This Morning

Water boiling for Vaughn's oatmeal
in the kitchen behind me.
Chorus of “surf's up, surf's up,
ho daddy, ho daddy,” coming from
the living room where Vaughn and Dash
are kneeling on the hardwood floor.
Harsh hush of cars rushing by outside.
Sharma's claws tug at her ottoman
tucked under the desk
in the dining room. I stir
the oatmeal and bring it to my daughter
not because she asked politely
but because we must be going soon.

Another Quick Little School Bus Morning Poem

The bus stops and Vaughn
climbs on, finds her seat
beside two other girls.

No wave goodbye this time.
No looking out at
Ayla,* Dash, and me.

The bus moves on, leaving
its exhaust behind. The days
of the week go by

so many times, one loses
track, like Thomas the Train
rushing to make good time.

_________
* Ayla is the Japanese Maple we planted in our front yard last year, named by Vaughn.

Dash's Poem / Waiting for the bus to pickup Vaughn

It's sunny and cold outside.
A school bus goes by.
Why's the car wet?
It didn't rain.
I think maybe
we should play catch.

Dark Telephone Pants!

“Dark telephone pants!”
That voice from a farther room
is Dash’s as he and Vaughn
are playing some obscure
childhood game, deeper
and more complex than tag
or hide and go seek.
“You’re supposed to do this
and I’m supposed to do
this ! Oh man, now we’re rowing
out to—now I’m in your house.”
The game could go on for hours
or evaporate in a few timeless
tom-tom moments. Now someone
has cast a spell and they are trapped
and Vaughn is being pulled
by her mouth and yammering
on like a chimp. I guess it could
go on for days if anyone would
let it. “The bad guys are guarding
me.” “They’re guarding me, too.”
“Oh man, they’re letting the horses
out. One by one. We have customers
in our restaurant. I mean, we own
a bookstore, right? Every day
is a different pony.” “But you didn’t say
anything about the Fraggle Rock
mystery?” Quivering lip, quaking
cloud. O epic, O broken lyric heart!

Blob-of-Dust Morning

No words, gray light,
only rooftops out the window,
black and staticky.
No birds, no squirrels,
only bruising car-go-by sounds
and Vaughn's voice
from out in the living room
as she runs like she's not supposed to
back and forth with her brother,
“I'm a blob of dust.”

Beach Abstract

Tone, beach, calm nothing
no feet to spy, no walk
see change, fling palm open
chalk it up to why the meat
can't help but feel shame
ring-billeds dot horizon like
I looks for you with eyes closed

        &

say something
shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
say something
shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
say something
shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
say something
shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

        &

plastic shovel Dashiell
break-a-dawn Vaughn
UV trace me KC
give-a-damn I am

        &

A failure to explore the details.
My failure. To pick up the shell and look
inside it, feel it with fingertips
and describe it with something like
urgency. Calm emergency.
Like how it is when I meet someone for
the first time. Not shyness but
an utter disappearance of words.
No speak. And no see probably.
If I try real hard I get Radio waves,
I'm on the table, and Sail boat momma.

        &

say something
shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
say something
shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
say something
shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
say something
shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Vaughn to Dash

Yellow is the color of sun.

Yellow is the color you can use.

What do you want that's yellow?

I'll draw.

Dash's List of What He Loves

Trains
Trucks

Mommy
Daddy
Vaughny
Sharma

Everybody in the world

Wet floor signs

What I Know About My Mémé

She was born in or around Québec in 1897.

She spoke English as a second language long before it was a concentration and when any of my friends would meet her they couldn't understand a word she said.

Her first husband, last name Juneau, was so bad she cut him out of what few pictures she had of her and him together.

She and Mr. Juneau adopted Agnes Wyman who would become my grandmother and go on to vouch that her adoptive father was not a nice man.

Eventually she married Robert Jones who I have no memories of, only a few pictures, my mother's stories, and one dream from when I was very young in which I find him dead in the bathroom of his hospital room (he died in the bathroom of his hospital room).

