a poet's guide to courtship

What do I do when I cannot write? I read.

Needless to say, I've been doing quite a bit of that. Poems, mostly, snippets of them running ticker tape through my head, which feels a bit like Times Square before a matinee. Which is to say: hot. Loud. Insufferable.

Yeats, that old dog, cheated on his wife and died of ripeness. But still he had the nads to write "Never give all the heart"—and bully for him. His reason:

". . . for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss."

The audacity of his advice to young lovers, the men who come calling with their toolboxes full of torture devices, astounds me. Thank you, Billy Butler, for legitimizing the age old tradition of head games and heart wrecking. The Ophelias of the world plug their noses and practice drowning.

A little advice to those listening: We the weaker sex do not prefer to be left in the dark by the phone.

I once thought I could sell a dating manual for men that would fit onto a business card. One side would say simply: "Man up and state your business." The other would read: "Decide what you want and then be there. Do that."

That is all we want. To know. Think of all the angst you could eliminate, the analysis of actions, the overanalysis of tone. I have a hundred women behind me. You are not special. We do not fall automatically in love. We are not immediately obsessed, monogramming towels and tote bags.

You are not special because you are a man and I am a neurotic creature. You are special because you are special to me. But I can live without you. My brain was born for other, bigger questions and I resent the space you take with your flimsy indecision.

I, we, do not need you to make the world any harder. So spare us the decade of drama from kiss to kiss. Declare your intentions and be done with it. Any passionate woman worth her salt will not shy away from certainty. For chrissakes, it will give her a chance to breathe and be herself.

Dorothy Parker said it best. "I should think it would be so sweet to be sure."

To tell the truth, I'm humbled and a little humiliated by my own inability to break the cycle. I've been down here for eighteen days now, with nothing but space. The precious commodity of time was mine for the taking and I have next to nothing to show for myself. A string of wasted days. Nights undersleeping, mornings oversleeping and nightmare after nightmare.

Right before I left, I bought myself a card, one of those inspirational messages printed in block letters from Barnes & Noble. And it says: "This is your world. Shape it or someone else will." I suppose that's what I'm most afraid of here. That I'm allowing someone else shape my world for the worse.

the other side of insomnia

On the dream train last night, there were helicopters crashing overhead, buses falling from the sky, and a semi that drove off a building to erupt in flames below. Flames I had to run from. Sprinting along the top of this train—which was moving through a metropolis—too slowly to outrun the perils and projectiles.

This comes only a few nights on the heels of the sailboat crash with the pontoon planes and the giant rock. The lover who left me howling in the hallways while he danced with everyone but me.

Something tells me I ought not sleep alone.

hello cruel world

You've been unkind this year, and you know it. I can only hope you know what you're doing.

Because I wonder. Through the bombardment, in the acid drizzle on the arid ground, there have been trail markers. Haven't there?

And haven't I followed them? I cut and I ran. I put the moving van behind me. I quit my job. I disinfected, showered, boiled. Folded, laundered, packed. I ran away and danced. You said go; I went. You said no and I turned tail. I drank your little bottle of yes. I closed my eyes. I leaped.

I'm beginning to think we're in Acting 101, doing trust falls, and you're the skinny kid with the dirty sneakers and the smelly pits. Your arms outstretched, your palms sweaty, you give every outward appearance of wanting to catch me, but your bony elbows are no match for my weight and don't I look foolish? A little stupider every time I fold my arms across my chest and keel backwards.

And yet, bruised everything, bruised ego, I continue. I scan the horizon for mirages, perch like a yogi on the mountain, blur my gaze to the future, listening to every wayward wind current for direction.

So far it says: love while you can. It says: write faster. It also says: be careful or it all goes up in flames.

It even says: Brooklyn . . . something about tuna and Mies and tea.

The odds ought to improve eventually.

portrait of the artist

Oh, lead me to a quiet cell
Where never footfall rankles,
And bar the window passing well,
And gyve my wrists and ankles.

Oh, wrap my eyes with linen fair,
With hempen cord go bind me,
And, of your mercy, leave me there,
Nor tell them where to find me.

Oh, lock the portal as you go,
And see its bolts be double….
Come back in half an hour or so,
And I will be in trouble.

-Dorothy Parker

every time it matters all my words desert me

When everything else fails, and we are left to pull our pieces back together, all misshapen with superglue, we turn to food. Some cook, some eat, others mainline Doritos and marshmallow Fluff.

I cook. I chop and pinch and sully pots. I stand before a hot surface and make sense out of so many disparate somethings. Form something tangible, taste-able, out of a bag of chaos. The whole process comforts me: fish market, grocery store, recipe book. Cutting board, spatula, sauce pan.

