Parataxis

Web (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

I.

There's this gorgeous moment in a Loren Eiseley essay when the writer touches a pencil to a strand of the web--forcing an intrusion into spider universe. He writes:

...Immediately there was a response. The web, plucked by its menacing occupant, began to vibrate until it was a blur. Anything that had brushed claw or wing against that amazing snare would be thoroughly entrapped. As the vibrations slowed, I could see the owner fingering her guidelines for signs of struggle. A pencil point was an intrusion into this universe for which no precedent existed. Spider was circumscribed by spider ideas; its universe was spider universe. All outside was irrational, extraneous, at best raw material for spider. As I proceeded on my way along the gully, like a vast impossible shadow, I realized that in the world of spider I did not exist. 

I stop, breath closing.
What cannot be named is irrational, extraneous.


II.

My mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
Hearing her say it out load was a pencil point inserted into my life.
I was 12.

Like Eiseley's spider, I too fingered the guidelines for signs of struggle--for that something that was bearing down on us,

isolating us

separating

cause from effect.

Does what you cannot name exist?

Shh....It was an irrational time:
my mom closing in on herself,
me learning how to watch, how to grow still,
and as I aged--how to escape out of the house to Brooklyn, to concerts, to parties, to boyfriends.

(Years later my husband would ask: Didn't they notice you were gone each weekend?)

My parents lived an interior life for the next five years.
We lived apart in the same house.
Sat down for dinner several nights each week.
It was a count down of days until the cancer was defeated.

A good war, 

                                            won 

                 even as we broke.

III.

Those days the metaphor of war slipped from our mouths with ease.

There was the war on poverty.
The war on cancer.
The war on drugs.

And there was Vietnam.

When Jack, my oldest brother, turned 18, he was number 2 in the draft lottery.
There was little uncertainty to his future.

My Da talked of Canada.
Jack told me how he and a buddy drank a fifth of Jack the night before they reported for the physical exam.

The average age of U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War was 19.

Jack would be deferred for medical reasons--wire in his jaw.
My mom would be diagnosed a month later.

She told only me about the cancer.  My brothers were not told.

IV.

We kept secrets and we aged across those five years.

Jack bought a VW bug.
Both doors were orange.
The hood was red.

My middle brother took to wearing brown leisure suits with wide ties.
He stopped banging out The Battle Hymn of the Republic on the piano at 6 AM each morning.
There were loud silences.

There were things I told no one.

My parents got high in the backyard with the neighbors.
My oldest brother crashed several cars.
My middle brother left home in a pearl-white 1961 Studebaker Lark.
He drove to Richland Center, WI to pay homage to Frank Lloyd Wright.
I got high on my way to school most mornings, some afternoons.
I made photographs.

V.

We were a study in parataxis.

Nothing touching.            

We were flawed,
circumscribed by our ideas, our fears.

This did not mean I was not loved.
I was, perhaps more.



Cited
Eiseley, Loren. (2004). “The Hidden Teacher.” The Advanced College Essay: Education and the Professions. 4th ed. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Kristin Dombek. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 9-21.

Poetry Break: The End and the Beginning

Circa 1967 (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

The End and the Beginning

 - WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA
  - TRANSLATED BY JOANNA TRZECIAK

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won’t

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Someone has to get mired

in scum and ashes,

sofa springs,

splintered glass,

and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder

to prop up a wall.

Someone has to glaze a window,

rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,

and takes years.

All the cameras have left

for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,

and new railway stations.

Sleeves will go ragged

from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,

still recalls the way it was.

Someone else listens

and nods with unsevered head.

But already there are those nearby

starting to mill about

who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes

sometimes someone still unearths

rusted-out arguments

and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew

what was going on here

must make way for

those who know little.

And less than little.

And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown

causes and effects,

someone must be stretched out

blade of grass in his mouth

gazing at the clouds.

Wislawa Szymborska, "The End and the Beginning " from Miracle Fair, translated by Joanna Trzeciak. Copyright © 2001 by Joanna Trzeciak. 

Patriotic (M.A. Reilly, Newark, NJ. 2014)

Ground Swell

Mark Jarman, 1952

Is nothing real but when I was fifteen,
Going on sixteen, like a corny song?
I see myself so clearly then, and painfully--
Knees bleeding through my usher’s uniform
Behind the candy counter in the theater
After a morning’s surfing; paddling frantically
To top the brisk outsiders coming to wreck me,
Trundle me clumsily along the beach floor’s
Gravel and sand; my knees aching with salt.
Is that all I have to write about?
You write about the life that’s vividest.
And if that is your own, that is your subject.
And if the years before and after sixteen
Are colorless as salt and taste like sand--
Return to those remembered chilly mornings,
The light spreading like a great skin on the water,
And the blue water scalloped with wind-ridges,
And--what was it exactly?--that slow waiting
When, to invigorate yourself, you peed
Inside your bathing suit and felt the warmth
Crawl all around your hips and thighs,
And the first set rolled in and the water level
Rose in expectancy, and the sun struck
The water surface like a brassy palm,
Flat and gonglike, and the wave face formed.
Yes. But that was a summer so removed
In time, so specially peculiar to my life,
Why would I want to write about it again?
There was a day or two when, paddling out,
An older boy who had just graduated
And grown a great blonde moustache, like a walrus,
Skimmed past me like a smooth machine on the water,
And said my name. I was so much younger,
To be identified by one like him--
The easy deference of a kind of god
Who also went to church where I did--made me
Reconsider my worth. I had been noticed.
He soon was a small figure crossing waves,
The shawling crest surrounding him with spray,
Whiter than gull feathers. He had said my name
Without scorn, just with a bit of surprise
To notice me among those trying the big waves
Of the morning break. His name is carved now
On the black wall in Washington, the frozen wave
That grievers cross to find a name or names.
I knew him as I say I knew him, then,
Which wasn’t very well. My father preached
His funeral. He came home in a bag
That may have mixed in pieces of his squad.
Yes, I can write about a lot of things
Besides the summer that I turned sixteen.
But that’s my ground swell. I must start
Where things began to happen and I knew it.

