Mission Hill Morning

Five AM, I wake to screams—

the neighbor's house bursting from within.

The fire reaching upwards and out,

as orange flames do at such an hour

against fresh eyes.

The sky, billowing black above,

that darkness of smoke rushing towards

the morning light.

Meanwhile, my eyes meet down left of the scene.

Downtown, a gold building that the sun can't resist,

is ablaze too,

the top half of the high rise flaring yellow.

The two structures conversing in light,

one true in its burning.

The city, begging to meet the day.

Written by Alexandra Ustach

The Very Old by Ted Kooser

The very old are forever
hurting themselves,

burning their fingers
on skillets, falling

loosely as trees
and breaking their hips

with muffled explosions of bone.
Down the block

they are wheeled in
out of our sight

for years at a time.
To make conversation,

the neighbors ask
if they are still alive.

Then, early one morning,
through our kitchen windows

we see them again,
first one and then another,

out in their gardens
on crutches and canes,

perennial,
checking their gauges for rain.

Madea's Wisdom

"Some people come into your life for a lifetime, some come for a season; you got to know which is which. And you're gonna always mess up when you mix those seasonal people up with lifetime expectations."

an excerpt from Pat Conroy's Beach Music

"But it was her figure that drew men to her, those surprising curves that make words like 'voluptuous' explode on the tongue with the sweetness of tropical fruit. I have always suspected that my father married the shape of a woman and had not a clue about the nature of that woman herself."

Ted Kooser's "A Room in the Past"

It’s a kitchen. Its curtains fill
with a morning light so bright
you can’t see beyond its windows
into the afternoon. A kitchen
falling through time with its things
in their places, the dishes jingling
up in the cupboard, the bucket
of drinking water rippled as if
a truck had just gone past, but that truck
was thirty years. No one’s at home
in this room. Its counter is wiped,
and the dishrag hangs from its nail,
a dry leaf. In housedresses of mist,
blue aprons of rain, my grandmother
moved through this life like a ghost,
and when she had finished her years,
she put them all back in their places,
and wiped out the sink, turning her back
on the rest of us, forever.

end of the essay "Homeless" by Anna Quindlen

"This is a difficult problem, and some wise and compassionate people are working hard at it. But in the main I think we work around it, just as we walk around it when it is lying on the sidewalk or sitting in the bus terminal- the problem, that is. It has been customary to take people’s pain and lessen our own participation in it by turning it into an issue, not a collection of human beings. We turn an adjective into a noun; the poor, not poor people; the homeless, not Ann or the man who lives in the box or the woman who sleeps on the subway grate.

Sometimes I think we would be better off if we forgot about the broad strokes and concentrated on the details. Here is a woman without a bureau. There is a man with no mirror, no wall to hang it on. They are not homeless. They are people who have no homes. No drawer that holds the spoons. No window to look out upon the world. My God. That is everything. "

the opening to Scott Sanders' essay "Under the Influence"

My father drank. He drank as a gut-punched boxer gasps for breath, as a starving dog gobbles food- compulsively, secretly, in pain and trembling. I use the past tense not because he ever quit drinking but because he quit living. That is how the story ends for my father, age sixty-four, heart bursting, body cooling and forsaken on the linoleum of my brother’s trailer. The story continues for my brother, my sister, my mother, and me, and will continue so long as memory holds.

found in The Art of the Personal Essay p734

part of Emily Prager's "Our Barbies, Ourselves"

“On the other hand, you could say that Barbie, in feminist terms, is definitely her own person. With her condos and fashion plazas and pools and beauty salons, she is definitely a liberated woman, a gal on the move. And she has always been sexual, even totemic. Before Barbie, American dolls were flat-footed and breastless, and ineffably dignified. They were created in the image of little girls or babies. Madame Alexander was the queen of doll makers in the ‘50s, and her dollies looked like Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet. They represented the kind of girls who looked perfect in jodhpurs, whose hair was never out of place, who grew up to be Jackie Kennedy- before she married Onassis. Her dolls’ boyfriends were figments of the imagination, figments with large portfolios and three-piece suits and presidential aspirations, figments who could keep dolly in the style to which little girls of the ‘50s were programmed to become accustomed, a style that spasmed with the ‘60s, and the appearance of Barbie. And perhaps what accounts for Barbie’s vast popularity is that she was also a ‘60s woman: into free love and fun colors, anti-class, and possessed of a real, molded boyfriend. Ken, with whom she could chant a mantra.

