Enchanted Oak

Wildcat Experiment Continues

2012-01-27T08:19:00.000-08:00

(Today's update below)

(Tuesday, 1/24/12) I keep my hands off feral cats unless they’re nursing kittens who appear to be abandoned. I’m a sucker for those, having adopted five ourselves over the years and placed a few others elsewhere.

But my heart’s gone out to a long-haired cat who adopted our front shrubbery last year. It doesn’t behave like a feral tom. It behaves like a frightened abandoned pet. I kept hands-off for months, but the temps have dropped to low twenties/high teens, and the cat has made a tiny nest in the nook of the fireplace wall this past month. It’s right outside my sunroom. The first rains came last weekend.

At dusk last night I saw it curled up there, and I swear I saw it shivering. The sight plagued me. Early this morning while nesting in my warm bed, I dreamed up a toaster bed for this cat. It involves heavy-duty aluminum foil over a wire hut and under its nest of leaves (carefully saved and replaced while wearing gloves), supplemented with hanks of Spanish moss under and over for insulation. I put out food as well to make this hut enticing. I think it might be too tall to reflect any heat, but better than nothing perhaps? We’ll see if the cat welcomes my interference. I let you know.

Day One: Cat Checks Bed, Says Yes to the Food, No to the Bed

Night Two: Food’s gone again. Cat slept under my car, even though I made my husband burn the last of our wood in the fireplace. This morning I’m getting sneaky. Put two morsels in food bowl but a whole handful on two leaves inside the hut. More firewood’s on order. Mark the Walking Man has offered construction advice in his comment. I shall refine the bed per his suggestions, since I don't know shit, really, about the reflective properties of inward-facing aluminum foil.

Third Day: (Investigator's notebook)

Someone was here during the night: evidence
leaf out of place
contents of offering plate, gone
footprints on moss carpet (maybe)

Nothing proves
who: any hungry nightcrawler
might have fallen joyfully upon the altar

Possible suspects: recently noted
gray squirrel w/ high-plumed tail, sniffing fence
tomcat, B&W cruising northbound
27 cedar waxwings casing the place
skunk on road (dead)

Poetry Jam requests poems of the senses this week, so I’ve adopted the feral cat’s view of this ridiculous experiment. Find more sensual stuff here.

Wild Cat Haiku

Whoever you are
What have you done to my nest?
It smells like a trap

I see what you made
That foreign thing is a mouth
I don’t enter mouths

Food magnet draws me
Crackling danger sounds inside
Ears laid low, I flee

Catastrophic mess!
Suspicious hair stands on end
I watch, quiver, wait

Then attack the food
Place stinks but how dear the meal
It tastes like more, please

Stripped

2012-01-21T11:05:00.000-08:00

My life has been stripped of a few things in recent days. See all the red berries on the cotoneaster in my header photo up there? The migrating flocks of cedar waxwings, who made their first appearance here on December 16, have stripped them for sustenance on their winter voyage to Mexico. I rejoice in the fact that my little piece of paradise helped fuel their epic flight from the northern climes to their hiatus in the south.

Then I received a splendid tool last week from my physical therapist, who has made it his mission to strip my neck of the agony that plagues me. He gave me a TENS unit, designed to combat pain with electrical stimulation of the nerve pathways that conduct messages of misery to my brain. I attach electrodes to my neck and direct the palm-sized unit to zap the neural fibers in the musculature with a level of intensity that I control. It works! I crank that baby up to the echelon of warfare and rejoice as it slams shut the gateways to pain.

It is empowering to live in the solution rather than mucking about in the problem. I’m so jazzed that I’ve dived into the brown lifeless stuff in the garden. Hacking away at the evidence of death is a joy too, because visions of crispy brown crap drags at my sense of hope. Tearing it away fuels little jolts of delight as I uncover tiny shoots of the hardy harbingers of spring. Hyacinths and tulips push through the hard, droughty soil in their enduring drive to bloom.

Next comes the Zen of pruning frost-ravaged roses. I have 13 of those, looking like shit in the front yard, yelling “Life has ceased!” every single day since the hard frost hit. I hollered back at five of them yesterday with a litany of “Prepare for spring!” I was a rose-pruning ninja, not a Zen master, because I only had an hour and was impatient to dive into solutions again. Having made the crucial beginning, I will go more slowly today and savor the art.

It’s lovely to be stripped of things that then fuel flight.

Hope, personified in the eye of growth on a winter rosebush.

Something’s Amuck in Paradise

2012-01-18T12:24:00.000-08:00

My first brilliant thought this morning: Something’s amuck in paradise. No coffee. No newspaper. And the phone rings, bearing wild anxiety from a woman I sponsor.

Mr. Coffee steams like mad to produce a thimbleful of lukewarm coffee. A hike into the colder-than-crap outdoors produces no newspaper. Both are essentials to awaken my bleary brain and allow me to produce speech. So I’m pretty pathetic when my frantic friend calls about her new medical insurance bill.

I tell my friend to hit her knees, then unearth the old percolator from the garage’s camping gear and crack open my morning meditation book, which discusses faith overcoming all adverse conditions.

That’s when my husband enters, bearing a hot latte and the newly arrived newspaper.

My Higher Power’s sense of humor is busy on a chaotic Wednesday morning.

The phone rings again: A service technician wants to postpone today’s scheduled maintenance so he can fix the heaters of those who are without heat on this 21-degree morning. Again I’m reminded that things could always be worse. I could be flat-broke like the woman I sponsor. I could be both broke and frozen too like others whose heaters aren’t working. I could be headed for chemotherapy this afternoon, like my own AA sponsor, or for radiation, like a man my hubby sponsors.

I shouldn’t ever take my first brilliant thoughts seriously. I can be as sour as I want to, or as joyful, because I’m free to start my day over again any time I like. By returning to a position of gratitude, by remembering to be thankful for what I have, I can make my home a better place in which to greet the world.

Today I have no legitimate complaints, as a man used to say in the early AA meetings I sat through 22 years ago. My humorous Higher Power converts even trivial adverse conditions into teaching moments about the value of faith. There’s nothing at all amuck in paradise today.

Scenes of Winter

The catfight wind yowls
churning the shrubbery
scrabbling over fences
staggers even the stoutest trees.

The stalk of a budded lily
arrow dipped in blood
aimed at heaven
quivers in its invisible bow.

The moon’s white opal
glows on blue velvet
rainswept with diamonds
swallowed by clouds.

Inside your love
is a woolly blanket
abrasively delicious
on a bitter night.

What reasons do you have to be grateful today?

Over at Poetry Jam people are pondering the power of home.

War Horse

2012-01-16T08:00:00.000-08:00

If you know how to soldier on, applause for you today! For no reason whatsoever I dedicate this day to the noble art of perseverance.

Those who persist when the going gets tough rank among the elite in my book. It’s hard work, being noble. Endurance takes grit and grace because pain hurts and fear is frightening. It’s easier to give up than to soldier on.

I had to meet my magazine deadlines last week with what felt like a red-hot spear buried in my neck, and that’s what started a preoccupation with fortitude. I have a bad habit of doing all my assignments in one long 11th-hour session, fine when you’re young and strong but my cervical vertebrae are disintegrating now, and I sustained a whiplash injury seven weeks ago when a Suburban plowed into my car at a crosswalk.

As I worked at the computer last week, someone heated the fireplace poker to red-hot and then plunged it into my neck. There it burned relentlessly until I sent off my last story (on time) and went prone for two days. Then we went to see Steven Spielberg’s War Horse this weekend.

I had to clap my hands over my mouth to stifle the exclamations that wanted to burst out. War Horse contains moments that myths are made of, and a lot of sheer nobility. From the first battle charge an hour into the film, men and horses mine the depths of sacrificial bravery in one concussive nightmare after another in that terrible war.

Modern life also offers ample opportunities to prove we’re capable of courage. If you’re persevering through difficulty today, I salute you.

Laugh in the Face of Everything

2012-01-11T12:00:00.000-08:00

Farm couple shares a laugh in 1940

Got no crop last year
Lived off the fat of the land
Ma says I taste good

On that new kwi-zine
Ma feasted. I fasted. Look:
Now I need new pants

Crop came in this year
We’re living high on the hog
Food’s good. Love’s better.

This old photograph reminds me that laughter's one of strongest medicines on earth. While 1940 wasn't a banner year in history, the farming couple from Connecticut still enjoys a joke, maybe made by the husband as he hoists his pants.

A sense of humor helps maintain my equilibrium as the world churns around me. I suffer from a tendency for catastrophic thinking, but there’s an antidote: a dose of hilarity. Mentors showed me I can improve my perspective whenever I want to, no matter what’s on deck, by celebrating life’s absurdities. I'm thankful for the power of laughter.

See what the photo inspires in others over at the Poetry Jam.

Photo credit:
Public Domain Photograph from the Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection in the Library of Congress; Jack Delano, photographer.

Sun Lovers

2012-01-05T13:41:00.000-08:00

In winter I think of the sun because it’s fickle. Fickle things annoy me. I need that sun, need its vitamin D and its hopefulness. When it’s shining, I’m thankful. Even if it is the color of watered down nonfat milk, it’s got power.

Happiness is a sparkling strand of spider’s silk
diamonds of dewdrops
in the rising sun

Happiness is finding in the rose’s thorny mass
a pair of praying hands
open to receive the winter sun

Happiness is waking beside a new beloved
surprised your body delivered the verdict
your heart hoped for
A new sun smiles

Telling a tale in exactly 55 words is the G-Man's Flash Friday challenge. Check it out here.
Color is what poets are jamming about this week at Poetry Jam. Find crayons here.

Peckers of the World Unite!

2012-01-03T06:00:00.000-08:00

The colony of acorn woodpeckers that lives in the three oaks next to my house is worth telling about. Since we're next-door neighbors and the birds live their lives in the open, I've learned some of their habits by observation. What I've seen has driven me to bird books, for which I thank my grandfather and my mother, and possibly their grandfathers too, because I've read that reading is a learned behavior.

Both my mother and my Granddad carried nature-identification books into the forests and deserts we visited, and I remember the pair of them, sometimes with my aunt or uncles, poring over the guide books at picnic tables, laboriously trying to identify--by studying the minute features of it--some particular tree or bird or flower. They could spend what seemed like hours doing this. And some of the family still can't visit nature, or even our back yards sometimes, without hauling out the reference books and binoculars.

The acorn woodpecker excited the last nature discussions I remember having with Mom and family members. We're fortunate here in the oak woodlands to have these birds; their range is small, and from what my books tell me, they seem unique among woodpeckers. Both males and females wear a red cap and a black and white tuxedo, and they're exceedingly busy in the fall with their acorn harvest.

One of my three oaks is what's called a granary tree: This one large oak is where they store their harvest, in holes peppered all up and down the length of the tree's trunk and arcing out into its branches. It looks like this:

The woodpeckers in my oaks are great stewards of their resources.

