February 9, 2012

7 Quick Takes for a Thursday

I’m a day early for Conversion Diary‘s “7 Quick Takes,” but I’m feeling a little wacky so I’m gonna do it anyway…

  1. Two weeks ago, my friend Ali told me about a blog called Momastery. My first (totally vain and selfish) thought was, “Oh no! Someone way cooler than me is writing what I’ve been trying to write but waaaaaay better! I suck.” And then I started reading her, along with what feels like every one else on Twitter…the same week. (How does that stuff happens?) I was right. She is way cooler than I am. And she’s writing things that stun and comfort and wrap me up. I love her. You should be reading her as well. As long as there’s room in your life for two monkish types.
  2. Tuesday morning (two days after August watched the halftime show of the Super Bowl with me), my boys and I were running errands in the car, listening to music, when August, pondering, said, “Mommy, who did you say was the queen of dance parties?” // ”Ummmm. What do you mean, honey?” (I had zero recollection of ever uttering that phrase.) // ”You said someone was the queen of dance parties. You said it when we watched the Super Bowl.” //  I thought of those Roman-esque guards carrying an aged Material Girl into the stadium. Oh, yes. I said that. “I think I said Madonna, the lady who sang the songs. I think I said she was the queen of dance parties.” // ”Yep. That’s right.” //  Oh, Micha. He’s always listening. Remember he’s always listening.
  3. I am currently giddy about: neighborhood kids who want to play with my kid every afternoon. (What? A play date I don’t have to plan or clean for?!), babies who sleep past the hour of 5 am, the raspy voice of my baby while he’s recovering from a cold, my new coral jeans (part of my resolution to buy clothes I really love), and the gentle stirring in Cousin Matthew’s lower region (a la Downton Abbey).
  4. I need a haircut in such a major way. Here’s how it usually goes: a month ago, I started thinking my hair was a mess. For two weeks, I thought about making an appointment. For one week, I was really angry with myself for not making an appointment. Then, one week ago, I actually did. So, two weeks from now I will get my hair cut. Six weeks after the first nudging. And…of course, 4 months after my last cut. Why can’t I get a grip?!
  5. I’m currently reading The Help, very, very slowly, because I’m also reading the 18 other books lying around my house. (I read Prince Caspian last Saturday because I was reading it outloud to August and I couldn’t stop myself from turning the next page.)
  6. Maybe my favorite thing this week has been how much my boys are playing together. Brooksie is becoming a real kid! He chased his brother (who crawled to make the game fair) across the living room yesterday morning, both of them giggling. Then they threw their bodies across my bed over and over yesterday, bouncing each other (while I spotted the sides for falling babies).
  7. There’s this mold in my shower that’s freaking me out. I took a toothbrush and straight vinegar to it yesterday but nothing budged. Then, this all-natural-cleaning gal pulled out the bleach. (For shame! I know!) I scrubbed till I feared for my family’s safety. The mold? I tamed it. But for how long?

What are you thinking about this week? How did you feel about Downton Abbey?

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February 8, 2012

{Praciticing Benedict} The Sacred Vessels of the Altar

“All the utensils of the monastery and in fact everything that belongs to the monastery should be cared for as though they were the sacred vessels of the altar…” (The Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 31).

If we aim to live as monks, then what else is our home but the monastery? Full of people encountering Jesus in the sacred places: the hallways, the gathering places, the altar. Home is holy: prayer moving through it all day like monks strolling (their vestments trailing) to the stone chapel.

Last year I posted a ancient Celtic prayer I’d discovered in one of my favorite prayer books: The Celtic Way of Prayer (by Esther de Waal). It’s a prayer women would say over their homes before bed: a prayer of protection and blessing for the woman’s husband and children. She would stir the hearth, the heart (and heat and stove) of the home, and make a prayerful mark of the Trinity in those embers. She would pray:

The sacred Three
To save
To shield,
To surround
The hearth,
The house,
The household,
This eve,
This night,
Oh! this eve
This night,
And every night,
Each single night.
Amen (47-48).

My hearth is the stove, where I stand night after night, stirring whatever fresh thing I have chopped. Where I glance back at the baby crawling in pursuit of more cat food, where I leave the food sizzling while I pull the cat food from my baby’s mouth. It is where my boys will probably remember me when they think back to what our life was in their early years: their mother at the stove, NPR on the radio, all that chopping, all that rhythm and ritual and movement.

The utensils of the monastery should be cared for as if they were vessels on the altar.

