Family Reunion & Pauling Wedding Reception, Summer 2010

A week spent celebrating family with my dad's side:
Aunt Beth & Uncle Lance & Cousin Kim
Aunt Jenny, Uncle Randy, Cousins Andrew, Jo, and Beau (cousin in law)
Grandma Jo (Dad's mom)
Annie & Dave, Cousins Adrienne, Tommy & Ryan (cousin in law)

My brothers, brother's fiancee Sally, my sister, Asia (Daniel's girlfriend) and Hector (Anna's boyfriend)

It was also the first time our family was able to celebrate Adrienne & Ryan's marriage. Here are a few shots from the weekend:

Plans to make plans to make plans...

August.

It's been raining here constantly, save the weekend we all packed up and hiked into Crow Pass, where Eagle River was pouring over its banks, flooding the trail, soaking our boots. Chilling our bodies when we stopped to take a dip, to cool off, to remind ourselves how small we are, how powerful, how willing to carry things.

Family reunion time. We've all gathered in four houses, three motorhomes, and a tumble of catching-up. There are bonfires and homebrew, and lasagna in huge cast-iron pots, table settings full of flowers and seashells. Wedding presents. My brothers are here. My cousins. My sister. My parents and grandmother. And soon we'll all be leaving again, our reunion a brief respite from the weight of oneself in the world-it doesn't seem so bad when someone is there to pat you on the shoulder, to hug you, to offer you the last scoop of cookie dough, the first one fresh from the oven.

Where I'm going is coastal mountain range. Where I'm going, there are marine highways and colonies of writers and music festivals. Where I'm going is the sea.

My cousin and her high school sweetheart will celebrate their wedding tomorrow, surrounded by all of us, raucous and giddy on my uncle's homemade wines. My brother and his fiancee arrive tonight-her engagement ring is perfect, at least that's what everyone says. My sister and her boyfriend will be there, his hand on the small of her back like always. And there will be our parents, and our aunts and uncles, and their friends, happy in the longevity of their lives together, content to watch.

There's still a picture or two of us somewhere. In one, we're slid together in a bar booth, the light low and our heads together, our smiles the same, eyes cast down on your camera, revisiting a moment that was only moments ago.

In the other, we're up on a mountain somewhere in the Tombstone range, and you're holding the camera at arms' length. Our hair is longer now, and you haven't shaved. I'm half-hidden behind you, my knees supporting your torso, and you're smiling, but only part of the way, mouth turned up in the way I love, because it mirrors how you look while someone else talks story, like you're getting ready to have something to say.

And it's dim in one and bright in the other. And it doesn't matter how different each image is. It doesn't matter that nothing's the same.

All around me, people are putting their lives together, grafting them like cuttings from one tree onto the next. In three weeks, I'll leave here, where those pictures were taken.

I'll be off, somewhere, bearing your weight against my legs, bearing this like I bore your body on mine, your face pressed into my neck.

All around me, there will still be mountains, still the dim lights of booths or campfires.

My heart is breaking. My heart is broken, and I've never been so full of joy.

You'd never know, would you, 'cause you don't ever ask...

I'd pay money.
... I'd pay money to be allowed to love you the way I already do...


CIVILIZATION

There’s an art
to everything. How
the rain means
April and an ongoing-ness like
that of song until at last

it ends. A centuries-old
set of silver handbells that
once an altar boy swung,
processing . . . You’re the same
wilderness you’ve always

been, slashing through briars,
the bracken
of your invasive
self. So he said,
in a dream. But

the rest of it—all the rest—
was waking: more often
than not, to the next
extravagance. Two blackamoor
statues, each mirroring

the other, each hoisting
forever upward his burden of
hand-painted, carved-by-hand
peacock feathers. Don’t
you know it, don’t you know

I love you, he said. He was
shaking. He said,
I love you. There’s an art
to everything. What I’ve
done with this life,

what I’d meant not to do,
or would have meant, maybe, had I
understood, though I have
no regrets. Not the broken but
still flowering dogwood. Not

the honey locust, either. Not even
the ghost walnut with its
non-branches whose
every shadow is memory,
memory . . . As he said to me

once, That’s all garbage
down the river, now. Turning,
but as the utterly lost—
because addicted—do:
resigned all over again. It

only looked, it—
It must only look
like leaving. There’s an art
to everything. Even
turning away. How

eventually even hunger
can become a space
to live in. How they made
out of shamelessness something
beautiful, for as long as they could.

Carl Phillips

Brevity.

I'd like some anonymity.
I'd like to disappear.
I'd like to be where no one knows me, by face or by name or by my tenuous attachments to other people.

I sat not so long ago in a coffee shop in Warsaw and was identifiably only by the tiny cup of espresso I ordered, by my muddy-hemmed jeans, by the pen in my hand.

I'd like to go back there.
I'd like for no one to look me in the eye.

"They love each other/There is no loneliness like theirs."

-James Wright

This poem seems so applicable in so many ways today.

Yesterday I held some of the strongest, bravest, 'toughest' men I know while they cried. Some of them tried to hide it behind sunglasses, like grieving widows or mob bosses in the movies. Some didn't hide anything at all. Their noses ran, their hands shook around my shoulders.

They all clung to me like somehow I might give them some answers. Like they wanted to be held by their mothers or wives, but had neither, anymore.

Yesterday was the first time in two years I'd ever seen Choi look old. We all look up to him, if for no other reason, as impenetrable. At almost 60 years old, he still has the body that a lifetime of hard work and hard fighting gave him. He is the embodiment of the banners in the gym that he likes to invoke, every time someone pauses jumping rope, or tries to slack and take a round off: Never Give Up. No Sweat, No Champion. Last night, he looked defeated. He wasn't smiling. His head was bowed. He looked his age, instead of twenty years younger.

