The other day, I had my socks on wrong. To be fair, they were complicated socks but not really because how complicated can socks be? I mean, c’mon. I went to my husband to rant about how nothing’s made the way it used to be and even socks don’t work right anymore and what is the world coming to and so on.
He gave me the most perplexed look I’ve ever seen, took a deep breath that somehow felt like a genuine pity hug, and helped me put my socks on the right way as I squirmed like a little kid.
Here’s a hint for those out there who also struggle with their socks: The ankle goes through the hole for the ankle. I know, right? You’re welcome.
These socks are now my favorite socks for so many reasons, chief among them is love. Like Pablo Neruda’s feet, mine, too, are worthy of that woven fire, those sacred socks as magnificent as marriage itself. Love is twice love and what is good is doubly good when it is a matter of two spouses struggling with socks in summer.
—
The last two sentences are riff on lines from Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to My Socks.”
You know that bypass road in Toquerville that I wrote the sad porcupine poem about? Well, while we were away, a boulder the size of a truck unexpectedly dislodged from the lava outcropping they’re slicing through to accommodate the road. The boulder fell straight down into the newly paved roadway while construction workers looked on, then it sat there for weeks because nobody could figure out how to move it.
Apparently, the boulder was eventually blasted to pieces using dynamite. The neighbors told us all about it when we got back. It was the talk of the town and even made it into the local paper. (Tom Bennett from neighboring La Verkin managed to catch the boulder falling on video, which made for a good online news story.)
The company building the road won’t comment on what happened or why they failed to anticipate it. There are many more boulders where that one came from. The outcropping that’s being opened up is heavy, dense basalt on top, but below it’s a combination of veins of hard and soft sandstone deposited over time that have been completely upended by geological forces so they may run almost perpendicular to the ground like the ones behind our home do. That’s important because it means water can erode the now vertical or nearly vertical veins more readily than if they were sandwiched horizontally between harder layers. Within all that sandstone are boulders of varying sizes, apparently including those the size of a truck.
There are houses up on that outcropping, too, which makes no sense. A little ways over by the Virgin River, a house slid into the gorge a couple of years ago. Other homes have been abandoned or are at risk. We saw someone trying to shore their property up with a massive retaining wall that eventually slid into the gorge along with their hummingbird feeder. Those people are gone now. They left their Joshua tree behind.
We’re in an erosion zone here as well, so everything is always cracking and crumbling and siding down to the lowest point it can find. This land’s essence is change. It doesn’t care one iota about smooshing people, houses, and roads as it continually changes.
But we care. So we talk about the big boulder and incorporate it into local lore and Henny Penny about it for weeks on end—and when the bypass road finally opens, sure we’ll drive on it, but probably not without looking up and saying a little prayer. We’ll be looking for boulders, to be clear, not toward the heavens.
I’m not sure how this bypass road conforms with Chapter 16 of Toquerville’s City Code, which requires the preservation and treatment of sensitive lands, including ensuring no hazards are created, such as rockfalls, and protecting and preserving significant natural and visual resources, such as lava outcroppings. But what do I know? Maybe I’m still just upset about the porcupine. (I’m definitely still upset about the porcupine.)
Good morning. What are you all doing today that’s poetry-related or not at all poetry-related? I have some big poetry plans but first I need to work up the will to wash my hair.
Here’s the impediment: I have a strong aversion to wet hair, including loose strands of wet hair that cling to my hands and arms and legs, wet hair matting drains, the feeling of wet hair as it’s being styled, wet hair stuck in brushes, wet hair on the floor, and so forth.
I just got chills, the bad kind, as I wrote about wet hair. I hate the way it looks. I hate the way it’s so soppy and formless. I hate the way it tangles. I hate the way it drips. I hate parting it. I hate smearing hair products around on it. I hate scrunching it. I hate having to coddle it by wrapping it in a towel until it’s dry enough to allow me to dry it.
I hate the towel. I hate the way the towel throws me off balance like Lucy in that one episode where she has that giant headdress on and can’t get down the stairs and everyone is laughing but she’s mortified because all she wants is to get down those stairs gracefully. I mean, it really is a funny scene. I’m watching it now.
