Fade to Quiet

Three Poems: December 15, 2012   The Swan On the first night my baby was not in my body she lay in a plastic basinet next to me in my room. Bundled, she looked like a sweet date. I lay in the pale lit room and I traced her features with my eyes, sketching her in my memory, recognizing that this is what it means to make a person; it will be someone you’ve never seen before and would change into anything to protect. I reached my hand to the plastic’s rim and lay it gently on her chest, through the blanket, through the hours that would complete her first rotation of the sun. I understood from now on I would be in direct competition with every harm that lives in the world. I would grow great wings invisible to any but her and me, and I would cover her when something terrible neared and I would hiss. The clock on the wall also became something more real to me. Until then, I had been waiting for her to come. Now every second was another of her movements away fr...

(photos by Michael Oppenheim) Some history of the Basilica: Paul Roebling Jr,  grandson of the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge, (Yes!)  first started development of Haywood Street exactly one century ago with The Haywood Building. At that time, Haywood Street was little more than a ravine running along the base of the resplendent Battery Park Hotel property. This is not the same Battery Park Hotel as the one standing at the north end of the city today. It was a Queen Anne-style green-painted wood and was owned by the Coxe family. Thomas Wolfe spent hours in the lobby watching the guests as they arrived, and he lamented its loss heavily when E.W. Grove purchased the land, razed the hotel and destroyed the mountain it stood on. Both Vanderbilt and Grove first espied their respective mountain real estate legacies from windows of that original hotel. Guastavino came to Asheville on a commission from Richard Morris Hunt, the first Fine Art architect in the U.S. and de...

I sent my first email in 1996. My boyfriend at the time had a computer, and the computer had internet. He sent emails all the time. When I was working on a project with PATH (Program for Appropriate Technology in Health) to develop a salivary ferning microscope that was cost-efficient enough to be distributed to impoverished women in India and Africa, I was asked for my email address. My boyfriend said I could use his.  One afternoon, my colleague at PATH forwarded an email from Mother Theresa. She was giving PATH her approval of the device. Once you get an email from Mother Theresa, there isn't much else to anticipate (Note to the 20000 senders of emails I've received since: you understand). The project got tanked along the way, despite my patchwork re-design that involved a cardboard kaleidescope from a child's birthday party and a 50x magnifying glass. I waited another two years to get my own email address, and another two passed before I started to actually ...

Well, the new fear today is getting your face eaten. Yesterday, the fear was having your rights of partnership dissolved, your gas price gone over the 4 or $5.00 mark. And before that it was getting bombed by your neighbor in the hijab, your other neighbor being shot in a hoodie. Before this, there was the fear of the hijacker, of the office building exploding, and before that there was the fear of the things that happen in farther away places than the mailbox that may or may not contain the letter laced with anthrax. Remember when the Tylenol first was “tampered with?” Remember the way we checked for razors in the Halloween apples and the candy spilled out from the pillow cases (because I grew up in a neighborhood where you could acquire a pillowcase of candy in a night) and a worried parent held each piece up to the desk lamp, searching for the  torn wrapper, the steel eyes of death tucked inside the taffy, and before this there was the terror of the too quiet room, the blan...

I am the grand-daughter of World War II prison camp survivors. My grandfather and grandmother met in Buckingham Palace where my grandmother was presented at Court at one of Princess Elizabeth's garden parties. They met later, again, in Hong Kong where my grandfather held a medical office in Kowloon. The attraction was undeniable. They married and enjoyed parties at Shing Moon, my grandmother wearing black burma silk evening gowns and hobnobbing with the British "dirty little foreigners" who enjoyed the high life of the Empire's global reach. She befriended the niece of Emperor Pu Yi and frequently joined her for tea within the labyrinthian compound of The Forbidden City. Theirs was a life of luxury. After the Japanese seized Nanking, my grandparents ignored the warnings and invitations to evacuate sent from the British Crown and moved north. My uncle was born in Swatow, my father in Tongshan. In Tianjin, miles from the unrest and terror of Nanking and Shanghai, the...

I want a Twilight font that drips blood and snaps in two when deleted. I want a Romantic poetry font that has birds in it and damp chunks of moss. I want an Art Deco font in which I will type in blue terra cotta tile. I want a Lascaux Cave font comprised of berries, blood and the sounds of wild animals outside the cave. I want a Marcel Marceau font that says nothing and still makes the reader weep. I want a Beethoven font that no one can hear and a Chagall font that flies, painted red, above the page. A Sartre font in which when I write I love you it doesn’t mean you are in a cage. I want a zen font that vanishes in the wind. I want a Camus font that carries no meaning. I want a Malthus font with a bug in its mouth. Design for me a Darwinian font. Let the words eat each other. And then eat the page. An Edith Piaf font that sings for the Resistance. A Billie Holiday font that prints only in blue. A Lao Tzu font. It is made of water, fire, some dirt and a soft breeze....