I haven’t posted much lately because of everything going on in my personal life, the things I don’t feel like sharing with the universe in part because of how they could affect other people. It’s interesting that some of my correspondence with Maurice this semester was about this topic. I read Stephen Dunn’s The Insistence of Beauty this semester. Although I wrote an annotation on another poem in the book, I was (and still am) haunted by the poem “Juarez.” In the poem, the speaker relays a story that his wife repeatedly asked him not to tell, that she was embarrassed about. You realize, as you read the poem, that the story becomes iconic in their relationship. He recognizes her story as a moment in her past that made her into the woman he fell in love with; she’s just plain embarrassed by it. So he stops telling the story. Their relationship dissolves. As a reader, we see how the shutting away of the story was a piece — maybe a small piece but a piece nonetheless — of the breakdown of their relationship. It’s possible, of course, that the poem isn’t based on reality, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it as though it was. He puts the story out there again, not just at a cocktail party for a few people to hear, but in a poem which thousands of people would read. I also imagined the wife, now the ex-wife, reading the poem, and maybe for the first time upon reading it realizing how the shutting away of the story contributed to the fall-out of the marriage. How sad would that be? The story must hurt more now — that she was embarrassed by it, that it’s shared this way, and that it had that affect on her relationship. Maybe it would become less embarrassing and just plain sadder for what it became, the new role it took on in her life.I know that much of my personal life ends up in my poetry. Whether it’s there directly (writing in the first person) or indirectly (writing about what I see or imagine that frames my perspective), it’s there. So why the hesitancy to blog about it? I guess that in a poem, the freedom remains to change the text because the rhythm is better. There’s more attention to the value of a single word. People are less inclined to see the situation as only my life. Here, it’s simply my life as I’m telling it.

Maurice and I wrote about the value of sometimes not including information in some poems because of the impact on other people — that despite the importance poetry has in our lives, its importance will never be greater than the people we care about. So all that said, I try to be cautious with my words, to recognize that they will never be used as weapons, and to try to maintain sensitivity when they could be perceived as weapons despite my intention.

When I was growing up my dad had a cousin with severe drug and alcohol problems. Larry didn’t come around the family much but my dad hired him to do landscaping work at his office and sometimes at our house. They had been really close growing up, Larry kind of like a younger brother to my dad. I’m starting to understand how my dad must have had to detach from Larry, to sometimes throw tools that he thought might help Larry get his life on track, but that he never (at least from what I saw) invested his emotional energy in trying to make Larry clean up. Larry died when I was nineteen. He had a stroke or heart attack while on his girlfriend’s sofa. He wasn’t even forty. I never really got to know him for the obvious reasons. I also have a cousin who I haven’t really known since I was a kid. He’s had his own drug problems and even spent a couple minutes dead until revived. He seemed to have some sort of awakening after that, but eventually went right back to the drugs. It is likely it will kill him too. I would like to believe that behavior like this is just irresponsible, but I’m understanding.

But nothing changes the sadness I feel.

My father said he could understand why I did what I did — how I wouldn’t do anything differently for a child. Now I see the responsibility I have in adhering to my boundaries. Because I don’t want to have to do this for a child — and now I’m learning that I can’t, even if they end up in a situation like this. My responsibility as a parent is raising my kids as best I can to avoid a problem like this in their own lives. I can’t stop it from happenning — but I can live in a way that teaches them they’ll have to deal with their own consequences. The childhood years I have with them to help form their ethics, beliefs, and behaviors need to be as responsible and stable as I can make them. And I can’t just tell them that they need to learn to deal with their own consequences, I have to show them that. I had to show it to myself too.

I feel more hopeful than I have in a long time. My sister said recently that I needed to relinquish expectations. Another friend said, You can’t have a relationship with someone without expectation. They’re both right.

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