A Little Life

You think A LITTLE LIFE is going to be something it’s not: one of those post-college coming-of-age-in-Manhattan books that takes you along through drug-addled friendships, boozy conversations, new babies, failed marriages, and the like. The start of Hanya Yanagihara’s 813-page novel certainly smacks of books like A FORTUNATE AGE, by Joanna Smith Rakoff, and even Mary McCarthy’s THE GROUP – complex, layered stories that chronicle that path of a group of friends as they navigate the adult world.

But A LITTLE LIFE isn’t A FORTUNATE AGE. It’s not THE GROUP. In fact, I suspect many would be hard-pressed to find an easy contemporary for this complex, tragic story. It’s a singular, unforgettable, searing work, one that navigates the realms of trauma, physical pain, and grief by means of expert language and gorgeous, visceral scene. For the last third of A LITTLE LIFE, I wept, turning the pages and wiping my eyes as the story unfolded, gruesome and true. 

The central figure in A LITTLE LIFE is Jude, the one who holds his group of male friends together.  He’s the victim of a childhood trauma, one that is revealed to the reader in fits and starts, snippets and scenes, until we finally grasp the horror, the breadth of such abuse, in the book’s closing pages. Jude holds his secret tightly, and his friends come to accept this. When he’s crippled with pain, paralyzed on the floor, they hold him close; they take him to the doctor; they don’t ask questions about the cuts on his arms. His friends are his saviors, and he, with his understated beauty, his generosity, his humility, is also theirs. 

At the end of the book’s second chapter (there are just seven), Jude remarks, “The only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are – not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving – and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself.” Jude’s best friend, the attractive and compelling Willem, is this friend: kind, generous, forgiving. He’s Jude’s foil, the picture of health and good fortune, and the relationship between the two is what carries the book forward, propels it through the decades to its final agonizing close. 

In A LITTLE LIFE, “Friendship [means] witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs.” At one point, Willem wonders, “Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going.” Willem and Jude’s friendship is like this: the most important relationship in each of their lives, and one that remains sexless, but not without love. 

As handsome and charming as Willem is, it’s Jude who steals the reader’s heart. Jude, who keeps his pain knotted tight inside himself, who never complains aloud, who feels, all the time, like his legs will give out—it’s Jude who’s the true hero in A LITTLE LIFE, the one who survives, who even thrives, despite the obstacles he’s faced. Jude hates himself, hates his failing body, his terrible past. He can’t enjoy sex, can’t enjoy his physical body: He sees himself as flawed, “a piece of junk.”

For this reader, Jude’s pain was the most compelling part of the book. I’ve taken my body for granted my whole life, and yet it’s brought me to countries near and far, to the tops of frozen peaks and to the shores of vast oceans. It’s folded itself into cramped buses, cabs, rickshaws, boats—all so that I could see the world. Swimming, walking, skating, climbing, hiking, skiing, rowing, biking, running: verbs have always been the vocabulary that’s defined my life, punctuated the other, more literary life I’ve also led. It took A LITTLE LIFE to teach me to treasure these things, hold them close, thank my legs and arms for taking me through another pain-free day, another day when I could forget about my body and get down to the business of living. 

A LITTLE LIFE is about enduring pain. Jude’s pain was never a friend, but it was always a companion, something he could count on, something he spent his life managing. And yet even in pain, Jude eked out success: As a prominent lawyer, he spent his final years with the man he always loved. The two gardened together, created beautiful spaces for themselves, those final years together all cool, shimmery pools and frosted cocktails in the afternoons. The book ends in tragedy, but it’s so imbued with beauty that you almost don’t even notice. It’s only when you finish reading do you realize you’ve been weeping for hours, and your face and hands are stained with tears. You’ll stand, aware of how your body hurts or doesn’t hurt, and you’ll see the world anew, pain-infused and beauty-bound, a brand new place each day. 

Hunger

I saw Roxane Gay last February at the American Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Washington, D.C. It was cold and gray that weekend, and I wore wool the whole time. I was walking with my friend Austin, making our way out of the conference hotel and into downtown D.C., and all of a sudden, Austin whispered, “Roxane Gay,” and he pointed with his gaze.