My life with my wet hair is never funny. If I could inject humor into it, things might be different. Maybe if I had some Vitameatavegimen I’d be able to deal with my wet hair or I would stop washing my hair altogether and just lie around writing trippy poetry while my hair grows greasier and greasier, which is also a state I don’t like in hair, but more Vitameatavegimen would probably cure me of that aversion, too.
This is part of my sensory processing differences, which make me love the majority of sensory experiences but detest a few specific experiences, like looking at, touching, cleaning up, and thinking about wet hair. Or greasy air. I like clean, dry hair. I love to touch it. I love the way the strands lie together smooth as bristles in a Purdy paint brush. I love the clean lines, the tapered ends, the glimmering color in each strand, the way it feels against my face. I love the expressiveness of dry hair. I love looking at photos of dry hair. I also love beard hair and have an entire Pinterest board devoted to beards, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.
I just need to wash my hair, then I can focus on poetry.
And no. I’m not going to shave my head to address the issue. (I have both the wrong face and the wrong head for that.) I won’t wear a wig, either. (They’re too hot, and I don’t like the way wig hair feels, even if it’s human hair. I hate how heavy they are and how they feel against the scalp and how the lace has to be trimmed, and the glue that has to be used, and the powder that has to be applied to the part, and the very real possibility that one would become dislodged in the wind. I live in extremely windy areas. Wigs are a no-go.)
I have some big poetry plans, but first I need to work up the will to wash my hair.
Here’s the impediment: I have a strong aversion to wet hair, including loose strands of wet hair that cling to my hands and arms and legs, wet hair matting drains, the feeling of wet hair as it’s being styled, wet hair stuck in brushes, wet hair on the floor, and so forth.
I just got chills, the bad kind, as I wrote about wet hair. I hate the way it looks. I hate the way it’s so soppy and formless. I hate the way it tangles. I hate the way it drips. I hate parting it. I hate smearing hair products around on it. I hate scrunching it. I hate having to coddle it by wrapping it in a towel until it’s dry enough to *allow* me to dry it.
I hate the towel. I hate the way the towel throws me off balance like Lucy in that one episode where she has that giant headdress on and can’t get down the stairs and everyone is laughing but she’s mortified because all she wants is to get down those stairs gracefully. I mean, it really is a funny scene. I’m watching it now.
My life with my wet hair is never funny. If I could inject humor into it, things might be different. Maybe if I had some Vitameatavegimen I’d be able to deal with my wet hair or I would stop washing my hair altogether and just lie around writing trippy poetry while my hair grows greasier and greasier, which is also a state I don’t like in hair, but more Vitameatavegimen would probably cure me of that aversion, too.
This is part of my sensory processing differences, which make me love the majority of sensory experiences but detest a few specific experiences, like looking at, touching, cleaning up, and thinking about wet hair. Or greasy air. I like clean, dry hair. I love to touch it. I love the way the strands lie together smooth as bristles in a Purdy paint brush. I love the clean lines, the tapered ends, the glimmering color in each strand, the way it feels against my face. I love the expressiveness of dry hair. I love looking at photos of dry hair. I also love beard hair and have an entire Pinterest board devoted to beards, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.
I just need to wash my hair, then I can focus on poetry.
And no. I’m not going to shave my head to address the issue. (I have both the wrong face and the wrong head for that.) I won’t wear a wig, either. (They’re too hot, and I don’t like the way wig hair feels, even if it’s human hair. I hate how heavy they are and how they feel against the scalp and how the lace has to be trimmed, and the glue that has to be used, and the powder that has to be applied to the part, and the very real possibility that one would become dislodged in the wind. I live in extremely windy areas. Wigs are a no-go.)
As a poet, I am not here to heal men, to do their emotional labor, to unilaterally support them, to coddle, to worship, to grovel, to beg, to fawn, to mollify, to explain, to reason, to plead, to argue, to prove that I am not nothing, that I am worthy, that I am human, that I belong, that I am a poet, too, which does not mean I was put on earth for their pleasure, their crushes, their fantasies, their abuse, their harassment, their drunk dialing, their sidelining, their dismissal, their denigration, their sublimation, their blacklisting, their name-calling, their erasure, and their defamation.