The wonderful thing, the unique thing, about these woodpeckers is their community. They live as a colony in these three trees. Everyone harvests, everyone works hard poking acorns into well-worn holes, everyone helps. They share in the work, and they share in the bounty. We wondered if they harvest grubs that might grow in the stored acorns, but the books say they dine all year on acorns themselves (with insects as a side dish), stored meticulously in the granary tree, in holes that are reused and carefully selected for each individual acorn.

Lunch menu: Would you like it roasted, or perhaps in a wrap?

They even cooperate in raising their young, from sharing the duties of incubating the eggs to sharing the endless chore of feeding the young and, finally, training them to fly. The young belong to everyone.

I have seen this colony of woodpeckers work together also to fend off an onslaught of starlings that appeared one day earlier this year. The woodpeckers unified to protect their interest in the three oaks. Even though the numbers of starlings and woodpeckers seemed about even, after several hours of strategic swooping and chattering, the woodpeckers convinced the starlings to set up house elsewhere.

Together they protect their habitat. They are a sustainable community, taking care of their land and resources, reusing the same holes year after year. They diversify by consuming crops from different varieties of oaks, and they maintain emergency supplies, living on nature's bounty of insects when that "crop" is available.

They share in the rearing of their offspring, cooperating in raising up a new brood of responsible woodpeckers and sending them off to find new communities elsewhere, thus keeping their population stable and not overtaxing their resources.

It appears to me that the acorn woodpeckers illustrate the life of a good community. I hope my community's leaders make decisions that use our resources well and protect our habitat. I hope the spirit of cooperation flourishes in the state, national, and global level, that we and our leaders all work hard to be good stewards and share the bounty of our efforts with those less fortunate than we are.

The best I can do to make that happen is to bring such a spirit with me into this one day, today, and be alert with the people who come across my path this day, then keep on doing that, one day at a time.

It's easy, as one of the "99 percent," to feel overwhelmed, ignored, and powerless. But I fight to believe that my actions, my mindfulness, in the small sphere of my daily life makes a difference one human being at a time, one day at a time. I believe in the ripples in the pond: that my responsible, kind, thoughtful actions with the people I meet are used by the Creator to spread to others, in the same way they were passed on to me. May God bless us, every one, with an awareness of the small, but global, ripple effect of our personal actions in this new year.

Acorn Woodpecker courtesy Wikipedia

Just to prove I don't sit around all the time pondering nature and serious social issues, here is a recent poem inspired by these birds:

Two Woodpeckers Sitting on a Church Steeple

One woodpecker says to the other,
I’ve lost my pecker.
The second woodpecker says to the first,
It’s hanging there right under your nose, dude.
The first woodpecker says,
That’s not my pecker, idiot, that’s my beak.
They look at each other.
The second woodpecker says to the first,
Well, where’s your pecker then?
The first woodpecker says,
If I knew that, my pecker wouldn’t be lost.
They look at each other.
The sun goes down behind the steeple.

Top photo credit: Victory Dance and Family Feast, courtesy ShareTheRoad Productions

The Beginning and the End

2011-12-31T14:24:00.000-08:00

Thus ends the year. Though much has been taken, much abides, to quote Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” and something big begins: My daughter Milo became engaged as autumn turned to winter, to a man we love too. The rainbow photo, taken in the mountains of northern California, is for her, my child who has always loved this symbol of hope.

This final post of 2011 is for love. Love is not blind. With eyes wide open, love sees, bears, believes, forgives, and celebrates. Love does fail, but it can dust its mucky knees and stand again. Its strength is tensile, a bond capable of stretching beyond the reach of human arms.

My daughter said I have never written a poem for her. So I wrote one last night for her and the man she loves, whom we met for the first time at a storage facility where our daughter lived with her best friend in the manager's apartment. With their permission, I share it with you on the last day of a hard year that ends with rejoicing, in love.

My Child’s Freshly Minted Fiancé

We did not have to wade
through an ocean of assholes to reach you;
you, unbidden, appeared,
our Knight,
to claim our daughter’s hand, heart, hazel eyes
laughing as we had never seen her eyes laugh
before
you came.

You, unbidden, appeared,
completely unexpected,
a Knight in a storage yard where junk is gold,
where junk unwanted yet unloosed is locked
behind blank doors
in an undead limbo between lost
and claimed, paid for but
discarded.
You came

unbidden, unexpected,
from that storage yard into our daughter’s heart,
our Knight
in chain-link fencing, your clear eyes kind
and your mind keen, seeing in our daughter
that great beauty
blooming
like a flower in a crack in the asphalt
before
you freed her.

Milo and Kaleb

An End To It

2011-12-29T01:30:00.000-08:00

Music ended a decades-long writer’s block for me. What I wrote that night five years ago is not a great poem, but it was an ice breaker. I’ve learned that making a beginning is the key to everything. And with the Poetry Jam’s prompt this week being music, and with the year ending, this subject has special meaning for me. I’ll share the song that ended the long silence of poetry for me, “Tu Quieres Volver” by Sarah Brightman.

To get the gist of what happened to me, you might listen to the song first, then read the poem that arose from it. I’ve posted the poem before, so if it sounds familiar, please just enjoy Sarah singing.

Look at It This Way

this is you
this is her
twin threads twining in space
up and up andupandup
sinuous as snakes
the dance of the double helix
making life grow high

this is you
this is her
round notes soaring
high and round as the moon
in a purple sky
full of light a bird in flight
a waltz of wind and feather
mounting waves of air

this is you
this is her
a swelling-rising-rearing-
crashing wave
shatters on the sand
and the sand soothes
calms and suckles
a soft sighing washing smooth
the rough edges and the fury

this is you
this is her
strong arms gripping
across the precipice of loneliness
strong limbs bowing with the wind
strong lines moored in heavy seas
above all holding fast
in the face of all storms

War!

2011-12-28T10:34:00.000-08:00

I watched a war take place this morning. While reading the newspaper with a cup of coffee (that grammar makes for an interesting idea: could an electronic eye be embedded in a coffee cup & used to scan the paper to a speech program for people with sight disability?), I glanced out the sunroom windows to see a war in progress.

This bird, the acorn woodpecker, lives year round with his flock in the oaks outside:

Acorn Woodpecker, from Wikipedia

He and a flockmate or two were harrying a couple of cedar waxwings, who migrate through here in the winter on their way south to Mexico:

Photo source: NatureWorks.org

The cedar waxwings love my neighborhood because of the luscious red berries of the cottoneaster shrubs in my blog header:

US Fish and Wildlife

So the small flock of cedar waxwings was under attack by the small flock of angry acorn woodpeckers. As the waxwings tried to swallow a berry or two, a woodpecker would dive-bomb them. This made the waxwings nervous, and they either would duck and hunker down or would fly off. Having won the skirmish, the woodpecker would then retire to the big oak, where it would raucously screech its triumph with a wing display. Whilst it was doing the victory dance, the cedar waxwing or two would return to gobbling berries, hungry as hell from its long flight from the northern reaches.

I'm a fan of both birds, but I was a bit ticked off at the woodpeckers. The cedar waxwings were not stealing their food supply. Acorn woodpeckers eat insects and acorns, for Pete's sake, which they store for year-round cuisine in the oak, in lovely holes they drill and reuse just for that purpose.

On the other hand, maybe woodpeckers don't know cedar waxwings from a hole in the ground. What they DO know is the terrible starlings who periodically attempt to take over the oaks, and then a real battle ensues between the woodpeckers fighting for their home of decades, maybe centuries, and the starling squatters. The woodpeckers, fighting for homeland, always have won, so far. Their vigilance has paid off. So, dear waxwings, flutter onward, where other berries are in abundance nearby.

My lesson today, then, is to choose my battles carefully, lest I drive away a harmless body merely hungry for kindness and a rest from life's travails.

A Christmas Lesson in Fractals

2011-12-25T18:00:00.000-08:00

What a fine Christmas Day: Hubby and me, daughter and fiance, my sponsor & spouse for dinner; expenditures minimal but pleasure in giving maximal, small thoughtful gifts and lovely times. Wishing such peace for everyone....

A Midnight Course in Fractal Geometry

Sleepless again    a repetition of many nights
Windows in the pentagonal glass room reflect
Endless patterns of white Christmas lights
Cheerful chaos erupts
From ordinary roofs and shrubs
Curves and angles and loop de loops
Swing in a wind rocking a storm in its arms
A rope of blue light transforms the invisible
Fence     Waves on a blue sea undulate
Again and again and again
In the looking glass
Infinite points of light
Form infinite replicas of stars
Repeating themselves until they vanish
In the midnight place      Men know how
To wrest order from chaos
They can turn these patterns into formulas
Explaining why the shapes make sense
But they can’t say why
The stars make peace
On a December night

Peace on earth, Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Poetry Jam: "solitary"

Furrst Love

2011-12-19T21:56:00.000-08:00

Heavy Petting

Oh Kate, Kate,
hefty weight of softest fur,
the pat on lap brings her leaping
up to crouch contented there
prickle paws, claws dig in
sumptuously glad
for stroking hand on silky back,
she lifts her head, squinty eyed,
for cheeky rubs, damp-nosed
happiness, vibrating purr
leaning all of her against my breast,
my Kate, my joyous cat.

Kate and her sister Mystery were abandoned feral foundlings, eyes barely opened. Nursed by hand, raised by beagles and women, what they know of life is human kindness and doggie tolerance, the world is their oyster, and our laps belong to them.

Sometimes, when the world seems dismal, my cat helps me to remember simple things are still priceless.

A Tiny Victory

2011-12-18T10:00:00.000-08:00

I hope I'm not the only writer who sometimes can't think of a single thing to say.

All my energy has been devoted to working through a paralyzing anxiety attack this week. I'm grateful that in spite of it I've conducted the basic stuff of living. Small things like paying bills and trimming the Christmas tree have been accomplished with gritted teeth and prayer, and the fear recedes a little more each day.

And today, a migrating flock of cedar waxwings paid a visit to the shrubs outside my office window. Their annual visitation always gives me joy. This morning I was especially thankful, because I have battled a beast and not been defeated. There are many kinds of victories, some so ordinary that they can be easily overlooked. I'm glad my eyes were open today.

(Don't know who to credit for this lovely shot of a cedar waxwing)

Sunday Morning Addendum:

Cedar waxwings everywhere! This morning's flock is huge, gorging on the red-berry bushes! Underneath the bushes, the kitties crouch, yakking at the beautiful birdies!

"Come to me, lovely little birdies!" says Mystery the Cat. The waxwings respectfully decline.

Occupy THIS

2011-12-14T18:11:00.000-08:00

An amazing thing happened today. My husband said he thinks a water pipe is leaking in an interior wall, and he pointed out his evidence. (This man has been ordered by our plumber to refrain from “fixing” things himself.) I studied hubby’s evidence, and it didn’t look like evidence to me.

But my head leaped straight into fear. Another expense! More bad news! Another explosion in our tight budget! My head freaked out so thoroughly, it hurled me right into an anxiety attack.

