Ru Freeman

A long time ago, it seems, I wrote a post here called ‘On Publication,’ during pub-week for A Disobedient Girl. I just re-read that this morning. Funny how clarity of thought about some particular things comes to each of us when it is necessary to have it. I realize, looking back, that this is still how I feel about publication. If there is a difference, then it is that I am even more aware that the life of a book is not so much about the book but about the people who surround it – those who bring it forth, those who receive it, those who hand it to readers, and the readers who give it their time.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of reading in my “home” town of Philadelphia, among many friends and family, most of whom had played some role in the making of this book, either by taking care of all the rest of my life while I went missing for weeks at a time to write, or by turning a blind eye to the state of sleep-deprived, deadline-driven misery that I require in order to finish anything of worth, that glassy eyed look that comes when I realize that the world is beautiful and the days are sunny and oh dear god I cannot move, I must sit, sit, sit, and read and write and read and write and doesn’t anybody care?! Oh! Why doesn’t anybody care?! Yes, those people were there, dressed up, taking pictures, asking questions and making me feel good.

There will be many things to write about, many images to share, along the way. But for now I’m going to share a few photographs from the time along the way, a visual reminder that the glossy dust jacket and the nicely bound book had its own story before it got there.

In my room where I sat for eight hours each day with breaks for lunch, chocolate tea from David’s, and a solitary walk, and wrote the first draft of the book.

The grove I stumbled upon on the day of my arrival, and where I went to spend the first anniversary of my mother’s death, which also was the day I finished that draft. The flowers I placed on that grave, which belonged to a mother who lost everything and still found a way to make such an enduring gift to artists, lasted a long time in the upstate NY Fall cold, and many of my new-found friends would tell me how they were doing long after I had gone. On that particular day, I read this poem in memory of my mother, a poem given to me by the poet who made it:

Spell to Be Said Upon Departure
by Jane Hirshfield

What had come here to do
having finished,
shelves of the water lie flat.

Copper the leaves of the doorsill,
yellow and falling.
Scarlet the bird that is singing.

Vanished the labor, here walls are.
Completed the asking.
Loosing the birds there is water.

Having eaten the pears.
Having eaten
the black figs, the white figs. Eaten the apples.

Table be strewn.
Table be strewn with stems,
table with peelings of grapefruit and pleasure.

Table be strewn with pleasure,
what was here to be done having finished.

Editing in a different space. I would write notes to myself in the night after all the work was done and I was in reading mode, and then paste them on the desk so I could cross things off as I went. I’d work all day with a break for lunch and a quiet, solitary walk (except for a post-dinner walk which often included the lovely Cathy Chung, in which case we’d be fleeing cows and shrieking with laughter.

There is always time to kiss the horses on a walk.

More editing. Work all day, with a break for lunch and solitary mostly walk but sometimes run sojourn. Quaker quiet before meals. And watching the night-blooming primrose flower, in real time, sitting on the bench silently with others at the Quaker retreat where I was staying.

Final edits. Such desperation. Such angst. Such panic. Really? You want me to put this into the hands of a mail carrier? You don’t want me to scan and mail? I’m impressed the mail-carrier did not care that I looked like an un-washed, un-rested, bug-eyed lunatic in my shabby lounge-about clothes and boots with no socks. Oh, and that the precious words made it from here to Minneapolis.

Which is to say, I went through a great many changes that paralled the changes being made to this thing of beauty, and some aspects of those things made their way into the language and direction of this book. I would have loved to have been able to sign one of these in gift to my mother, but also know that losing her was folded into this creation, the way that everything we experience transforms everything we experience after.

People often asked me – after the first novel – how my book was doing. Whenever I heard that question, I would think of my friends, the ones who were brilliant and talented, but had no publisher yet, the ones who were not as gifted but who did have their work out, published, and everybody in between. In such a world, how does one judge how well a book is doing? In such a world, I celebrate the absolute miracle of seeing the stories that came to me without my going in search of them, that got written through so much else in my life, that found welcome in the heart of an agent and an editor I respect deeply, and was then made, with the assistance of many hands more accomplished than mine, into what they are now, these books.

