But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

Can you find Icharus's two little legs?

Musee des Beaux Arts (1940)

--W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

After a horrible night of struggling with my laptop—streaky screen, corrupted files, RAM grinding to a halt, it is on its last threads and me with it—I am finally updating today with a month of backlogged entries. These are all things that I have been thinking about and working on for weeks, even though I have been silent here. Chock it up to my compulsive editing, if you wish.

Also, according to Megan K, April is poetry month! (I can’t help but wonder, is there a month for everything? Support Your Local Florist Month? Shoelace Appreciation Month?) All the more reason to get back into this…

In the last few days I have realized that I hate when people talk about someone “battling” cancer or anorexia or depression or alcoholism. There are no broadswords or crossbows; no armored warriors on horseback; no flags flapping in the breeze, bearing the crest of a red dragon or white lion. Instead, there are a lot of quiet moments, wasted sunny days, and friends and family members who don’t quite know what to do or say. And as for everyone else, they are on the “expensive delicate ship,” sailing calmly by.

I have always been captivated by the motif of Icharus—the golden boy who dared to fly towards the sun and then came crashing back to earth in a mess of hot wax and feathers, his father’s warning ringing in his ears. There is this fine balance for our parents, and for us: They want us to reach farther and achieve more than they could, but they are also wary; they don’t want us to fall from grace and have to fish us out from the depths of the green sea.

Ever since I came back from The East—both the East Coast and the Far East—I have felt not like Icharus fallen, but like Icharus grounded. I remember saying to Emily last month, it’s like someone has clipped our wings, and she heartily agreed. Yesterday, at Baja Fresh, I couldn’t talk to one of the employees in Spanish, even though I knew I could’ve communicated to her what I wanted to say and what she didn’t understand in English. Last summer, I wouldn’t have batted an eye at trying to order dinner or “chatting” with a taxi driver in my minimal, nonexistent Chinese. Fake it ‘til you make it or, as Jules wisely said, “just screw it and do it!”

What I like about this poem—and about Breugel’s painting—is that it illustrates the simple, mad indifference in this world. (Maybe it is particularly rampant here in the Midwest, as Michigan-expert Charlie Baxter muses in Saul & Patsy. Indifference is something to bask in when you’re exhausted from the excitement of the world and something to despise when you’re craving that excitement.) No one much cares, at any given moment, what’s happening in the world or what anyone else is really doing or if they’re falling out of the sky. A mild, cloudy Tuesday is just as good a day for tragedy as it is for epiphany.

All mimsy were the borogoves

The flurry of Alice-related articles that surrounded the release of Tim Burton’s latest film was probably the best thing that happened to me in early March and, of course, inspired me to post this zany, mythical poem.

I have a long-standing attachment to the Alice books—they are like old friends, entangled with mom and math and my time in England. When I studied in London, I visited Oxford and saw the tree under which Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and the Liddell girls often sat, and the river where they went boating; at The British Library in London, I stumbled upon Carroll’s original Alice manuscripts and was enchanted by his scritchy notes in the margins, trying out different titles for his book; and the following Christmas, Mom gave me her ancient copy of the definitive Alice-work, The Annotated Alice, with notations by acclaimed mathematician and puzzle-maker, Martin Gardner.

When speaking of gyring and gambling in the wabe, I should also probably mention the first day of my advanced geometry class at Michigan, when my professor put this poem on a PowerPoint to demonstrate sets, and how promising that class seemed then during my rocky mathematics career. Thinking about all of it now still makes me a little sad. But even after abandoning math and teaching, and after seeing Burton’s ill-fitted Alice sequel with the Gholz brothers, I still have a soft pocket for Carroll’s works—and for anything that merges the lines of art and language and math. (See M.C. Escher and my favorite read, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, narrated by a lovable British boy who happens to have autism and who labels his chapters with prime numbers.)

The week Burton’s new movie came out also coincided with a wonderful, wacky reunion between me, Alex, and Sasha, who neither Alex nor I had seen for 10 years since we graduated from Covington and all went to separate high schools. Alex started playing Facebook-tag with Sasha back in December so, when she came home from Peru because her sister was having a baby, we all finally caught up in person. The last time I saw her she was a thirteen-year-old and now…she’s an aunt!

