Per my friend Barbara’s suggestion, I listened to Mexican poet Coral Bracho and her translator Forrest Gander on Bookworm.

(This show, Bookworm, is simple and nearly perfect. It’s just such a gorgeous idea to have writers read their work, just a little bit, and talk just a little, to the host Michael Silverblatt. I do love writing on the page, and sometimes I don’t like how authors read their own words, but I think that a lot of poetry is understood by ear. And writers aren’t famous for being outspoken, so to speak just a little, read just a little, it makes them human, but in this context they are still revered. They have a chance to speak really intimately about their work to a man who really cherishes it. I would like to be him, to get a chance to give the public an earnest, complex, and intimate portrait of a writer in half an hour — with no call-ins, no questions from the audience, just the two of them. There’s a respect and reverence for poetry and poets, artists and art, that feels really important in this era, and rare.)

Coral Bracho spoke about poetry like it’s a painting. She talked about uniting the world that we see with the world we can only understand with our eyes closed, the concrete and the spiritual. She had such a complex way of explaining it — funny that, like a painting, I couldn’t repeat now what she said, but I can see the arc of what she meant in my mind’s eye. It’s refreshing to read her poetry, which feels timeless in a way that I don’t see almost ever.

They Touch Secret Stained Glass

Crickets (the termites damper
their scarlet discourse) set the fruits swaying by their trilled names,
and the ferns. They touch secret stained glass
(the termites bandy echoes in the silence)
with the vesperal vigilance,
the vertilicality,
of high calm nights.

September 16th, 2009 | Category: overheard | Comments (1)

September 16th, 2009 | Category: drawing | Leave a comment

I recently ran into a friend who has been saying since I met him six years ago that the whole world is redundant. All that can be written has been written, that can be said has been said. There are only so many words, which is true, and all the combinations of words have been played out. We are born into a world that doesn’t need our thoughts because they have already been thought.

I used to try to believe him, because he’s older and so what did I know. And a part of me still wants to try to believe him, because he’s my friend, and because I never said I know how to live this life. And because he’s read way, way, way more books than I have.

Maybe it’s because I, naive me, is bringing a whole new person into the world, but I couldn’t listen to it last time he told me. Now I have to believe that this world is new and that each person who enters it isn’t just the same as each person who has entered it already. My body is changing, my sense of height and depth and scale and smell and taste, everything is different.

Recently I was asked if I’ve ever walked into a room and felt like I’ve never seen it before — the person was a therapist and she was gauging how much I detach from my body and sense of self. She concluded that I detach no more than anyone else, but my passion for her question surprised me. Because I feel like I always walk into a room and feel like I’ve never seen it before. Was that couch always so low? Was that hallway so wide? Has it always been dark in that corner? Did the sun always make a quadrangle right on top of that painting? Steve and I go on walks each morning, and often we’re walking the same route. But each time I feel like I’ve never seen one or another house before ever. I’m sure it’s not new, I’m sure it didn’t grow over the grass overnight, but I’m seeing it for the first time. Maybe that’s because we’ve left five minutes early and the light is different enough that the paint color strikes me, or maybe it’s because the grass is longer and I suddenly notice scale, or because the flowers are falling and I see their new muted color in relation to brick and siding. Being in this particular self is unironic, it’s not cynical, and it doesn’t make for good jokes or cutting quips, and it probably doesn’t come across as very smart. But every walk is different. Every time I come home, I see my home for the first time.

September 15th, 2009 | Category: inward | Comments (2)

Jennifer came over in her new owl smock from J.C. Penney (the store where I used to get my hair cut when I was little from the tiny woman named Tina). She brought her cutting scissors and professional things that clip sections of my hair out of the way while she cut layers. She cut from about 1:30 to 4:30, and I think she was nervous the whole time. My hair just felt so heavy and sad before, because it’s fine and doesn’t curl so much when it gets too long. And I wasn’t feeling sad, so I wanted a happy cut. And pregnant people tend to grow out their hair, so I didn’t want to.

It’s not crazy short. Really it was a three-hour bob. But bobs are hard to cut.

For the last hour she worked with me to make sure that when I put my hair up in pigtails, the pieces that didn’t fit would still look good out of the elastic bands. Now that’s a tailored cut.

September 14th, 2009 | Category: happening | Leave a comment

(don’t mind the blue tape, we’ve been prepping the wood in our house to add a clear coat of varnish this weekend.)

