Van Helsing on America

This totally hurt my dang feelings until I realized it wasn't directed at me. It's from Bram Stoker (a filthy Mick, and therefore in self-loathing flight from the colonizing British whoremother even as he ran towards the fetid hum of her foul breath)'s 1897 novel Dracula. A novel about a sort of highly cultivated savage making his way from a world of primal aristocracy to a world of manners and money. And this, for Van Helsing (whose small below-sea-level country is colonially post-coital, now given over to the harnessing of wind power and the cultivation of tulips, and who can almost think straight about savages again as a consequence) is how to understand such an untamed human creature--not with scholarship or, strictly speaking, reason, but with big bangs of instinctive insight, with intuitive leaps that threaten violence to the mind of a sane and cultivated queenservant. Even to think about such a creature requires the civilized mind to transgress itself--to enter a new sort of death, an old kind of chaos.

What does this tell us? Not much? no! The Count's child-thought see nothing; therefore he speak so free. Your man-thought see nothing; my manthought see nothing, till just now. No! But there comes another word from some one who speak without thought because she, too, know not what it mean—what it might mean. Just as there are elements which rest, yet when in nature's course they move on their way and they touch, then pouf! and there comes a flash of light, heaven wide, that blind and kill and destroy some; but that show up all earth below for leagues and leagues. Is it not so?

Shoot boy, don't nothing but steers and pouf!'s come out of Dublin, and I don't see no horns on you. This is Stoker looking at England looking at Ireland, even as Ireland is beginning to lose interest in this game, seeking new forms of poverty and servitude in the next parish West. And not just that, of course--also seeking freedom and possibility. That, too. We reinvent ourselves as a form of address. Some of us seeking terms of rapprochement with the departed, some of us speaking the outline of something that still forms on the Western horizon.

Gonna have to build your own America, boy. I backed over the old one in my hearse.

Yellow Fever

I awoke at seven to the sound of my sons pounding their way downstairs. I lay in bed and realized I didn't have it this morning. I needed a sick day. I waited for someone to tell me to get the hell out of bed and do my job, but no one came in. I waited for an hour knowing families need breakfast and wives need a morning fire and boys need lunches packed and rides to school. I knew these things. I know these things. But I just didn't have it this morning.

At eight-thirty, twenty minutes before the mad race to school, Joseph slammed the bathroom door which caused the doors at each end of my bedroom to swing open. It was cold out there. Jill walked by one doorway while instructing the boys to pack their bags. I called out to no one, to everyone, "I have yellow fever. I think I have yellow fever." I heard the boys "humph" at the breakfast table. I waited for some kind of concern, some kind of response. Nothing. I yelled, "Heat! I need heat! I have yellow fever." But the word 'heat' sounded more like, "Heeeeeeet. I need heeeeet."

Gracie ran to my bedroom doorway and like a bleating goat cried into the room, "Heeeeet! Heeeet!"

"Gracie," I said slowly. "Tell mom I have yellow fever." Gracie scampered away. I waited. Then Noah walked by and I said, "I won't be here when you return Noah. I have yellow fever."
Noah looked in and while putting on his jacket said, "O.K. Dad. See ya." Like it was no big deal to say goodbye to his dying father. And this cheered me up. I thought, this is how I'd like people to talk to me on my deathbed--breezy, off-the-cuff, "See ya." "Take it easy." "Catch ya latter." No tears and wailing and heavy conversations thick with foreshadowing. How much easier it will be for me to die if folks send me off like I'm taking an afternoon walk. "See ya."

So I got out of bed and put on my jeans and belt and tucked in my t-shirt. I walked into the kitchen and asked Jill, "What are the symptoms of yellow fever?" Jill was busy. She was wrapping sandwiches and the boys were eager for her to finish. "You don't have yellow fever," my son Joseph said as a matter of fact.

"Just tell me the symptoms." I said.

"No." Jill said without looking at me. "I'm not telling you."

"Why?" I asked. "Why won't you tell me. I can handle it. Just tell me."

Noah looked over at me, "Dad. Dad, don't tuck in your shirt. You look ridiculous. Especially with that belt. Dad. Dad, un-tuck your shirt."

"But my stomach is cold." I explained. "I need to keep my shirt tucked-in to keep my stomach warm. I think that's one of the symptoms."

"Dad, you don't have yellow fever." Joseph said with even greater confidence.

I continued to look at my wife. "Just tell me the symptoms Jill. Tell me."

Jill sighed a deep tired sigh. "I'm not going to tell you."

"Why not?" I asked, suddenly worried. "Why won't you tell me?"

