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Sharing Writing is Sharing our Humanity

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sharing memoir

This baby robin gets it.

I’m honored that I was chosen to read an excerpt of my evolving memoir at the Grub Street Writers Spring Open House. I generated the pages in Memoir in Progress with Dorian Fox. Prior to the class, I had made tons of progress on my memoir. In my head.

Just like life, the class was transformative, joyful, difficult, and painful. This was memoir and I loved it. I entrusted my struggle with a cycle—a theme of my writing—to nine strangers who critiqued the pages in class, while I sat there feeling exposed. “What do you think of how he’s characterized this woman in his life?” asked Dorian of a fellow student’s work. “I think it sounds sexist,” I said hotly.

A few weeks later I came to class early and sat with the student on the couch at the end of the hall. We looked at one another. My feedback hadn’t shut him down. Sharing our writing had created an opening for him to tell me about his struggle with his son. That day, he gave me precious insight into being a father. Over the course of the ten weeks, I felt privileged to be part of an outpouring of talent. There were stories about illness, emigration, relationship struggles, lost siblings, divorce.

I realized we were all writing about the same thing. One night toward the end of the term I looked up at our necks bent over our notebooks. I saw how fragile we all are. And how strong, to be telling our stories in one small lighted room in the dark.

Supine in a Hammock, Under Pines

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Pine TreesSough like a cow,
or sough like enough,
I’m in love with you—
whether soughing, sighing with a moue,
or soughing, as cirri made of fluff drift,
dipped in blue.

Even the stiff needles above bend to my sigh of love for this sound,
made by thousands of boughs bared to the wind. Unwind,
and lie beneath the soughing trees,
swinging, sighing,
in love with me.

—
Photo credit: “The Fells” by Basheer Tome is licensed under CC BY 2.0. Unchanged from original.

Time Capsule on a String

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yo-yo, 1955, Duncan, tournament, family, history, family tree, remembering, memento, genealogyIt sits on my mother’s kitchen table amidst a flurry of papers I’m helping her sort. Searching for documents to add to the family tree that grew from my Grub Street Writers Six Weeks, Six Poems class, we have become sidetracked.

Mom has kept a stack of condolence cards from dad’s death, in 2011. He was born in 1935, and now, unearthed from somewhere in the house, sits a remnant of his youth. It’s a red 1955 Tournament Yo-Yo, preserved for all time in a plastic box. A time capsule.

It’s strange how like an iceberg my father’s passing has been for me. Alive, I knew only a small amount about him, the part that broke the surface of our lives.

He left for work bearing a domed battleship gray lunchbox with two silver latches, incongruously festooned with yellow smiley stickers. He supplied us with yellow legal pads and black “U.S. Government” pens from his job with the Federal Aviation Administration at Logan Airport. He kept a gun in the car.

Now that’s he’s gone, I have slowly uncovered parts of his life that were previously unknown. Like his being a yo-yo champ. He would have been 20 when he won the tournament, and received this coveted prize that sits in front of me 60 years later. I can picture him now. Tall and lean, he lofts the bright red orb into the sky. For just a second, it hovers there against the vast blue, suspended on a thin tether.

A Truly Wondrous Bird

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Franklin Park Zoo, BostonThe insight arrived in the middle of my Six Weeks, Six Poems class at Grub Street Writers in spring 2015. Responding to an exercise in which we were told to write a poem about a map to somewhere, I imagined a map that would depict part of my daughter’s cultural heritage—the Vietnamese side. I had begun to explore my husband’s family in verse, but had completely neglected my own Irish-American roots. In my poem, The Mandarin’s Robe, I imagined the silk robe’s journey through time with the Hy Nguyen family. Why did I start there? For one, my husband’s family seemed proud of their heritage. Were the Donahues? Further, because they are Vietnamese, my husband’s family was expected to keep track of their achievements, which are documented in a giant book with a red cover (of which I am now part, as the second Caucasian to marry into the family). The Donahues have no such documents. But they did have me. It was time to explore just who the Donahues are—and were. I began with a photocopy of an article my mother gave me from a nineteenth-century Boston newspaper. My great grandfather, John Thomas Donahue, worked in the bird house at the Franklin Park Zoo for 33 years—from the 1920s through part of the 1940s. I headed to The Connolly Branch Library in Jamaica Plain.