That pan I wash every night.
That sharp knife that glides through the garlic.
Those sippy cups. Those plates. Those lovely cloth napkins with the daisies.

All of it on the altar.

There is a sweet holiness in this daily life full of earth-bound needs and earth-bound rituals: the feeding of children, the clothing, the brushing of teeth and hair, the reminders to go potty, the books read and savored under covers, the picking up of toys and the getting out of toys, the hugs and songs and poems whispered in the dark. Sometimes the earthen vessels are the most sacred.

Today, may we gather at the hearth of our homes, in the morning over the scrambled eggs, and may we hold our spatulas with the secret knowledge of their sacred use.

We are priests, my friends.

Let us scramble those eggs. Then may we lift the chalice to the parched lips of those who wait for God’s good gifts.

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February 7, 2012

The Man Love Raised: A Thankful Tuesday post

Pawpaw and my brother (Big Brooks) at their shared birthday party last month

Last night, my 89-year-old grandfather fell and hit his head and broke his hip. I got a text from my dad while my boys were in the bath. Time after time, I’ve thought we might lose him. Last year at this time, I was 7 1/2 months pregnant and trying to make plans for how I’d fly home to Amarillo from San Francisco if I was needed. He recovered. He has always recovered.

This past year, though, he’s folded deeper and deeper into the shadow of age. He can barely walk and he is mostly unaware of his world. My Pawpaw has always been the kind who fiddles with his hands, who whistles a tune. The jokester. The story-teller. And I’ve been so grateful to discover that as age has taken his mind, his sense of humor and general love for people and life has remained. Who cares if he has no idea who the people are at the family birthday party? He’s just happy with cake and he’s happy with the song in his head and all those smiling people sitting beside him at the table.

His mother’s name was Love. Isn’t that the dearest? Sometimes when I see his joy I think, Oh, he was raised by Love.

How could I wash those fresh little boy bodies and imagine my grandfather’s aged skin, his pain and his blood and his ride in the ambulance? How to hold both of those things at once?

I’ve sensed in myself lately a longing to remove any painful situation from my head, to extract it the way Dumbledore pulled those threads of memory from his mind and left them in the pensieve. In moments when someone I love is hurting, my temptation is to sift it out of my mind and save it for later, to focus completely on what’s in front of me. When my boys are splashing in the tub and giggling at each other, how can I enter into my grandfather’s suffering? How can picture him in the emergency room, my grandmother (his wife of 68 years) beside him, her lips tensed with knowing?

I zipped my baby into his footsie pjs and sat in the rocking chair in the dark, nursing him before bed. I said to God, Let me think of him, know that he suffers. Don’t allow me to forget his need. I prayed for whatever Pawpaw felt in that moment, for joy, for a sense of comfort from his family around him, for God’s good presence (like Lucy’s face in Aslan’s fur).

And when I lay my baby down in his bed, his eyes already closed, his body curled around his blanket on his side, I lifted my hands: one over his crib and the other toward my older boy’s room across the hall and I prayed, picturing their faces lined with age: the 89-year-old August, the 86-year-old Brooks surrounded by the people they loved with their lives. Oh, and I prayed for all the fullness of an ending for them. The kind without regrets, the kind with music and laughter and touch and families who love them.

It’s a strange thing to see your babies as old men nearing death. But they were the best kind of old men, like my grandfather: laughing from his gut, smiling with his vacant eyes. Lord, let them be the best kind…

It’s Thankful Tuesday. I’m thankful for age and worn skin, a deep lines of wisdom in the brain. I’m thankful for my family, for the present joy and for the future hope.

I’m thankful that all is grace, even the end. Especially the end.

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February 6, 2012

{Practices of Parenting Carnival} In Which I Believe in Family Dance Parties

EmergingMummy.com

My family had one living area in our three bedroom ranch house. It had a shiny brick bench in front of the fireplace. It was a perfect place for a stage and served as one pretty faithfully for this girl obsessed with her own performance skills. Most of my best moves were done while I happened to be alone in that living room, Amy Grant’s newest cassette on the tape deck and my back to the audience, arms rising at my sides, hands jazz-spread. I only turned around to sing the words at the last possible moment, “Angels Watching Over Me!” belted to the couch full of stuffed animals.