But there were problems with Ken. I always felt weird about him. He had no genitals, and even at age ten, I found that ominous. I mean, here was Barbie with these humongous breasts, and that was O.K. with the toy company. And then, there was Ken with that truncated, unidentifiable lump at his groin. I sensed injustice at work. Why, I wondered, was Barbie designed with such obvious sexual equipment and Ken not? Why was his treated as if it were more mysterious than hers? Did the fact that it was treated as such indicate that somehow his equipment, his essential maleness, was considered more powerful than hers, more worthy of concealment? And if the issue in the mind of the toy company was obscenity and its possible damage to children, I still object. How do they think I felt, knowing that no matter how many water beds they slept in, or hot tubs they romped in, or swimming pools they lounged by under the stars, Barbie and Ken could never make love? No matter how much sexuality Barbie possessed, she would never turn Ken on. He would be forever withholding, forever detached. There was a loneliness about Barbie’s situation that was always disturbing. And twenty-five years later, movies and videos are still filled with topless women and covered men. As if we’re all trapped in Barbie’s world and can never escape.”

found in 40 Model Essays: A Portable Anthology p128-130

Making Things Right

For My Father

By, Barbara Bloom

Driving through the apple orchards
heavy with fruit,

I realize I have let the anniversary of your death
slip by-ten years already, or is it eleven?
It's a gray morning, and the clouds press down,
obscuring the sun.


I wonder if you knew

when you had to be helped on with your shoes

for the ride to the hospital

that you would never again
stroke your cat
or walk into your lab room
with its walls lined with antique instruments and books.



What I remember most from that time

is standing by your bed

as you grew smaller and smaller,
less and less of you

who had so frightened me as a child,
and looking down at you

lying there quietly

when it was too late to talk.

I just held your hand 

and told you I loved you.

I don't know what you heard 

or what you knew,
but those words were all that was left
that could matter
before you leapt off
from your bed

in that tiny white room
into something huge.

Practicing, by Marie Howe

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,
a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:
That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths

how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and
one was the boy, and we paired off- maybe six or eight girls- and turned out

the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our
nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:

concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.
Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes

instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun,
plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats.

We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs
outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was

practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost

in someone’s hair…and we grew up and hardly mentioned who
the first kiss really was- a girl like us, still sticky with the moisturizer we’d
shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song

for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire,
just before we made ourselves stop.

Fragments

On napkins, in notebooks, or scraps

shoved away in drawers,

the phrases like shirts draped over chairs,

tried on but never worn.

Thoughts that had a chance,

but were discontinued like ice cream flavors

you had loved but not enough people did:

the wildflowers from the farm

bursting from a tin pail,

and how the summer disappears.

How at age six I first saw Monet's waterlillies,

and after, all I could paint were

textureless waterlillies.

Five foot fourth grader grows normal.

Sex ed videos with people eating peaches.

Disaster du jour.

Claiming our innocence long after it's gone.

The conversations of our past

that we were too passive in.

In church, small and suffocated amongst

Polish women plump in fur and rouge.

And all of those will be lost in time,

crushed between pages of books

I'll never flip back through.

Thoughts with ellipses

that went untouched.

Alexandra Ustach

Dulce et Decorum Est, by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! –An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime. –
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Married Love, by Liz Rosenberg

The trees are uncurling their first
green messages: Spring, and some man
lets his arm brush my arm in a darkened
theater. Faint-headed, I fight the throb.
Later I dream
the gas attendant puts a cool hand
on my breast, asking a question.
Slowly I rise through the surface of the dream,
Brushing his hand & my own heat away.

Young, I burned to marry. Married,
the smolder goes on underground;
clutching at weeds, writhing everywhere.
I’m trying to talk to a friend on burning
issues, flaming from the feet up,
drinking in his breath, touching his wrist.
I want to grab the pretty woman
on the street, seize the falcon
by its neck, beat my way into whistling steam.