Tonight it was simple. Halibut Livornese, zucchini and summer squash. Served with rosemary grissini, truffle sottocenere and champagne. We sat on the deck and took stock. We ate our feelings, whatever they happened to be.

My September sojourn has presented me with this orgy of options. I have no answers for you—or anyone. But I can say this: I am sitting still. Listening for the frogsongs as they come, obeying what signals I am sent, trudging across finish lines and spinning my idle wheels.

When I can't think what to say (or think, or write), I use the kitchen. Take out the olive oil and basil and build something. That something never lasts, but a task is a task. A meal is a meal—structure made and dismantled.

I become secondary, with people to feed. And that feels good. Because otherwise, I revert to mooning, to melancholy, to sitting on bar stools tracing question marks across the room.

I don't know what to make of him, of me, of any of this. So I make dinner.

labor pains

Sometimes you just need a margarita. Or twelve.

Tonight, of course, I couldn't make use of that particular coping mechanism. Lest I counteract my 3oo dollar antibiotic cycle and risk the mysterious "very bad reaction" the pharmacist foretold. But I made a few anyway and that was a party. The ladies drank them. And god saw that it was good.

There is such a thing as Girls' Night, and it covers all manner of sins. We have cultivated this tradition across the ages. We the seed gatherers, the wheat threshers, the women. From a ruddy congregation in the dark of the signal fire to the more finely evolved modern survival schema of baked goods and elastic waistbands, we've been making molehills out of mountains for centuries.

You see, there are moments in every woman's life that call for introspection, and there others that require processing—by committee. Times get tough enough, hurts get harsh enough, the lemon pile reaches the flood line, et voilà! The herd convenes for baying and keening and the licking of wounds.

A good Girls' Night can be anything, anywhere. A terrible movie and a ten ton tub of popcorn. Microwave lasagne out of the cardboard carton. Sex and the City episodes on DVD. A six am drunken pizza party to ring in the new year. A handful of Kleenex and a bottle of wine. Fat pants and brownies. We are adaptable. We adapt.

Then there is Mexican Night, a particularly heartwarming subgenre involving equal parts estrogen, tequila and avocado. It doesn't take much—I've seen this manifest at Chili's bars and grills nationwide. But the medicine is no less potent. It's your bottle of XXX moonshine under the bathroom vanity cabinet. You pull these stops on special occasions and under duress. Or, you know, just because. (Although, at least in the lifespan of the average American woman, it's never "just because." Who among us can safely recall a day without a tragedy to tackle, else a victory to flaunt?) It's never the inbetween, ladies. The dog faces either upward or down. We peak and we valley. And in the hollows we seek solace in sisterhood and salted rims.

On one such evening, Valentine's Day, 2006, I split my middle finger open on a can of black beans making enchiladas to soak up a piña colada sobfest. Outside, former frat brothers marched up and down 3rd Avenue with bodega bouquets to escort their J Crew clad girlfriends to overpriced table d'hotes. Inside, my friend the EMT superglued me back to single girl wholeness and we went right on weeping and wailing, cursing the Hallmark holidays.

Even as a kid, I sensed the magic. I wasn't so tall then; I used chiles out of a can and I made a few righteous messes of home and hearth, but I knew. There are certain demons that can only be fought with cayenne peppers and grated cheese.

A sprig of cilantro, lime juice in a paper cut, the clink of grocery store glassware . . . the dosage doesn't have to be exact to drown out the din. Even for a moment. A few women come together over a bowl of corn chips and poof: All that ails you goes up in a cloud of calories.

Tonight was no different. The day after Labor Day, when the whole world went back to work. All our summer hopes began to spoil in the fruit basket. And, well, somebody somewhere must have summoned the Kraken. We merely answered its call. With Sauza Gold and grouper tacos.

Maybe, for an hour or two anyway, we feel a little less alone.

brace yourself like a man

I'm going to wear my underpants on the outside for a moment and say that, if wishes were time machines, I'd go back to Baltimore and call for an immediate do-over.

Of course wishes are not time machines. Nor are they horses. Nor do they grow on trees. They are only wishes, and no matter how hard you think on them, they will not bend your life to their parameters. The meat grinder moves on and makes of you what it will.

If you are like me, you believe in rhyme before reason. That there are forces of fate working in defiance of our comprehension, with little latent 'ah-hah's weeks, months—years—down the road to look forward to. Non-believers beware, you doubt these truths at your own peril. Or perhaps you prefer chaos. Maybe the void makes more sense.

All I know is I struggle with Why. And as each of my dreams and limbs in turn are mangled and misshapen, I prefer to wait it out, rather than wrestle with the senselessness of a human life span.

Oh, for another 140 years.