How well is my book doing? My book is doing great!

In her book, Autobiography of My Mother (Plume 1997), Jamaica Kincaid writes that witnessing the unfolding of a life from birth onward is the essence of love: “no life is complete, no life is really whole, without this invisible current, which is in many ways a definition of love.” It being mother’s day, I am immersed in thoughts both of what life is now and what life has been before and, as always, it is a day on which I reflect on a year past. I came across these lines from my brother, lines I’m taking from a post he wrote about New Year in Sri Lanka.

These are not the best of times, but surely these are not the worst of times either. Not exactly times of abundance but still times when many small mercies can be remembered and celebrated, across the length and breadth of the land. In the most humble of kitchens there will be a Tamil mother, lighting a lamp, in the humblest breakfast table a Sinhala father would feed his children and they would all, hearts endowed with the fullness of giving offer sweetmeats and plantains to their Muslim, Christian and Burgher neighbors.

Renewal, then, is not about starting with a clean slate after erasing old enmities among family members, but reaffirming solidarities that are ancient, enduring and resistant to the ruptures sought by the intolerant and extreme. It is about the extirpation of poison, from mind and body, community and culture, the water we drink and the earth we rarely walk with the respect it deserves for holding us in all our infirmities and all our vile, human ways.

They reminded me, these lines, of something that has been on my mind a lot, the pain and joy of forgiveness. It is strange that I came across these words today – something that came about because of other things going on in my life each with their own equal magic and unexpectedness – because much of what remained in the wake of my mother’s passing was this wish to forgive and be forgiven.

Not long ago, I picked up a book that my mother had given me seventeen years ago, a book that celebrates motherhood in verse and prose. I was looking for something appropriate to write in a birthday card, to a daughter who was going through a tussle with me. Out of this book slipped a letter that my mother had written to me five years after that, a letter that I had not seen. In it she writes of what she was doing at the time, where I was (asleep after a first coffee and dessert sojourn in the wake of a five month old), and where she was and what she was doing (on the pull-out couch, in low-light no doubt, reading and writing down things she liked). This is always how she began letters – putting me where she was, her frame of mind, her surroundings, and then of course her thoughts going this way and that, often difficult, often tortured, veering between love and despair. But in this note she had pointed me toward a particular passage in this book that she hoped I’d read, an excerpt from the diary of novelist and Bronte biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell:

To my dear little Marianne I shall ‘dedicate’ this book, which, if I should not live to give it to her myself, will I trust be reserved for her as a token of her Mother’s love and extreme anxiety in the formation of her little daughter’s character. If that little daughter should in time become a mother herself, she may take an interest in the experience of another; and at any rate she will perhaps like to become acquainted with her character in its earliest form. I wish that (if ever she sees this), I could give her the slightest idea of the love and the hope that is bound up in her. The love which passeth every earthly love, and the hope that however we may be separated on earth, we may each of us so behave while sojourning here that we may meet again to renew the dear and tender tie of Mother and Daughter.

I could say it was strange that these sentiments were exactly those that I wished to pass on in that difficult moment to my own daughter, these words that acknowledge the fact that this relationship between mother and child will not always be easy – that there will be reason to forgive and be forgiven – but will always contain the divinity of a particularly lasting love. I could say that it was surreal the way they came to me when I needed them in a letter written by my mother before she passed away, and read twelve years after she had set them down. But I’ve come to believe the answer I give to my daughters when they ask me “how did you know?” Because I’m a mother. I’m magic. There is no other explanation for it than that, the way a mother knows in life and in life after life.

