A Retrospective of Self

Posted on December 9, 2009 by Phoebe 158No Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F2009%2F12%2F09%2Fa-retrospective-of-self%2FA+Retrospective+of+Self2009-12-09+19%3A07%3A00Phoebehttp%3A%2F%2Fphoebeeating.dreamhosters.com%2F%3Fp%3D158

For some reason, I started looking back through one of my older online journals–which was, in many ways, embarrassing, and which I won’t be linking here for numerous reasons–and I was struck by a few things. How mean some of Jordan’s friends were to me (Saying that people were “sucking my cock” every time they left a nice comment! Telling me that I should shut up every time I discussed my feelings toward him!) and how I put up with it. How raw I was–about myself, sex, friendship, family, feelings, love–how very, very raw. And how my poetry was, I think, better than it is now. Rough nineteen year old stuff, sure, but good–alive, glittering in a way it doesn’t now (especially now–these days, it all dies after a few lines). Now, with distance, I read it as if someone else wrote it, and I catch my breath for a moment. Who is this poet? What happened to her when she went to poetry school?

The Lives of Insects

sometimes when walking down the stairs
in the dark at night you’re mistaken in
believing you’ve mis-stepped, the sensation
of falling without going anywhere like
toeing the edge of a light house, a steep
stair case, the viewing deck of one of the
world trade centers, a cliffside at night
with your boyfriend and you’re stoned you
have sex believing you’ll fall into the
lights of suburban families sitting down to
vegan dinners or beating their children or
going to separate beds–lights which are really
stars. belief begets sensation but you
don’t tumble or tuck your body into yourself
which you learned in a book will save your
your face and your ribcage but maybe not your
spinal cord but who doesn’t love a para
palegic you just watch as his shoulders move
up and down and up and feel the blood drain from
your fingers.

i’ve built a wall for myself out of intelligent
fiction, books about primate biology, existential
ism, little girls discovering what those-folds-are-
for in chicago apartment complexes, pottery, poetry,
and the real meaning of those flowers in through
the looking glass. my wall is strong. it’s guarded
by insects: mosquitoes smoking exotic cigarettes outside
of concerts without paying the cover charge, fire
flies in coffee shops, dull and dim and drowning on
espresso, and you, a green fly, and me, a mantis, and
i don’t know who we really are any more, apart from
justification for my theories. i think in stanzas,
relate in five paragraph form, a strong thesis and three
supporting arguments and a conclusion but i always lose
myself around the conclusion

and you, you’re still standing on those stairs at night
barefoot and breathless and believing that if you open
your eyes you’ll be bloody on the carpet, banister
buried inside your ribcage. i’m still waiting for you
to take that first step, and hear the old boards shift
beneath your toes. walk past those walls and stop
talking in your journal about it.

there is really only one insect in this story.

Love and War

He wastes time with whiskey on the ancient couch
swallowed in a throw she had composed for him out
of blue and yellow yarn a little jewish ingenuity
the smell of her sex; once they built shelter from
pillows and blankets, lamplight fireworks filtered
through pale threads. She fought her wars with her
fingernails, left rivers of blood along the geography
of his ribcage and he retaliated, bruising her throat,
her pulse scored with napalm burns; they took off a layer
of skin and they starved, the radiation fallout poisoning
of love–

love was a treaty of bodily borderlines, the taut skin she
never let him taste, the tributaries that rushed out from
his navel at night while he waited for something better to come
along well of course he loved those grey grenades she called
eyes, her aK-47 cup. He was a veteran envisioning god
in limbs that were only phantoms, flash backs of bullets
raining like first-kiss passions, wrestling, groping gunless,
streaked with her lipstick and her orgasms, her orgasms,
her orgasms were silent as a solitary shot
glass on a Saturday night.

Something happened after I graduated from college. Part of it was growing up. Part of it was going on birth control that made me less crazy, but muted my emotions, over all. Part of it was loss and fear and fear of my own mortality: my mom got sick, my grandfather and my cat died, I became terrified of the idea of my own death. My journaling, and writing, changed–it was something panicked, preoccupied. Before going into the MFA program, I tried writing fiction which, I recognize now, was just a mass of sad wish-fulfillment. My second livejournal, which I also won’t be linking here, became a record of unhappiness and stress.

I’m happy with my writing these days; the fiction I write feels good, productive. But I miss that nineteen-year-old poet girl. There are days when I’d like to call her back to me, to coax her from the guarded walls of myself. To be brave and bald like she was. But I don’t know if I have it in me to be her, anymore. To put it all out there. To risk pain and censure.

I’d sure love, at least, like to write poems like she did, though. Because she really was a lovely little prophet-girl:

ideally, yes, i’d watch the sunlight spill over his pale back every morning; the green sheets would come to memorize our indentations. we would sweat together in august with no air conditioning and take showers just to cool off and sit on the fire escape with hard cider and popsicles and sing into the sunset.

ideally, yes, in winter my nose would turn blue when i’d dig my car out of the banks in February; at night after long dark hours deprived of vitamin e under fluorescent light we’d leave our boots trailing mud across the foyer and our socks over the radiator and our fingerprints on each other’s flesh as we rediscovered fire and the meaning of the words “body heat.”

ideally, yes, the cat’s name would be shroedinger and would curl in siamese curves against his belly as he read, one finger to his lips, the other poised between the creature’s ears; i would play music and dance by myself and take photos of my feet standing in the bathtub and draw pictures of him in green marker on the backs of napkins when he wasn’t looking.

ideally, yes, we would be true to one another, pen dry erase poetry on the refrigerator door, make love and only sleep on the couch because of insomnia; naively, yes, ideally, yes.

and i don’t care about the spaces in between but I want you to be the last thing I see when I sleep and the first thing I’m sure of when I rise. i want i want i want

to belong
to you.