past due

In the air, all these distraught thoughts falling like licked fingers. Slippery tails with nails, leave a little nip, a mouth mark along the inner elbow.

I am walking there too, marking losses gained, marking the kingdom comes of all these red tweak last days.

On the radio, the interviewer asks the apocalyptic preacher when the last days will come. He says, "It could be now, in the next moment, it could be ten years. Every day I will burn with intensity for my God." He is an errant light pole on my day.

How is it reasonable to live with so much certainty in timelessness? If you are holding your hand around the blank-tank edge of the universe, what do you have? I am holding and I am finding my hand on the black edge of the tank of my universe and it is small, pitifully small--blank.

Though, there is something being illuminated. I am periscoped to my heart, I am turning each dark corner, reminging myself to stop looking for a knob. There is that and there are my many side-glances. They are not flirtatious or kind.

Indeed, between my teeth there is lemon candy. I spark it and I suck to sour, I sour it and I suck.

While outside, someone is singing operatically so their voice inches out over the buildings, a paint of wavering tone creeping upwards. I climb the wall to grasp a note and hold it like a groan, a keen. Pull it over my head to feel the warmth, that breath.

Then, there is the greatest shifting inside me, a finger rending apart.

*****************

Fuck your cultural hysteria. Fuck you.

the night came in

There are times in this city where I am uncertain that I live amongst thousands of people. It is so quiet. I have to get up from my chair and look out the window to see the people, finally hear the noise.

Our Solar Lounge

There is so much good news:

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The boy with the limp, with the body problem? I have seen him today joking with another student. As in Korean style joking: linking arms and wrestling mildly with each other, standing very near one another and walking together, linked somehow though your bodies (hands, heads, shoulders, something), no matter what your sex.

And he has done so, the link, the laughing, the joking with his friend, the talking before class. He has done so today and it has made me extremely happy.

I realize I am a bit too interested in his life, but I am so happy to see him acting just like a normal kid: talking, joshing about, waiting for his friend to follow him on the playground. I am so happy to see who has made him his friend. A nice boy from my winter English camp. A boy who gets very nervous whenever I speak to him, like so many boys at this school. He is the body problem student's friend.

A month ago I was told by another student, about the body problem student: "He doesn't speak." And now, I see, obviously he does.

And even when he must go to P.E. and shuffle about weirdly, he's got his friend. I watch them link arms out on the playground and the boy with the body problem drags a bit, but his friend holds him up with his arms. He sometimes carries him essentially in his arms and pretends not to notice how they zig zag because of the boy's jolting legs.

That's grace, my friends. God, it's grace!

********************

He told me so many things that made me happy. I thought about many clay pictures. What is moldable? What could make me smile?

The day wasn't long enough for everything I wanted to see. It needed to be lengthened for several years. That's how much I liked the moment when he said, "Come on, lady!"

********************

I will miss this country terribly.

I will miss seeing young men wear teddy bear t-shirts unironically (complete with fake fuzzy fur on said teddy bear).

I will miss kimchi mandu.

I will miss homemade dubu (tofu) from the visor-wearing adjumma lady who speaks some English.

I will miss my students being so excited to see me on the street that they all stop and say "Hello, Ruth Teacher! Where are you going?"

I will miss that they (my students) say I am "beautiful." Especially, my blue eyes.

I will miss hangul and the beauty of a shape-driven language and how I suddenly must realize English is also "shape-driven."

I will miss the weather and the light that lingers in my 2-bedroom apartment and how I have so much space and time and Korean money.

Certainly, I will always miss my school lunch. It is the best school lunch I have ever had in my life. I will miss it terribly as I will miss my students and their shock/awe/amusement when I speak English.

I will miss it. Who knew? I would miss it.

Happy Buddha's birthday

It is only 7:20 p.m. Shouldn't it be more than that?

The day stuffed already with nothing, and nothing growing, so that each minute feels as if it is seventy years old--slow-paced and shuffling. Shouldn't this be more than that?

I keep looking out the window hoping that the day will have gone dark. It is now just. So keep going.

I keep reading a book, finishing one and taking another, saving one for my airplane ride home, thinking through that and beyond, then back to the steady fact of the now and here, the screams of the children outside. The delight of a troupe riding bicycles together. If a circus came just now, I'm sure I'd sigh and give up. My bored heart scoffing at tight ropes, secretly mouthing the air with infant want.

