movie recommendation: Burning Man

 

I've been thinking a long time about this, and I've finally decided that Burning Man is the film The Master would be if The Master were less concerned with being pretty and more concerned with being good.

Mary Oliver

Ask any poem and it will say
It is tired of being left in the woods.

I went to woods – all the way

To woods – and was still in my old

Shape, not wood-shaped as woods

Are or poem-shaped as a boy would

Have me – should he know the shape

Of that old poem made of woods.

If there were fewer poems, it’s sure

That there would be more woods

Or at least more paper airplanes we

Could use to travel by if we would

Go from wood to wood the shape

Of paper when it is laid out white

And plain for holding poems. In any

Poem I am white and plain as Mary

Oliver in a day for going to woods

And cutting woods into the shape

Of poems, if a wood could fit the page

For poems, as a poem is always square

Like a city or rectangular like a city

And not meant to be natural and big

And alive as woods. I live in the city –

I will not go dead the way of poets

Who go and go to woods to see poems

Or what they’ve been told are poems

And die in them, their poems, all

The poems they have left in the woods.

IN WHICH I BEGIN

In the long-sunned summers of childhood, I could walk out forever under heat without boiling on the hundred-acre farm my Polish grandparents kept in the disputed lands between Georgia and South Carolina, where the South went on rivaling itself out of boredom and slow-growing grass. I was barely alive then, smaller than the other children and bound to be lost somewhere among bushes or haystacks, chickens scratching wild at their feed, but I had not yet – and have not yet still – learned to keep conversation so instead walked out forever to be alone in my legs through meadow or wood.

It was a lonesome year in which to be overheated. My grandfather had taken me out on an old pontoon boat into the middle of the big lake on the border, right out into the middle, where we might by good chance spy the caves he said bears were living in, big black bears that went to caves to digest the things they had eaten. The old boat made a purring sound, big as a barn cat. Out on the water, other boats went pushing past the planet’s pull, limber, quick enough to make wind that whipped their little sailors’ hair like spring. Other boats were stirring waves that washed up against us, the old, brown pontoon invisible in the brown water except for its sound.

I was sure as anything the caves existed – I was even willing to grant my grandfather his scary bear story, how the climax was sure to be something terrible, his hands suddenly grabbing me at the height of suspense and tossing me into the brown water, my lungs taking in the unexpected lake – but I was more sure, even in curly-headed childhood, that to want the caves – to want anything at all – meant they wouldn’t happen. We wouldn’t find them. They would have been swallowed back into the earth. And just that way the old pontoon boat heaved a little, there, in the middle of the lake, and gave up on itself, as if it had only been wanting to reach the shore again and had said that want out loud. The motor went quiet, the barn cat having swallowed its last blind mole and now laid to rest in the root-infested soil of the family cemetery. The sun stood high and menacing, and we were stranded, having lost at once the caves and the stories and the means of reaching land. I spread my beach towel across a hot leather bench and then my brown skin across it. Yes, it was better never to want anything and certainly never to be caught wanting it.

My grandfather knew better than anyone how to whistle any tune beautifully but not how to teach me the trick of it and not how to fix boats. Still, he was a pretty good swimmer and just as good at convincing any stranger they were old friends, so it was decided that he would swim to shore and, from there, find someone who could tow us back to safety. I said I wasn’t afraid to stay there alone, but he left me his hat to hide underneath if I needed to. Then he went into the water, and the water took him, leaving only his round head moving, ghoulish, against the waves until he was gone.

It was a hot summer, like any summer, and, like any summer, it was a summer for drought. From the shoreline the lake appeared to be hung low, the crusty sand having room to sun itself and the water shrinking away from its own fish, but out in the middle of it, as I was, it could have been an ocean, only uglier. Without anchor, the dead pontoon drifted into shade and out of it. I moved clumsy to the back of the boat where a little ladder went down into the water, thinking I, too, might climb down a little and let my legs dangle off the side to cool myself. Instead, I stood over the ladder and saw how dark the water was. It was too dark even for the sun to make a mirror of it so that I might look down and see, reflected there, the other me. The lake as a place was just so much brown water, and it must have gone down forever, right down through the earth and out again to deep space. If I were going in even a little bit I would have to go down to where it ended, just to see if it would end at all. Here now was the choice: to go full-bodied and blind as far as the water would or to sit and wait, possibly for always. Ultimately I decided it was too great a risk – to go down forever and be trapped there, to have to go on living in the black underbelly of the lake – so I remained two-footed on the boat, waiting, the sun now and then licking at me, tasting, as I waited. For hours, I waited – and may be waiting still, having dreamed this other life in heat stroke, having been whispered every bit of it by the sun.

