Given that fear is the opposite of love, see phobia, see philia,

what is the opposite of obsession? The opposite of opposition?

Some fears are purely rational:

helminthophobia, the fear of being infested with worms,

hydrophobophobia, the fear of rabies. Also myxophobia,

the fear of slime, closely related to okraphobia,

a subset of lachanophobia, fear of vegetables.

Then again, there are words for fears of some of the finest things in life,

things without which our memories would be empty:

lakes, garlic, music,

meteors, colors, opinions,

flowers, otters, foreplay,

infinity, flutes, northern lights,

solitude, dancing, the heart,

justice, the sea, home,

stars, dawn, daylight,

knowledge, taste and the hearing of good news.

I do not understand anablephobia, the fear of looking up,

or the fears of chins, knees, hair, glass and names.

Of course, some fears are so rational, life without them would seem foreign.

Going to school, even learning itself? Petrifying, especially when the teacher

leaves the room just as you try the new task on your own, without a net,

and everyone is watching, waiting for you to wobble and fall.

Fear of snow makes sense for anyone living at the top of a steep hill,

for anyone with a slight case of cheimaphobia, fear of the cold,

leukophobia, fear of white, or taphophobia, fear of being buried alive.

For those who have been in love more than once, mnemophobia makes

perfect sense. At the first bars of a ballad, Memory can reduce one to tears.

Perhaps I even have a slight case of paralipophobia, fear of neglecting duty,

given the countless nightmares I have had, in which the pets I was caring for

died horrible deaths, left alone in hot, dry apartments for a week. Maybe

that’s why I played halfback instead of forward—a form of performophobia.

Some have climbed the pyramid of terror, from fear of pyramids, say, to

the fear of terror, then the fear of words, then of thoughts, then of the mind and last,

of the self itself.

I have not seen the words for the fears my friends report: fear of buttons,

of possums, insomnia, fundamentalists. Where is the word for the fears of

abortion, abortionists, and abortion protesters? Where are the diagnoses regarding

mosquitoes,  April 15, drunk drivers, divorce, insurance forms and panic attacks?

Falling sleep behind the wheel, ebola, identity theft and cactus? The phone ringing

in the middle of the night?

Perhaps single words, even those as elegant as athazagoraphobia, the fear of being ignored,

and angrophobia, that of becoming angry, do not suffice to encapsulate the fears that drive me:

fear of simultaneously landing on the ground, hearing the cracking ankle, and feeling shooting pain,

fear of thinking obscene thoughts about Jesus in church,

fear of misspelling the publisher’s name in a news story,

fear of people who love me more than I love them.

And where is fear of dropping the baby, fear that this perfect little gallon

of potential will be spilled, landing on her head, glassy eyed,

institutionalized for life, never logging her first laugh, all my fault?

Thanks, Phil Chen and Puget Sound Speaks, for letting me blog for them this year!

516 Prospect Street, Maplewood, New Jersey 07040
Phone 973-763-1905   Email: info@essexethical.org

Hope to see you!

Perhaps her conception was on an upbeat.
Perhaps one song is about the christening gown
knit from a single strand; she seemed to like wearing it.
Maybe the long ahhhhh notes, repeated, rising at the end,
are dedicated to the giant plush cardinal, the favorite bunny to pat,
the fascinating daily items: toilet paper roll, whisk, playing card.

Perhaps she is sad about the sky. Or excited
about her new variations on a theme, the song
of the brimming blue-veined breast, how warm,
taut-looming, how right. She is years too young for
zip-a-dee-doo-dah, but includes that verve in ahhhhh,
a fermata of locked-in eye contact. Her high squeals,
learned somehow from infant dolphins, talk to the dogs
two blocks away, try to tune her radio to our frequency.

Maybe soon she’ll sing of why she smiled first when falling asleep,
and laughed first in her dreams, sing of the safety of thresholds
in the darkness behind her eyes, letting her bubble over. But for now
she sings of slucking, sleeping while sucking. She sings of the taste of toe.
And she sings to her hands, and how they are still hers
whenever she turns them over.

