Blog : Beautiful-Things
Dress Up
| September 14, 2015 We were having drinks at a friend's house when my two-year-old entered the room, pantless, sans diaper. Whenever his older sister and her friends played dress up, he'd get silly and play dress down. But this time he was red-faced and crying. I excused myself, brought him to the other room.
Duet
| September 7, 2015 On a dirt road behind a Midwest farmhouse, John and I walk between last year's corn stalks and the soybeans to come. Although spring appeared in the form of a printed milestone on the calendar, the wind clips and scatters spoken words.
August Garden
| August 31, 2015 My August garden has changed overnight, like a middle-aged woman looking into a mirror, asking, When did that happen, or how did this happen so soon?
Leaving Our Mark
| August 24, 2015 In the weeks before we end our active service in the Marine Corps my roommate, Caleb, and I slug Wild Turkey in our barracks room, and then decide to celebrate our impending freedom by burning down the thirty-foot-high diving platform a mile away off Christianitos Road.
The Killer Bee
| August 17, 2015 My dad took me to pick it up in an empty school parking lot, at night, like a drug deal.
Stay With Me Awhile
| August 10, 2015 When Pete at last called Helen to request a visit, she said yes with both reluctance and anticipation. They hadn't seen one another since her diagnosis. Pete was her last boyfriend and because she was terminal, would always be the final man in her life, the only remaining thread of sexuality, desire. She seemed angry he'd waited so long to call. "I know he's just afraid of…..you know, it being difficult," she said. "But hell, I am too."
The Smell of Old Books
| August 3, 2015 There was a row of shops where the flyovers now swirl and swoop. The shops were cubes of tin and plywood on a strip of pavement in heaving, humid Calcutta. They stood under gulmohar trees; fire-red petals with shade as cool as coconut water. In this shade, on low wicker stools, sat the men who owned these shops, playing cards, passing time. They were gatekeepers of old books.
House Call
| July 27, 2015 I never learned the cat's name, although Tom mentioned it when I visited him in his apartment. "Don’t mind Mr. Something," he said of the cat whose name was Mr. some other word. Tom lived just five minutes away from my house, and his wife said his legs were so swollen that it would require a 911 call to get him to my office. This was the only house call I’ve ever made. A year later, Tom was hospitalized with sepsis.
White
| July 20, 2015 We no longer remember the sound of birdsong or the feel of dry pavement beneath our feet, but we walk to school anyway because school is the place we're meant to walk to on Tuesday mornings. Temperatures register -23 below zero if you don’t count the wind chill, and I always count the wind chill.
Crush
| July 13, 2015 When I was married I crushed on another man. He played a pan flute while riding his bike past the reservoir and I stepped into his path feeling reckless one evening on one of my walks. Our groping shouldn't have lead to anything more. But I was wearing a coat that had just one button, a suede coat with bright scarves I'd sewn to the hem via uneven stitches, and when we spun to the ground the scarves tangled around us, the trail aglow with crushed mulberries, my babies damp in their beds in the house down the road where their dad sat reading.
Guppy
| July 6, 2015 Under a sky of half-moon and stars, my husband, my son, and I sit crouched near the small pond in our garden. Moss undulates in the water. A moist breeze hints at the monsoon that will soon descend on our city in South India. My son has fourteen orange- and coffee-colored guppy-fish swimming in a thin plastic bag. He is waiting to empty the little, translucent creatures into the garden pond.
Trash Collection Day
| June 29, 2015 Every Friday morning in the summer I would sit on the carpet in front of the giant picture window facing the street and watch the trash collectors empty cans and toss bags into their giant truck. The window opened low to the floor, so I could sit cross-legged with my nose just above the sill, my eyes and forehead barely visible to the road stretched in front of me.
What I Made
| June 22, 2015 I want to be a man who pays each bill the day it arrives. I want to be a man who knows the precise location of every object in his backpack. I want to be a man who knows about carpentry.
October Moon on Lake
| June 15, 2015 I have seen too many such moon-rises in seven decades to write a poem about this one. But isn’t that what I’ve always done? Perhaps, yet I won’t write it, with its reference to Selena or to some familiar musical standard--"That Old Devil Moon,” say--or whatever. To imagine such allusions is to feel self-contempt, as if I had written about butterflies as tokens of fragility.
His Pockets
| June 8, 2015 At four he is an earnest collector. He keeps his secrets in his pockets and leaves them for me in the laundry basket. As I unroll the cuffs of his too-long-yet pants, sand dribbles out, a clump of mud caking the cloth. Even if all is quiet, I remain cautious. Experience has taught me to turn the pant legs out to see if anything moves. Has he captured some critter and forgotten it there? Using my thumbs, I push the fabric inside out. I’m careful to do this over a container.