  

I knew what Roxane Gay looked like, of course—I’d seen the pictures online and in her books’ jackets. But nothing prepared me for Roxane Gay in the flesh, just a few feet away from us, leaning against a wall and smoking a cigarette. She was dressed in dark colors, denim and black, and though I’d sensed nothing a moment before, I now felt her presence like a spirit in the room with you when you’re sleeping. I gasped. She was the woman who’d written the stories that broke me down, made me weep, made me remember for years afterwards. She was a legend, a literary goddess, and here she stood, smoking a cigarette and leaning against a wall, just a few steps away from where we walked. We hurried past, not the type of fans to gush or hug or be a bother, but I was chilled for the rest of the night, stunned by what I dared to feel coming off of her: this latent power, warm like the sun.

*

I couldn’t believe it: Roxane Gay’s Hunger was on the shelf, and no one had snapped it up yet. I love our library, especially when it feels like no one goes. I checked it out, tucked it into my bag, and had it open by lunchtime, sandwich and lemonade forgotten. “We should not take up space,” Gay writes on page thirteen. “We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but its something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.”

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is Gay’s courageous, beautiful, terrible story of her coming-of-age, her sexuality, her roaring twenties and fumbling thirties, her rise to fame, and always her body, her body, and her hunger. The book feels like you’re reading someone’s diary. It feels, uncomfortably and blessedly, like an invasion. This is the best, rawest, most troubling, most healing kind of memoir there is, and it’s the kind I can’t yet make—she tells us everything, she lays her life bare, she opens her heart and dares to let us take it. The intimacy of this book is a revolution, and should be required reading for all women and men, all mothers and fathers, all teachers and civil servants. Everyone who resides in a body in this world owes it to herself to read Hunger.

In her memoir, Gay divides her experience into the before and the after – the innocence and then the fall from grace that followed a trauma I won’t describe – read the book, Bad Feminist, or other reviews if you really want to know. Or, just take a guess. You’re probably right. Anyway, Gay swallows the worst day of her life like an edible secret, and everything falls apart – her confidence, her blossoming physical beauty, her open trust in her family. Food becomes a way to hide, the weight a disguise that renders the body invisible, genderless. Gay’s short chapters span the topics of cooking and food preparation, breakfast and binging, flying on planes and sitting in too-small chairs, and, of course, the weight-loss reality-TV shows that populate most networks. In one of the book’s most poignant passages, Gay describes Rachel Frederickson, the Season 15 Biggest Loser winner who weighed in at 105 pounds on live television. “In the two months after her big reveal,” Gay writes, “Frederickson gained twenty pounds and reached, apparently, a more acceptable but still appropriately disciplined size….those of us who deny ourselves and discipline our bodies know better. Rachel Frederickson was doing exactly what we asked of her, and what too many of us would, if we could, ask of ourselves.”

Reading Hunger was a little bit like reading Americanah, by Chimanada Ngozi Adichie—the reading process was also a process of learning how it is to be black in America, or, in Gay’s case, to be too big in America—for armchairs, for planes, for the public’s comfort. The stories she tells break my heart and smack me in the face, because of how little I’ve seen, and what I’ve been willing to ignore—in airports, in college, and even in my own classroom. Chairs that don’t fit, clothes that are always too small, doorways that are always too narrow. Strangers who take food from your grocery cart and put it back on the shelves. Nurses who wince when they weigh you. After a while, it all gets internalized, “and then I start to hate myself for my unruly body that I seem incapable of disciplining, for my cowardice in the face of what other people might think.”

In the end, Hunger is a story of triumph, even if the book isn’t framed that way. “I often wonder,” Gay writes at the close of her memoir, “who I would have been if this terrible thing had not happened to me, if I hadn’t spend so much of my life hungering so much.” And by the very end, she’s asking her reader to look within: “Does anyone feel comfortable in their bodies?”

I closed the book this morning, tears in my eyes, and I thought about the day I’d seen Roxane Gay standing outside the Marriott Hotel in downtown D.C. I thought about the experience I had at that conference—all the walking, the standing, the waiting, the sitting, and how easy it was for me to fit. I thought about my own body and the times I’ve hated on it, run it ragged, dragged it too far, pushed it to make it thinner, starved it. Beat on it. All the ways I’ve hated my body over the years.

I can still feel the way the writer’s strength hit me like a warm gust of wind, though she hadn’t looked at us, hadn’t moved at all. In fact, if Austin hadn’t said her name, I might have walked right past without noticing the tall, denim-clad woman smoking a cigarette by herself.

