Into the morning

Into the morning routine, Heart to Heart and Silk, quickly followed by black tea, drink it while watching The Backyardigans w/ Vaughn. "Ski patrol to the rescue" on a muggy July morning. Out of the morning routine quickly, outside to mow the lawn, just the front and the sides today. Do it fast before allergies go bonkers. Peel allergen-laced clothes off in the basement, head upstairs to shave and shower. Steam in the shower. Thoughts are like this, rising out of nowhere not nowhere really but the hot water, as a body is mostly water. Thoughts are like this steam rising only to disappear. I think of Dash's ten-month-old vocab stuck on two words for at least a month now: mom-ma and dad-da. First words of a person. First words of a poet. My first poet words, worthless as they are, ain't ever gonna slip outta mind. "As I walked alone / down the long, abandoned road / I saw a bird. / It was dead." First stanza of not literally the first poem I ever wrote, but really the first poem I wrote. At fifteen and never having read any real poetry before. It's redundant, not concise, and easy generalities (road, bird) are substituted where specifics could have added something (synagogue parking lot, starling—not actually sure of the bird, didn't know birds at all then, but I recall speckles, definitely darkness, and possibly iridescence). This is the poem my head-bangin' friends took notice of, the one they showed to the class intellectuals who surprisingly also approved, even my English teacher, who at one point had told me I shouldn't be in the school, put it on the front of a collection of class poems at year's end, though my piece wasn't from an assignment (otherwise I probably wouldn't have done it). Simple vanity of people excited by your work, who can escape that completely? What strikes me about that opening stanza now, almost twenty years later, isn't it's faults, but that at fifteen and with no experience of poetry, and with the rest of the poem, IIRC, falling into exact-rhymed quatrains, I would resist the temptation to do the same to those lines. However bad the writing is, the poetry isn't terrible, the poetry is in the sounds: the consonance, assonance, and slant-rhyming all work pretty well. An accident, of course. But still. The steam keeps rising. I take long showers. I have to owe the early comfortableness with free verse to Jim Morrison's Wilderness which I had picked up from a Waldenbooks not long before writing the poem, brought home in secret, and stored away in a bottom drawer as if it were porn or a pint of Majorska, because it was "worse," it was poetry. Porn was an unspoken given, vodka a rite of passage, but guys weren't supposed to read poetry. By this time I'm out of the shower, in bedroom getting dressed, thought replaced by other thought: gotta get going, KC needs to get to the grocery store. She takes Dash; Vaughn stays home with me. She wants to "read" the bird book. It's been a month or two since we've done this last. We'll look through the Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Birds and I have to tell her the name of the birds on every page. Males and females. Summer plumage and winter. Overhead views. Everything. When we get to the Great Auk I tell her, this time, that it's extinct, and she asks what that means. I tell her that means there are none left in the world. None on the earth since 1844. "They all died?" she asks, and I tell her "Yes, they all died." We move on. But after a dozen pages or so she wants to return to "the extinct one." We go back to that page, "There's not even one left?" she asks. "Not even one," I say. And after looking awhile and talking about how "pretty" that Auk was and the shape of his beak, we go back to the page we were on. But before we can even get to the Herons, she wants to go back again to the Great Auk. She points to one of the Auks above it, the Thick-Billed Murre, says "Let's give him a new name." "OK," I say, "how about Billy?" "No," she says, and then after a moment she asks, "What's this one's name again?" She is pointing to the Great Auk; I tell her the name. "I want to call this one," the Thick-Billed Murre, "Great Auk," she says. "Alright," I say, "that's the Great Auk now." We'll go through the same motions later, the Monk Parakeet is renamed the Carolina Parakeet; the Mourning Dove, the Passenger Pigeon. These changes don't make her happy, but they will do, it seems. Reading through a bird book with a three-and-half-year-old I worry about some of the bird names, hope she doesn't repeat them at the wrong time. There are Boobies, Tits, and Cocks, and people might not know what she's talking about. The rest of the time before KC gets back from shopping, Vaughn and I build "separate towers" out of the Duplo blocks: one yellow, one red, one green, one blue. When KC gets home we help her unpack the groceries, Dash goes in the play-yard. Vaughn return to our towers, but instead of playing with them, we spin the Duplo creatures (two penguins, "Chalk" and "Spot"; one sea lion; and "Little Guy" who is nothing recognizable) on their heads. We keep track of who spins the longest; whoever spins the longest wins that round. By time lunch is ready, all four are tied with three victories. Lunch is Boars Head skinless beef franks, KC also has leftover pasta, we both have a garden salad, and Vaughn has some carrots. KC feeds Dash, I don't know what. Dessert is a big deal, Vaughn's first time with an ice cream cone. I plop a couple of scoops of bright green Edy's Slow Churned Rich & Creamy mint chocolate chip on a Keebler sugar cone. She's all over it and doesn't make a mess. For myself, a couple scoops of Edy's Grand espresso chip. Nothing makes us smile so much in this house as a good dessert, I think, but that's not exactly true. We clear the plates, load the dishwasher, and then KC nurses Dash. And then KC and Vaughn head out on the hour-long round-trip to pickup the pink watch at Rosy's. Pink watch KC told me today doesn't even work, needs a part, but it's a gift from Auntie Joss Vaughn's gotta have. I scoop up Dash, push play for disk 5, Sonic Youth, A Thousand Leaves. Five tracks that work for Dash: 2, 4, 5, 7, 8. All we need. Five tracks, and over a half-hour worth of music. Big f'ing anti-pop balls of Sonic Youth (or, with Kim Gordon there, I'm reminded of an old L7 lyric: "Got so much clit she don't need no balls"). Before we even get to the Hits of Sunshine (track 7) he's conked out. Curled into himself and my chest. Ball of a boy in my arms. Here's the universe squeezed into a ball. I carry him upstairs, place him down in his crib slow-motion like—so tough to get him down, he sleeps light like his mom. Not in that regard at all like me or Vaughn. I head back downstairs. Decide to let the music keep playing. "Yellow girls are running backward," Thurston sings, just above a whisper. Time for me to take a shit. Over the music, I hear the house shake—no KC and Vaughn aren't home yet (the side door sometimes requires slamming), it's just the dishwasher, rinse cycle kicking in. Same five disks in the CD player for three or four months now: Tom Waits, Bone Machine; Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fever to Tell; Neil Young, Harvest; Morphine, Cure for Pain; and the Sonic Youth one. Before that it was months with The Beatles, Abbey Road; David Bowie, Singles (disk 1); xmas CDs by John Denver and Johnny Mathis; and Vaughn's favorite, The Beastie Boys, Ill Communication. We danced to that one so often, KC and I got tired of hearing it, but sometimes it was the only way to get Vaughn to nap. She would go around saying "like Vaughn Po-tee" because of the line "like Vaughn Bode, I'm the Cheech Wizard." One time, around the holidays, I was talking to someone and said the word "communication" and Vaughn came out with "like Ma Bell" (I'm just glad that was all she came out with—it was time to start skipping that track.). "Hard to believe they'll go away, these sure and steady days," writes Dale Smith in Black Stone. I can't help but believe there are some who feel this more painfully than others. Is that wrong? The neighbors last night setting off fireworks past ten o'clock, seventeen days past fourth of July, Dash finally gotten to sleep: that's wrong. But now KC is home. Vaughn asleep in her arms as she carries her upstairs. I've been typing too long. Time to do something more productive, I suppose.