the lengthening of the days

lost tooth

Each time a tooth loosens in Katherine's mouth, each time some fragment of her baby self dislodges and makes itself a gift, she places the piece of bone under her pillow and passes a restless night. She waits for wings or small lights, or maybe a bell. She waits to know if this part of her is worth a coin, or a book, or some magic, something to make a loss desired.

Yaakov / A Hole in the Sky

bubble and squeak

We are a family without strong food traditions, having inherited few and rejecting most of them. Tonight's dinner, cooked for a dinner guest from Israel: vegetarian bubble and squeak (British), spicy oyster, button and portabello mushrooms (Chinese), palmiers with fresh berries (French). Many of our dinners come from cookbooks like 1000 Vegetarian Recipes. We cook them once, then wander onwards to other tastes.

in a Chevy Chase coffee shop

as if we needed the reminder

As if we needed the reminder that
the world can at 4:53 fall in shards and
slabs, take to dust a school
(children at a blackboard, children at their desks).
As if we needed again that postcard
from above that he was elsewhere, that
he didn't see that corpse we're watching on the news
or the baby who died still waiting or
even the orphanage, now gone, and the director
and his children, gone, rubble.

reoriented

First faculty meeting in three and half years in which the chair at the table's head was not mine.

trouble being present

Each morning when I run the hill at Tenley looms, makes me weary even before its slope impends. One morning familiar fatigue hit just at its start, by the VW dealership where a sale is perpetual. I braced myself, but vanished into thoughts of days to come. When I arrived at the Metro station that is the hill's end I couldn't remember space in between.

Too many days have become Tenley hills, swift movement and vague memory and no world better for having lived within it. Trouble being present.

a small tradition

When someone begins a course of study with me (not in a large class, but in the intimacy of independent study), I give them on the first day a clementine. The gift marks the commencement of our learning together, and learning together is sweet.

warriors and graves

Today we visited the the terra cotta warriors exhibit at the National Geographic headquarters. Alex and his friend Carlos marveled at the preserved weaponry. Katherine waited for the figures to move, thinking them robots. I found the enormity of this trove against death sad: to believe that a life to come would be infinite extension of the world we already possess.

a house with music

My mother taught herself to play a portable organ, a gift to an unimpressed daughter. She knew one song especially well, and she played it happily, lilting of a bride and a bicycle. Her gift to me: a guitar and a teach yourself to play manual, but no lessons. It was like being given a book in Polish, or Urdu.

Two musical children inhabit this house. When they are not hammering melodies from the piano, they are listening to something, or asking. Both their tastes run, for the time being, to sugary pop. Coldplay and Lady Gaga are shared favorites, Black Eyed Peas not far behind.

Not the best music, maybe, but I love living in a house with music.

progress

night traffic

When Katherine asked me why cars now run so late, what she really wondered is why we should be so long out of place. We're in our Six Month House, and the end is not in sight. The old house is problems in a litany: pipes that violate their codes, floors that reach towards each other but miss at the touch.

Here we are well past midnight. She has been sick, and I keep the bedside watch. We're listening to traffic on Wisconsin Avenue, conduit of night trucks and unknown cabs, a metal light stream that doesn't know to halt its flow. When she asks why cars now run so late, I tell her that they have always done, they will always do. A day of more familiar sounds is coming. Closer, still, after this ill and worried night.

Earthquake in Haiti: Photoessay

Link to red Cross video from Matt. Donate here.

Wondering and Christianity

[cross-posted from ITM]

My family spent part of last summer living in Paris. We rented an apartment near the Rue Mouffetard from a professor of 19th C literature at the Sorbonne. My kids loved the city for its food, its art, its mode of life, its parks. I've written a bit about our visit to the Mémorial de la Shoah, and we did eat at a deli in the Marais ... but like most old European cities Paris is place whose Christianity is inescapable. I wouldn't be much of a medievalist if I were surprised that cathedrals had shrines to saints and Virgin Mother altars and stations of the cross within. These religious artworks always startle my kids, though -- especially Katherine, who at five remembers the gelato we ate in London a few years ago but not the many churches we explored.

We'd been sailing boats in a fountain of the Jardin de Luxembourg and decided to make a visit to nearby Saint-Sulpice. At the Louvre earlier in the week Alex had declared himself an admirer Eugène Delacroix, partly because he recognized Liberty Leading the People from the cover of his favorite Coldplay album. Saint-Sulpice has some murals by Delacroix, including a spectacular envisioning of Jacob wrestling the angel. We were gazing at that image in the dark of the church when Katherine called us away. "What's this?" she asked, pointing to a depiction of a man leaving a tomb. My wife shrugged her shoulders and said to me "You can explain it better."
   "Well, " I said to Katherine, "Christians believe that Jesus--"
   "Who's Jesus?"
   "Their messiah."
   "Their what?"
   I tried a different tack. "The person they pray to ..." She nodded. "Christians believe that after Jesus was killed on a cross and placed in a grave, he came back from the dead. It's called the resurrection."
   Katherine jumped from my arms and ran from the mural. "He's a zombie!" she yelled as she retreated. She had no desire to see the picture any more.
   Well, that really backfired, I thought. It didn't help that her older brother had been scaring her with nightly tales of the undead. But Christian narratives like the Resurrection are not yet part of her cultural literacy, and I am not always the best interpreter for her, as my stumbling shows (in retrospect I'm fairly certain the mural depicted Lazarus rather than Jesus). But the episode did make me think about how much we take for granted -- or perhaps, how much I take for granted -- when it comes to the Christianity of the Middle Ages. We tend to assume that the stories behind the images were always well known, and that such narratives caused universal nods of assent rather than the shaking of a head in disbelief. We comb through the Patrologia Latina to discover what people really thought, to trace the coherence of orthodoxy, but we often don't leave enough room for what John Arnold calls unbelief, for what might also be called wonder. Sometimes I think that Jews became such figures of danger to Christians because they brought to presence the ability Christians surely had to be astonished by themselves.

