Who has been to Throop?

I was looking for some information about satellite TV when I came upon a list of towns in New York State where service is available -- a listing, in other words, of all the towns in the state. Herewith, in no particular order, are some I found especially enticing: Paradox Lake, West Candor, Stone Arabia, Kismet, Promised Land, Sparrowbush,
Big Moose, Sunken Meadow, Clockville, South Nineveh, Neversink, Echo. And here is a set of towns where one might not want to live: Throop, Lake Desolation, Middle Hope,Semina, Sanataria Springs, Starkville, Gray. (My apologies to readers in any of these probably perfectly cheery regions.)

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UPDATE: Mark Wunderlich reports that he actually lives near Stone Arabia, and that I missed another splendid town near there, Medusa.

Florida Sublime

We're just back in the city this evening from Ft. Lauderdale, where the remnants of what could have become tropical storm Ana were racing in from the Bahamas, making this glorious drama up above the low-slung, not-really-so-glorious landscape of Broward County. Paul's mother's name -- as you already know if you're a reader of his blog -- was Anne, and indeed this seemed like her weather, a swirling atmospheric turbulence to mark her passage from the earth-plane to whatever's next. (Which is maybe also the earth-plane, but in another form, experienced entirely differently?) There was a viewing, and a funeral mass; the best of it all were the words Paul spoke at the ceremony, a precise and loving tribute, which felt suffused with regard for his mother (that is perhaps the best of love: the deepest regarding) because it tried so hard to see her, and to name who she'd been to him and to her family. It's an odd paradox that the rites of burial are so full of attempts at consolation and spiritual comfort when in fact what people really and truly crave is to see, name, and consider the person who's gone, to tell stories about her, to hold that character up to the light of our collective attention. That is the uplifting part, somehow. So Paul's words -- which described Anne's love for the shore, her delight in going for a ride, getting out to see what the world was made of, the huge energy she gave to supporting her children's passions (even when they were, um, a little dotty) -- those loomed like the largest thing in the room, in the modern Catholic chapel with its artfully askew stained glass. That, for me, was when things turned toward lightness.

Later, I was by myself in the motel room while the Lisickys had gathered elsewhere. I was meditating and letting down the tensions of the day when I imagined Anne coming into the room and saying, Well, I'm just going to sit down and rest on this bed, this being dead has worn me out, I've been everywhere. And I said, Have you been busy? What's it like? And she said, Like nothing you can imagine.

mother of us all

Paul's mother's death has me thinking about my own mother, who died thirty-three years ago, in 1976; she was fifty six, a year older than I am now. It seems very far away, that death, and yet there are also moments that I can revisit with absolute clarity, though I won't write them here, as somehow it feels wrong to chronicle that wounding hour when we're off to Florida in the morning for this funeral. Every loss does call back every other, as though the deaths of mothers were looped together in a long chain. But then of course it isn't just the deaths that are linked. Three young women I know, all poets, are pregnant with their first children. In the town pond here a pair of swans has been nesting all spring. They were right out in the open, in a pond beside an ancient cemetery and a cluster of 18th century houses,in the very oldest part of town, where there's actually a grave for a man, Lion Gardiner, who was born in the 1580s, which seems astonishing to me. The swans made a kind of half-cone of very black mud, like a volcano, and the female sat inside it, day and night, in sun and in rain, sometimes alert and watchful, sometimes with her neck laid back across her wings, head resting. She sat for six weeks. And then just this week, the nest was empty, and there she was on the water, with six small gray cygnets, little incidents of fluff which point right to the term "swan's down" -- you can see how soft they are. And when we went to the pet store today, to look for some way to get the blooming algae out of the pond, there was a pen where a mottled chestnut-colored rabbit was surrounded by her offspring, baby rabbits of the most elegant gray velvet coats. We wanted to bring all of them home, the mother included. It's spring, the whole world's mothering.

Brief and wondrous life

I've just finished Junot Diaz's THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO, which I loved. I read it on it the way to Chicago and back, where I'd gone to spend the day at a high school I liked a lot, Lyons Township -- really a remarkable poetry culture there, a place where teachers have built a regard for the art over many decades of work. I gave a reading after school was out, and two hundred kids came!

Anyway, Junot's book is terrific, and its energy and vital force were helpful now, when the spirit of our household has been made heavy by Paul's mother's passing. The book turns a bracingly direct gaze at suffering and at death, which is what one wants at a grave hour -- no false distractions -- but it also has such drive and life in the narrative voice, and a contagious eagerness to know its characters.