There is no comfort for that.

Five days ago, all I could think of was that I wanted my mother. We arrived back from camp dusty and exhausted, feeling some small sense of triumph, in that we'd survived four days without running water or electricity while herding other people's kids around, making God's eyes and friendship bracelets and singing "The Bean Song" for hours and hours.

An hour after walking in the door, I was told:

Lucas is dead.
I think we should put it on the shelf.

Disparate statements, to be sure. Funny how we struggle, day after day, to control these small pieces of our lives that calve, like glaciers, away from us. I live in truisms now, the ones I hate, and swore I'd never use. Cliche.

One day at a time.
"For now."
It is what it is.
If it's meant to be...

I can't number the amount of times I've hated the asshole who came up with that one, the one about things that are 'meant to be' coming back to us. But I can't ignore it, insipid as it is, either, can't stop myself from repeating it in the morning in the shower, in the evening curled up in the narrow bed (there's only room for one, you see).

I still want my mother, still want someone else to collect the pieces, to shepherd them back to shore. There are still so many things to look forward to, everyone says. So many things you haven't done. Places left to go. Go.

There is no loneliness like this, is there? I'm rooted in it, stuck in a kitchen chair every morning, stuck in my own head all day. I cling to what I hope will happen, what I want more than anything, a child clinging to a tattered stuffed animal, but the voice of what seems to be reason now has to be my own, so I wake up, and I am startled and then saddened all at once by this emptiness, and I repeat to myself again and again, prying myself away one clenched fist at a time...

Let go. Let go let go let go.

Just When I Think It's All Coming Together...

...something or some things come spectacularly apart.

It hasn't been an easy decision to forego the Peace Corps. You don't just, you know, up and quit that, throw down your apron or your vest with flair or your paper hat and stomp on it. Because, really, how do you 'quit' an ideal? A philanthropy? How do you 'give up on' a life's work?

What are we without what we call the courage of our convictions, without our specific brands of charging in on white horses with banners held high, with swords at the ready, and all that? It's a difficult thing to surmount, when your failure is greater because the endeavor involves what you believe is larger than you are, is a conduit to contribution to what's 'bigger than yourself'.

We're all so convinced, aren't we, of one thing or the other-of our infinite smallness in comparison to the world, to each other; of our invincibility, of how we oversee even what we can't see?

Well, sure then.

What's bigger?

Where do all the bits fit, the bits being us? Into the sectioned and cordoned-off world, the bodegas and favelas and slums. Into the city. Into the mountains or out onto the water. Where do we put all this intention of good, when the first plan fails, and we've failed to make another? What the hell am I supposed to do, I've been asking, with this shambles of a summer-into fall, with the idealism and the enthusiasm I thought I'd built up for sharing it?

Boy oh boy is that a hard question. For a few days, I'd have liked to curl up and give in. To return to making paychecks and paying bills and the unsatisfying currency of the same old same. And yet this is only because I recognize the ease with which I might slide into that trap-the trap we're all in, partially anyway, our entire lives: trapped by comfort, by relative affluence, by how easy it is to un-know. To ignore.

I don't want to do this, this media-driven, culturally-acceptable (not just in North America, but everywhere, somehow) coast through most of life. I'm looking into AmeriCorps now, because, as everyone says, there are problems in this country too, and people in need. Mostly I'm looking into change, a move, to keep moving. Rolling stones, as they say. The adage is true. Much of my disappointment comes from losing the opportunity to travel, to jump off to explore what's over another edge. My disappointment comes from the potential to disappoint others-and yet therein is another comparison: would they love me more if I did more/were more/knew more?

There's that too, isn't there? Love as learning. Learning to love not as you think you deserve, but as the ones you love deserve. And I know through their responses that the people who love me are doing just that, telling me over and over and over again in whichever way they choose that there is a bottom line here, a be-all-end-all: love. Nothing more and nothing less (what is ever more, and who deserves less?).

Oh, these shoes that may never drop, the ones we wait for, heavy with the dirt of what we want, and what we think we need to accomplish. These ways in which we sleep fitfully, wondering when someone will pinch us. I know I'm loved, and am thankful for it eternally.

I know what it is to love in return, and how best to handle, now, the twists and turns I'm given, the evolution, the shocks and bittersweet surprises. The frustrations.

Ask a favor of what you cannot see.
And then?

Count to ten.
Count to ten.
Count to ten.

Hiatus, episode I

Road trip. Canada. Not a jetset, but a hiatus nonetheless. I am going to cold, ear-flap-hat-wearing, cheap-beer-swilling, ice-fishing, beaver-trapping, eh-saying...paradise.

Don't send a search party.

I don't want to come back.


Iggich isuat*

Mountains do not end here.
We’re stuck between them, a dry and winding
road throwing us together—

Aurora and three dogs
and me at the wheel,
victims of last year’s forest fires

sentinel over the pavement,
black and withered,
and Aurora sneaks the dogs

cheese crackers
and tells me how she strips now,
her name’s brilliance

reduced to this: blue and purple
disco lights
flashing

on the parts of herself
she hides now in scarves, in long hemp
skirts, just as her face was hidden

when I picked her up,
thumbing her way back to town
215 miles from home,

and we share the last cheese cracker
while the mountains siphon
us from the city,

burnt cottonwoods’ limbless trunks
soaking up our talk like water,
like Aurora’s dream

of planting strawberries next year
is the river they long for,
the glacial blue

nourishment they so desperately need.