Leigh Lucas
“If you are not the free person you want to be, you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself.”
“In A Mapmaker's Dream, Fra Mauro decides the search for the ultimate map ends with the individual. “Wise men contemplate the world,” he thinks, “knowing full well that they are contemplating themselves.” It may be folly to imagine anything more universal, more objective, more true. Each of us stands at one unique spot in the universe, at one moment in the expanse of time, holding a blank sheet of paper. This is where we begin.”
What the Living Do
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
“The story, he said, it should just move really fast, like pedal to the metal, so it doesn't get boring. Plus it's hard to write, right? You want to go in, get the job done, and get out. Like when I worked for Renee's septic tank cleaning.
I considered this and realized it was the best writing advice I'd received in years. In all my life.”
“On our wedding night we smiled at the antler chandelier rigged with rope and walls as cold as snow. Sorry, sorry. How on earth.”
Very interesting. A perspective I have never in my life explored... Talk about a gutsy memoir. Opened it in a bookstore not knowing what it was, sat down on the floor and read it straight through.
Patricia Smith's cover quote says it so beautifully and better than I could: “A fierce and formidable redefining of the American family, crafted in a time of havoc and impossibility. This collective lyric upends the chaos and marshals the power fo a son—struggling with questions of hue and root—as he confronts the anguish, confusion, panic, and unleashed joy of becoming a husband and father.”
Some lines that will stick with me for a long time:
“Because I have wanted/ to be a father as long/ as I have feared its weigh.”
“Because my body/ begins to fail a little more each/ morning in minute & quiet/ increments like gradual,/ gorgeous rust.”
“I can eat sweet dates,// steer the car with one knee./I can look outside the window and see grass//glowing green in rain and streetlight—/so many bright beads of water.”
I Have Not Forgotten
I have not forgotten, neighbor,
Our red brick townhouse, tiny and quiet
With the window always cracked open
Even in winter, and us rolling together
Into the middle of the dented mattress,
A rooster in someone's courtyard crowing
In the gray, lording it over his harem
Of illegal chickens; where like gods
We couldn't stop being naked;
Those evenings the sun, superbly streaming,
Broke its sheaf of colors on the glass,
Seemed a giant inquisitive eye
Watching our long quiet suppers,
It's reflections spritzing like candlelight
On frugal tablecloth
And on the strewn pages of your manuscripts.
AFTERLOVE
Then there was a time I felt the room I was in
a prison: the young squirrel my childhood cat caught
and let go inside our house: a blur, all tail,
and my mother's scream for a more favorable
catch-and-release. The way I held it—firm
but not so tight as to bruise—how readily my hands
became a cage, such utility. Once I picked up a man
at a bar—while he slept a blue light from the bathroom
illuminated part of his body. How long I spent studying
his lone tattoo: a fly wing, in such detail, above his heart.
“Let's say it takes all night
for us to get home, the train having to make
every stop, & everyone forgetting to step off
the first,
even second times,
so there's all this looping back
& back, while we're still kissing that kiss, that green,
& June”
- from “I Dream on a Crowded Train with My Eyes Open, Body Swaying”
“Understand her uncomfortable. Love her awkward. Adore her whole. Respect her being. Embrace her difficult. Cuddle her complexity. Caress her chaos. Hold her honest. Take her broken; lick it”
...now as you eat what your mother eats
her fear is your world torn & thrown to birds.
but still the light is thick in the trees. the callery
pears are loud this season & my throat is bright
with flowers for you both. such beautiful flowers
i hardly have the words.
- for my niblings in anticipation of their birth
“Who Remembers the Armenians?”
I remember them
and I ride the nightmare bus with them
each night
and my coffee, this morning
I'm drinking it with them
You, murderer—
Who remembers you?
The Half-Sister, Unmet
Paint the edges of an imagined life in a foreign tongue,
in a land rich in exotics: silk hanboks, piled-high beaded
pearl hair pieces, tea ceremonies, swallowing odd animal eggs.
Exotic because it's over there, inappropriate, of course,
for fetishizing the other. (I am performing). Let's say
how inadequate: my fecundity swells up sudden, a heavy
perfume at the apex before the slope to decay. Our heads
nestled on one pillow, we might have whispered to each other
tiny confessions of who we lusted after, even loved. Sisters. Secret
keepers. Probably, we would have hated each other.
From “I Swam in a Cold Lake and Watched My Body Convulse on Shore”
“...
When offering small sandwiches
I might stare out of one of the windows,
imagine the ocean blue. Or, say, when cleaning
up a toddler's vomit, I might yearn
for a less solitary life. But otherwise, loneliness
might be okay when surrounded by other
flight attendants in the sky, my body
a body made for tending to bodies in flight.
I'd breathe in the air of neither
here nor there. I'd remember everything
about my lives on earth.”
Finding the Woodsman
At the end of the road, a doe
dead under a sign: Dead End.
After all these years,
I'm still turning
every stone, looking
under every hoof.
To find a stream.
A rifle cartridge.
An ankle
poking through the dirt like a tulip.
MOON YEONG SHIN
Written on the white slip at the bottom
of a polariod, cut off by the frame:
a name. Many years passed before I learned
surnames come first in Korea. I rode
my bicycle in circles around this reversal.
For years, my skin leaped from shadow to shadow.
I drank the darkness, or the darkness drank me,
but what's the difference when your veins are full
of haunting? One day I will walk
the narrow streets of many cities full of ice
freshly frozen. I will hike through forests
of wind storms newly risen. I will learn
and forget the names of many trees,
of tea leaves plucked too early in the season.
I will orbit the earth like a moon
searching for its shadow. Where does a moon
find its planet? Or is it the other way
around? To be a recently hatched egg-moon,
curved shell pinned to the sky. I've spent my whole
life in orbit of other people's light, celestial satellite
in ceaseless wane. How much can you learn
from a stranger's surname? A young animal
crawls its way out of the womb, stretches its legs,
and feels cold for the first time.
I would give this book 3.5 stars. Really interesting insight to a particular woman's relationship with Iranian culture. I learned a lot.
I think more risks could have been taken in the story's illustration as it read almost always like a straight comic strip.
“dumbfounded, adj.
And still, for all the jealousy, all the doubt, sometimes I will be struck with a kind of awe that we're together. That someone like me could find someone like you—it renders me wordless. Because surely words would conspire against such luck, would protest the unlikelihood of such a turn of events.
I didn't tell any of my friends about our first date. I waited until after the second, because I wanted to make sure it was real. I wouldn't believe it had happened until it happened again. Then, later on, I would be overwhelmed by the evidence, by all the lines connecting you to me, and us to love.”
I love the original Little Prince. I think something more creative could have been done in the rewrite...but fun to revisit in a new way, it made particular parts of the story stand out...