She and Robert Jones adopted Agnes's daughters Bonita and Anita and renamed them Marie and Alice, the latter of whom would become my mother.

They lived on a floor of a multi-family home on Washington Hill in Waterbury, Connecticut.

They survived the flood of '55 during which they saw people stranded on rooftops on the streets below.

As one half of Ma and Pa she forbid my Aunt Marie to go to college; my mother was allowed to attend nursing school because she was going to go one way or the other.

For a short time not too long after I was born in '73 my mother and father and I lived with Mémé and Grampa Jones in their small ranch-style home on Frost Road.

After Grampa Jones died and my parents divorced, Mémé suffered a stroke which paralyzed her left side.

She lived the rest of her life in a wheelchair.

She loved Lucille Ball.

She watched The Carol Burnett Show, I Dream of Jeanie, The Price Is Right, Wheel of Fortune, and General Hospital.

She taught me how to play solitaire and concentration, which she called memory.

She kept a pin cushion in her bedroom.

She loved Social Tea cookies and bread dipped in maple syrup.

No christmas tree ever looked as good as the christmas tree in her living room.

She had the best pillows there, too, including a black velvet one from Kansas City with Arrowhead Stadium on one side and Royals Stadium with its glittering fountains on the other.

She always wore an apron and a shawl.

She had to let my mother bathe her sometimes.

Once, some teenagers broke into her house, while she was there, and stole her TV.

In 1985, after my mother had remarried and we moved into our own house for the first time since I was two or three, Mémé sold her place on Frost Road and moved in with us on Williamson Drive.

She couldn't help spilling crumbs on herself which Corky our golden labrador-bassethound mix happily lapped up.

She taught me how to make crêpes, which I've long since forgotten.

On Saturday mornings before it was time to go to my dad's I went to her room and we watched wrestling together; sometimes I got there early and we watched Roller Derby first.

Her favorite wrestler was Rick Martel, the sharp-looking Canadian-born AWA champion and one of the good guys.

She died in 1987 in the middle of the night in the room beneath mine on the day the Challenger space shuttle blew up.

Later that year my mother asked me to swear on Mémé's grave that I wasn't the author of a nasty letter written to a girl in our neighborhood, and I did.

A First Loose Tooth

Standing on the step stool to look in the bathroom mirror while she wiggled her tooth, Vaughn announced, “My tooth is a rocking chair.”

      —•—

Later last night, I tried to explain to Vaughn, who had been bothered by talk of starting again to look for a new house, that it didn't matter what house we lived in, the important thing was that we are all together, to which she replied, “We won't be together when we’re gone,” and then proceeded to cry.

      —•—

My tooth is a rocking chair.
We won't be together when we’re gone.

Halloween Paintings by Vaughn

Vaughn has been busy the past month or so making lots of Halloween art. Here's one of her paintings I came home to today.