The Mandarin’s Robe

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This is the actual Mandarin's Robe, passed down to and cared for by my father-in-law.

This is the actual Mandarin’s Robe, passed down to and cared for by my father-in-law.

I.
To find grandmother’s
brown-haired treasure,
begin by pulling
this thread.

Feel time gather
on your skin,
raw silk connect
you to
a mandarin
in the Imperial City.

Rough hands
wove the two outstretched arms
of his robe,
clacking the wooden loom
back and forth.

II.
Wading in
as he splashed
the Perfume River
onto his skin,
great uncle carried the robe on his back.

He perfumed the river with his fear,
the pants of his
white suit darkened silk
as he climbed
from the river.
Warp and weft held him as he wept.

The invaders had arrived.

III.
Great uncle carried the robe on his back
to your father,
who kneeled to be married.
Threads of perfumed smoke
spoke to the ancestors.

Listen:
Grandmother has prepared a feast
for the monks.
The mandarin wore the robe
in the king’s court.
Great uncle carried it on his back.
Your father wore it to be married.

IV.
The invaders took what grandmother had built.

Her heart plummeted
to the depths of the Perfume River,
each stone a memory,
each memory a jewel
she sewed into the robe.

Your father wore it to be married.

V.
Cut the right sleeve,
and a jade phoenix will rise
on a golden thread.
Your lifebreath will feed the stone.

Inside the hem,
find the circle,
filled drop by drop
with light.
Your finger will be embraced by it.

Cross the heart.
Cut the left sleeve
and feel the cool orbs inside
click through your fingers,
kissed by oysters,
lustrous as prayer beads
oiled by grace.
Your blood will warm the pearls.

Phased Out

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Part 1, March 5, 2015
elephants, Ringling Brothers, retirementMany fans recalled the press
of a father’s hand,
or remembered
a smaller hand, holding
a rare cumulus
of pink.

Although some
had found it unpleasant,
others, rapt in the dark,
were comforted
by the routine odors,
the sharp edges that
hit the olfactory in stages.

First, the tickle of hay,
and then the vinegar
slap of dung.
The scent of sawdust
that, when pressed,
surrendered a sylvan hint.

One could see,
from the poorest seat,
the relief map of bone,
over which was
stretched a vast grey canvas.

Closer to the ring,
flapping ears blessed
hot cheeks with
warm gusts.

All were
made dizzy
by their circling,
trunk to tail.

Trunk to tail,
they formed a chain
that linked
our earliest pleasures,
now past.

Oh, to see
their old grey bodies,
their young brown eyes.
Even their smiles
were black caverns
into which our attention
fell,
and rested.

The circus.
Without the elephants.
What will we call it now?

Part 2, January 1, 2018
“The elephants will retire to a conservation center in Polk City, Florida.”-NPR

I’m sick of being a symbol,
aren’t you?
Felt like the weight of
the world on my back,
though maybe
that was the showgirls’
high heels.
Stilettos!
My hide may be tough,
but it’s not made of steel.

And I got a cramp in my trunk
from that boxcar.

Well, this place is
nothing to turn up my trunk at,
though I feel like I’m more
of a Miami elephant.

My cousin
in Burma has got it made.
Forests, streams,
plenty of wild girls.
He’s living large.

But Polk City?
It’s kind of a backwater.
At least it seems that way
when you’ve danced
for thousands
in Atlanta,
Denver,
St. Louis.

Ringling calls us “pampered performers.”
Sure, we were pampered,
if the lap of luxury
consists of 18-hour
workdays and subpar alfalfa.

Can an herbivore
get a snack here?

Anyway, hand me that umbrella.
I’m going to stick it
in that trough
and make me a nice,
cool tropical drink:
I’ve earned it.