Jill stopped her activity, turned and looked at me, which caused the boys to turn and look at me. Jill said calmly, "Tell me your symptoms."

I scanned my body, "My feet are cold.....my back is kind of sore. I feel like, I have that feeling like I need coffee. And....and...I think I'm feeling kind of down, you know...sad."

"O.K." Jill said with some gentleness, "O.K. I know what you have. You're turning forty-three. It's not yellow fever. You're turning forty-three. You need to put on some slippers, make a cup of coffee, and stand next to the stove. That's what you need." The boys stared at me. Jill gave me her maternal look. We all waited for a moment.

"But why won't you tell me the symptoms of yellow fever?" I asked.

Jill turned abruptly, the boys lifted their packs. "Come on Dad. We're late." I put on my jacket and boots and snow hat and drove the kids to school.

The Girl and The Bear Continued

The highway into town was strangely barren, and then she remembered it was Saturday and quite early for travelers. In the three mile walk they saw only one vehicle, a truck, most likely headed to California, loaded with pears. She watched the truck pass with its neat wooden crates and wished for a pot hole that would kick one of those treasure boxes loose and rain golden pears down into her lap.

They entered the town just as the shop keepers were arriving. Some glanced warily at the man with the mule, and the girl in the oversized coat. Others smiled and offered a cheery, “Good morning!” She smelled bread from the bakery and took a deep draw, hoping to taste it on her tongue. As they passed the café she saw a man and a woman eating hot dishes and she wished her father would slow in hopes that they might see the hungry girl and invite her in. There was a Model A pickup parked by the square and she studied it to see if it was the one her father sold. As they headed past the feed store she noticed the Harry and David truck parked with a young man in leather boots and tweed pants, re-working the straps of the canvas tarp. As they passed, the man smiled and addressed the girl, “Well, good morning young lady.” He reached over and scratched the mule’s ears.

“Good morning.” She said quietly.

“I used to ride a mule like this when I was your age.” He stretched out his other hand and began rubbing both ears. The mule’s eyes went half shut in pleasure. “You must feel like a princess riding up there like that.” The young man winked at the father. The girl looked down, uncertain how to respond. “Well I have a royal gift for a young princess like you.” The young man reached under the tarp and pulled out a golden pear, one of the Royal Rivieras her father used to pick when he worked in the orchards. She looked at her father to see if he approved. He nodded, and she quickly snatched the pear from the young man’s hand and hid it under her jacket.

“Thank the man.” Her father whispered. Without looking up she turned and said, “Thank you.” The young man leaned in close. “Certainly, young lady. Now you let that mule have the core when you’re finished. Even mules need a treat now and then.” The young man patted the mule’s head, adjusted his suspenders, tipped his hat to her father, then jumped into the cab and started away.

They walked behind the store fronts and her father tied the mule strap to a young alder. The mule turned from the girl and began to forage among a cluster of choke cherries. The father hoisted the girl to the ground, took the pear from her hand, and dropped it into his jacket pocket. “We’ll save that for later,” he told her. She felt hot tears gathering from the loss, but her father noticed and quickly explained. “Hold on darling. I’m going to get you something else for breakfast. We’ll have that pear for dessert. Now you wait right here.”

The father walked across the alley and tapped gently on the back door of the bakery. A square headed man in a white apron opened the door. Her father spoke in a low voice. The man looked at the father, looked over at the girl, then left the door open and disappeared into the store. A minute later he returned smiling with a greased paper bag, rolled tight at the top. Her father took the bag with two hands, made sounds of appreciation, tipped his hat, and then walked across the dirt alley to the girl waiting by the mule.

The father knelt by his daughter, opened the bag, and looked inside. “Now let’s see,” he said pondering the contents, “Oh yes.” He reached inside and took out a round bun with slice of sugared apple baked right into the top. “Try this one.” The girl couldn’t believe her eyes. She hadn’t had such a pastry since her mother had disappeared. She took the sugared bun and without thinking, licked the crystal topping, which made her father laugh. The girl looked up startled; she hadn’t seen her father laugh in a long time. The girl smiled and licked the bun again. “Gracie, you are your mother’s daughter. That’s for sure.”

Her father took out two bread rolls and dropped them in the large overcoat pocket beside the pear. He rolled up the remaining contents of the paper bag and tucked them into the mule pack. “Come on, Gracie. Let’s walk the park.” She pulled her arms from the sleeves and wrapped her mother’s coat around her shoulders. She looked and noticed the hem hung below her knees. She kept one hand by her chest holding the edges of the jacket at her neckline while her other hand held the apple pastry safe within. The father reached down and took an empty coat sleeve and they crossed the road toward the city park. They stepped the damp wide lawn full of tiny yellow dandelions and headed toward a bench made of river rock at the edge of a duck pond. She looked across the mirrored water and noticed a cluster of birds hunkered down beneath a Japanese maple, planted like a giant’s delicate umbrella.