I’m over at the Huffington Post with a recap on the PEN report on the ways in which the Chinese government has been suppressing the voices of that country’s writers. You can read it here. Below, an excerpt:

PEN deserves to be recognized for the work the member centers have done to produce this report, for its relentlessness in going to bat for its most far-flung comrades, and for garnering the written support of some of the most celebrated and determinedly political writers, among them Gioconda Belli, Wole Soyinka, and Edwidge Danticat. There is a sense of optimism surrounding the work that PEN does, including this latest initiative on behalf of Chinese writers, that harkens to the greater good that, one hopes, still remains in sight of even the most repressive of governments. The Chinese, as Saul points out, have experienced that good in the past and surely would wish to reclaim it now.

I’m over at Bookslut today, answering questions about reading, writing, influences, as well a this one:

And the family and friends who ushered you into adulthood? Who are they and in what ways do they appear in these pages?

I think I was ushered into adulthood by a character called political violence, more than any one human being. Violence, the kind that unfolds here, obviously, but many other occasions of death and betrayal — of people, of ideals, of political objectives — were the real companions of our lives; they informed our views, they circumscribed our journeys, they dictated our relationships. The anti-government uprisings that were put down in the mid-late 1980s and in which my brothers and their friends were caught, the way we grew afraid of our neighbors informing on us for political expediency, the death threats my father received over the years, the phones that were tapped, and through it all, this drawn-out war in which we were all (every disagreeing political faction), under the threat of suicide bombers from the LTTE [Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Eelam, also known as the Tamil Tigers, a militant separatist organization based in northern Sri Lanka]. You live differently under such circumstances. You learn to expect bad news, to ask the question, “Did anybody die?,” which is really asking, “Did anybody we know die?” because, of course, somebody has died, many people have died, and though we mourn them, we are also instantly grateful not to have to mourn the ones we know well.

There is that sense in these pages, the way in which we are, ordinary people, transformed by the politics, and the politically motivated violence around us.

I’ve been sitting here at my desk trying to sort out some things. I realize that almost all of it has to do with friendship, the kind that impacts our lives deeply and whose changes cause the kind of reverberations that transform how we will approach the world in the future. Today, for instance, I feel fragile. Much of the joy that I have been feeling – almost all of it – drained out of the day.

I’ve had many occasions on which I have had to reflect on the vagaries of friendships. Mostly it has to do with the sudden realization that what it means to my American friends is not what it means to me. For me, a friend is anybody I’ve met (and who hasn’t pissed me off). For that person I will do very nearly anything. If I like the person then I’m wont to imagine that I will love this person for life, and, worse, that they will love me back – how could they not? This is what I think. I seem unable to contemplate the fact – sometimes eventuality – that this will, in all likelihood, not happen, that most people weigh the worth of what they love before they choose to love it.

The thing about it is that the present dislocation also throws the past sense of ease and affection into question. Making sense of that past is similar – less drastic, but similar – to what Joan Wickersham describes in The Suicide Index, (Mariner, 2009), her book that deals with the aftermath of her father’s suicide. Everything you believed or thought you knew about the person is suddenly suspect. And you are left with the feeling that you have been either blind, foolish, or both. In her case she might ask, how could this father, whose way of being made me who I am, who loved me so much, decide that he would leave me, and do so in this heart-shattering way? In mine I might ask, how could this person with whom I’ve shared such a personal part of me decide that s/he would shut me out, or talk badly about me, or think ill of me – you pick, and do so without a second thought?

I once had someone whom I’d stood by in everything over two decades – even when she treated me pretty abysmally, and after, through her abortions and her depression and the eventual birth of her firstborn – write me a letter, an email, no less, to tell me how I had failed her in two very specific ways. Both times it was through things I had said, laughingly uttered in complete trust that we were kindred spirits, feeling the same way about the same ridiculous things. In subsequent years I’ve dealt with some such moments – all of them incomprehensible to me, all of them unanticipated – but possibly none as devastating as that one was. And still we muddled through, she and I, and came out the other end reasonably intact. It has been my sense when these things happen, that I forgive the ones I like – I write fiction, after all, and I can come up with a 1001 excuses for the things people do. The slightly-damaged people, in particular, I find a way to get back home, as it were, with them.

