Winds always did woo badly.

Eyes large and dark-lashed, a grin like a wolf, she could not help but catch the eye. He saw her swimming in her complex’s pool and made the mistake of shivering through the trees.

“Is it winter already?” She murmured, and with that she was out, dressed and gone. There was nothing to do but bring a courting gift—the best of fall leaves on her apartment doorstep, some brilliant, some dark with decay.

“At least the fall is beautiful,” she admitted, and the wind smiled, for she had liked both the golden and the grey.

He could swear she heard him when he spoke to her. When he met her, (he claims by chance), he sometimes told her the wind himself admired her for all she did. And while she had rolled her eyes more than once, hadn’t she also bought a bright red kite? Best of all are the gifts that can be shared.

Certainly no one looks up Boreas and “stress-induced auditory hallucinations” in the same hour by chance?

She was kind, strong, incomprehensibly solid, and she sang as though she were dying. One winter night, he realized he did not know her name and howled outside her windows, begging for syllables.

She turned up the heat, and checked the locks.

“Fuck this noise,” she muttered, closing the curtains. A clear dismissal. He heard her swearing as she warred with her long winter socks.

The wind decided that perhaps the Upper East side, and not Brooklyn, needed a chill that night.

The peak of winter, and therefore his power. She had begun to flirt with a coworker, and he realized he must take drastic measures if he was to catch her attention. Bone and flesh did not come easily to him, at first; and it took longer still to become handsome—symmetry never did come naturally—then striking, then finally himself.

Mediocrity reflected in a lover’s eyes was, he decided, the worst of curses. The blue of this scarf suited him. Didn’t it?

He knocked on the door. She had already taken off her bra and her makeup, and was none too interested in guests. The deadlock remained well in place.

“Selling something?” she drawled. He held a stolen shawl in his hands, a peace offering.

(The North Wind of New York steals scarves from plenty of people, and resents the South Wind’s accusation of “childlike infatuation” as the cause of this particular theft. “You should see the Eastern Wind of New York’s hat collection,” he has said, defensively, when asked.)

“I was wondering where that got off to,” she growled. “You know it has my name on the tag.”

He swallowed. His hair forgot, for a moment, what he had told it to be, climbed ruefully over his eyes.

“It’s not a kind thing,” she told him. “Stealing a woman’s name.”

“It was not my intention,” he answered. “I haven’t read it,” he added, and this seemed to placate her. She looked the shawl over, as though she would be able to read in it the honesty of his heart. Satisfaction, curiosity, consideration.

“You could always ask for my name, you know.” He could see the wolf now, quiet and patient in her eyes. Perhaps one of her ancestors was a witch. Perhaps not just one of her ancestors.

He began to smile. He could not quite remember how to speak; it had been so long, and he was, most recently, a fox rather than a man.

“You look cold,” she said. He leaned forward. She closed the door.

On it, her name, precious as first snow.

(The North Wind of New York, again, denies all claims of infatuation.)

The sound of the deadlock being undone.

“Are you sure we’ve never met before?” She asked. “Besides the, uh, scarf stealing.”

“Which, I might add, was entirely accidental,” he said. She snorted, looked him over with tentative familiarity.

“So you… live around here?”

He nodded.

“You’re not… crazy, are you?” I’m not crazy, am I? The unspoken question.

“I make no promises,” he replied. She rolled her eyes.

“Well, I’ve got a taser and some hot chocolate,” she decided. “Since you do look half-frozen. But I’ll only let you in on one condition.” She tilted her head, biting her lip.

“Anything,” he said, knowing full well he had almost nothing to offer.

“Your name,” she replied. He bowed his head to hide his smile.

the stories preach

the danger of dissatisfaction

hunger, sin of witch and wendigo –

the woman who ate children, her children

devourer of family and of tribe.

but – surely there is some virtue in insatiability

in this complacent, complicit world –

what is wildfire but the redwood’s

first friend?

It is behind me again. I can feel it the way you feel light on closed eyelids, the heavy presence of heat on my back. What is it that they will not let me look at?

Sometimes I see my mother, standing in front of me. Sometimes I see a tall woman in a white coat, her chin too high. They keep their eyes on me, as though they do not see the thing behind me. It’s a test, I remind myself. A meditation against the dark. Keep your eyes in front of you, on the light, and you will succeed.

Is it a cave or a lab? I cannot remember. Or perhaps it is a school at midday, and I am sitting with my face forward, focused on my lunch, as though I do not know it is there, as though I cannot hear it.

The woman makes a note, and I keep my eyes fixed before me. I try to smile and she nods, as though I have done something right.

Is it still behind me? But I cannot ask, because I should know. Perhaps there is nothing at all behind me. But it is a test, remember. Does it matter, then, whether or not there really is something there in the dark?

The sound of breathing. I wish I had a mirror. But that would be cheating, wouldn’t it?

