letters to myself
September 20, 2008
How you allow men inside: through breath that parts your lips, is taken up in your lungs. They say your name and it threads through you like a weed vine. Their diamond stylus needles fall into your ruts, take up residence there, scrape gently along your ridges. Men pull from you what is within you and translate it as sound. You keep skipping, like a record. You keep skipping. You hold their names in your mouth, roll them around like rocks. When you speak, you return to them what they have breathed into you. When you speak, there is no sound, only motion.
letters to myself
May 9, 2008
Something inside you keeps saying, What the hell am I doing? You open doors, close them, greet everyone with the same false smile, the one where you raise the right side of your mouth more than the left, in a near-smirk, like Tom Cruise’s wife, What’s-Her-Name, the one with the pretty hair and pretty features and a nose smaller and straighter than yours. The kind of face you’ve always wanted.
But this isn’t about looks. There’s more going on, the fact that there’s not much to celebrate, of course, where your life is concerned, certainly not while something in you keeps saying, What the hell am I doing inside this small life with its picture-framed windows, retractable shades? This cubicle of a life, where nobody takes your picture or even notices that you’ve arrived. Where is the red carpet, the studded high heels you’ve longed for since childhood? Where are the rabbits that get pulled out of goddamn hats?
You knew a man once when you were young, a friend of your father’s, who could tie a knot in a cherry stem using only his tongue. He showed you and you laughed, his tongue sticking out with the knotted stem wrapped around the end. That’s when you knew magic existed in ordinary people. You believed you’d grow into that magic, like the women who got sawed in half then walked away whole, or like girls whose breasts exploded into double Ds practically overnight. You looked through catalogs from JC Penney at the lingerie section hoping someday magic would find and transform your body, make you into something remarkable and or at least wanted.
Your father had magic, walked into a room, his footsteps lighting it up. He soared on a combination of Marlboros and Bloody Marys, his every gesture illumitated. Power does that for people, makes them funnier, more engaging. But who cares if the attention is feigned? Didn’t someone once say appearance is all that matters?
But back to you. Dull, idle, wasted potential. Never amounted to much. And why does all that matter? Because of the promise that was made implicitly and explicitly — that you would be something, that people would notice you. But there’s nothing much to celebrate, other than your survival. And what does that amount to? Millions have done no less and against far greater odds.
You wait for the clouds to part, for something deep within to be churned up like water in a lake, its nutrients rising to the surface.
You wait to celebrate yourself.
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This letter to myself uses or plays on the following lines from poems by Charles Bukowski:
Something inside you keeps saying / what the hell am I doing?
There wasn’t much to celebrate / of course
I was only celebrating myself
letters to myself
December 3, 2007
Impossible to write in this rain, when the whole world sounds as if it’s draining away. You are afraid to open your shades because you know what’s out there is wet and hopeless. Even the trees have had enough rain.
* * *
The weekend was better: snow.
Something about snow makes you want to run through it, and so you do.
The night stays light, brightest down by the snow, as if the there were uplights hidden inconspicuously near your feet and around the shrubs. This light, of course, makes you feel like your life will never end.
It’s like being on a movie set where there is no time, only a crude approximation of night where everything is more clearly rendered than it should be. Being in this world makes you feel more clearly rendered, too, as if suddenly you knew what to do with yourself. Don’t the weed trees look lovely in this light and covered in snow? You imagine that you must look lovely too but won’t allow yourself such flattery.
You have never noticed before that near a street lamp the snow seems to fall in a conical shape toward the center of the beam. That’s another trick of light for you.
You will get caught up in watching both the snowfall and the shadow of the snowfall. You will feel dizzy if you watch long enough. You will not understand if what you are looking at is snowflake or shadow. This will make you open your mouth to laugh, and snowflakes will land just inside your lips. Their shadows will fall on your face, but you will never know precisely where.
But precision will not matter in this moment. Something about snow makes words stick together. There is no writing when it snows either. It is a time to be part of the world, not to stand back from it as an observer so you can describe it later.
* * *
Impossible in this rain, in these dark days of winter, to do anything but drag your heavy body from room to room and hope to occupy yourself. You turn music on to drown out the sound of the water sloshing through the gutters. But cars keep driving past, kicking up water as they go and reminding you the water is out there, dirtying in the streets.
Today, the lowest areas of your yard fill with water. The soil can take no more and purges what it cannot hold.
* * *
Yesterday, you watched snow change to water and drip from every branch.
from the sublimation archives: letters to myself
July 22, 2007
how to hide
Hide so still you no longer breathe, and you will find skulking in the silence the body you would rather leave behind. Call it back to you. Do not let your body push open the pocket doors.