I was mauled by the sense of impending doom, pummeled by the “What Ifs” and the “Oh Nos”! Right off the top of my head, I conceived of 1,000 other things that could go wrong, from the personal to the global level. Then I went straight to the place where I can kneel in prayer, did that, jumped up and went to an AA meeting. Came home, breathed, called my sponsor. Was instructed to breathe some more.

I haven’t had an attack of fear like that in a long time. In recovery I’ve learned how to redirect the kind of catastrophic thinking that used to plague me. I have tools that work. Hours later, I’m still shaky, but my feet are planted firmly in the present, where all my needs are taken care of. After dinner, I’ll go set up a church hall for an AA meeting, where I know I’ll hear the music of faith from people who have been transformed.

I’m grateful that I can occupy my mind with what’s good, here and now.

Too Preoccupied with Birds to Notice

Sometimes when my mind is full of dire news
swollen by streams of the world’s sorrows,
I hunt for robins.

A pair of them live like lords on my land,
where they feast on a cornucopia of insects
leading busy lives in centuries of mulch.
The world’s calamitous chatter fades,
irrelevant, as the robins strut and pluck
the strands of their living harp.

Posted for Poetry Jam: “Occupy This”

Oh, Boy! Deep Freeze

2011-12-05T06:35:00.000-08:00

The killing frosts have hit us here on the central coast of California. Our nights are down in the 25-degree zone that kills all the tender growing things in the garden. Tomatoes that remained on the vine are popsicles in the mornings, turning to paste after sun-up. My beautiful dahlias are now brown stalks of mush. Normally, this would depress me: Winter is coming, alack! alas! But something’s different this year. I don’t feel like Eeyore.

In fact, I feel pretty interested in life. I’m checking out this garden scenery….

…and I’m thinking, I betcha that puppy has viable seeds in it! I’m looking at this dahlia….

…and I’m thinking, there’s a gift for me in there! I suspect a praying mantis laid an egg case on one of those branches, and I’m going to find it and save it when I cut that dahlia back.

Several things are different in my life this year. I’ve been working with a new AA sponsor, and she’s had a big impact on my outlook. We’ve been studying faith and gratitude, and I’m reading Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You. She also was diagnosed last month with stage-four lung cancer. Now we have our weekly talks while she’s getting her chemo treatment. I’m not scared about her future; I’m blessed by her life.

Maybe it’s the added vitamin D in my diet. I’ve taken substantial D-3 since a deficiency was diagnosed back in March. My immune system is vastly stronger than it was last year, with its serial pneumonia and relentless infections. There’s a correlation, too, between major depression and D deficiency. Maybe the converse is true as well, and I’m nutritionally better equipped. Who knows? Is it God or vitamin D? Who cares? Life is good.

The deep freeze around here has sent the sap earthward, but my spirit lifts upward. Tolstoy has affected me greatly, a gift from out of the blue. I caught the tail end of The Last Station a while back, and it sent me on a research run to learn more about his "spiritual anarchy." His study The Gospel in Brief held me spellbound. When the word “deep” was offered this week as a prompt on the Poetry Jam blog, I thought of this poem, written a month ago at a café while waiting for a lunch date who never showed.

The Water Walker

Faith made Peter climb out of the boat
and walk on water for a while until
he remembered people can’t do that
and then he sank. I understand
his sinking; I too have sunk
into the impossible and had to stroke
for shore, arising on reality
drenched and choking.

It’s the faith I want to summon in the boat
that mesmerizes me: to see the liquid
which I know cannot support me, yet
to trust in God’s incredible command
that I be more than bone and flesh
tethered to physics and the imagined
certainty of all my limitations.

The Bravest Thing I've Ever Done

2011-11-27T16:05:00.000-08:00

Getting sober is the bravest thing I’ve ever done. To look the world straight in the eye, without self-medicating first, requires this alcoholic to dig deep for the courage that many people seem to come by naturally. And she has to keep digging too, to keep up with the adventures of being human.

The artwork I’m using today is an illustration by Gustave Doré in the 1866 version of John Milton's Paradise Lost. “Satan rises from the burning lake” illustrates what Milton calls Lucifer’s “courage never to submit or yield.” The piece also has been used in reference to one of my all-time favorite poems, “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which ends with these wonderful lines:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I memorized “Ulysses” for a college speech class, drawn to its celebration of the enduring adventuresome spirit. I never have read Paradise Lost, and I find the Satan connection a little icky. But the prompt for this week’s Poetry Jam asked poets to write something inspired by Paradise Lost, John Milton, or Gustave Doré, and my research led me to my beloved “Ulysses” via the aforementioned Lucifer link.

Courage is the thing that gets me excited. I’ve had to find some. I’ve had to learn how to endure when life goes sideways. I’ve had to learn self-discipline, the courageous act of refusing to yield to my own wild impulses, which would have me flee from uncomfortable circumstances. I’ve had to plumb my inner resources when shit hit the fan, and when I came up empty, I’ve had to discover that God’s grace is sufficient on any given day.

All of which is a boatload of verbiage to introduce a very short poem ~ 160 characters, to be exact, counting the spaces. Visit other poets monkeying around with ultra-shorts at Monkey Man’s place here, or jamming with Milton here.

Here is my extremely short epic poem:

Without a shield, I face my fears
Weak, unarmed, I will not yield
As the smoke of battle clears
I’m still standing on the field
By your cheers my wounds are healed!

Thank God My Car Was Smashed, Not Me

2011-11-23T09:09:00.000-08:00

A tank destroyed my rear end this week. I’m grateful that it was my automobile’s and not my own posterior.

I didn’t see that at first. My initial reaction was a lot of effin’ this ’n’ thatness when the young lady in the souped-up Suburban plowed into us at full street speed, having failed to notice the cars ahead were stopped at a pedestrian crosswalk. Her apologies seemed inadequate to my shocked and whiplashed self as I confronted our seriously wounded beautiful car.

Afterward the 12-Step training kicked into gear and waged a rousing battle with resentment, armed with those formidable “Thank God” weapons. It’s not a walk in the park to be grateful in the face of crap, but it’s doable. Thank God for insurance on both automobiles, for no serious injuries, for credit cards and car rentals and trustworthy auto-body specialists owned by AA friends.

We’re off now to spend Thanksgiving amid the blessings of family, friends, and our old AA home group. A study of gratitude made the news today, finding that gratitude is good for the brain and the body’s well-being. Alcoholics Anonymous has preached that for 75 years. May you swim in thanksgiving, no matter what adversity you face.

"Every decision I make is a choice between a grievance and a miracle. I relinquish all regrets, grievances and resentments, and I chose the miracle."

(Deepak Chopra, “The Soul of Healing Meditation”)

A Priceless Gift

2011-11-21T05:51:00.000-08:00

The garden's last flowers

I received a precious gift on my birthday, making it the most beautiful of birthdays in a long time. It came from a beloved member of my family, who was given the great burden of a severe-early-onset Alzheimer’s diagnosis, shortly after Mom died of that disease.

To understand the gift’s significance, you have to understand that severe Alzheimer’s steals not just memories, not just language in all its totality as the foundation of communicating between people. It steals the brain’s computer processor, so it can’t access stored information, filter data, recognize context, transfer essential messages, or discern logical pathways in the process of decision-making. Areas within itself are isolated from each other. The brain fights through this incredible interference to make sense of a whole world in incoherent motion, as it tries to serve its owner’s needs.

After months of withdrawal, as my loved one struggled in the aftermath that diagnosis, a birthday card arrived the day before my birthday. It was followed by a phone call on my birthday, opening with the birthday song, and then a long conversation, full of news and willingness to patiently work through spots where words would vanish, a strength of attention to hear my words. Love lived energetically in that phone call, a wonderful feat of reaching out.

At dinner with my husband later, I opened all my birthday cards, saving that special one for last. It was signed with a loving message, warm with recognition of our history together. At first I wept at the evidence of language difficulty, fleeing to the ladies room for another (brief) war with God over this. I washed my face, came back, and read the card again, this time thankful for the strength and love that glowed in its message. Sorrow can be blinding. When I wipe my eyes, I can see the tender mercies that always there.

It was a blessed birthday, rich with loving gifts from my family. I’m thankful to be part of the human experience, present and sober and wiser for the life given to me to live on this planet. May all our days be rich with reaching out, offering some simple blessing to someone else.

Learning Endurance

2011-11-19T08:26:00.000-08:00

Photograph by Dorthea Lange, 1936

Great moments in history on this date: Goodbye, Ford Edsel; Hello again, Moon (second Apollo landing); and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address

"We can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. ... It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us ... that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

I wonder if survivors of the Great Depression and the Midwest Dust Bowl bequeath a primal-memory gene to some of their kids… some inheritable, shady sense of having endured the catastrophic and standing ready to endure it again.

I owe my life to the Depression and the Dust Bowl (proof I should remember next time I question whether ill winds really do blow in some good). On both sides, my parents’ families were migrant workers in the 1930s, one from Oklahoma, one from Montana, who came together in a small California town, eventually creating me. It’s my birthday this week, and I’m pondering my beginnings.

The photo I’m using with this post was taken by Dorthea Lange in 1936 just down the road from where I was born. It shows a woman named Florence Thompson with three of her seven children, at a migrant camp near the pea fields (which still are grown there). Lange easily could have photographed one of my grandmothers with my father or mother in tow, heading for their rendezvous with destiny (sorry).

Besides my own family history (discussed around dining tables all my life), I’ve also interviewed many Great Depression and WWII survivors in my magazine work… so maybe it’s just familiarity with their generations that gives me a sense of kinship, rather than some unconscious primal memory of endurance as a way of life. What I know deep in my bones, whether it has come via genetic code or education, is that human beings are capable of suffering great loss and misery with dignity, without complaint, and with a majestic patience. That character is something I want in my life.

Lange’s “Migrant Mother” is the poetry prompt this week at Poetry Jam, where you’ll find other interpretations of that great photo. Here’s mine.

Good Norwegian Stock

My grandfather’s ways sprout from my fingers
like seeds lifting their round heads
out of black earth under a broad blue sky.
Skydotter, he called me, with mirth in his eye:
the Norwegian name for rain-laden clouds.
And daughter I am, a loaded ship of cloud
in an ocean of sky, sailing the big Plain
sowing grain in my wake.

In his time,
Grandfather paused to tip back his hat
and watch the wild geese vee southward
as clouds lowered for winter’s long march.
Eyes watering with Montana cold,
well-worn flannel warming his neck,
he spared a moment in endless treks
from house to barn to fields and back
to honor the enduring geometry of geese.

The time came
when he bowed his head before dry fields
that refused the seed and sealed the land
against the grain. He surrendered
the farm to the drought-battered Plain
and turned westward, where his hands
skilled in the nurture of growing things
became carpenter’s hands, sawing trees
into usefulness as cupboards and houses,
though he preferred them wild.

Undeterred,
he dug his hands in the unfriendly dirt
behind the small place in the new country,
with aging patience coaxing from it
fields of freesias and clouds of lilac,
roses bowing heads heavy with buds
above a sea of tulips. Tomatoes marched
through rainless summers in his garden
guarded with small offerings of water
and waves of corn ripened by the fence.