Only a few hours now. I can hear it pacing sometimes, but I keep my eyes forward. Did it touch me, or was that the whisper of a breeze?

I whisper the chants we sang in sunlight, but they mean nothing here, are of another language than the darkness.

They told me a story once, of a girl who looked back. They said that it devoured her alive, that it wasn’t really real until she saw it, as though she created it by looking. And I never told anyone, but once when we were at Christmas together I thought I saw her pass by the window of the house, her eyes flicking towards the tree. No one else saw her, but I glimpsed her again in the morning, her face white against the window of the train. Perhaps I imagined it, but there was a letter, too, one Mother wouldn’t show me… and why would I imagine her with a scar?

Is there anything behind me, or am I imagining it? Sometimes I imagine things, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Does it really matter if there is anything behind me?

What if they don’t come back? If they leave me here, waiting in the darkness below. The woman has gone out. There are no cameras, if I turn they would not know…

The inching of the head. Dawn’s light near the front of the cavern. Perhaps the sun has risen, and now I can look?

A quarter turned. My shoulders haven’t pivoted, it hardly counts. That is the light of the sun, isn’t it?

Footsteps, up above. They are coming now, coming to get me. I have passed the test, haven’t I? The woman and the lab, all a dream. I can look now.

Halfway turned, the head, the darkness deeper behind me, thicker and richer than the darkness of nighttime, unquiet. It would be a sin, if I finished, if I…

They are lowering the rope now, and I dare not look behind me. I wish, again, I had a mirror. What are they hiding? Why is it so important?

I walk forward. Snap the carabiner around the loop in my belt. I am facing forward now, facing the light. You can’t look back, not if you want to live in this world; that’s what they say.

Slowly rising. The sky the same blue, brighter than I remembered. Could the cave and the sky exist in the same world?

The rope twists, a few feet from the edge of the cavern, and for a moment my eyes settle on that far edge, that darkness once behind me, the abyss that leads back I know not where. Not a creature after all, but something white, a still, contorted shape, not unlike…

My feet against the earth. My mother holds me in her arms. So glad you made it, so glad you survived, you passed the…

Back in the world again, we do not speak of what we saw, or did not see below. That, too, is part of the test. A necessity of remaining.

I can still remember the girl’s new address, written in that delicate, shaking hand.

“Take me home,” I say, and she drags me forward, away, further into the sunlight.

I will not remember what I dreamed I saw, the night before, deep in that darkness. When I look back the hole that was the cave seems shallower, a simple dip in the ground.

Perhaps there is no cave at all.

 

 

knowledge does not damn us,

but only the knowing sin.

for while ignorance begets evil,

apathy lets it win.

she is midwife to the mother,

 

 

nursemaid to the child,

she who knows good from evil,

yet does not conscience reconcile.

 

 

Give us our daily bread, and 

(forgive this atheist

for supplicating the universe

in the words she was as a child taught;

empiricists have so little poetry

in their communions.)

 

i find myself as tongue-tied as the moses

who refused to answer god,

my head and heart

are lost like languages in the tower of babel,

for certainly we cannot, do not

understand each other. god’s practical joke?

the true mistake of humanity, i think

was not finishing the apple.

 

 

reassuring, to remember

that the world has always been ending

don’t the mayans, and jesus, and the scientists

all say so?

a second flood awaits us,

and perhaps a dove will bring

an olive branch

for this appalled and appalling

world.

 

though you

wrap your heart in bandages

leave clear your eyes

only the righteous dead deserve blindness;

they have done their time among us,

and suffered in ways we will never have to

again, perhaps.

 

 

in the next world, we will all be

artists, scientists, explorers;

in this one, we must be builders.

bridges,

not staircases or towers

will lead us to our god.

 

(Given my recent 21st birthday, I’ve decided to try writing wine reviews for the blog. I will try to avoid what I, with my untrained palate, perceive as pretentiousness, and to keep them short and sweet. I’ll read around a bit more, and see what the conventions of the genre are for any later reviews.)

Recently, I purchased this wine, the Rio Madre. It is a Rioja region wine, meaning that the grapes involved hail from a small region in North Eastern Spain. The wine is unusual due to the type of grape used — the Graciano grape — as it is usually only used as a complement to other varieties. The wine is smooth, mild, and just slightly dry, with a beautifully dark color. Overall, a pleasant and inoffensive red, and well worth the price.

I have just received my first poetry rejections — or at any rate, the first ones of a more formal nature, with criticisms for each of my pieces. I am sure that these will be the first of many rejections I receive, if I do as I should, and am trying to decide what is the best way to handle rejection of a professional nature.