No One Can Pronounce My Name

In the tradition of Jhumpa Lahiri, Nell Freudenberger, and Akhil Sharma, Rakesh Satyal’s NO ONE CAN PRONOUNCE MY NAME emerges as the funniest, freshest story of the lot. There’s a market for Indian fiction, as the author astutely observes through the lens of his protagonist, Ranjana, and NO ONE CAN PRONOUNCE MY NAME has budged itself right to the front of the line. This beautiful, hilarious, and richly reflective novel explores the fate of the Indian family on the North American continent, with the narrator’s observations constantly drawing parallels between East and West, old and young, ancient and modern. Ultimately, the Indian-American family is reshaped, reformed, and refashioned into a motley crue of friends: The flamboyantly gay Teddy, the tentative Harit, the gaudy, talkative Cheryl, and the literary Ranjana. In America, the author seems to suggest, the family that endures is the friend group we adopt.

In smart-but-not-isolating prose, Satyal presents the lives of disparate characters whose lives intersect. There’s the Indian contingency—we first meet Harit, who, despite ten years in the States, feels no more acclimated than he did when he arrived. Donning saris and lipstick each night, he pretends to be his dead sister for his mother’s sake, though it’s not until the last quarter of the book that we learn the true, stupid reason for his sister’s untimely death. (We also learn that, all along, his mother knew it was him—such is the humor of this clever, tightly-wound book.) With the gender bending of the first few pages comes an element of the queer—unexpected for a book about Indian families, but knotted deeply into the fabric of these interconnected lives Satyal has designed.

From Harit’s life, we move to the story of Ranjana, who has lived in the States for fifteen years but who, the narrator reveals, still doesn’t feel a part of the culture either; she doesn’t drink, doesn’t flirt, doesn’t walk on the street with men she doesn’t know. In our flirty, sexy culture, Ranjana is an outsider: at her job at a proctologist’s office, in the market, and even, it seems, in the company of her own husband. The conversations she has with her college-aged son over the phone are conversations among strangers; Prashant, the son, can never end the call soon enough.

Ranjana’s only peace is her writing hour, after she’s served her husband dinner, worked all day, and completed all errands. Late at night, all alone, unfueled by wine or weed or caffeine, “It was easily her favorite time of day,” Satyal writes, “work barely a memory, dinner accomplished, her husband appeased, a story her only world for an hour or two. It was at once fun and disorienting.” It is Ranjana who sails the rest of the book forward, she who guides the fumbling characters towards unity. “That was what writing really was,” she observes, “an excuse to gild your loneliness until it resembled the companionship of others. It was entertaining yourself when you had no other entertainment. It was the way out.” Just as her own writing becomes a “way out,” so too do the characters, for each other, become an alternative to the realities they occupy.

            As Ranjana’s taste for writing develops, she joins a writing group, where, each week, the members tear each other apart while defending their own bad writing to the death. Ranjana, for her part, spends the hour feeling self-conscious and reading her worst work, hiding her bloody Indian vampire stories for after-hours, when she’s alone. It’s only when she finally shares one with the group that the other members take note of her ability, and she’s invited to a writers’ conference.

            Because I’m a writer, I loved this book, whose climax concluded with two days spent at said conference. The book’s four central characters – Ranjana, Cheryl, Teddy, and Harit – end up making the trip together, in one car, though Ranjana’s the only writer of the group. In one of the final scenes, the four of them meet Pushpa Sondi, the book’s version of Jhumpa Lahiri, and Ranjana’s initial reaction is not admiration or awe but envy, “jealousy, the top of her mouth turning to metal. All the goodwill that she had built up – the warmth that she had felt upon ingesting the stories and their beauty – was effaced upon the author’s entrance….there was no emotion as swift and complete.” This is the type of writing that makes me love NO ONE CAN PRONOUNCE MY NAME; such fumbling grace, so real, so true. The envy is Ranjana’s and mine.

            Just as quickly, Ranjana’s envy melts at the woman’s next words: “Fear is as common as blood,” Sondhi admonishes her audience. “It courses through us and is, in its way, a vital source. It is the requisite formula for our continued work as writers.” Ranjana is “immediately reenergized,” and begins to wonder how her own writing, however humble its beginnings, could provide readers something that even the great Sondhi’s words could not.

           

            Like others that have come before it, NO ONE CAN PRONOUNCE MY NAME is a poignant reflection of what it means to be the Other, the relocated, the one who came from somewhere else. This is an Indian story, but it might as well be mine—or my grandmother’s, who came here from Finland at twenty-two with a fake passport and no English to speak of, but who worked as a maid in rich ladies’ houses to raise my mom right. While my grandmother grew old and white-haired and feeble, I became a writer myself, shaping stories around the journey she’d taken so many years ago. At the book’s bold close, Ranjana seduces her husband, rekindling a love she thought had died years ago: “She turned her head to his and pressed her laughing mouth to his agog one. She kissed the man who had brought her to this country, to this house.”