By that point, I was alone in my performances. I was the youngest and my brothers–three and five years my seniors–had long moved on to the more important things that 12-year-olds and 15-year-olds think about. But, long before my solo career, we performed as a trio, late (at least it felt late to me) Saturday nights, with Mickey Mouse Disco on the record player, my parents moving around us for what felt like the entire record: just us dancing and laughing and singing at the top of our lungs. It was 1984 or 1985 and I was five. My brothers were heroes even then, skinny goofballs with dances I’d never seen before (they’d learned them at school, no doubt). I was mesmerized by those boys, but we were still equals in our shared home, raised one at a time onto our father’s shoulders while my mother gasped in fear. And running from one side of that room to the other where a pile of pillows and blankets made for a perfect diving pit.

That’s what I think about when my boys are cozied into their jammies, the baby scooting along the coffee table in his little footies, the preschooler running from the door to the carpet for a knee slide (how does every boy instinctively know how to knee slide from the moment he turns three?).

See, I’m imperfect. And, even more shockingly, my husband is not quite perfection either. And there are days when all I’ve been is the worst version of myself: snappy and frustrated and envious of all the people in the world who have perfect children (it’s only on those days that I think perfect children exist somewhere). I have yelled when I didn’t want to. I’ve cried on the toilet. I’ve eaten an entire bar of dark chocolate during nap time. And I’ve found myself rolling my eyes at the pile of laundry as if it’s the laundry’s fault for existing.

It’s on those days that I absolutely must turn on the music after bellies are fed and teeth are brushed. I know, you’re not supposed to rile your kids up before bed. I know, it’s supposed to be time for quiet and gentle nudging toward sleep. But, sometimes, your husband gets home from work and you stuff pasta into everybody’s bellies and you find yourself sitting on your bed asking God to remind you that your life is the most beautiful of all: That your life is a miracle of grace. That these children came from your body…but before that, they were secrets in the heart of God. That your husband just showed up that night in Ithaca, New York. He just showed up at that random house you visited with your barely-friends before the acapella concert and he walked with you up the road, in the dark, both of you bundled under sweaters in November night. And in that reminder of grace: your body sitting on the bed is filled magically with light, as if you were finally your true self for the first time that day. The boys are whining in the bathroom, getting their teeth brushed by that man you loved first that night in 2002 and now you see him scrubbling their teeth, his eyes older, his jaw stronger and better than before and you know it’s time.

There’s only one thing to do:

Find the Katy Perry Pandora station. Hit play. That’s when August runs from across the room and dives and you dive with him. That’s when Brooksie rides on your husband’s shoulders and you gasp a little and then release your breath and out of your mouth comes all the lies you believed that day: about your worth, about what’s lacking.

And here, right here, this moment, when Usher is singing about the dance floor and the baby is squealing, you recognize the truth. And you spin in it holding your son and you both laugh because all is forgiven; all is new.

Linking up with one of my very favorites Sarah Bessey at Emerging Mummy for the “Practices of Parenting Carnival.” (And using her signature, “In Which…” style in her honor.) You should link up too!

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February 3, 2012

Poem-a-Day Friday: Wislawa Szymborska

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In graduate school I took a course on 20th century Polish poets (Poland has produced some of the world’s best poetry in the past 100 years). It was a fantastic class. In it, I studied Wisława Szymborska, a woman whose poems were moving and full of delicate images that always cut hard. I love what little I know of her work because of it the way it pulls me toward emotion. It builds and builds and builds until I can’t help but fall with her to the other side. I amazed that her poems, which were not even written in my language can still move me so deeply.

When I heard about her death yesterday morning, I went out to the garage in search of the book of her poems that I had read and marked in the early 2000s. It was nowhere to be found. (The movers lost a box of books in our move and I’m still discovering what I’m missing.) After grieving the loss of her book with some dark chocolate, I went online to find her poems and try to remember. This was yesterday’s favorite discovery:

 

Under One Small Star

by Wislawa Szymborska (translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczakby)

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all.
Please, don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don’t rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don’t pay me much attention.
Dignity, please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.
Soul, don’t take offense that I’ve only got you now and then.
My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man.
I know I won’t be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

Wislawa Szymborska, 1923 – 2012

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February 2, 2012

Simplicity: Meat and Spiritual Practice

I spent yesterday morning rinsing, drying, salting and peppering two chickens. One was for a friend who has just had a baby girl and one was for my little family of eaters. I handled those chickens with love, patting them sweetly with salt all over my hands while Brooksie napped and August played astronaut nearby. I held the little bird and thanked God for his (or her!) life and the reality that its sacrifice will nourish my family. And then I listened to it crackle in the oven and the scent of roasted chicken filled the house. It was lovely.

It was especially lovely because I have not cooked meat in my home in a long time.

