Compilations

I like the way the days form structure around the weather. The lift and breath of weekends long awaiting late night conversations next to camp fires or Sherman's Grillin' Beans (since 1908). Waking up to Wilco and songs that orchestrate memory and good freedom. Last night Pressure Drop picked up a broken wing and I danced alone along the brick patio, quietly for awhile till the air shift and everyone shuffled inside to darts, poker, and baseball. I rode home slowly, empty cookie tin and change of clothes in my backpack, taking routes through the city that have become my backyard.

A month ago I demanded summer, wanted the fresh expulsion of lawn mowers and people in parks. People talk on subways and say hello on sidewalks and dance on subway platforms when the train takes so long. The good things about the quadruple seasons: there's always room to change, always room to recede and progress. The months in the Midwest are longer, the politics structured, breakable, but home. I miss being cupped by the rolling hills and open pleasure of the east, the easy going nature of anger: forgivable. But I like the yellow grains of the prairie, the flat lands that express outward space. There's too much room to grow, but so much room to maintain open. I am distracted by the city, by an inability to close up shop. Socialization that bridges networks like high tension wires that don't cause headaches, or sever the ones that do.

It is May, near June rolling into July. I plaster a stamp on the month that says middle, listen to the yellow finches that hide in the trees when I look for them. It it summer, it is four weeks away. It is the best time to fly east, to camp out with family in backyards missed since Christmas, or the fourth of July.

I cry for the calm rest of the Atlantic, the breaking waves against the Norther Maine bays. The carriage of routes and rocks and conifers and the highways you know without a compass, the directions you close your eyes to find. Travel blindfold through the tops of mountain ridges, hawks circle the clouds around you.

When you look out you see no houses, just trees like cushions ready to catch you if you fall.

Civic Hybrid

So, I'm not sure exactly how they work, but my understanding of the Honda Civic Hybrid looks something like this: a single web comic panel split down the middle, one side emits a gaseous fume into blank space, the other is a single picture of a super power battery with green and white cables that link to the ignition (green positive, white negative).

Although, I'm not quite sure if battery cables even ink to ignitions (?), so this could turn into a nice big ditch I'm digging for myself...

It's a concession. I drove a Hybrid today. I am a new member of iGo Car Sharing, a “Chicago-based non-profit committed to economical and environmentally sound transportation choices” (what’s up, PR?). It's been so long since I've driven an automobile (this word makes it sound like I'm talking about a horse and buggy), but the start up and acceleration were smooth, quiet. The brakes tight and the pads cushioned. Everything in alignment and the muffler intact - no holes rattling the exhaust to expel unfiltered carbon. It felt good, but then again, maybe all new cars feel like this?

To be honest, much of my exhilaration driving today stemmed from a place of nostalgia, splashed with an eco-friendly flair. I have not owned or driven a car in almost 5 years, and though I am grateful to live in a city where owning a vehicle is not necessary, there are times I would like to run an errand on my own, without the hassle of public transportation, or adhering to another person's time.

There is a strong sense of independence and ownership attached to driving a car, and even though the one I drove today is "shared," it was mine for three hours. I felt free of the strains of public engagement. I could go where I wanted, and though it wouldn't have necessarily been good for the environment, I thought about abandoning my errand and opting for a detour up Lake Shore Drive: road tripping in quiet meditation, humming to the partially electric powered engine, listening to bad Classic Rock radio stations.

But instead, I drove to Target and learned that I still remember to use blinkers in parking lots (Thanks, Dad).

It was a fun adventure, and the pick up location for the car is literally across the street from my house, so it's as if I really am pulling the car straight out of my driveway. It's actually parked in a safer spot than most privately owned vehicles, as far as tickets and unwanted fender benders are concerned.

The downside is there aren't many reasons I need this car. It's a luxury, an indulgence. I want to drive, simply. Out of the city. In the city. I want to drive.

But I’d prefer to drive an electric car.

