Bright Lights, Big City

Warm greetings from snowy Tianjin! All is well; I’m safe, healthy, alive, etc. All of my needs have been tended to, and most of my expectations have been exceeded. Really, I’m a little embarrassed by the expectations I had for this country and for this city. This is modern China. If reading the NY Times every day for the last three years has taught me anything, it’s that this is the future of our world. I still can’t tell you if that’s a good or a bad thing; no one can, I don’t think. But it’s fascinating walking around in a place like this, where the oncoming millennium seems to be converging (or colliding, I suppose) with an ancient world. A subway that feels like an Epcot ride, an airport that looks like the set in Synecdoche, New York, and an ocean of history just below the surface, bubbling up in small, strange, unexpected ways that I might be cognizant of only because I'm new to it all and always vigilant. To be sure, Tianjin isn’t Shanghai, or Tokyo, or Seoul, but it’s huge. It’s immense, almost overpowering; so much so that I can’t imagine living in a city bigger than this one (how could one of those super-cities not be overpowering?). 10 million. That’s how many people live here. I’ve heard 8, 10, and 12 from various anecdotal sources, so I’m averaging them when I say 10. But I’ve heard, also, that no one knows how many people live here, that no one can know because so many new residents are unregistered. The twenty fastest growing cities in the world are all in China—and this is one of them. It’s alive and chaotic like no other city I’ve ever seen.

I’m ashamed of how nice my apartment is. It’s nicer than anything I need, and better than what I’m conditioned to think a teacher should have the means to attain. I can get lost in the view from the 20th floor—the neon cityscape at night, the sea of skyscrapers that goes on for miles—and I do, often. There’s no such thing as a “downtown” here; skyscrapers are built wherever they’re needed, wherever they’re wanted, and the effect this has on pedestrians, I can tell you, is disorienting. Getting my bearings will take time. So far, my approach has been to walk in one direction till I’m out of the forest, so to speak, till the buildings shrink down to normal size—and I can’t do it. You can walk for miles (or km, here) and a ways off in the distance, behind the haze, wherever you go, there are invariably more buildings looming, silver and gray and forbidding.

None of this is bad news in the least, mind you. The sooner I begin to understand this place, the sooner it will no doubt start to bore me. For now, it’s bewildering and magnificent and only slightly oppressive. From my window, the flashing lights, the ceaseless din of car horns, the fireworks at night all call out like a harsh challenge from a bully: dig deep, adapt, show me what you’re made of, there’s nowhere to run, you’re a part of all this now. Testing my mettle, both in the classroom and every day in the streets, for right now at least feels really, really good.

There’s been snow on the ground here since before I arrived, and tonight it’s snowing again, so in honor of that, here’s a poem called “The Snowbound City” by a poet who survived on his own on the Alaskan frontier for decades, sort of like a less tragic, less puerile version of the kid from Into the Wild. I like it and hope, as always, that you do too.
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The Snowbound City

by John Haines

I believe in this stalled magnificence,
this churning chaos of traffic,
a beast with broken spine,
its hoarse voice hooded in feathers
and mist; the baffled eyes
wink amber and slowly darken.

Of men and women suddenly walking,
stumbling with little sleighs
in search of Tibetan houses —
dust from a far-off mountain
already whitens their shoulders.

When evening falls in blurred heaps,
a man losing his way among churches
and schoolyards feels under his cold hand
the stone thoughts of that city,

impassable to all but a few children
who went on into the hidden life
of caves and winter fires,
their faces glowing with disaster.
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Goodbye, Occident

The long and arduous process of packing has commenced. Tomorrow morning I depart, and Thursday afternoon I arrive in Tianjin. Today, while out and about running errands I went to mass at the old parish where I went to elementary school. Attending mass on a Tuesday is atypical for me, but I wanted this morning to sit for awhile and think about my next transition in the company of the nice, old people who go to mass every day. But to my surprise, I found the church filled to the brim with students when I stepped inside. So I sat in the back and observed, and listened to a homily about childhood and adulthood, about the struggles of growing up, and the things a person needs to have in good supply to become a happy and effectual grown-up. It was poignant and a little surreal; I felt like a character in crisis in a movie, returning to his roots for wisdom on how to live and live well. Had it been a movie, I probably would have teared up and emerged resolute and certain of how to make the most of the next phase of my life; instead, the principal scolded the whole congregation for not singing loud enough and none of the students' mothers in the back would give me the sign of peace, presumably because I either look like I have a cold or they suspected I had dubious motives for attending children's mass. I feel better, nonetheless. I have a long afternoon ahead of me, trying to cram more into suitcases than I can probably get away with at the airport, so let me leave you with a small litany of poems that have been on my mind, for various reasons I really just don't have time fully flesh out right now. Trust me though, they're worth a read-through. I'll see you again on the other side.
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Poem at Thirty
by Michael Ryan

The rich little kids across the street
twist their swings in knots. Near me,
on the porch, wasps jazz old nesting tunes
and don't get wild over human sweat.
This is the first summer of my middle life.
I ought to be content. The mindless harsh
process of history; with its diverse murders
and starvations, its whippings, humiliations,
child-tyrants, and beasts, I don't care for
or understand. Nor do I understand
restlessness that sometimes stops my sleep.

