February 2019: The Ones That Astonish Me
On Saturday nights some time we get dinner before 6:00pm when the restaurants are mostly empty. It feels like heaven and we won’t live here forever. A student asked me to advise a poetry independent study this semester, and so I created a syllabus that is everything I love, stacks of the books I have in my apartment. Because I don’t have an office we meet at Starbucks for our first meeting and I talk with my hands. I’m positively shouting about the poetry that has a beating heart, that makes imprints on the fabric of souls. I pile all of the poetry in our house into tall stacks by my bedside. They topple over when the cats dash around and sometimes we are sleeping with Nikki Giovanni under our pillows or Louise Gluck tipped into the laundry basket, only to be found before all the close go to the laundromat. It’s a nice surprise. Sometimes I say the words twenty nineteen and it feels like fiction. No idea how we hop scotched into early middle age but here we are. I once drank so much that someone asked if the bar had another room and I marched us in a big drunk circle around the perimeter of the bar and announced, when we arrived where we started, here we are! These stories happened so long ago they also feel like fiction, but they can scratch the underside of my memory in a way that makes me press my nails into my palms. It was all very different back then. On Tuesday nights I teach creative writing now. There are five women and myself in a brightly lit room with no windows. I worry that without windows we won’t know when the world is softening into spring. It’s the kind of classroom where the lights go off automatically after an hour and so we all have to wave our arms in the air to tell the lights that we are still here. I took the month off of social media to rewrite the memoir and this means that I take less photographs and write when I can’t sleep, which is often. The radiator hisses me awake. With the curtains closed in our bedroom I listen to the pattern of traffic on Nostrand Avenue in order to guess what time it is. Last night a car halfway down the block played music with its bass just loud enough that it came into our bedroom. It was like trying to sleep inside of a music box but how else could it be. We’re planning a wedding which means that some nights when we eat dinner we read poems to one another and wonder if they could be our vows. We talk about flowers and fabrics and the people we love. We talk about pie. We talk about which songs we want to dance to and we practice by dancing to them in our small apartment when the cats are watching and my winter depression lifts a corner of its blanket and grants me enough energy to enjoy cooking. Every February is the same. I’m behind on my email and want to fall asleep at 8pm and sometimes fantasize about walking out of my day job out of my office on my lunch break and never coming back. When asked how she chose the stories she taught Annie Dillard blinked and said the ones that astonish me. We bought valentines to send this year because why not. Remember the colorful boxes of them they sold in the supermarket when we were children. Remember the perforated lines you had to fold and tear them apart on. The jokes inside, the tabs to gently bend them shut into a surprise. To everyone in my second grade class. From Courtney. God how I loved to write my name, how I loved to write! Every time I draft an email at work four dozen times a day I think of that song is that all there is? The PJ Harvey cover of it I found in high school and even so young the existential melancholy of the song thrummed in me. I’m teaching poems I’ve loved since high school. I’m getting paid for students to send me essays about Eileen Myles. The first student work arrives in my inbox and I find myself grinning, just grinning. I’m a Lite Brite for poetry. Maybe this is the future, this twenty nineteen. My downstairs neighbor has moved a throwing wheel into the space that used to be her bedroom. The bed now sits in the living room and the throwing wheel is covered in clay that spatters the walls, the floor. She shows me and I am enthralled by the transformation. We are about the same age and we realize that we know some of the same people, queer people and musicians and names that make my heart light up. We stand in the hallway with our front doors open and talk for so long. I am going to make it through this winter. I am going to rewrite the memoir so it can unlock me and I can write more and more and more books. The students ask about writing and somehow, weirdly, I am the writer in the room. I open my hands and show them where I am most vulnerable. I tell them that writing is the love of my life. What else would make me sit up during insomnia and write in a journal in the dark? I dare not turn on the light.
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