            In NO ONE CAN PRONOUNCE MY NAME, all of your wildest dreams come true: A housewife goes on to earn bestselling fame. A bumbling Indian man finds love in Men’s Furnishings. A chatterbox receptionist rises above her child’s death, and a man forgives himself a fatal mistake. In the characters’ fumblings, we recognize our own, and my only response was compassion. 

Blue is the Warmest Color

Blue is the Warmest Color is timely, sensual, smart, and emotional. Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, the film explores women, hunger, and what it means to be a lesbian—or not—in today's open-minded world. Love will always be a rose—beautiful, expensive, potentially dangerous—and in that, Blue is nothing new. But for anyone who has ever wondered what lesbians do—in and out of bed—Blue is a must-see. Be warned: you'll weep, laugh, and blush madly. Not one to watch with your mother, methinks...but then again, I don't know your mother.

Released in 2013, Blue begins as a slow-moving movie, paced more for a 1980's audience than that of today—though the French, perhaps, are less device-addled and ADHD-plagued. And yet Blue quickly reveals that the French, in many ways, are less many things than we Americans are: less addicted, less guilty, less repressed. The characters love preparing and eating food, making love, drinking wine, lying in the sun, standing in a park, cuddling on a bench. Pleasure is taken at every turn, and as a result the actors boast clear skin, bright eyes, and toned midriffs.

Anyway, you might not make it through all three hours of Blue, and that would be okay. The first hour is satisfying in itself. The first ten minutes are. But the movie in its entirety is a lesson in patience and its subsequent reward, for those who sit through Blue are paid handsomely.

Blue tells the story of pouty-lipped, 15-year-old Adele (Adèle Exarchopoulos), who lives in France with her parents. They serve her wine at dinner (while the American audience sighs...if only the US could be that mature) and in the mornings, Adele goes off to high school exhausted and tousled. For the first thirty minutes, the movie goes on like this: Adele is a hearty eater, smokes cigarettes on her way home from school, and has sex with a cute guy at school who takes an interest.

Of cute guy, Emily Greenhouse, in her New Yorker article "Did a Director Push Too Far," writes, "Early on, Adèle tells a suitor that she likes languages—the word is langue. It’s the same word, in French, for “tongue,” and the camera hardly ever leaves hers: her mouth, her rude chewing, her sucking, her wails." Langue, langue. It's a theme that pervades the film. Anyway, predictably, the sex between Adele and suitor is uninspired and, by the end, pretty sad—a vacant look in Adele's eyes and all that. Still, something tells us that this behavior is nothing new, and this is not the first time. Something else tells us there's much more to come.

The movie's first turn comes when Adele, late at night and alone in her room, conjures an image of the cute blue-haired gay girl she passed in the street. Subtle and fine, this scene is erotic and transcendent. Blue hair is there, and then she's gone, and Adele is left alone with her body. From there, the movie picks up, though there remain many long camera shots of Adele's pouty mouth.

Eventually, in a lesbian bar of a caliber that surely only exists in France, or in a French dream, Adele meets blue-haired Emma (Léa Seydoux). Their meet-cute is sexy and smart. Adele is almost painfully earnest, and so, so young. Still, the scene grips and holds.  What follows is one of Blue's crueler turns, arriving in the form of Adele's so-called friends. They have seen Adele with blue-hair, and they accuse her in the schoolyard of being lesbian. They taunt her mercilessly—almost unconvincingly—and a crowd forms. Adele, so obviously gay, turns red in denial.

From there, Blue chronicles the lives of Adele and Emma. Adele's sexual awakening—her true one, not the one she's faked all this time with men—takes place in the form of many long sex scenes with Emma, the first famously seven minutes in duration. Do not, I repeat, watch this with your mother. Let's just say that the women go from casual to serious fast, and then they have made a life together. They throw parties together. Adele is the object, constantly, of our gaze and Emma's.

Greenhouse's New Yorker piece goes on to expose the director as a slave-driver: "Seydoux and Exarchopoulos said that the shooting had been unbearable and they would never again work with Kechiche. The French union representing the film industry spoke of deplorable conditions for the crew. Seydoux [...] said she felt like a 'prostitute.' Exarchopoulos described a 'horrible' continuous take in which Seydoux hit her over and over, leaving her raw."

