*and if you don’t know what Pong is, I don’t even want to hear about it

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What is dead: seagull
What is dying: seagull

Evening. My husband and I walk south over wet sand at Cannon Beach, roughly parallel to the ever-shifting waterline. We come across a dead seagull. Another. Another. A carcass every few hundred feet. Each body we come upon is more recently dead than the one before — more in tact, more body-like, more recognizably bird.

We pause at the fifth carcass. It is clearly only hours dead, if that. Thirteen seagulls surround the body. They systematically strip it of flesh.

It seems at first like a random attack but is in fact an organized effort. At any given time, three gulls have the dead bird in their beaks, one at the neck, two clasping either leg. The three pull in unison, stretching the still-pliant body into an expanding triangle until chunks of feathers and flesh tear away. The body breakers hop off to devour their share as three gulls from the larger group move in to perform roughly the same maneuvers as the last.

What is dead: seagull
What is dying: seagull

Sky burial, this is a kind of sky burial, I think. The flightless, the dead, being consumed by the living. The dead weighing down the living. The dead being carried off in so many ever-expanding stomachs.

What is dead: seagull
What is dying: seagull

Here and there, clumps of feathers stick out of the sand: What is left over after the harvest cannot be called bodies, can it. Cannot be called flight, since it takes more than feathers to fly. Half-buried dirty broken ornaments these feathers are, nothing more.

The sixth bird is not yet dead. It sits facing the wind. It does not move, except to blink, shiver. Between the wind and the cold, it has been a hard day here for gulls. A dog named Lana tries to attack the dying bird. Lana’s owner pulls her away. Wind blows sheets of dry sand just over wet sand. A pile of sand accumulates in front of the dying bird’s body. Soon the bird is caked in sand, most of its feathers no longer visible. It continues to blink.

I sit alongside until dark. My husband stands behind me. A woman pauses, looks at the bird, says Circle of life before moving on. I pick up a small stone near the bird, slip it in my pocket, wish the bird well. We make our way back down the beach, toward the dead, deader.

I wonder if the gulls will wait or begin eating the sixth bird while it is still alive. They gather around the dying gull as we move away.

What is dead: seagull
What is dying: seagull

8:51 a.m.
I wake to things that are, or appear to be, round: the sun, an alarm clock, my husbands eyes. The phrase “the bones of desire” is in my head. I wonder where it came from. Of course, it makes me think of birds.

9:56 a.m.
I stare at a postcard with an image of Bill Hammond’s The Fall of Icarus on the front. (Thank you for sending it, Catherine.) I think about W.H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” how it does seem “everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster,” and not just the disaster depicted in the poem, which is the fall of Icarus, but all disasters.

A wry joke I heard last night seems relevant: Knock, knock. Who’s there? 9/11. 9/11 who? I thought you said you’d never forget.

9/11 got our attention, no doubt. But then we turned, quite leisurely, away.

10:18 a.m.
I wonder why, on the eve of a birthday that marks my outliving one family member’s suicide and living beyond another’s attempted suicide, my husband chose to give me these two early gifts: a pocket knife and a pack of Exacto blades.

I think about how intriguing it is that my husband can at once be so compassionate and attuned, yet so detached and emotionally dissonant. He knows I don’t like knives and knife-like devices, ever. He’s seen me eying knives in the kitchen with suspicion. He knows I carry them blade-down with both arms fully extended and that I avoid carrying them whenever possible because their potential scares me. (I’ve heard of them puncturing toes, slicing off fingers. Remorselessly.)

Knives are up to no good, and my husband knows I know it. So I sit here, again asking myself, Why so many blades, on the eve of such a pivotal and, for me, scary day?

11:21 a.m.
I just e-mailed someone and essentially asked him to be my friend. He’s someone I think is cool and would like to be friends with, which means my typical course of action would be to avoid him and instead talk to people I am less drawn to.

I’ve always been like this: keeping at a distance the most intriguing, magnetic people. I have yet to uncover the source of this dysfunction, although I suspect it has something to do with the most intriguing, magnetic person in my life dying when I was 13: my father.

