I'm just saying.

When you live in an apartment building, it's not uncommon for you to get other people's mail.  Sometimes your neighbor's mail finds its way into your box, sometimes it's an envelope addressed to a previous resident, and now there's apparently a third scenario in which you start receiving a subscription to Entertainment Weekly under someone else's name.  This is my current situation.  The magazine is addressed to my apartment, but there is no one in the building who has the name on the subscription.  To my knowledge, there's never been anyone called Marcus Mungiole in our apartment, and we've been here for 3 1/2 years, so it's a little strange that these magazines just started coming a few weeks ago. 

I'm not complaining.  If anyone can appreciate a free subscription to an entertainment magazine, it's us, but it does seem highly suspect coming straight out of the blue like this.  Somewhere there have to be strings attached.  It doesn't seem like it could be a mistake because we have a very distinct address and the building only has 4 units. 

Who are you, Marcus Mungiole?  Reveal yourself and I will turn over back issues of the magazine you ordered.  Also, maybe look into getting a facebook page because a google search of your name revealed nothing.

This Is Just To Say

by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Does anyone ever say "no" when asked if they like music?

I am a sucker for strangers suddenly becoming united through a shared experience, especially when it involves music.  Stopping to witness a busker outside a subway station playing classical pieces on a set of crystal water glasses or getting a karaoke serenade by an undercover Jewel, these equally thrill me.  In this case (yes, it is a T-Mobile commercial), it's the welcoming of new arrivals at Heathrow airport with spontaneous singing.  



It's just something that makes people pause in their everyday lives and connect with each other.  It often results in the quick draw of a camera phone, but it also makes you glad to be alive.

In honor of the upcoming holiday season, here is a "Random Act of Culture" brought to you by the Opera Company of Philadelphia.  (Did you know that their Macy's has the largest pipe organ in the world? )





The Guitar

The weeping of the guitar
begins.
The goblets of dawn
are smashed.
The weeping of the guitar
begins.
Useless
to silence it.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps monotonously
as water weeps
as the wind weeps
over snowfields.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps for distant
things.
Hot southern sands
yearning for white camellias.
Weeps arrow without target
evening without morning
and the first dead bird
on the branch.
Oh, guitar!
Heart mortally wounded
by five swords.

-Federico García Lorca

"Why did cheese decide to perfom heroic deeds in France?"

I was so excited the other day when I was killing time in a book store and I came across Pablo Neruda's The Book of Questions.  I have been trying to find this book since college and it seemed to have gone out of print for a while.  Now there it was sitting nonchalantly on the shelf. 

Some of you may recognize Pablo Neruda's name from the character in the movie Il Postino.  He was a political Chilean poet.  This collection is different from his others because all the poems in the book are made of questions.  They don't have rational answers, but they are meant to just make you reflect on things. 

Here are some of my favorite excerpts:

If all rivers are sweet
where does the sea get its salt?

Is there anything in the world sadder
than a train standing in the rain?

Do tears not yet spilled
wait in small lakes?

What are you guarding under your hump
said a camel to a turtle.

And the turtle replied:
What do you say to oranges?

And what did the rubies say
standing before the juice of pomegranates?

Does the earth sing like a cricket
in the music of the heavens?

Where is the child I was,
still inside me or gone?

Tell me, is the rose naked
or is that her only dress?

Why I shouldn't have fish as pets.

I have been having some weird dreams lately.  Maybe weird isn't even the right word . . . just really real dreams.  To the point where I remember reading emails that I can very clearly see in my head but I never received in real life.  It's kind of like that scene in Romy and Michele's High School Reunion where Michele takes a nap in the limo and dreams that she knows the formula for Post-its glue.  It's disturbing to wake up and realize you don't really know the formula.

