I like to play a game in cities. Ask a local, “What’s a word you’ve never heard used to describe this place but that feels particularly apt?” Over the years I’ve learned that New York is a movement, LA is blinding, San Francisco is broken – and Seattle is pregnant.
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Pearl and I go to the NCTM President’s remarks. You would have liked what Robert Q Berry III has to say about reframing competence as participatory, not about accuracy, how he is interested in the positionally of intellectual authority in the classroom.
“In other words, how others are positioned in a context depends on both the manner in which they wish to be represented and their perceptions of how others view them.”
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The important thing about the sky is that it is always there. It is true that it is blue, and high, and full of clouds, and made of air.
But the important thing about the sky is that it is always there.
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I can’t stay mad at you. You smear my walls with jam,
insult my songs, destroy my phone, use up
all the toilet paper, break my favorite chair,
wreck my car, let the inside cat get outside,
drip motor oil on my new white Chucks.
You tell my ex where I’m living.
But your mess is wonder, it’s art, you are
God throwing trash from a moving car
and making beauty happen.
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The important thing about Uncle Ike is that he is a white man. He built his pot shop in a gentrifying neighborhood, across the street from where cops harassed Black weed dealers for years, and he built his pot shop like a fortress next to a Black church.
But the important thing about Uncle Ike is that he is a white man.
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The important thing about Seattle’s street signs is that they are ironic. It is clear they are green, and plain enough to read, and they stand at angles marking corners where you can buy chronic.
But the important thing about Seattle’s street signs is that they are ironic.
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Sixteenth Ave’ teems with dream-drawn immigrants.
Neighbor kids gather in shared schools…
Immaculate, Maryknoll, O’Dea and Garfield.
Spring and summer, we play capture-the-flag, touch football
or
shoot the”pill ‘til
the hoop disappears in dusk.
We twist, swing, slow dance
to 45′s.
“In the still of the night….”
Ride the 27 Yesler for a swim in Lake Washington
until Matsudiara’s
buy a black ‘57 Ford
an’ Joe and Ed drive us.
Cool.
Older, I score a ‘56 2-door Bel-Air Chevy
copper, glass pacs & silver moon and rims.
Drive an’ make out in Seward Park.
I was cool too.
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Rye manhattans with the ghost
of Alice B. Toklas. A brocade
closet encloses exhaustion:
to love to love is to love
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When we were little, mom’s friend Stella used to bring us Turkish delight. This could not have happened more than three times, but the memory has latched onto some imperfective aspect – a habitual childish realization that smell-tastes are possible, that in this sweet world something can taste wildly like the scent of roses.
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My city is like a scandalous, beautiful, mind fuck.
Full of cannabis craving lovers, deserted,deranged teenagers
and unhungry sharks,drunk on their own egos
My city is as simple as a multi colored labyrinth
Fingers green with envy. Pressing, rubbing together
Demanding more when we’ve burned all that was left to give
My city is as broken as Satan is sadistic
Shining like broken mirror shards
And reflecting like diamonds
My city is twenty five different but perfect angles of fucked up
full of big hearted, foul mouthed, bold and diverse individuals.
My city is as contradicting as it is tall and wide,
but I shed blood, on this pavement
and I made home on this pavement
and I cried out to that skyline.
This city is mine, not quite how I’d like.
But it’s where I reside
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The important thing about a shoe is that you put your foot in it. You walk in it, and you take it off at night, and it’s warm when you take it off.
But the important thing about a shoe is that you put your foot in it.
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“Louise Bourgeois created Father and Son specifically for the Olympic Sculpture Park. As the fountain’s water rises and falls, father and son, each in turn, are engulfed in water and separated. It’s an impossible and poignant situation, as the two face each other with arms outstretched, striving to overcome the divide.” (from Olympic Sculpture Park Map & Guide)
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This is why we’re here isn’t it? A continent away from home, out of the classroom and in rooms full of chairs full of teachers, each with half a mind here, half a mind tethered back to their classrooms in other places full of chairs full of students we’re here to better reach.
I’m not sure how to tell you what being in Seattle for NCTM is like. I feel proud to be presenting, I feel guilty to be away from New York and my students.
&& Seattle is as we left it, very white and wet, held together by hemp.
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The important thing about rain is that it is wet. It falls out of the sky, and it sounds like rain, and makes things shiny, and it does not taste like anything, and is the color of air.
But the important thing about rain is that it is wet.
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Amrita&Greg helped make this, the Seattle Poetic Grid, and so I plot a course, winding my way from poem to poem, untwining how others compose Seattle.
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They say there’s a giant squid in the reservoir
that if you could climb the fence
you could stick your hand
into the Bright Water
and feel his slimy body swimming by yours.
And there’s a giant bone in the park
that kids say is the squid’s skeleton.
But if you were to brush away the wood chips
you’d see a placard and commemoration.
We’d slide down the soft curves
and land on our knees,
letting the damp soak through our jeans.
When it rained
we would hide in trees
and feel the cold bark underneath our toes.
We’d laugh so loud that the sky
would be scared of us; our umbrella laughter.
On snowy days we’d take cardboard
for sleds
and leave our scarves at home.
They say when the reservoir freezes over,
the squid still lives
but only if you throw rocks
over the fence and break holes
in the white ice
for him to breathe through.
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Sunlight on technicolor maple leaves
Drop
In a heap
Of red, yellow, purple, and brown ochre
Showers, gray, clearing,
Gray.
Repeat.
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I smell the salt, feel the damp,
I step outside
Blooms in February–January even
Still grey
I see the squirrels, not red, not black,
Grey–grey like wolves
Like the sky
Like this city
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I circle the circle,
orbit your abdomen , pale extended
There, the nick on the surface
of your planet
where the surgeons took the remnant connection
of you to mother
land
I panicked when you were under
too frightened
of losing you, I gave permission
for them to take that piece of home
and later kissed, what is still missing
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Maps of this city
number in the thousands
unique and folded
neatly inside each citizen’s
heart. We live in the city
and the city lives in us
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Cobble stone roads luring you inside
wondrous caverns of memories
of reds and browns coating the heavenly
warmth of commerce companionship
reflecting welcoming faces and foreign dispositions,
intrigued by the promise of adventure
sweet and savory ride the airways
to hallways buried within themselves
triumph and despair wound
in debt and deflated dreams soften with a gaze of interest
layers of shoes at a snail’s pace
keep the cadence to the spirits heartbeat,
highlighted by high hats of chatter
overlaying strings of desire,
under the eye, of a golden pig
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A silver tree beckons
from its desolate plot.
A flotilla of ancient ships,
their rusted hulls plying garden sands,
or weary waves
migrating to a welcoming shore.
symphonies of shadows dance
amongst the bulk of metal
creating beauty of their own.
a poem of interpretation
is up to us.
From the cities frantic commerce
along a calming path
a stand of quaking aspens
arises
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The important thing about a plane is that it’s happy to be free. It pushes you down before it lifts you up, and it rumbles and banks as it turns, and out the window through its tears the world spreads wide for you to see.
But the important thing about a plane is that it’s happy to be free.
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