If you come at me, I won’t flinch. Not this time. I’ve survived much worse than you.
I say this to the past, present, and future. I say this for myself and for others so they may come to fully realize what they are and are not here to do as poets and as human beings.
May we all live our lives fully and without using others to fill what’s empty inside us.
I’m dismantling the Kris Kristofferson shrine on my timeline now. Parts of it, at least. I must be reasonable. After all, I’m still alive. There will be more time for despair when I’m dead. I’ll keep a few photos up, my favorites, and try not to add any more as the day wears on.
Last night, I dreamed I was inside a frozen water droplet that was also a cell and an egg and the earth and the multiverse and the brain and the mind. It was the past, present, and future: all the possible pasts, presents, and futures. It was sliced horizontally all the way through as thin as sections of the human brain before examination in an electron microscopic.
Each section was an alternative reality or a past or a biological process unfolding or a sunrise or a volcanic eruption or a building full of people doing telemarketing in a sea of cubicles. There were openings between the sections, hidden passageways. On one side toward the bottom, there was a hemangioblastoma that was red and throbbing. It grew a little anytime something new was added to the droplet.
The droplet and the tumor had to grow at the same rate, otherwise the droplet would be compromised and eventually break. They grew together when individual worlds grew, new universes were born, humans and animals evolved or made new discoveries, things like that.
But trauma was different. It made the tumor grow but not the droplet. The tumor was growing fast, much faster than the droplet. You could see it encroaching on the rest of the droplet’s space, like retinal blood vessels into an eye’s vitreous body.
There was too much trauma in our cells, in our eggs, in our earth, in our multiverse. There was too much trauma in our waters. I woke up before the droplet burst.
My water is over my bridge right now. I say that knowing there is literal water over literal bridges in parts of this country and that bridges and every other imaginable thing, along with people and animals and lands, are being bombed out of existence right now. But my water is over my bridge. I try to keep it under my bridge. That’s how I survive. Otherwise, I will be my own undoing, and I don’t want that. Kris Kristofferson says, “You don’t paddle against the current, you paddle with it. And if you get good at it, you throw away the oars.” I guess I’d better figure out how to paddle. I need to find some oars before I learn how to navigate the current without them. I think poetry might be my oars. It better be.
I think I’m done posting about Kris Kristofferson. It’s like my whole life has been a deck of cards precariously balanced, and he was one of those cards, so I’m moving pretty swiftly into old pain as my cards fall. I’ll clean up my timeline tomorrow. I just want to leave all my posts up until then.
There weren’t many good things about my childhood. Thinking I was going to grow up and marry Kris Kristofferson was one of them.
I’m sorry. I never thought about the fact that I’d one day have to live in a world without Kris Kristofferson. I was not prepared for this.
Animals know fear. I know that much.
I think I’m entrained on curve-billed thrashers singing in the morning as opposed to being entrained on dawn. That’s fine, I guess, since the thrashers are entrained on dawn. What bird will signal morning when I’m in Utah? I may need a curve-billed thrasher alarm.
I just earned twenty-two active zone minutes putting away the one hundred twenty-three diet sodas my husband brought home this morning. Apparently, they were on sale, so he bought one hundred twenty-two more than I asked for.
I asked my husband to run out and get me a diet soda. He came back with one hundred twenty-three sodas.
Say what you want to say and what you need to say when you want to say it and when you need to say it.
You never know what lives your poems are living outside you.
Who’s to say / how old I am / in poetry years.
The painters unwrapped my house while I napped on the sofa. I woke to sunlight turning my eyelids into glowing pools. I am reborn. I want nothing. I want everything.
I will not hyperfocus today. I will not hyperfocus today. I will not hyperfocus today.
I’m messing around with my poetry database again today. It’s not going very well because I’m pretty high. Our townhome quad is being painted, and the fumes have made their way inside our house. The new color is decidedly ’80s dusty rose, a real blast from the past. It was supposed to be copper. It’s not copper. But the older women who live in the three other townhomes absolutely love it, so I will try to love it, too.