The boat went on moving and being moved by the lake, drifting now around a bend in the land, the trees leaning low to lose their leaves among the water. Around the bend there was a high embankment, orange, mud and stone mixed to make the earth. In the embankment, wedged there between the water and the roots that left their trees on higher land to spiral downward, breaking the tough soil, down and down toward the pit of it, toward the lake, I saw it – the cave – the thing I had been wanting. But as the boat rocked gentle in the waves, inching nearer toward what I’d been seeking, I could see the emptied space in clearer picture, as it was. The cave as a place was only earth the brown water had eaten. The lake had come up and swallowed one whole piece of it, the salt of the embankment tasting something like an ocean, and when it had tired of eating it had gone away – gone at once to drought. No bear would brave the slope to sleep there. No bear would swim the lake.

 

The hundred-acre farm my Polish grandparents kept was famous in local mouths for containing within it the highest point in the county, a hill where lightning would go for reunion, leaving more black places in the ground in a year than most anyplace anyone around had ever heard of. Pioneering cactus plants moved in to make their home there, first slowly and then multiplying, as if attracted by the smell of scorched earth. Before I went walking out forever I was given the same two warnings – never to cross that hill when a storm came through, even a little shower, and never to walk too near to a bull, especially near enough to look into its red eyes – as the two mistakes could ultimately yield the same result.

The farm was famous, too, for a little cemetery at the far end of the property where Scottish settlers had put themselves after death some two hundred years before I could ever walk on top of them. Every year come late summer their bearded descendants would cross the country and walk through our weak fences to stand over the bones, playing bagpipes to the off-tune memory of what came before. The headstones were weathered, broken. I would sit some days underneath the oak tree, cool and invisible in the shade, to read with my fingers what was left of their poems – the poems carved in stone to say a death had happened. All the time the wind and rain had been helping the earth to forget. The poems had been stripped down, erased, leaving only single words or pieces of words – hand, house, bloom. An old yellow horse lived on the adjacent property, and afternoons it would lean its long neck over the fence to stand with me under the mangled oak limbs, watching me watch the dead stay dead. My grandmother, who would believe anything, especially Jesus, was sure that these sleeping Scots would wake now and again, at night, probably, when only the stars were awake to speak of the event, to walk the land, the fishing pond and woods, that had been theirs. She was equally sure that the old farmhouse she was living in with my grandfather and my grandfather’s beautiful whistling was haunted, too – not by settlers but Civil War soldiers still in uniform, medals sparkling and pearl-handled blades. In any case, they never bothered me – the Scots or the soldiers – but refused also to join my games, so we all agreed to leave one another alone.

               

To walk out forever often meant to choose one direction, double back, and choose again. The land was not mine; it just happened to be there, and sometimes I was inside of it. Choose a direction. I’ll be your imaginary friend. The land keeps walking out forever and so does the ocean and then they double back and walk out again.

 

Before I went mad I went out the big green gate. The sun came first out of the yellow grasses. I wore a white dress to reflect the worst of it. Cows were walking out forever too but slower, their tails flicking and grasshoppers waiting in ambush. To avoid tripping clumsy into one of their wet noses, I went west again, having already doubled back, up the big hill like lightning when it’s got itself sprung out in reverse. At the top, at the very top of it, I knew I must someday be mad. From there I could see everything, the rest of the county sprawling on its back and maybe farther, maybe out over every little living thing, but everything began to look like nothing, every place a place to go and wait for waiting to become death. A little cactus put its thorn through my lace sock while I considered this and brought out round, red blood to say I was not welcome there to do my waiting. I would not stay. I put myself in a direction for wind and went on walking.

