Category: Poetry

Notes from a Road Trip

The Decay of Living

Did you ever have one of those days (years, lives) when everything breaks? The one where you look at the pot handle lonely in your hand as the pot you wanted to fill with water clangs onto the kitchen floor, and you scream, “I’m so glad this is hard.” Dumb tasks that should take a second become all-day quests on the scale of Don Quixote. The other morning one of the little plastic doohickeys on the collapsible plastic tube that keeps the toilet paper attached to the porcelain thingy on the wall snapped off when I tried to replace the roll. My first instinct in cases like this is to try and fix it. So several squirts of epoxy and some duct tape later I realize, “For the love of god, Lisa, stick this in your bag and go to a hardware store.” $2.99 + tax later, all was mended. But the cost to my day? Priceless.

Everything, it seems to me lately, is breaking. The existential stuff, sure, but what about my parents’ yard? The other week when I visited Virginia, brother Jeff and I pulled into our parents’ driveway, and the first thing I noticed was all the chickweed in the flower beds. By this time of year, those beds are cleaned out, mulched, and planted with petunias, but ol’ Bernie in his 89th year has a hernia and was waiting for surgery, so all the planted beauty was on hold. Upon surveying the rest of “estate,” I noticed piles of oak tree spooj, er, “catkins,” in pond form on the driveway and pea gravel patio; periwinkle out of control; a dead dogwood. So after days of rain, during which I cleaned their house, stocked up at the grocery store, and did whatever other daughter stuff was needed, I set off for outside to pull chickweed and sweep up the driveway.

Within ten minutes of using the outside broom—mended at the bristle-handle connection several times over with Gorilla (TM) tape—it broke past repair. The handle coating was cracking in strips. The third time I used the dustpan it literally crumbled in my grasp.

WHAT IS HAPPENING?

I just turned 59, so you’d think I’d just roll with all this, but in truth I got weepy, not because of the broom and dustpan, though sure, it was an inconvenience (I texted Jeff to please buy one at Lowe’s while he was there picking up a new latch for the 50-year-old front storm door, the one that caused our father to get locked out the previous morning while out getting the paper at 4:30 AM—fortunately we are all early risers and I heard the knocking while Jeff was in the bathroom and our mother still in bed with her coffee). It’s that all this infrastructure breaking down mirrors my parents’ physical and mental deterioration; inevitable though it is, and tough old birds that they are, it’s not something you can just smile through. Though we do, often as not.

Couple this personal existential stuff with the coming end of the democratic experiment in America—and forget that, what about the EARTH?—and I have to ask, how are we all not losing our minds?

Blooms Buried

This spring, everything bloomed a full month early. (New York City—a city of subzero winters and months-long snowpack when I moved here 20 years ago, had the warmest winter I can remember, and sadly will probably never know such cold winters again in my lifetime; my co-op doesn’t even bother to order salt anymore, and we used to order a dozen bags a winter.) I do not celebrate this. Lilacs, a mid-May flower, were here and gone in early April; so were the daffodils, tulips, and azaleas (a late May bloom), all at once. I don’t know if you follow bloom schedules, or enjoy the unfolding of seasonal changes as I do, but last spring’s walks were simply miraculous, helping me emerge out of my Covid coma, spring taking its sweet time moving from crocuses, to daffodils, to tulips, to blossoming trees, to irises, right up to honeysuckle.

This year, it’s like the whole bloom gang showed up drunk to your spring party and passed out as they handed you their coat.

My friend Tom, a Virginia native, retired English teacher (mine, in high school), and avid gardener, called me from his Arlington home a week or so before my visit, freaking out about this seasonal disruption. “What is happening? Everything bloomed for a split second and was gone! I can’t keep up!” He was also freaking out because of the steady and unstoppable decline of his partner and spouse of fifty years, Ron, who was dying of cancer of the bile duct in a nearby nursing home. And as passionate about politics as he is about poetry, Tom was also having apoplexy over the Republican Party’s transparent policies to unapologetically end democracy. Death was in his garden, in his home, in his country. It was all just too much to handle all at once, and yet there he was, handling it.

Before I could visit, Ron died shortly after I arrived in Virginia, peacefully but still unexpectedly around noon on May 2, right there with Tom. It happened the day after the 50th anniversary of their meeting. EMTs, police, inquest, courthouse, death certificate, phone calls to insurance and Medicare and Social Security and Dominion Power and the bank…and not a second to grieve. Our whole American system is hurry-up heartless. Tom only spoke to one actual human, who was so kind, while the rest was AI simulation voices or operators from overseas reading from a script of “How can I help you today?” to “I am sorry I could not fulfill your request.” Fuck them all.

