*and a poem at the end

:: Yoshino cherry trees in bloom at the University of Washington

A woman and her three children pile out of their gray sedan, silver digital cameras in hand, and make their way to the trees lining the entrance to Juanita Beach Park. The trees are in full bloom, their small white and ruby flowers open like brooches. The four take turns posing in front of the trees then disappear, smiling, inside the park.

One year ago today, I wrote my first poem after deliberately not writing for more than six years. When I worked at the University of Washington, I walked through the Quad every morning on my way to work. On this day last year, the Yoshino cherry trees started blooming. Students were on spring break, so the campus was nearly empty, which meant I had the entire Quad to myself, save for a few stray people here and there who came with little cameras to capture the trees or their loved ones standing in front of the trees. That day, I wrote a poem about the Quad, and I wrote another one every day for the rest of the week.

This was the start of my remembering who I am and what is important to me. Things that seemed important, even central to who I was, began to matter less. Writing poetry was what I’d been running from and what had been trying to call me back long before March 21, 2006. I always knew the poetry was there, waiting. I could tell by the way I was tempted to make associations between things and in the way certain strange and beautiful phrases and images would pop into my head (things that would be of little use anywhere other than a poem).

But after a long time spent purposefully ignoring these things, I began to believe I had succeeded in burying the temptation to write poetry. I had finally trained myself to see things as they were rather than for their potential and possibility. And I had learned to let ideas and images pass without making note of them.

Yet something flicked back on that day in the Quad. I wrote that first poem entirely in my head as I walked from one end of the Quad to the other. When I got into my office, I hurriedly typed the poem out, made a few changes, and showed it to KIA, my friend and co-worker. He said it was good. He said he liked it. His response gave me the encouragement I needed. I floated through that day, impervious to all the usual muck work threw at me. I came home and showed the poem to LoveShack. He liked it, too. I even worked up the courage to share the poem on my blog, where I received positive feedback. I knew then I wasn’t going to stop writing again. I’d lost too many good, productive writing years, and I wasn’t about to repeat that mistake.

And now, a year later, I’ve just mailed off my letter to the University of Washington officially accepting the offer to attend their MFA program. This is the part where I get all choked up, where I take stock of everything that’s happened in the last year in terms of my writing and realize I can’t even believe it — from being in Rebecca Loudon’s workshop to working with Liz on Poetry Thursday to making connections with other poets around the world (all because of this little old thing known as blogging).

The last week or so, I’ve felt somewhat lost in terms of what matters to me. For a number of reasons, my new job is using up a lot of my energy. In typical form, I am working way too many hours and putting tons of pressure on myself. This has been affecting me outside the office, not only by cutting into my free time but also by reducing my ability to enjoy the things I usually enjoy doing, including writing poetry.

So today, I took a much-needed day off. I am spending the day honoring this very special anniversary and thinking about what’s been important to me in the last year. I have a feeling that in a few years, if not sooner, all the details about my job at the University of Washington and my current job will have fallen away. Those details will be of no interest or value anymore. What I will always remember is that this is the year I began writing poetry again.

I thought it would be good to remain silent today, so starting at 11 p.m. last night, I quit speaking. This decision has forced me to quit listening to what I might say is bothering me and instead hear what my internal voice — that quiet one whose concerns are often overridden by my actual voice — needs me to listen to.

And as I sit here at Juanita Beach Park, my own silence has allowed me to sense the park in a way I wouldn’t otherwise. I can almost hear the newly opened buds taking in their world for the first time. They are exclaiming, All sky, sky and more sky! Their astute and honest observation reminds me what a big world it is. Big enough even for my dreams.

::

I did Poetry Thursday’s (completely and totally optional) idea this week, as suggested by Dennis. My poem is about a painting by Tsuguharu Foujita. I wanted to link to the piece I wrote about, Young Girl in the Park, but I wasn’t able to find it online. So you’ll just have to use your imagination.

The poem is about the artist’s internal dialogue as he paints. Of course, I would have no way of knowing what his internal dialogue might have been, but I enjoyed writing from this perspective. The whole park-setting-and-internal-dialogue thing seems appropriate, given my day of silence in the Juanita Beach Park.
* * *

Young Girl in the Park, Tsuguharu Foujita

How dull the others are
in their black clothes.
How can one draw them
when you can’t tell where they end
and their shadows begin.
The only thing darker than them
are the iron benches they lean into.
Even the tree bark
has more color.

Then you pass, your fat,
wide-eyed cat impossibly
propped on the ruffled apron
knotted to your waist.
Your hoop skirt, three times
the width of your small frame,
covered in rose-colored silks
that drag the walkway behind you
like trails of blood.

* * *
Note

I typed up this first section from my journal. And by that I mean my actual spiral-bound paper journal. I had to write out this entry by hand because, per my arrangement with myself, I wasn’t allowed back on my computer until 11 p.m. tonight. I wrote this at Juanita Beach Park at around 4 p.m.

:: Father, July 17, 1929 – March 8, 1985

The first things your brother took were the suits. Then he cleaned out the entire closet. Shirts, ties, casual pants, loafers, even the shoeshine box were packed up and taken somewhere. You didn’t ask where. You didn’t care. You just stood in the empty walk-in closet and touched the off-white shelves, looked at all the tangled and bare wire hangers.

