In Every Story She Writes [revised]

the sons have red hair that won't cooperate,
chase unlucky toads, and lose annual footraces
to clever and unhappy daughters.

Mothers wear plaid aprons and listen
to political radio programs, slamming spatulas
on the counter and cursing those goddamn
commies when the kids are outside.

Fathers come home from work early or not at all,
and spend weekends at jazz clubs
regretting that they stopped playing bass.

First loves will end for foreseeable reasons
that daughters are about to explain in a cafe
when the final sentence reads, “Then a bomb went off”;

death, as if by principle, takes no enlightened turn.

Old Wishes [re-lineated, as image so the indents will show up]

Oh, how I miss the days
of the Bubonic Plagues,
my neighbors was in graves
and didn't ask for eggs.

Chin-Wag: An Interlude

Maybe we could go on a pilgrimage to Canterbury because a pilgrimage there is supposed to be healing and I need healing and you probably do too. We could bring horses and medieval capes and baguettes and strangers and tell stories to entertain each other the whole way there and whoever tells the best one gets a free meal and drinks. Maybe we could tell stories about ourselves but I'm not sure we could do it in a way that is true so maybe it is better to make them up.

Let's pretend we are on the road to Canterbury now. I am going to tell you a story and you pretend you are walking and in England and maybe it will help you with things. Maybe it is talking that is healing and not walking on a road at all because why would sore feet and going more places make you better? But I think you should pretend you are walking just in case.

Okay this is it:

Once there was a girl who decided she would never wake up. Right after dinner she climbed the ladder to her room in the loft, changed into her favorite pink nightgown, and put a quilt on her bed so she wouldn't get cold when winter came in a few months. After crawling under the covers, she blew out the candle by her bed, closed her eyes, and right away she started dreaming.

She had the most grand adventures in her dreams but she was never scared even when things were very dangerous because she knew it was a dream. In one of her dreams she and a blacksmith and a monk had to protect a village against a pack of wolves and the only weapon they had was one sword. In another dream, she was a princess who wanted to learn magic even though it was forbidden. Late one night she cut off all her hair, dressed like a servant boy, and ran away from the castle with her pet bird. She might have had to hit one guard over the head real hard so he wouldn't squeal. Her favorite dream was when she was a deer and spent all day in a meadow drinking from the stream and running so fast her ears blew back against her head.

Sometimes she had dreams about her family. Like the one where her sister married the most handsome man in the most beautiful church in the middle of a field and there was white flowers and music and dancing and a cake as tall as you can stretch your arms wide and grandparents and cousins and even her old boyfriend because they forgave each other and are friends now. She dreamed her brother became a judge who always knew who the bad men were and the whole town went to his birthday party and shook his hand and built a brand new library for his house.

The one dream she did not like was when her mother and father died of a coughing disease. Even though they were old and couldn't hear what their children or grandchildren said and it was good they died together so they didn't have to live alone, if you saw her sleeping you would have seen tears making her hair and pillow wet. After this dream she did not know if she liked dreaming anymore but she had been asleep so long she did not remember how to wake up. She had more dreams about waterfalls and fairies and climbing trees and swimming underwater like a fish but it was hard to forget the one dream even after she had been dreaming for a very long time.

That is all of my made up story and I do not know if it has a good ending and now it is your turn to tell a story.

[p.s. now I've used the label 'fiction'! hooray!]

Chin-Wag Part 3: Little Gidding

[warning: the picture is not a picture of Little Gidding. I will upload the right photos when I have my computer again]

Little Gidding is a place in the countryside of Cambridgeshire and T.S. Eliot said nice things about it most importantly that it is "the world's end" and is "the intersection of the timeless moment" and isn't that a nice thing to say about a place so why not go see it? There is a group of thirty British people who walk five miles to get to Little Gidding on an annual pilgrimage and it just happened to be the day you came. If you get a little lost on your way because people who have tongue rings do not give very good directions, you'll miss most of the service but will still get to have tea. You might meet a nice man from Ecuador and his friend who is named either Bonny or Johnny or Lonnie and has bad teeth and doesn't know English well so you just stand by him weirdly until one of you leaves. Did you know the word weird comes from the Medieval word Wyrd which means fate? I think that is interesting.

