Feb. 8, 2010 4:53 p.m.
From the KOMO News website:
Car hits overpass killing one
submitted by Morris Malakoff on Monday, February 8th, 10:04am
A one-car traffic accident about 9:30 Monday morning took the life of a 66-year old man.
Valley Regional Fire Authority was dispatched to the southbound lanes of SR-167 at 15th Street SW where a Toyota pick-up truck had slammed into a bridge support from the 15th Street overpass.
Witnesses said there were no break lights from the truck before it hit the support at a high rate of speed.
The lone occupant of the truck was pronounced dead at the scene.
The State Patrol is investigating.
Posted by Dana on 02.08.2010 at 4:55 pm
Categories: how it came to pass that i left poetry | Have your say »
Feb. 8, 2010 9:43 a.m.
Highway 167 South. One police car. Two police cars. Three. Four. Five police cars, each coming into view one at a time as I move closer and as other cars to the left of me pass, opening up a window onto the scene. One ambulance, doors closed. No activity around it. No gurney. No paramedics. No mobile medical equipment. No movement.
One fire truck, also silent.
In 92 minutes, the children in a class I work with will listen to a song about what a great day today is. “Be grateful for this day,” the song will tell them. I read them a story called A Monkey Among Us, and they pick out all the colors in the book. Orange. Blue. Green. Purple. Pink. Red. We count the colors and add them up. “How many is that,” I ask. They reply with various answers, anywhere from one to seven. For some, the colors are easier. For others, the numbers are easier. When I hold up a piece of plastic fruit, some yell out its color first, others its name. Which is more important for any given class or any given child — description or signification — seems to follow no pattern.
Margaret holds the letter “P” in her hands, a plastic magnet that is part of a larger set. She does this every week with a different letter. She can’t listen to stories without sneaking over to the tray of letters and snatching one.
Joseph has a new backpack. He can’t do anything without wearing his backpack. He keeps it on all day long. When I ask each child to do a silly dance move for the others to imitate, Joseph’s move is to turn slightly and show off his backpack. We all pretend to have backpacks. We turn to show them off to one another.
Halfway through a story, Margaret’s “P” slips from her hands and falls to the floor.
I tell her it’s OK. We all have accidents.
Two of the police cars are on the other side of the median, the rest on my side. The ambulance and fire truck are on my side as well. I say “my side” as if I own this highway, or at least this stretch of it. The way Margaret calls the letters in the tray hers, as if she owns the alphabet.
The way is straight here, clear. Portions of this highway are very unsafe, but this is not one of them. The median is wide, covered in grass and weeds that are still green, thanks to the Pacific Northwest’s temperate winters. I am not even wearing a coat today. An overpass stretches overhead. Several large pillars extend up in support, like old-growth trees rising from the earth. They have not yet been retrofitted with metal fittings to make them more earthquake-resistant.
Joseph has stealthily left the circle. He scoots to the classroom’s far wall. I ask him to come back. He shakes his head. I smile. He shows me his backpack. I smile. He unzips it and begins removing toys. A plastic jet plane. A plastic choo-choo train. A plastic car. Another plastic car. He points to the car in the artwork on his backpack. I smile.
Traffic is backed up both northbound and southbound. People are impatient. They shift in their cars, grumble. When they pass the scene, they lay on the gas.
We are all standing now, going through the motions of the hokey pokey, which has been reinterpreted in a children’s book called Sock Monkeys Do the Monkey Monkey.
We put our tails in. We put our tails out. We put our tails in and we shake them all about. We do the monkey monkey and we wiggle all about. That’s how we scream and shout.
The children mix things up as we go along. For example, right and left — arbitrary concepts they haven’t quite mastered yet. When I tell them to put their tails in, some protest, “But we don’t have tails.” I tell them that they do. I tell them they can be anything they want, even a monkey with a tail. Our dance isn’t very precise, but that’s OK, too. I tell them we all make mistakes. We don’t have to be perfect.
What strikes me is the precision. The truck impacted one of the pillars exactly in the middle. What I can see suggests a direct line from the highway to the pillar. No swerve or brake marks on the highway. This is one of the only areas where there is no wall blocking the median, where the median and pillars are accessible. This was not an especially easy mark to locate, or hit.
We are singing along to “Knuckles Knees.” The song requires us to touch our knuckles to our eyes, noses, stomachs, toes, hips, lips, legs and hair. As the progression becomes faster, none of the children can keep up. I can’t keep up, either. “Going this fast is hard,” I tell them. Though they don’t verbally agree with me, the look of bewilderment on their faces tells me they think it’s hard, too. “Boo,” I say to the song.