But there are lessons I’ve had to face, each time, and each time unlearn. I hope to forget these things, as always, to not take them too deeply to heart someday – not today, today they have settled within, making me mostly stare out of my window and grieve deeply for what is lost. I hope to because I like the way I have chosen to live – this way of embracing people and being with them, close and unfiltered, being mistaken in the things I take as givens, opening myself completely to whatever it is that they are about.

Lesson #1
We don’t interact as people, we interact as stories. Half the time what we think is conscious intent is really unconscious narrative. All of it is a backstory and we dance around like we are the main protagonists. In other words, we think we unfold in NY, but NY is its own unfolding.

Lesson #2
The words that you say aren’t always the ones that are heard. This is a hard one for a person like me whose entire life is about words; if someone cannot hear them, or understand them, then they have not known me at all, no matter how much time they’ve spent with me. That is tough to take – I’m sure those of of my friends who also write can empathize.

Lesson #3
Most people choose self-protection over abandonment. It is easier to hold on to what you have than to let go in free-fall. Free-falling is thrilling and joyful and risky. People usually prefer safety.

Lesson #4
Of all the horrors that escaped from Pandora’s box, pride exacts the highest price.

Lesson #5
In his memoir, The End of the World As We Know It: Scenes From a Life, (Algonquin, 2007), Robert Goolrick writes, “If you don’t receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it.” I would add that such a person will always seek to confirm the absence – never the presence – of that withheld love and so guarantee that it will never be felt. It is easier to do this than to forgive the mistakes of flawed human beings, particularly those who are supposed to be like gods to their children. Which brings me to this last.

Lesson #6
A person who cannot forgive, is not capable of love. I think back to that BFF and the falling out, the bitter things that were said by us both. I think also about another BFF, an American one this time, and I, the dreadful hurtful words that were uttered. And yet, somehow, there is still love. I don’t know for sure that they love me back, just as hard, but I have to believe they do because their very brokenness – like my own – convinces me that they are as capable of forgiveness, and therefore love, as I am. We, all of us, acquire grace because we understand our own fractures, and it is that grace that permits forgiveness. Without that hard-earned grace our hearts don’t have a chance of becoming something pliant, tender, hospitable to love.

So there it is. There’s more, perhaps, but this is all I am able to write, having spent this day so much in contemplation and withdrawal. I don’t feel great today, but someday I will. And when I do I hope to return to being the person I was: incautious, joyful, wide-open to whatever life brings, softer-hearted even than I am now. Somewhere in that future I hope that the people I have loved will find it in themselves to forgive me, too.

I don’t know too much about basketball. I don’t know too much about baseball either. But I can get madly excited about both. There is something about feeling one with a large group of people cheering for a team, putting our souls into their hands, that gets the blood flowing. And, like in most other things that I take on – with the exception of love – I never expect or anticipate or fear loss. It comes, sometimes, but I am never there until the last long-shot from one end of the court is made, until the final strike out is called. I hope until the very end.

These days it is basketball that has my attention. Specifically, the Lower Merion High School team, the one that has always boasted an exceptional group of starters, but has not won States since Kobe Bryant lead them to victory in 1996. March 1st, 1996 to be precise. Like this:

So the Aces had another shot at beating arch-rival Chester this year, 17 years on, on the same day. They held their own through the third quarter and finally lost. Oh well.

But there’s something else about this team that has won my heart: their fans. Their fans who show up and stack up like sardines, end to end of a section of the stands they refer to as ‘The Dawg Pound.’

In the fall of 1999, Coach Gregg Downer met with the team and a group of student fan leaders to officially launch “The Pound.” More than just a “student section,” the Pound would lead chants, promote games, organize tailgates and road trips and design official t-shirts like a college-style student fan club. Fueled by their energized student fan base, the 1999-00 Aces rode the spirit and enthusiasm of “Dawg Pound I” to 15 consecutive wins, a Central League title, and a state playoff bid.

