Why I Never Get Anywhere, or, A List of Mostly Failed Poetry Ideas Scribbled at the back of Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

Prologue…

I was second to last in line when Ross Gay was signing books at the Dodge Poetry Festival. He was tall and his eyes were a soft brown. His aura was a pale gold. Rather than sign the title page, I asked him to sign at the back because I wanted him to see the scribbled list he had inspired. “You’d think I was an insane person if you read it,” I quickly said. He smiled his wide, square-toothed smile and signed: “Thank You Kim. Truly, Ross Gay.” 

The List:

1) Ode to a Stolen Zither

I actually owned a zither when I moved from Cincinnati to Tucson for college. It is one of those odd possessions that, even in 20/20 hindsight, makes me scratch my head. Why did I pack that zither? How did it originally appear in our household in Ohio? Did I really pay to have it tuned when I barely had two dollars to my name? But I loved my zither.  The smooth backside was perfect for cleaning weed, and it came with a booklet of simple ditties noted in color-coded circles. 

Five years later when I left Tucson armed with my poetry degree, I packed my possessions, including my zither, into the smallest, cheapest, car-roof U-Haul container I could rent and revved my Honda Civic for Seattle. I stopped overnight in Oakland to visit a friend which is where my U-Haul was ransacked. I had a suitcase inside the house that contained some clothes and my jewelry box.  The box was Chinese lacquerware, black with gold and maroon cranes carved into it, a small flip-up mirror on top, and four drawers, each with a tiny brass pull. It was a gift from my father’s new wife, Maggie, I hated how much I loved it. Its gilt details flashed an artful taste that my mother, now living alone in Walnut Hills, lacked. The only valuables I ever owned were inside: three necklaces from my paternal grandmother⎯a strand of pearls, a strand of jade beads, and an amethyst pendant.  

There was a sorry heap left inside of the U-Haul after the raid. It looked like a late-night donation dump outside of a closed Goodwill. I tallied up my lost items: flute, zither (I could play neither but liked to toot and strum), clothes, a tent, a sleeping bag, a backpack. I didn’t call the police. I had another leg of the trip to go and I had my cash, a half gram of cocaine, and a map. I bought a better lock and hit the road.  

For a long time I worried about what happened to my zither; if it was abused and ridiculed; if the thieves were strumming it too hard while laughing at what kind of dork I was; if they mocked me and then just tossed it into the trash like worthless junk. No one I knew had a zither or any interest in one. Zithers weren’t in orchestras or bands. I have never seen a zither recording. I just liked it because I could press down the keys and prance around my little studio like a renaissance jester.

2) Grandma’s Jewels

Grandma’s jewels were stolen during another transition. It was 1982. I sold my broken Civic in Seattle, took the thousand dollars, and moved to East 13th Street in NYC.  My Grandma’s three necklaces had survived so far. The lustrous pearls, the jade beads, and the amethyst pendant that my father told me was from Vienna… but my father wasn’t good with facts so this remains questionable.  

Dad’s flexible reality lived on even after he was in the grave. Maggie had wanted to include in his obituary that he had been a captain in the army but, at the eleventh hour, my brother stopped the presses and broke it to her that Dad was never a captain but was honorably discharged as a private for tinnitus, a condition he told us resulted from a grenade exploding near his ear during drills. I was comforted that he also lied to his second family. That he hadn’t moved out west and become a paragon of fatherhood. But my brother kept reality bent to protect Maggie; only he knew that it wasn’t tinnitus, and the honorable part was never discussed.  

Long after the divorce, we felt a certain ease discussing our father in our mother’s presence. We could even quickly glide over Maggie’s name in conversation. I brought up the near-miss with the obituary and we all laughed about the wide gap between a captain and a private with tinnitus.  My mother added that he’d been an excellent teacher in the Army, a fact that I vaguely remembered. Suddenly my brother and sister double-teamed me: “It wasn’t tinnitus.” Then my brother condescended that they would never use live grenades during drills, which seemed suddenly obvious. “That was just what he told everyone.” We squabbled for a moment but you can feel the truth and I knew it was true. My brother’s raised eyebrows made me ask, “Was he messing with the wrong person?” He goaded me for always being the last to know. My sister turned toward our mother and said, “I know one person at this table who can clear this up,” and it dawned on me that he’d been having affairs since the beginning of their twenty-four-year marriage and Maggie was the last one, not the first. My mother’s initial light-heartedness faded. We razzed her to tell us what happened, spill the beans, but her lips sealed shut. It was a rare opportunity for our mother to ‘come out’ to us. It was a chance to unite in truth, for once, but she wouldn’t budge and a familiar silence closed around us. 