I grew up in a field of plenty, cultivated
by a grandfather still wearing the old felt hat.
I, his sky daughter, wore his hat with pride
the day I stood as the heavy sky burst,
my dirty hands outstretched to catch the rain
falling, falling, on the young strong grain.

Dorthea Lange’s photo is reproduced from The Commons on Flickr, an awesome site of worldwide photography in the public domain, with use restricted to personal, educational or research purposes.)

Lightness of Being

2011-11-13T23:09:00.000-08:00

each day
you wage a thousand wars
to preserve the nation of yourself

to defend your freedom
to lie down in your bed

you are a good country
responsible, alert
so you

marshal your resources
govern your thoughts
safeguard your borders
discipline your troops

you exercise vigilance
moment by moment
in every transaction
every choice, every plan
no wonder you’re weary
of fighting the war

stop now
and rest
notice light plays
in a window
it wanders
and dances
through wars
without ceasing

Prompted by the Poetry Jam, "Photograph a still life and write about it."

Gimme an Asteroid, Sunny-side Up

2011-11-05T11:16:00.000-07:00

Weird stuff to ponder on a weekend morning: What plans should we make for our appointment with an asteroid Tuesday afternoon?

I have a freelance writing deadline that day: Will it matter if I make it? The looming asteroid stimulates Hamlet questions. Is it nobler to spend the weekend nose-to-grindstone, honoring my commitment in hopes of a future? Or should I shine it on? Shall I take arms against a sea of oppressors and their outrageous fortunes, go Occupy somewhere, or should I go to the movies?

Seriously, folks, I’m going to see Puss In Boots before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

Now, after that peek through a window in my silly mind, here’s another, hot off the press. It was provoked by this week’s Poetry Jam prompt (more sneak peeks here).

Window

What hides from the outside world
behind her face festooned with flowers
might be the prick of the poisoned rose
or worse
the clatter of cloven hooves
as her demons cook their dinner
with this day’s torments

You never know
what gingham curtains veil
what beast exhales
behind that convivial cloak
willing you to leave
frightened by the light
you stand in so bravely

Do You Ever Wake Up Batty?

2011-10-31T10:36:00.000-07:00

Do you ever awaken with things on your head,

woes or worries, or what you should have said?

Do you wrangle with someone who's not even there?

Are bees in your mind, or stuck in your hair?

Have you wakened offended, or stuffy with wrath?

Only one thing can save you:

Have a nice laugh.

Happy Halloween!

“We Are Not Saints.”

2011-10-29T20:19:00.000-07:00

Frances, my mother, age 18

I live a checkered life. When I got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, I went back to the church denomination I was born into, which happened to be Lutheran. A wonderful pastor helped me find a “new” God there, one I could sort of understand and sort of not understand but be comfortable with.

The pastor introduced me to Martin Luther, the man, not the author of the catechism I had to memorize as a kid. Luther had an idea that people of faith are a paradox: They are simultaneously both sinner and saint, screw-ups who live in a state of grace. That concept helped me find forgiveness.

I’m thinking about saints, tarnished and otherwise, because this week’s host of Poetry Jam, NanU, wants us to write about the eve of something hallowed. [Poetry Jam, eve of holy somethings] Tuesday is All Saints Day, which actually means something spiritual to me today. I live to Google, and I found a nice little essay by a Methodist pastor, Rev. Dean Snyder, on huffingtonpost.com.

“If Easter is when Christianity celebrates the resurrection of Christ [Snyder writes], All Saints' is when Christianity celebrates the resurrection of the rest of us. The focus of Easter is the victory of Jesus over death and the grave. The focus of All Saints' is resurrection and life eternal for the rest of us.

“I think it can be an act of courage to believe in eternal life and to strive to live lives consistent with this belief. It takes courage to live as though our lives matter eternally -- even if they seem to us very ordinary, even frustrating and disappointing. It takes courage to believe that our lives matter beyond this lifetime, or even the earthly memory of it, when so much of what we do seems trivial and even pointless. It takes courage to choose to do the good and just thing in terms of eternity, rather than what is easiest, even when it will cost us something in the short-term and nobody will much notice or care anyway.

“It takes courage to believe that the lives of others are eternal — that each life we intersect and those we don't have eternal meaning and value and that we have a responsibility to each other that transcends the time, place and circumstances of our present lives.”

When I think of the “eve of something holy,” I think of the three nights I sat vigil with my dying mother. Both of us started out scared. Both us found courage. She’s one of those full-blooded saints now, no longer living a checkered life. This is the poem I wrote as she lay dying.

Your Dance of the Final Days

Your chest rises and falls rhythmically, I see
glancing at the narrow bed across the room.
It is anyone’s room, a blue sea of carpet,
a drawn window shade, but here is your
cedar chest, scarred with memories. Here
is your sewing cabinet, made by your father,
its varnish worn. Here am I, in your office
chair, slash of duct tape on its vinyl seat,
its squeaky, rusty wheels. I watch you
sleep, your labored breathing drowned
by the hum and hiss of oxygen, afraid to look
away. The bedclothes might stop rising
and you slip off, me unaware, intolerable
thought. I want to see you should you slide
from the bed and do a jig across the floor.
I never saw you dance in all these years
but there’s no telling what you’ll do.
You have surprised us all before.
You surprise me now with your tenacity,
my skeletal lioness, chomping the neck
of the very last giraffe.

What's Left?

2011-10-28T10:16:00.000-07:00

At day’s end I came to the egg.
I had cried all the tears left in the sac.
Only me and it, and the shadows now.
Did it matter, really, what had happened?
I had magic in my hand. In this egg
lay the seeds of unknown future.
I cradled it. Later I could decide.

This is a flash poem, because blogmeister Mr. Knowitall digs it when people write micro-work for his Flash 55 Fridays, and I dig Mr. Knowitall.

Don’t Say What You’re Thinking

2011-10-26T02:00:00.000-07:00

Anger was the topic of our Tuesday meeting, and I heard good stuff, from people whose thought processes I can understand. I share more commonality with the Vietnam-vet biker who says, “Rage is the wind that blows out the candle in my mind,” than I do with the average 50-something I meet on the street. One of the things I love about AA is the wonderful cross-section of purposeful, thoughtful, flawed, and honest humanity I’ve come to know because of meetings.

I got to share that last year I took on the F’d Be I, the Dept. of There-Is-No-Justice, the U.S. Secret-ary of Health and Inhuman Services, the Attorney Generality, and the health-care-not industry over the moral and civil-rights outrage perpetrated on my defenseless 79-year-old demented mother [is that bitterness I hear?], and nine months of misery later, this caped crusader for Truth, Justice, and Human Rights for Alzheimer’s Victims was a sad piece of a work, drowning in her outrage, and my mother was dead, free at last. I got very ill last winter, and by early spring it was clear that my outrage over injustice was harming only me, and I was going to have to change myself so I could live in an unjust world.

Resentment, says the book Alcoholics Anonymous, is poison to the person who nurtures it. How are we to make peace in a life where people and institutions do wrong and suffer no consequences? How are we to live serenely in a world where sh*t happens to innocent people? The fellowship of AA has devised many brilliant means of doing just that.

Mostly, they all boil down to what Gandhi said: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Start with giving grace, unearned forgiveness, to people who wrong you, as you have received grace from the loving God in your own imperfect life. Practice restraint of tongue and pen. Do not retaliate, argue, fume, or chew on arguments in your head. Instead, go do good work, own your own part in the shit, and be grateful for the ordinary miracles in your daily life. Work with a mentor. Wash your floors. Reach out a friendly hand to someone in need, and in general, learn to stay out of the bad neighborhood that is your own selfish head.

I am ceaselessly surprised that these things work. They work, in that they build a level of inner peace with the ebb and flow of life. Even if you choke on what you know is hypocrisy as you pray for the person who has offended you, doing it on your knees with your teeth gritted every day for two damn weeks, just because your sponsor suggested you try it, by God, it works! The one who changes is you, not the world, not your neighbor, just the one you live with day in and day out ~ that person becomes someone kinder, calmer, thankful, and a little more honest.

An aging ex-gangster at the meeting said his morning prayer is simple: “Hi, God, I’m awake, good luck.” Laughter is like tapping anger in the back of its knees: down it goes, toppling over like the great pretender that it is, mostly smoke and mirrors, self-justification and often fear masquerading as righteousness. Laughter heals a lot of wrongs, including our own. I’m grateful to be part of a community that laughs at itself and goes to sometimes great lengths to help others.

These days, I practice a lot of not saying the judgmental things I think about others. To a trusted few, I say whatever I think and laugh at it. My head, says one friend, is for entertainment purposes only. When the serious stuff that warrants deep thought crops up, I go to someone who has the kind of faith and wisdom I want, and I sound it out.

A line in a humble little book changed me this year. I found it in AA’s “12 Steps and 12 Traditions” under the discussion of the tenth step, in which we make a practice of honest self-examination and prompt admission of wrongs done. In a paragraph advocating a more merciful view of others, the writer says, “it is pointless to become angry or to get hurt by people who, like us, are suffering from the pains of growing up.” The italics are mine.

If I can recognize that my life is a series of adventures in growing up to be the person I want to become someday, if I am in the process of becoming and haven’t yet arrived there, how can I not grant you the grace of your own suffering?

You too are on a journey. I might enjoy thinking, in the private entertainment center of my mind, that you’re damned far behind me thanks to your stupid behavior ~ enjoy thinking that privately for, say, ten minutes max. Okay, twenty, AND I get to tell a trusted friend. Anything more than that is a resentment, otherwise known as beating myself with a hammer and hoping you are the one it hurts: a habit to avoid.

Ripples in the Pond

2011-10-25T02:00:00.000-07:00

Fog in the harbor, Morro Bay, California

Ripples in the Pond

Sometimes it hits me upside the head,
how what happened to her
touched him and he touched me
and I told someone and
in the telling she was touched
and the touches keep touching.
One day I want to ask God:
Please show me
the ripples in the pond
where my stone reached.

Found: One Set of Wings and a 160, Free

2011-10-22T20:00:00.000-07:00

Now here’s a strange true story, mostly, proved by a photograph:

Angel Wings

I know it means something, this moment
of surprise
,
when I’ve hurled myself out of the car
late as always for an obligation
in that grim world of a parking garage
too far from where I have to be to be there on time
and at my feet
on the yellow paint between gray spaces
rests a pair of white feathered wings
child size
.
Immediately I see they’re too small for me
but I’m staggered
,
caught in the open door
between the woman who is late and another
who can stop, bend down, take the gift
slip them on, lift my arms and fly
.
In that moment, the clocks stop too
the whole world shrinks
as the white wings spread
and stroke
and stroke
against the sky

And for no extra charge,

a Sunday 160 version in exactly 160 characters

a sort of angel rap piece for my favorite character, Monkey Man,
He Who Hosts the Microest of Micro Fiction:

Angel stop

Angel drop

Angel rock’n’roll

What da weather

Chicken feather

Angel do a poll

Weather fair

Angel hair

Angel wear a stole

Angel wing

Angel fling

Angel save a soul

Strange, the things you might stumble across while doing the humdrum stuff of daily living, if you keep your eyes open. May you be surprised today.