I also have two recurring dreams.  One is about a tornado and the other is about pet fish.  The tornado dream I've come to believe signifies change, but the fish dream is messed up.  In the fish dream, I'm usually out with some friends and we go into a pet store.  I look at all the animals and then I decide to buy some awesome tropical fish.  At that moment I suddenly realize that I have had an aquarium of fish at home all this time and I haven't fed them for THREE YEARS.  I rush home, terrified of what I'm going to find-- the horrible gaping carcasses of fish staring at me with betrayal.  I get to the room with the aquarium and I'm afraid to turn on the light.  I dump a bunch of food into the tank as if that will make up for everything and then this enormous Piranha-type mutated fish leaps out of the murky water and snaps at me.  I barely get my arm away in time.  Now what does that mean?

In honor of dreams, I wrote about another familiar phenomenon:

Falling in Sleep

It disturbs us.
A nightmare we can't quite recall,
where a hint of evil lingers:
an apple that's too polished,
a clown whose grin is too wide,
an argument too easily won.

It happens when we think it won't.
in the No Man's Land of our minds,
and just as we're settling into our canoes
it's over the ledge,
hearts expanding, filling
each limb with rushing air,
until the bungee cord around our waists
takes back some slack and we bounce,
midair,
blood bubbling in our ears,
legs twitching as we wonder,
why didn't my heart burst?

You're apologizing to me?

Back in college I wrote a poem that included a line I thought was pretty great: "a stitch that itches the womb."  The poem itself wasn't anything special.  It was about humanity, which is basically the broadest topic you could pick to write about, and I only decided to do it because I saw a magazine in the supermarket that had a photo essay on fetuses.  I had to have an assignment to turn in the next day.  Boom.  Fetus poem.  I secretly loved that one line, though.

I was a little nervous when I had to read the poem out in class because I knew my theme was flimsy to say the least.  There's always that moment after you read something out loud where the whole room is silent, taking it in, and you wonder which way the audience is going to tip.  But it was that line, only that line, that saved me.  I got a lot of praise for it, with my professor specifically picking it out.  "A really nice use of internal rhyme," she said, "I love the way it plays on the tongue."

The trouble is, after I turned the poem in, I suddenly wondered, did I write that?  Was that my original line?  Could I really come up with something so neat?  Did I subconsciously plagiarize it? I was reading a lot of Plath and Sexton at the time.  It did sound distinctly Plath to me . . .

I didn't want to know.  If I wasn't capable of that level of grown-up writing, and if even my own brain was overcompensating, then I'd rather just leave well enough alone.  I avoided the Google search box.  I ignored the book Ariel sitting on my shelf.  There was one poem I suspected I borrowed from in that collection, and I didn't want to go near it.  So it went on for nine years until the day I recently lost my job.

Feeling sucker-punched and directionless, I was questioning my purpose once again.  It was a familiar place to be.  I decided that I'd had enough.  I had to know: did I write that damn line?  To the Google search box!  I typed in the quote.  Something came up.

What's this?  An apology?  Google actually apologized for not being able to come up with an exact match.  I could scarcely dare to believe it.  There was only one other way to be sure.  To the bookshelf!

I went into my bedroom and dusted old Ariel off the shelf.  Even so many years later I still knew exactly which page to go to.  From a poem called Lady Lazarus:  "And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls."

That's it?  That's it???  Granted, that's a beautiful line, but I didn't plagiarize!  The stitch that itches was mine.  My line.  I wrote it.  Now, I feel safe to say, here is the poem:

Anyone Could Join the Circus

The first month we look like worms,
eyes in a sac, a stitch that itches the womb.
We are bulbs of flesh, photographed
for Time magazine's latest fetus spread.
This is how millions
discovered just how close we'd come
to being left in a shape nowhere near human,
had the covers been suddenly yanked
off our cozy amniotic waterbeds.

At three months we have the snouts of pigs.
At eight we could be the progeny of a pachyderm.
What is to keep us from popping out
with a small, wrinkled trunk in those last
two months?  Maybe those who are allergic
to peanuts have been the humans all along . . .

Would my mother have loved a child
more elephant than not?