For no apparent reason, Meta AI sent me a message describing the geologicial features of Douglas, Arizona.
I managed to send five poems to one literary journal. That only took about forty hours of work. Now, I have to eat.
I want to write a heartbreaking poem about a wombat, but I am too tired.
I revisited my Eastern Washington poems yesterday. Now, I’m aching for Eastern Washington. I never left. (I left before I arrived.) I took it with me when I left. (It wouldn’t come with me.) It asked me to stay. (I didn’t stay. It never asked me to.) I left myself in it. (I left it somewhere inside myself.) I left it. (It was already leaving me.) I drove away. (It drove me away.) I was moving. (I appeared to be in motion.) I wasn’t still. (I wasn’t in motion.) I was the one who moved. (It was the one that wasn’t still.) We are both still now. (We are both still moving.)
My husband woke early and made the world light before it was light.
Someone left the moon on all night.
I sit in the dark. A cricket sings in the courtyard. The moon is gone.
I’ll stir when the rufous-winged sparrow stops singing.
Lots of coyote talk this morning, too.
I heard a western screech owl this morning and got a recording of its call. I’ve never heard or seen an eastern of western screech owl before. All the birds were communicating because a Cooper’s hawk was in the area.
We’re on our way to Target to get a second weighted therapy dinosaur so we each have one and they can sit at our dining room table and hang out together. I am super excited. They may even have a tea party. Yes, we’re in our fifties. Between the two of us, we’ve been on this earth for one hundred seven years. I guess that makes us almost as old as dinosaurs.
Edited to note that the second weighted therapy creature we bought is a dragon, not a dinosaur.
Lizards seem to have time on their hands. I could have talked about this with my friend, but she’s been dead for twenty months. The last time we spoke, she said, “Of course bees play. Of course they do.” I want to tell her how lizards climb and cling and swim and glide and run and how one teases my dog every morning by hanging upside down on the patio screen. I don’t want to have time on my hands. I want someone to call about lizards, someone who birds land on and who rescues cats and dogs and names them after characters in books, someone who knows the hearts of animals because animals helped her survive the unsurvivable until she didn’t and was no longer an animal, no longer part of time.
The dead usher us toward death simply by being dead.
As soon as I think about sending my poems out, they quit glinting and turn into sand, sand, more sand, so much sand.
Facebook is trying to sell me on an AI boyfriend. I already have an OI husband: an autodidactic neuroatypical advocate, artist, composer, electronics wiz, gamer, hacker, mentor, musician, outdoor enthusiast, pet lover, and software engineer. Organic intelligence for the win.
I learned some Spanish today from my fellow Tucsonans: Chinga tu maga, no mas naranja.
Now that you’re a bird, not my father, I can look at you. I did that. I turned you into a bird.
If you seek peace, if you seek prosperity, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Open this gate. Tear down this wall.
Wildness is one of those words that looks like it’s missing a letter. I want another d or n. Something. Maybe a second i or one of those slashes right through the middle that allows the word to be at once one thing and two things. Wild|ness. That still doesn’t look right.
I had a thing to say about poetry, a quip or an aphorism that I came up with while I was making the bed. Then I saw my husband’s blood on a white pillowcase and lost my train of thought. He cut himself working on the house and didn’t think he needed a bandage. He needed a bandage. Because he had no bandage, the pillow became his bandage.
There’s something about the blood-red of blood on the bright white of white that makes the non-brain parts of my body react. To what, I don’t know. I saw a beaten woman bleed all over her white eyelet skirt at substitute teacher training last year in St. George, Utah. But this goes back further than that.
There are also, of course, the white floral handkerchiefs women used to carry that had crimson berries sewn onto them to disguise the blood they were coughing up because they had TB. But that’s not it, either.
It’s something from my childhood, something I saw or experienced. Blood drowning white cloth. White cloth destroyed by blood. Frantically trying to get bloodstains out of white fabric.