I feel like a kid in grade school again. I used to walk right up to people I liked and ask, Will you be my friend? That is, until one girl replied, You can’t just go up to people and ask them that.

So I stopped asking. But I’ve always wondered what the real issue is there. Wouldn’t it make more sense, and cut through all the bullshit, for us to be direct when it comes to these undertakings?

12:01 p.m.
I wonder if I’ve made the wrong decision. Decisions. To start, I wonder if my desire to stick it out in my mother’s inhospitable womb was a bad one. Whatevz. My husband and I are about to make our way to Discovery Park. I am wearing my favorite T-shirt, the one that reads: Writing well is the best revenge. My rack looks pretty nice in it, too, which is a bonus.

1:44 p.m.
We are finally leaving for the beach. We are sometimes slow to get things underway.

2:42 p.m.
On the trail that leads to the beach, I pick up a stick and carry it in my right hand. The stick makes me think of my father, the two of us in the back yard playing fetch with small, overeager dogs. I did not know then that anything was wrong with my family. I thought all families were like us.

I carry the stick because it comforts me. We pass a man and woman. The man is carrying a stick of his own. We nod at one another as if to say, Nice stick you got there.

3:17 p.m.
Closer to the beach, I think about a woman named Robin. I had worked with her, but we weren’t friends. She thought I was flaky and insubstantial. She tolerated me at best, until the last time I saw her, which was at Tivoli Video in Kansas City. She talked to me for whatever reason.

I said some things that made her laugh. She seemed sad. I wanted to make her less sad. Her smile was beautiful. I wanted her to smile. We talked about how hot K.D. Lang was, which was as reasonable a topic as any, given that her poster hung in the window of the music store across the street. We agreed her latest album was shit.

I wanted to ask Robin to have dinner with me, but I liked her a lot, which means I avoided further contact with her for fear I’d fuck things up. She walked out of the store. Later that night, she went to her garage, started her car and sat in it. When she didn’t come to work the next day, someone went to her house to check on her. She was dead. Her friends weren’t surprised. They knew she thought it wasn’t possible or right to outlive her mother, who had committed suicide at her age: 33.

sometime after 3:17 p.m.
We find two stones, throw them in the water: one for my mother, one for my great aunt. I throw the one for my great aunt; it immediately sinks. My husband throws the one for my mother; it skips three times across the water before going under.

3:51 p.m.
There’s more beach glass on the shore than I imagined there would be. I’ve never looked for it before. I crouch on the wet sand, avoid waves. I feel like a child.

I turn around to find my husband whittling a small, cylindrical piece of wood. I fall even more madly in love with him. I look back a few minutes later to find him really going to town with whatever he’s creating, leaning his whole body into it. I realize there’s so much about this man I still don’t know. I rise, go to him. We walk along the beach admiring the driftwood sculptures people have created: seesaws, lean-tos, chairs, altars.

A child is buried in the sand, begs to be freed. Her father goes to her, a tiny bucket and shovel in his hand.

6:22 p.m.
Beans and rice at Third Place Books. People seem happy.

7:51 p.m.
Home. Sad news from a friend. I wait to talk to him.

10:07 p.m.
I feel scared and uncomfortable. I think I need to start doing a lot of my writing not on this blog. On paper, or sticks or rocks or leaves. Anywhere but here. I don’t like it here anymore. I’m starting to feel self-conscious. I’m going to write all my worries on things that sink, then throw them in the water. I’m going to write on my hands, then wash my hands clean. I’ve decided poetry hates me. It rushes to the other end of the playground when it sees me coming.

I’ve been nervous about turning 36. I’ve felt guilty about the ever-increasing possibility of outliving Aunt Grace. I never really thought I would.

I’ve been nervous about turning 36, about building a better life from the refuse of my childhood than my mother was able to build from the refuse of her childhood.