Year in and year out, the Dawg Pound helps give the Aces a distinct home court advantage. Each year brings a new style and design to the official Dawg Pound shirt. Each year leaders emerge at the forefront of the Dawg Pound, donning crazy costumes (Captain America, Superman, Batman, etc.) and sharing their unrelenting vocal chords and witty cheers.

During the Cinderella playoff run of 2004-05, the Dawg Pound caught the state’s attention for travelling en masse to far-flung gyms. Playing in the Western bracket, the Aces were forced to journey hundreds of miles for their games. No distance proved too great as busload after busload of fans showed up — including 12 student buses (nearly 700 total students) for a Tuesday night game against Erie Prep at State College.

I go to the games as much to shout myself hoarse, invoke Jesus Christ far too many times for a Buddhist, dance on the inside (so as not to embarass the Queen of my household), in general make a perfect fool of myself, and……to watch the Dawg Pound. I love those kids. I love that a group of teenagers between 14 – 18 of every gender and stripe can pour out of their cafetaria and form an honor guard for a team leaving to play a game. I love that they all volunteer to wear a certain color for a game – blue now, marroon the next, black on a third day, that they cram themselves in tight and often stand through the whole game. Yes, the whole game. I love that they do an axe-chop over their heads when the calls go against LM (unfairly, but of course!), that they are creative with their cheers, united in their hope. Here’s a look-see from December, 2012.

More than anything else, though, the moment I love best is when the entire Dawg Pound joins in for the last bars of the national anthem, drowning out whatever angelic voice is giving the song their best shot. There is something thrilling about their young voices rising, so proud and glorious, and overpowering, over the thousands of fans in the stadium. It always seems to stun the opposing team whose fans look on, slightly bewildered. Wait, they seem to be saying, aren’t we playing basketball?

They are. But life is played so often in the mind and what you carry in there is what carries you through everything else. For the Aces, it isn’t just a game with five players, two hoops, an orange ball. It is a way of life, a matter of tradition, the abandonment of individual reservations, the embracing of a school. It is school spirit at its best. Who can beat that? Not even the winners go away with that kind of love surrounding their players, their school.

The Aces pulled off a pretty stunning victory in the final minutes of the fourth quarter against Harrisburg. And tonight they head to Williamsport to take on the undefeated New Castle at the state semi-finals. Whatever happens on the court, there’s nothing but sportsmanship, gratitude, and real affection for them from their fellow-students – those who will ride the fan buses nearly three hours each way, and those who will be watching from home. Top that, New Castle.

Over at the Huffington Post with 13 bests from AWP2013. Here are numbers 5 and 6 (below). The rest, over there.

5. Best Tribute to the Legacy of a Teacher: Derek Walcott. Nothing can beat the stories told by a students – even those in absentia, as Melissa Green was, while the teacher is still around to hear them. Bonus? Yusef Komunyakaa leaning forward to listen, hard.

6. Best Worst-Moment: a bouncer appearing at the bar of a hotel hosting 11,000 writers, and trying to prevent them from getting a drink. Not cool.

Also, here’s the visual of the Grub Street booth:

I returned – a little bit tired – from AWP last night. I had intended to write something for this blog on the train from Boston to Philly – about impressions, about friends, and also write something about the sessions perhaps. A ridiculous idea, given the noise levels in the Loud Car on the train, given my fatigue. When I got home and checked email last night, however, I found this lovely note from someone who had heard me say a few things during our panel on navigating the writing world without having an MFA. What she asked, these questions that plague so many of us no matter where we are in this story, and my response, I feel, could stand in for a lot of what I would have written about the conference. So here it is. For what it is worth. (That – in the picture – is Cathy Chung, author of Forgotten Country, getting five books signed by Anne Carson by the way)

Ru Freeman,

After the AWP conference, where I took one of your cards, I went to your website. That feeling that had developed after spending the day there, that sensation of being lost in a confusing world when the path once seemed so clear vanished. I was so impressed not just by the overall aesthetic of the site itself, but by the amount of work you put into your writing career – blogging, tweeting, writing essays, poems, fiction, non-fiction – so that it’s just that: your career.