The haystacks in the field are impossible to climb and you might rub your eyes and regret it a lot when you learn you are allergic to hay. The flies will get bored and leave when they realize you are not cow poop. The wind will be cold and strong because it blows across so many fields to get to where you are. There are trees but mostly fields and the sky is so big and open that you will feel like the patient etherized upon a table but without the etherization or whatever it's called.

Even if you are not reading Hamlet you will feel alone. Maybe "what you thought you came for / Is only a shell, a husk of meaning" so it is okay you don't have any great thoughts and only feel like an ant like Charles the First might have when he visited here before he was executed. You might think about Van Gogh who shot himself behind a haystack in a wheat field. At first I thought it must have been storming then too and he was also watching the clouds move across the sky towards him and feeling the rain blow on his face and the wind was making it hard to stand but then I decided it was sunny. When it gets dark like that you want to shout at the sky and survive and prove you can beat it so I bet there were birds chirping instead.

It turns out you can climb the haystacks and you only picked the wrong one before but your friend can show you the right one. When you get to the top you will wish you had memorized poetry with bad weather like when people curse storms but all you know is "Blow foul winds, blow!" from when King Lear was on the heath and since you don't know the rest of the speech you just yell "Lear on the heath!" which is not very effective. You can try various Attempts to Contain the World poses and your friend will do the Calmly and Strongly Confronting Life pose which says a lot about her. You can talk about that more when you are safe inside the room made especially for short people.

The next day you can visit Steeple Gidding and see that it is disappointingly well-kept and visited too often for it to be cool even in the slightest. Be sure to talk to the cows on the way there because they are nice and will look at you for a long time and not even get bored. On the walk back you will remember the old man from the bus ride who held a photograph of a row of houses and traced the bushes connecting the front yards with his finger. I guessed that it is where he grew up because the photographs were from the 40s and he was about 70 but maybe it was where his wife grew up and she was too sick or dead to make the trip. Either way he was very careful with the photographs and kept them in a yellow envelope. What was crazy was that the hair on his arms was still blonde. I noticed because he had tattoos that were only blobs because the ink ran together and at the same time he had shoes that velcro shut. Weird.

Today a different old guy walked by me and two people all reading Canterbury Tales in Port Meadow in Oxford and he said "By jove! Look at those swots" and we smiled because he was smiling even though we didn't know what he meant. Swot is British slang for a studious scholar, but the word is "often used derisively" and maybe I should be offended but when British people talk it is best to smile and laugh or say something witty.

Chin-Wag Part 2: Tintagel

Hello are you there? Okay I will tell you about Tintagel. The cliffs are hard to get to and you will have to carry your backpack to the hostel so pack light and maybe exercise so you will be ready. The cliffs are very steep and if you take pictures they look like they are from a helicopter even though you are only standing on the ground. I would say you can see for miles but since it is in England I should say kilometers. There is a cave called Merlin's cave and I stole a magic rock from it that I will show you but not let you keep when I get back. Merlin was trapped in the cave by a girl he loved who did not love him back. He is not there anymore or else he did not respond to his name when I yelled it or maybe he is just old or too sad about the girl to talk which could happen.

There are fields that smell like cow poop so be careful where you sit to read unless you like the smell of cow poop or the wind is blowing the other direction or you are too lazy to walk far. Even if you read Hamlet you will not feel alone and that is why Tintagel is a good place. On one cliff you can see fields far away and the beach far below and the sun set over the ocean. After a while the seagulls will fly real close to you and ants will crawl on the same rock you sit on because they trust you. If you watch the ants and trace the lines in the rocks carefully there is as much to see there as in the whole sky and all the blowing grass and the beach. Waves hitting the rocks is a peaceful sound until the sun sets and then it is like moaning but it is getting cold and you should head back anyway.