The pendant from maybe Vienna, maybe Macy’s, was not my favorite, nor were the pearls. My favorite was the strand of jade beads gradating in size from the tiniest spheres at the clasp to one large, marble-sized orb in the middle. The necklace held variations on the deepest, most comforting greens. Inside each bead was a solidified green mist. There was a heft and coolness when you held the beads in your palm. 

How I was allowed these valuable things as a rootless youth is a little window into our haphazard family dynamics. In a sane family, the valuables would have been placed in a safe deposit box until my sister and I at least had steady jobs. But instead it probably went something like this: “You and your sister go split up grandma’s jewelry.” Yay! We probably dumped it onto the couch, trading and bargaining like it was so much Halloween candy. 

Thirteenth Street was notorious for trouble in those days. Gentrification was not going well. The lock on the front door to my building was constantly busted, crow-bar style, and the door swung open with ease. I got robbed every other week and wondered if the landlord was in on it. In one of those ransackings, my jewelry box was picked through. I wondered why they didn’t just take the whole box. It wasn’t large and it was lightweight. Maybe it was an all-you-can-stuff-in-your-pockets event. The pearls and amethyst pendant were gone, but the jade necklace was there. I managed to lose it on my own a few years later.  For months I eyed the blankets of bric-a-brac sold by various entrepreneurs along St. Marks Place, hoping to see the amethyst pendant again and buy it back, hoping the jewels would somehow rematerialize into my life. To this day, those necklaces are the most precious things I have ever owned. They were my only heirlooms, all I had to carry the half-truths and mysteries that were my father.  But now that I think about it, the loss of those valuables seems perfect. This is my heritage.

3) The Bumble Bee Moth Hummingbird

“Look to your left,” my sister says. I’m sitting cross-legged on her warm concrete patio undoing an intricate knot in a necklace chain that neither of my nephews had any success with and neither was I, although I never forego even the smallest opportunity to prove my superiority. I turned my head and hovering at eye level was the tiniest hummingbird I have ever seen. No larger than an inch. It alit (Who says alit?)…it landed a moment on the concrete slab and then zigzagged back toward the garden.

She told me it was a Bumble Bee Hummingbird. I was dumbstruck by its Tinkerbell magic. When I returned to New York it flashed onto The List but then Wikipedia told me that Bumble Bee Hummingbirds only live in Cuba, so as impossible as it seemed that such a tiny bird even exists, it seemed even more impossible that one had drifted up the coast, taken a hard left into the Midwest to touch down in my sister’s suburban backyard. A little more poking around and I discovered something called a Moth Hummingbird which is a moth, not a bird. This must have been what we’d seen, so I crossed out “Bumble Bee” and penciled “Moth” above it, unsettled by a slight, but familiar, disappointment.

4) The Menagerie

In Menagerie, my unwritten book, there are only poems about animals. I could start with the Bumble Bee Hummingbird. Every poem would end with the same last line:  I miss my brother. And here’s the tragedy: after he died the entire natural world dulled. With no one to explain again that autumn leaves don’t actually change color but lose chlorophyll, I just admire the season’s brilliance but don’t follow the metaphor about the true color being what’s left after the drain.  

In our childhood home we had a menagerie; that’s what my father called it. At its peak we owned 26 animals: four chickens (mean bastards), two ducks, a boa constrictor, a wild possum that lived perched on the curtain rod in the living room, various hamsters (some boa food, some pets), a canary, a parrot, two cats, two dogs, and so on. We never counted the fish tanks.  

