The ice makes the world into not-our-world, into an alien world. But it is beautiful, so beautiful. The glass trees and the crystal blades of glass everything glittering so hard it hurts your eyes.

Certain things can save you,always: the quiet of a pencil, the suppleness of cloth.

(First of all, I apologize in advance.)

The springtime means Shakespeare and crocus flowers and fuchia crabapple blossoms, means poetry and fake duels with fake cardboard swords on the front lawn of the school. Always.
And outside the world is waking up, blue and blushing.

So, though I hold loyal to the snow, I can't help this. Really, it's inevitable. An ingrained habit. This is the worst of times, the best of times, the time when my father's eyes are brightest and his fingers on his keyboard the fastest, the time when I most wish that I had taken after him and been a poet, instead of taking after maybe my mother or maybe just myself and fallen wholly in love with prose.

And now, for no other reason than the inevitability of Death, Taxes, and Springtime:

~
“The Day the Phoenix is Born”

There are crescents of midnight
Under your eyes
As you drink Sandy coffee
And miss the sunrise.

There is more you meant to do
Than this book of Sudoku
Whose loose, buoyed pages
Have nothing left for you.

There are bent rays of light
Turning red with the night
As you lay down your pencil--
And miss Firebird’s flight.

~
“Mudriver Music”

The day starts early,
Before the sun does.
Then, slowly,
The sky paints each of sixteen windows
A different part of the same rainbow.
By nine I have done nothing,
By noon little still.
The day doesn’t really begin,
Until so to the moon.
Then,slowly,
The violinists play,
Their hands spinning fibers
Of music and wire.
And on the green slopes I listen
For the first birds to sing.

~
The Pear

First, you stand and stare,
head back, neck smooth and bare,
hands curled to fit the contours of your hips,
your eyes narrowed and watering against
the rush of blue morning light.
You see, muddled by mumbling leaves,
a jigsaw piece of freckled golden skin.
so like your brother’s, your friend’s, your sister’s skin—
but not quite so sweet.
Then suddenly the wind works in your favor,
the leaves blow back,
and you can see the whole pear, now,
Familiar: smooth and bare.
The bark is chalky, you discover, as you climb-
loose, crumbling, rocky.
The leaves shift and mumble, make you muddled,
A jigsaw piece of freckled golden skin.

~
“East-West”

The isles are tight and crowd
With packages which display
Fish I have never seen,
Fruits I will never hold.
I wonder what a lychee nut tastes like
What Hello Kitty tastes like--
And reach for an undulating glass bottle
Of melon soda instead.

~

(This one is not my fault. It was for a class. An evil, evil class. The sort where the teacher has you write skits about someone attempting suicide. The kind taught by the yoda-quoting tie-wearing faux-english-prep-boy teachers who are afraid of adverbs. The kind taught by the teacher who shows you two creepy dark sci-fi paintings entitled “The Island of Death” and “Atomic Children” and makes you write poems about them. So. The thing you are wondering: why I am including this at all? I like the first two sentence. That’s all.)

“The Island of Death”

In the touch of her hand,
There are moth wings and dust
In the sheen on her lips,
There is filigree rust
In the sweat on her brow,
There is not half a chance,
In the blue window glass
Muted silhouettes dance.
In the still of the air
There is the lull of her breath
In her dull hazel eyes
Are there towers of gold--
Or an island of death?

Do you remember any of it?

Anything at all?

Just a hint. Just a whipser. Just one morning's rainbow colored sky.

I hope so.

I doubt it.

I think the only thing I really want right now is Jack's porch. His guitar in the backround and his perfect scratchy smoker's voice, rounded and lilting with wine. And Dinease's tinkerbell laugh and tiny feet in bright, bright slippers. And their one-eyed cat rubbing incessantly up against my leg, i's frame so fragile that I'm afraid it will blow away on a breeze. And maybe Grahm, too, appearing out of nowhere with a newer guitar and a smoother voice, but still one that tastes vaugely of wine, noisily making ovaltine and volenteering to watch Jaws with Chandler and I, halfway out of kindness and halfway out of not wanting to watch it by himself. And Jaws. And ovaltine. God. I get so homesick for that place, so fucking homesick. So hollow and lonely and stretched thin with lounging for the chaos of London Ontario and the cold gray waves of Lake Heron, and all of it, all of it. I will maybe someday miss Iowa City like I miss that place, but I'm not sure. I love Iowa City intensely, I love it so much about it; I love, love, love our city--and yet I'm not sure I will ever feel more homesick then I do right now. I have never even lived up there but that doesn't matter. I am so hemmed in by cornfields.

