Immobile

 in homage to the Yiddish poet A. Leyeles
 who published a poem of the same name
                  in New York in 1926

Standing under the awning of the trolley station
watching raindrops fall into puddles
poor drainage
troughs of water sloshing on the platform and between the tracks

the way the plashes bubble outward
creating intersecting perfect circles
an everyday miracle that for once seems miraculous to me.

It's not exactly the raindrops that amaze me, it's the circles.
I remember screensavers from the '90s
fluorescent circles plinking here and there on a black field
expanding to intersect, like these raindrops
imitating the electronic dance entitled Sonic or Ripple.

A whiff of geranium, the sunroom where the computer lived
full of leaves and light
and air colder than in other rooms.  At one end of the house
where I was already discovering my love of edges, corners
having my back to the wall
where I could not be caught in the middle of anything.

A chaise longue where I went to make long-distance phone calls
to read Harry Potter
to scratch rashes.  The computer, for homework
for wondering
for covering my tracks
and for the absorbing games I made up myself
like clicking all the tabs in file hierarchies to show all the subfolders
then going back and clicking them all again
so they'd telescope down into a one-page list.

After eight years of summer camp
the ninth we traded screennames
a suggestion that it didn't have to end just then, a portal with potential
like a hand-me-down tape player
later a Walkman, a beat-up Honda
each machine too good to be true
too free to be mine when it appeared.

Later, subways
all that mobility for only two dollars.
Dreams of trying to run through air thick as molasses
make me wonder now if it was never the house
but rather my own body that tied me down
so slow, so immobile
so much slower than eyes or words.
A dream of items, clothing, shampoo,
relentless, the wrong item coming to hand
so that I cannot finish showering and dressing
and be on my way.

But I seem to go places
even if I notice only when I get back
even if leaving is so hard every time.
Even if the stillness accompanies me
heavy, sinking, adhesive
when I am flying at five hundred knots.

I want to try running on my own two feet
so I can leave faster.

About Me

Devotion.

If you take my pen, I will hunt you down.

"...beyond even self-doubt no writer can justify ruthlessness for the sake of his work, because being human to the fullest possible extent is what his work demands of him." - May Sarton, A World of Light

"The world is too wounded/not to write..." - Rachel Klein, "For Joy"

"What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive." - Susan Sontag

"We can't accelerate our lives now beyond the normal.... No, what you must come to discover is where your own deepest need lies -- that is hard enough....We live by faith in the end, not by reason. If you are a real poet you'll never be sure -- there'll always be the enormous risk to take, the risk that you are following a will-o'-the-wisp, as my father used to say. And you may not even know when you die, whether you had the right to take the risk." - May Sarton, The Bridge of Years

"For must one not try to be at every instant the whole of what one would choose to be for eternity? To fail now, to be less than the utmost possible, was perhaps to fail for all eternity.” - May Sarton, The Bridge of Years