I feel today a bit like Semele in Carolyn Kizer’s “Semele Recycled.” After being broken into pieces and flung into a river (only in my case, it was a lake — Lake Texoma), after my legs crawled out of the lake to become a roadside shrine, after my arms and torso had been pieced together by an old man for use as a canoe, after my head had been set up as an oracle and my eyes used as marbles in a simple game — all these dead parts of me are making their way back to me.

For me, the change from necrotizing pieces of flesh back to working whole body has nothing to do with the rumored return of my god, as is the case for Semele. It has to do with my realization that the same points do not have to be connected to form the same picture.

There are many ways to connect the points, so even if some of those I’ve plotted (or that were plotted for me) are ones my mother, aunt and other female relatives/ancestors have also plotted (or had plotted for them) — even though unspeakable experiences and quiet injustices do in fact run along my mother’s family lines and come to a head in me, I can still push back — against and through — those pains and, I hope, come out somewhere on the other side of them.

But, like Semele, my “inner parts remember fermenting hay, / the comfortable odor of dung, the animal incense, / its birth and rebirth and decay.”

And I don’t just remember it for me. But for her, and for her, and for all the other hers out there.

::

There is no meaning to your life, other than that which you ascribe to it. The broader the strokes you use, the lighter and less detailed you will live. The more you fill in the picture — weighing your life down with meanings that resonate with the past, with others, with the world around you — the more you will begin, slowly, to see your sufferings are not yours alone and your healing is not yours alone. You will begin to see you is You and We and They and Them and That and Those. And all those things are you.

For what is kindness, if not realizing we are all of a kind and then treating everyone accordingly.

This is the life I strive for, that I invite in. Today I celebrate the birthday Aunt Grace never had. For her, I will carry a single stone in my pocket. I will throw it in the water at dusk. I will remember her even though we never met because I know her, even without having met her.

And from my mother, today I ask for the courage and strength to walk through life the way she, under better circumstances, might have been able to. I ask for her permission and understanding as I move forward with a better life.

Thank you, ladies. You were beautiful and tragic and are sorely missed. Now let’s walk, arm and arm, through August 11, 2007. There’s so much I want to show you. I have party hats for you both.

::

Click here to read “Semele Recycled.” It is in Chinese at the top, and in English below the translation.

Wow. I used a translator to change the Chinese version back to English — it’s a completely different poem. Not completely different, more like a companion poem.* It’s lovely. I love translating pieces through multiple languages and seeing what new meanings and resonances they carry. A friend of someone I know had one of his poems translated into shorthand. Isn’t that excellent?

* * *
Notes

*Or is this supposed to be a companion poem to Kizer’s original. It’s hard for me to tell. So similar but maybe it isn’t supposed to be the same poem. However, it’s what appears to be the translation section of this online journal, so I dunno. I dunno what to think.**

**OK, I’ve read, line by line, through the re-“translation” of Kizer’s poem from English to Chinese and back to English. I put translation in quotes because I just used a cheap online translator. But still, and the Chinese version definitely seems like an attempt at translating the original, not a companion poem — as I was thinking it could possibly have been. I’ve decided to do a series of short pieces based on this re-translation. I’m stoked about it. I’m starting on it right this second. I will be taking liberties, of course, because that’s what poets do.

A moth is not very attractive, desirable, or known for many positive attributes. There is the story of a moth being attracted to the flame, which got too close to the flame and was destroyed. The moth in your dream may be pointing out a personal weakness or may be bringing to light a deception in your life. It could be suggesting that you are being lead to a place where you will be hurt unless you recognize the danger. Since dreams are very rarely literal, the danger could be emotional or psychological, not necessarily physical.

Hmm. I’m just sayin’. Hmm.

I mentioned in a comment that, the morning before the moth class, I had written a poem in which an Io moth plays a central role and that, later on the same day, Sharon Bryan and I were talking after her class, and she brought up Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Man-Moth.” Bryan had no idea I’d just been writing about a moth. I also just remembered that, the night before the moth-in-eye incident, I noticed how a fellow student’s tattoo resembled an Io moth with open wings.

Hmm. Interesting. Very interesting coincidences indeedy.