My body given over to impatience. To record the shape of a bruise, to graph a presence and not forget that. Not forget each corresponding x/y and the shape of the wave, to make that hold steady, want.

But, dear, all this fucking waiting! I crumple so many sheets with my paranoid mathmatics.

Waiting, which is desire, which is suffering.

Buddha said, tanha. This splitting mouth of tanha, this craving, which he called a "thirst" is at the root of the incapacity to spend a day.

spring double-header

A little deedle-dee. A text message from the weekend flap.

Chime to a distraction. Chime to a ching?

The rice fields are being prepared for what comes next. (Summer.) I am prepared for next. Green shoots, the outgrowth and the back-look.

Chime to a chime to a chime.

I forgot to put the plan in my pocket and so I let him do anything. I was outgrowth. I was green. Bending to a will.

Chime to a chimera, a khaki call to someone. Which means: I called bland and nothing, half past midnight.

Yet, there is spring, there is green: it is a window.

Oh Dear, Lady, Go, go!

*************************
My view on the way home from school:



Causes me to say: Yes, we troll, yes we wet, yes we do no work in the field, we do nothing dear, yes we do green though, we do.

It is spring and we are fools.

jimjilbang and jonesing

Last weekend, I went to a jimjilbang for the first time. [Not my picture, but you get the drift.]

I left with this impression: why don't we have these places in the US of A? I can think of so many reasons.

Jimjilbang involve a same-sex public bath with several different pools--cool, hot, ginseng, jade, hot tub, calm waters--you name it. In the same room, there are women sitting on stools washing themselves, and others standing in open shower stalls washing themselves, and small girls running around naked amidst general happy nakedness. My friend and I, foreign and naked among them not daring to look too long anywhere.

And thus, caught up in the weirdness of walking around naked with many, many Asian women, I have experienced the height of living high: being scrubbed down, exfoliated if you will, by a portly adjumma wearing a black lace bra and black silk panties. [Re-reading this sentence makes me pause, but I assure you she was all business despite my waygookin-ness and my general state of petrified nudity. I feared slipping off the table, buck naked, slathered up with soap and floundering people! Floundering!] She scrubbed my skin hard and without embarassment, sloughing off those old cells of mine. She left me bare and soft like a baby. All rough patches totally gone for only 20,000 won ($20)! Shit, that's a steal.

Later, my friend and I went into the sauna area where families, couples, old people, young people, hip people, unhip people, young men alone, young women in groups all milled about eating baked eggs, watching tv, and occasionally going in to small oven like caves for a sweat soak. Everyone lounged in their identical pajamas.

We went to sweat in the jade room, then ate some eggs, and got a massage in a massage chair that made my spine jiggle and consistently squeezed my calves like a gentle man for 10 minutes. Only 1,000 won ($1).

I say, I have been baked like bread in Korea, leaning up against a rough log of wood while the echoes of Korean voices speaking Korean weaved thier music around me, and I have liked it. I have soaked myself in the ginseng bath and hoped to be healed of all negative influences. I have watched all bodies going in and out of the water, naked. I made my own conclusions about body image and hoped, again, for the best.

And then, I left with the feeling that I had swam all day and was murky and relaxed and clean as a whistle and several ounces lighter without my skin and feeling a bit better/worse about being naked.

Jimjilbang, I love you.

day and limelight

It felt a lot like the perfect day, except it was Thursday.

***********************
I bought dubu (tofu) from the woman on the street. It is the most amazing tofu I have ever tasted. I don't know why I haven't bought it before, but something kept me from making the exchange of money for food.

Eating it started a memory in my head of a and I in Spokane. We often bought a brand of organic tofu that championed itself as the "microbrew" of tofu. And it was. a and I bought it and used it in our cooking in his large kitchen full of odd foods. We cooked it with the backdoor open in the summer, when we were sweating over the rice cooker or stirring eggs into noodles. a and I cooked it when we were fighting and a and I cooked it when we weren't. I rarely bought it for myself. a and I always played music in the background of everything we did and often, I played music in the background when I was alone. In that way we fit together.

This lady's homemade dubu was better than that tofu, better in its own way. More pure, less showy. And she sells it on the street in front of my apartment, wearing an apron and gloves. The tofu comes wrapped in a plastic bag and as you walk up the sidwalk to your building door it will feel cold and weighty in your hand. A trapped square of white night.

A large and solid white block. A sweet, simple taste.