Nobody reminds me

Nobody reminds me of anything. I had something to say but then I forgot it. Oh yes, I remember now. I am eating meat loaf. Few words could be more meaningful. Dash is calling me from his toy telephone. I don't understand a word he says. It's big like a 1980's car phone. Yesterday driving home from work I wondered: Do ants have noses or don't they like to fuck? It's a long drive home and the radio reception is awful. Candlewood Lake was black and blue with evening coming down. I wondered how KC's day went at the high school. Not teaching but observing. When I get home she reminds me of something that I'm so thankful for but now I don't remember what it was. The best writing often contains an unsurpassable attention to detail. A strong memory is helpful. This reminds me of Jack Kerouac. I used to drink with him. It was just before I stopped. No, it was just before I went mad. He plunged me in and then he saved me. The pages were yellow and it made me sneeze, but it was alright. Please allow me to introduce myself. I am nobody who will remind you of anything. They took me to the hospital. It was a garden of wandering minds. There was an old woman in a wheelchair who sang “God bless my underwear” followed by words I couldn't make out, her verses punctuated with “fuck” and “shit” and “assholes.” There was a twenty-something, very masculine-looking gay Hispanic man with the saddest eyes I'll ever see who had tried to kill himself by drinking cleaning products, I don't remember what exactly, to get away from his family. There was a surly but friendly overweight redhead who used to be a thin, sane psychiatric nurse until she was attacked by a patient; she had been stabbed by many things, syringes, I never got the full story. She had just had a spinal tap when I met her, or maybe she was just about to go for one. She taught me how to play spades. A few days before I left, a young Hispanic woman with slashed wrists arrived. The older manic-depressive woman who had stopped taking her Lithium, or maybe it was that it had stopped working, called her “a real spitfire,” so I learned a new word that day. I don't know why but she was crazy about me: not the older manic-depressive, whose name I think I remember was June, the young Hispanic. I would have gladly fled the country with June had she been forty years younger and shown the same kind of interest. For a few days I had a roommate who practiced karate; he was a veteran who had been stationed in Beirut where he lost some friends. He was from Michigan originally and liked to tell me about how that was the headquarters for so many of our national chains. The craziest of us was this middle-aged woman with a broken arm. We all called her The Debutante, the way she wandered so lightly around, head tilted back over her tall, bony frame, nose to the stars that weren't there. At one point she threatened to kill the redhead. One day when I was sitting in the lounge she came in and sat across from me. I wasn't looking at her but I could feel her attention. “So you're one of those, too,” she said. After a pause I did look at her. “Some send and some receive,” she said. Then she smiled and left the room, leaving me here.

Dash's Jolene

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene,
please don't take my
cheese,
no, no, no.
Don't eat the candle,
no, no, no.
Candle light up,
oh!

KC was singing “Jolene” this morning when Dash took over. From the “cheese” on, it's all him. Here's the original version by Dolly Patron:

Dashzilla

Vaughn sitting on the floor
in the living room, rebuilding
her Lego tower. When Dash
totters over and knocks it down
again, she turns to him and says,
“You're a monster, Dashiell.
You're the god of grief.”

Stumble through the hall

Stumble through the hall of morning's first moments. Familiar rumble outside from the construction across the street. Into and out of the bathroom. Into and out of the dream. Into and out of the thoughts that aren't there. There might have been a dream, sitting in a cell block, looking at a clock through iron bars. Some chubby guard with a dumb grin, fuzzy eyebrows, and big blue clothes. Big ol' Hollywood keychain hooked to his big black belt. Pacing the hall in his big black boots. Down into the morning, Vaughn at her desk in the kitchen, cranking out the multi-colored Play-Doh. Dash tottering between Vaughn and his mom as he learns how to walk. Magnets across the floor—an orange g, a green o—and tupperware and toy silverware, and toy-sized tins that either are or aren't toys I have no idea. Sometimes my guts want to give up and seep back into the earth. The little noises too much. The excesses, the effusions, the never enoughs. Vague and dizzy feelings cradling objects. "The sky / is a black / sudden cloud, / a sun. / Speak / to me, say / what things / were forgotten." (Creeley, from "The Shame")

bits

Sitting at the dining room table feeding Dash bits of peaches and whole wheat bread. Curtains drawn to shade the room. Vaughn seated at the chair behind me, working on a grilled cheese sandwich. She starts singing, "Higher, higher / the room's on fire." I ask her where she picked up that song. She says "It's from London." "From a movie?" I ask her, thinking Mary Poppins or something. "None movie," she says, "I made it up for you. And Dashiell-do."
      —•—
Took a book from the shelf, last night. Opened it to a little brown bug. Closed it back up and put it back on the shelf. Wonder what he's doing today.
      —•—
Vaughn at her desk in the kitchen, kneading a Play-Doh sky. The whistle of a truck blowing by outside, not quite as loud as summer's seething insects. Grumbling construction across the street. The rumbling stomach won't settle down.
      —•—
Vaughn: "Ow, the chair went on my toe. Ow!"
KC: "I'm sorry you got hurt, honey."
V: "Oh, when will I never get hurt, Mommy?"
K: "Unfortunately that's part of life, honey."
V: "When I die I'll never get hurt."
(Pause)
V: "Ow, I'm so saturated."
K: "Exasperated?"
V: "No, I'm so saturated."
K: "Saturated? You might say that if you were wet."
V: "No, I'm saturated that I'm hurt."

