The Paris of the West, The Paris of the Middle East

Perhaps the message is
You will know
what it is

to be trapped in your homes like rats*;
you will never go anywhere
where lots of you gather;

your public sphere is full of air,
and we will deflate it.

Or perhaps it is only
the message John Milton
assigned to Lucifer,
who would rather
rule in hell than serve in heaven.

But then again, where
is heaven?

When I landed at Charles DeGaulle
in 1989, I thought I'd attained it,
just months after Lockerbee,
a few months before the Berlin Wall
came down. Americans,
we tsked-tsked about LePen
and apologized for Reagan.
It occurred to me the stars and stripes
that flew outside our residence
could attract violence,
and French friends made me wary
of Algerian men I met
on Boulevard Jourdan.

Just this summer at the Stones
concert, high up in the stands,
I looked for the exits. Maybe heaven
has to do with clouds
of oblivion and distance.
And maybe the message is a clear sky
and nothing to get to
but this place bristling with weapons
and history and hell. As a teen,
I was often scolded for having
my head in the clouds. It was a luxury
so many didn't have. Maybe
there isn't a message at all.
Milton wrote best
when he thought
the revolution would succeed:
A regicide had to mean something,
Cromwell had to rule in hell to serve heaven.
Before long, the typologies cancelled themselves out.

Now the younger LePen calls for annihilation
and the Internet churns out
the messaging.
When the news anchor says this is our
world war, this is our
dent in history, I shrink to the size
of an ancestor I've never met
buffeted by factors, dispatched by dates on a timeline.






*From Emily Carlson's Symphony No. 2

Keane Ekphrasis

We had some Big Eyes prints in our house,
probably Green Stamp redemptions.

A beagle puppy against a red brick wall,
crusts of bread on the hard ground beneath him,
on the right the diamond grid of a fence.
The rope around his neck was snapped,
so having broken free, he'd been impounded.
The outsize eyes looked up in a mix
of insolence and contrition.
It was in the boys' room, and I wonder if,
when they were grounded there, it spoke to them.

In my room, the pink room, a yellow cat,
plaintive and stuck in a corner (also red brick),
neck a long vase, the bouquet of its head
sprouting two lime-sized eyes.
Its tail curved around its front paw.

Cats were female, dogs were male—
the unwritten assumption in our house.

I had big eyes, but not as big as these,
with their manhole pupils. It was the seventies.
One night I came home late
from some extracurricular activity,
and my father inspected my pupils.
He shone light in my eyes,
but I wasn't high, had never been high.
It was just another one of his efforts to read me.
There were pages and pages of me for the taking,
but he wanted to read his own story. After all,
we were surrounded by pot-smoking teens.
He was a cop,
and saw a lot.

The cat was exceedingly scrawny,
those pupils a woeful well of acceptance.
Of course, I felt put upon and misunderstood.
One wall of the corner was in shadow,
the other bright. No collar on its neck, no broken leash.
The dog was a textbook bad boy, the cat a classic stray.

My Favorite Writing Self

My favorite writing self is someone who sits in light, body relaxed but alert, ears open, eyes wide but not about to burst into tears. She steps on a stile and goes over a fence, works through the tough passage then skips through the rest until another tough passage arrives. She doesn't run from its demands but doesn't force things either. She is not at war with herself about will she do it or won't she. She is not trying to prove something to anyone, herself included. She's simply filling her time and her space with arrangements she makes anyway, whether she writes them or not. These words that she once used as weapons or shields are her modest star relays, one eye to the next, the light always arriving but never quite here; the texture of what the earth makes her to be—beyond time, within time—can burn like a fire, crackling there.

A fire, crackling there. It's a sign she's alive. My favorite writing self dives but won't drown. She's immersed and she's present for all of it. When she's worried, she shepherds all her worries to a fold. They rest while she labors, and then, while she rests, they spackle the pasture. Their presence makes it green.

It's physical. My favorite writing self is there with all her body, and her body breathes and lets the mind go where the writing takes it. The body says, I'm here for you; when you are still, I move; when I am still, you move. And we are friends for the duration, who really aren't two different beings, after all, but sides of a wide circle, turning.

My favorite writing self loves circles. There may be storylines, and one thing may come before the other, but she always writes a spiral on which stopping and starting are neither painful nor pronounced.

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

After Emily Dickinson's "I'm Nobody! Who are you?"(260)

So finally the moment I realize what I am: Almost beautiful. It's taken me 53 years to get that through my head. It means I can be seen as both gorgeous and ugly in the selfsame instant. I hope it means there will be no further struggle. I am down to a working dose of estrogen, and I am almost beautiful. I join the ranks of everything that is not declared, 90 to 100 percent of the time, "Beautiful!" Is that you, too? Let's bind together, then, and make the most of it, not telling just anyone: Just think what they might do with it. It could turn cliché real fast, you know? Then we'd be just like those bimbos, those stars, those plier-to-the-nose-type primping desperadoes we sit here and watch on the awards shows!



http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/im-nobody-who-are-you-260