I had a date last night. We’d been planning it for over a week. I even got a haircut in the morning. I put my daughter to bed a little early so I could be almost on time.
I’m taking my assignment to do a weekly Artist Date (see The Artist’s Way) very seriously. Julia Cameron insists that it should be a solo affair, time alone to recharge, but with a nine month old, it is next to impossible to find both time alone and to see friends, and this week I decided to combine my artist date with a friend date.
It was a poetry night: Tongo Eisen-Martin in conversation with Zeina Hashem Beck at Green Apple Books on the Park. Tongo is the current SF Poet Laureate, a powerful figure that stands out as one of the few remaining voices from a San Francisco that was disappearing before I got here. I respect his work and his opinions, and if he is sitting down with this woman then I should probably get to know her as well.
I carried O, her latest book of poems around for a week thinking I’d read it to Maya when we had some down time. She was fascinated by the vibrant cover, a golden ring creating a neon effect on the red background, with purple hands implicating the physicality of the book. One afternoon I open to “Time,” and read aloud as she crawls around on the front stoop. Instantly I recognize this as a prayer from a mother to a daughter, and to herself.
When I ask her to inject herself, I’m asking her to live
without me, & she knows it. When her legs trembled,
& I soothed with “I’m here, I’m here,”
she reminded me: “But you can’t do anything.”
Her daughter is eleven, but I can already hear those same words from Maya, when she bangs her head, crying and pushing me away because it hurts, and it’s true, I can’t take back the fall, the missed catch. Can’t do anything except be there, be with her.
All of her poems are like this, the words tumbling out, straight into my heart. They poems grab me and say, hello, yes, I’ve written these for you. I feel like I’m talking with a long-lost sister, born in Beirut and raised by the 90s, a mother and lover, a realist but also a dreamer.
The reading was as lovely as we could have hoped. Watching Tongo perform was a treat, and Zeina’s poems appeared in a new light when read aloud. She reads “I kiss the tiny tears on her fingertips,” and pronounces tears to rhyme with bears, where I had read tears, those salty drops that come out of your eye. Both versions fit, and the homophone feels intentional. The book is full of clever and unconventional uses of words, turning nouns into verbs and places into adjectives: “I Beiruted East Houston”. Reading her poetry is fun, listening to her speak is fun, and I wonder if we can be friends.
Here is another fragment from a poem about her other daughter, which does the work of poetry. It doesn’t tell us what motherhood is about or what it looks like; it conveys the emotions and sensation of being a mother, shows us what it means to her.
…This is not about heroism.
This is not about selflessness, for you know too well
how many times I’ve refused to play cards with you,
how many times I’ve failed to listen, how I obsess
& disappear in search of words I don’t always
understand. Perhaps this is an apology. Perhaps I’m saying
life will sometimes infect your daughter’s lung
& fracture your ankle in the same week.
& most days, the car doesn’t break down,
& the children are healthy, & your husband
loves you, but you will be terrified nevertheless,
& sometimes empty. It’s okay if you forget
to put one foot in front of the other
I wanted to mark each poem, each page, to remind myself to come back to that one, to remember that you are not alone when you want to rage about marriage or wear lipstick, both of which feel odd to say aloud but it is true. Sometimes I want to wear lipstick (and not cover it up with a mask), and sometimes I want to rage about the parts of life that feel unfair, but today I want to sit here with Zeina, my older and wiser sister, and listen to her stories.
This was really fun to read, and I enjoyed being able to engage with the pieces of your life that you shared!
So beautiful! Reading your reading about her reading - I love it! And I love that you’re committing to Julia Cameron’s instructions in the best way you can - so exciting!