again

from the light of that season
between winter and fall
you came and went.
your coming was never marked
by an arrival or a rush of heat.
it was the quietest stay.

your departure was marked
by a floating, swirling beam of loss.
not like losing but like becoming less
than nothing for a time. like nothing
could cover it. soak it up.

how hard we try to fill in these spaces.
caulk the leaking crevices. maybe there will be
another who comes. maybe with limbs,
a body, a mind who can think of me. Another you.
Another you who might be here already.

the significance of steam trains

(I feel the need to add some kind of disclaimer to this poem, which is much more traditional than most of my current work. I feel a strong need to write this poem for a more traditional sense of "understanding" because it is for my son. When I speak to him, I am attached, unified, and sure of my trajectory; therefore, my usual sense of division and confusion is erased, of only for a moment. I want the words to carry a figurative weight of a more traditional style- more lyric in the traditional sense. Because this poem serves a specific purpose for me, it is written in a specificly direct way. Not that you asked. . .)

For Eliot

Such explosions, steam. Rising in the dome.
Turning the wheels.
For you, everything is linked, coupled,
sequenced in terms of who
carries whom. You wake up already attached
to the elements of significance:
Who is the engine? What is being carried
into this separate coincidence
we call "freight"? Who is, after all,
on the train?

Still, I'm astonished to see the dexterity
with which you connect everything. Paper clips;
silverware; books, once a pile, now lay end to end,
from one side of the house to another.
Your tracks take shape and look
both like circles and tangents at the same time.
Each engine has its place, its own power source,
and its own cars to carry.

We've read countless books about trains,
some are about arriving, some are just about
getting on. Destination and arrival. You often return
to the story of our own journey on a train, the orange engine
straining up the mountain and through heavy rocks,
tunnels, emerging into light. You slept soundly
on my lap as we descended, like a river,
into the valley. Your wheels, for once, at rest.

& illusion

It wasn’t like
you fell
the line.
All street
backsides
plump and
scarlet. There
the moonlight
half green,
half lemon zest.

The magician
magically rises,
sure to cover
his left foot
in shadow.
In this light
it’s difficult to
know what is
happening
and what is
just poem.

This half
world can’t
recognize things
like your steadfast
eyes, how well-
worn your image
is in my own
personal equation.

(She reminds me
It’s not poetic
to always go home
with the same guy.
But you alone
are a mixture,
a hybrid
of balsam and
trajectory.) You say
you are not
complicated. Often
I find you
impossible.
How else
would we maintain
the beam
that divides
these galleries?

It’s not
a matter
of playing
along. In a quiet
moment, you
fall pale and
demystified.
But at the end
of each critical
flash, you return.
The magician
not levitating,
but standing on his
left toe. The poem
collapses. Your face
may be
looking away. There
is no more
secret. That
alone may
keep us.

& counting

Gondola, red envelope. Sweet boxcutter and dandelion. She walked through the valley, undesiring. Bleu-rimmed china keeps appearing, plates flying like UFO's like salad like wheels. Once, I sat there, surrounded by quick transportation. Specifically, dragonflies and trains. Always hating the smell of cigarettes, how it meanders and rivers and zeros out the oranges. Voile. Trick ponies. The famous poet said to be deliberate. Was he set on fire? Wasn't it an unwritten rule? She argues that nothing is unwritten. She can prove it, her lacquered nails, her tobacco lips pursed. I will tell you one more time. It was red and floating. It is gone now and never did.

Unusual, her fingers twirled anxious photographs. Clearly of children. What of centuries of goddesses trying to be women? Are their bodies hardened in birth; how do they carry and bear? Aware of shrapnel. Exploded torso. Can a bone explode and become another body? World or wars. Glue or anovulatory spike? It has nothing to do with the moon.

January

First poem since October

This year, there was nothing made. You can't even find
your precipice. Enter me with purpose. (no matter) I imagine my uterus
shedding like leaves from an autumn tree. Apples falling.
Such small members of disaster. Shrapnel. Discharge.
Stigma and skin. Somehow ash. Somewhere exchange.

This year I fought for crumbs.
I still do. So much of the unwanted
descends. Blood. Bananas. The birds nest, now empty.
Storms to keep you there. Pure ravaging guile.
Somewhere between August and November,

I remember losing my breath. Falling cold took its toll.
Sometimes it finds its way back. Crystalline and returning.
What to do with the warmer flow, the earth's red lava
erupting from each crevice? Let it mix with water.
It will find its way. I am not so sure.