Two colors stand out. Yellow and red. Yellow is the color of the tarp covering the body. Red is the blood all over the airbag and what is left of the front of the vehicle. I begin screaming when the site comes into full view, though I knew this was what I would see. As soon as I counted more than three police cars, I knew it was really bad. The overall lack of movement, the stillness, told me it was fatal.
An instructor has inadvertently knocked some of the letters out of their tray. The children look over in unison. “Another accident,” I say. “It’s OK. It’s all just fine.”
Driving back from the school, I count tire marks left by previous travelers who have had to apply their brakes quickly. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. I get into double digits. I only stop when I realize the tire marks are everywhere. I see a cluster of three crosses off to the right side of the road. Dates are written on the crosses, but I am going too fast to make them out.
I think about what I saw earlier. Single-car accident. In light traffic. On a clear day. No entry into oncoming traffic. I think of someone I know, someone once dear to me, whose suicidal ideation is always about driving off the side of a highway and into a pillar. “Some days it just seems so easy,” he has told me.
I get home and open an email from W.F. Roby and Emily Van Duyne.
“Here’s the text of an Exquisite Corpse,” W.F. writes. They sent it, he explains, because they think I might love it or hate it.
The word corpse throws me at first. I ask if I can include the poem in a piece I am writing about an accident I saw on the highway today. “I would rather talk about the exquisite corpse than the real one,” I explain.
Emily says I can use the poem. I realize it does not appear to have a title. I decide to say the first line is the title, at least for now. I’m sure they will let me know if I’ve made a mistake. No biggie. Words can be changed, and what we do with them can be changed. That’s one nice thing about language.
* * *
Rain Sounds Like a Choir Clapping Somewhere
Rain sounds like a choir clapping somewhere
over there, away, distant. Over here
faintest lump in the throat, guzzle of rain,
a brilliant career. The real you
bent back against bricks. Snow sounds like
a holler into a windstorm, empty like that:
a snare drum, a brush, a stick of peppermint gum
chewed to bits, tongued to a bubble and popped.
Weather’s like that — turning faces to flash replicas
or mirroring a bad habit by blacking out the light.
Light’s a poor teacher. It blacks the spaces
it neglects: purpled half-moons underneath the dull eyes you deflect.
Sound is worse: the snorting car under a spotlight, the hiss of toll-road change
slung into the bucket, the burp of a tire, the a-ha of a cop. Strange.
Think of Venus and Adonis as you know them — the sunshine
lays its palm against his plum-tucked face and she’s a goner,
mortal for a bit, in love. She’s a stone-fruit married to a knife,
an old copy of the Game of Life missing a few pieces, rubbed
to ruin, pale at the corners — he’s
a bluebell in a wasp’s blue bonnet, broken nest strung from an Elm tree
in a made-up place, an English wood, bobbled just above a lady’s hat. She sleeps.
It’s peaceful. Neat in the shadow of a church steeple. Night’s like that –
sealing your ears to keep out gallons of water. Snow on the Welcome mat.
Snow stuck to shoulders and hats, flurried into paper, shredded into flakes,
someone’s week-old divorce ripped to bits and flung, a cap on graduation day, confetti.
Posted by Dana on 02.08.2010 at 3:22 pm
Categories: how it came to pass that i left poetry | 3 Comments »
Feb. 8, 2010 6:07 a.m.
Someone has found their way to my site after searching for the phrase: “how to kill a woman.”
I can see the time they visited the site, where they are located, their service provider’s name, how many previous visits they have had, how long they stay, what pages they visit, their IP address. If I wanted to zoom in on their location on a map, Statcounter would allow me to do so. I can label their entry so I know if they come back. Even if they come back using a proxy such as Hide My Ass or Cloak, I can still see all their information.
If I wanted to, I could use various features of Stacounter and Google Analytics to organize and analyze visitors in terms of trends and behaviors. This is the same kind of analysis used in market research and is in fact used in this way by bloggers who sell advertising on their sites. In this manner, the people visiting my site could cease to be people and instead turn into statistics — into members of groups that are assigned not based on their validity as grouping criteria but rather on their correlation with consumer behavior, as established by marketing professionals.
For example, one reason the LGBT “group” is being marketed to more heavily these days is not because people are more open-minded. It’s because marketing professionals figured out this group spends money. People might be more open-minded, too, but the marketing efforts still come down to the dollar, as do most things. Bottom line: If you want inclusion and representation in this country, you’d better be able to pay for it in one way or another, collectively or individually or both.
And you had better fit into a demographic that has been identified and is being tracked. Otherwise there will be no marketing professionals monitoring your group’s spending patterns and making recommendations to their organizations and businesses based on those patterns. Blame groups and group-think and dichotomies and the binary on capitalism. But it’s really a chicken-and-egg situation, ultimately, since it is human beings and our narrow-mindedness, our limited perceptions and perspectives, that inform how capitalism operates, as well as the marketing infrastructure that supports capitalism.
