Tucson

Light Music

Morning. I feel my hair feathering the sides of my face, a sensation I don’t like but can’t remedy because I’ve lost my hair clip. When I do find it, a section keeps falling out because it’s too short to reach the clip. I locate a smaller clip and ensnare that section separately from the rest. I look like I have tree stuff stuck in my hair, the fluffy, seedy matter that forms before the leaves do and litters streets when it’s shed to make way for actual leaves, actual spring, actual warmth, actual hope, whatever hope is these days, actual or otherwise.

I have to find my earplugs now because my fifty-five-year-old husband is playing a video game at 6 a.m., and I can hear him clicking the controller. CLICK CUCLICK CLICK CLICK CUCUCLICK. There’s no pattern to the clicking that I can settle into, make sense of. I feel like someone’s strumming my ribs with their nails.

Now, the refrigerator is trying to get out of its body as it does for several minutes every morning, poltergeisting the entire kitchen with its WAWUM WAWUM WAWAWAWAWUM. I used to have a wooden rabbit on top of the fridge, but it would vibrate off to the left side whenever these hauntings occurred. I didn’t like seeing it askew, putting it back, and seeing it askew again. At some point, we have to stop engaging in repeated patterns that will never change, never turn out any different. So no more wooden rabbit.

Oh, good. The refrigerator has gone silent, as if it’s been practicing self-soothing techniques. Cry it out, fridge. Cry it out. Breathe or whatever you do.

This is not the morning I want. I want om tare tuttare ture soha playing quietly while I read my new David Ray book. I want to sink into that sadness and silence and away from the furniture banging around in my skull. David, I have taken the counsel of trees / and wise enough to wait for dawn. I’ve waited and woken into all the things. I’ve taken my thyroid medication and had my morning zero-sugar soda and gentled my dog into the morning alongside me and plopped myself down in front of this big window that looks out into the wildlands surrounding Tucson. And David, you used to live here. And David, you lived in Kansas City where I lived. And David, Studs Terkel loved you. And William Carlos William loved you. And you were at one time one of the most celebrated poets in the United States. And now?

You’ve only just died, David. Last December at age 92. I knew before I picked up this book that you were gone. Somehow I knew, though I hadn’t read the news. But here you are on these pages. How can I call you dead? Let me tell you about the things in my head, David. All that furniture that lives inside sound. My husband’s clicking. His footfalls. The sound of him urinating right now with the bathroom door open. Pouring coffee. Clearing his throat. Opening a door. Closing a door. I love him, David. I do. But I am at the edge of the forest. I came there, as you did. Is the darkness before me, behind me, or all around me?

All of the above.

You’ve gone the way every one of us will go: into obscurity and into everything. Being lauded means nothing in the end. Living a certain way, writing a certain way, means everything. Good morning, David. Thank you for the gift of your “light music” over this scene.

Proof of Something

The dead have a way of killing the living, as do the living. That’s what I woke up thinking at 3:30 a.m. when my rodeo neighbors flew their helicopter over my house and the walls vibrated and the bed vibrated and I vibrated.

I’ve been dead and alive for months now, maybe years. Maybe since I learned about the sex trafficking in the communities my father moved in and moved me around in.

Maybe since I learned that [REDACTED]. They’re rotting aspens, my family, carved with graffiti and missing bark, their leaves falling dead to the ground. All dead. All hollowed long ago but still demanding their remaining branches reach the sky somehow. For what? A sun that heals? A sun like a dead god who will help them forget how they’ve lived, if you can call it living. What do you call all that fluttering in the air above rot?

Definitely since my brother-in-law began dying from early-onset colorectal cancer last fall. Definitely since then.

Then there’s the call of the living who are dying or think they’re dying, the living I love, the call I will answer whenever it comes, even if it comes in the dead of night like a helicopter tangling the desert sage as it passes over. Or in the form of my husband. Or in my neighbor in Tucson, whose eyelashes are gone from chemo, and more, and more.

I’m tired. I’m sad. I’m scared. In Tucson and elsewhere, Indigenous people are being detained and told they aren’t citizens. And that’s just one atrocity that’s been happening over the past week. You can read about it in the news. I’m not the news and don’t want to be the news. I’m barely a person right now and am certainly in no shape to be reporting on anything.