And though this was my first time driving a Hybrid, it was not the first time I'd been in one: In November 2007, I hailed a cab at the Belmont/Halsted intersection, and a Toyata Prius pulled up. Apparently, every cab company in Chicago is required to lease at least one Hybrid, which, at the time, was news to me (and probably news to most people today). It’s a small one, but a step toward environmental freedom nonetheless. I zoomed home that night in a publicly funded Hybrid, listening to Japanese techno, and tipped the cabbie probably better than I have ever before.

In the year 2009, I wish car sharing systems could translate rurally, or that train systems would improve. Or that we didn't sink our economy into bad investments, because now we don't know what to invest in. That's why I support non profits that support clean energy. Why I ride my bike, dream of rooftop gardens, and hope for universal solar electric powered houses (or cars).

Convert your engines.

Turn off your lights.

Let Many Bad Poets

by Donald Hall

Let many bad poets praise the Grand Canyon, the Panama
Canal, the Statue of Liberty, Mount
Hood, the Napa Valley with its products of fermentation,
Sicily, Connecticut, and themselves.

Some of us spend our whole lives praising Danbury, New Hampshire,
or Mount Fuji: Praising our places, we
praise ourselves while pretending to look outward. We build Tu Fu’s
Chengdu cottage as a shrine for ourselves

in every Poetry, by printing reflections, in free verse
without noticeable attention to
line breaks, on snapshots of the poetic mother and father,
in their weird clothes, on vacation, before

the poet was born: How poignant it is, how remarkable
that one’s parents were older than oneself!
Then they died. Oh. Because I have nothing to say, and nothing
deeply pitiable to whine over,

I program my poem-processor for irony, malice,
envy, loathing, and the decent pleasure
of breaking anyone’s Mont Blanc who disturbs my solitude.
While others probe an already sore place

with the pickaxes of guilty ululation, I relax
with a good book on the soul’s wooden porch,
or, as they advised Amos some ages ago, I eat bread
and prophesy. It happens I predict

myself, praising my villa as Horace did, praising Ragged,
Camilla, Eagle Pond, and Max the dog.
I prophesy the country I invent by shutting the door;
I praise citizenship in the nation

of myself. You too can withdraw into a granite valley
defended by the troops of history,
learning, sexual luxury, diligence, and narcissism.
Just remember: Never knock on this door.

Spoken Word for Spring

Past the March cemetery at dusk,

some neighbor slings a bag, it bulges:

mason jars, containers, used napkins,
condoms, and old shirt
torn in the night…

I run past black jackets,
they step off the train wearing that look
that looks for things
at the end of the day,
eyes squinting like thumbnails in the sun.

When summer begins, we are powerful.

We take more steps than usual to plow through the winter,
and a promise we made before fall we wouldn’t forget,
but probably did.

I see boys and girls in short skirts
and no shirts
and the dawn is breaking later
and the city’s silence is brooding,
remembering how to speak.

I am drawn to this. I am drawn to the skirts,
to the sound of birds
nestled in spring -

(and if the days are not yet yellow,
at least we know they’ve been)

I’ll dress accordingly and extend gratitude
through maintaining something new.

Anticipate a year without loss,
a year without weather induced cost:

Waistlines’ slimmer, dampened feet,
sand melting through toes on a beach
reflecting glass and we reach –
we reach for the land in water and drown
in tastes of touch,
lick the salt from our bodies and dream,
once again, of a boredom that does not subsist,
but becomes active in our degrees of measure.

We embrace because we can,
and leave what isn’t quite behind
in some dust bowl memory
we can’t recreate.

And when I look for you?

You are running, too.
In a tangible sadness
that takes longing too far,
loneliness too lightly,
always on the edge of pressing things.

Music
removes this,
and we dance in a rain that brings back life,
that brings us back to life.

And we stare at a night sky that bears no stars but one:

The sun
is awakening,

the restless consolations

(a little taken aback)

greet each morning with an evening,
count each streetlight against pavement,

waiting for the waiter to remember the wine.