And if you don’t have money, you might very well end up in a group that is pathologized. I call that pathology marketing. These are the people drug companies want to sell drugs to. Drugs business is big business. If you don’t have money, you can at least still “participate” in our capitalist culture by being someone who “contributes” by way of opening your slim wallet — and the larger wallet of your health insurance company — for pills you may or may not need to treat diseases you may or may not have.
Do I really believe this? Yes and no. My answer is not entirely, “No, I don’t believe this.” I suggest reading Fritjof Capra’s The Turning Point if you are at all interested in pathology marketing and the business of drug companies. It is an older work, and drug business has only gotten bigger and more powerful since its publication. Take 1997, when new FDA guidelines allowed drug companies to advertise directly to consumers through various forms of media, including magazines and television. I was working at The American Academy of Family Physicians in medical editing at the time. We could not believe it. We could not believe what we were seeing. The power.
So much for privacy where information is concerned. So much for anonymity. I consider uninstalling Statcounter for ethical reasons. I don’t want to be Big Brother — especially not when one of the people I am keeping tabs on is my actual brother, my estranged brother, who has been visiting this site for months using a proxy, even after I asked him to stop reading my work. I suspect he thinks he will come up in the memoir portions of my writing. I can assure him he won’t. He had no appreciable role in my life, so he will not figure in the retelling of my life.
Posted by Dana on 02.08.2010 at 6:08 am
Categories: how it came to pass that i left poetry | 2 Comments »
Feb. 7, 2010 8:31 p.m.
I have a cold. I am tired. My husband backed our car into our other car this evening. We were trying to leave the house. We thought getting out would be a good thing. Reading what I’ve written has him a little addled. I’m a little addled, too, by the process of writing it. There I go saying “a little” when I mean something much more than “a little.” It’s hard to tell secrets. Harder still to commit them to writing. I ate some green beans. Some were yellow, others … green. Two were rotten. I did not eat the rotten ones. Facts about green beans are easy to commit to writing. Perhaps this is why so many poems are about toasters and Bacos and plungers and Sonicares. None of those things can talk back or tell us we’re lying about them, that we’re full of shit. There are no consequences when it comes to name brands and off brands and small generic tools positioned around our houses. The word rotten looks weird to me right now. Someone sent me a photo of a pink butterfly hair clip lying in mud. She said it reminded her of me, but she did not know why. The title of the image is “this made me think of you.” I did not reply with an emoticon smiley face, but I should have. A couple sent me a video that includes a dog and two beer cans. I don’t make this shit up. I am interested in the identity of the dog but not that of the beer cans. Everyone keeps asking me if I’m OK. A few ask if they can do anything to help. I am as OK as I’ve ever been. A little lonely. A little scared. I want a cocoon. I like the way the word cocoon looks. My husband says, “Cocoons are just hard things that hang in trees.” I tell him not to say mean things about cocoons. I have not written what I’ve written because I felt pressured to write it. I have written it because I knew I would find other, more pleasant, things to write and do if I did not move through the writing quickly. Sometimes speed allows us to penetrate the impenetrable. Speed is not always a pathology any more than any other thing is a pathology. We like to pathologize as much as we like to label. This story will be here tomorrow, if it is in fact a story. I will pick up where I left off tomorrow, if I want to continue. I hope I will want to continue. There’s a lot more to tell. I hope to do right by the story of my own life, and my recent decision to leave poetry. My husband sits next to me in an uncomfortable chair with his feet propped up on an ottoman. I read this entry to him. “I am sliding out of this chair,” he says. “It feels like something is pulling me by my ankles.” I tell him that’s the devil.
Posted by Dana on 02.07.2010 at 8:46 pm
Categories: how it came to pass that i left poetry | 1 Comment »
Feb. 7, 2010 9:38 a.m.
Because he looks like our father and is nearing the age our father was when he died. Because I look like our mother and am the age our mother was was when I was born. Because once he lives longer than my father it will be like watching my father live out the years he was not granted. Because looking in on my life might make him feel as if he is re-witnessing hers. Because in this way he is a ghost to me. Because in this way I am a ghost to him. Because ghosts hide from one another. Because in hiding we remain peripheral. Because the periphery only knows silence. Because it is natural to ignore what can’t be acknowledged. Because cloaks have folds to hide inside. Because folds are pleasurable. Because pleasure is safer. Because there is no safe.
Posted by Dana on 02.07.2010 at 9:42 am
Categories: how it came to pass that i left poetry | Have your say »
