Month: December 2010

What happens to poor people in America when their unemployment benefits run out? Since there is no section 8 housing program for those who can no longer pay the rent where will the long term unemployed go? Or more properly, where do you expect them to go? I ask as one who used to get unemployment benefits, as one who has lived on social security disability payments and has lived in subsidized housing. I ask because I have lived among the poor and while I now have a job and a home I’ve never forgotten the people I met in the meager offices of the state. They were struggling to hang on, clutching children, and many ill clothed as winter was coming on.

Mr. Boehner, I know your answer. For you and your cronies the question is inadmissible.
You believe that the Reagan philosophy of “trickle down” economics is the sufficient explanation and justification for permanent tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Never mind there’s no evidence the wealthy use this benefit to invest in job creation–never mind there’s no “trickle”. You know the advantages of rhetoric over reason. In other words it works for you.

I would like to see our ruling classes live among the very poorest in America. In fact I’d broaden this to say that our ruling classes should have to spend time with any of the people whose lives and livelihoods they imagine on the chopping block.

Mr. Boehner, why is it that the rich, who can best endure the chopping block are off limits? Mr. Boehner, you should really spend some time on the street before you speak up.

S.K.

For my sins I lived in Iowa City & my heart was dark as poetry itself–
My little heart my raven my common bird of dispositions
Joyful that God is no God to the hearts, birds, poems. The nest box
Of hearts, birds, poems sways up in the ash tree.
The hearts, birds, poems make a place in all weather.
See Picasso: A person, an object, a circle
Are all “figures”; they react on us more or less intensely…
Ted, no gods but walking lightly with tiny silver bells today…

S.K.

By Andrea Scarpino

 

7-year-olds can do many things very well: draw butterflies, make pancakes, tell knock-knock jokes and recite weird animal facts. They also are excellent carriers of disease, as I found this Thanksgiving when my 7-year-old friend Zoe brought us stomach flu.

The first day of our visit was wonderful. We made our own spa products—lip balm from Shea butter and drink mix crystals, sparkle-filled body gel, chocolate bath bombs that turned the bathtub a murky, sick color. We made ornaments for our Christmas tree, ate lots of pizza.

But then, in the night, Zoe got sick, really sick, throwing up every hour for hours on end. By the morning, she was still feeling miserable, screaming in pain, inconsolable. So off we went to the Emergency Room for fluids and monitoring. By the next evening, her dad had the stomach flu. Then her mom. Then me. One by one, we succumbed to vomiting, fever, aching heads and backs, throbbing legs.

Because Zoe was in the ER most of Thanksgiving, we promised we’d save our dinner until Friday, when she would hopefully feel well enough to eat. But by Friday evening, the rest of us were beginning to get sick and we never all actually sat down together to share our holiday meal. The potatoes we had peeled went bad—still sitting in the pot on the stove. The stuffing lost its crunch. Even the cranberry bread Zoe and I baked before she felt sick became strangely slimy. We finally froze the green beans and pumpkin pie in order to save them, threw away the roasted chestnuts.

“A disaster. . .” I said to Zac on more than one occasion. Here we had tried so hard to plan for a fun holiday with our friends—bought all the food they requested, mapped out several hikes we could do if the weather was good, planned on a trip to the Children’s Museum. Instead, we mostly spent time in the hospital, lying in bed, feeling miserable.

I’d like to think that our terrible holiday brought us closer together as friends, will be a funny story Zoe remembers when she grows up—the year of the barftastic Thanksgiving. I think, though, that we’ll all remember it as the first terrible attempt at a Thanksgiving without Gracie. It seems fitting, then, that Zoe cried out in pain her first Thanksgiving without her big sister, that she spent hours in a place made expressly for emergencies. That we were all sick—physically and mentally—most of the holiday. It seems as if our bodies wouldn’t let us forget what our minds were trying to ease us through.

But maybe that’s making too much of it. Maybe we were just unlucky. Kids are disease magnets—and combined with the many germs of the flights to Marquette, maybe we were all going to get sick, no matter what. I don’t really know the answer. But I feel disheartened, sad—that I couldn’t provide a better first-holiday-after-Gracie’s-death, that I couldn’t give my friends some comfort.

As Zoe would say, “the first is the worst.” Of course by her logic, that means the second will be “the best.” And then we have to be prepared for the third to be “the one with the hairy chest.” After this terrible virus-ER-no-dinner Thanksgiving, most anything would be an improvement.

 

Andrea Scarpino is a poet and essayist and the “rust belt Bureau Chief” of POTB. You can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com

 

 

Helsinki. April & snowing. I walked to the Strindberg Café for coffee.

I walked & counted my steps.

Down the wintry Esplanade I went

My footfalls muffled by snow.

I could hear my heart beating under the sweater.

“My heart,” I thought, “is gliding without me.”

The heart like a rich man in his sleigh…

(I was at step thirty; halfway to go…)

Just to amuse myself

I pictured my heart as the last Czar of Russia.

It was going to the opera–the grandeur of Boris Gudonov,

That terrible dance with death & the hands of a nightmare clock…the palace

Like a ship on the winter sea…the audience hushed, not a soul breathing…

& Chaliapin standing in a staged moonbeam,

Hands pressed to either side of his enormous head,

His twisted, bearded face raised to the wheeling, soulless stars.

That’s how it was. I would soon find the doors of the café.

Chaliapin saw the angel of winter, something at once cruel & beautiful as a swan

& reached for a low note, a gasp from the plates of the earth.

 

S.K.

Most days I think about art not as a co-determinate of politics or of social influence but rather as the vehicle for the representation of line and color; of objects and shadows. These fascinations must always come first. Then comes the compulsive thaw when we see what we’ve been about as Jackson Pollock once famously said. For poets this secondary stage is the place of the head with all it’s distortions and playfulness. In other words, it’s what you feel about the shadows makes the poem.

Here is an example, a fine poem by the Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinski, translated by Sam Hammill:

This summer is full of insects.
As soon as you go to the garden,
a cloud of flies buzzes around your head.
Bumblebees nest in the birdhouses,
wasps nest in the hazel,
and as I sit at the window
I hear a buzz I cannot name,
whether the voice of bumblebees, wasps,
or electric lines,
a plane in the sky, a car on the road,
or the voice of life itself that wants
to tell you something from the inside out.

S.K.