The Pepto clouds

The Pepto-Bismol clouds of sunset, yeah, they're there, just like the fever clouds behind the hills, the remnants of rural lives, the groves and canopies and houses with fields. I woke up hours later, around three a.m., exhausted from too much sleep but feeling better than I had in twenty-four hours, even the sludge slogging through my digestive system was approaching settled. What was with that Ziplock of leaves fallen in August? Vaughn, her bed slightly lit now for the past few days since we bought a night light for the bathroom so she can find her way in the middle of the night, looks to the north I suppose. She who sleeps deeply and thrashes into the wall at times. Her floor a mess of wooden blocks, Lego bits, and books. Dash's door is closed. He who sleeps lightly and gnaws the white paint off his crib when he wakes up. The dark blue night through the window in the hall, the veil of Mary. You can't get rid of what they give you when you're young. I can't at least. I stagger down the stairs, lift my head at the cat as if she can understand that means "hey, how you doin'?" Pour a glass of water. Sit down at the dining room table. It's covered with newspapers, magazines, and old bills. The bananas in the fruit bowl are perfectly spotted. The street's actually quiet. Through the bowed opening of the curtains where they're supposed to meet: blue night, low rock wall edging the neighbor's driveway, vinyl siding and gutters, garden hose, wire fence with chubby posts, the cement walkway ending out of sight, their dining room window all lit up, some people never sleep. I sip the water. My stomachs don't feel better anymore.

      —•—

from "Sixteen Sloppy Haiku"
by Paul Blackburn

A sound you'll never
hear again:
pissing in the toilet
about 3 A.M.
 

A bag of leaves

Vaughn returned from Nana's today with a Ziplock full of orange, yellow, and red leaves. I didn't mow the lawn for like the twentieth day in a row—it makes a great pretend jungle. The Cowboys' first team didn't look so hot this time out. Could be a long season, especially if T-New misses significant time. A few things conspired to have me thinking autobiographically today, from Reginald Shepherd's "Working Class Hero" blog post to Kent Johnson's "competence, linguistics, politics & post-avant matters" in the new Absent issue to Lisa Jarnot's post with pros and cons of academia—the universities are packed with worse poets and minds: it's a sad commentary that she hasn't landed a full-time gig by now. Also, up late last night reading how Creeley “never forgot Williams’ contention that ‘the poet thinks with his poem, in that lies his thought, and that in itself is the profundity . . .’ ” What have I never forgotten? There must be something substantial at the core.

Strange bug, 2 a.m.

2 a.m., Vaughn rests her cheek on her sheetless mattress, knees tucked into her chest. In her red Mount Rushmore T-shirt, a bundle of brightness in the dim night. "My Big Starlight," I call her, ever since she first called me her "Little Moonbeam" what seems like years ago already. She tilts her head and squints her eyes up at me from their pale sockets. She puts a hand on my knee and tells me she loves me. The best feeling in the world against the worst: not being able to help your child. I try to remember we're among the world's privileged, low budget and all. The children in warzones with their shattered selves, fragments of flesh, marrow—what happens to capillaries?—image of a father trying to piece his daughter back together. Fear there's no answer. Vaughn starts hacking again. She lifts her head, I grab the tupperware and move it under her. The easy foods we fed her today—oatmeal, crackers, Jell‑o—compiled into liquidy greenish goo. She asks for a paper towel to wipe her mouth, I fetch them from the bathroom, tear off a sheet. She wipes her mouth and hands it back to me. I crumple it in my left hand, seal it away. She has wriggled to a lower spot in her bed. I rub her back. I sing her a lullaby:

               Making your way in the world today
               takes everything you've got.
               Taking a break from all your worries
               sure would help a lot.
               Wouldn't it be nice to get away?
               Sometimes you want to go—

She interrupts and asks me to sing the one "with the girl and the pretty dress." It takes me a second to remember what she's talking about. We had gone through a phase a few months ago, when during a bath, or maybe after one, drying her off with her purple towel, I half-consciously sang the opening to The Doors' song "Running Blue." She latched onto it immediately, asking me to sing the four lines over and over, for weeks and weeks. Though after the first spontaneous singing I realized I had to change the word "dead" to something else.