Late at night you should go to the graveyard. Bring other people too because it is dark and you get lost easy and you want to be friends with them. Be very quiet when you creep past the old bus with the gypsy girl who was playing recorder earlier because now her friends are there for a bonfire and they might be dangerous and it is more fun to sneak. At the graveyard there will be one candle flickering inside the chapel that you can see through a slat in the door and if you are brave you will find an open window and crawl inside and kneel on the stone floor and pray in front of the candle but I am not brave so I don't know if there are ghosts or thieves waiting in there. It is important to stand on top of a stone wall and quote as much poetry as you know to the graves and the moon and the people you are with. Your friends might recite poetry too and the cold wind will make you shiver and the grass will rustle like it is shivering too and be sure to walk back holding at least one friend close because it is more dark than when you left and you don't have a flashlight and even the gypsy has gone to sleep so it must be a bad time of night.

I'm finished talking about Tintagel at least for now.

Chin-Wag Part 1: London, etc.

Sometimes there is a nice person sitting next to you on the plane from O'Hare to Heathrow who went to College of Dupage but is now from Pheonix. He might be a psychologist who works for the air force and is going to a conference about flight simulators and intuition learned from experience like when a fireman knows everyone should leave a burning building and then the roof collapses after everyone gets out.

Digestives are delicious and good for tummies that hurt and fried eggs are actually sunny-side-up eggs and cars all go the wrong way so watch your back which means look out. There are so many cathedrals with dead kings and saints buried inside them that after a while you don't care anymore. Sometimes the castles and abbeys are in ruins and you can see the sky and clouds because there is no roof. Tintern Abbey is basically a stone jungle gym that would be fun to climb on if people didn't yell at you for it. The only thing that should be spoken at Dover beach is the poem "Dover Beach" because that is everything that needs to be said there but maybe you could play cello if it is not raining.

In London there is a Peter Pan statue that is hard to find, and a Rothko/Turner exhibit at the Tate Britain that is free and if you are there long enough it will make you cry so you should leave if you wear eyeliner and probably just go see Wicked which you shouldn't and I didn't either. The Liberty Bounds is a restaurant with fish and chips for £4.99 and was recommended by the boat tour guide who knew what he was talking about and said one of the bridges was built by women only and is very strong. Large groups of British people smell like cigarettes and alcohol so if you don't like that you should not go there in the first place. "Waiting for Godot" has good words but unless you like words a lot you should not get the twenty percent view of the stage tickets even if it is Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart.

If there is a long day trip you should skip it to get a ticket to see "Hamlet" especially if Jude Law is playing Hamlet. If you are alone the couple next to you will buy you coffee because they see you can't leave the line, and the tall man with spikey hair will tell you they live not far from the city and he is an Irish literature professor and his favorite author to teach is James Joyce because the students like him, and the woman with long curly hair will hold his arm and he will kiss her forehead and she will tell you Michael Jackson is dead and would you like to read about it in the paper and have part of my ham sandwich. They will wave at you from the box seats and you will be happy and hope it makes them as happy you. If you are alone your heart will be heavy when the curtain opens and all through the acts because the world is sad enough to make a person go mad and Hamlet and is alone so you should go see him alone.

The Dragon School is a boarding school in Oxford for British schoolchildren and has no dragons or else they hide them very well. If you steer a punting boat badly, you might separate a mother duck from her ducklings and they will swim around confused and you will feel bad about yourself even though you only wanted a close-up picture. Philip Pullman has crazy hair and lives in Oxford with the ducks and will sign a book he wrote that you buy at Borders but does not know Dr. Jacobs who is the person you know that he is most likely to know. A lot of people took a lot of time to replicate C.S. Lewis' house and it probably wasn't necessary.

I have a test tomorrow and should leave but want to tell you about Tintagel which is the most beautiful place in the world at least that I have seen.