One of the feats of the book is that its central character doesn't really do a whole lot, until quite late in his life, when he takes up a quixotic quest. Oscar reads fantasy novels and writes his own, designs role-playing games, fantasizes wildly over women he's afraid to meet, and that's about it. Yet he's the carrier of the heritage of diaspora; it's in his troubled body that a cursed history of his mother and grandfather's suffering under Trujillo comes to rest -- and maybe, in fact, it goes further back than that, the burden of a colonized history, an occupied past.

And the structure of the book is spectacular; it feels effortless but moves in a complex way back and forth in time, between generations -- so that the history of Oscar's sister is couched inside his story, and inside his story is the heartbreakingly grim story of their mother. And then further back, to Oscar's grandfather, whose destruction by the dictatorship sets into motion the tragedy of his mother's life -- a bitter and impossible woman who becomes increasingly a center of emotional gravity in the book, for all the pain she's carried, and for all the nerve it took to keep going forward anyway.

And it's spectacularly funny, in the most unlikely way; who would expect footnotes on the bloody history of dictatorship to be delivered in a voice that slides into wisecracks without a bump? -- a voice that gracefully hashes together Spanish, English, bits of Tolkien, Dominican and Paterson NJ slang. When the book was done, I missed that narrator. I wanted him to keep talking to me.

Ark of Difference

Yesterday I went to the Central Park Zoo for the first time. I'd never been because it's in the city where I live, and you're always more likely to see the sights in places you don't actually inhabit every day. And, although there's little I like better than looking at animals, I share some common prejudices about zoos: that they're for children, and that they're unhappy places of confinement for animals.

Given that the Central Park Zoo is run by the Wildlife Conservation Society, I should have known better. They're one of the premier forces in the world for the protection of species, and of course they'd make a place that honored bountiful life. The Zoo is small,but it has a large spirit. There are two magnificent polar bears, in a big open-to-the-skies habitat with enormous stones, and a waterfall, and a deep pool to swim in. They were lying on their backs, sunning their bellies and scratching. There's a harbor seal who was rescued in Maine a few years back who can't be released back into the wild because his vision is impaired; he swims in apparent delight, as do the sealions who have a circular pool around a fountain. There's a rainforest biome where the birds fly around from branch to higher branch, and seem mostly quite interested in people; they land on a nearby perch and eye you inquisitively. It's a delight.

And I like the way poetry's integrated here. I'd seen photos of the installations of pieces of poems in the zoo (see previous post on The Language of Conservation), but seen in situ they do subtle and intriguing work, shaping the experience. I especially liked the banners that were both inside the zoo and outside, in the surrounding Park.
One's above, with a great Neruda quote. Another bore this wonderful Hass translation of Basho: "Year after year/ on the monkey's face/ a monkey face."

But it wouldn't be a real experience of animal life without a note of disconnection or strangeness. In the penguin exhibit, the birds (who hardly seem like birds, but something all their own) swim and dive, and you can watch them both underwater or strolling around on the stony shore. The rocks mount up several layers high, and behind them there's a sapphire field of artificial sky. One penguin had climbed up as high as they could go. He was standing, with his back to the teeming crowd of his peers, and he was fixed in position, studying the false heavens. He didn't move all the time I was there. He seemed like that unforgettable penguin in Werner Herzog's Scenes from the End of the World who wanders away from the tribe, heading firmly away from the sea, from food and company. The penguin in Herzog's film will walk till he dies. The penguin in the zoo -- you can see him below, looking skyward -- can't go anywhere, but he seems to have left anyway. Is it too much to think of him as the poet, the one who can't ever quite remain in the group? Either inwardly or outwardly -- and here I can't help but think of Deborah Digges and of Craig Arnold.

Anyway, the zoo was more real because someone there had stepped apart alone. And maybe he'll just turn around in a while, weary of his study, and come back down to the water with the others. Probably he will.

Found Art: a Louise Nevelson, West 16th St, 10:30 A.M., Wednesday, 5/13/09

Under the Trees

If you're in New York on June 16, here's what promises to be a delightful thing to do. Marie Howe, Nick Flynn and I will be reading under the trees in Bryant Park, at 42nd between Fifth and Sixth, at 7:30. It's wonderful to read with friends and there should be a convivial summery energy to the night.