Summer Poem # 1

Ghazal
Marilyn Hacker

for Mimi Khalvati

The air thickens, already more than half in summer.
At the corner café, girls in T-shirts laugh in summer.

The city streets, crowded with possibility
under spring rain, thin out, don't promise enough in summer.

That urge to write one's life instead of living it
makes sentences slip limply off-the-cuff in summer.

Stacked in a drawer under an expired passport,
curly-head in an orchard smiles for a photograph in summer.

Going downstairs early for bread: two winos snore on the landing,
"Can't they make do with sleeping in the rough in summer?"

Hard-case on the street, teacher out of class both harbour
a low-grade fever and productive cough in summer.

Espresso winter, springtime of Juliénas:
black tea with honey's what I'll quaff in summer.

Despite my wall of books and Bach's geometries,
some scent wafts from the street to call my bluff in summer.

Not in a tank but a golf cart rides the oligarch:
however, he does not dismiss his staff in summer.

Let them not, in Maryam's name or Marilyn's,
blot any cindered city off a graph in summer.

Saturday noon,

and I've just finished computing my students' grades. For the first time in four sems, I submitted grades a week and a half before the deadline!

But I hardly deserve a pat on the back, since I have another writing deadline I can't meet. Will have to ask for an extension, tsk tsk. As one of my students wrote, "The dictionary defines me as a procrastinator, meaning one who procrastinates....At least I'm pro something now, a supporter, or even an acolyte. If only crastinate was a word."

For the past two nights I've been having dreams involving snippets from memoirs I've pored over and graded. How weird is that---assimilating foreign images into one's consciousness? I suppose some papers were just too entertaining or disturbing to forget. Last semester I focused on woundedness as a theme for their final papers. After getting hesitant and strange reactions ("Ma'am, what if I'm just not a wounded person?"), I decided this sem to just let them write about any significant dimension of identity, and to emphasize humor as a technique.

The result being a batch of papers that are wittier than most I've read before. Some of the best are by:

- a guy who wrote about his circumcision, and entitled his piece "Keeping the Covenant": "The woman brought me [to the Delivery Room], a place where screaming women eject screaming babies into the world. She brought me here. I guess it was my turn to scream."

- a girl who knew early on that Santa Claus was a shared delusion. Her parents "thought [she] should be good because it was ethical and right, and that being good for the presents would distort [her] value system," yet she professed to believe in him at a party anyway---her initiation into the "Santa-believing world"---for the peace that conformity brought

- a guy whose memoir title ("Something From Deep Inside Me") I thought was initially corny, until he began talking about an operation to remove his gall bladder

- a girl who was so tall in grade school that she used to avoid the school bathrooms at all costs. "I could just tilt my head in the direction of the next stall and see the occupant...hard not to do because the top of the stall was only up to my chin."

- a guy who considered himself an average Joe yet won the student council President position anyway because he was "lucky to be underestimated"

- a guy whose parents separated long ago because his mother was never the "let's share!" type, and then stalks his "possible brother"---a senior on campus with the same surname and whose nickname mimics his own

Of course, there are the more heavy ones about parents separating, Lolos/Lolas dying, being betrayed by best friends. One that had the most impact on me was about a grade 4 boy who had classmates over for a group project. They walked to a nearby sari-sari store, and raced back to his house. While running, his friend got hit by a speeding motorcycle. The friend was rushed to the hospital, was in a coma for 3 years, then died. The paper was less about loss, and more about his struggle with responsibility (though the boy's parents had long stopped blaming him, and are still suing the driver).

What to do with these threads of stories still swimming in my consciousness? I have a feeling bits and pieces will find their way to one of my next poems. I'll just have to thank my students and ask for permission.

On Happiness

I read this article in Time Magazine yesterday morning, and it put me in a good mood, despite teacher evaluations and a textbook-writing deadline to keep (though a surprise financial boon didn't hurt either). In it, Alan C. Robles posits an answer to why Filipinos consistently top national happiness surveys, despite poverty, natural disasters, and countless other reasons to be unhappy.

His insights? Most Pinoys are: happiest in tight social groups; easily amused; resilient and self-sufficient. In other words, happiness is in the attitude. Then his killer closure: "Around the world, people are searching for happiness. For Filipinos, happiness isn't a goal: it's a tool for survival." I'd love to discuss this essay in class next semester, if only to get students' reactions to points that are debateable.

* * * * *

Yesterday's little joys:

- buying Charles Simic's The Voice at 3:00 a.m. Selected and New Poems
- a fresh bag of generic clumping kitty litter for Metaphor
- sharing an order of pork salpicao and browsing at two bookstores with Elmo
- bumping into a former student who waved a copy of the new Heights at me
- paying off my debts
- a belated birthday dinner for my brother at Italianni's, where I had shrimp fra diablo, panacotta, and V8 vegetable juice (though I really wanted a Bloody Mary)
- finally articulating to my family that I haven't been happy swimming in theory for my MA. Now they're all nudging me to apply for an MFA abroad. Hmm, let's see if this indeed will be a lucky year for Libras and Roosters.

* * * * *

My new favorite reality game show (aside from American Idol, where I'm rooting for Constantine, Bo, Nadia, and Mario---predictably, haha) is Last Comic Standing on ETC. It's fascinating to watch these colorful characters be ironic, politically incorrect, self-deprecating, full of non sequiturs, yet still always authentic. Never having watched stand-up comedy before, I only recently realized it's almost an unwritten rule that the comics' jokes be taken from their own lives. Ang galing. So a Vietnamese-American guy confides he was the only Asian in school to fail math; an obese man says the folds in his stomach serve as hiding places for kids; a demure ectomorph is warned before going to India that "if you look vulnerable your chest might be grabbed," and hence tries her best to "look vulnerable."

One thing I realized, after watching this and having a few new poems workshopped last week: I'm not witty on the page, I can't tell a joke for the life of me! Maybe I should just stick to being sinister and sentimental.

Because Hemingway said, "Write the truest sentence that you know."

STILL
Lisa Zeidner

We still want to say the one true thing
we almost said by that pond in the beginning.

One of us skipped a rock instead, not well,
and offered something paradoxical:

Then we wanted now. Then we said, will be best.
Though we know better now, we still miss then.

Later, snowed in---though the only elements
were typographical---we read Hamlet

out loud, watching words clink through ice.
How distinct a word was then, how crisp!

What is this homesickness?
What do we think we've lost?

Though nothing's wrong, we still suspect
the true thing must be said in verse---so what,

we therefore ask, is verse? The reverse
of how we've spoken all these years?

If so, when did we grow prosaic? Why?
I tell you everything we did was poetry:

our words were stepping stones across
the fairy tale pond, meandering and mossy,

yet getting us somewhere---here, perhaps.
Of course it's more complicated than that.

You reminded me---we had a history even then---
how I once said, You are the perfect sentence.

I remembered a scarf of yours, bright red.
Was that the true thing needing to be said?

Let's say it to this vulnerable snow, tonight.
This snow, unsaying itself on the pavement.