November 11: My Son's Anger, Jennifer Reeser, "Compass Rose"

Jennifer Reeser has a poem about devotion to a child.  The impulse every parent feels to surround his/her baby with all that's good.  Warmth and blankets and sunlight.  Pumpkin seeds and lullabies.  It sort of breaks my heart:

Compass Rose

by:  Jennifer Reeser

I’d buy you a Babushka doll, my heart,
and brush your ash-blonde hair until it gleams,
were Russia and our land not laid apart
by ocean so much deeper than it seems.

I have an oval pin, though -- glossy lacquer
hand-made in Moscow, after glasnost came,
with fine, deft roses on a background blacker
perhaps, than history’s collective shame.

I’ve done my best to compass you with roses:
the tablecloth, the walls, the pillowcase,
the western side-yard only dusk discloses
briefly, in Climbing Blaze and Queen Anne’s lace.

May they suffice for peace when you discover
your love is not enough to turn the earth.
I dream I saw a handful of them hover
against my pane the morning of your birth.


I find myself in a difficult position right now.  My son is having some problems.  He has ADHD and has been on medication for it since the first grade.  Recently, he's been having outbursts at home and school.  Violent, angry outbursts.  At parent teach conferences this week, his teacher said that his anger is "scary" sometimes. 

My wife and I took him to the pediatrician for a flu shot yesterday, and we talked about his anger.  The pediatrician wrote a prescription for an additional medication.  The only problem is that it might really change his personality.  Make him tired all the time.  Sedated.  There's no way to know how it will work for him until we try it.

I don't want to make him take another medication, even though I know he needs it.  When he has one of his anger episodes, there's no controlling him.  He needs help.  But I also don't want to lose my smart little guy.  The one who got up early this morning because he misses me when I'm at work.  The one who stands in front of the TV and does a "butt dance" after his bath, shaking his rear in an eight-year-old version of a twerk.  The one who says grace before he eats a Milky Way. 

Saint Marty is saying a few prayers for his son tonight, that he won't ever forget to shake his behind when the mood hits him.

November 9: Class Observation, Jennifer Reeser, "Souvenir"

Okay, on top of the trauma of last night's election results, I have another thing that is causing much anxiety.  In a little over an hour, I have to go teach my Intro to Film class.  That isn't causing me anxiety.  We're finishing up Brokeback Mountain and starting into our last film of the semester, It's a Wonderful Life.  That isn't what is causing me anxiety, either.

What is causing me anxiety is the fact that a colleague of mine is coming to observe my class for about the first hour.  It's my annual evaluation.  Now, I've taught this class many times before.  I've taught these films many times, as well.  It's not a big deal.  But, there is this impulse to really do something pedagogically impressive.  I want to "wow" this guy.  However, I will settle for not sounding like an idiot.

I didn't sleep well last night, because of the election results and my observation this evening.  As the time gets closer and closer, I'm getting more and more anxious.  The funny thing is that it will be over very quickly.  I will do the lesson that I've prepared, and then I will start the movie.  Period.  My colleague will leave with his notes and write up his evaluation.  It will either be good or bad.

The only thing I have control over this evening is my teaching.  I will do my best, and, hopefully, that will be enough.

Saint Marty may drink when he gets home tonight.

Souvenir

by:  Jennifer Reeser

So many mornings I awoke in tears
from one more dream of crying at her grave,
but she was always there, secure and strong,
perfumed with talc, or Oriental spice,
with perfect words and comfort cold as ice—
the only love I ever held too long.

November 8: Light and Darkness, Jennifer Reeser, "Elizabeth Leaves a Letter for Dr. Frankenstein"

I am tired.  Tomorrow is coming, regardless of who wins the presidential election.  The sun will rise, and, in a couple of weeks, the United States will celebrate Thanksgiving.  Then Christmas and New Year's.

I am not feeling really great about my country right now.  Or hopeful.  At a time when we are supposed to be focusing on light and love, I am seeing a whole lot of darkness.  I want to believe that all will be well.  I want to believe in charity and joy.  I do.

Saint Marty isn't giving up yet.  There are still good people in the world.  They just aren't in Ohio . . . or Texas . . . or Florida . . . You get the idea.

Elizabeth Leaves a Letter for Dr. Frankenstein

by:  Jennifer Reeser

Whether the clouds had abandoned Geneva that evening
no one can say now, but what I remember are roses
bruised at their edges, and china cups yellowed with age.
“I am too sick of interior vapors,” I told you,
“Find us a corner of sunlight, and hammer it down...
Tell me again I’m so lovely the insects won’t bite.”
Do you remember it, Victor? A time before pleasure
turned into sacrilege hungry to threaten the dead.
So many secrets you whispered -- but I, like a child
drawn to myself, hale and hearty to hear my own weeping,
bored by your ghost stories, left you both late and too soon.
Sunshine deserted or altered the tops of the grasses
subtly, with each changing breeze, as the shadows required --
dark, but not black, like my hair; and you claimed that each instant
some auburn-browed woman appeared, I re-entered your mind.
Later or sooner, our futures will enter it, too.
Now, though, it seems hope’s a difficult vision to conjure;
what you imagine of beauty so lodged in grim trivia
even the sentences spoken inside it are dark.
Mourning will fade, though, I know -- like your Ingolstadt nightmare.
Bells will resound. I will come to you. All will be well.

November 7: Poet of the Week, Jennifer Reeser, "Good Friday, 2001, Riding North"

I questioned whether I was going to name a Poet of the Week today.  Paged through a pile of books on the floor in my office, and didn't find anything that grabbed me.  Went through poets in my head that usually call out to me.  Sharon Olds.  Galway Kinnell.  Billy Collins.  Bin Ramke.  Nope, nope, no thank you, and nope again.

Then I did an Internet search for "Contemporary American Poets."  I found a Website with a pretty extensive alphabetical list of the usual suspects.  Narrowed my search down to poets born in the late 1960s.  And I found Jennifer Reeser.

The poem below intrigued me for obvious reasons.  I can't resist a writer who uses Christian imagery in new and fracturing ways.

So, Saint Marty crowns Jennifer Reeser as Poet of the Week.

Good Friday, 2001, Riding North

by:  Jennifer Reeser

Yellow makes a play for green among
the rows of some poor farmer's field outside
the Memphis city limits' northern edge.
A D. J. plays The Day He Wore My Crown,
not knowing it entices into tears
this woman never once disposed to travel
the holiday before. My children squander
unleavened bread brought forth from Taco Bell.
What sacrifice of mine could be worth mention?
Enshroud it. Christ's is death enough to mourn.
Casino Aztar, Blytheville slide from view,
their souvenir and deli stations yielding
to miles of scrub-packed, newly-cultured meadow --
the man beside me rushed at the expense
of all around him.
Gripped by sentiment
at being once again in this, the country
his innocence absorbed, he sings the songs
of artists prone to praise the great Midwest,
prodigal farms and wheat. My eyes are burning.
An eighteen-wheeler whip has somehow managed
to drive his truck straight up a grass embankment
which rises to an overpass ahead.
It lingers there, a sacrament of chrome,
as I make peace at length with pink crape myrtles,
white baby's breath in bloom, whose counterparts
have two months past surrendered back at home.
How long were they bent down, exhausted, jealous
for what could not be theirs, before they fell?
And did the lilies of Gethsemane
cry out with all their strength for God's relent,
or were they sweetly mute as these I see?