I turn to you in the dark, oh husband,
watching your lit breath circle the pillow.
Then you turn to me, throwing first one limb
and then another over me, in the easy brotherly lust of
marriage. I cling to you
as if I were a burning ship and you
could save me, as if I won’t go sliding down beneath you
soon; as if our lives are made of rise and fall, and we could
ride this out forever, with longing’s thunder rolling heavy in our arms.

Things I'd Love to Know (Part One)

I'd want you to show me around the kitchen
so I could understand how to
make stuffed mushrooms so plump and full,
and I could know the preciseness of the fresh pesto
that I saw you picking basil for-
kneeling in the soft, upturned soil, the green in each pluck.

I want to know about your carrot cake
that Dad loves so much.
The recipe written in your hand feels close
but not the same as your hand taking mine
over the mixing spoon.

I picture my children
watching me from their swingset,
on a breezy summer day,
as I pick vegetables in the garden,
and I look up at them, and at the sky,
my knees in the dirt.

Alexandra Ustach

2nd draft

Privelege of Being, by Robert Hass

• Many are making love. Up above, the angels
• in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
• are braiding one another’s hair, which is strawberry blond
• and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
• down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy—
• it must look to them like featherless birds
• splashing in the spring puddle of a bed—
• and then one woman, she is about to come,
• peels back the man’s shut eyelids and says,
• look at me, and he does. Or is it the man
• tugging the curtain rope in the dark theater?
• Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
• two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
• startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet
• lubricious glue, stare at each other,
• and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically
• like lithographs of Victorian beggars
• with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags
• in the lewd alleys of the novel.
• All of creation is offended by this distress.
• It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
• rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
• it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
• they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
• feeling the mortal singularity of the body
• they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,
• and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
• I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
• that you could not, as much as I love you,
• dear heart, cure my loneliness,
• wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
• that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
• And the man is not hurt exactly,
• he understands that his life has limits, that people
• die young, fail at love,
• fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks
• of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of
• coming, clutching each other with old, invented
• forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready
• to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely
• companionable like the couples on the summer beach
• reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes
• to themselves, and to each other,
• and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.

Albert Goldbarth's "After Yitzl" from Many Circles

"In this story-in-my-story they say, 'I love you,' and now I say it in the external story, too: I stroke you slightly rougher as I say it, as if underlining the words, or reaffirming you're here, and I'm here, since the gray in the air is darker, and sight insufficient. You murmur it back. We say it like anyone else-- in part because our death is bonded into us meiotically, from before there was marrow or myelin, and we know it, even as infants our scream is more than the teat. We understand the wood smoke in a tree is aching to rise from the tree in its shape, its green and nutritive damps are readying always for joining the ether around it-- any affirming clench of the roots in soil, physical and deeper, is preventive for its partial inch of a while.

So: genealogy. The family tree. Its roots. Its urgent suckings among the cemetarial layers" (2).

"Which is what we did with love, you and I: invented it. We needed it, it wasn't here, and out of nothing in common we hammered a tree house into the vee of a family tree, from zero, bogus planks, the bright but invisible nailheads of pure will. Some nights a passerby might spy us, while I was lazily flicking your nipple awake with my tongue, or you were fondling me into alertness, pleased in what we call bed, by the hue of an apricot moon, in what we called our life, by TV's dry-blue arctic light, two black silhouettes communing: and we were suspended in air" (3).

"I've seen each friend I have, at one time or another, shake at thinking how susceptible and brief a person is: and whatever touching we do, whatever small narrative starring ourselves can bridge that unit of emptiness, is a triumph" (3).

"We grew fat on pickled herring in cream, and love. I suppose we looked jolly. Although you could see in the eyes, up close, there was a sadness: where our families died in the camps, where I was never able to find time for the poetry-- those things" (13).

"But nothing is ever over-- or, if it is, then the impulse is wanting to make it over: 'over' not as in 'done,' but 'again'" (15).

Execution, by Edward Hirsch

The last time I saw my high school football coach

He had cancer stenciled into his face

Like pencil marks from the sun, like intricate

Drawings on the chalkboard, small x's and o's

That he copied down in a neat numerical hand

Before practice in the morning. By day's end

The board was a spiderweb of options and counters,

Blasts and sweeps, a constellation of players

Shining under his favorite word, Execution,

Underlined in the upper right-hand corner of things.