Somewhere during the course of the evening, Sasha turned to Alex and I and said: it’s funny how, even after 10 years, we all somehow ended up on the same page—she in Peru with the PeaceCorps, Alex recently returned from a year in Taiwan, me with my stints in China. And when a group of people—I kid you not—came into The Black Lotus dressed as The Queen of Hearts, The Mad Hatter, The Rabbit, and Alice, all three of us were whipped into equal flurries of excitement. The nonsense of our day-to-day lives…there is no language for it. But sometimes, people just get you.

So here is Lewis Carroll’s The Jabberwocky—full invented, blended, portmanteau words—and some excellent photos of me, Sasha, and Alex at my Bat Mitzvah in 1999. Because where would we all be today without a little absurdity, a few awkward slow dances, and the words chortle, burble, and galumphing?

"When I use a word,” says Humpty Dumpty, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

The Jabberwocky

--Lewis Carroll

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:

Long time the manxome foe he sought --

So rested he by the Tumtum tree,

And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,

The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head

He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?

Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'

He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Little Me and Little Sasha

Little Alex

All three of us are in this one!

and each will smile at the other's welcome

The last in a series of love-themed poems, here is Derek Walcott’s Love After Love. The poems this month progressed in an order unlike the phases of a relationship—first the nurturing, satisfying (or dissatisfying?) love of Billy Collins’ Osso Bucco; then the classic, overwhelming I carry your heart by e. e. cummings; followed by the flirty sentiments and deep-felt loss of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why. Finally, and perhaps my favorite of them all, is this poem about the loss of one love and the rediscovery of another—the love we come back to again and again: the love for ourselves.

Right now, I interpret this poem indirectly. (Isn’t that the beauty of poetry? A single poem can speak to us in so many different ways, at many different times in our lives.) I haven’t gone through a tumultuous breakup—though maybe a few losses—but here I am, greeting myself at my own door, in my own mirror, and I am beginning to smile at the welcome.

I am once again surrounded by things that feed me, things I had forgotten about thanks to time and distance—walls covered with familiar paintings; shelves of well-loved books; ceramic vases and pitchers and lopsided animals that I shaped with my own hands; the seashells mom and I painstakingly gathered on dozens of walks down Juno beach; and photographs of me at every age, carefully selected to fill the house when my scampering footsteps are far away.

Yesterday, Mom and I spent the entire evening and well into the night on our quiet pursuits. The snow was coming down silently on our woodsy, white backyard, while the back room was filled with churning creativity and my constantly streaming Ann Arbor radio. I sat at the long table, with art and books and photographs and the chess set I bought in China for company, and sketched for hours—jars, vases, tea sets, bowls, bottles, and sake sets that I will hopefully be able to make soon. My hands are itching to get back in some clay… Mom set up a batik silk-painting lab of sorts all around the room—with sponge brushes, containers of wax, huge sheets of paper, a wood painting frame, finished scarves draped over chairs—and I watched her, all night, exhibit the kind of quiet delight she once directed towards gardening and which I haven’t seen in a long time.

I could say a few things about our talk at lunch—about Bill Joy and the Michigan computing center, about law school, about that internet democracy firm in DC—or I could say how strange it is to be so quiet all the time. I could talk about the haphazard objects around the house and how I’m trying to do my part by getting rid of some of them, or how hearing Tchaikovsky on the radio made my legs crave dancing again. But I’m trying out this quiet thing. I’m doing something that’s hard for me, like everyone keeps telling me to, and it’s slowly becoming easier when I can pass the still, snowy evenings watching Star Wars with Alex or absorbed in art with mom.

There’s a reason this poem is quietly and simply one of the best mantras on love. And it’s the last line, my favorite in all of poetry. I assembled an anthology for a poetry class in college and I titled the entire thing after that one line—one thread to quietly pull everything together, one phrase that I am still trying to heed.

Love After Love

--Derek Walcott

The time will come

when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.