Dancing

It is beautiful
When every part of the body moves
When the legs shake from
Pushing up the weight of another body – pointed toes,
Arched foot, contorted
Gorilla pose like
Koko.
Or Couture.

Those of us who do not have
Every small muscle pushing out of our backs
Like a watermark map
Of intricate pully designs,

We do other things
Like
paint,
sing,
grow orchards
hold hands,
make instant noodles,
scribe nonsense.

Writers are ridiculous.

When they are suicidal
they cannot write -
they are too busy
Jumping off of buildings or chairs.

When they are pissed
It is OK to write -
I hear it is good therapy
And better than throwing
Your neighbor’s cat into your child’s
Swimming pool.

When things are sensationalized
To the point of tears
They cannot write -
Their participation in the arts
As over-excited drone receptors -
Is too disgusting
Even to themselves.

When they are happy
We
should not be writing
Within the confines of our
Carousels -

We should be running in the
Rain, snow, moon, comet
Swept outdoors
Dancing in the mud,
Painting on eachother’s
Wind-lit bodies -

And while it lasts,
This for which we are in hope,
We should be holding each
Other’s dew damp heads

And sleeping.

Until
The dreams between our eyelids
Crack open
To a state of utter speechlessness
in which every being begins to
kiss and fall down
and wamk and sing and cry
and rick-a-too-ta

Rick-a-too-ta

and write

and dance.

Who is John Updike?

My control key has stopped working
I think there’s something stuck beneath it -
A stale crumb from a sandwich crust,
A baby cockroach, fatally curious about
the whirr contraption
A nail clipping
A tiny piece of carrot
A hardened ball of dust -
I’m thinking of John Updike.
He’s dead now and that is how I know about him.
Sure I’ve heard of him before –
“Updike writes books” and “Updike says lovely things,”
“Some of the things he says may even be true” – shalalalalala.
But, like Picasso – it took the passing of a soul.

I’ve always felt bad for
posthumously famous people.
Fame – it comes so rarely –
The famous should last long enough
to enjoy
the misery of utter, personal exposure;
to hear
the sound of anonymity running naked
out the door with a quiet laugh that sounds like *poof!*

If someone had sat me down and said -
Jean – you have to read this guy.
He is that good – you don’t have time?
Make time. He knows things.
I would have done it.
I think I would have done it.

Perhaps then I would understand
What the columnist from the New Yorker
Meant when, upon his death,
commemorated Updike as
“The perfect author to dip into.”

Can I dip into John Updike?
How do I do that?
Do I take my carrot fingers
And slip them in between the pages of
His creamy, literary dressing?
Must I dip or can I dunk or can I drown
Into this author, can I immerse myself
In anything at all – or is he a
La-dee-da kind of guy
who chameleonizes himself
like myself, who stands in front
Of a field and turns into a
Perfectly symmetrical, sun-burnt flower?

Now that he's dead
and I’ve read a few of his things,
I feel like I know this guy pretty well.
If I could,
I would have him over for tea, he and his
76-year-old grin that takes his face muscles
– all of them – and some of his
neck muscles too -
And I would say
“Now John, tell me what it means to be
part of the Protestant middle class,”
Or "John darling, shall we go to the races next week?"
Or “John Updike, where are you now?”

We Refused to be Eachother

We refused to be eachother, you and I.
When I was 5 and you were 8,
I followed the deer and the snowstorms
and you watched television in the motel room.
We grew up there, up in the mountains
Next to the retreat center, two hours from
the nearest pizza joint, three steps from the graveyard.

I found out that
you were beautiful
because you could see the
sunlight in the breath of night
And everything you said was
better and wiser than
the gibberish-speak of our parents.

When Peter died, you told
me to pack my things
And we left and lived with
the fishermen who did not know about
Peter or his dying or who we were
and how we were not eachother.

When we saw the long-haired woman
rise up from her pillar of stone
you told me to be still
and so I was
though I was shaking.

When we returned at dawn,
we snuck into the barnyard and balanced ourselves on
the dusty wooden planks of the rafters
eighty feet above the ground.
When the light yawned between us
we could see the whispers of morning dust
settle onto the tops of our heads.
If I fall, you fall, you said.
Yes. Your eyes are blue, I said.