On giving thanks-
It’s snowing in the Bronx. New Yorkers love it when I tell them I’ve never seen snow before, that this will be my first winter. As if they needed to remember that there are places on earth where it’s summer all year round, where the water -- be it the seawater, drinking water, rain -- is always warm. The snow is dusting the black tree branches, whitening the tops of the steaming parked cars, dissolving when it hits the gray pavement. It is slower and more deliberate than rain. Snow drifts. It touches you, imperceptibly, then melts. I wish you were here.
Yesterday, I went to the American Museum of Natural History with my friend Z. We went to college together, and won awards for our poetry together. Now she’s visiting from Hong Kong, where she has a solid and enviable life as an art dealer and a wife. It was my first time in the AMNH too, and I intend to go back to take it in slowly: the dioramas, the perfect taxidermy, the windows into elsewheres. The wolves in particular moved me.
Lonesome George was also newly on display.
He wasn’t particularly old for a tortoise at his death but, as a Pinta Island tortoise, George was literally the last of his kind. He seems to be doing okay in the afterlife.
Here’s an amazing photo of Smithsonian taxidermists at work, and a 2011 article on the art of restoring those dioramas.
(Last night: Z and M and me, talking over sliders in St. Mark’s. They had sweet wine, I had a bitter ale. We were discussing God. Z said she believed. M said she wasn’t sure, but she acknowledged that there was so much beauty in the religion we were raised in.
How could one not be moved? She reminded me of a class we took together on Saint Augustine. I said I did not know about God, whether I believed in Him as a force or an ontological being, but what I believed in was belief.)
Today I canceled a plane ticket to North Carolina. I loved this man all throughout summer, and on the day of the first snowfall I told him so, once more, again, but maybe for the last time.
My no-longer-lover, still making his machines in another borough, a loss on his shoulders he might never comprehend. For Christmas he flies back to California. Santa Monica is a town named after Saint Augustine’s mother. I read this in a poem by Ron Padgett.
Tomorrow, Thanksgiving.
Saint Augustine agonized over impermanence. (The wolves, frozen forever mid-leap under a Minnesota moon.) What, in this swiftly changing world, he wondered, would remain? (The brown bear, on his hind legs, being carefully painted back into life after death.) Was there not something [was it only nothing?] above this earth, bigger than all we could know and comprehend, which would outlast our flesh, our money, our pain? (“This is the most expensive breakup I’ve ever had,” I sobbed into the US Airways phone line.) When we go, where do we go? (Lonesome George nosing his way through the undergrowth of an Ecuadorian island, his possible mate expiring in hunger, George unaware that he was at that moment the rarest creature on earth.)
“For thou art ever the same because thou knowest unchangeably all things which remain neither the same nor forever,” Augustine wrote.
Tomorrow, Thanksgiving. My gratefulness in the face of loss, my gratefulness for what might remain. My thanks given for what, gracefully -- like the bear and the wolf and my sad love and the snow as it hits the ground -- transforms.
Yesterday, I went to the American Museum of Natural History with my friend Z. We went to college together, and won awards for our poetry together. Now she’s visiting from Hong Kong, where she has a solid and enviable life as an art dealer and a wife. It was my first time in the AMNH too, and I intend to go back to take it in slowly: the dioramas, the perfect taxidermy, the windows into elsewheres. The wolves in particular moved me.
Lonesome George was also newly on display.
He wasn’t particularly old for a tortoise at his death but, as a Pinta Island tortoise, George was literally the last of his kind. He seems to be doing okay in the afterlife.
Here’s an amazing photo of Smithsonian taxidermists at work, and a 2011 article on the art of restoring those dioramas.
(Last night: Z and M and me, talking over sliders in St. Mark’s. They had sweet wine, I had a bitter ale. We were discussing God. Z said she believed. M said she wasn’t sure, but she acknowledged that there was so much beauty in the religion we were raised in.
How could one not be moved? She reminded me of a class we took together on Saint Augustine. I said I did not know about God, whether I believed in Him as a force or an ontological being, but what I believed in was belief.)
Today I canceled a plane ticket to North Carolina. I loved this man all throughout summer, and on the day of the first snowfall I told him so, once more, again, but maybe for the last time.
My no-longer-lover, still making his machines in another borough, a loss on his shoulders he might never comprehend. For Christmas he flies back to California. Santa Monica is a town named after Saint Augustine’s mother. I read this in a poem by Ron Padgett.
Tomorrow, Thanksgiving.
Saint Augustine agonized over impermanence. (The wolves, frozen forever mid-leap under a Minnesota moon.) What, in this swiftly changing world, he wondered, would remain? (The brown bear, on his hind legs, being carefully painted back into life after death.) Was there not something [was it only nothing?] above this earth, bigger than all we could know and comprehend, which would outlast our flesh, our money, our pain? (“This is the most expensive breakup I’ve ever had,” I sobbed into the US Airways phone line.) When we go, where do we go? (Lonesome George nosing his way through the undergrowth of an Ecuadorian island, his possible mate expiring in hunger, George unaware that he was at that moment the rarest creature on earth.)
“For thou art ever the same because thou knowest unchangeably all things which remain neither the same nor forever,” Augustine wrote.
Tomorrow, Thanksgiving. My gratefulness in the face of loss, my gratefulness for what might remain. My thanks given for what, gracefully -- like the bear and the wolf and my sad love and the snow as it hits the ground -- transforms.