Last week, I got the results of an extensive genetic test back. I’m not viable. That’s the bottom line. Yet here I am. I’m in the 99th percentile of fucked or fucked up on just about everything that matters. But genes aren’t everything. We know that. Whatever keeps me going isn’t my genetics. I’m in the 99th percentile for atherosclerosis, so yesterday I had the interventional cardiologist review the CCTA he ordered for me in 2022 when I was having heart issues. The test wasn’t done to determine how much soft or hard plaque I have in my arteries, but the cardiologist was able to pull it up and interpret the results. Jon and I stood in the exam room as he scrolled through the images from the test as if my interior was one of those flip books children make. Nothing. No plaque anywhere. My first thought was great. My second thought was why not me, why him. Him being my husband.

Risk doesn’t mean you have disease, the cardiologist says.

It’s good to know risk, but what we want to know is if you actually have disease or are on your way to having disease.

In this case, I’m high risk, no disease. Jon’s low risk, disease. Fuck risk factors. I mean, I don’t mean that. I don’t know what I mean. Just fuck maybe.

I had a dream two nights ago that took the form of a prose poem. Trump had dismantled the EPA and shut down all environmental cleanup sites, telling builders contamination won’t matter once the sites are developed.

It’ll be buried, Trump said. The waste will be buried. Just bury it. What’s buried can’t hurt anyone, almost as if he was talking about his own father, as if dead family can no longer do harm. I’m here to tell you they can. Look at my father in his grave, nothing now but bones caving in, obeying gravity like a falling apple only rotten all the way to the seed.

In the dream, I thought of Midvale, Utah, and the outrage locals felt in the 1990s when more than ten million cubic tons of toxic slag by the Jordan River were haphazardly covered in plastic with no lining underneath, vented, and later turned into commercial and residential developments. Folks in Utah wanted the EPA to do more, not less. They fought hard for more to be done but lost that battle. What would they fight for today? Less? Little? Nothing? Probably nothing. Just cover it up. Abolish the EPA. Who needs them. Who needs water and soil and air and viability for living beings.

In real life, not in the dream, we lived on that slagged land when we first moved to Utah, just down the street from Overstock, which was owned by the now-infamous Patrick Byrne, whose round concrete building with a peace sign on the roof was also on that land. Byrne got a deal on it, and he liked a deal. Jon worked for Overstock and for Byrne. This was right as he, Byrne, was transitioning from being a three-time cancer-surviving neuroatypical genius to whatever he is now. Maria Butina. Voting machines. Deep state. Trump as savior. Bars of gold and hunks of cheese stashed in Utah caves so he could feed and pay his employees in the event of an apocalypse. All of that. We’ve seen a man move from brilliance to chaos. We know what that looks like. We recognize it in others. I recognize the potential in myself. I certainly have the genes for it.

I’m afraid of myself. I feel like I’m full of slag, like my teeth and mind will loosen and fall out any day now. I don’t know how the Trump thing was a prose poem in my dream, but I know my mind was telling me to write. For me, writing is the way through, the only way through. Through to where, I don’t know. That’s the thing. What are we. Where do we start and where do we end. What is starting and ending, even? Some way to explain why we taper into fingers as slender as unlit candles that continually graze what is not us, or so we believe.

Almost as soon as the helicopter made the house rumble, it was quiet again. The house, I mean. Also the helicopter, which had landed on the neighbors’ helipad. But I was still quivering, my organs like china on a glass shelf in a display case nobody can open or illuminate other than a doctor who uses a mouse to drive through me one image at a time showing me how perfect I am, how goddamned perfect I am, despite everything. Proof of viability. Proof of life, at least for now. Proof of something.

You are also something. I can tell you that much. It’s all the news I can muster.

The Subtle Ordering of Words

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 Reufle. He didn’t even say Mary Reufle or Reufle 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 Reufle’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 Reufle 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 Reufle’s and find new things to love about language—within those sparse words that do so much vital work.

Falling in Love with Places

I fell in love with Tucson today. That means I’m now in a quintuple with three cities: Walla Walla (Eastern Washington), Greater Zion (Southern Utah), and Tucson (Arizona). I may be in love with all of Southern Arizona. We’ll see how the relationship develops over time.