Tom’s obituary for his partner and spouse of 50 years, in my journal.
How do you measure a man’s life?

Today is Mother’s Day, and so far Lynne is hanging in there. On Thursday, May 18, the good lord willing and the creek don’t rise, my parents will celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary. On June 5, my dad is scheduled for outpatient hernia surgery. Meanwhile Jeff is cutting the grass and trimming out the lawn; we bought a hanging basket for the backyard while I was home. And Tom is trying to figure out a good time to have a gathering to remember Ron, at their home, maybe this June; and Democrats still use their elected offices for governance of and for the People, bless ’em.

Miss O’ and mom Lynne, May 2023
Miss O’ and brother Jeff O’, train station, Virginia
Bernie and Lynne with their oldest child and youngest grandchild (not Miss O’s)

Our Earth continues to warm at a beyond alarming rate. Republicans are breaking democracy. Declines happen. But the death of the Earth, the death of democracy, unlike human death, is not inevitable. We don’t have to lose them. We don’t have to annihilate all life as we know it just because a few people are having, I guess, really bad days (years, lives) and are taking it out on all of us.

This week I sent money to Biden to stop fascism and Brady to stop guns. At the farmer’s market on Saturday, I bought plants for the porch pots on my little deck over the trash alley here in Queens. Every little bloom counts. It has to.

Porch pots of Queens.

Somehow, we persist. You persist, too.

Notes on a Crack Up

Prelude to a Crack Up

Sunday morning around 9:30 AM, errands around Queens: An old Chinese woman in a wheelchair stuck in a groove of the automatic door of a grocery store, when the pusher popped the chair over it, and then I saw he was an old Chinese man, quite small, evidently her husband. How do we do it, we wretched creatures, I thought. And yet off they went, continuing to the next errand. Ahead was a 30-ish brown-skinned man, Arab maybe, with red highlights in his closely shorn hair, new-looking boots and navy pants, rubbing a scratcher with a coin, eagerly, turning this way and that as he scratched. What does he want the money for? Beyond him was an old fat lady like myself, except that her big hair, sans hat, was dyed brassy reddish brown, roots in her center part, and I wondered what kind of a person I would be if I were the sort who dyed her gray hair. (And when I saw this woman I experienced a rippling puddle of a memory of a dear poet friend, who had dyed her hair (this was years and years ago now) a dark brown before I arrived at her apartment, where I found her panicked with a violent rash around her neck and ears, and she needed me to take her to the Urgent Care clinic; and I remember being sort of relieved, because she was always so smart and strong-minded and perfect, that I finally got to see her humanized, even if only by an allergic reaction.)

Further walking for the second set of groceries (the first round involving a 5 pound sack of flour and chicken thighs and cans of broth) found me passing a tall, slender young man (gay, I’d say) upright in a navy pea coat, hands in pockets, and a young woman in a short parka and pom pom hat, both of them white, he talking of sound engineers and an orchestra, her saying “yeah.” As I passed them, I couldn’t help noticing that, between 50th Avenue and 48th Avenue, 45th Street looks a lot better than 46th Street, and I have to wonder why.

Sometimes I think in poems.

At the Liquors Store on Greenpoint

You know there’s a son in Italy, or a daughter

Trying to explain to their dad, or grandad,

That no one needs wine bottles this heavy,

That the same 750 ml of wine can be delivered

In bottles with a third the amount of green glass,

That it’s a waste of resources, a needless expense

For red wine $13.99 American,

And that the grandfather, or father, is misting over

For a time when the full weight of any endeavor was

Worth its weight in green glass, in wine, in gold.