A Time for Everything: Killed By a Bank

2011-10-20T01:30:00.000-07:00

My family’s business folded this week, 40-some years after my father and mother started it from scratch and built it into a small company that employed 40 people. It’s now in the hands of a large bank that received $316 million in bailout funds from U.S. taxpayers in 2008. The bank demanded large payments on principal that the small business, struggling through the economic times, couldn’t make. The bank received grace from the American people in its hour of need. The bank did not give back the same grace. There's a parable in the Bible about such things.

It’s been a sad day, and it’s been a challenge to quell the little bursts of bitterness. I took flowers to my mother’s grave and sat on the grass beside her headstone as the sun lowered in the sky. I could hear her voice in the distance saying, “For everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.”

My mother loved the Bible, and it was among the last books she could read before Alzheimers disease took away her words. She raised up her kids in church and planted a lifelong reverence for God in us. The Bible verses I learned in my youth come back to me at times when I need to be reminded that life has an eternal value.

Pain is a good teacher. I’ve been driven to my knees in pain, and come away from it stronger, kinder, more forgiving. We all need so much grace in this life and we find it hard to give. We keep getting lessons in grace because we have poor memories, I think. I keep learning about forgiveness all over again.

I came home Wednesday and laid down on my bed and let the memories of my father and mother’s business play through my mind. Many of them come from long ago but they rolled out vivid and textured, beautiful in their way. I prayed for my brothers and others whose livelihoods are affected, and then I went to an AA meeting, where the topic was gratitude. I looked up the verse from Ecclesiastes that had come to me at Mom’s grave. I was reminded that in the end, the best we can do is enjoy our labor and do good in our lives, and be grateful for the gift.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
What profit has he that works in that in which he labors?
I have seen the task, which God has given to the sons of men to be occupied in it.
He has made every thing beautiful in its time: also he has put eternity in men's hearts, so that no man can find out the work that God does from the beginning to the end.
I know that there is no good in them, but for a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life.
And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labor, for it is the gift of God.

Today's Monumental Events

2011-10-18T16:01:00.000-07:00

Waiting for something to happen

I am restless, uncertain, uncomfortable in my skin. What is wrong, I wonder.

I could sit and stew all day in this miasma. Or I could answer that question: If I'm honest, what troubles me are three unmade phone calls about unpleasant possibilities, and I don't want to tackle them. That's all. So I go outside with the camera to visit the praying mantis in the dahlias. I eat a little because I ought to, not because I'm hungry. Then I make one of the calls.

Hello, little fly!

No one's there, and I leave a message. This is called "baby steps" in my 12-step program, and it counts on the plus side of my personal little inventory. How I feel is my responsibility, so what action can I take to be more comfortable? Take care of business, sweet pea! That would be a start.

Then I make the second call. Check! That one's satisfied. I feel better already. I ponder the third and final call, the ickiest one of all. I'm in a position of strength now, and I can see that I should get answers to "x" and "y" before I place the call. Now I get to make more choices, with a level head and honesty. This problem has no urgency, and it could spend a while in the hands of someone wiser than I am. I have a place for things like that, called a "God box" ~ a gimmick I've been using lately, a little red box and shreds of paper scribbled on and dated. So I put that last call in the box.

I love my lunch.

"Look away from unpleasant surroundings, from lack of beauty, from the imperfections in yourself and in those around you. In your unrest, behold God's calmness; in your impatience, God's patience; in your limitations, God's perfection. Looking upward toward God, your spirit will begin to grow."

Twenty-Four Hours a Day, Oct. 17

Ghost Town, Mojave Desert

2011-10-14T17:00:00.000-07:00

I’ve been gone a while, doing things that require work like traveling, writing assignments, lying sick in bed, but today has been a restful day. I took photos of my desk,

my cat,

my flowers,

myself reflected in the computer screen (up above). Then I researched quartz for no compelling reason and wrote a poem based on an experience I had while traveling last week.

Some sad things have struck my family since my mother died last summer, and they caused me to be called out of town. I knew I wanted to write a poem about something that happened on the trip but didn’t know how to begin. At three in the morning Wednesday, sleepless, I wrote down five words ~ ghost, laugh, laundry, edges, beer ~ and posted them as a prompt on Poetry Jam, a blog I’m hosting this week. I wrote the poem Thursday. I’m interested to see what other poets do with the words.

Ghost Town, Mojave Desert

Someone spilled a glass of milk in the sky
and the indifferent wind pushes it
against the barren hills that frame this town.
From the open window of a stale motel
I watch the creamy puddles eddy
among signs that scream for gas, food, lodging
as mesquite brush waffles in a vacant lot.
When I was a girl, I cruised that drag
in a blue Mustang and worked at a florist’s
over there, where that pawn shop squats.
I want to hate it now, with everyone I love
erased from here. But I see my father
teaching me to steer an army Jeep
across the desert, his brown arm braced
against the windshield as we bounce along
and laugh. I see my mother hanging laundry
on the clothesline by the driveway, where
my brothers and their cronies lounge
against their trucks with cans of beer
and shirttails hanging out. I hear my family
working, banging, revving, hammering,
the pop of rivet guns, hissing blowtorch,
the hollow whine of sheet metal
sculpted in their hands. I smell the tang
of ozone, sharp as a knife, after the rain
and I smell the sand, a billion shifting grains
of memory that stick like windblown grit
and won’t wash off, except in the blessed rain
which comes only when it will, not
when you will it. On the edges of my life
the wind still sings its love for the desert
and I taste the sweet bitter fruit of loss.

I’m a Microclimate for God

2011-10-02T03:47:00.000-07:00

I found some treasures at an antique show this weekend and took great pleasure in bargaining for them. One of them, a small hand-forged pitcher, asked me to write a poem about it. So I made a little 160-character ditty for Monkey Man’s Sunday 160 challenge. You’ll find others on his blog here.

The Tin Pitcher

Call me old,
tarnished,
rusted and flawed,
but in the confines
of my battered state,
I am a microclimate
for God
where flowers grow:
apparently, my fate.

On Holiday from Real Life

2011-09-22T10:51:00.000-07:00

Update: Found out there's a hotspot in the campground so I brought the laptop just to be able to communicate with my daughter, who's due to arrive here this evening. Hi, blog friends, from lovely Big Sur, California!

It’s time to shut down the busy brain for a while. We’re off to Big Sur and the beautiful California coastal redwoods this week for an annual AA campout, where the only challenge is the hike to the restrooms at night. I always come back grateful to have a bathroom with toilet, tub, and hot water in my own room. At the campground, this is my own room:

We leave behind the challenges of maintaining hearth and home. This month has been especially taxing. A new computer required, thanks to the rogue sprinkler that watered my desk through the open window. Unexpected and costly automotive work on our 11-year-old pickup was another blow. I’m thankful we had a savings account. My head, as usual, wants to add a cranky “But” to that last statement, but I won’t let it.

Got almost no sleep last night, thanks to my head and its itty-bitty-shitty committee. So I’m punishing it by making it stand in the corner today. This is what it looks like:

Notice the condition of its nose. It has suffered from nosing around in places that are none of its business. In AA, we are reminded over and over again that our business is between our noses and the back of our heads. Everything from our nose outward is none of our business. When I try to exert control over the world Out There, I’m mucking about in someone else’s business without skill. My head likes to think it is skilled at that work, but I’ve noticed a total lack of success in that department and I suspect my head suffers from denial and delusion.

So, it’s off to the woods with us, without cell phone coverage, wi-fi, or any other distractions. We sleep in a tent and cook on a propane stove, and there are no schedules to keep, no bills to pay. Well, I can’t forecast the bills part. Lord willing, and the creek don’t rise….

And I got a big miracle sendoff: My dead watered computer rose from the dead!!!! The mail came as we were packing, and in it, my resurrected friend!!!! The tech guys, whilst doing the autopsy, found the corpse still breathing, patched it up and sent it home. Miracles happen!!!! I'm a happy camper! (And I had just got the new "puppy" trained.... Well, I guess our young housemate has got herself a computer, courtesy her grandfather and me. It was a happy moment all around.)

