Constellation

Here is a coffee table photo of my daughter

toothy smile and soft map of freckles

eyes open as palms

her face a whale’s call

a self-portrait

reminding this me

that moments are coastlines

and she lives there between land and sea

seven forever within her frame

Next to her a photo of my mother

the same age I am now

her eyes like Sirens

success stitched into her dress

The frame can hardly contain her

frozen life expanding like ice

Her voice breaks through the cracks: there is still time

Here is my fault line

where continents slide past each other

like cross country trains in the dark

where a prairie becomes a sudden gorge

revealing layers of sediment past

and the core is forced to the surface.

I hold one picture in each hand

and create a meridian

through my body

to link shores and seas

and torn continents

but each resists the shift

insists on territory

So I close my eyes and make each of us a planet

in a large enough galaxy

but with mutual pull

With my outstretched arms

I draw zodiac lines connecting our lights

And set the picture of our souls against the sky.

The Tiger's Wife

I guess I liked The Tiger's Wife, the bestselling novel by Téa Obreht, most because it reminded me of so many other novels. I don't mean that it's unoriginal, for it's fiercely imaginative and fresh, but rather that it created an intertexuality within my own mind as it spoke to other novels I love: The Deathless Man recalled the Golem in Kavalier and Clay, a wandering phantom that embodies the shadow side of human life and belief, but one who is conscious of his fate, like Melquiades from One Hundred Years of Solitude.. The tiger seemed so much like the tiger in Life of Pi, a reminder of the beast within and the veneer of domestication, of our uneasy relationship with our wild and gentle selves. The post-tragedy setting, the suspicion, the heavy sense of collective loss kept taking me back to The Unbearable Lightness of Being, reminding me how we often choose weight over escape, even as it causes us pain. At great risk, Natalia sets out to find not so much answers but meaning, not like a detective but more like an innocent, like Kundera's Teresa. The historical context, a cycle of tolerance and destruction among peoples, seems so much like the inevitable demise of the Buendias, though Albrecht's ending is not as brutal as García Márquez'. And the way the magical elements mesh with the realistic and historical narratives reminds me of the stories that speak loudest to me, like Kafka's Metamorphosis, Shakespeare's Tempest, Helprin's Winter's Tale, Borges' Labyrinths, even Wicked. There are many readers and critics who label works like The Tiger's Wife as fables, suggesting that the animal characters and heavy hand of destiny reduce the work to childish moral allegory. Instead, to me it is these features that bring the work into the archetypal, a landscape of the familiar, where our actions and experiences, however strange, make sense.

Origin

The intersections I'm most interested in right now are the growing overlap between cognitive psychology and neurology, the change of the human brain from reading brain to digital brain, common ground between mythology and science, the ways in which language shapes our thinking, and stories (fiction or film) and visual art that feature Jungian elements, folk tales, and myth.