Cracking Up 1, A Self Destroyed

Yesterday I learned that a dear old friend’s 48-year-old son took his own life on New Year’s Day. Nearly a decade ago he had a complete mental break, coincidentally occurring the day I was driving country roads out to visit them all from New York. It was a shocking episode that led, after a long hospitalization and months of tests, to a diagnosis of treatment-resistant schizophrenia. An author of a dozen books and hundreds of scholarly articles, a professor and head of an MFA writing program, a happily married husband and gentleman farmer from a great family, he showed no signs of anything like a coming collapse, simply no warning. The deterioration of his brain led him to, among many other awful changes, divorce his loving wife, who never knew what hit her; retreat to a cabin with a dog; try to write only to find the voices telling him to smash his laptop. There’s much more to this story, deeper, harder, uglier; also moments of great success, almost normalcy, too; until his brain became, according to the mutual friend who messaged me yesterday, a doctor herself, “treatment refractory.” I’m still in shock myself, and a few texts exchanged with his mom, my friend, after she didn’t answer the phone, told me she was still in shock, too, also full of rage over mental health services and the lack of them in our country, still after 100 years to know better we still don’t really act better on what we know. (Even in New York City, once again, the mayor has begun institutionalizing homeless people against their will based on nothing but, say, a police officer’s random gut reaction.) I think about how immediately all of the life you have known can be destroyed, and quickly; or horribly slowly; or in the blink of an eye at the hands of the ignorant and stupid.

Cracking Up 2, A Self Recovered

On the other side of that mountain, my friend Chuck Tripi, a poet, just published his third collection of poems, Wander Where They Will, and this is something to celebrate. Chuck himself has come through a great deal, and out of catastrophe many years ago, Chuck moved from airline pilot to poet, creating a wonderful poetry collective in the Paulinskill Poetry Project in New Jersey and publishing two collections I just love, Carlo and Sophia and Killer Pavement Ahead.

The year before Covid, Chuck’s beloved wife Barbara, a poet and photographer, died. After Barbara died, Chuck struggled in many ways while living in an assisted living facility when Covid hit. I spoke to him on the phone only once, and he was a shell of himself; he never thought he’d leave the place alive let alone write again. So this volume is nothing short of miraculous. I wouldn’t mention any of the particulars of Chuck’s life except that he has now poured his experience into this new volume, which is a heartbreaker because of the lucidity of his lines. Chuck’s is a soul that inspires me in its expansiveness and generosity, sure, but goddamn this man dives deep into every emotion that scares the shit out of most of us, and I love him for it.

Cracking Up 3, A House Divided

What is there to say about the Republican Party, so transparently craven, selfish, hateful, dangerous? A week of a shit show without shame that debased the United States in every new low, lows beyond what we thought was the nadir of January 6, 2020. But no. In his pursuit of the Speakership, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) gave away whatever it took to win, including the dissolution of the House Ethics Committee, which promise didn’t seem to make the cut as of yet. The spectacle is only beginning, in that no one in the Republican Party is in office to serve anyone except themselves and to do whatever it takes to hurt Democrats. (I just don’t get why a Constitutionally guaranteed free press would deliver Republican lies as equivalent to Democratic facts.) The Republicans have created the wedge that is cracking us up. The press helps them, as does the worst of the Christian Church.

Here’s what makes me crazy: Like the Republican Party, the Church asks for your money to help them keep their institution going, while expecting you to solve all your problems with prayer. Why do so many people—who would have enough but don’t because they fall all over themselves to pour out all their tithes into the coffers of church pastors for whom no amount will ever be enough, apparently, to buy their flock into heaven—never learn? And they transfer that addiction to tithing over to their elected officials.

Deliver us from the ignorant and the stupid and the mean, those who would destroy because they can.

Here we are, after a month of binge eating and binge drinking, coupled with this desolation of spirit, and I can’t help wondering about why we think food will fill the well where a soul should be. For me, poetry is a balm. Why is it we keep failing to heed all those millennia of lessons and poems?

Cracking Up 4, Enough is not Enough

So many posts on social media, including my own, ask for nothing more out of 2023 than for everything to calm the fuck down. Just…boring. Be boring. Just for a while. Boring is not sustainable, of course, because boring makes us sleepy. I feel like there’s not enough energy to feed on right now. Why do nearly all the musical artists now sound like they are falling asleep in mid verse? Ref: See Billie Eilish and that cute trio on Instagram, great talents all but but but. I like my music to make me dance, to wake me up, to quicken my blood and mind. And I love a soft song as much as the next person, but mostly I enjoy music that makes me feel something, even sadness, but not music that makes me want to give up. As the poets show us, there is a needed tension between longing and fulfillment, catastrophe and recovery, repentance and redemption, Tom and Jerry. Where was I?