When you handed out your card, I felt it was because you really wanted to hear from young aspiring authors (I say author because I already consider myself a writer, though largely unpublished). I felt the need to contact someone because I’m overwhelmed. By what, you might ask? Yesterday I listened to a panel of writer discuss how the publishing field is drastically changing. I learned just by being at the conference the sheer number of writers competing for different retreats, MFA programs, publications, and more. I’m overwhelmed because what I’ve considered my goal career for so long seems that much further away. But maybe it always has been? Now, after viewing your website, I feel I should contact you not only to tell you my admiration, but also to ask you some questions.

Did you start tweeting and blogging before your book? Was this self-promotion something you decided to do by yourself alone or was it introduced by your editor or agent? How do you keep up such a schedule of tweeting and blogging so often? How do you schedule yourself to so many events (I looked on your events page)? How do you finance trips to different places or are they in fact financed by your publisher/editor/agent?

I hope it isn’t presumptuous of me to ask you so many questions, nor to write you in the first place. I really enjoyed your talk on the panel “Master of None.” I thought you were so well-spoken and not just that, but so inspirational. I was indeed feeling bad after listening to so many writers list their qualifications when I have none. It was highly encouraging to hear that even today a writer can get by based solely on their talent and gifts. I also loved your advice, especially on getting references.

In any case, I hope this email reaches you happy and well. I hope that you can find the time to reply, whenever is convenient for you.

Thank you for your time and understanding,
JW.

Dear JW-

Thanks for this note. I will share with you that my first AWP was in NYC in 2008. I looked around at the 10,000 people there (the record until Boston, 2013), and thought I just cannot do this, there are too many people doing it, I should just give up and go home. I fell miserably ill, I hated most of it. And yet, five years and four AWPs later, I have learned that AWP – like everything else – is about making connections and being kind to people. It is no more than that. We cannot speak to all 11,000 people and we cannot be influenced/disheartened by whatever is going on with those 11,000 people either. So first, take heart, it will get better.

I have always been on FB – “always” since the earliest days I guess – though I didn’t use twitter as much until about a year before my first novel came out. I don’t see either as self-promotion however. I see it as being engaged with the world outside my own life and aspirations. It feeds my creativity and my political interests and I feel that, in return, I am able to offer some commentary on it. I wrote a piece for the Huff Po once about FB etiquette for authors – I think it might help to read it, to think about the ways in which the more we support other people, the better our own lives become. Here is the link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/facebook-etiquette-for-au_b_398318.html

With regard to travel – the tours are usually handled by the publisher, sometimes the costs are shared. Some of the time the events are by invitation from an organization or group or university in which case they are paid for by the host.

Lastly, I don’t know that I am where I am right now solely because of innate talent – I may have some gifts, but I don’t think they are the whole story. I think you have to work hard, and you have to place yourself in the light somehow – whether it is at readings, by writing online, by submissions, by reaching out to people as you have just done – and if you stand there long enough and nicely enough (i.e. as part of a bigger picture, not as the star of your own show!), then good things do happen. I have many many friends who are far more talented than I am who are still struggling to be recognized, and others who are perhaps not as good who are very successful. None of us can let the truth of that get in the way of continuing to do what we love to do.

I don’t know how old you are or what your circumstances are, but there is a belief among medical practitioners that a woman’s body will not permit a pregnancy if the physical and emotional composition of the body is toxic to an embryo. Similarly, I feel that we cannot create good work if we are emotionally drained or stressed out by getting caught up in the drama that surrounds writers sometimes – who is winning which prize, which one has an MFA, why did that person go to that retreat and so forth. It is impossible to resist completely, but it is vital to try.