The Female Mystique

2011-09-17T20:31:00.000-07:00

After a few days of wallowing in computer-induced depression (see below), I was given three gifts in the past three days: 1) I found a solution for configuring my email [perseverance pays off!); 2) I worked with an AA newcomer, which reminded me of the life-shifting grace of the program that is central to my existence; and 3) I gave the best poetry reading of my life. My own words seemed to be full of power that evening, judging by the exuberant response of the audience and the raves of my husband, a man-cave kind of guy. Afterward, I sat in the dark on my patio, glowing like a lightning bug, pouring out my gratitude to the God of my understanding, who transformed me from a suicidal drunk into a woman who inhabits her skin with joy.

~~~~

(Commercial break: The following poem is based on the photo above, courtesy of Ainsley Allmark at Dolphin Visions. Visit Poetry Jam for other poems inspired by Allmark's photography.

The Sea Is a Woman

The sea is a woman who bears children
and then must feed them with what food
her kitchen holds, beans and onions
when times are hard, elaborate spreads
when the larder’s rich, and always after
scrubs the dishes.

Her governor, the moon, a bureaucrat,
ordains her tidal blood without concern
for inconvenience, but she’s resigned,
even sees the benefits, to child-rearing,
say, or affirmation of her womanhood,
in the ebb and flow.

It’s the tax man who exacts the heavy toll
of living, that hungry sun who sucks
her shekels, whose daily glare demands
his due. What comes in, soon goes out,
the nest egg evaporates, but she grimly
pays the price.

Ferociously she loves the land, her mate,
but he is forever leaving her behind.
In the moments when she has him near,
something in her surges, and fervently
she licks his skin, his neck, his thighs,
his earthy taste like honey on her tongue.
They kiss on the sand; she shatters
on the rocks of his imperturbable
soul. She takes the small gifts he offers
and savors them, rolling them around
in her mouth like unbreakable promises
that he will always, always return.

Who Gives a F*** about First Place?

2011-09-17T04:11:00.000-07:00

A chorus of dahlias, none of which won first place in a competition.

Losing a competition doesn't make you a loser. I entered a poetry contest a while ago that required us to use as our first line a line from another poet's poem to create one of our own, and the results were announced this week. I didn't place. The winners were wonderful poems, and as I read them, I was thrilled by the quality of their work.

The world is full of music of all sorts, and at this point in life I don't feel the need to believe my preferences are the best. There's room in this world for a choir of voices, and it's the blended sound that is beautiful. The joy is in the variety.

So here is my contribution to the choir of poetry, inspired by someone else's first line, but sung in my own voice, in a tune that arises from the wealth of my own life.

A Savior Lies in the Desert

When I rose from my bed I was a watering hole for justice
and you were the desert of skulls encircling me
Twilight squatted on the juiceless ground like a blue dog
and you spoke
with a clattering of jaws from the skulls of the dead
lolling on the sand:
I thirst.

You embraced me, craving vindication,
all you who died a ghastly death
by negligence, design, fucked-up neurons, roadside bombs
I went to bed a woman with ordinary woes
but woke to find myself
your last resort
How do I atone for the bony hand that nothing filled
the demented crone who died alone, that lonely
bloody shoe?
You asked too much
of a simple seepage in the sand

All I had to offer was the trembling puddle of my empathy
But you begged
so I bestowed a kiss from my moist lips on every skull
that rolled to the brink of my pool and I called this
justice

One Week After the Disaster

2011-09-12T20:11:00.000-07:00

I seem to have misplaced my head.

It has been a week since my computer was destroyed by a rogue water sprinkler. There’s some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that my printer resurrected itself from the dead. I had the new one out of the packaging and ready to go, when something made me try the old one again. It must have dried out following its dance with the water sprinkler, because it worked again. Yeehaw! Back went the new printer into the box, happily returned to the store.

The bad news is that I’ve lost my email program, Outlook Express, along with everything that was in it. After many frustrating hours, I can’t seem to get the new Outlook email program to work, that is, to find my server, log on successfully, and so on. The hours I’ve spent on this endeavor have driven me into a dark depression. I’m forced to use a yahoo thingamajig which is annoying. I curse it. I curse many things. Oh, well, tomorrow is another day.

The good news is that I managed to salvage my document and photo files. I’ve spent the past week working madly on magazine assignments and got them all done and submitted. This is a big deal, and worth celebrating, especially since the subject of one story had her husband go and die on her right before my copy deadline. This threw her whole story out of whack, not to mention what it did to her life. But with a little sympathy and rewriting, the story was written, approved, and submitted. So there’s cause for celebration. However, I’m stuck in the dark depression of the email fiasco, and that is all I can think about. I’ll have to work on that.

The bad news is that my office is still topsy-turvy, with everything moved and stacked and out of its usual place, letting the carpeting dry after its assault by the rogue sprinkler. Oh, well, tomorrow is another day.

The good news is that I have a new computer. My documents and photos on now on its hard drive. This is a blessing, one worth celebrating, if I weren’t so busy being annoyed that it isn’t configured for me. There’s a special circle in hell for training computers to mind, to find their servers, to refrain from pop-ups that one doesn’t want, to behave the way you want them to behave in general. I hope when I die I don’t go there.

My old computer is finally on its way to get an autopsy at its manufacturer. I’m praying for it, as if it were a living person who is deathly ill. I would like to have it resurrected, along with my email program and all its contents. It seems like my life has gone on a strange diversion this past week. And in the hubbub of the past two days, as I worked around the strangeness to get my last three stories finished, I forgot to do my morning meditation, pray, and work on my gratitude journal. That has no doubt contributed to my sense of depression as the day has ended.

Oh, well. Tomorrow is another day. For now, I’ll go make a few entries in my gratitude journal and remember that every day above ground is a good day. May God’s blessings be with all of you.

Disaster!

2011-09-06T16:42:00.000-07:00

My computer was DESTROYED Monday in a freak accident, along with the rest of my electronics, when my ~~beloved~~ husband set a hose-end sprinkler outside my office window and 20 minutes later discovered the hose had gone ROGUE and was VIGOROUSLY shooting into the window, watering my desk!!!! And a houseful of guests were about to arrive for a Labor Day barbecue and croquet game.

The resulting collision of water and electricity blew the circuit breaker and fried everything, including all the files relating to four stories I must turn in tomorrow to my magazine publisher. Everything is kaput...laptop, copier, scanner, printer, photo editing software...

But I'm blessed!!!! My hard drive survived, so the nice tech guy salvaged my files and they're somewhere inside this external hard drive if I can figure out how to extract them. I had accident insurance, so ~~God knows when~~ eventually I'll be reimbursed for my laptop. There's some money in savings to buy this here ~~unconfigured cheap empty frustrating~~ replacement computer and a new printer. I'm still married too (although I can't get my hubby to come out from under the bed where's he's been hiding since yesterday).

We had to scrap the croquet game yesterday, due to my driving need to get my computer to the tech store for a diagnostic, but we had a nice meal with our family anyway. I'm thankful to have a 12-Step program that keeps me from wigging out when crap happens. I didn't make anyone's life miserable yesterday or today, including my own. So blessings on your day, take a minute to back up your hard drive if you haven't done it in a while, and watch out for rogue sprinklers. I'm off to set up a new printer and wrestle me a grizzly or two...

My Curious Guest, Revealed

2011-09-04T00:10:00.000-07:00

It was pure serendipity that I found this creature tucked into the roses Saturday morning. It looked at first like a dry curled leaf, and I'm not sure why I moved in for a closer view. Picking dead leaves wasn't on my agenda; I was picking dahlias. I like to think that God was nudging me so I could enjoy His strange surprise. Last night I queried Google images and learned that my beautiful guest is a sphinx moth that goes by the name Eumorpha achemon.

The moth has a fighter jet's lines. I learned that sphinx moths are some of the fastest flying insects, and some can fly over 30 mph. The achemon has a wingspan of about 3.5 inches, about the width of my palm, and it flies at night. One website said it is rarely seen, which reinforced my sense of the serendipity of our meeting. Achemon feeds on nectar, especially petunias, which I don’t have. Maybe that's why it was gone this morning.

In Greek mythology, Achemon and his brother Basalas were a pair of mischief-making ancient spirits, who once stole the weapons of Heracles. He punished them by tying their feet to his club and slinging it over his shoulder, marching off with them hanging upside down, facing backwards. From that perspective, the brothers beheld the sight of Heracles' bare butt and burst into laughter, and when Heracles demanded to know what they were laughing at, he cracked up too and let them go.

I have no idea why the Achemon myth inspired the gentleman who named this moth in the 1700s. But the Poetry Jam requests a humorous poem this week, and the Achemon myth inspired this haiku:

Two mischief makers
spy Hercules’s godly ass:
Divine heroic crack-up.

I like to turn events like this into life lessons, so I remind myself: You never know what might cross your path today. Might be some little miracle tucked in there. Tunnel vision will blind you to it, so be observant!

Catastrophic Thinking

2011-08-29T10:53:00.000-07:00

I’m watching the neighbor’s two dogs run loose in the neighborhood. The tall golden one with tail lifted like a flag trots ahead, footloose and fancy-free, while the short-legged corgi-type scampers along like a caboose. They seem to be enjoying this lovely summer morning while we neighbors fret about them. One neighbor has corralled them once already and returned them to their back yard. She and my husband confer when the dogs free themselves again: What to do? No one is home at the dogs’ house and obviously the back yard cannot contain them.

People here care about their neighbors. My observant, friendly husband walks our dogs every morning and garners news or dispenses advice. I wonder if anyone has noticed we have a new housemate. Our 18-year-old granddaughter has moved into my daughter’s old bedroom to work and attend the local community college.

This has wrought a monumental change in our methodology. That bedroom was the bedroom of our two foundling kitties for the past two years. It was where we sequestered them to keep them safe from the dangerous outdoors when the doggie door was open for the beagles. I wanted indoor kitties when we adopted them because we once lost a cat to a predator, we think, and we once had a cat mauled. By this time, the young cats know their room, and they gallop into it with tails high at night, or whenever enticed by shaking a tin filled with cat food.

Since the advent of Lalas, as we call our granddaughter, the cats’ material goods have been moved into our room, and the cats are confused. They dash to the closed door of what used to be their habitat, and stare at it. At night, they wander our bedroom, wreaking havoc, opening cupboard doors, climbing the blinds, terrorizing the beagles, generally creating mayhem that keeps us awake and grouchy.

Twice last night in the dark I tripped over a frightened beagle who didn’t know which way to run: away from the cats, or away from the human feet. So she froze and was tripped over with great cusswords. By midnight, I was considering divorce. I’m a catastrophic thinker.

Thank God the weekend brought an AA convention to our area. At least for pockets of time I was not crazy. The Friday night speaker, Cliff R. from Southern California, gave me food for thought. He quoted Mother Teresa, and I wrote part of the quote on the back of my name tag:

“The fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love, the fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace.” (Mother Teresa)

I suspended my plans for divorce this morning and made a date with a newcomer to meet her at an AA meeting today. I want some peace in my life, and the only peace I’ve ever found from my catastrophic thinking is in the oddly wrapped gift that is Alcoholics Anonymous.

War Wounds

2011-08-23T00:14:00.000-07:00

In a crowded garden like mine, flowers are bruised by the leaves of their neighbors as they jostle in the evening breeze. A stiff hairy leaf, like a sunflower’s, will rub bald spots on a dahlia bloom. I hate that.

I still pick the flowers, though, then patiently give them little haircuts and put in them in vases, disguising the bald spots with greenery and other flowers. To the uncritical eye, they are still beautiful.

My left inner wrist is a mass of scars: eighteen of them, 2 to 2.5 inches long, running lengthwise up my forearm, across the width of my wrist. I made them with an Exacto knife 24 years ago. Some are thicker than others. I forget they’re there. Then I’ll put out my hand to somebody for some reason, look down, see them, and I feel nothing. Most people say nothing. Neither do I.