My mother knew how to do that. She removed nearly all traces of what happened to her, what she survived. She had a wildness that couldn’t be beaten or shaken or ripped out of her. I mean another word there, not ripped—a word I can’t say here on Facebook. Remove the i and one p. Add an a. Yeah, that word. By my uncle and later by my father.
Wildness is one of those words that looks like it’s missing a letter.
Trauma is one of those words that looks like it’s packed with bodies.
Mother is one of those words that looks like it can be anything at all. Moth. Ether. Mote. Other. Tome. Moot. Mere. Mete. Hoe. Tooth. Hoot. Root. Home.
Poems are everywhere. Find them. On social media, in thrift stores, in the air, tucked inside your body, in old typewriters, under rocks, on islands, in what you misread, in the margins, in dreams, in the dead.
Pay attention. Not the kind of attention that excludes multiple forms of attention, but rather the kind that embraces polyattentionality.
Write everything down. Keep it or throw it out, but always save what you’ve thrown out or at least part of what you’ve thrown out. Maybe tear what you’ve thrown out down the middle and rewrite the missing half or join two different halves and see what happens. Maybe take some Wite Out to ninety percent of it and see what emerges. It might be what you were trying to say all along.
Save what others throw out. Rummage through lives and handwritings not your own. Put a gilded frame around discarded words and see if they wriggle back to life.
Don’t be afraid to see a poem in a grocery list or a patient education handout or a menu or a box of rusted paperclips.
Collect things. The stranger, the better. Handle what you collect with love, always. All things are related to each other and to us. Treat things the way you want things to treat you.
Do the work. Make your way. Write as yourself and for yourself. Never write for others. To others, perhaps—letters are a lost art, after all. But if you write for others, you may get lost inside them when you need to get lost inside yourself.
Find one poem you wish you could write but can’t. Carry it with you until the paper it’s printed on is worn thin. When you can write that poem, find another poem that you can’t yet write. Carry it until you can. And so forth.
Know that you will die. If that bothers you, write about it. If not, just write.
One thing that was interesting about the first piece she read was the subtle ordering of the words and how each word relates back to the other words even though the whole piece is rather sparse.
My husband just walked through the front door and said that to me. It’s what he was thinking about on his morning walk with our dog, Lexi—last night’s poetry reading by Mary Ruefle. He didn’t even say Mary Ruefle or Ruefle to identify her. He just said her, like he was saying aloud the last part of something he’d already started saying to himself during the walk.
My husband doesn’t write poetry or read poetry or even like poets much because of what happened to me in 2009. He’s still not sure exceptions to the rule in poetry are actually exceptions. He’s not sure there are actually any rules at all where behavior toward female and female-appearing poets is concerned.
I’ve tried to tell him the exceptions are exceptions and that there are ways to stay safe within the poetry community. I’m navigating all of that myself. My initial response was to leave poetry and never write again. But that is not living. I managed to eek along for seven years. I took up birding. I took up weaving. I love birds, and I love fiber, but I also love words. I loved words first—well, second right after classical music—just as soon as I was able to navigate language, which wasn’t easy because I’m dyslexic.
What a joy I found language to be. An absolute delight. A place to play, work, imagine, create, build, live, linger. I was thrilled to see that Ruefle’s reading had an effect on my husband, that her reading helped loosen language up for him. He’s a software engineer who doesn’t have a lot of flexibility with words and finds writing and speech tiresome. He’s also dyslexic but went in a different way in his life: away from language rather than toward it. Or, rather, toward a completely different type of communication, the many languages of code.
We have a safe word for poetry readings and other outings. It’s a phrase, actually. If either of us says the phrase, that means we’ve seen or sensed some kind of red flag, and we need to leave the situation. After what happened last year with the couple at Snow Canyon State Park in Utah, we’ve realized we can never be too careful. We’re especially careful around poets.
I’m glad the safe words weren’t what was rattling around in my husband’s head this morning. Mary Ruefle doesn’t know it, but she and the entire audience at the Poetry Center helped my husband feel like I’m safe, or at least safer, in poetry these days. And he feels safer, too. Now, he can play inside poems like Ruefle’s and find new things to love about language—within those sparse words that do so much vital work.
Dana Henry Martin 