That greenish couch used to have its back to the photograph, and that center table wasn’t cockeyed, but for a few weeks — and then intensely for a few days — I was hating our living room. Two rooms in our house I love desperately — our kitchen and our dining room. There’s nothing huge about them I would change, or that I could change really. But our bedroom is constantly getting repainted (four times in three years) and rearranged (seven times). I think it’s getting closer to being the space I need it to be right now.

I thought that what our living room needed was additional furniture, and certainly it does, but then in a flash I decided that it needed more than that. I suddenly realized that our living room was trying to be something that it’s not — it was trying to fit into my sister’s fancy house, and while in her house it would look simple and professional, in my house it looked unloved and uninviting. Nobody has sat in our living room since we could sit outside, and so it’s been a long glorified hallway to our bedrooms since early May.

I walked down that hallway this weekend and suddenly knew that the couch had to sit more strangely. I suddenly saw that if I wasn’t going to use this space comfortably, then I could never love it. I don’t think the coffee table is right, but it’s what we have. I would like something square or circular, or even one of those soft ottoman-like coffee tables. Then I knew that the couch needed two side tables to act as arms for its armlessness, but one had to be short so that you could still fly over it (visually, or if you’re Rosie, literally). The stool I’d spray-painted turquoise this past spring was suddenly the perfect side table. Then the red side table from another room added the color that made me want to enter. Plus I put my most loved throw over the couch, which I’ve never understood why people do and then suddenly I knew: even if no one would ever use it, it’s an invitation of potential comfort. Oh plus I hauled in some pumpkins and gourds from our yard, for color.

It needs so much more to be the room I want it to be, and I’m not saying it won’t change tonight, but suddenly I can love our living room again, just in time for fall. When Rosie came home on Saturday, she threw all of her stuff on the couch (as she always does despite the mudroom and my picky reminders), she found my iphone with its games, and she sat by the fireplace in one of the reddish chairs, her feet propped up on the coffee table. I was shocked. We haven’t sat there, no one has sat there, for a very long time. Then my friend Jennifer came over and when she walked in she saw it right away: ooh, good feng shui, she commended.

The house changes with me. When we bought it, we were still used to shopping for furniture at the Kiwanis center. I was still hanging crystals to make rainbows, and thumbtacks seemed better than frames for art. But the crystals got dusty, and the art got hurt, and Steve kept pushing for real furniture — furniture we selected, where we got to pick the fabric, and it took weeks to make, and then it was professionally delivered.

Recently I’ve been intensely analyzing my bedroom, maybe because I know it’s the place where the baby will stay at first, and also maybe it’s because it’s the last place to seem grown up — clothes everywhere, dog beds and parts of dog beds all over the floor, stacks of boxes, cheap Lowe’s closet inserts to try to make the most of the tiny space. I’ve been wanting it to be brighter, more simple. My mistake is when I look to Pottery Barn, because I could never live in those rooms for more than a week. I’d start hauling pumpkins into my bed for color. Still, I’ve brought home too many paint chips with light sage and pale blue-green, and I’ve stickered too many magazines with images of bedspreads that are so pale they’d have a dog print on it in a minute.

Then I was reading a New Yorker the other night (I couldn’t tell you which one, our backlog is daunting), and there was an article about a wild designer in LA — mirrored walls, yellow carpets, hot pink leopard-patterned bedspreads. I could never live in those homes, but nonetheless I realized that neither could I live in its opposite. She was describing what’s happening to homes in America (our baby-shade paint on the wall, neutral art, neutered rooms, no war anywhere, nothing to complain about), and I realized that while I’ve been trying to grow up, I’ve also been assimilating. When it comes to a home, where it seems that everything is expensive, making a playful choice can sometimes cause too much regret, so the safer choice is often more economically sound. Yet as much as I want the austerity, I end up at the end of the day turning toward the room with the funny things tacked to the walls. Though that doesn’t mean I’m not learning how to pick up my clothes, thank goodness — there’s delight and then there’s just clutter.

September 14th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

September 14th, 2009 | Category: photograph | Leave a comment

September 14th, 2009 | Category: photograph | Leave a comment

September 14th, 2009 | Category: photograph | Leave a comment

September 14th, 2009 | Category: photograph | Leave a comment