History

History (M.A. Reilly 2011)

The Stare's Nest by My Window


- Willam Butler Yeats

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned.
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war:
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Yeats write this poem when he was 57, living with his wife and two children. The context for the poem is the Irish Civil War. (BTW, in the west of Ireland, a stare is a starling.)

Recent Books about War & Civil Unrest: Grades 5-8

Novels
Agosín, Marjorie. (2014). I Lived on Butterfly Hill. Illustrated by Lee White. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers. (Pinochet’s takeover of Chile)
Avi. (2012). Sophia's War. New York: Beach Lane Books.
Bradman, Tony. (Ed.). (2014). Stories of WWI. London, UK: Orchard Books. (WWI)
Dallas, Sandra. (2014). Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky. Ann Arbor, MI: Sleeping Bear Press. (Japanese Interment, WWII)
Faulkner, Matt. (2014). Gaijin: American Prisoner of War. New York: Hyperion. (Japanese Interment, WWII)
Fleming, David. (2013). The Saturday Boy. Viking Children's (US-Afghanistan)
Foreman, Michael. (2014). War Game: Village Green to No-Man's-Land. London, UK: Pavillion. (WWI)
Gonzalez, Christina Diaz. (2012). A Thunderous Whisper. New York: Knopf Books for Young Readers. (Spanish Civil War/WWII)
Gonzalez, Christina Diaz. (2010). The Red Umbrella. New York: Knopf Books for Young Readers. (Castro's Revolution, Cuba, 1961)
Matti, Truus. (2013). Mister Orange. Brooklyn, NY: Enchanted Lion Books. (WWII - Set in Manhattan)
Morpurg, Michael. (2012/2015). A Medal for Leroy. New York: Square Fish. (WWI)
Myers, Walter Dean. (2013). Invasion. New York: Scholastic. (WWII) (Grade 8 and higher)

Pellegrino, Marge. (2014). Journey of Dreams. London, UK: Frances Lincoln Children's Books. (Guatemala, 1980s)
Voorhoeve, Anne C. (2012). My Family for the War. New York: Penguin. (Kindertransport, WWII)
Whelan, Gerard. (2013). The Guns of Easter. Dublin, Ireland: The O'Brien Press. (Dublin, 1916)

Novels in Verse/Poetry
Brown, Skilla. (2014). Caminar. Somerville, MA: Candlewick. (Guatemala, 1980s)
Frost, Helen. (2013). Salt: A Story of Friendship in a Time of War. New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (War of 1812)
Lewis, J. Patrick. (2014). Harlem Hellfighters. Illustrated by Gary Kelley. Mankato, MN: Creative Editions.  (World War I)

Lewis, J. Patrick. (2012). And the Soldiers Sang. Illustrated by Gary Kelley. Mankato, MN: Creative Editions.  (World War I)
Lewis, J. Patrick. (2009). The House. Illustrated by Robert Innocenti. Mankato, MN: Creative Editions.  (World War II to Present)
Nagai, Mariko. (2014). Dust of Eden: A Novel.  Park Ridge, IL: Albert Whitman & Company. (Japanese Interment, WWII)

Nonfiction

Arato, Rona. (2013). The Last Train: A Holocaust Story. Toronto, ON: Owlkids Books. (WWII/Holocaust)

Ellis, Deborah. (2010). Children of War: Voices of Iraqi Refugees. Toronto: Groundwood Books. (US-Iraq War)

Farrell, Mary Cronk & First Lieutenant Diane Carlson Evans. (2014). Pure Grit: How American World War II Nurses Survived Battle and Prison Camp in the Pacific. New York:  Abrams Books.

Marrin, Albert. (2104). A Volcano Beneath the Snow: John Brown's War Against Slavery. New York: Knopf Books for Young Readers. (1800-1859)

Matthews, Jenny. (2014). Children Growing Up with War. Somerville, MA: Candlewick.  (Refugee Camps, Contemporary)

Moss, Marissa. (2013). Barbed Wire Baseball. Illustrated by Yuko Shimizu. New York: Abrams Books. (Japanese Interment/WWII)

Stone,Tanya Lee. (2013). Courage Has No Color, The True Story of the Triple Nickles. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press. (WWII)

Walker, NIki. (2013). Why Do We Fight?: Conflict, War, and Peace. Toronto, ON: Owlkids Books.

Wilkes, Sybella.  (2010). Out of Iraq: Refugees' Stories in Words, Paintings and Music. Evans Brothers. (US-Iraq War)

"...someone still unearths/rusted-out arguments"

Lincoln (M.A. Reilly, 2013)

The End and the Beginning

Wislawa Szymborska

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won't
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall,
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We'll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

from Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wislawa Szymborska, 2001
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, NY

Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak

Copyright 2001 by Wislawa Szymborska.
All rights reserved.