—
Photo credit: “Elephant Walk” by angela n. is licensed under CC BY 2.0. Unchanged from original.

A Plea

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A PleaThey are as substantial as we are,
the dead,
and far more patient.

Father, great aunt, uncle,
have all gone beyond;
whether it is great
only they know.

Why do we labor so,
the survivors,
to keep them alive?

Sweating in the sun,
we plant perennials
on pauper’s plots,
brush dirt from flat slabs
that tilt and sink with the years
receiving plastic flowers, small flags and tears:
for all we know,
they are dying for us to leave.

Soon a mass will be said for them.
There will be prayers and singing,
and after, we will eat food because we can.

The relationship, you see, is a bit one-sided.

For they are gone,
and would dearly appreciate it if we would
—please—
get a life.

 

—
Photo credit: “Ghosts route” by Tuncay is licensed under CC BY 2.0. Unchanged from original.

Sit and Read for a Spell

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Spelling Bee SaboteurIf you should hire me, you will be spared the embarrassment of the supervisor who authorized this sign about the dangerous “aquaduck” failure. (These creatures should be avoided at all costs, by the way.) Rest assured that you will be in good hands with me.

If everyone, as Andy Warhol posited, gets 15 minutes of fame, I have already had mine. In the fourth grade, I beat every student in our district in spelling. I’ll never forget the glory of beating a sixth grader with the word, “professor.” I credit my early reading of cereal boxes.

I’ll always remember my pride as our principal escorted me, a minor and mini dignitary, to the finals. What’s also true is that I’ll never get over my bitterness at placing fourth in the finals in Hyannis, because my rival, who placed third, happened to get an easier word. The green silk ribbon I received did little to dispel the feeling. Cellar? I could have spelled that in my sleep. They gave me “saboteur,” clearly the more difficult word. And just as I pored obsessively over three-ring binders of words to prepare for my 15 minutes of fame, I won’t let go of your project until every last word is spelled correctly. Even if it’s “saboteur.”

Frog Pond Carousel—Boston, Massachusetts

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Boston Common CarouselThe year is 2014:
only a few revolutions earlier,
heretics swung
where cows grazed.

The world turned again,
when each eyeball, hoof
and fetlock was painted,
each neigh carved and preserved,
in 1947.

Built to migrate from city to city
the carousel
followed the outstretched dollar,
with carnies riding herd.

Now children clamor
to choose their steed
then clamber
aboard,
slowly rising,
then falling,
and turning,
always turning,
to face the present:
grass, trees, buildings, pond.

Once around is never enough.
Children are born knowing this.

—

About the Frog Pond Carousel:
The Frog Pond Carousel was built in 1947 by the Allan Herschell Company of North Tonawanda, New York, which specialized in producing portable machines which could be used by traveling carnival operators. A museum exists in the original manufacturing facility in North Tonawanda. For information about riding the Frog Pond Carousel, visit: www.bostonfrogpond.com.

—
Photo credit: “WTB Boston Common Carousel” by Cryptic C62 is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Unchanged from original.

Choice Words

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Words MatterIn high school, my English teacher, Ms. Stewart (who later married a math teacher and became Mrs. Moscaritolo), taught us a lesson I never forgot. She pointed out a classmate’s writing, and said, “See how each word is deliberately chosen?” My classmate, Eric, had been thoughtful about word choice, and it was a revelation. I became conscious of haste, and labored to choose each word only upon reflection. Much later, reflection was necessarily tempered by a lesson in deadlines.

Writing is a craft, like masonry, each word precisely chosen and stacked to fit thought, sentence, paragraph, page. Since my early lesson, choosing the right word has become so ingrained, that most times I’m not even conscious I’m choosing, as I’ve labored of late to describe, for example, the landing of the Curiosity Rover on Mars. Is the planet red, blushing, rubicund?

I still have one of my haiku, which Ms. Stewart “published” via a mimeographed sheet, among those of a few other students. Eric included. So if you’re feeling curious, or even inquisitive:

Jagged whitecaps crash
In conspiracy with
the relentless driving wind

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