Because of Ruckus's exuberant good spirits and arborial enthusiasms, we will need to curtail Christmas this year. So I've cut a teeny-tiny spruce tree that I hope I'll be able perch on top of a high shelf that he hasn't gotten around to scaling yet. Presently the teeny-tiny tree is sitting on the porch in a milk pail filled with snow. If I don't have to take the dog to the vet, I may find some time today to play with it. But unlike Ruckus, Anna is not glowing with health. I suspect a vestibular disorder, but maybe she's just got dog flu.

Pets. What a distraction. And I thought retiring from livestock would make my life emptier.

On his Facebook page, my 16-year-old wrote, "R.I.P Nelson Mandela. You were one of the greatest civil rights activists the world has ever seen." This, I thought, was a fine thing for an American teenager to recognize. Yet in the kitchen, when I continued the conversation with him and happened to use the word apartheid, he looked at me, puzzled, and asked, "What is that?"

I suppose one could say: this is how much Mandela changed the world. He changed it so much that today's concerned, intelligent, American teenagers have never had to hear the word apartheid battered around on the evening news. On the other hand, I was appalled. In my son's lifetime, Mandela has only been a respected public figure. But in my lifetime he underwent an unthinkable transformation: from state-reviled prisoner to president of that very same nation. It's not that my son is ignorant of Mandela's particular brand of greatness. He just didn't hear that racist label splashed day after day among Iran Contra embarrassments and Michael Jackson hits. Of course he didn't. But even though I know this, time never stops being a surprise.

Today is the birthday of Amy Lake, daughter of my friends Linda and Ralph, murdered by her husband, along with her two children in June 2011. And here is a poem that borrows from the officials' chilling psychological autopsy of the case. Sometimes I include the piece among my western Pennsylvania poems and pretend that it happened there. But it didn't, though it could have, because it could have happened anywhere. And it does.

According to Our Sources

Dawn Potter

The man owned “maybe twenty, twenty-one

firearms” and had bought, “I don’t know,

seven or eight BB guns” for his ten-year-old.

That boy “was the apple of his eye, no question.”

The girl, “well, not so much.” Still, he was “a good feller,”

“a go-getter,” “he’d always been a doer not a thinker,”

he just needed “to relax now and again, nothing serious.”

“Some people can’t take a joke, you know what I mean?”

or else “things might of ended up different.”

It was “weird but also a little bit crazy funny, you know,”

when he sat in the La-Z-Boy and shot the ornaments

off the family Christmas tree, and, “oh, sure,

sometimes he did dumb stuff,” not like “pills or booze,”

more like “laughing too much when his daughter cried.”

It was “common knowledge” he kept a loaded pistol

holstered on his bedpost, and “he could be mouthy”

at “kind of the wrong moment”—for instance, that party

when he told his friends he’d be “dragging the wife home”

to give her a “hate fuck.” “A couple two, three times”

he threatened to use her dad as “knife practice.”

 And “what some heard” is, after he “kep a gun on em”

for an entire summer night, and she “broke down”

and called in the cops, “well, soon’s he seen the blue lights,”

he swiveled round to his son and told him “real calm,”

“Now your mother’s done it.” Which is to say

“most folks agreed the man had his angers,”

but “who’d a thought he’d turn out so dangerous?”

[first published in 5AM, no. 37 (2013)]

Yesterday I started reading proofs for Same Old Story, a task that is both exciting and nerve-wracking. What if my concentration flags and the printed book ends up containing some big stupid mistake? On the other hand, who wrote these interesting poems? I know that sounds hubristic, but typeset pages look so different from manuscript pages. That visual shift makes the work seem brand-new to me, as if I've never read these poems before, let alone composed them.

So far, I haven't experienced any "Oh, my God, this sucks" heart seizures. This may, of course, change at any moment. I still have a lot more proof-checking to accomplish.

In other news, I'm editing a book about sex, and it's a good read too: a sociological study of women's generational and life-course attitudes and full of verbatim transcripts and individual voices. A holiday gift for the academic copyeditor, apparently.

Signed Books for the Holidays

If anyone is interested in personalized, signed books as holiday gifts, please let me know. I have copies of the poetry collections Boy Land ($12) and How the Crimes Happened ($15), the memoir Tracing Paradise ($20), and the anthology A Poet's Sourcebook ($30). I'll sign and inscribe them, wrap them if need be, and mail them to you or a gift recipient. My contact information is on the "Teaching & Editing" page.

Snow and snow and snow. No more running in the woods, it seems. I will have to switch to snowshoeing today.

I went looking for a snow poem, and I found this 1922 piece by Claude McKay, along with many others, including poems by Longfellow, Emerson, and Bryant. At a quick glance, I noted an interesting shared feature of snow poems: many of them seem to be too long, by which I mean that one of the stanzas feels much stronger than the rest of the poem. The McKay poem is relatively even, I think, though I'm not sure that I love it. Still, it has its charms.


The Snow Fairy

Claude McKay

I
Throughout the afternoon I watched them there,
Snow-fairies falling, falling from the sky,
Whirling fantastic in the misty air,
Contending fierce for space supremacy.
And they flew down a mightier force at night,
As though in heaven there was revolt and riot,
And they, frail things had taken panic flight
Down to the calm earth seeking peace and quiet.
I went to bed and rose at early dawn
To see them huddled together in a heap,
Each merged into the other upon the lawn,
Worn out by the sharp struggle, fast asleep.
The sun shone brightly on them half the day,
By night they stealthily had stol’n away.


II
And suddenly my thoughts then turned to you
Who came to me upon a winter’s night,
When snow-sprites round my attic window flew,
Your hair disheveled, eyes aglow with light.
My heart was like the weather when you came,
The wanton winds were blowing loud and long;
But you, with joy and passion all aflame,
You danced and sang a lilting summer song.
I made room for you in my little bed,
Took covers from the closet fresh and warm,
A downful pillow for your scented head,
And lay down with you resting in my arm.
You went with Dawn. You left me ere the day,
The lonely actor of a dreamy play.

Despite spending five days in the clink, Ruckus is surprisingly pleasant this morning. Perhaps he benefited from pre-release counseling. Our house, however, is less pleasant, though it is now better than it was yesterday evening, when the kitchen thermometer read 32 degrees. Wood heat is charming until no one is around to stoke the stove.

I hope you all had a reasonably calm and collected Thanksgiving recess. Barring some snow squalls and dog squabbles, ours went smoothly. Number One Son arrived by railroad and enthusiastically consumed large amounts of my mother's cooking, Number Two Son efficiently entertained his small cousins and even managed to finish his homework, and the poodle did not have any accidents on the floor.

In the interstices of baking, eating, drying dishes, playing Scrabble, and hiking over snowy fields, I read a small amount of Philip Roth's American Pastoral. At the last moment of packing, I found I could not face carrying along a history of the crusades. American Pastoral is not much more relaxing than the crusades, but at least it offers some mulled-over regret between the battles.
And then there's this, which struck me as a reasonably apt:

Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.