“What are we doing, Daddy?” the girl asked, her mouth full of warm apple filling. “We’re going to see the bear,” he replied while taking a roll from his pocket and holding up to his nose. The girl looked up. She had overheard kids at school talking about a captured bear, but she never knew it was real. She looked around to see if there was a bear walking around the town. “When your mother and I first came to Oregon, before you were born, we stopped and walked this park. We sat at this pond and fed crusts to the ducks. We walked and talked the whole day.”

Gracie never heard her father speak of her mother. Even when she asked he just shook his head and stayed quiet. She wanted to hear more, but didn’t know if he’d quit talking. “Daddy?”

“Yes.”

“Can we do everything you and mother did that day?” He stopped and examined her face. Grace noticed his eyes were holding tears. “Yes dear. Yes. That’s exactly what we’re going to do.” He turned and pointed at a bench by the pond. “We’ll start there. That bench. That’s where we had lunch and fed ducks.” They walked to the edge of the pond and sat on a bench made of river rock. Gracie squinted her eyes and tried to see back in time. She tried to see her mother and father sitting on this same bench and wondered what they looked like. Did they smile? Were they laughing? Did they sit close, or at a distance? She tried to concentrate, but she could hardly remember what her mother looked like. They sat down and the ducks took notice and paddled over.

“Daddy?”

“Yes.”

“What did you and mother talk about when you ‘talked the whole day?’” Her father broke off a piece of his roll and threw it in the water, then handed a small piece to Gracie. The ducks quickly congregated around the floating bread and soon they were quacking and snapping at one another. Gracie didn’t want to throw her piece to the ducks. She wanted to eat it. Her father could see what she was thinking, reached into his pocket, and took out a braided roll and placed it in her lap. Gracie smiled and then threw her little piece at a brown-speckled female floating off to the side of the quacking males.

“Let’s see. We talked about a lot of things. We talked about our new life here. We talked about growing peaches and building a house. Mostly, we talked about you.”

“You talked about me?” Gracie could feel her chest beating warm and fast. She wanted to hear her mother’s words. “Yes. Your mother was carrying you, of course we didn’t know it was you, but we both were hoping for a girl. We talked about names and decided if you were a girl we’d name you Gracie, after my mother. We tried to imagine what you’d look like, what color of hair, what kind of eyes…you know, that sort of thing.” Gracie sat still. She wanted him to keep talking. She had forgotten about the cold, she was completely wrapped in her father’s words. Her mother had sat on this very bench and thought of her! Now here she was doing the same thing in reverse, trying to imagine her mother—her voice, her hair, her smell.

Stefana's Native Earth Comes to Find Her

Erþe toc of erþe, erþe wyþ woh

Odd to come around a corner and be confronted by the face of Andrei Codrescu peering up at you with intense and game skepticism. And, more often than not, met with the VOICE. Codrescu has been at the school where I teach for two days, speaking and wandering the halls, waiting for his speaking sessions to begin. He was lovely, patient, and studiously sane-- only occasionally reminding us that he retains the prerogative to make wild pronouncements and to answer the questions we ought to have asked rather than the ones we did ask.

He made the case in a number of ways that language has as much to do with how you hold your body as it does with words. You can understand every word that someone is saying and fail to answer the real question, or conversely understand very little and come right to the nub by watching as they speak. I went to my doctor this week to have a neck injury checked out. She called back the next day to reassure me that my MRI showed no evidence of a stroke. A stroke? says I. Um, nice--what about my neck? Somehow we weren't talking. And yet the oscillating rhythms inside the MRI tube made me euphoric even through waves of claustrophobia. Made me feel cared for, grokked. Dr. Ghafoor, competent as she is, not at all. I prefer the great womb of the Machine Mother.

Codrescu lives with ghosts speaking several languages from the wreckage of several cities, including Baltimore. Lots of talk of speaking across borders of language and culture and history, always darkness and light in his tone. We ate Afghan food on Wednesday night, the day after the announcement that the U.S. will be sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan to make more ghosts. The wine was Portuguese and pleasantly viscous, Turkish coffee. We started talking about Jim Carroll's song, "People Who Died," and then about that poetic form of listing the dead, invented by whom? Ginsberg? the prophet Isaiah, maybe? perhaps Death Itself? And then about Alice Notley's wonderful haunted book, The Descent of Alette, in which a woman is trapped beneath the surface of a desolate city and beset by ghosts and demons as she attempts to find and confront the source of the evil. It is a book about ghosts, Codrescu, says. First her husband Ted Berrigan died and then, quickly, a new young husband whom she married a year later. His talk is a tower of Babel of names, gifted people who appeared, who appear, for an incandescent moment and then were gone, are gone.