This is from the new issue of Drunken Boat, and has a recording of me reading the poem as well.

“If we knew we were going to be the Beatles, we would’ve tried harder.”
—George Harrison, quoted by his eulogist, Eric Idle

He was the teneral child,
of celebration, departures together, anticipation,
of flying in vacation hats before the destination.

He was the green in my eye
future funambulist, tamer of gators.
He proclaimed, “I brought the loud in the house,”

ottered all summer in layers of liquid glee.Now what if we reinvented ourselves
new name new job new style new friends
on a regular basis, remembering dates of new births?

After the accident he gathered his buddies to spread the ashes
of his ring finger. He could still play. They met under the falls,
watching the edge. It looked like piano keys tickled fast.

This was before his soul’s vasectomy. Then,
domesticated by the shopping list, he fell too far down
the sleep staircase. We could all be Ringo or George,

maybe even John if we knew.

THE WORD KITE

In Italian, it’s cervo volante, flying red deer. In French, flying stag.

In Germany, it’s the same word as dragon. In Japan, octopus.

The Spanish cometa suggests the stars, and fengzheng, in China,

is the wind’s stringed instrument. Kite for us is a predatory bird,

from the Old English cyta, for which “no related word appears

in the cognate languages,” though we know now that kites

were once used by virgins, midwives and surviving twin sisters

to hang their laundry up to dry.

Perhaps the Dutch wouw really means a kind of bird that blooms;

the Finnish tulppaanikonen is a tulip turning itself as wide

as possible, just before its wings fall off;

the Thai wan-we is comfort that the moon comes back;

and the Latin, miluus, a toy for the Festival of Rise Towards the Sky.

In Afrikaans voilvlieg must be the unlikelihood that a bird seen once

on a tree would ever return. In Esperanto, I believe milvo

may capture most concisely “an elevator that can be steered.”

More words are needed:

Kitarsis: the flying of a kite soaked in one’s bad luck and illness

until it disappears; the letting go of the string of such a kite.

Kitekin: a miniature kite flown at the fetes for conceptions of royal successors.

Pismo domine: a letter to a deceased relative, flown at the end of a string.

Requeste de l’aire: a marriage proposal made while flying a kite hung with small, colored candle lanterns; alternatively, a kite flown with the question,

“What is the nature of my future?”

But stop. Enough.

Word is to string,

page is to kite,

as snail is to butterfly.

Look at the candlelike

light from the cabin

the shadows of light on snow

my husband inside

the smoke rising up, the warmth

the fire a little machine.

This small world

how the astronaut felt

looking at earth

the only sanctuary

for as far around

as can be traveled to tonight.

I love the mere existence of the word patience,
a complex idea in a small word, two syllables
for the ability to wait and work calmly through adversity.

A complex idea in a small world, in the eye
of a needle, a sculpture made of dust motes,
painted with a sharpened human hair: Mister

Sandaldjian’s tiny self portrait: his bald head rolling
down one of his hairs, suspended across the girders
of the needle his wife used to support them while he worked,

hunched over his microscope, building nine birds on one hair
of his 3-month old grandson, building the Pope holding a cross
two blood cells thick, adding color in the stillness between pulses.

Late at night, with less static, less dust, less vibration from traffic,
he’d work for 14 months on one. Miniaturists should wear silk,
refrain from speaking over their work. Breath kills. He crawled around

his table for weeks looking for the “supremely graceful ballerina
he refused to reattempt,” lost in a typhoon sneeze. It is a curse
to be big. Think of a cat’s bell and how hard it is to wear one.

I try to see what’s inside the pupil of my eye, close up, closer,
and see only my own night. But Mr. Sandaldjian sees, and sculpts.
Invite me, sir, to the eighty-third chamber of your nautilus shell.

It is glorious to be little, like the shadow of a bird crossing the sun,
the brittle last wafer of soap, the morning’s crescent moon,
the match’s first sharp instant, its small smell bright as mustard.