It was a bad night. I was 34. I worked on it for a couple of hours. Got drunk and got blood all over the kitchen. Had a young child sleeping in a bedroom. Made a call finally, somebody came and wrapped my wrist in cotton gauze. Two days later, I went to a psychiatric hospital for a couple of weeks. I got better. Two years later, I got sober.

Five years ago, I asked my husband of 14 years to hide the Exacto knives because I heard them calling. He had only known me sober. He had no idea I had been drinking in the garage during that winter. But he knew my scars, and he was scared. So he hid the knives. I got honest and sober again a few months later, but the knives are still in hiding. I asked for one last year to do a project. He couldn’t find it.

In a meeting recently, a guy said he was allergic to alcohol, and when he drinks he breaks out in handcuffs and IVs. I laughed. I break out too, in other things. That’s the back story for this poem:

Wounded Flowers

Flowers speak for me. They say
a leaf is a dangerous thing
a petal, too vulnerable for words.
Look
that leaf is a razor
how it has sliced
that petal.
Oh
when I was young
I could not bear the world.
My blood flowed
with the razors
of other people’s leaves.

Flowers speak for me. They say
perfection
is imperfect.
Look
how my wrists
work in tandem with
the scars that line them
as I snip the razored petals
of the injured
flowers.
Look
how pretty
in their vases
are the wounded.

How I Try to Save Polar Bears

2011-08-21T07:00:00.000-07:00

I'm regularly assigned by a local magazine publisher to write of things I know nothing about. Thank God for Google and Wikipedia.

I know next to nothing about polar bears, except what I read in newspapers and National Geographic. They tell me it won’t be long before two-thirds of the world’s polar bears die off because of the shrinking Arctic ice. Within 40 years the bears will have lost nearly half of the range they need to live in.

Figures like that depress the crap out of me. One of my assignments was to uncover small things that helpless, depressed people like myself can do to reduce global warming. Here’s one factoid I found, although I don't remember its source: If every U.S. family replaced one regular light bulb with a fluorescent one, we’d eliminate 90 billion pounds of greenhouse gases, the same as taking 7.5 million cars off the road. We replaced three light bulbs. It may be pathetic, such baby steps. But better baby steps than no steps at all.

For this week's Poetry Jam, we are asked for poems that attempt to make a difference. I'd like to make a difference for the polar bears.

Song of the Arctic

The Arctic is screaming
a scientist said
The blanket of ice
on top of the earth
is fraying so fast
some summer soon
the walrus and wolf
the white bear and seal
will have no ice
to wander

They are not walkers on water.
They are not Christ.
They cannot redeem the world.
They cannot make ice.

We read this in the paper
sipping lattes on Sunday
take note for a moment
like a twinge in a tooth
It passes and we forget
we are a bowling ball
hurtling down the lane
at a bevy of pins
we soon will shatter
and they are living beings
screaming in the Arctic

Navel Gazing in the Extreme

2011-08-18T22:19:00.000-07:00

I saw myself in a book one day when I was 36. Drugs and alcohol had driven me into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, and there, in what we call the Big Book, the text of AA, on page 62, I read this:

“Selfishness—self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate.”

It was an aha moment for me. I recognized myself, my essential problem with life. My role as a victim ended that day. Not long ago, I read a comment on a blog and it sparked a poem about what my life could have become had I never set foot in AA.

How to Be Invisible

Her vaguely alarming
binocular soul-searching
was tedious to her friends
of whom there were few
and fewer still as the years
trudged onward
and her lenses fixed
ever more inward.
By the time she shuffled
off this mortal coil
she was minute, a mote
of dust on a microscopic
lens, and her soul
had vanished.

This is a Friday Flash 55. Go visit the G-Man for more tales in 55 words.

Fear Is the Mind-Killer

2011-08-16T21:11:00.000-07:00

Fear used to rule my life, but not this week. I put on my journalist's hat today, driving way the hell-and-gone out into the country to interview an elderly man about his pioneering family. Not so long ago, I struggled with intense anxiety to do such a simple thing as calling to make the interview appointment. Days of agony attended a simple interview.

They make pills to manage anxiety like that, but I can't take them. If I do, my mind says I need 10 pills because dontcha know I have a high tolerance. I would rather battle anxiety than tempt such a monster.

In five years, I've gone from not being able to leave the house without my husband to cheerfully undertaking a half-hour drive through the country to find a man I do not know and help him feel comfortable telling me his family stories. It's been a bare-knuckled fight, accompanied by visits to my therapist and calls to my AA sponsor, not to mention prayer and gritted teeth. Mostly gritted teeth, if I'm honest.

I don't know how many times I have (mis)quoted Mr. Nietzsche in this private war against the debilitation of anxiety disorder, which is officially a member of my mental diagnoses. The accurate quote is "What does not destroy me, makes me stronger," but "That which doesn't kill me makes me stronger" is my mantra. Saying it didn't help me drive my car when anxiety ruled my world or make any number of forays outside my comfort zone for a long time. But saying it gave me, over time, the ability to look my fear in the face and say SOMETHING to it instead of "Yes, master."

Fear is the mind-killer, I remember reading in Dune years and years ago when that book came out. That line has helped me, too. I see fear for what it is: a slayer of all that is good in the human psyche. Funny, how violent is the verbiage of courage for me.

I learned a gentler, softer language in AA. "Fear is the wind that snuffs the candle in the mind" was one thing I grabbed onto. Another was: "Courage is not the absence of fear; it is taking action in spite of fear." And finally, it still comes down to this one for me: "The battle does not have to be won today, only the first skirmish." I've boiled it down to this: Just take the first indicated step; let the rest wait until tomorrow.

I've done many things in spite of anxiety, that four-syllabled sister of fear, of which I am enormously proud today. I've read my poems to crowds in auditoriums. I have gone to visit my mother, locked in the morass of Alzheimer's, and found her doing things that broke my heart but did not break me. I have spoken in city meetings. I have driven hundreds of miles by myself to attend conferences. I've talked myself down from panic attacks. Well, let me rephrase that. I have prayed myself through all those things. Even Nietzsche is a prayer.

Once, four years ago, I allowed myself, with my sponsor's go-ahead, to take anti-anxiety medication to fly across the country on vacation. All it did was make me a loaded anxious person. After that experience, I flew stone cold sober, preferring prayer to my own stupidity.

My struggles with anxiety are assets today when I talk with women who are dealing with fear. Without fear, there would be no need for faith. Fear can be a faith builder, just as fear can be a mind killer. Everything has a shadow. Fear's shadow is courage. Every time I take that first fearful step, I prove to myself I can be more than I am afraid I am.

I know there is a God because I know freedom today. A woman who couldn't leave her home five years ago is free today. Shaking a little inside, sometimes. But walking out, nevertheless.

August Night

2011-08-14T07:00:00.000-07:00

Twilight falls on an August evening. A sprinkler waters a neighbor's lawn with a cha cha cha shewwww cha cha cha shewwww. A thousand crickets begin their orchestra in the darkened park.

I have to go put on long pants and slippers, the air is so unusually cool. A quick tour of the garden earlier, after we came home from a friend's dinner party, shows some of the dahlia buds have begun breaking into flower on plants that haven't yet bloomed. It's been a strange summer in this usually hot neck of the woods. The garden looks like a midsummer garden, vigorous and full of life.

Four years ago, in the dog days of summer, I sat on a bench in the park next to my house and wrote a poem about the sad state of the garden. It was a different kind of August then, the unrelenting heat speeding the cycle of life and death.

The Poetry Jam prompt for Monday is "evening," and I thought of that poem. It surprises me how great the sense of loss is, when life cycle winds down and plants turn to the production of seed. Seed is a promise of resurrection, but it doesn't arouse hope in me in August. In early spring, yes. In August, seed is an ending, a reason to lament.

The Garden of Dry Bones

The long warm light of an August evening
strikes the black petals of a blown red rose.
Leaves of the dahlias droop; flowers rot
where they have fallen.
Dust drifts in the still yellow air.
Even the ground is tired.

All the bright blooms have faded.
In wild abandon, the sunflowers
throw back their heads, dripping seed.
The herbs, pungent and robust a month ago,
spend their straggling selves on seed.
Seed is the coin of late summer.

Seeds, and more seeds, fall from the
carcasses of flowers, like dry bones.
The golden light of August slants
through the graveyard of the garden.
Bereft, the gardener picks dry leaves
from the hollyhock.

In the waning light of August
the earth falls silent slowly,
the fading note of a violin.
Onward plows the cycle.
Downward bows the rose.
This is how love leaves you
one dead flower at a time.

Chaos Theory in Relationships

2011-08-12T23:48:00.000-07:00

I’m thinking hard about chaos. It is not just a theory. It is people! It is relationships with people!

What a messy business!

Chaos: a state of complete disorder and confusion.

Chaos Theory: a theory that complex natural systems obey rules but are so sensitive that small initial changes can cause unexpected final results, thus giving an impression of randomness.

Relational Chaos: I tell Myra that I like Joan’s new haircut. Myra tells Joan I think she’s cute. Joan tells my boyfriend that I’m gay. He ditches me and moves to Arkansas with Joan.

Relational Chaos Theory: While I sit around thinking broken-hearted thoughts about Joan and my boyfriend, none of this would have happened if I hadn’t opened my mouth.

While I was busy wringing my hands recently about relational chaos, here’s what I could have read in the little “Twenty-Four Hours a Day” book if I’d opened it like I should have done before starting my day in the chaotic world of people and relationships:

“He who made the ordered world out of chaos and set the stars in their courses and made each plant to know its season, He can bring peace and order out of your private chaos if you will let Him. God is watching over you, too, to bless you and care for you. Out of the darkness He is leading you to light, out of unrest to rest, out of disorder to order, out of faults and failure to success. You belong to God and your affairs are His affairs and can be ordered by Him if you are willing.”

So this is why I pick up that little book, I thought when I read it today. And now, this is what my little soul looks like:

Order.

I Can't Stop Myself!

2011-08-09T14:00:00.000-07:00

My days revolve around my flowers, which is a helluva lot better than revolving around economic tumult. The dahlias are coming into their own, in all shapes: balls, anenomes, cactus, decorative, lacinated, collarette, waterlily. In the photo above, in a wonderful vase I bought in New Mexico, are an anenome dahlia, "Lucky Ducky," a waterlily named "Giraffe," a couple of ball dahlias, "Ruskin Gypsy," and a pair of anenomes named "Riverboat."

Life isn't all about flowers. It's about having courage and faith in the winter seasons, when life hands you killing frosts and death and other creepy things. It's about having faith in the future and being willing do the work required today. Here's the same vase a few days earlier, with the ball dahlia and a lacinated dahlia, "Pinelands Pam."

I must like the red palette, or else they happen to be strong varieties that thrive for me, because here are some more of a different type:

With some of my prize money from the regional fair's floral competition, I hunt down vases in thrift stores. Here, in a vase I found at Goodwill, are a red waterlily dahlia and a pink semi-cactus, "Heather Marie."

Most of my dahlias are three to four inches, a size I like for flower arranging. But a few larger varieties are blooming now. Here, in a tall pilsner-shaped vase from a local thrift shop, are "Spartacus," an informal decorative dahlia, "Grand Finale," a semi-cactus, and "Curly Que," an incurved cactus.

As I tend the garden and mess around with the flowers, I think about how courageous are some of the people I know. I see a lot of hope and resilience. I think about grace and mercy, how they keep marriages intact and help us all forgive each other. I think about the nature of faith; I've been told it's an active verb. I think about shit: did I use too much? not enough? Funny how shit is a word we use for fertilizer, which is a good thing, and for lousy things that assail us. Then I hum a few bars of some unidentifiable tune, and there's my day: part shit, part grace, and full of flowers.

Set Free

2011-08-05T17:27:00.000-07:00

My mother died a year ago this week. I’ve commemorated the final four days I spent with her in several different ways, alone and in the company of friends and family, starting with flowers on her grave. Her headstone makes me smile; it’s a note she jotted on her way home, ending with her initials.

And then there’s the odd little poem that came to me on Wednesday. It’s an elegy of sorts, for this week’s Poetry Jam prompt, and a Friday Flash 55. May your weekend bless you.

Freedom, In Other Words