In my travels I came across this quote:

“The restlessness in the human heart will never be finally stilled by any person, project, or place. The longing is eternal. This is what constantly qualifies and enlarges our circles of belonging. There is a constant and vital tension between longing and belonging. Without the shelter of belonging, our longings would lack direction, focus, and context; they would be aimless and haunted, constantly tugging the heart in a myriad of opposing directions. Without belonging, our longing would be demented. As memory gathers and anchors time, so does belonging shelter longing. Belonging without longing would be empty and dead, a cold frame around emptiness. One often notices this in relationships where the longing has died; they have become arrangements, and there is no longer any shared or vital presence. When longing dies, creativity ceases. The arduous task of being a human is to balance longing and belonging so that they work with and against each other to ensure that all the potential and gifts that sleep in the clay of the heart may be awakened and realized in this one life.”

― John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes

The way that Chuck was able to turn his tragedies into art, I want the nation to be reborn out of the dregs. I want to see myself and others find something deep in us to create something life affirming out of our shocks and agonies. Here’s my horoscope for December of 2022, and I want it to guide me into 2023.

Horoscopes by Rob Brezsny

Week of December 1st, 2022

 TAURUS

 (April 20-May 20)

Of all the objects on earth, which is most likely to be carelessly cast away and turned into litter? Cigarette butts, of course. That’s why an Indian entrepreneur named Naman Guota is such a revolutionary. Thus far, he has recycled and transformed over 300 million butts into mosquito repellant, toys, keyrings, and compost, which he and his company have sold for over a million dollars. I predict that in the coming weeks, you will have a comparable genius for converting debris and scraps into useful, valuable stuff. You will be skilled at recycling dross. Meditate on how you might accomplish this metaphorically and psychologically.

The year 2023 has already hit us with a lot of debris. I feel like our souls, like our earth and our politics, are stuffed with detritus that threatens to overwhelm us, and most of us don’t know what to do with it.

I shouldn’t presume—I guess I mean my soul feels sort of shredded up or filled with too much of the wrong stuff or distracted. It’s a shame and shock to let all the shit crack us, er me, into bits, if there is anything within out power to change that, because not everyone is given a choice. All we can do is use what we have and try to make something. I’ll keep you posted.

(FYI: I started my 2023 blog with a new web address, missoshow.com, committing to my WordPress experience by paying for the privilege of posting. It seems time. I thought about changing the blog name to The Miss O’ Show: Reading Glasses. We’ll see.)

Miss O’

Uncategorized

We Don’t Go to the Movies

Miss O’s bathroom reminder not to be late. For whatever.

Pass the Data

The other day I heard a learned philosopher discoursing on self-knowledge. While we used to engage in self-exploration through meditation, sports, or art, for example, Yuval Noah Harrari asks what it means, then, “when this process is outsourced to a Big Data algorithm?” That line stopped me hard. Where Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons, how many of us measure out our lives, our wellness, and our worth in “likes”? in “steps”? in money earned, spent, and saved? in mileage on the bike? in states or countries visited? in our biometric numbers for sugar, cholesterol, weight, percentage of body fat, calories consumed, points earned? lays sought and found on a sex app? books read? shows seen? tweets twatted? MAKE IT STOP.

One way I measure out my mental health and self-worth is through the laughs I generate in others, and judging from that last few years of meager blog posts, posts on social media, and reactions the few times I’ve seen others in person, I am in rough shape. I don’t think this post bodes well for wit, and for that, one of my three or four readers, I apologize.

The most important measure of my mental health for me is my capacity to weep at beautiful songs, singers, poetry, movie moments, pictures, and other acts of human decency. I was just listening to the Barbara Streisand/Judy Garland duet “Happy Days/Get Happy” and found myself in tears. So, check. (I hadn’t thought about the ways in which I might bring others to tears, but I think that happens out of my capacity to irritate more than, you know, move someone by making something beautiful.

You Laughed at an Image

My first boyfriend*, from back in high school, got back in touch recently. He has been with his wife, a fellow artist, happily for 32 years. When they eloped after living together for almost a decade, I mailed them a toaster. They totally got it. He began reaching out to old friends, he said, in the wake of Covid, and on the cusp of age 60 next year. I told him that I myself have actually paid for a ticket to my 40th high school reunion. I am going with two buddies of mine since second grade; my old bf’s was last year, and he said, “MAGA vibe, super spreader event; pass.” Probably true here too, but friend Carl promises it’s really a reunion of friends from elementary and middle school, and it will be fun. Okay.

The best part of the reconnect has been the ART share, in multiple texts; the meme share; the political jokes. According to the data, I laugh and heart a lot, so that must be good. My inner life, I mean. Should I dig deeper?

*Note: I never had any boyfriends. Sure, I went out with two guys in high school, and steadily, and talked about marriage with another guy, but I was ABOVE BOYFRIENDS. And still am. Why? Dunno. Let me ask an algorithm. “You laughed at an image.” I guess I’m fine.