If you know me well, you might gasp at the horror of such a statement. What? Micha stopped eating meat! Hush, hush, little bird, it’s okay. I still eat meat. I grew up in Amarillo, Texas. My childhood staples were barbeque and burritos. I have always loved my meat and eaten heartily.

Two things have changed in me. And they happened around the same time. I began to feel convicted about the treatment of animals. Now, I don’t mean that I don’t think people should eat animals. (I have no problem with the use of animals as a food source.) What I have a problem with is chickens stacked on top of each other in disgusting conditions, never seeing the light of day. I have a problem with chemically zapping cattle into meat monsters and force feeding them corn instead of grass for our own sake, for our wallets. What I’m trying to say is that while I don’t know much about agriculture or ranching whatsoever, I do know about conviction. And there’s something in me that says it’s wrong to mistreat an animal, especially one that is giving its life for my own sustenance.

So, as I began thinking about that and wanting to make a change, I found it was difficult to afford organic grass-fed or free range meat. I was struggling between meeting our budget and adhering to my newly forming conviction.

Around that time, we became friends with a couple in San Francisco who we really admired for their commitment to simplicity. I had been studying St. Benedict for a year or so and had begun to think about what it might look like to simplify our lives for the sake of Jesus: our closets, our use of money, etc. But I had never once considered food consumption as a way to simplify. They were over for dinner one night, eating one of Chris’ perfectly done (crispy on the outside and juicy on the inside…so good) pork loins and it came out that they never eat meat at home. We were perplexed. Oh no! Are you vegetarians and here we are force-feeding you this oh so wonderful pork loin??? No, that wasn’t it. They had stopped eating meat at home as a spiritual practice, a way to live gratefully, a way to appreciate meat when it came their way, but not to demand it or expect it.

I’ve never gotten their commitment out of my mind, mostly because I really respect them. For a short time in my childhood, my mom committed one dinner a week to a simple meal of rice. It was a chance for her to teach us about missions, for us to experience what life is like for a majority of world, for whom food does not come easily, for whom meat is a luxury.

I kept coming back to that childhood experience, thinking about what it means that meat is a luxury for most of the world, that there are other ways to get protein, that I was buying meat I felt uncomfortable with because I couldn’t afford to spend more. After we began to think about what we could do to practice simplicity in our lives, meat seemed like such an obvious choice.

So, we’ve decided to simplify our week day meals (the ones I’m in charge of). We’ve switched to wraps and salads, eggs and tofu and beans. On the weekends, Chris is our chef and he can makes us whatever deliciously meaty thing he wants.

I’m loving it. Here’s why: Yesterday that chicken smelled so wonderful. Yesterday, the flesh in my hands was a real creature I could be grateful for and I actually remembered to be grateful. Yesterday, I was reminded that in a culture that allows me to have anything I think I can afford to own or consume, it’s good for my soul to wait, to live simply most days so I can feast some days.

So I can hear the chicken crackling in the oven. So I can notice.

 

What does the practice of simplicity look like in your home?

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February 1, 2012

{Practicing Benedict} The greatest possible concern

“As for the abbot or abbess, they must show the greatest possible concern with great wisdom and perseverance to avoid losing any one of the sheep committed to their care. They should be well aware that they have undertaken an office which is more like the care of the sick than the exercise of power over the healthy. They should be anxious to avoid the Lord’s rebuke to the shepherds through the Prophet Ezekiel: you made your own those you saw to be fat and healthy and cast out those who were weak. They should follow the loving example of the Good Shepherd who left ninety-nine of his flock on the mountains and went off to look for the one sheep who had strayed. So great was his compassion for the weakness of that one erring sheep that he actually lifted it onto his sacred shoulders and so carried it back to the rest of the flock.” (Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 27, emphasis mine)

My son peed his pants at school yesterday. He still hates using the potty anywhere but at home, and he refuses to do it out and about unless Chris or I are there with him. So, the teacher called me 15 minutes before I would have left to pick him up to let me know he was “having a rough day.” I could hear him sobbing hysterically in the background. But he didn’t want to talk to me. He just wanted me to come…now.

They’re so fragile, these children. So new to the world. I remember August’s new pink skin smoothed out and puffed up in his babyhood. I remember staring at it wondering what would happen to him in this world that would break that skin open, toughen it, stretch it, wear it thin.

