Is there anything better

than a used bookstore? The chain stores - and frankly, even the independent bookstores - have fairly modest poetry sections. But a used bookstore in a University neighborhood? Yowza. I browsed shelf after glorious shelf, and here's what I brought home:

Repair: Poems by C.K. Williams
The Star-Spangled Banner: Poems by Denise Duhamel
The Black Shawl: Poems by Kathryn Stripling Byer

Perhaps I'll bring all three on the plane. That's right, I'm making my escape, however brief, from this Chicago winter that will not end. I've got a book talk in San Antonio, so for three days, I can walk outside without socks. I'm really excited about it. I'm going to go paint my toenails right now.

Non ignara mali

I am working on a poem about a girl I knew in elementary school, and for some reason, Dido's statement to the shipwrecked Trojans keeps going through my head:

Non ignara mali, misereris succorrere disco.

So now that I've researched this, I realize I may have had the meaning slightly wrong all this time. Most translations go something like this: "Not unacquainted with suffering, I am learning to help the wretched."

But I always thought it was this: "While not ignorant of evil, I am learning to help the wretched." That's a very, very different statement - more interesting, I think; and more noble.

Incabinate

I love this word. It means exactly what it should mean: to enclose in a cabin; to confine. Winters in Vermont would occasionally render us incabinated. I remember one year, the snow was so high, we asked my mother if we could jump out the second story window into the snowbank. She said yes, but only if the dog jumped first.

Damn that lily-livered dog.

Once were orphans

When my parents used to go on vacation, they would drop the little kids off at St. Joseph's orphanage on North Avenue. I have such vivid memories of the place - the little white metal beds, the giant stone bathtub. When I was 4-years old, my parents went for a 2-week trip to Uruguay, so off we went to St. Joseph's. I remember the nuns wouldn't let me sleep with my big sister Hope; all the kids were separated by age and gender, so Hope was in a different room. But at night, she would come and find me, and we would sleep together in that tiny metal bed.

My brother David stole a doorstop from the orphanage. My mother didn't find out until years later, and she was too mortified to return it. Turns out it was actually an artillery shell, probably from nearby Fort Ethan Allen. I assume it was an empty, as opposed to unexploded, shell, but who can tell? As far as I know, it's still sitting there, stopping the door in my parent's library.

"suddenly the sea

is green and lust is everywhere in a red cravat,
leaning on his walking stick and whispering,
I am a city, you are my pilgrim,
meet me this evening. Love, Pierre."

Lynn Emanuel, Inspiration

Chop Suey

We spent Saturday morning exploring the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Art Institute. Wow. After an hour, though, I thought my eyeballs would explode. Apparently you can have too much of a good thing. Nearly every painting begs for a long look, and the colors are so saturated, it's a little bit like staring at the sun. It took a whole lotta huaraches and sugary beverages to bring us back down to earth.

A Better Place

They are cutting ice on the lake again. You can hear it crack when the chisel breaks through. A groan, like a bone being set in the trenches. Or a cow birthing a dead, misshapen calf. Futile pain.

When people tell you it’s a kindness, what they really mean is “Your sorrow is tiresome.”

They are building a causeway to the islands, a giant dock you can drive on from here to South Hero. So no one has to drive on the ice anymore. Remember when a truck broke through one winter? We thought we’d swim out to the wreck come summer. But he was only hauling hay. No point diving for wet grass.

“She was too good for this world” sounds an awful lot like “She had it coming.”

People used to get stranded on the islands. Too much ice for the boats, not enough for sleds or trucks. They’d hunker down with their provisions. Wait for a freeze. Or a thaw.

The old ladies say, “At least she never had to grow old,” but what they mean is, “Thank you, God, for sparing us.”

Next autumn, I’ll take the causeway to the islands. The Jamaican apple pickers will be there, stripping the orchard as fast as locusts, their arms flying like mandibles. Then they’ll stretch out on cots in the bunk house. They’ll change into crisp whites and play cricket on a grassy airfield, a green rug unfurled between the trees. Halfway through, they’ll stop the game so a plane can land. A little red thing. Flimsy, like wind-up tin.

You were going to have a house here. You were going to park your airplane right here, up against the cortlands and the mackintoshes. Next to all the other single-engine crafts that could be taken for farm equipment, if not for the yellows and blues—and words like “Angel” and “Osprey” on the nose (because nobody names a tetter. Or a harrow).

People who say “She’s gone to a better place” must not know about this one.

Curtalax

or curtle ax, if you prefer; either way, it's a lost word that means cutlass. I'm going to go out on a limb and wager that we've got a whole bunch of English words for weapons that are quietly disappearing (or slinking away in shame). It reminds me of a class I took with the venerable C. M. Naim on the Urdu Marsiya. Every week, we'd translate sections of a marsiya as homework; in class, we'd take turns reading and sharing our translations. What an exhausting experience. Urdu seems to have about 500 words for "sword," and the average marsiya pretty much uses each and every one. The only book I opened that winter was Platt's Dictionary.

Flat-bed with a side of bacon

For the longest time S. confused IDOT with IHOP. When he'd see an IDOT (Illinois Department of Transportation) tow truck pulled over on the highway, he'd wonder at the strangeness and the beauty of middle America, where stranded travelers are rescued by the famous purveyors of breakfast confections. And wouldn't the world be just a little bit nicer if that were true? The stranded, the broken down, the rear-ended. God knows we could use some pancakes with that tire iron.

That happy thing, a perfume critic

"I once sat in the London Tube across a young woman wearing a t-shirt printed with headline-size words ALL THIS across her large breasts, and in small type underneath “and brains too.” That vulgar-but-wily combination seems to me to sum up Trésor. Up close, when you can read the small print, Trésor is a superbly clever accord between powdery rose and vetiver, reminiscent of the structure of Habanita. From a distance, it’s the trashiest, most good-humored pink mohair sweater and bleached hair thing imaginable. When you manage to appeal to both the reptilian brain and the neocortex of menfolk, what happens is what befell Trésor: a huge success."

From Turin and Sanchez, Perfumes: A Guide. You can read all about it in the New Yorker.

Faugh!

interj.

1.

An exclamation of contempt, disgust, or abhorrence.

I looked for "faugh" for so long - that was way back in the days before the internet, and I was too lazy to hie myself to a library (oh, how things change). Of course, I was spelling it "fa" (actually, faaaaa!), so that may have had something to do with it.

Growing up, when I played with my siblings or my friends, if one of us did something wrong (said a swear word, broke a known rule), the others would all point their fingers and say "Faaaa!"

I began to suspect this was some kind of regional expression when I left home for college, said "faaaa" to my classmates in jest, and found that no one had the first clue what I was talking about.

Not long ago, my sister called me, all excited, having discovered, at long last, the origins of our beloved "faugh"; apparently, it's a Shakespearean-era exclamation of disgust or contempt. We used it for shaming purposes, I guess you could say, so I think it fits.

I am left to ponder the sad fate of endangered interjections everywhere. Welladay! Some of these are just too good to let go.

"balls! fiddlesticks! havers! heads up! horsefeathers! rats! spells! begone! behold! bingo! blast! blimey! bother! bullshit! crazy! crikey! damnation! the devil! doggone! god! good! goodness! gracious! grand! hell! honestly! indeed! look! nonsense! silence! so! sod! soft! son of a bitch! son of a gun! upon my soul! up with! upsy-daisey! well! woe! no wonder!"*

*Vladimir Ž. Jovanovi, The Form, Position and Meaning of Interjections in English