Weekly Report: Your screen time was down 11% last week.

Weekly Report: Your sense of self-worth was down 25% last week and continues to plummet.

Weekly Report: 99.9% of Republicans blame all girls under age 11 who are pregnant for being too hot to resist.

Weekly Report: Humans are fucking up the planet and are fucking fucked but only about 25% of Americans fucking believe it’s fucking true, and YOU are one of them. 

Weekly Report: 100% of meals in America contain tough nuts.

Anything else to REPORT? I mean, there it IS.

Work It Out for Yourself

My Queens basement flooded again yesterday afternoon. Only one inch of rain in an hour. What the hell? Last September my last chance for a vacation for the foreseeable future (and what would have been my first in three years) was swamped over by drain overflow in the wake of Hurricane Ida. My last real vacations were in 2018 in California, Lake George, and here in NYC when friends came for a week to visit. The year 2019 was WORK, the year 2020 was WORK + Covid; 2021 same. But Labor Day week friends and I were going to make a break for Lake George again…and Ida. Since then, my parents, while still sharp and okay, have grown frailer. I spent 5 weeks there this spring to help my dad after a surgery, and help my 85-lb mother, too. Lucky to be able to do it—the sad residual benefit of the pandemic is that we have this new way of working, remotely. And wow does it make me feel remote—from others, from myself. A lot of us are at the point of wondering why we work at all—so many of our jobs are just humans trying to plug the holes and reduce the problems inflicted on humans by the humans who are doing the jobs in other companies and institutions and there is no bottom. Why aren’t we just growing food, singing a little, dancing, and cooking again? What happened? Boredom?

And don’t get me started on the rat infestation at my co-op building, or the super going on vacation and the back-up falling through and me being the only person not afraid of the rats, so this gray-haired fat lady will be sweeping up (including the dead rats) and hauling garbage out for the next two weeks. And temps in the 90’s. This is how I will die. And so what, really?

The opening phrase of the first poem of my friend Jean LeBlanc’s latest collection of poetry, our pitiful metaphors, is, “Work it out for yourself:” and the first time I read it I just about threw the book across the room. I was so tired, you see. I don’t want to be challenged or taunted or berated. I don’t want to work it out for myself. Just tell me my horoscope, give me the meds, the diet plan, the answer. Why is this hard?

“we inflict upon the cosmos our pitiful metaphors.”

I reread the collection this morning, after putting all the flood-soaked towels in the laundromat washer, which sounds like a pretty easy task, until you factor in moving all the shit in the basement mudroom to get the heavy duty cart out, lining it will a big plastic bag, filling it in four trips from bathroom shower to trash alley carrying the drenched textiles, heaving the laden cart up the stairs, locking the gate (dragging it over swollen concrete—is nothing just a thing?—and pushing it all to the facility; followed by returned the cart to the basement, etc. It’s laden with sadness, this poetry collection; arguments, missed connections, and loss. I find myself wrestling with all the terrible beauty. I contrast it with our friend Anna’s collection, Buoyant, about the joys of scuba diving, the poems’ speakers filled with wonder; and our friend Katrinka Moore’s latest collection, Diminuendo, which returns again and again to the sensation of floating, hovering, and the feeling of being connected tenuously by the thinnest of strands. 

“When at last the great animal arrives/ out of the primordial past, mouth wide” (“Grace”)
“but I make my way out. when/ I can. The fetch of space” (“Thin Places”)

There are moments these past few years when I’ve felt held together by only the thinnest of strands; known that I am forever and always having to work it out for myself; and also given a reprieve with moments of wonder, as this week with the first color images from the Webb Space Telescope.

I made the mistake of texting my despair post-flood yesterday to a friend who said, “Fuck, Lisa. Get help. Call 988.” I remembered the first time I went to therapy years ago, my therapist Goldye said, in response to my skepticism about going to a therapist when I have friends: “Our friends don’t care about our pain. They will say whatever it takes to make you okay so we can all go to the movies.” 

Walking in Midtown Manhattan. Look up.

And this is why you walk your neighborhoods, write stuff, draw a little, and don’t share your pain with anyone, not even friends; why we have to turn to the poets, the artists, the musicians in our darkest hours. People have their own shit to deal with, and they don’t need yours. It’s a lonely truth in a lonely world.

Sending love and poetry, somehow. Bless those poets.

Miss O’s desk. Queens.