Of Blue, the New York Times writes, "It’s a three-hour movie about women, a rare object of critical inquiry perhaps especially for American men working in the male-dominated field of movie critics. The truth is we need more women on screen, naked and not, hungry and not, to get this conversation really started."

Scathing reviews, forced prostitution, and director brutality aside, the truth remains: Blue is an astonishing film about women, beauty, and sex. Three hours passed quickly, and when Blue was over I wanted more. 

Marriage for All!

One huge step forward, everyone!

Here's to our country, for finally making gay marriage legitimate. It's surreal on many counts, especially as I learn the news through my laptop in a remote adobe house on the New Mexican plains.

Beneath the Gay Marriage Triumph article, the Times showed a Tweet roll. One Tweet said, "I'm proud to be an American."

And I thought, "I'm not."

And that was a terrible thought, I know, I know.

Except that this decision is being made far too late, later than it should have, and this issue is in fact, in five out of nine very important minds, a no-brainer.

OK, maybe not a no-brainer. Much careful thought and all of that. But still. I suspect, deep down, it was a no-brainer.

Meanwhile, decades have dragged along. Gay couples across our bountiful nation have, for far too long already, endured lifetimes without rights or recognition. We're late in the game. The issue of gay marriage has been covered in the media to an extreme degree, drawing our nation's attention away from other critical national and international issues. In short, we have wasted so much time. This should have been decided long ago.

Are those the wrong things to think? Should I simply be jubilantly happy? Should I be weeping tears of joy, and not of frustration? Should I be seeing this as a global triumph and not a national one, not as closely tied as I might think to my identity as an American? Should I keep in mind that the whole world, besides dear Holland (and even that only happened in 2000!??), is late in the game?

I remember a day years ago when my friend Sam and I stumbled accidentally into Buenos Aires' pride celebration. Gay marriage had been legal for about a year in Argentina, and this was a wild fiesta: funky, rootsy, and wholly organic. We drank beer and shouted and cried. We made friends. We didn't just watch the parade, we WERE the parade, just the two of us plus about a million giddy Argentines, marching down the Avenida de Mayo towards Congreso.

May America know such bliss, if it doesn't already.

Hooray for the gays!

Beautiful, gay BA

Yay for photitos of Pride! (Just a week late...things have been hectic). My dear friend Sam visited last week, and we literally stumbled upon this parade, which we hadn't expected, since Pride normally happens in Spring....but this is the southern hemisphere! It's spring! It's Pride!

Anyway, it was a beautiful day, a beautiful parade, all set against the backdrop of BA's stately Avenida de Mayo. The march began at the Casa Rosa - the pink government house - and ended at Congreso. In typical BA fashion, the parade was scheduled to begin at 6 PM, actually began at 7.30, and ended in the wee hours, in beautiful darkness. It was truly an awesome thing to behold, in the truest sense of that word. I'm still high from the day. 

One week left in Argentina, my loves, and I'm drinking it all in...more to come, at least before the fateful day I'm set to leave....sadness.

A quick note about this one below-- this is the Avenida 9 de Julio, supposedly the widest avenue in the world...and at Pride it was empty of cars and filled with revelers. An incredible thing.

Forward-thinking, bohemian places

Frank Bruni, in his NYTimes op-ed 'Same-Sex Marriage in Portugal,' does a nice job of exploring the legal status of same-sex marriage around the world, pondering why certain countries (cough cough) choose not to nationally legalize it. It's well worth a read, but if you don't have one of your dwindling twenty to spare, find below an interesting excerpt that mentions Argentina!! (Where gay marriage is nationally legal.)

It was only a little more than a decade ago that a country first legalized same-sex marriage, and that happened in precisely the kind of forward-thinking, bohemian place you’d expect: the Netherlands. About two years later, Belgium followed suit.

Then things got really interesting. The eight countries that later joined the club were a mix of largely foreseeable and less predictable additions. In the first category I’d put Canada, Norway, Sweden and Iceland. In the second: South Africa, Spain, Portugal and Argentina.

Why those four countries? People who have studied the issue note that that they have something interesting and relevant in common: each spent a significant period of the late 20th century governed by a dictatorship or brutally discriminatory government, and each emerged from that determined to exhibit a modernity and concern for human rights that put the past to rest.