When he was eleven months old, he reached for a cord and pulled a curling iron down on the back of his hand. Oh, how he cried, how I cried, how his caregiver cried. The heat burned his skin, peeled it free of his body. Isn’t it amazing how that can happen? I was working at a camp that month and he was with me there, being watched by Ms Amazing, who did everything to prevent his being hurt. Yet there she was holding my boy, his face in panic, her face in panic. It was early morning, 7 am. And he and I walked together, clinging to each other around the lake as the sun rose and burned off the dew. I sang songs until he calmed. The camp doctor sealed that skin with potion, and he recovered.

Some days I look across the table at breakfast and I see his scar, an unhappy, imperfected circle of once-melted skin, and I sigh. I know what once was there, how fragile it all is: our beating hearts, our soul’s ability to feel and see and live.

So yesterday all I could see was that little boy who didn’t want to pee his pants but did, who is still learning to understand this world and his body in it and what is required socially and emotionally and physically. I brought him his blankey. By then, he was already smiling again dressed in clean clothes, blissfully disconnected from the emotion of twenty minutes prior. But I could still see him in his wandering and ache.

St. Benedict speaks in this because we are all the Abbess, we are all shepherds, perhaps to our children, to someone else’s child, to the friends in our lives, to the broken we pass by on the street. What is whispered when I see my son in all his vulnerability is the calling to an “office which is more like the care of the sick than the exercise of power over the healthy.”

How fragile we all are. How tender and new. How soft and untouched our skin.

Oh, Lord, that we might see with eyes of the Good Shepherd, those who groan in their weakness, who weep over their embarrassment, their shame, those who cannot stand on their own and need our hands under their arms so they can shuffle their lead feet.

Oh, that we might see the one sheep in our midst, the one wandering, begging to be found. That we might choose other than to be taken with the “fat and healthy” and instead run after the frailest with tender compassion.

Let’s be Abbots and Abesses, my friends. Let’s rescue.

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January 31, 2012

Vroooom Thankful

  • That my baby has learned how to use sound effects when pushing his brother’s cars around on the floor. (Can vroooom count as his third word?)
  • For the sound effects that have become a significant part of my communication skills. I catch myself saying: “Boom!” and “Splat!” while I chop the slices of cucumbers my kids are about to consume. How did everything become a sound? (Btw, my friend Cat would say that my sound effect making is not solely based on having kids. She’d say that I’ve always made really awkward sound effects when conversation stalls: “Dupee Dupee Du…”)
  • Several moments this past week to be reminded of how I have the best kinds of friends: the friends who will give up hours to read my work and give me difficult, thoughtful feedback, the friend who emails with deep honesty and trust, the friend who calls from her hospital bed as she gets chemo, asking me about my life. The friend who pursues me even when I fail to pursue her. The friend I can dream wonderful, giddy, silly romantic dreams for. I’m thankful for friends.
  • I’m thankful for reminders of how much I love my husband, and the shock of how good I have it.
  • For The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. For “deep magic” and truth in my little boy’s ears.
  • For a baby who is no longer laid-back. (It was bound to happen.) For his longing to run and his drive to get those feet moving.
  • For forgiveness and rest and warm afternoons and a clean house
  • For laundry and its monotony and the reminder that we work and seasons move and babies grow and dishes pile and are put away and my hands look more like my mom’s and all of it matters. All of it matters.
  • Afternoon sun through the windows, squares of light on the couch. Isn’t winter light so distinct? So hopeful?
  • The moments of feeling like a failed mother, followed by moments of believing God loves me. That process is the miracle.
  • Boys playing in the grass, boys laughing at each other at the table, boys driving each other crazy in the car and stealing each other’s toys in the living room. Brothers wrestling with their dad on the bed.

It’s Thankful Tuesday. Time to list yours, friend.

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January 30, 2012

The Host Raised

MaryBeth Witulski Photography via Pinterest

One of the things I most love about the intentionality of liturgy is how suddenly it can catch my throat in worship. Lately, though I’m always moved by words in music or scripture, it’s in the physical movement of worship that I am most reminded of God’s sweet presence, that I hear most loudly the movement of grace and forgiveness and restoration.

At Christ Church, we follow a liturgical tradition that is a bit odd (compared to your regular liturgical service…at least I think it must be). I’ve been told our liturgy comes from an African tradition of worship in the Anglican church and is highly influenced by the physical freedom of that tradition. So, when we offer up our fears and sorrows and “send them to the cross of Christ,” we literally raise our arms up and push the invisible things toward the cross at the altar. The first time I visited our church, I stared in wonder that this room full of seemingly normal worshippers wildly shoving at the air. And then, after a few weeks, I joined in. And I can’t get enough of it. It feels so good to throw my burdens at Jesus and then raise my arms to receive the blessing.

