Epic

We like to think of it as parallel to what we know,
Only bigger. One man against the authorities.
Or one man against a city of zombies. One man

Who is not, in fact, a man, sent to understand
The caravan of men now chasing him like red ants
Let loose down the pants of America. Man on the run.

Man with a ship to catch, a payload to drop,
This message going out to all of space. . . . Though
Maybe it’s more like life below the sea: silent,

Buoyant, bizarrely benign. Relics
Of an outmoded design. Some like to imagine
A cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,

Mouthing yes, yes as we toddle toward the light,
Biting her lip if we teeter at some ledge. Longing
To sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best

While the father storms through adjacent rooms
Ranting with the force of Kingdom Come,
Not caring anymore what might snap us in its jaw.

Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community.
All the tall shelves in the big open room. And the pencils
In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.

The books have lived here all along, belonging
For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence
Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,

A pair of eyes. The most remarkable lies.

                                        - from "My God, It's Full of Stars" by Tracy K. Smith

Tyranny

And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead. Exodus 12:30, KJV

Lesley McSpadden being comforted outside the Ferguson Police Department on Monday night. 
AP Photo/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Robert Cohen

Mothership

I'm at Chick-fil-a in Newnan, Georgia, and I think I've never seen so much makeup in all my life. The girls look like pretty, benevolent aliens, hapless and strange. If I lived here as a girl, or even now, I suppose I  would want to transform into an alien race, too.

I'd huddle up with the other alien-faced girls in someone's basement, in our pajamas, to share secrets. We'd whisper about all the people who are just so wrong about us. Because really we are making plans to call in our mothership.

The time is not quite right yet, one alien-face would say, but it will be very soon. Yes, we all agree, something imperceptible is changing. Soon it will come and take over city hall and the middle school. Soon it will change everything, and everyone will know the truth about us. Then it will be everyone else trying to change their face, not us. Not us ever again.

Rush hour

At dusk after a rain, the city has a fishy look, glittery like Atlantis. And all of us in our slick, slick cars are headed downstream. Moving like this, I could almost be weightless, but all day I've been on my feet, and the touch of my toes on the pedals hurts like a shock. 

 

Of course, of course. It's the hardness of the ground. Now I realize that's what gets me. If I had never heard the click of a heel, I would not now hear the cracking of a skull.

 

In another, fishier world, I could never dream of falling. I might dream of rising.

Persephone and the Pomegranate

They say Persephone was kidnapped. But the old stories always pretend that women are helpless (against villains, against their own naïveté). So I wonder if it didn't happen differently.

Edith Hamilton writes in Mythology that the gods of Olympus were "untouched by lasting grief." So when Persephone first saw him wandering alone, like herself, among the fields of narcissus, when she saw the despair of mortal souls darkly glowing in his eyes, it must have been a paradigm shift for her.

Watching from a distance as the crust of earth arched back to admit him again, she must have felt the shiver in the air. Her mind must have flooded with all the things she had only just begun to know. And poor Hades, as he turned to go, must have dropped the small plucked flower he had been twirling in his fingers. I wonder if he didn't kidnap her. I wonder if he only got to that dark doorway and paused.

She must have run. She must have charged after him, more Faustus than goddess, making her deal with the devil.

Then when the earth closed up behind them, and they stood confused and alone in the darkness, he would have asked, "Who are you?" He would have asked, "Why did you come?" She might have said, "I couldn't let you go alone," or she might have said, "I want to know." She might have only shrugged.

The adjustment wouldn't have been hard for her because she was the right type, the type to want to know and to not let anyone go alone. She would have found herself at ease conversing with lost souls. She would have enjoyed the strange happiness they built for themselves, just listening to one another tell their sad stories and never saying they'd heard it before.

In time, of course, the godly ordinance came that Persephone must return to the earth for half the year. They say Hades tricked her into eating the pomegranate that would engender the darkness inside her. But the earth had become a pleasant inside joke between them, so I think it more likely that she snatched the pomegranate from his hand, knowing all along, just saying, "One for the road."

Of course she would have felt death blooming in her blood. Still, I think, she shot him a sly look as she burst the seeds between her teeth.

Lost

"Life is short!" They say it joyfully, a cheer for experimentation. Or they say it wistfully, with the breathy confidence of conventional wisdom.

They never say it with the terror of gaping paradox.

They never say, "Life is short! But I have waited so long for this day to be over." They never say, "How can life be so short when I have spent so many nights waiting so long for sleep?" They never say, "It seems that life is short, but the more you contemplate eternity, the slower it turns." They never say, "I am unconvinced."

But I am unconvinced. Because I have waited a long time for this day to be over. And because I have contemplated a million things today and I remember almost none of them. Maybe my life is not short but shortened, by the thousands of days blacked out, by the millions of long deliberations and flashes of insight I thought were shaping who I am, but that now may as well have never happened.

Maybe it's the lightspeed of our synapses that makes our life feel so long, the way our thoughts hurtle backwards into untraceable darkness, faster than we can turn to watch them go.

Humanity is 500,000 years old. But what is it that our human history has left us, if each of us loses 90% of everything she ever comprised, every minute? Five thousand years of written history is just the bits of cloth and wood and dust that remained after all the people blew away.

It makes me angry, it's so overwhelmingly frightening, that though I could read everything, all the wisdom of the ages, I can still only be 25. And how sad for you, to be only 50! And how very, very sad, at 80 years old, to have gotten no older by then. And to have started over every minute, your whole life, with only a fraction of everything you held moments ago.

I guess, then, it isn't such a mystery, these frequent moments of panic, and the way I rush to the bathroom mirror to lock eyes with my own face.

Wherein I write my husband's love poem to myself.

My husband posted a very romantic message for me on Facebook today, in honor of our third wedding anniversary, and after three years, my response to his romantic gestures is the same as it has always been: Who, me? For real?

I would have expected him to say something more like this:

To my wife on our third anniversary

Beloved, for three years you have sat on the couch

and eaten Cheez-Its. You have told one thousand

"Your Mom" jokes and fallen asleep during all

my favorite movies. Lovingly you've asked me to take 

the dog out when it is too late, or too cold, or raining.

You maintain the youthful innocence you held 

when we were first married, refusing to admit

the sobering reality that you would not end up

so mad if you only put your shoes in a place

where you could still find them two days later.

Imagine my puzzlement, having heard you use

the word "mofo," and having seen the tv turned to

"Toddlers and Tiaras," to see you the next minute

pulling Shakespeare's hardback face off the shelf,

rolling your eyes and calling my interests "banal."

Every day you scatter absurdity around our house

like love notes, or your socks. And I know already 

how delighted you will be by my writing this metaphor, 

because I have figured out much more than you realize:

I know that to you, a love note is just like a sock.

I know that for you, there is no truth except hyperbole
and no life except absurdity, and it's only you who wishes
you could give me something normal. So as long as
you keep asking "why do you love me?" I remain

content to have no answers that suit you.

 

 

 My dearest husband, thank you for loving me, and for loving me in such a perfect way. In honor of our anniversary, just for today, I won't ask you why.

 

You are the best thing that has ever happened to me, and I love you, too.