I can see most of the points that they made — that my poem “Allergic to Love” had a clichéd title, for example, and that authorial intrusion weakened the other two poems I had submitted — but they also called “Allergic to Love” immature, albeit with a mild yet deliberate obliqueness of wording. Was my voice too immature, or simply conversational, I wonder? Did the poem seem too personal, or simply not follow the more literary style of the other two? Certainly, the subject matter could be described as immature, in an optimistic view of life. It’s certainly vulnerable, but I hadn’t thought it would be so much so as to be unrelatable, or limited to a certain age-range. Perhaps they meant to say that the poem did not seem as looked over as the others.

The vagueness seems a little criminal, but it’s not as though I’m going to ask them to specify further. They say in writing to that it’s best to “kill your darlings,” and certainly, this is the first time I’ve felt as though someone has called my child ugly.

I received the rejection while in class, for social psychology, and on my phone when I really shouldn’t have been. We had been discussing self-esteem, self-image, and self-concept. According to social psychology, people protect their self-esteem in a variety of ways — externalizing blame yet taking responsibility for their successes, avoiding situations in which they may fail, etc. People with moderately high self-esteems tend to do better in life, even if those self-evaluations do not reflect reality. Yet, if their self-esteem became too high, they tended to externalize blame more, make more mistakes, produce less to try to protect that self-evaluation, and even were more racist and reckless, generally. Someone with low self-esteem could be more successful, if they believed that they had the power to change the ways in which they fell short, chose to, and reflected, rather than ruminated, on their perceived errors.

I asked the psychology professor after class what the best way to react to rejections was, mentioning my recent poetry rejection, and she laughed, and said that sort of thing happened all the time in academia. She suggested I read the rejection and write a bunch of mean things down on a paper about whoever wrote it. Then I should reread it again, more slowly, and try to apply the useful criticisms to my work in the future. (Slightly more practical than my original plan to stick my rejections on a spike in the wall, Stephen King-style, no?) She also said that sure, the poem could be immature — I was twenty, still finding my voice, and these people were most likely forty-somethings. This was reassuring, though I am not sure the strength of my voice has ever been an issue.

When I mentioned the rejection in passing to one of my old poetry professors, she just laughed and said, “Welcome to the world.”

 

It has been some time since my last check-in, so here it is. I am back at school, and delighted to be there after a summer of work and a year abroad. In Spanish class, I am reading Doña Barbara, an embarrassingly sexist book. (Imagine a glorified colonization story, except Europe is a spoiled city boy and “the barbarian” is a vilified rape-victim who taught herself how to hustle.) I am taking English with the famous writer, Ha Jin, and learning about the literature of the migrant. I am reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin in my American fiction class, and find myself constantly criticizing the implicit and explicit racism of the author, though even I was shocked by how well she wrote the river scene. We haven’t yet reached the meat, in terms of social psychology — our readings seem designed to convince us that participation in class is, in fact, a good idea — but the teacher won me over within the first half hour, and the students in my discussion class are brilliant, so I think I’ll have a good time. I’ve met up with old friends, after a year away. My roommates are straightforward and cheerful. I got to see Sir Christopher Ricks the other day, and see how he was doing. Tomorrow is my first day as a writing tutor, and hell, even my sheets are clean.

All in all, not a bad start — though perhaps I should learn to cook myself something other than pasta and burritos.

I need to start writing my five hundred words a day, again, and to finish some pieces. I lapsed in Spain, and over the summer, and have been generally terrible about starting again. I need to start exercising, and come up with a system that works to keep at it. (I should also eat vegetables and be nicer to people, but I try to be realistic about my expectations.)

I have meditated enough on future plans in blog posts, and I have all the places I am thinking of working abroad — Spain, Chile, various countries of East Asia — as well as the scholarships I am planning on applying to, mapped out. Graduate school is for later, a fork in the road that I will postpone for as long as I can. Tonight is for being in the moment, and proud of what I do have. I have written and published poetry that I am proud of; I am back in Boston, finally, and so happy to be here; I am lucky enough to have people happy to see me, after all this time. I even have a ricecooker — and today, when my Fulbright commission looked over my application, they told me that they loved my writing, and that my voice and humor were a refreshing break from the monotony of other applications. 

In short: my life is full of many little and good things, and I am lucky. I must work on the usual things, and I intend to.

(Virgil can keep the Muses;

they’re welcome, of course,

but finer and fairer

than I’ll ever be. We must all of us set

reasonable expectations.)

Oh, Crooked God,

what can’t you do?

Go straight, go straight.

Then by the winding way

we’ll walk together.

Make me a criminal —

not Hercules, Orpheus,

or even Odysseus,

but a thief who

enters by the front door.

Hermes, polytropos,

give me the words —

to make them less lonely,

to capture their ears,

to move hearts to motion,

to leave behind fear.

Teach me your craft,

liar and lyre-maker,

thief, runner, wrestler:

god of my heart.

God of the crossroad,

a versified offering:

may you accept it,

and bless my new start,