On the back side of the hill, where the sun was, I left my blood in the grass. Those long acres down and down again toward the fishing pond, a little dock went out into the quiet water, and so did I. Catfish went on eating at the black bottom of the world. I had tried my small hand at fishing once, had gone so far as putting hook to line, but when I threw my arm for casting, the hook came doubling back and caught me by the lip – and that was the way to be tricked into death. I wouldn’t have any more of that. Let every moving thing do its own waiting. Instead, I sat cross-legged on the wooden boards until the dragonflies stopped dancing, having dropped their seeds into one another in the glistening heat and flown away again, maybe so far as the sea. I pulled off my lace sock, pink now in stain, and let it drop down into the water and drift there – a white flag, S.O.S., someone help me please. Fish came up from the bottom-world to put their lips to the blood.

There were all the woods beneath me – the cemetery – a stream – and a place in the meadow where a horse’s skull was growing its own moss, but I was down to one sock and still bleeding. I pulled the hem of my white dress from where it lay snagged in the flat mouth of a nail between the boards and went doubling back from where I’d begun.

Halfway to the top of the burnt hill, a tractor had stopped too long to catch its metal breath, and the ground had come up, giving fire. I didn’t see it happen. Maybe the fire had been long in coming, the engine halfway to rust already or a longstanding oil leak. Whatever it was, fire had come and then the blackening – the tractor standing now only in warning, its spider legs and body and circular, glass eye all charred and charring under heat. The smell of it went into the ground and doubled back and came up again in new grass. Death goes walking out forever too – but it does it quick and it does it while you’re blinking so when you look again it always seems to be sitting still and quiet, as if it wouldn’t move. The tractor, black as it was and half-buried in its own ashes, wouldn’t move and wouldn’t move until it was so much a part of the earth that it became invisible – as if death, too, were helping the earth to forget. But the earth was not a part of me – it just happened to be there, and sometimes I stood beside it – and I was afraid. The tractor was still there – it was still there doing its same violent dying – and I could see it and I was afraid.

But as things go, I came to know that I was more afraid of waiting – the other me still waiting, reflectionless, on a boat somewhere forever – so I went on walking out dead ahead toward the tractor – may it open its black lungs for me. Tall, tall, yellow grasses and bushes and bushes with thorns had come out of the earth to pull the dead tractor back down into it the way they would my grandfather in his brown pickup truck in a year or two years or three in the same hot season and the same hot smell. I wanted to crawl up into the tractor and sit there, inside of a dead thing, but the earth, to say that it was busy reclaiming, had made bushes with thorns – and I had been bloodied already by one image of death. Better not to want anything – I pinched myself to make the memory stick.

The cows came down, moon-bellied, into the low pasture on the east side of the big hill, where they’d let their babies fall out of them some seasons and lick them clean. They were eating their way to the woods. My shoe was beginning to hold blood where my sock had been, so I sat down in the grass and watched them go. Everything kept on going, cars out on the state highway all rushing to red lights. Down deep in one of the bushes, a little cry came up – birds, freshly hatched and naked in their nest, calling up and up for anyone. I practiced my bunny knots, one shoe lace touching the other again in that intimate way, and thought I might be still enough to see the bluebird or the wren come full-beaked back to its babies. When no bird came, I went myself to the edge of the bush and spread its leaves to look down upon the nest.

The living and the dead and those of us who are in between go on mimicking one another. When they pulled me, sunburnt something awful and alone, from the boat, the strangers didn’t ask, have you gone mad? Will you, someday, be mad? Where I expected to find birds, yelling angry in their first breaths for their mother, a snake had caught a little mouse by its hind legs and had only started its slow swallow. The mouse gave out a terrible noise, and it went out forever and doubled back and in that doubling became something sweeter, became a little birdsong. I was wide-eyed within the sound. There was a mouse in the bush and a snake in the bush, and the snake went on opening its cavernous body to hold the mouse there, cradled, in the black insides of anyone, the way death goes on keeping any little life. Though yellow-haired and all in all single-socked, I could see myself in the mouse – breathing, the two of us, but all the while partially digested – all this time long-legged to tempt the snake. The mouse, of course, claw-footed at the throat and screaming as it was, could not see itself in me. It had not yet learned to go headfirst, black-eyed and empty, toward the end.

 

SESSION

It is impossible to explain death to anyone who hasn’t been dead. There is a bliss to it, sure, but not the bliss of a cigarette or sex. It goes the way of the procedure, the long sigh when the process has ended and the body has emptied of breath. The lungs sitting empty and still. There is bliss, too, in having reached the inevitable, a naturalness to it. The coming back to nothing. How everything goes comfortably colorless and then not at all.

