"There is a crying for wine in the streets;

all joy is darkened, the mirth of the land is gone."

I had so much fun this weekend

I forgot to feel guilty about not writing. Sunday night, we took the boys to see Nosferatu, with live piano accompaniment. What a blast. I wondered if it would be too scary for Remy, who is only nine, but I needn't have worried. We laughed more than anything. Being a silent film, everything rested on facial expressions, so the joy with which the main character does everything (in the first half of the film, that is) is just hilarious, tactile, 3-D. Knock, the Renfield character, is deliciously grotesque (oh, those eyebrows!) and the scene where Nosferatu carries his own coffin through the town is, well, about as bizarre as it sounds.

Other fun things we did this weekend:
1. Filled our window boxes with flowers
2. Made maple walnut ice cream (Faizan did that)
3. Framed an old transit map of Chicago
4. Stocked up on library books

"Funny,

I sometimes feel like a motherless child (trad)
too, unknown
black voice"

Franz Wright, Planes

Getting better

I feel six-feet tall in my new brown shoes -- like one of Helmut Newton's broads.
Still angry about the Brazil Nut Effect, but mollified by the addition of dried cherries.
It's a three-day weekend.
We are not going to Detroit.
We are not going to the Dunes.
We have no barbecue plans.
We don't even own a set of tongs.

Shikayat

I coughed all night.
This morning I spent 10 minutes looking for socks without holes.
Lowered my expectations and looked for socks with minimally-annoying holes.
It's May and I'm still wearing corduroys.
I was helping Remy tame his crazy hair and in a fit of pique, I picked up the shears.
I saw a picture of my mother from 5 years ago; something changes in the eyes.
I saw chicken bones on the street and wondered about Santeria.
What is it about numb extremities?
I think I have a tapeworm 'cause I'm still hungry.

Does it really take fewer muscles to smile than to frown?

Nope.

Armchair traveling

I spent a weekend once in an extraordinary house in San Francisco. The rooms were painted various shades of sherbet: orange, lime, lemon, raspberry. (When we were kids, we pronounced the word "sherbert," and I really resisted the removal of that second "r." Sherbert seems friendlier, somehow - agreeable, devil-may-care. Sherbet strikes me as curt in comparison).

The house was in Noe Valley, on a ridiculously steep hill. From the front, the house looked like a piton wedged into rock; from the back, it was propped up on stilts, just like Baba Yaga's.

I liked the weather in San Francisco. It wasn't hot and it wasn't cold, but you were always aware of the air - as if it were ever on the brink of some grand gesture.

Birthday by Chagall

"She will have big boomerang eyes

that will mow down the wheat like a windowpane
frosted
and starred from a revolver's bullet."

Benjamin Péret, Arm in Arm

Today is my birthday. I will probably be late for work. I will eat leftover plantain enchiladas for lunch. Then I'll read some prose poems by Charles Simic. There are unopened packages on the piano bench. There is a pineapple in the fruit basket because I like the way the scissory top looks. If someone makes me a cake, I'll eat it; otherwise, I'm making fruit salad.

It is too late not to have my name

Even though it's a quilt pattern.

And it means penis in Urdu.

Even though someone with my name writes bible stories.

And the two Rs together feel awkward, like a mouthful of gauze.

Even though my father called me Joe Pete. And also Annie Laurie.

Even though my in-laws tried to re-name me Sara Zahra.

Even though I would have made a good Ellie

it is too late not to have my name.

Plans for the weekend

"The journey with you into pain is what I long for"*

For some time now, I have been working on a longish poem, in the form of Letters to Antigone from her sister Ismene. Frankly, it's not going well. This has led me to wonder, yet again, if great topics -- ones with complex emotions, deep backstory, and over-the-top drama -- can often be a liability. Somehow, it's easier to write a really good poem about, say, a paper clip, or eating a sandwich on the Midway. Maybe it's because focusing on the ordinary forces us to root out the details, whereas great topics can mire us in abstractions.

I had a colleague who was doing her dissertation on memory and public history in India. Her field site was a village displaced by one of the country's infamous dam projects. For most of the year, the buildings and landmarks of the village were completely underwater; for a short time each year, the water would recede, and the buildings and roads would reappear. "Wow," I remember saying; "what a great topic!" "Yes," she said, "and therein lies the problem."

*Ismene, to Antigone