Poem-A-Day #34 : Quilt for April 2 2016

Quilt for April 2 2016

On the last day of March it begins to snow + it continues into April + that line about black boughs + cruelty echoes across the New Mexico landscape like a dirt devil full of tumbleweeds

I ask the woman behind the counter what I want there’s a silence between us that would be hilarious if it wasn’t insane

The pictures of the quilt across the National Mall the largest bed in the universe – rest your head on Lincoln’s lap + stare into the dome of the sky + what sort of dream is there in the circular night sky – is it a mirror of the day that happened or one of the future

Wrap the cloth around you and roll in the grass until everything is covered in green until your skin is stained with life

The week old baby is asleep + I can’t help but wish that the future is better his parents are there and we all kind of nod in agreement – it’s dark + sad + maybe inappropriate but it’s the truest thing that has ever happened

We Are

College is a time when you are putting yourself together. In a very real way, it's THE time you are doing this.

I know. 0-5. When the body is literally putting itself together.

What I'm talking about is self-control on the where each thing goes.

A college freshman must (usually) deal with: being alone for the first time, living with non-family, sorting through a schedule on their own, time management, laundry, food, etc.

All while doing the work the classes demand.

Let's not pretend that the college freshman is somehow a blighted individual worthy of our sympathy. While the debt they are taking on is definitely worth a few tears, I won't lose sleep over these new kids joining the already massive crowd - Today more than 40 million of Americans have student debt. That pile of non-existent cash tops out at $1.2 trillion.

This fall I am teaching two sections on identity in America. The classes are basic English 101 deals, with the bonus of me being able to design the reading list.

I could not think of a better topic for incoming freshmen to deal with.

Who we are as a country, as groups, as individuals needles its way into every day life. Into the make-up of the country. Politics, communities, online scandals.

This week we are reading The Gettysburg Address and looking at it for rhetorical devices. It's in prep for the students working on their own analysis paper. Read over the lines I was reminded that the Address was read at the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 2001 terrorist attack in New York. That we, as a country, turned back 138 years for comfort.

And there is something in that about who we are as a people.

That we looked backwards to explain the present.

I'd make some analogy about how the nation at this point in time is like a college freshmen, figuring out how to do laundry and eat properly on our own for the first time. But I think that's obvious.

Inspiration : Cheapen

Cheapen 9/29/09

Pennies tarnish - turn green the
milky waters of the bay

I have always loved the look of old things. The dark spots that form on silver. The way wood softens around the edges then the grain separates before finally crumbling.

Copper tarnish is beautiful, green-blue, it looks like stain painted onto the surface.

Creepy.

There are barnacles that look like Lincoln
on hulls of schooners

The idea that a barnacle could have the face of Lincoln is ridiculous. It is also amazing. This is the idea of finding Jesus on toast. Satan in the smoke of the World Trade Center.

It is finding the shapes of things in clouds.

But I mean it. I mean that somehow a penny was dropped into a spawning of these little creatures and they took the shape of the Emancipator himself.

Look at barnacles. They are halfway to having faces. They are eyes without heads. Or mouths, they are venus flytraps. They are Audrey II's.

Ford Theatre curtain fragment.

His nose smells all seven seas and in
Times Square they have a bit of curtain

The smell of the ocean is particularly strong on the east coast. It is different then the Pacific. It smells like brine. Like fish. It smells darker, somehow colder.

From the Ford theater - history
under glass - untouchable

This is true. The fragment of curtain was on display in 2009.

Eventually all faces are left to pictures only
just masks

Old photographs are amazing. The faces staring up at you through time. Their eyes still holding whatever thoughts they were having as the shutter snapped shut.

In most antique stores you can find bins of discarded photos, postcards with cursive writing on them. All for sale for under a dollar. Memories for less than food.

Of paper
there is a thickness to blood lacking in paper

Blood is very hard to clean. It has a strange thickness to it. It smears rather than absorbs.

That copper taste and the red that seals brown
that softens in water

Sellers : Killing Lincoln

Killing Lincoln

Authors: Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin (9/27/11)

352 pages

I am not interested in giving O'Reilly any press. Even the small press a post on this blog would give.

As of next week this book has sat on the bestseller list for a year. It has held firm at number 4 or 5 on the list for months. So I have to acknowledge it if I am going to seriously consider these posts as looking at best-selling books.

So this book has been selling for a year. Selling a lot. There are apparently 1million copies in print. In 2012 that is a giant number.

Is it an obsession with Lincoln? Or an obsession with O'Reilly? My guess is a mix of both. I have a hard time getting any sort of excitement up about the man or this book.

What new things are there to be told of this over-discussed part of our history? Why is O'Reilly privy to these new things?

It was the first successful assassination of a sitting President. Yes, it was shocking. But does it warrant the scare quote sub-title? Especially when you consider that we had just exited a much more shocking period in the Civil War/Reformation period.

In 1835 Andrew Jackson had two pistols pointed at him at point blank range. The guns misfired allowing the President to beat his attacker with a cane. In 1864 Abraham Lincoln was riding a horse when a gunman fired at him. His horse bolted and later they found his hat with a bullet hole in it. This breach of security is way more shocking given that the shooter was only a few yards away hiding in bushes.

Yet did any of these change America forever?

O'Reilly's follow-up to this will be called Killing Kennedy. Seriously. Was that death less a change forever? I would argue that Kennedy dying at the height of the civil rights movement was way more emblematic of the time he lived in. Was way more shocking for the movement. It said that no one was safe in an America. I think that Lincoln's death was a sad end to a long war. It seemed pre-written that he would not survive. Kennedy is an odd mirror death. A sort of other end of that civil rights question that the Civil War was/was not about.

I don't think either death really changed much though. Garfield and McKinley were killed while in office. Were their deaths somehow less changing? Both of them were killed by half-craze men. Garfield by a former speech writer who wanted to be an ambassador to France; McKinley by a man who claimed anarchist ties and hoped to gain an unnamed political outcome.

I find these more shocking due to their less ideological or political-based reasons. These senseless killings. are the ones that I wish we described as 'changing America'.

I'm not saying Lincoln or Kennedy deserved to die but their deaths, the reasons behind them, they make sense. From a position of the where's and why's. These were deaths for reasons political, racial, class-based. They were deaths with sanity attached.

I'd love to see a book about McKinley in the top ten for a year.

Though I think this book is there for darker reasons.

I think it points to the great racial problem in our nation's past and it says 'this, this is where it started'. I mean that it is where the civil rights fight started in earnest. And to some this is not positive. Lincoln represents all that is great and conflicted about us. Race, politics, class. All of it.

The death of Lincoln did change America. But so does every moment in time. Every death. I think we are obsessed with the deaths of great men and women. We obsess over life cut short. We obsess over our own dark hearts, could we do the same? Will we?

I look at politics today and see the same type of faces that have always been there. The same crazed men brandish guns for the same reasons. The shooter in Norway with his vague political motives. Gabby Giffords shooting in Arizona. All of these things are the same as the other, older ones.

In essence, we have never forgiven ourselves for ourselves.

Sellers is my attempt to examine what books are topping the best-seller list and why. To talk about and understand the trends in popular writing.