Thanks for sending, Sam! Hope you're all having a marvelous Sunday. Love, Kate

Addendum: Sam just told me that if you access a NYTimes article from an outside link, it won't count as one of your twenty!! So read on, my devoted following! Read on. 

Balls Out

McSweeney's Internet Tendency is consistently excellent and addicting. Philip Graham had a wonderful column there, 'Philip Graham Spends a Year in Lisbon,' which was eventually expanded into his luminous book, 'Moon Come to Earth.' And right now I'm loving Tim Peters' Notes From the Caddieshack. And I think my mother and brother and all golf-lovers and summer-job lovers out there would love it, too.


In this post, though, I especially wanted to plug Casey Plett's column on transitioning genders. Her 19 entries made me laugh and moved me to tears and I highly recommend them to you all! Her writing exudes a maturity, an honesty, that's ironic and beautiful. Below, a lovely excerpt from her fine column, 'Balls Out: A Column on Being Transgendered.'


Your confusion is not a weakness. Don’t get hung up on the world, it’s changing and accepting more with every day. The closet is worse, and there are all kinds of closets. I can’t pretend I know what you may have to go through or what you will become. But for divining the choice yourself you are beautiful, you are beautiful, you are beautiful, and you always will be. I promise you.

Lima Pride!

Some images from Lima's Pride Parade, held yesterday! In typical Latin American fashion, it started much later than anticipated, and apparently no drivers had been forewarned. Thus, traffic was held up for miles and miles, but no one seemed super cranky about it. I bet one or two thousand people participated in the parade, mostly youth, but everyone was definitely represented. Anyway, Pride is a beautiful thing, here in Lima just like anywhere else in the world. Enjoy!   

Tears...of joy

Ok, I know I'm spending a little too much time online tonight. I swear I'm going to put down the box of wine and go out and enjoy Cuenca's Septenario scene real soon...

But.....

Gay marriage is legal in NYS! My home state!

Read more here:

http://gothamist.com/2011/06/24/gay_marriage_legalized_in_new_york.php

LOVE WINS!!!

In tears.

(htttp://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2008/06/gay_marraige_across_the_border.php)

Glory

Ruefle/Poets.org

Congratulations to Mary Ruefle; her amazing poem, Glory, has won the 2011 William Carlos Williams Award. I'm proud to know Ruefle from my time at Vermont College. Give yourself the gift of reading Glory, below.

Glory

The autumn aster, those lavender ones,

and the dark-blooming sedum

are beginning to bloom in the rainy earth

with the remote intensity of a dream. These thing

stake over. I am a glorifier, not very high up

on the vocational chart, and I glorify everything I see,

everything I can think of. I want ordinary men and women,

brushing their teeth, to feel the ocean in their mouth.

I am going to glorify the sink with toothpaste spat in it.

I am going to say it's a stretch of beach where the foam

rolls back and leaves little shells. Ordinary people

with a fear of worldly things, illness, pain, accidents,

poverty, of dark, of being alone, of misfortune.

The fears of everyday life. People who quietly and secretly

bear their dread, who do not speak freely of it to others.

People who have difficulty separating themselves

from the world around them, like a spider hanging

off the spike of a spider mum, in an inland autumn,

away from the sea, away from that most unfortunate nation

where people are butterballs dying of meat and drink.

I want to glorify the even tinier spiders in the belly of the spider

and in the closed knot of the mum's corolla, so this is likely

to go on into winter. Didn't I say we were speaking of autumn

with the remote intensity of a dream? The deckle edge of a cloud:

blood seeping through a bandage. Three bleached beech leaves

hanging on a twig. A pair of ruined mushrooms. The incumbent

snow. The very air. The imported light. All autumn struggling

to be gay, as people do in the midst of their woe.

I met a psychic who told me my position in the universe

but could not find the candy she hid from her grandkids.

The ordinary fear of losing one's mind. You rinse the sink,

walk out into the October sunshine, and look for it

by beginning to think. That's when I saw the autumn aster,

the sedum blooming in a purple field. The psychic said

I must see the word glory emblazoned on my chest. Secretly

I was hoping for a better word. I would have chosen for myself

an ordinary one like orchid or paw.

Something that would have no meaning in the astral realm.

One doesn't want to glorify everything. What might I actually say

when confronted with the view from K2? I'm not sure

I would say anything? What's your opinion?

You're a man with a corona in your mouth,

a woman with a cottonball in her purse,

what's your conception of the world?