I forgot about the tradition: archiving my new year’s poems from the past six years, including last year, which really feels like five minutes ago. In the spirit of that tradition, and since BB reminded me of the great poet John Yau tonight, here’s my January 2007 poem — though I’m more interested in what’s past than what’s to come.

Summers, Mimi’s

These days, when I can’t sleep I think of
those nights, my grandfather snoring
down the hall, the cream shag carpet,
the shadows under the door,

the glowing green silence of the microwave’s
digital clock blinking in terror over
and over
and over
and over, its
reflection slapping the wall.

Remember the rust-red pull-out sofa squeaking
like a dying pig as I turned
sideways to watch the Swarthmore night
behind a balcony veil sheered too thin;

remember getting up again and again
first to fold shut the metal coat closet,
then to draw, as a full sail, heavy drapes over the black night,
the laughing moon, thus creating

a peaceful sea, an enclosed cocoon of a living room, which,
these scores of years later, I’d remember to remember
like a discarded book or a dress my mother wore,
lying in this Boston bed, staring at this Boston floor.

Happy birthday to 3-year-old JONAH…

Happy birthday to 3-day-old HELEN…

and happy birthday (again) to 3-week-old KAYEN.

Somtimes I look at T’s photography (see “Diary” link, the various years) and it’s like breathing the pictures instead of seeing them. You almost know what they taste like instead of what they appear to be. It’s a visceral understanding, or maybe I don’t really understand them, I just like them. Anyway, check it out. Still pierces a part of me when I see anything he puts up.

You’ll notice I haven’t been posting any video blogs lately. Why? Because I’ve spent the past several weeks editing, at length, a friend’s 90-minute wedding video. Now that that’s done, you’ll see more on this blog soon. Meanwhile, the house is completely still, and I’m burning out the sick & fish smell with some incense. The mice think I’ve gone to bed, so they’re running between the walls, scratching brazenly. A week or so ago, I came home at midnight to find a mouse frozen in the kitchen, shocked solid by my entrance. He looked at me. I looked at him. And he took off — then realized he was headed in the wrong direction (toward me) — then skidded, his feet madly pedaling the linoleum, made a dramatic about-face and dashed behind the trash can into the wall. It was a moment.

As Sunshine Peterson would have said, and once did, “I’m kind of glad I didn’t capture it on film. It’s so much better in my memory than it ever would have turned out in a photograph.” I think of that phrase so often — then realize, with a gasp, that although it hasn’t changed, I’m five years older.

For friends of F. & D., I just got the news that Flo had Kayen, a little girl, in Buenos Aires after 24 hours of drug-free labor. Woooo!

Not much to write about. Somehow, in three weeks of not wearing my jaw-aligning elastics, my bite has completely destroyed itself again. And then, for the first time, I popped off a bracket on New Year’s Eve, biting into a cracker at a party.

At my emergency fix-the-bracket appointment, Doc looks at my bite (the right molars no longer touch each other; the left are fine, and the crossbite is back) and asks, worried, “Have you been wearing your elastics?!”

“No,” I said. “You told me I don’t have to anymore.”

“Well you have to,” he said. “Just wear the one on the right side, from your top canine to your lower canine. It’s REALLY important you wear it all the time, because your smile is still crooked.”

“And my bite is completely messed up again, right?”

“Just wear the elastics.”

“You know what I’m afraid of?” I said. “I’m afraid that these gaps between the front right teeth aren’t going to go away, or they’ll go away, and then when the braces come off, the teeth will separate again. I’m afraid of that happening.”

He responded with some offhanded joke about ‘who’s the doctor, anyway’, which made me think he’s worried about it too. Whenever he’s confident in some aspect of my treatment, he’ll explain it technically so that I won’t doubt his strategy. But when he laughs off my accusations, I doubt his strategy.

“These are going to take two more years, aren’t they?” I mumbled, while he applied horrible-tasting glue to the bracketless tooth. “That’s ok, I like having braces at 30.” He laughed again.

It being February in three more weeks, obviously my teeth won’t be done by the projected date. I’m betting on April or May, and that’s if the bite re-aligns quickly and the spaces close and the front right eye tooth moves back a little.

So now I’m wearing this elastic again and it hurts when I sleep, because with the bad bite I clench my teeth, and I find myself waking up at 3a, ripping off the elastic. In other news, it was 68 degrees today.