               Poor Otis, lost and gone,
               Left me here to sing his song.
               Pretty little girl with the red dress on—
               Poor Otis, lost and gone.

It's a short ditty, and after a few times around I try to think of another song, maybe a little more soothing, and that I still remember the words to. But Vaughn says she saw something black fly through the room. "Did you see it?" she asks. "No," I say. "How big was it?" I ask, imagining a Grim Reaper-type thing. "Small," she says, "like a bug." "Like a fly?" I ask. "Yes, like a fly. There it goes again. I think it went into the closet." I look around, squinting because I don't have my glasses on, but I don't see, or hear, anything. There've been very few flies in the house this summer, not like last year. "Maybe it came in through the holes in my wall," she says. "You mean the vent in your ceiling?" "Yes, the vent." "I don't think so. That's for the air conditioner. I haven't seen any bugs coming in through there." "Well, maybe, they can go in there," she says. "Maybe," I say. Our breathing's silent but in sync. The air light as our eyes are heavy. I settle into a lullaby.

               Carry me, caravan, take me away—
               Take me to Portugal, take me to Spain.
               Andalusia, with fields full of grain,
               I have to see you again and again.

               Take me, Spanish caravan,
               Yes, I know you can.

               Trade winds find galleons lost in the sea.
               I know where treasure is waiting for me:
               Silver and gold in the mountains of Spain.
               I have to see you again and again.

               Take me, Spanish caravan,
               Yes, I know you can.

Vaughn's eyes are closed, though she's not quite asleep. I kiss her on her hair, on the back of her skull. I want her to live forever.


 

strange bug, etc.

Been a tough week for writing. Vaughn picked up some strange bug in Maine where she seems fine all day but wakes up in the middle of the night and throws up three or four times. Dash had it, too, the last night in Maine, and then he had, you know, that other digestive issue for most of this week. Took them both to the doctor Monday and the dr. said wait it out. Called him on Wednesday and he said call him back on Saturday if we need to. Dash did finally seem to be over it today, but if Vaughn yacks again tonight, it'll be off to the doctor again tomorrow.
      —•—
Tuesday night at work I got a call from KC saying it was our anniversary. Not your stereotypical wife-nagging-hub call. Nope, we both forget the day. Every year for four years so far. Probably something to do with being together for like seven years before that. Also maybe that we both primarily look at it as a good excuse to go out to eat. So today Meme watched the kids, and KC and I went out for lunch at the Cookhouse. KC had the lemon-butter grilled salmon, horseradish mashed potatoes, and coleslaw; I had the lemon-butter grilled salmon, horseradish mashed potatoes, and a salad. There's a reason we're together I guess. Conversation was mostly about the kids. KC mentioned a really interesting take, intertextual, on one of the Harry Potter characters (I haven't read the books at all; she tells me about them, then when the movie hits we check it out). She asked if I'd been writing political poems lately because the various notes she's seen around the house are mostly political. Not really, I tell her. No more than usual. Not as much as I'd like, perhaps. She told me how she tried some gelato they now have at the bakery on the green. We considered stopping there on our way home, but it was getting late, meaning close to the time I'd have to leave for work, and I wanted a little more time to spend with Vaughn. We'll go with her when she's feeling better. Back home, Meme, Vaughn, and I played a game of Crazy 8's that just wouldn't end. It went on so long, I ended up getting into work just on time: the latest I've gotten there in months. Vaughn won the game, just as KC was about to take my place.