I think the only thing I really want is Jack's porch. His guitar in the backround and his perfect scratchy smoker's voice, rounded and lilting with whine. And Dinease's tinkerbell laugh and tiny feet in bright, bright slippers, and their one-eyed cat rubbing incessantly up agianst my leg, it's frame so fragile that I'm afraid it will blow away on a breeze. And maybe Grahm, too, appearing out of nowhere with a newer guitar and a smoother voice, noisily making ovaltine and volenteering to watch Jaws with Chandler and I, halfway out of kindness and halfway out of not wanting to watch it by himself. And Jaws. And ovaltine. God. I get so homesick for that place, so fucking homesick. So hollow and lonely and stretched thin with lounging for the chaos of London Ontario and the cold gray waves of Lake Heron, and all of it, all of it. I will maybe someday miss Iowa City like I miss that place, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure I will ever feel more homesick then I do right now.

There is nothing lonlier than being in a room full of muscians. Being in a shadowy corner, watching orange gold light pool on the contours of their instruments, hearing their voices so round and raised and full, your own mouth clamped shut, your own fingers still, appreciating without participating in the raw beauty of their music, of their magic. You are the only one who is silent. I don't think they know at all what that is like. They are on another, better plane of existance and you are not with them. And really, they are too distracted to care. And I can't even blame them, not one bit. I just kind of wonder if there is something else, something just as bad, something the same--I wonder if they've ever felt that way, or if they are purely as oblivious as they seem.

There is a single red rose in a blue glass bottle getting ready to leak petals all over the kitchen table. The rose is from the co op. The blue glass bottle is from that lovely, tacky renissance festival. Oh, green hills and cream soda and correographed jousting! Oh, summer-- And winter now, winter in all her sparkly glory.

And roses.

But damn, if it isn't just a little harder than you always let on. If it isn't just barely bad enough for you to write in questions, where anyone can read them not answer. Whatever; you'll delete them later. Whiped clean. The internet's memories don't linger--thank god.

Pomegranites are like geodes. You don't look at them twice when you see them lieing in the sun under a tree, but when they split open it is an ambush, it is silk from a magician's sleeve, it is daimond and rubies. Pomegranites taste better, though, I'd imagine; less like dirt.

The pink plastic curl of a sheet sled. So bright and so slick, and down we go.

That particular stench of chemicals. That particular toss of her head.

Eric's mom makes caramels. They are wrapped in chalky wax paper and they are hard and rectangular and they taste like brown sugar. They are not like normal caramels. They are tougher and daker, almost the color of my hair. I am overcome by a wave of love for these seventeen. Damnit, if this class just isn't keeping me alive. If Mrs. Davis's guilty bright-eyed laughter and cocaine-skinny Jake's blank smile, Eleni's rainbow wooden jewelery, if all of them and all the others aren't the only thing left to get up for.
They aren't, really. But they are the only thing right now.

At City Park the lights are on; they lean over the pond in swooping dangerous arcs like the lantern fish's antenna. The snow is still falling, glittery,glittery, glittery. It just sparkles so hard. I almost can't stand it,the feeling of it's particular blindness is too good to keep up with. I walk on the water. I slide on the ice. I can see the etch-e-sketch lines of a thousand hockey goals, a thousand eight year old prodigy's thousand figure eights. I lie on my back and make an angel, right there. The snow keeps falling and glittering and blinding, it covers me up with glitter and blindness. In the back of my head I can hear Colin Meloy singing; the bombs are fading away, he says, and they are, I can feel them fading. My mother is somewhere nearbye. She came with me and now she is a child and there is a bigger angel near mine and what do I miss, what do I miss the most. The fairy tale childhood of wild green grapes and the mean neighbor's stripey cat. Having someone put sleighbells out on Christmas morning, even stomping fake deer trails all around; or maybe those were real, the deer trails. What do I miss the most. Your fingers. Your fingers, I miss the most. Or elderflower water, which was too expensive anyway but now is gone. Or nothing. Glitter glitter glitter goes the snow and all is good right now.


The apple and the cherry and the watermelon suckers are delicate jewels, shiny and bright. We swallow them whole.

Somehow in sixth grade I was so certain. Maybe it was still being pocket sized and having still gold hair, maybe you just loose something no matter what. Or maybe, maybe not. I never thought I was invincible. But some of you did. And some of you I guess realized that you aren't and maybe that is why this is all so weird and lonely.

Maybe the one thing that will remind of my adolescense is sour sugar, a constant shene of half-off valentines day candy on my lips, a sudden whiff of lemon as I turn my head.

Yeah, and the world keeps spinning. Feel us furrowing on towards spring.

Another one of my wisdom teeth is growing in and it hurts like I'm teething.