He believed in football like a new religion

And had perfect unquestioning faith in the fundamentals

Of blocking and tackling, the idea of warfare

Without suffering or death, the concept of teammates

Moving in harmony like the planets — and yet

Our awkward adolescent bodies were always canceling

The flawless beauty of Saturday afternoons in September,

Falling away from the particular grace of autumn,

The clear weather, the ideal game he imagined.

And so he drove us through punishing drills

On weekday afternoons, and doubled our practice time,

And challenged us to hammer him with forearms,

And devised elaborate, last-second plays — a flea-

Flicker, a triple reverse — to save us from defeat.

Almost always they worked. He despised losing

And loved winning more than his own body, maybe even

More than himself. But the last time I saw him

He looked wobbly and stunned by illness,

And I remembered the game in my senior year

When we met a downstate team who loved hitting

More than we did, who battered us all afternoon

With a vengeance, who destroyed us with timing

And power, with deadly, impersonal authority,

Machine-like fury, perfect execution.

I Go Back to May 1937, by Sharon Olds

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,

I see my father strolling out

under the ochre sandstone arch, the

red tiles glinting like bent

plates of blood behind his head, I

see my mother with a few light books at her hip

standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,

the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its

sword-tips aglow in the May air,

they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,

they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are

innocent, they would never hurt anybody.

I want to go up to them and say Stop,

don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,

he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

you cannot imagine you would ever do,

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

you are going to want to die. I want to go

up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,

her hungry pretty face turning to me,

her pitiful beautiful untouched body,

his arrogant handsome face turning to me,

his pitiful beautiful untouched body,

but I don’t do it. I want to live. I

take them up like the male and female

paper dolls and bang them together

at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to

strike sparks from them, I say

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

After Reading the Inferno

Second Circle

We cannot condemn the lovers,

but rather relate to their longing.

Together, but never again able

to experience earthly touch.

Doubled over with passion,

where Dante can only faint from the sight

Of the two imprisoned

by their overwhelming love.

She recalls romantic memories of the two

making love with their eyes open,

the light sweat glazing the crease

where pelvis meets thigh.

The coming ecstasy, the tired touch.

To live in punishment from loving too much,

and caring too little about

anything but the lover.

To love someone more than the self,

more than God.

Alexandra Ustach

Bellini's Castadiva

Performed by Maria Callas

I hear it for the first time, in the bedroom,

over the buzz of the ceiling fan,

and it is so graceful it's as if she were

a falcon flying or salmon swimming.

It is that instinctive.

And I only know some Italian

but it doesn't matter.

I don't even want to see the translation.

The way it sounds, her voice, is so much

more than words could ever speak.

I lay there, small amongst the giant notes

that billow in the evening air.

I picture bursting waves over rocks at sea,

Both tension and release,

but mostly release.

Alexandra Ustach

Saying Goodbye

They said she could hear me

as she laid there violently still.

Her soft Irish skin spread like putty

to the mattress,

her speechless mouth hung open,

and her eyes,

like fish eyes- glossy, unfocused, bulging.

How I prayed to hear words

from her, there, living lips

as if to pull out some meaning.

I remember the day

she told me this might happen.

How naive I was about her bruised

and wheezing body.

And when asked a month before,

if the chance of her dying might come,

Any questions? Anything to say?

I just stared at the evening

stroking tall buildings outside.

How much I'd change that,

the closed mouth, the young mind.

What I might ask of her now-

all the things I'd love to know.

Alexandra Ustach

How to Deal with Rivers

How do we come to understand water

in each of its motions,

as it changes form without changing its nature.

In all of its goings and comings--

the inevitable progression,

and the accidental risings of water.

And then to read a book of the earth,

to learn of it uncovered by rivers,

eroded.

And the water under a luminous body,

with an original illusion of strength,

dries up as the rays of the sun

fall upon it.

As if after long and anxious explorations

making love to the edges of the earth,

it fulfills its functions, falls off

and dies.

a collage poem.

by, Alexandra Ustach