I envisioned a calico cat whenever I heard the word menagerie. I thought the etymological root meant “mixture” (hence the calico cat) but I’ve been conflating menagerie and mélange which does mean mixture.  Menagerie, however, evolved from Middle English – Mainer (to stay); from Old French – Mesnie (household); from Latin – Manere (to remain).  

I miss my brother. 

5) Red River Gorge and Pete McHanon’s Penis

When my parents allowed me, at thirteen, into the custody of my fifteen-year-old brother for a camping trip to Red River Gorge, I was ecstatic. I had begged him for weeks to take me with him until he finally said that if mom and dad said it was okay then I could go.  He was confident they would say no.

Pete McHanon was a good looking, nice, baseball-guy, the eldest of six brothers that Mrs. McHanon was raising single-handedly. Their upstairs resembled an army barracks, doors all equally ajar, beds made, shoes lined up. Once a year, a silver-haired Lothario came revving into the neighborhood on a chopper that he parked in her driveway. Even as a young girl I knew that Thelma, the captain of that ship, could not resist him. You could see it in the way he let down the kickstand with the heel of his leather boot and swung his leg over the seat on the dismount. My mother would grumble, curse him under her breath about going back to Florida. Every mother in the neighborhood peeked with disdain (and sexual envy) from behind her kitchen curtains.

The gorge flash flooded on our camping weekend. Our spot, a flat point of land jutting between two tributaries that merged into the larger river, seemed perfect until we woke up with our pots and pans floating away in the turbulent, rapidly rising water. “Jim Beam in the Stream” entered our teen vernacular forever after. We grabbed what we could, unstaked the tent, and dragged it with everything inside straight up the ridge. No time to pack. Isaac led because our group knew he was the genius.

The tent was useless as was every other soaked provision.  When Isaac was yelling Move, Move, it seemed like encouragement and not an alarm against rushing death. There was a sandstone cliff face at the top where an alcove had been carved out by eons of winds and rain, but it  now provided shelter against those elements. Somehow a damp fire got built and like mud-covered cavemen, we began to adapt. By the time we’d negotiated our new campsite, treetops were jutting out from the rushing waters, their branches like the fingertips of the drowning. Only Isaac seemed to realize that if the river kept rising, there was no way out. 

The day was spent shivering and rotating our damp clothes on the line rigged above the smokey fire. Isaac had instructed us that it could be a few days before the water receded. I wondered if my parents were worried; if the flooding had made the local news; if my mother threw her hands to her face and wept. I always slept better imagining a tragedy. The river began to ebb by late evening.

That night I saw Pete McHanon’s penis. It was pitch-black but the pale sandstone cliffs seemed to emanate light. Pete was there with his girlfriend, Lizzy. He always had a serious girlfriend. I liked her. She had thick, unruly blond hair and she offered me half her canned sausages. In that bizarre way that a tornado can flatten a home but leave the set table undisturbed, the flood had spared her sleeve of Saltines. No one was complaining. We were happy to be away from our nagging parents.  

That night the row of sleeping bags went something like Isaac, Mike, Paul, Rob (my brother), Me, Pete and Lizzy. I heard them whispering in their double-sized sleeping bag and my eyes were open as I turned my back to them. I wondered what they were doing, if they had on their underwear, where his hands moved. I listened to bare skin rustling against nylon. Pete mumbled about needing to pee. He got up, walked a few steps down the slope and angled himself about thirty degrees in my direction. I could see his physique in silhouette, the curvature of his rear end, his muscular shoulders and then his penis sticking straight up. He gripped it underneath with one hand and guided it slightly downward to pee.  My parents never told me a thing about erections or sex or periods.  Everything I learned I pieced together from bathroom walls, rumors, gossip, television. I don’t remember exactly when I lost my virginity or my first kiss or first period, but I remember Pete McHanon’s adonic silhouette with his erect penis. 

The next morning the waters ebbed enough to begin our slide down the wet incline to the upper trail. When we finally arrived home, I walked into the living room and my father burst into laughter, “What happened to you? Go look at yourself in the mirror.” I went into the bathroom. My hair was matted with sticks and leaves, my face mud-streaked, but the whites of my eyes glowed. I leaned closer to the mirror to stare down that animal.

