The Cruelest Month

All right T.S. Eliot, you win. April is the cruelest month. Thank goodness that's over! The last few weeks have been among the worst in my life, with unlucky events happening one after the other. I was beginning to feel like the title character in Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, except that it was all month long, and I didn't have the option of moving to Australia.

Fortunately, April is behind us now. I received some very good news today, and I feel like May's going to be a better month for me. But I'd like to have a quick moment of silence for my car, which was recently totaled in a very unfortunate traffic accident. Farewell, stealth car. We had a good run.


(The only photo I could find was of the car covered in ice, but you get the idea.)

Spring Cleaning

Hmmm...it smells like fresh cut grass, the world is puddle-wonderful, I think spring is here at last!

With the first week of really nice, spring-like weather I have been feeling a strong compulsion, verging on physical panic, to organize my house (and by extension, my life). Last weekend, for example, when I should have been outside frolicking, I was rearranging my closets. It started out innocently enough, with me trying to find a box of sandals and other summer-y shoes. Then, naturally, I had to unpack the summer clothes, and then find my daughter's warm-weather stuff as well. Before I knew it, I was in full-on spring cleaning mode.

This cleaning jag feels similar, though not so intense, to the "nesting" instinct I experienced during pregnancy. It culminated the day before my daughter was born, when I could not sit still for a second because of all the imagined tasks I had to complete before the birth. I remember pleading with my husband to help me hang some ceramic hippos above the window in the nursery, so our baby would have something interesting to look at (keep in mind that newborns can only focus on things about 12 inches away from them, and it takes months for their eyesight to fully mature). Finally, I dragged out a stool to do it myself. My husband talked me down from the brink of madness (because lumbering my 9-month pregnant body onto a stool would have been madness indeed), the next day I gave birth, and the hippos were forgotten. In fact, they remain unhung to this day.

It's interesting how the change in seasons still brings back those primal "nesting" urges, even though as humans we don't necessary have our babies in the springtime.

(the painting is Spring by Alphons Mucha)

A Pure and Perfect Mango

Many of you who know me in real life will be aware of my personal grail quest: the search for the perfect mango. I've eaten just one perfect mango, several close-to-perfect mangoes, and entirely too many terrible mangoes. I just don't have the knack for picking the good ones. But that doesn't stop me from trying.

The one in the photo, which I ate yesterday, was slightly less than perfect. The texture was good: firm, slippery, never stringy (if there's anything that makes my skin crawl more than a stringy mango, I don't know what it is). The flavor was a little off, a little too astringent, perhaps, but I was pleased with it. So pleased that I rushed out to buy four more mangoes from the same box at the same store. We'll see how that pans out.

There was a poem I wanted to quote in relation to mangoes and my often fruitless (ha!) pursuit of them. I know I have read--or heard--this poem somewhere in my past, and I know there is a line about eating a pure and perfect mango. I've been obsessing about it for hours and I think I have narrowed down the poet: Carolyn Forché. I think I attended one of her poetry readings and heard the poem there. It makes me crazy that I can't remember for sure. I pored over my bookshelf and discovered that I do own a book by Ms. Forché: Against Forgetting. Unfortunately, this is a collection she edited, and does not actually contain any of her work. Even the internet is silent on the subject of Carolyn Forché and mangoes.

I'm sure the poem wasn't about mangoes at all, more likely it was a poem about war or civil strife. Yet somehow I remember that one line, the ideal of the pure and perfect mango.

A eulogy, of sorts

In October 1995 I was just starting college: young, idealistic, naive. I was priveleged to attend a writer's conference with such local writers as David Lee (Utah's first Poet Laureate) and Leslie Norris. Norris was a Welsh poet influenced by Dylan Thomas (whoever he was) who moved to Utah in his later life. I was equally priveleged to attend a poetry reading by Professor Norris, which included the title poem from his most recent book of poetry, A Sea in the Desert. I described Leslie Norris in my journal that night as "an incredible man...with broad gestures (but small hands) and a worn but scarcely hidden Green-Isled accent".

My favorite stanza from his poem A Sea in the Desert goes like this:

A man is moon to his own sea --
he draws it after him,
like a dog it follows him
the days of his life.

You can read the poem in its entirety here. I love the way the shape of the poem echoes the rhythm of waves on a beach. Something about the idea that we each tug our own ocean along behind us really resonates with me. When I first heard this poem, I thought that this metaphorical ocean described the pool of our experiences, our "baggage", if you will, which we can try to share with each other but at the same time can only be completely understood within ourselves. A lonely idea, certainly, but to me the ocean was always the epitome of loneliness.

I was shocked and saddened when I learned, on preparing to write this post, that Professor Norris died last April. It makes me feel fragile and melancholy to learn that this man, who so inflenced me, who I haven't thought about in so many years, has passed on.

I still have the dog-eared and copiously annotated copy of A Sea in the Desert I purchased immediately following his reading. I noted the date inside, 10/11/95, but wish I had thought to have him sign it. I guess in the end a man's poetry is as much of a signature as anything else he could provide.

(art by JMW Turner (Dawn After the Wreck) and Hokusai (The Hollow of the Deep-Sea Wave off Kanagawa)

Hallelujah!

from dictionary.com:

hal·le·lu·jah /ˌhæləˈluyə/ [hal-uh-loo-yuh]

1. Praise ye the Lord!
2. an exclamation of “hallelujah!”
3. a shout of joy, praise, or gratitude.
4. a musical composition wholly or principally based upon the word “hallelujah.”

Also, hal·le·lu·iah.

[Origin: 1525–35; < Heb halălūyāh praise ye Yahweh; cf. alleluia]

Hallelujah is a word you can't say without singing. I know the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah has been done to death, but I really think Handel was on to something. According to the Bible, this is THE WORD (or at least, a translation of that word) the angels chose to announce their jubilation at the birth of Jesus. Whether you're Christian or not, you've got to admit, that's a powerful word. I can't think of any expression that better encapsulates a feeling of pure joy. In fact, I challenge you to say it and not be happy.

Actually, my challenge is masterfully met by that haunting Hallelujah song by Jeff Buckley (my sources tell me the song was originally written and performed by Leonard Cohen). You know, the one that has appeared in every movie, hospital drama, and "very special episode" of TV ever produced. Basically, in any scene where somebody is or might be dying. Love that song. After hearing it a million times, this line still makes me weepy:

"I've seen your flag on the marble arch
But love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah"

On a totally different note, the song You Can Call Me Al by Paul Simon contains one of my favorite lines of poetry ever:

"He looks around and around
He sees angels in the architecture
Spinning in infinity.
And he says hey, Hallelujah!"

Love it. Wish I wrote it. Hallelujah, indeed.


(stained glass by Marc Chagall)

"an oceaning abyss of orange dream"

I took this photo in May 2006 on the Pacific Coast Highway, just north of the Oregon-California border. I was in the middle of a grueling 11 hour drive, I was hungry, and my daughter was wailing in the backseat. I stopped anyway. The quote above is from a lovely e.e. cummings poem: you can read it here.