Waking, those mornings, is like being thrown from a train.
All you know comes to falling:
the body, in its witless crooning for solidity,
keeps heading for the ground.
There is no air, no sound, nothing
but dumb insistence of body weight
coming down, and there is no thought of love,
or passing time, or don't want to be alone.
Probably one hundred thousand impressions
wrinkle the brain in a moment like this,
but if you could think about it
you'd admit the world goes on in any case,
roars on, in fact, without you, on its endless iron track.



But most mornings I ease awake:
also a falling,
but delicate as an agile wing
no one may touch with hands,
a transparent wing like a distant moan
arriving disembodied of pleasure or pain,
a wing that dissolves on the tongue,
a wing that has never flown.

Because I've awakened like this,
I think I could love myself quietly
and let the world go on.

So today I watched a pudgy neighbor
edge her lawn, and heard the small blade whine;
I saw her husband, the briefcase man,
whiz off in his Mercedes without a glance.
I believe I'm beginning to understand
that I don't know what such things mean:
stupid pain or pure tranquillity,
desire's dull ache or conquering the body,
the need to say we and be known to someone
or what I see in myself as I sit here alone.

The sun glares most mornings
like an executive's thick pinky diamond,
and slowly the dark backs off
This is one reason this morning I awakened.



No one can tell you how to be alone.
Some fine people I've known swirl to me
in airy forms like just so much hot dust.
They have all moved through in dreams.
A lover's smell, the gut laugh of a friend,
become hard to recall as a particular wind.

No one can tell you how to be alone.
Like the deep vacuum in sleep, nothing
holds you up or knocks you down, only
it doesn't end in waking but goes on and on.
The tangles of place, the floating in time,
you must accept gently like a favorite dream.

If you can't, and you don't, the mind
unlocks the mind. Madness, with his lewd grin,
always waits outside the window, always
wanting to come in. I've gone out before,
both to slit his throat and to kiss his hand.
No one can tell you how to be alone:

Watch tiny explosions as flowers break ground;
hear the children giggle, rapid and clean.
It's hard to care about ordinary things.
Doesn't pain expand from lack of change?
I can't grasp exactly the feelings of anyone.
No one can tell you how to be alone.



At thirty the body begins to slow down.
Does that make for the quiet on this porch,
a chemical ability to relax and watch?
If a kid bounces her pelvis against a chain-link fence,
bounces so metal sings
and it seems she must be hurting herself
how old must I get before I tell her to stop?

Right now, I let her do it.
She's so beautiful in her filthy T-shirt
and gym shorts, her hair swings with each clang,
and she can do no wrong.
I let her do it as background music
to storm clouds moving in like a dark army.
I let her do it as a fond wish for myself
I feel the vibration of the fence
as a wasp feels voices on a pane of glass.
The song in it I can't make out.

This day, then, ends in rain
but almost everyone will live through it.
Tomorrow's thousands losing their loved ones
have not yet stepped into never being the same again.
Maybe the sun's first light will hit me
in those moments, but I'd gladly wake to feel it:
the dramatic opening of a day,
clean blood pumping from the heart.

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Ray
by Hayden Carruth

How many guys are sitting at their kitchen tables
right now, one-thirty in the morning, this same
time, eating a piece of pie? - that's what I
wondered. A big piece of pie, because I'd just
finished reading Ray's last book. Not good pie,
not like my mother or my wife could've
made, but an ordinary pie I'd just bought, being
alone, at the Tops Market two hours ago. And how
many had water in their eyes? Because of Ray's
book and especially those last poems written
after he knew: the one about the doctor telling
him, the one where he and Tess go down to
Reno to get married before it happens and shoot
some craps on the dark baize tables, the one
called "After-Glow" about the little light in the
sky after the sun sets. I can just hear him,
if he were still here and this were somebody
else's book, saying, "Jesus," saying, "This
is the saddest son of a bitch of a book I've
read in a long time," saying, "A real long time."
And the thing is, he knew we'd be saying this
about his book, he could just hear us saying it,
and in some part of him he was glad! He
really was. What crazies we writers are
our heads full of language like buckets of minnows
standing in the moonlight on a dock. Ray
was a good writer, a wonderful writer, and his
poems are good, most of them and they made me
cry, there at my kitchen table with my head down,
me, a sixty-seven-year-old galoot, an old fool
because all old men are fools, they have to be,
shoveling big jagged chunks of that ordinary pie
into my mouth, and the water falling from my eyes
onto the pie, the plate, my hand, little speckles
shining in the light, brightening the colors, and I
ate that goddamn pie, and it tasted good to me.