6) Yamma

At a Barnes and Nobel Starbucks, we were separated by one table. A DaVinci torso languished across his computer screen, his eyes darting back and forth between his laptop and his sketch pad, my eyes pretending to read whichever magazine I’d chosen to peruse while luxuriating in a free afternoon. I kept stealing glances at him and the gorgeous drawing emerging on the paper. The rapidly firing signals between his brain’s neurons and his deftly moving hands created an energy field that I wanted to be near but not disrupt, so I avoided the empty table directly next to him. The tip of his afro was a silver crown, his fingers thin and graceful.  Then there was a pause and I turned from my pretend reading. I stammered about not wanting to intrude but the drawing was so beautiful.  “Are you an artist?” 

He shrugged. I understood: he was an artist but not paid as one, which is, unintentionally, the other half of the question. I can’t claim that I’m a poet without the follow-up question: Do you have a book?  He answered, “I am, but not professionally. My daughter does most of the drawing now, on everything: walls, tables, sometimes paper.” He added joyfully, “I let her, sometimes we do it together.”

With envy I imagined them sweeping rainbows and simple clouds across the living room, filling empty spaces with hearts. Him with a thick piece of red sidewalk chalk while his three-year-old daughter gave him instructions. He asked if I was an artist in return, and I said no, then demurred, “Well, I’m a poet.” 

Work, bills, children, art—our entire lives imbued each uttered word of our short conversation. We briefly commiserated. He asked my name and if he could read any of my poems anyplace. I spelled out F-A-R-R-A-R and said a few things were online. He told me his name was Yamma with two m’s. We exchanged our good-byes and well-wishes for art in our futures, and I left him to his drawing. I turned back and we waved across the crowded room.

I loved him and he loved me that sunny afternoon in Starbucks in Barnes and Noble in Union Square in New York City in the United States in the world in the galaxy in the universe. Somewhere in our DNA, we had met a thousand years ago and perhaps it was equally as brief and we knew then, too, that we’d met a thousand years before that.

I scan the cafe every time I purchase a new book.  

Addendum: Last weekend my family went to an art show at the Asia Society about representations of hell and Yama (one ‘m’) is the Hindu god of death. Like many Hindu gods, in one aspect he is the punisher and in another the cheerful god of departed ancestors. Yama was the first person to die and “blazed the path of mortality we all walk.” He took on many likenesses. I wonder if Yamma was named after him?

7) Lychee Nuts

Once upon a time, a woman, her daughter, and her husband were walking in Jackson Heights, where curries scent the neighborhood and Bollywood hits roar from boomboxes. Come in, come in. The Seventy-fourth Street strip is lined with sari shops and jewelers selling India’s delicate filigreed gold. Off the main strip, the sidewalks are ruptured by giant tree roots. Shingles advertising tax and immigrant services hang cockeyed and weatherworn.  

The little girl’s blue eyes prismed in the bright sunlight, but she could not speak, not when the old woman toting her fruits and vegetables approached, not ever. The old woman was tiny and hunched but spritely. As the family and the woman walked toward each other, she held out a branch to the young girl. The mother curiously eyed the gift: a knotted twig with dangling, leathery balls below a few curled leaves. Her husband whispered, “They’re lychee nuts.” She had only seen lychees served in syrup as a complimentary dessert at Ollie’s Noodle House. She allowed the gift. The old woman only said, “For her” as the child accepted the branch. 

When they got home, the mother peeled the rough-skinned casing from the delicate fruit and plopped a glistening ball into her mouth, rolled it around like a haunted-house eyeball with her tongue. So sweet and cold, finally slipping the seed out between her pursed lips. It was delicious. She cut up a few for her daughter who would never magically speak, but in that late afternoon light, they plucked and peeled and slurped. The old woman all the while walking into their long story.