This year fell hard on my thighs, my torso, my carrying muscles.
I expected it in my hips. I think of her, how it all backed up,
how it dried like a transplant that never took root. Not like a clipping.
Like a dragging. How she still can't look at the faces of mothers
as she strolls. How divided it makes us, this desire to make.

Euphoria of lost

Well, I'm done with my dissertation defense. . .I actually have been for three weeks, today. . .but I've not really been able to get it "together" since. Being done with something that I've been working on for such a long time brings the expected feelings of relief and pride. Admittedly, it's the biggest accomplishment of my life, academically & career wise. It is the thing, in fact, that I have been motivated to achieve since I was a teenager. Here I am, nearly two decades later, doing it.

But it's not all sunshine and roses. This leaves a gap in my life that has, for the last few weeks, been filled with a sense of confusion and disorientation. What does one DO after the Ph.D? What's next? To say that this is something I should have thought about before is both true and impossible. As a mother of a toddler, part-time teacher, wife, poet, and managing everything that comes along with those titles, it's safe to say that actually finishing the Ph.D. was a feat in itself. Actually bracing for and preparing for the next step surely would have resulted in full melt-down. Now, however, the question has descended, like a villain from a fairy tale, resolved to steal whatever thunder and momentum such an accomplishment has given me.

I feel extremely lost, but not in a scared, trapped sort of way. It's more of an inquisitive, probing process of lost. There is a job or two I might apply for here in Denver at the school where I'm already teaching. There's a part-time thing here and there that I'm shoring up for. And life might just look like this for a few years until I find my niche, publish my book (please!) and build my resume. But otherwise, what am I supposed to do with myself? My highly-educated, motivated self? What is there to fill the hole?

One of the things that has been agitating me for quite some time is that a Ph.D. doesn't REALLY get you anywhere. Right now, my part-time teaching job requires only a Masters, which I had six years ago. The poetry teaching jobs that I dream about require at least a first book if not multiple books. What then does a Ph.D. give you? An in-depth knowledge of which to talk about at cocktail parties? Overqualifications for nearly any other job but teaching at the college level, which you're still, somehow, underqualified to do even though most of us have been doing it since day one of our Master's degree? I don't mean to sound ungrateful-- I truly do feel that the Ph.D. experience taught me SO much about professionalization, how to speak about my poems and make them reflect my ideas, how to speak about other's poems and relate them to complex theories that I would have NEVER been exposed to in, say, an MFA. Nonetheless, here I am. Armed with the highest possible degree known to poetry, and not a single thing to do with it. Truth be told, I'm not even teaching poetry at Metro- I'm teaching composition (which I like, don't get me wrong. . .but my qualifications are obviously stronger in other areas).

I suspect I'm not the only poet in academia to ever run into this dilemma. I'm reminded of a friend who I met while working on my MA at CU, Boulder. He had his Ph.D. and was teaching at CU part-time as an adjunct. He was and is a brilliant poet, but when I would speak to him in those days, he was extremely frustrated by the exact thing I'm speaking of. He had yet to have his first book published at that point, which meant no "currency" on the job market. Now, three books later, he's the head of a fairly prestigious Creative Writing Department. Does this evidence suggest that on top of ten years of graduate school, MORE dues need to be paid before getting the "break"? I also think about the fact that this friend was a single male, not a married mother. Surely, this gives me a huge handicap.

And I haven't written a poem since the defense. Bizarre.

another frantic update

The good news is. . .I managed to get tickets to the World Series! I'm excited- it took a lot of online time, multitasking (grading papers while reviewing my dissertation while the computers tried to get me tickets) and persistence, but I managed to get in. . .somehow. . .and buy tickets. It wasn't easy to get tickets- there was a huge mess up on Monday when tickets were supposed to be sold, and only 500 of the 60,000 tickets were sold. They tried again on Tuesday and I'll tell you. . .there were still issues. Once I was lucky enough to get in to buy tickets, it tried to kick me out like three times. I kept back-paging back "into" the ticket buying system, and eventually managed to get a single pair of tickets in the nosebleed section (I'm not complaining. . .but at one point I had seats right behind home plate in my basket. . .and then got kicked out because of a glitch!). It should be a good time. I'm not the biggest Rockies fan ever, but I'm a huge baseball fan, so I'm really excited.

We're going to the Saturday night game, then I'm on a plane the next morning headed to Chicago for the big dissertation defense. I'm really excited, actually, to have a discussion about my dissertation/collection and see what my committee thinks about it. I'm tying up the loose ends right now with paperwork, # of copies, etc. . .all the stuff that could screw me up at the last minute. I'm going out on Sunday, defending on Monday, and turning in the final copy on Tuesday. . .if all goes well. I'll keep you posted.