Carp, Cartwheels, & Carnivals

As with most good weekends back home, it starts with authentic tacos and a small grin.

When I say good weekend, I mostly mean it. I feel ready for the final two weeks of the summer session now, and I have reflected on the insanely-busy past two weeks and realized that I have a new, healthy body of work to begin molding. I see a small chapbook budding in a brand new vein. The landscape is similar but different, and I like singing over these new(ish) hills with an old(ish) throat.

It’s been a long time since I’ve stayed up to watch a sunrise. When I was 11, I stayed up every night for an entire summer, drinking black coffee, perfecting the grilled cheese sandwich, and watching the sun rise over the bay. Dad says it happens at 4:29—all orange over the campus of my undergrad days, but, alas, I couldn’t stay awake.

This weekend, the water was black along the shore where spawning carp were just heavy fish pulling slow turns. Later, from the top of the big blue side, they were silver buoys rocking in and out of sunlight. A man said to his small daughter, “Look, honey—fish!” I laughed. Then, I cheated and laid back on the slide in order to missile down faster than both my boys. The oldest is now 5’ 8”. He out-wrestled me this weekend.

It’s true, I speak backwards, tell stories backwards, do everything the hard way. So what.

There’s nothing like a carnival ride that holds you upside down and threatens to drop you. What can you do but laugh until your stomach hurts? You can turn cartwheel after cartwheel in the field at 1am and out-maneuver the dog who drug you through the mud the day before. Correction: the puppy. Specification: the half-husky puppy. Dramatization: through the mud is really more like being slammed rag-doll style into a dirty puddle with a heavy thud and a big splash. This is why God invented harnesses.

Speaking of muscle control and God, Cole Swensen’s Try—the book I fell in love with over the past two weeks—deserves a few words. I probably shouldn’t speak of it without reading it again—another careful read—but I will anyway. The book is a series of ekphrastic-based poems, considering the role of the painter, the viewer, and the space in between. The poems are less about what the paintings say than about what the paintings have said throughout time and how the author’s narrator views them out of context. It also considers life as a viewer, inside a museum, who is told not to touch the paintings (or be arrested). Noli me tangere; Christ and Mary M; a love poem blooms and unblooms in unexpected but expected places.

The book is brilliant—broken down into groupings of three: trio, triune, trinity, trilogy, triad, triptych and so on. Within each, the language is sensual and sparse and the use of repetition (from poem to poem and section to section) is where the story holds together. Forms vary, sentences break off (the influence of language poetry but not in traditional usage) in the most eloquent and poignant ways. Here is a poet who knows how to manipulate but to keep her body out of the stage lights. Not so much as a shadow here. It is consistent and changing and lovely in both of those things. It is engaging. It tugs. A should read more than twice. As Leslie Adrienne Miller said, the book teaches you how to read it. So true. And it taught me far more than that.

I am long-winded.

I am a swollen eye, a pink under-lid, another mysterious skin irritation. A damn doctor visit.

I am a summer about to begin, a steady trill in a bowl of northern woods: home again.