8) Mother – Gravestone

The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.
—William Faulkner

Every summer as a kid, our family visited my maternal grandmother who owned a small dairy farm outside of Quarryville, Pennsylvania.  My father usually stayed behind unable to tolerate both a dry county and my hellfire & brimstone Uncle Ben. But I was free there, free to roam while my mother sat in the living room talking to Grandma who always held a flyswatter in one hand. One day I wandered down the long gravel driveway and crossed over the paved road. No destination, just looking at corn stalks and flying grasshoppers, listening to the distant hum of traffic on the new interstate. I veered into some woods. The cold mud and shade dropped the early morning temperature, so I roved back into the warm sunlight. There was a berm of weedy, untended grass that seemed too far from the nearest house and too close to the woods to be anyone’s property. There wasn’t a No Trespassing sign nailed to any tree. I spied a large flat stone and decided to investigate, probably hoping to dislodge it from the earth to watch the pill bugs curl up and the insects scatter beneath my godly power. But when I got closer I could see the word M O T H E R embedded in the rockface with smaller stones. Each fragment had been painstakingly hammered into a chiseled groove. The word rose from the flat surface instead of being carved in. The shards looked like leftover granite pieces from a real headstone factory. I stared at the construction, wondering about the strength and know-how of the son or daughter that hammered that word in place. I imagined him (I saw a boy) crying, pounding, stone by stone. It was crude but I didn’t think of that adjective then. I thought about the son. There was no other information. No name. No date of birth or death.   

When I got back to the farmhouse, I told my grandma what I had discovered and she said, “It’s probably where they buried the coloreds.” I understood it as well then as I do now. 

Many years later, my mother gave me a manila envelope stuffed with very old photographs of my grandmother as a child, one of fourteen children, and then from even further back. Strange folks in heavy woolen garments and sour faces. There was also a copy of a confusing amateur genealogy that someone in the family had cobbled together. I had long claimed that my line were poor Scottish farmers, not enslavers. I was a co-sufferer, compadre of the oppressed. There is a woman identified in one of the photographs as “Mink” and I fancied I had some Native American blood to cover that base. One greatbighappy genetic melting pot. There is a whole branch of my family tree related to a line of Osbornes, a name I don’t recognize. I never met anyone called Osborne on our summer sojourns and I met whole towns of cousins. If I unknotted the thread correctly, Enoch Osborne married my great great grandmother. This is what the genealogy says:

Enoch Osborne formed a Revolutionary War company in 1776 and was commissioned captain. Protection against Indian raids was the first order of business, but the company may have fought in the Battle of King’s Mountain and possibly the battle of Guilford Courthouse.

After the Revolutionary War, Enoch served as a justice of the peace and a magistrate. He accumulated 1,000 acres of land in Grayson County and more in North Carolina. Among his belongings auctioned off following his death were five slaves and thirteen books.

And there it is: “Indian raids”? Who was stealing from whom? “1,000 free acres”? “Belongings”? “Auctioned off”? Full stop. And then I wondered: which thirteen books?

Addendum: A friend of mine who is African-American recently returned from a trip to The Edinburgh International Book Festival. When she called, she excitedly asked, “Guess how many books I bought?”

“Twelve.”

“No, thirteen!”  

Silence. 

9) Exaltation

If you say a word over and over and over it sheds its meaning, except for onomatopoeic words which are perhaps the only honest words: Plunk.    

And then there is the twinge that maybe hollowing out a word to its sound is more interesting than what it means. In the end, it’s all ash and creosote. (I have waited thirty years for that word, creosote, to plunk itself down within a line.) And I’m conflicted because words are both alive and dead like Schrödinger’s cat. Now I want to Google that famous thought experiment.  

This is why I never get anywhere. In my extremely limited misunderstanding of science, contrary to the maxim that you can’t get something from nothing, quantum physics says you can. They discovered that energy bubbles up and recedes out of the nothingness in the vast universe and even the great scientists don’t understand it. 

I am an atheist. I put my faith in the idling truck outside my window, the rattling of dishes in the kitchen as my husband gets his breakfast, the photographs of star nebulae from the Webb Telescope. And as I’m approaching the end of my list of great poem ideas, this is the first one for which I cannot remember what vision jolted me to add it to The List. Exaltation is such a grand word, now just strokes: /-|\_//\|-\