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