("Ray" refers here to Raymond Carver, whose own genius is most clearly illustrated here.)
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Three Truths, One Story
by Maurice Manning


In faith, dear friend, I can't make up
a name like Turnipseed, or that

I knew a man who went by such
a goodly name. Now, everything

I'm telling you is true. This man
had come from people who knew what they

were doing once, and why it mattered.
Do you know what you're doing? Do you

know something old? A turnipseed
is tiny, it's a little bit

of hardly anything. I guess
that's something old to know: you could hold

an itty bit of almost nothing
and know it's something still, and know

it's always been that way. Do you
like knowing things like that? I knew

a bunch of folks some years ago
whose name was Stonecypher, I kid

you not, and some of them were still
engaged with stones and had the hands

to prove it. They lived way out. Speaking
of out there places, my father told

me just the other day a tale
about his mother: Mama came

from Leatherwood, he said, Lord knows
what they were doing there, back then.

And that is true for sure; there's not
a living person left to say

what they were doing there. They had
a stripey mule, as Mama said—

the stripes run crossed the ginny's flank—
she told me once, but she is gone,

and missing her has gotten old.
There are words and there are deeds, and both

are dying out, dying away
from where they were and what they meant.

God save the man who has the heart
to think of anything more sad.

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The Lost Pilot
by James Tate


for my father, 1922-1944

Your face did not rot
like the others--the co-pilot,
for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,
the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.
But your face did not rot

like the others--it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their

distinction. If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening,
down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you,
read your face as Dallas,
your hoodlum gunner, now,

with the blistered eyes, reads
his braille editions. I would
touch your face as a disinterested

scholar touches an original page.
However frightening, I would
discover you, and I would not

turn you in; I would not make
you face your wife, or Dallas,
or the co-pilot, Jim. You

could return to your crazy
orbiting, and I would not try
to fully understand what

it means to you. All I know
is this: when I see you,
as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life,
spin across the wilds of the sky
like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead. I feel as if I were
the residue of a stranger's life,
that I should pursue you.

My head cocked toward the sky,
I cannot get off the ground,
and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling
to tell me that you are doing
well, or that it was mistake

that placed you in that world,
and me in this; or that misfortune
placed these worlds in us.

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Next Day
by Randall Jarrell

Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,
I take a box
And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.
The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical
Food-gathering flocks
Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,

Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise
If that is wisdom.
Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves
And the boy takes it to my station wagon,
What I've become
Troubles me even if I shut my eyes.

When I was young and miserable and pretty
And poor, I'd wish
What all girls wish: to have a husband,
A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wish
Is womanish:
That the boy putting groceries in my car

See me. It bewilders me he doesn't see me.
For so many years
I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me
And its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me,
The eyes of strangers!
And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile

Imaginings within my imagining,
I too have taken
The chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog
And we start home. Now I am good.
The last mistaken,
Ecstatic, accidental bliss, the blind

Happiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm
Some soap and water--
It was so long ago, back in some Gay
Twenties, Nineties, I don't know . . . Today I miss
My lovely daughter
Away at school, my sons away at school,

My husband away at work--I wish for them.
The dog, the maid,
And I go through the sure unvarying days
At home in them. As I look at my life,
I am afraid
Only that it will change, as I am changing:

I am afraid, this morning, of my face.
It looks at me
From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate,
The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look
Of gray discovery
Repeats to me: "You're old." That's all, I'm old.

And yet I'm afraid, as I was at the funeral
I went to yesterday.
My friend's cold made-up face, granite among its flowers,
Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body
Were my face and body.
As I think of her and I hear her telling me

How young I seem; I am exceptional;
I think of all I have.
But really no one is exceptional,
No one has anything, I'm anybody,
I stand beside my grave
Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.

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Birthday
by Henri Cole

When I was a boy, we called it punishment
to be locked up in a room. God's apparent
abdication from the affairs of the world
seemed unforgivable. This morning,
climbing five stories to my apartment,
I remember my father's angry voice
mixed up with anxiety & love. As always,
the possibility of home—at best an ideal—
remains illusory, so I read Plato, for whom love
has not been punctured. I sprawl on the carpet,
like a worm composting, understanding things
about which I have no empirical knowledge.
Though the door is locked, I am free.
Like an outdated map, my borders are changing.

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Questions of Travel
by Elizabeth Bishop

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
--A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
--Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
--And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

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