Here’s how it happened! Actually, I don’t really know how it happened. My love for places tends to emerge after I’ve been somewhere for a little while. It’s like simmering cinnamon, vanilla, orange peels, and other stuff on the stove. You forget about the concoction, then suddenly the sweet perfume permeates your body. You can’t say which component you’re responding to because it’s not one thing. It’s all the things together.

That’s how it happened in Utah. I was downtown and Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” came on the radio. I looked around and saw all the quaint little shops like MoFACo, which has since closed down, and the pawn shop that’s really a gun store but also has nice T-shirts and beaded keychains. The sun was bouncing off the Mormon pioneer-era bricks, accentuating their texture and calling attention to the fact that each one was made by hand.

I fell, hard. It didn’t matter that this wasn’t my history or that folks there didn’t really want me in that place, as a poet or as a human being. I loved it. That was that. I’d already decided I wasn’t staying in Utah by that point, but that didn’t make my love for the place any less real or enduring. I know I complain about it and can’t live there and find it extremely problematic on a cultural level. But I do love it.

Walla Walla was different. My husband and I had been out that way once during a major snowstorm, so we didn’t see much when we were there. We made the move there from Seattle on a clear, crystalline day. As we got to the outskirts of the town—Jon rattling along in the moving van and me following close behind—there were suddenly golden fields everywhere flanked by low-slung, heavily eroded purplish mountains that seemed to encircle a whole, otherworldly place, or at least that’s how I remember it.

I fell in love with Walla Walla then and there. I began weeping and calling my friends to tell them how immersive that landscape was. I think I even made some audio recordings to document the moment.

Tucson was a simmer, no doubt about it. We’ve lived here for four months. I didn’t know if I’d ever have that “falling” feeling replete with crying, full-body chills, and that distinctive dizziness I get when falling in any sort of love, even (or especially) when I fall in love with a place.

But it happened. Some alchemy occurred between the music on the radio, the landscape, the roads winding through wildlands, the people and their graciousness and their quirkiness and their fragility and their strength, the creativity embedded in this city, the smell of the grocery store and its worn concrete floors and its awkward layout and its enchanting shoppers milling about and the chip display and the meat- and vegetarian-meat display and the slightly sad produce and the immunity shots that were on sale and the children looking for their favorite healthy sodas and …

It just happened. Like that. Lickety-split. I know for sure it’s love because I’m all the way back home now, and I still feel this way. I love you, Tucson. I really do. Oh, now I’m crying again.

Incrementally, Tenderly

Morning Prayer September 21, 2024

In the fall, Tucson smells like mildew, dirt, and cold metal. The wildlands behind our home are full of mouldering plant matter, animal matter, too. Every morning here is like an episode of my favorite series ever, Sunrise Earth, which aired on PBS years ago. The earth wakes up the same way everywhere: incrementally, tenderly, and without assistance from humans.

The coyotes are howling. They’ve been like this for days. They made it to fall. They’re anticipating winter, perhaps, bodily if not consciously. The moon has been big and glorious, which has affected us all, especially, it seems, the coyotes.

It’s like Sunrise Earth here with the birds calling and singing and buzzing, first the curve-billed thrashers, then the northern cardinals, then the house finches and the cactus wrens and the gila woodpeckers. A northern flicker even joined the crowd today, a rare treat.

The birds sing more as the sun rises higher, until it’s above the saguaros and palo verde trees. They sing until they stop, either because the sun is where it’s supposed to be and singing time is over or because the Cooper’s hawk has made an appearance. The birds are alarm clocks. They have a collective circadian rhythm that’s entrained on dawn. They help me keep my body clocks in sync and in working order.

Human sounds are here, too, which is where these mornings diverge from the Sunrise Earth episodes. Cars, too many of them, speed along Old Spanish Trail anticipating or dreading where they’re headed. Someone operates a chainsaw next door, an undertaking that started before six in the morning. If only humans would stop and watch the sunrise for five minutes and be part of the earth rather than setting themselves apart from it. I don’t know what that might change, but it might change us.

May we all be part of the Earth today. May we find a way to anchor ourselves on this planet and the lands we inhabit. My we be of this world, not separate from it.