A Single Layer

Working at the Main Library has surprising advantages. Just now I stepped out of my office, walked five paces across the hall, scanned a badge, and walked under the civic center plaza to the elevator that stretches from beneath the earth up to the mayor’s office on the fourteenth floor. I didn’t have so far to go—just up one level to the utilities counter, where a sympathetic, amused woman named Sue shut down my gas payments. It took less than five minutes. I finished packing up my kitchen days ago. My cake pans were in boxes sometime early last week. But as I walked through the underground loading dock on my way back to the office, I was distinctly aware of the finality of what I’d just done. I would never, from that moment on, be able to bake for anyone out of that kitchen. Maybe it doesn’t seem like a very big deal, but I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of a certain identity, namely being “the person who bakes a lot”. I made a tiered wedding cake for some friends (because

I'm moving to Texas in less than two months. I've lived in Long Beach now for nine years. Already I have stacks of books covering my dining room table that I'll be reading for my PhD program in the fall. I've quietly begun the tedious work of sorting and cleaning everything in my little apartment. I'm scheduling all of my last days with friends, moving through my calendar in reverse order from when I expect to slip into my car and drive away. This is the longest I've lived in one place, so I've never really experienced a leaving quite like this before. I remember the day I left Wheaton, closing the bedroom door on my best friend, walking down to Chaeli's car so she could drive me to the airport. (The greatest grace of Texas is that she will be there. Some friends we never lose completely.) I remember leaving California for Scotland—walking away from my mother in the Palm Springs airport. We leave people who have changed us, and we leave places that ha

It must have been a decade ago, or nearly, that I wrote this poem for a friend. It was coded verse in her voice to someone else, and today its strange metaphor was born in the most literal sense of labor and breath. So I'm posting it here today. Welcome to the world, Everett. We have waited for you long. "An Incarnation" Certain as stars am I that this embryo will grow as though filled with the patient spirit that met Mary so intimately  upon her humble Yes. Certain as stars, though stars die, setting hope on long life— all the millions of years  between their first burning and our sight— I will wait. It is not enough that he grow in me a child sleeping silent— He must grow in you also between the sheets of your heart like pages in a story book. This is the Law of Waiting and I hold to its words like a child to its mother—I would be a mother, but am barren and weeping at the temple doors, making vows to my patient

I just finished reading this for the second time last week, thanks to the forever book group of Grace. It was equally as lovely the second time around, and while reading it, I wrote down a dozen more quotes from the incomparable Ames, who is both too beautiful a man to be real and too beautiful a man not to be real. (I'm grateful and amazed to know a few like him.) "It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water." (p.82) I have found this to be remarkably true. I see it in myself, and in many others as well. "I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect." (p.91) This seems to be about the only way I experience visions, but because memory is a rickety thing, I tend not to trust them much. Which makes me a poor prophet. "I know, too, that my own experience of the church has been, in many senses, shelte

I wrote the following about nine months ago, but it didn't feel right to post at the time. I still mean every word. In the film Wives and Daughters , and the book by Elizabeth Gaskell which inspired it, Squire Hamley lives through the deaths of both his wife and his eldest son. He's a proud man, whose pride is greater than either his education or his purse. But each of these deaths, coming as they do at the beginning and the end of the story, change him in significant ways. The first hardens him; the second softens him. We see in the squire (perfectly portrayed by Michael Gambon in what I consider to be one of the greatest performances on screen) a complete character transformation. He is changed, but we still recognize him. In fact, we see him all the more clearly. Grief does that to a person. It uncovers them. Today I went to a memorial service for a woman I never knew. Before the service started, her two year old son found his way up to the podium, pacifier in his mou

Last night, after having spent the day with two of my favorite people—one a writer, the other a musician—I sat down at my computer with a glass of red wine and I wrote a terrible poem. It was so bad, I'm pretty sure I won't even bother trying to edit it into something readable. And you know, I was blissfully happy with it. It was the second day of 2015, but certainly not too late to make a fanciful plan for the next 364 days.  A plan to write at least one bad poem every day. I haven't written much poetry in a long while. I used to write poetry pretty frequently, but it's never been a discipline. It's just happened irrepressibly. So when the fountain turned off, the poetry ceased. When it comes to establishing creative patterns of behavior, as I mentioned before, I'm not very steady. Part of my inconsistency has to do with having a short attention span. But when it comes to poetry, it's mostly because I don't want to write it if it isn't life-cha