Thursday morning he spoke to a group of students, ostensibility on The Writing Life, but somehow none of us could let go of the topic of immigration and flight, the odds parts of oneself that are lost and replaced by refugees. He is, as it turns out, Jewish, and was bought from the Soviet government by the state of Israel for around $2000 U.S. The school where I teach is full of these stories, full of the children of the Jewish diaspora, and of the half-remembered places and languages they carry with them.

He mostly found his way through the morning by taking questions. When did he start to dream in English? Is thought prior to language? A very quiet, dark girl asked him from near the front, when you return to Romania, do you feel alien? Dark hair across half her face, her eyes moving tentatively between Codrescu's eyes and her own hands. He raised his eyebrows for a moment, took a half-step toward her, and began to answer to her in Romanian. And she spoke back in Romanian.

Stefana was adopted from a Romanian orphanage at the age of six, which I had never known, and which Andrei had no way of knowing. It was her mouth when she talked, he said. The needs of our divided and immigrant nation require us to understate the imprint of place and ethnicity, but our mouths keep the shape in which they were first held--keep this shape across oceans, continents, decades, even generations. The shape can even survive the death of hope and love. I walked past Stefana in the hall yesterday and wondered what that moment meant to her. Was it a moment of being found by something that she thought she had lost? Like losing your glasses and finding them, after an infuriating search, on your nose. Or yet another moment of her strangeness confirmed? Or did the ghost of that moment just enter the room where her other ghosts mill around speaking in tongues? And how do I hold my mouth when I ask her?

Entries from Day One of Last Summer's Greensprings Retreat

--There is a sugar pine behind the work shed, behind the trucks and rusting shuttle vans, behind the decaying mill house where the caretaker's son kept catalogs of women's lingerie. I carried a Mexican blanket, folded it beneath the cracked bark of the sugar pine and lay down. I lay down and read Nikos, his pilgrimage on Mt. Athos, his masculine yearning for God, for purpose, for a worthy adversary. I placed a soft, rotting log beneath my head and slept. I dreamt of a gash across my chest, three inches in length. In the dream I squeezed it and thick, paste-like, flesh came out. Dross. The dross around my heart.

--At the prayer I met Frank. We embraced in silence, old friend that he is.

--We were called to find a sacred moment and return to it. Many images came, but they fell away like tired relics. My soul did not want to travel further than last December--the family retreat in Carpenteria, the soft beach, the oil derricks, the sky bruised purple, soft as plums. I felt the pleasure of my family, happily warrened in our yellow tin condo. I sat in this memory, in this prayer, and felt the call to rest, to trust. It is the call from God, from reality, that never ceases: "Trust. Rest. Wait. Let life overtake you."

--I retreated to my car, the gluttonous Ford Explorer, forest green. I sat in it as I've seen homeless men sit in their cars--all their possessions spread across the back seat. I sat and ate my turkey sandwich: sourdough bread, cheddar cheese, the pickle surprise--it was as sacred as Christ's body. I sat waiting. Homeless.

--The chicken's are back. Beautiful. Grace would appreciate them. Her favorite book, Extraordinary Chickens. Grace appreciates the wonderfully absurd. There is one here, an Aztec King. Black and golden, it's headdress fanned in all directions.

--The teachers, my friends, are soft and precious. It takes some restraint to keep from barking profanities (though I know this too would be met with gentle appreciation). I wish for fewer words, less precision, less purple, more desert sand and rock. Stark. More stark.

--I napped in the Explorer and dreamed of Mt. Athos. The Grecian light. I want to see the light, the sunlight on the monasteries, the Greek sun on white walls. I want to drink coffee with black grounds stirring at the bottom. I want to see olive, laurel, and cypress trees backed by the Mediterranean blue.

--The mountain is cold today. Shrouded in clouds visiting from the ocean. All retreats should take place on the sea. The sea is as close as I can get to God incarnate. There is no sea here so God has sent the coastal fog, the grey clouds heavy with salt water. It is a blessing, given in response to our yearning.

--A few weeks ago I found myself crying in a dream. I had lost something, something dear to me. It was lost and could not be retrieved. I stood on a dirt road and wept. I awoke in the middle of the night and my chest, my chest was heavy with grief.