Something bad happens.
Something bad happens, and for a while it is a physical pain, it is your lowered head and your over-bitten nails, it is the whiteness of your cheeks and the stillness of your lips.
Something bad happens, and for a while you can't let it go, you can't get away from it, you can't concentrate on anything else, you can't breathe, you can't think.
Something bad happens and then it is just something bad that has happened, something that is done. You raise your head, shy at first, and your cheeks become the color of skin again and your nails grow back and your lips even murmur.
Something bad happens but eventually you forget. Or no; you never forget, but you get bored of being broken so you put it aside and you turn to other matters: to a blue sky so bright that it hurts, to a paintbrush, to a new friend, to every glittering thing in the world. You are good again. Sometimes in quiet moments, there is that familar bad ache, that old bitter edge that you thought you and worn down to softness from all that use. But mostly, you are good again.
Finally, you start having normal days.
Things have a new pattern. It is starting to fit you.
You have one normal day after another.
Then, one day, one normal day, you are feeling fine, normal-good even- when suddenly something happens and in a dry-lightening flash you remember, you remember everything, and suddenly you are right back where you started and Something Bad Has Happened, and even though it has already happened, it is already done, it feels just as bad as the first time and you bite your nails down to the skin and go silent and pale and never ever raise your head.
Maybe you find a wilted yellowed letter. Maybe a glossy photograph. Maybe a little braided ring or maybe a small plastic dinosaur. Maybe you sit in a spot where you used to sit. Maybe you drink a soda that you used to drink. Maybe you just see the fall of her hair, or the way his fingers curl around his sleeves. Maybe it doesn't take anything at all.
You always think it's over, but it's not.

A barn raising, maybe. Or all the fireworks set off at once,the sky a single epileptic blurr. Or frost. Or maybe long grass, yellow and green and brown, scraping at your legs as you run down a hill.

The Bell Tower:

The quiet, the gray metal walls with the wild webs of graffiti,the windows, glowing and white, the view that never ends, the smoke and the clouds closing in outside, the slanting sureity of the lines of the ladders. The peace. The solitude. The little drift of snow, the swirling draft of air. The freedom.
I can not begin to express my love for that place.

When one day I try the door and it is locked,I don't know what I will do.

Hey, guess what you guys?

I actually will be able to vote in the 2008 presidential election...

Yep. I'm sure you weren't wondering/ probably knew about that, but still. I'm excited.

Also, I was thinking about war and half-off valentines candy and politicians and grime and little kids eating chips of sweet lead paint and reindeer and counterfiet coins and accoustic guitars and three colored flags...and everything, everything there is. And I came to a conclusion:

The world could really, really, really due with a few more idealists.

I had an epiphany the other day. Something that had really never occurred to me before. Amidst rivers of sunlight and meltwater, I realized that things might actually be okay. I might not have done myself in, yet. There might be just as much sunlight and snow three years from now.

God, and for so long I have been underwater, heavy and salty-eyed, seeing everything in terms of possible peril, not possible....just possible! Things are possible. Good things, too. I might-- I really really might-- be okay after alll.

He is dressed as the statue of liberty. He carries a torch and a sign that says, 'HAVE SOME FUN, GET YOUR TAXES DONE.' Before I saw his face I expected him to be different- older and more defeated, maybe, but he is young, and miserably defiant. His hair and his eyes are black and his skin has a tint like thin shene of soysauce. His jaw is clenched and pointy, and shved almost clean. I catch his eyes; they are so smart and so sad and they follow me for just a moment as our car slides by. I think how it was the only job he could get, how they are paying him next to nothing even though there he is, humilated and cold, and probably hungry, too. There is something ironic about the stiff, awkwardly draping grayish green clotch, the spikey crown, the torch that does not even have a real flame to warm him. He looks noble, though, bitter and brave behind the patriotic facade. I try to think of something I would give him, if I could, if I had passed him on the sidewalk instead of the road, but all I can think of is the bland hot chocolate you get at sporting events, and that is not good enough, that is no match for the precision in his eyes.
We are gone.

There is this line in this song that goes, “You want to be a perfect fire burning white and tall, and to be free of all this terrible impurity,” and then later this other line, “You just want to be held and told you’re worth it after all.” And it’s close, so close, too close. When did everything get so muddy? When did our maps become Australian? That’s it! That’s why. That’s why there is ‘AUSTRALIA’ in big loose letters on my pimply ceiling. Because Upside Down. I got it. I figured it out. I remembered. I think I should get some sort of reward, now. A drink that tastes like roses or the solace of darkness and shiny shiny snow.

And there are types like him all over the world. Comforterably caucasian, male, and middle class.
Terrified of adverbs.
Everything in this room is souless and stale. I can not keep my eyes open and the air tastes like dust.
I need a window and endless hair. Escape.

Down by the rivers where the willows bend it's cold and still and there are leftover crabapples soured but not gone always under foot. Everything is all right, there.

Ah, the remarkable blueness of newness!

I want cold that I can bury down deep in the middle of my bones, and the cleaness of ice. Snow more than anything. Fernlike dendrites and whirligig wings. Fallen angles, all white and rainbow. Magic in the world again. I want my winter back.

Silver fluttering through the sleek dark sky like a raindrop, then suddenly gone into the muddy water. Wishes weighed for worth. Coins assigned. Promises forged.
But the next day, more spectacular yet, a zoo lost as completely as our change opens up its lion's jaws, and lets us in.

I had the most remarkable day. Ask me about the lions.