Summer Night
| June 1, 2015 On warm August nights, I take out my contacts and go outside, find a spot to lie down, and look up through the basket of live oak branches.
Inheritance
| May 25, 2015 My father loved a good roaring fire and attended the ones he built with great reverence, as if viewing a cremation. But, after all, he knew his wood. In his 70s, dad bought a gas-powered log splitter and would perch on a stump for hours, loading one log after another, pulling the lever to engage the iron wedge, which descended with a crushing force to split the logs.
Taking an Art Class
| May 18, 2015 We are given a project to do. Here are the parameters. Lines parallel. Lines perpendicular. Clear relationships. Mass, plane, line. No diagonals. I put the safety glasses on. I cut the wood. I use the joiner. I plane the wood. I glue the pieces together. I use clamps on every side. Make sure there is no give.
Tiny Purple Flowers
| May 11, 2015 My mother stands at the grocery store counter. Tiny purple flowers rest tucked behind her ear. They have wilted as we walked through the aisles, comparing prices per ounce and coupons to sales. Now, the flower petals are withered balls of lint. They droop down on spindly stems as dry and thin as discarded threads. "Isn't my mommy pretty?" I say. I plucked those lavender stars, clusters that sprout from the cow pies that litter our fields, especially for her.
Road Warrior
| May 4, 2015 Someday, the newspaper photographer told me as we drove back from the fire, he was going to do a photo essay on all those raptors along the highway. "All the what?" I asked. But just like that, they were everywhere.
First Walk
| April 27, 2015 It is my first walk in the woods, four months after the accident. I insisted. Cautiously hiking the old deer run behind our house, my husband stops, and holds me in a bear hug; chest to chest, heart to heart. This is his way of wordlessly expressing his concern for me on this blustery, wintry January evening in Michigan.
A Walk on Wooded Isle
| April 20, 2015 Spring had been so long in coming. At last tree buds, gray-green and plump, were braving the frigid sunshine. I had left my office in only a thin windbreaker, with just my keycard in my pocket, my cold hands clasping the cuffs of my sleeves. I had intended to circuit the Japanese garden--gravel path, half-moon bridge, stepping stones across the dry pond--then go back to work. Instead I pressed on into the less kempt part of the park.
Fearless Eye
| April 13, 2015 I sat on the plank deck of a house in the forest and shared my watercolors and brushes with my nine-year-old nephew. I painted the chestnut-colored ponderosa pines with their puzzle-piece bark. I painted the blue morning sky and white clouds. My nephew said, "I want to paint that sunset we saw last night!"
Surf Check
| April 6, 2015 November on the coast. Cracking cold and painfully clear. We cram 12 of us in a one-bed cabin on the Quileute reservation, not caring about personal space or what is whose. In the morning we're up as soon as the sun starts to slide its slow half-circle around the horizon. It feels like you can see to Japan if your eyelashes don't freeze shut first. We pour weak coffee, put on puffies, and scramble stiff-legged over the driftwood toward the break.
Letter to a Ladle (Stainless Steel, $18.99, Purchased Three Years Ago)
| March 30, 2015 How glorious: the invention of soup! How stunning: the invention of fire to heat the soup! I've watched the water boil. I've witnessed my wife and her designs of scallions and carrots. I've studied the smell of garlic and cayenne pepper. It filled our hallways with the history of our families. Not once--Dear Ladle--did you fail to do the one thing you do.
Highway 13
| March 23, 2015 "Time after Time" played on the radio, static through icy Colorado. I wished I loved the man I was driving toward the way Cyndi Lauper loved someone once.
Fireflies
| March 16, 2015 Up in the air are hundreds of fireflies, like scattering sunlight. We—me and the man I've been seeing—pedal our bicycles through dusk on the Keystone Trail in eastern Nebraska. Neighborhood playgrounds and thickets of trees line either side of the cement pathway.
Grace
| March 9, 2015 "Thank you," I tell the manager, "for taking my order so late." The sizzle of the grill frames my words. "I appreciate it." "Not at all," he says. Sweat curls his hair. "Is a good time. We’re still open."
Red Wings
| March 2, 2015 A familiar sound breaks through the morning quiet as my dog and I head out for our usual walk alongside a rocky beach and the marsh that drains into it. Without even looking up, I recognize the rhythmic thwap, thwap, thwap overhead. It’s from the main rotor blade of a helicopter, airlifting someone from the rural island where I live to an emergency room on the mainland.
Army
| February 23, 2015 In southern Spain, in the military, in December, I once danced in a field of sunflowers. Or not danced, so much as sang.
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