Your father had made the shoeshine box himself when he was a child. It was one of his projects the summer he took up woodworking because polio had shut down the public pools. Your father’s story made it into the local newspaper, a picture of him sitting next to a workbench he’d made himself. The press was looking for good stories to tell that year to take people’s minds off the disease. The journalist talked about how your father saw the closed pools as an opportunity to learn something new, to be productive.

Your brother went through all the drawers in the house, loading up the hair dryer, the change catcher, the knee-high socks, the underwear. He went to your father’s office and came back with a box. One box is all a career, a life, amounted to.

In the years after his death, you would begin to look for your father in objects around the house. You wouldn’t find much. There was one photo of him tucked inside a drawer in the wet bar he built back in the ’70s. The drawer used to house swizzle sticks, decorative napkins, a wine opener and those colored swords for spearing maraschino cherries.

At some point, a pencil tray had been placed in the drawer, and this photo of your father found its way into one of the segmented compartments most likely intended for paper clips. The person in the photo looked like an old man, not like your father. You wished there were other photos of him, but you couldn’t find any, except for the slides from Korea stashed in a cigar box in the hall closet.

You’d pulled the slides out a couple of times, but they scared you. They were old and damaged, and when you held them to the light, all you saw were a bunch of men in green. In some photos, the men were drinking and smoking. In others, they posed with their guns. You didn’t like to think that one of these men was your dad. Your brother would come to visit one weekend and go through all the slides, throwing out the ones that were bad and taking the rest. It would be 20 years before you would see any of them again.

In one of your searches, you would come across some paperwork of your father’s, stashed inside a cabinet in an unused bathroom. It was some printed material that had to do with the retirement he never saw, and there were a few handwritten notes in the margins. You would return to this paperwork from time to time, happy to see his strong, clear penmanship. You also had his signature in a scrapbook on a school document he signed when you were in the eighth grade. You would lightly run your right index finger back and forth across his name. You would attempt to sign your name like him but you would never be able to imitate it so you would eventually give up trying.

Over time, the workshop he built out back would be stripped of its tools. Then the back wall would be eaten by termites. The shed that housed his riding lawn mower would first stand empty then become a repository for broken planters, trash cans and other unsightly and defective things that tend to accumulate in suburban yards.

The garden crops would be tilled under, sod would be planted and a tree would be dropped in the middle. The tree would grow larger every year until the branches would be so gnarled and thick that it would look like it that had always been there, all your life or even longer. You would almost be able to stand in the yard and pretend his garden had never existed, that this had never been his house, that your entire life with him was nothing more than something you’d dreamed up.

You make a plan in case you ever come across a rattlesnake. First, you will try to back away. In case that doesn’t work, you will always carry a stick so you can stab the snake or scare it off. If that fails and you are bitten, you will be prepared to cut an X in your own skin then suck the venom out, that is if you are limber enough. You figure the snake will bite you below the knees, so you should be able to manage.

You will not like cutting through your own skin, but your father and brother have shown you how it’s done. One cut through the middle of the bite, another cut perpendicular to the first. These can’t be shallow cuts, they’ve told you. They have to go as deep as the poison. This means you must press your pocket knife hard with your first finger, and you have to make the cuts quickly.

You hope the need to save yourself will kick in but worry you will wimp out. You know the pain of cutting yourself won’t be any worse than the pain of the bite. You tell yourself there will be relief as your mouth removes the venom from your body.

Of course, these thoughts are pure fantasy. You are a girl, which means your father won’t let you carry a knife of any kind, not even the type with the built-in scissors, tweezers and fingernail file. His pocket knife is large, too large for a pocket, really, with wood grain, fake ivory insets, two blades and a bottle opener. He uses this knife to slice fish open before they’ve even had a chance to die. You’ve never seen him use it on anything else, except maybe twine. When he’s not looking, you like to open it, one blade at a time, and press each tip into your palm or calf, until the blood rushes away from your skin and it begins to hurt. You want to see how much. How much you can take. When he catches you with the knife, you quickly flip the open blade back in and promise you were only playing with the bottle opener.

You hate that there are snakes everywhere and that they can kill you and that you have to worry about them every time you go for a hike. Even the pasture’s not safe. You swear you heard a rattler in there once, but never found the source of the sound, just grass, rocks and cow patties. You wonder why the cows never get bitten. You ask your mother about this. She doesn’t answer.

You remember driving through the pasture with her once, but you can’t remember why. There was no reason to drive through it. It wasn’t on the way from or to anywhere. You do remember it didn’t phase the cows, who kept chewing as you and your mother passed in the Monte Carlo, the car kicking up dust needlessly. There was a bull in the pasture that day. You asked your mother why bulls charge when they see the color red. She said how the hell would she know. You worried the bull would charge the car because its interior was still kind of red, even though it had faded in the sun and been stained by cigarette smoke.

The snakes in the grass aren’t as bad as the ones in the water, you can at least say that. You’d take your chances on land anytime. Every time you’ve slid into the lake, your skin has inevitably brushed up against something, whether it be fish or rocks on the bottom. You’ve imagined each brush as a water moccasin. You’ve tightened for bites that have never come.

And is that what you would do if you did see a rattlesnake? Clench, freeze up? Would you even have it in you to back away? You are, after all, the girl who begged your mother to drive faster, faster so the bull wouldn’t get you. What would you have done if she hadn’t been there to speed you through your irrational fears.