You have crouched in this closet for hours, behind worn and outgrown clothing, next to boxes of broken and nameless items, the only light leaking in around hinges and turning back to darkness before reaching you.
The quiet is not all bad. The sharp notes, his voice calling your name, are what set the heart clattering like a broken metronome. That is when you must watch for the light to change, listen for footsteps to come close.
What about this closet? It smells like mothballs. Over time, it has begun to smell like you, or you like it. It contains everything once used and now discarded, covered over by spiderwebs and time. There is nothing here for him, no reason he would lay a hand on either doorknob. What he wants is you. Why would he go looking for his prize amid such rubbish.
from the sublimation archives: letters to myself
July 15, 2007
You weren’t supposed to attach yourself to her blown-out uterus.
The doctors said it was impossible. Not after her ectopic pregnancy, after the weeks she spent on the sofa 13 years earlier, latch-hooking a large wall hanging of an owl while waiting for the child she carried to rupture her fallopian tube.* She knew it was inevitable. That all she could do was lie there as the dark eyes took shape, as the body’s form became recognizable, as she worked her way down the animal’s body, knotting thread after thread, until she finally reached its thick, strong talons and the drab branch to which it clung.
The pain was like nothing she’d felt before, she would tell you years later. You would wonder how she could be composed enough to wait it out, knowing her child would die inside her and possibly take her own life in the process. You would also wonder how she felt knowing something she held was so full of want, so in love with the idea of its developing form that it would grow until it destroyed whatever held it and was, in turn, destroyed.
What you would not come to understand until years later was that you also started from this kind of kindling — a blind, all-consuming self-love. Perhaps it was something that skinned over in your mother’s scarred and forgotten uterus, a hint of that other life that burned out like a dark star inside her, allowing your mother to become terrestrial again. She would eventually rise from the sofa, hang the owl decoration in the family room, and take back her life.
It took a handful of years. Who knows how many other fertilized eggs tried to settle into the unforgiving landscape of your mother’s body. They all failed, just as the doctors had predicted. You mother was labeled barren. It became a truth spoken of infrequently and in hushed tones.
But you did not listen. Your first success was not asking anyone if your survival was possible. Your second was dropping down into her blood lining, where your small alien form lit up inside her like a single firefly under acres of tree cover.
You took what you could to sustain you. You did so without implied or expressed permission. Soon, your form became recognizable. Your dark eyes took shape. She would call you a miracle. They all would. Someday you would come to believe them, a truth you would speak of infrequently and in hushed tones.
*Sept. 13, 2008: I need to fix this because I remember now that she actually made that latch-hook owl while she was pregnant with me.
from the sublimation archives: letters to myself
March 6, 2007
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.
from the sublimation archives: letters to myself
March 3, 2007
At the Lake.
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.
from the sublimation archives: letters to myself
February 10, 2007
1981.
Another summer day.
You run into the road, barefoot, drop to your knees, and stare at the bands of tar bridging each slab of concrete. You’re looking for welts in the tar, a product of the sun’s heat. You’ve picked all the bubbles to your right, where the road threads in front of your house and out of your neighborhood. You know at this rate, you’re outpacing the sun. You won’t have enough bubbles to last all summer. You’ll be lucky to make it through July, and in August, you’ll be reduced to wedging your Silly Putty in the crack where curb meets grass, the one that forms when summer is at its peak, the soil’s water has dried up, and the manicured lawn leans into itself.
Mashing Silly Putty into that crack isn’t nearly the pastime picking tar bubbles is. But when the time comes, it will have to do. Either one gets you out of the house, away from them. Either one will brown your pale skin and freckle your face, making you look healthy, happy even.
And you can breathe out here. And you can pretend. Some days, you imagine them rushing from the house to coax you inside because they don’t want their child kneeling in the street.
You inch along the road’s midsection, come to a stop, drive your fingernails into each bump of warm tar until you find its core, the hollow no one else sees.
This is my blog wherein I, Dana Guthrie Martin, write things and stuff. Most of the time, writing and I hobble along in a sort of three-legged race where there is no finish line. (more...)
Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships. — Charles Simic
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beg, borrow, but don't steal
This work is licensed under Creative Commons. If you don’t credit Dana (by using her full name and preferably by linking back to the appropriate post) for however you copy, distribute, transmit or adapt her words, you are being bad. And naughty. And she will have her servant monkeys hunt you down and cut your hands off so you can never copy, distribute, transmit or adapt anyone’s work again and call it your own.
(Unless, of course, you were to use your butt cheeks to manipulate your keyboard with the copying, distributing, transmitting, adapting and whatnot, but Dana fortunately has only met one person whose butt cheeks are that talented. He could play a major third on a piano using nothing but his ass. She kids you not.).
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flick, flick, flick
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i cannot be bought
