my girl friday

hearts and boxes.

This Christmas my mom brought out my grandmother's paper doll collection from the 1930's, which my mother had also played with. In an old white shirt box were several grown-up women with stylish clothes for every occasion, brunette versions of Ginger Rogers. A miniature set of the sisters from National Velvet, the most important of course being the young Elizabeth Taylor. Also, about 30 newspaper cut-outs of various sizes, ages and styles of Shirley Temple. My grandmother was really making a study of this particular fashion. She saved newspaper clippings from columns describing the fashions of her films and social events. The tall, angular brunettes were much less loved and weather-worn than the seven Shirley Temple paper dolls: four identical, one large-bodied (this seemed to be her favorite), with a traced, white shadow duplicate, and another smaller with slightly complicated and sillier outfits, always including something like a basket of kittens. For the smallest quadruplets and the large-bodied twins, my grandmother had painstakingly traced dozens of silhouettes, and drawn dresses to fit the outlined shapes. Little single shoes, baby dolls with striped socks. Pink ruffled party dresses, sailor pants, and those little pastel shorts. Even more exciting were the dresses she hadn't finished yet, drawn on opaque, yellowed paper, with notes to herself about the color, fabric, and occasion for each garment. My grandmother dreamed of becoming a dress designer, all those years ago.

So you're moving to Missouri,

how do you feel about that? are there rules? have you made friends? what is it like, this new place of yours? do you spend your time at work? do you read novels? do you miss New England? has the place made itself home? or is it just a calling that keeps you?

does your adventure feel like Jo in New York City? Jane Eyre? Or perhaps Peter in Narnia? maybe it just feels like your life, as nothing has quite yet. does it feel like what you've imagined for yourself, or is it a surprise view from an unexpected twist of the path?

is it a poem or is it a novel? heroic? romantic? divine comedy? or maybe you can really only discern the words and their shape looking backwards over the distance you've traveled. perhaps the pattern has yet to emerge. perhaps it's one long utterance that goes on and on, changing shape with the speaker's lips, but never ceasing. has it grown that way, from within, something that has been born and grown outward like music? but then again, maybe it winds across land, shaped and shaping itself against the rocks it moves through.

so many oxbows in the ribbon. gnarls in the oak. how is it, my old friend? how is is with you?

threads

Watching a film adaptation of E.M. Forster's A Room With A View, I recall the sensation of carrying objects through books.

I think about his love of Beethoven, how it rises to the surface here and there to speak. How as a reader I touch these things with my hands. The echoes of the caves of Marabar. I carry them, and trace the colors of their wakes. It is a physical sensation.

reading, even calvino seems kind

Things are lifted up out of the faces of the world, brought to roost in one home intangibly, through suggestion. That is how I feel about reading. It is all so improbable. That out of all these conversations, a few words could be lifted out to create a pattern. Not just a pattern, but music. A movement that picks up and leaves off, like a generous teacher. Finding you, leading you, letting you go. Most improbable of all though, that someone once thought it would be a good thing to do in the first place. What need did that person see? Or perhaps it was joy, confusion, heartbreak.



I guess I thought about this because I wanted something to speak, and things are always speaking. With voices! That is love.

Cypress

never
never before have I
heard it

the ring
the gold coin's
round ring

I heard it in
the water
the cold wavering water

as I
slept
slept

joy may be the answer

shake, shake
the sugar from the
stalk

let's go back
to the fountain

"birds fly up
where my foot
was going" *

I found
chamomile flowers
roots

like loves

papers fallen from a
certain hand

falling, fallen into the
water

* from W.S. Merwin's East Window, "Japanese Figures II"