I will close with another memory. I remember walking down a hallway to a meeting with an editor – Alane Salierno Mason – at Bread Loaf. I was supposed to pitch my novel to her. All of a sudden just before I got into that room I had a clear sense that it did not matter whether I impressed her that day or not, my novel would, in its time, find its place among other books. And just like that the meeting became just another moment in a journey, not the end of it. Alane did not become my editor, but by keeping in touch over the years, we are now working together on a project for Words Without Borders.

It is how the world works – good luck making your way through it. And thank you for writing.

All best – ru.

My childhood home was filled with poetry. Not so much in books but in memory, recitation, rendition. The poems we brought home came copied down from books that other people owned. (I talk about the way whole books found me in this interview I once did). The rest of the poetry came from my mother and there’s something I wrote about that exchange, her teaching, my learning, the abyss in between on this blog. You can find it here.

Everything else was what we, my brothers and I, wrote ourselves. Terrible rhyming poems, maudlin couplets on love, hideous bits of creative expression that I am glad survive to remind us all that we never let what we were bad at doing stop us from trying to do it, and that, therefore, we all eventually became writers graced with some talent with words. There were also the limericks my mother composed year after year about the cricketers on the Royal College team, and the books of poetry that my inscrutable father published, the ones that became part of academic curricula there and elsewhere, the ones about which at least one of his friends was heard to say, “there is such compassion and feeling in his poetry. I wish I could see some of that from him toward me.” The kind of statement that fills a child’s heart with all kinds of unanswerable questions.

Anyway, I was sitting at my desk and musing about life on this grey day, the weather so veined for making a writer think about the big things in life. And I remembered this poem. It was one that I copied down from a copy that had been copied down in turn by my oldest brother’s girl-friend then wife then ex-wife. I remember the elegance of her hand-writing – I can see it now – and the way the poem foretold a loss that was coming for her and for me. I, too, wrote down that poem thinking about a boy I loved back then. And in my mind it was predestined that he would leave me; I was so besotted that it stood to reason that I was also worthless of being loved in the same way by the object of my affections. I filled up every bit of space with all that I felt and having done that there was no room for either of us to breathe, let alone for me to see that there was an equal love for me. I imagined that one day I would find myself speaking these words. Instead it was I who left, my hair that lay in such silences and he who said, go and if you are ever unhappy, come back and I will still be here. And despite all that I had ever professed, and deeply felt, changed universities over, left a country for, despite all of that, never a backward glance once I chose to go though he, indeed, waited.

I still have that poem. It is written on the last page of a notebook that I carried all through college and after, in a script that tried to emulate the controlled clarity of the words written out by my brother’s girlfriend who became a sister and still remains one in my heart though our relationship – in the wake of the end of their relationship – is beyond repair, a passing I regret even as I feel an immense love for the woman who took her place. This, from e. e. cummings.

it may not always be so; and i say
that if your lips, which i have loved, should touch
another’s, and your dear strong fingers clutch
his heart, as mine in time not far away;
if on another’s face your sweet hair lay
in such a silence as i know, or such
great writhing words as, uttering overmuch,
stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

if this should be, i say if this should be-
you of my heart, send me a little word;
that i may go unto him, and take his hands,
saying, Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face,and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands.

Thanks to Libby Mosier for alerting me to this effort by Beth Kephart (all the lovely people live in Philadelphia!) Oddly enough, this beginning starts with the same word that ends Libby’s excerpt: After.

After

The road that leads into Jerusalem embodies the contradiction within which he exists: Route 60. A $42 million dollar project which allows him, a Druze-Israeli to drive his brown car with the yellow license plates across it, bypassing Dheisheh refugee camp where he sometimes works, and into Jerusalem so he can visit the community center in the Shaykh Jarrah neighborhood in Palestinian East Jerusalem where he spends his evenings. If he takes it, he is on time. If he chooses not to drive, he is late. Late reaching the Domari and Arab and the few Jewish children who come to the Community Center for Reconciliation, and who wait for the blessed relief of his arrival, for the music and the joy of his company.