir -- dear poetry reader, I bet you tip well, and often, and with a smile in your bleeding heart.
This is from the Wall Street Journal today. I’ve been thinking about how we are living in a post-democratic oligarchy. An oligarchy that masquerades, and badly, at giving ordinary folk a say in how we’re governed. In my darkest hours, I think, too, that we’re mired in a smash-and-grab economy where anyone outside of a small core of uber rich white people are subject to metaphorical and actual search and seizure at any time.
I don’t have any idea how to push back against this monolith.
I’m getting a bit leery of what’s going to happen to my small, beloved city when an influx of football fans from all over the country and world flood us to twice or more of our size. Is it a sign that they’ve been sucking out the sewers lately?
Overwhelming Questions
Why are people these days so mean and unforgiving? Have they never wondered if who they are is not what they're meant to be? Do the rich really think that the poor are that way because they are lazy? And who really believes that race doesn't matter? Or that power doesn't corrupt you down to your core?
Now that everyone is arriving for the NFL Draft, what should we Green Bay locals worry about? Traffic? Celebration excess? Vandalism? Overpopulation? Rogue parking on our lawns? Rivers of shit and icebergs of trash? A strange mutation on the level of our DNA?
Where did I put my glasses? And why don't my eyes work right anymore?
Why does the end of the semester seem so long? Is it just me, or is more than 50% of every class refusing to turn in any homework?
How did the two dead flies get into the florescent light that hangs, sealed, over my desk?
And what the fuck was T. S. Eliot thinking when he wrote "A Game of Chess" to condemn women in general and his wife in particular and then asked Vivienne to type up and edit it?
Is there a God? If so, is She happy with what we've done with things so far?
Linda Schrevens and I wrote this poem together. Here’s a reading we performed (a link to a file on Google Drive).
Adagio
the world weeps gray clouds scrape the pine trees a yellowing willow sways as if dancing to invisible music outside the salty window somewhere the Pope's spirit joins the air
a clock tick tick ticks -- a faucet that won't turn off -- time leaking from a dull April sky
despite the rain a cardinal calls hides its starling red in a bending fir I'm trying to say something --
two flags writhe against the dull sky -- American, Wisconsin -- tugging back and forth snapping and whipping then subsiding but still moving I am too tired to weave them into any metaphor empty of any deeper meaning
what happens when we die? (how does it feel) what does it mean to love utterly and completely? what are the trees telling each other? Is my father in the wind or the rain?
how do we know when we're done? the last prayer word breath each moment ripe full tilt toward the lip of existence