When a girl has swallowed enough pills, she becomes gradually aware of her body. It isn’t like sleep. It starts in the spine. One vertebra will fold in and then another. Breathing slows down and then time. Sound stops. Death goes on fingering the bones, and there is a warming to it. There is such a slow warmth. A girl might close her eyes and see the usual blackness, but it becomes nuclear, a little ringing before it’s gone. And then, without her realizing it, there is, again, nothing. No sound to the body sliding infinite to the floor.

The little doctor makes notes on a yellow pad. He doesn’t look at me. He says, are you after attention with all of this? He won’t say suicide. He won’t hear that I’ve been dying to be dead.

No, I answer.

Coming back to consciousness in this same body was the absolute surprise.

We are in the little hall office in the hospital. There are no windows, only the dim, droopy lamp spitting flickers on the metal desk. They’ve taken away my birth control pills so that I begin to bleed down the thigh, as if to experience unexpected menstruation is appropriate punishment for having wished to be without blood. Here I am, suddenly human, only not allowed to shave my legs, not allowed to sit alone in any room.

Is your life so difficult, he says. He says, what is it that you’re running away from?

As if life and death were two rooms, death being the room one would only enter to escape fire in the better room.

There are drugs in me. They are in me – I am full up with drugs. When I open my mouth, I find it shaped for only giving back an echo. The little room is getting longer, with the little doctor far away now at one end of it, his glasses fogging over from humidity, and me, practically toothless, at the other. If I keep getting smaller, I will fit inside a dollhouse. I will be given doll-sized drugs.

The little doctor makes a scribble on his yellow pad to be sure his pen hasn’t died suddenly without his permission. He means to convert me to what everyone has said. Life: good. Death: bad. He means to make me what everyone already knows.

How many times now have you been hospitalized for this, he says. He won’t say suicide. He won’t lift his eyes from the yellow pad.

Three, I say.

This is, of course, not true. There was a fourth time in Europe the doctors here won’t know about, how I learned the whole throat of a new language in coma. There were times, too, when I managed half a death without alerting anyone, how once I went unconscious under pills for two days without being found, how I came awake at the skin again in the blanket of my own dried vomit and never thought of hospitals.

This time makes three, I say.

There are some mistakes that will not bear correction. Life: good. Death: bad.

The little doctor shakes his head, his yellow pad and he now in private conversation. I am itchy, bleeding in a chair. Every map is a map of people dying, every second, street by street. For having drawn my own map I have been passed from one doctor to another in endless rotation. A gag gift. For the man who has everything.

And do you think this will be your last time, he says.

I laugh. I am laughing, and this dark room in this dark hospital is eating its sound.

Yeah, I think third time really is the charm, I say.

He doesn’t laugh. He clicks his pen, a death, and closes up his yellow pad.

No, he says. He says, I think you will be here a very long time.

good, cold world

Welcome to internet, Sway Press. Here are three poems.

Happy birthday to Matthew Salesses, who makes good words. I've been waiting on the couch all day for the mailman to bring his new book to my door (has it happened yet?) because now I'm twenty-three years old but don't tell anyone.

Thank you to Helen Vitoria for including this poem in the March edition of Thrush, one of the most beautiful sounds. It is almost March, almost.

movie recommendation: The Invisible War

Oscar season is upon us. What films are you rooting for?

Maybe keep this in mind:

DREAM

& sometimes when I dream of hospitals I dream of new hospitals

& I am in them

& I am doing something bad

& I am taking all the pills

& my behavior seems aggressive

& look, I’m crying for no reason

& everyone I’ve known has said I’m crazy

& it’s clear to them I’m crazy

& a threat – to myself or anyone

or whatever it is that they say

& in truth I am bad and made from fire

& I am taken away

& a doctor kisses me so that I won’t know it

& he does it on the mouth

& he has black hair

& I ask him what his name is

& it’s the name of someone I might have loved

& he asks if he broke my heart, whoever that was

& I say no, but he tried

movie recommendation: Miss Representation

 

I talked a lot about this move last year, and, unsurprisingly, it's still the best. So, if you haven't seen it yet, it's 2013 now. Come on, friends.