Happy New Year (for real this time)

My last post in 2011! And my first in four months. The school year hit me hard, and I've been struggling to keep my head above water. I've also been writing in a few other places. I have been blogging for Teaching Tolerance here, and I wrote my second piece for Upside Down World, published here. But my resolution for 2012 is to establish a real writing routine, and I hope that leads to more posts for On My Way. The winter break has afforded me some time to get out of the city, to reflect and write. Since my 9th graders and I are in the midst of a poetry unit, I have felt inclined to linger on poetic paradoxes, think in metaphors, and indulge in the sensory details that make good imagery. The resulting poem (below) was inspired by making squash soup, running in the Wiss, walking on the beach in Cape May, and a glass of red wine.

The Knife I Have And The Knife I Don’t Have

The knife I have

Pries open a butternut squash,

And a door to ten thousand years ago

Gives way with a reluctant creak.

Globules of water

Rise from the orange flesh

And two round pits stare up at me,

Ready to be excavated.

Creamy baldness on the outside,

Nest of wild hair within.

I sink my hands into cold tangled guts,

Into the rich, ancient brain of a squash,

Buttery tendons, stringy synapses

Grown in perfect darkness

(darkness that never knew light,

never knew it was darkness)

slimy tentacles wrapped

around hard, slick thoughts

that I squeeze into the light.

I wonder, Women of Oaxaca,

How did you open your squash?

And did you cook it?

Or eat it raw?

And how did you know

That the seeds you culled

From the soft, fertile mess

Were fatty diamonds?

Like meat that did not need

To be tracked, hunted, killed.

Only planted.

Planted and replanted

Until cities grow up around it

And fall and grow again.

Until I am sitting on my kitchen floor,

Wet diamonds dazzling on my countertop,

A hot river churning in my dishwasher,

Neat chunks of squash roasting in my oven.

The knife I don’t have

Slices through the surface of things,

The fine skin of light and color

That coats the world’s hot guts.

It pierces the predictable light of the city.

The thin soup that fills my apartment,

The fluorescent tedium of my classroom,

The geometric patches,

Shrinking on sidewalks

And glossy on windowpanes.

It stirs up the sun on the water,

Makes a hot shivering wound

On the creek in the Wissahickon,

A glare that I can’t look into

And can’t look away from,

A scrape in the skin of the woods.

On a cloudy afternoon,

When the light lies on the sea

Like a broad, flat fish on display,

I wish I had a knife.

Silver scales stretched

From shore to horizon,

And one cut could expose

The red flesh of the sea,

Waiting just beneath the

Skinny shimmery skin.

Waiting with its seeds

And its slimy brain,

Its immaculate darkness.

But that is the knife I do not have,

The knife to cut open the ocean

And dig out the world’s wet soul.