Addendum: We are good friends with a family from Mexico. Last week they gave us rosca de reyes or "three kings bread." Into this cake has been placed a baby Christ figure. Katherine was poking around her piece and declared "I think they forgot to bake a Jesus in the cake." Suddenly a small, white plastic doll toppled out of her slice. At first she was happy, thinking she'd won a prize. Her brother told her, though, that the person who finds the figure has to cook the tamales for the family for the year. Now she keeps it by her bed and calls it ... the zombie baby.

ruah

sundae monday

I.
Dessert to celebrate a return to teaching: we walk to the ice cream shop with the $3 Sundae Monday special. One with cake batter, one chocolate chip, one cookie dough, each with a whipped cream pinnacle and a cherry redder than nature. The night moves with commuters and bus lights and shoppers. We watch from the window and we joke. As if to render the moment perfect, snow falls.

II.
The idea seemed good but I am weary: a return to teaching has taken more from me than I thought. "Alex stop" and "Katherine stop" are my imperatives, and they are as tired of commands as I am. Still they tease and scream and run when traffic is near. They push those buttons that only siblings know to tap, fights as frequent as fooling. The night should be more magic: the lights are here and the confections and the snow. But I am tired, and they are pushing buttons.

Sunday morning

Complacencies of the peignoir

Movement, and complacency will not hold

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair

Coffee in a cold store, staring at Staring

And the green freedom

Tomorrow's anxieties: teaching, and teaching

silent Palestine

This morning we had guitar, piano, Hebrew songs

'Is not the porch of spirits lingering

I left the children at synagogue, and after a walk "Myths of Britain"

It is the tomb of Jesus, where he lay.'

Not my messiah, not for me.

isolation of the sky

My teaching is all the religion I have, and all my poetry.

Deer walk upon our mountains

I don't know nature, and I do not love it, and it is not god

Ambiguous undulations

But maybe poetry

The need of some imperishable bliss

But maybe poetry

Not as a god, but as a god might be

In this life without permanence, where every trace fades, where Sunday morning and reaches only towards Monday's class and is leaving the children in Hebrew school: its flight towards literature will someday also fade.

pain au chocolat

snow, again

An early walk with the dog. For once, no wind, all still, as if time had stopped. Thin crunch of white, burnt radiance of sodium light. The world was ours: the alley, with its cement and trash graved; the sidewalk, on which our prints were lunar; the cold air, with its absent traffic. All of this shared between me and her.

Though her sight is dimming now, and she does not walk well, and it was hard not to find in that silence something nearing.

what the earth might swallow

To every parent a nightmare, as irrational as it is compelling. Mine for Katherine: that she will leap a storm drain, the dark rectangle beneath city corners. She will not see the slope. She will slide inside.

She will fall, maybe forever, into dark. I will lose her. I will try desperately to gain the inside, but my body cannot go where children slide. I will lose her.

Crazy, I know: she also would not fit into that opening. Yet I grasp her hand tightly every time she jumps that mouth. Every time she leaps I think of what the earth might swallow, and how I might lose her, and the impotence of love.

metapherein (every object conspires)

Every object conspires to draw metaphor
or to be dragged into something it does not hold.
Every house is on offer for family
Every dog for domesticity, contentment, or contempt
Every bit of weather a fragment for a mood.

In this room this morning I wrote the Shoah,
pogroms and massacres,
children dead, blood on sleeves.
I wrote events that murder.
I wrote the left behind reeled.
There are no meanings here.
Beneath this room the pipes were banging:
not little bangs, either. The house was shaking.

Clanging pipes, technically: water hammer.
Check it on Google.

But the pipes wanted something more than air and copper.
I'll stop pondering the underneath,
stop considering that the bang is loud,
an intrusion, a ruin of the house as shelter.
Yet I can't help thinking that the fault is not giving metaphor to objects,
but in refusing them that draw.

circling back while rolling

Done with graduate student, nontenure track teacher, assistant professor, associate professor, professor, chair. Today a new office, small and a little shabby. New view from the window (a grage, a rising building, a hispital, the Metro). Folders and boxes in piles.

Today, something commences, at once old and new.

Illustration: the graphic I'm using on my "Myths of Britain" syllabus this semester.

At home

The smallest god is the god of small things

I keep a little notebook, cardboard around worn pages, in which I write the things that I might file for this archive. Today on that pad I inscribed a phrase that has become the title of this post, a phrase that is really for the post below, a post I pretended was yesterday's deposit but is a snippet of Sunday breakfast table.

I've been thinking all weekend of lares et penates, the household gods who do not know the sky, little divinities who watch after soap, bruises, clementines and dropped magnets. I've been thinking I prefer them to thunderous destinies. I have been thinking how easy to make of the house a church. These small gods watch the notebook I keep. They ask me to record the view from the porch of the Six Month House, inscribe the sound of citrus in a red bowl, fight in vain small ways against a world full of death, loose words that the words not become lost yet.

of all the loves

of all the loves the smallest is love of tables
nothing sidereal in this one
no gods unless minor household idols
blank visages of benevolence
nothing warmer than tea

but here the food and the books
tears cake coffee theses
I'm just trying to relax and she keeps
quarrels over apples or milk
What? Stop looking at me like that. I said
dissection of the who and the why
the dosing of the medicines
Another whine out of you and you will have to go somewhere else
the thousand things to forget and make the past lovable
the small details to send to the future,
postcards from the time we had

Drink Play Temple