It feels good to cross myself. I’ve been crossing myself for a few years now, allowing my hands to move through the most sacred parts of me: my mind and my heart, brain to lung, shoulder to shoulder. There’s such an assurance as I pray that God is covering me: the words I will speak, the thoughts I will own, the air I will breath…it’s all already redeemed. I cross myself as a simple reminder.

Who would think that in an Anglican church I would watch the mother of four in front of me quietly move out past her row of children so she can make it to the aisle and dance (not distractingly, just joyfully) simply because the song has moved her?

I’ve mostly been the girl who skeptically raised an eyebrow at emotional worship. I’ve always inwardly sighed at those who seemed to only “feel the spirit” during the emotion-inducing key change and hyper drumbeat arriving three-fourths of the way through the new, cool praise song. But, here at our new church, I find myself in the midst of honesty, of movement that belongs to Jesus in all of its dorkiness, all of its sweet humility.

And always, at the end of the service, as we sing, the last remnants of those taking communion filing back into seats, there is my pastor walking the length of the rows, eyes fixed on us, holding high the Host, the bread that represents the body of Jesus, broken and strewn about for us, the broken and strewn about. Our pastor Cliff has this stare, the look of hospitality that I’ve rarely seen before. His eyes say, This is still for you, whoever you are. You can still come. You may always come.

And every week I stare at his face and every week I shiver at the deep magic* of the invitation. What is it for God’s life to be given, broken to pieces, and rebuilt? What is it for my life, your life, to be reformed by a story, a Person, that once was dead but now lives, that keeps living–its pieces given to all and yet always remaining whole? Such magic. Such an invitation, our hands in the air, chunking our broken places, our fears, our hopes, and grateful loves–toward the cross of Christ, and sighing that internal breath of relief that someone not only holds our empty fears, but is remaking them, and remaking us into who we always were meant to be.

 

*We’ve been reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe aloud to August and I’ve been reminded of the “deep magic” that brings Aslan back to life…

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January 27, 2012

Poem-a-Day Friday: “The World as Will and Representation”

I’m still working my way through Robert Hass’ Time and Materials so you get another Hass poem this week. (Next week I’ll give you something new, I promise.)

This book is beautiful. There are several poems I could have chosen (some that are probably an easier subject matter). However, I picked this one because, of all that I read of his this week, it stunned me most and continues to haunt me. I’d love to know that you think about it in the Comments…

The World as Will and Representation
by Robert Hass

When I was a child my father every morning–
Some mornings, for a time, when I was ten or so,
My father gave my mother a drug called antabuse.
It makes you sick if you drink alcohol.
They were little yellow pills. He ground them
In a glass, dissolved them in water, handed her
The glass and watched her closely while she drank.
It was the late nineteen-forties, a time,
A social world, in which the men got up
And went to work, leaving the women with the children.
His wink at me was a nineteen-forties wink.
He watched her closely so she couldn’t “pull
A fast one” or “put anything over” on a pair
As shrewd as the two of us. I hear those phrases
In old movies and my mind begins to drift.
The reason he ground the medications fine
Was that the pills could be hidden under the tongue
And spit out later. The reason that this ritual
Occurred so early in the morning–I was told,
And knew it to be true–was that she could,
If she wanted, induce herself to vomit,
So she had to be watched until her system had
Absorbed the drug. Hard to render, in these lines,
The rhythm of the act. He ground two of them
To powder in a glass, filled it with water,
Handed it to her, and watched her drink.
In my memory, he’s wearing a suit, gray,
Herringbone, a white shirt she had ironed.
Some mornings, as in the comics we read
When Dagwood went off early to placate
Mr. Dithers, leaving Blondie with crusts
Of toast and yellow rivulets of egg yolk
To be cleared before she went shopping–
On what the comic called a shopping spree–
With Trixie, the next-door neighbor, my father
Would catch an early bus and leave the task
Of vigilance to me. “Keep an eye on Mama, pardner.”
You know the passage in the Aeneid? The man
Who leaves the burning city with his father
On his shoulders, holding his young son’s hand,
Means to do well among the flaming arras
And the falling columns while the blind prophet,
Arms upraised, howls from the inner chamber,
“Great Troy is fallen. Great Troy is no more.”
Slumped in a bathrobe, penitent and biddable,
My mother at the kitchen table gagged and drank,
Drank and gagged. We get our first moral idea
About the world–about justice and power,
Gender and the order of things–from somewhere.

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