To celebrate my mother’s death
one year ago today
I went to a shop and tried on
tight dresses
imagining myself
reading poems
to Pablo Neruda in his dotage
wondering
would he want me
and my poems
to stay the night
if I were
wearing this?
Something about my mother
being gone
has turned me
loose.

I Am All Feet

2011-07-31T00:37:00.000-07:00

Of all the kooky things a person could start with on a Saturday morning, I started my day with a study of metric verse: ta TUM! It was an accident!

I just wanted to write a short poem in iambic pentameter for our Poetry Jam this week. For some reason, I unearthed my copy of “The Complete Rhyming Dictionary” from 1936 and promptly got caught up in rondelets and dactyls, tercets and feet. Its editor, Clement Wood, writes wonderful essays about everything you could ever want to know about rhyming poetry. Got so enchanted, I didn’t write my little poem until late in the evening.

It reminded me of the time I wanted to fact-check an interview I did with a WWII veteran, just to double-check my dates on the Allied march into Germany. I ended up reading about the Third Army under Gen. Patton for two whole days, fascinated. And I was on a deadline!

Anyway, the Poetry Jam assignment is to write a poem about being 67 years old. Hostess Dana had her reasons for this (find them here). She also said to write poetry outside of our standard operating procedure. So I chose a form foreign to me: the rhyme royal, a seven-line stanza out of the Middle Ages, used by Geoffrey Chaucer. I haven’t looked at his stuff since college. It might as well be Greek. It has five pairs of iambic feet: ta TUM ta TUM ta TUM ta TUM ta TUM. The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-c-c.

Writing the poem was kind of like building a kite: It proved harder than I thought it would be. So I took a break or two and photographed the flowers I put on my desk Saturday morning. And here is my poetical account of being 67, in a stanza pattern way older than that:

The Next-Door Neighbor

We call her “She,” the woman living here.
We don’t know her past or age, let alone
her name, only that She’s terribly queer

about her garden, so much overgrown
She vanishes there. But with crooning tone

we can hear her chattering to her plants—
and they reply! With great exuberance!

Hey! There's a World Out There!

2011-07-29T01:10:00.000-07:00

I've had enough flowers to last me the rest of the month. It's Friday, time for a brief poem and a breath of fresh air: views of the countryside from a ride we took a while back. Above, the scene from the window space of an old garage we came across. Below, its workbench, looking nothing like mine at home. It's much cleaner than mine.

And the garage itself in situ:

Next, a weedy young vineyard marches up to a hill.

Now, a quick commercial break for a poem in exactly 55 words, including the title, so I take part in Mr. Knowitall's Friday Flash 55 festivities. I wrote it while taking a break on Tuesday from the slavery of all those flowers I've been drowning in the past two weeks (see posts below if you've missed the drama).

Cat, Lying on Hassock

Look, Mom, how I fit
between your legs, how
my front paws play
the piano of your toes
and the snake of my tail
flows slowly up your thigh.
Let me soothe your feet
with the rake of my teeth.
Let the work
go mind itself.
It only seems to call.

(This would be the cat in question, Kate, a lazy soul if ever I saw one:)

And finally, a parting shot of the western hills as we head home again.

So go visit Mr. Knowitall for more brief breaths of fresh air.

That Jumping-Off Place

2011-07-27T22:45:00.000-07:00

I’ve had three hours of sleep, and today I’m thinking about bliss. I even looked up the word to be sure I knew its correct definition: complete happiness or a state of spiritual joy, according to the dictionary that accompanies the Word program.

I’m thinking about “following your bliss,” a phrase coined by myth master Joseph Campbell as he discussed mythology and the hero’s journey with PBS journalist Bill Moyers in a series aired in the late 1980s. It means something like discovering you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be in this life, doing exactly the right thing for you to be doing, and finding fulfillment in it.

I’ve had about eight hours’ of sleep in three days; yesterday began for me at 6 a.m. and ended around 3 this morning. I was doing the work needed to compete in the final floral competition at our local fair. I signed up to do two separate, complete wedding flower displays. I don’t know what I was thinking. At 2:30 this morning, the work still wasn’t finished, but my body made me give up.

This morning I wrapped up the last bits at 7 a.m. and my husband helped me haul the pickup-load to the fair. I was content with the work I’d done and immensely grateful for many things. Friends let me harvest flowers from their gardens because my main bloom is still a few weeks off. The strength to work on my feet all day and all night was there. The inspiration was there, and the problems I encountered had simple solutions. Mostly, I was grateful to have found the desire to do a thing I love to do and follow it through all the friggin’ way, even when the work was hard.

Someone asked me at the flower building this morning if I would give her some tips on floral design. All of a sudden, the years fell away and I was 16 years old, living in a small desert town. My brief stint at McDonald’s hamburger joint had come to an ignominious end. My spirits couldn’t keep up with the busloads of tourists on their way to Las Vegas wanting burgers their way right now. I promptly went across the street to the town’s flower shop and offered to work for free if they would teach me how to arrange flowers. The owner looked at my little application, lifting her glasses off her face, and then she put them back on and looked at me. “Come back Monday morning,” she said. “We’ll pay you minimum wage to start.”

That was my first "jumping-off place." For the next five years I worked for her after school and during summers while in college, learning how to arrange flowers for every occasion. I went to college in the first place to study floral design and horticulture, which I promptly abandoned after the first semester to become an English Lit. major. English Lit. gave me a wonderful career in magazines, but I worked in flower shops off and on over the years between jobs. What’s not to love about working with flowers?

I’ve been blessed over and over throughout this summer’s floral competition by the awareness that I’m exactly where I should be, at this stage in my life. I’ve received bountiful gifts from my Higher Power, in the form of joy, ideas, flowers, weather, prizes, love, and memories. It’s been a spiritual experience, leading me to the discovery that joy has returned. Another "jumping-off place" has happened.

This is what Joseph Campbell says about bliss: “I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat-Chit-Ananda. The word ‘Sat’ means being. ‘Chit’ means consciousness. "Ananda’ means bliss or rapture. I thought, ‘I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.’ I think it worked.

“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.”

The judges liked my wedding work, pictured here. Now I’m going to enjoy the refreshment of a nap and say another prayer of thanks.

***
Several hours later….

Couldn’t sleep, so I got up and cruised around on low speed, cleaning up here and there after the explosion of floral detritus over the past 10 days. My house looks like a tired flower shop on Mother’s Day: stems, leaves, vases and buckets of aging greenery and unused flowers everywhere. I even swiped the vase that normally sits on the corner of my desk with something in it all seasons, and the blank hole there bugs me. So I arranged yet another vase of flowers, which I later took to an AA meeting tonight and gave to my sponsor in thanks for letting me have trimmings from her redwood, eucalyptus, Japanese maple and pine trees for my greenery. Can’t bring myself to put another vase together tonight. A nice chore to look forward to in the morning.

The AA meeting got me thinking about the tie between a couple of my life’s jumping-off places and being sober. “We stood at the turning point,” the Alcoholics Anonymous text says of that moment when a person is suddenly driven to ask for help with her drinking problem. There’s a willingness at that moment to surrender to anything that promises an iota of relief from the misery of drinking oneself to death.

I drank to change how I felt, to feel more of something, to feel less of something. I did that from the time I had my first drink. When alcohol hit my bloodstream, something inside said, “Oh, yes!” It never stopped saying yes with an exclamation point. I couldn’t picture my life without it. But some mysterious awareness had bloomed in my brain, which told me that alcohol might be the source of my misery instead of being the solution for it. I discovered I wanted to live, and I found myself seeking out Alcoholics Anonymous and teetering on the brink. I can’t live with booze, and I can’t live without it, I metaphorically said. The people in the AA meetings said, “We know how you feel and we have a solution that allows us to live sober, happy lives.”

I took that leap of hope. Today I can do all the things I thought I’d never be able to do without at least a little buzz. AA saved my life and gave me a life, as I’ve heard said in meetings, a gift I didn’t foresee when I stood at that jumping-off place in the doorway of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in May 1990.

And I’ve found that it’s true what I heard said in those early meetings: You walk in the door with a little list of hopes—just to stop drinking yourself into misery, stop being so very ill from alcohol poisoning, stop losing parts of your life like your job, your spouse, your self-respect. You think that’s all you want. But you’d shortchange yourself if you settled just for that little list, because sobriety brings with it an enormous list of miracles. People are reborn.

Flower Power

2011-07-23T23:32:00.000-07:00

Have you ever dreamed up something that doesn’t exist and then made it exist?

What causes that creative inspiration? Where does the idea come from? What part of the brain can picture something it’s not seen before, let alone then figure out how to make it happen?

I was talking with my husband about the creative act. He doesn’t have a brain that makes things up. He won the top baking prize at our regional fair last week, the “Best of Show,” for a lemon tart that tastes like heaven. Joe follows a recipe when he makes it, the same recipe he was given by the chef at the culinary school where Joe trained and now volunteers every day. He gives that recipe to other people, who make the tart but it doesn’t turn out as well as Joe’s rendition of that tart. So Joe has a special touch as he cooks the juice and blends the curd and then the crust and then bakes the tart. He makes a beautiful, unbelievably delicious tart, but he doesn’t invent anything.

I invent things, and he thinks that’s amazing. I can’t make that tart, but tell me to make a flower arrangement that represents a famous writer of my choice, and I’ll picture a full-blown floral design that illustrates not just the writer’s specialty, but uses components of his style and references to specific works. I’ll see it all in my head. How does that work? Why does that happen? I love that it happens, but it’s so curious.

The second floral competition of the fair required floral designers to do table settings for 1) a famous person associated with mountains and 2) a favorite writer. I chose Ansel Adams and John Muir.

I used Adams’ unbelievably beautiful shot of Yosemite Valley as my inspiration, those incredible textures and lines of that monochrome shot. With angular black and red Asian tableware and vases on a white cloth, I used red dahlias, red miniature roses, black eucalyptus and highly textured white-green foliage for two floral designs.

It was stark, monochromatic, and totally true in structure to an Ansel Adams composition. I loved it. I didn’t shoot a very good photo of it, but here it is:

John Muir’s design got redwood foliage in homage to the redwood forest state park named after him here in California. I used wood tones in vases and tableware, and combined small curving branches with lavender Echinacea coneflowers and golden yarrow in simple, woodsy arrangements.

The judge gave the Muir setting a thumb’s up, with a first place ribbon and the Judge’s Award. He or she was not overly impressed with the Ansel Adams work, giving it a third place. I usually agree with the judges in the floral design competitions, but when I saw the first and second place settings in the same class as Adams, I got myself an attitude. I saw blue ribbons on my four other pieces illustrating winter….

spring….

autumn….

and summer…..which I forgot to take a photo of…. and laughed at myself and at my Higher Power, who listened to me asking please, may I have a couple of special ribbons for my work, and who generously saw to it that I got blue ribbons for everything (except Ansel Adams) plus a big fat “Judges Award” plus a big fat “Best of the Day” award for a lovely little flower called a peacock orchid that I had entered in the show’s cut-flower divisions, which I found in my garden this week after having totally forgotten I had planted it years ago and so I did nothing to make it grow and it grew only because of God’s sun, rain, and fine weather.

So I was given the couple of special ribbons I asked for, plus more besides, and who do I think I am to whine about anything, I ask you? I am so blessed to get to work with lovely flowers and make things that I picture in my head. Now I’m going to rest up like a happy camper until Monday, when work on the third and final flower show begins.

(The photo at the top is the exhibit I made on the first day of the fair illustrating the fair's mountain theme. I speak of it in the post below.)

Glad Tidings of Great Joy I Bring

2011-07-21T01:30:00.000-07:00

The state fair has opened here and the tidings were good for the first group of competitions I entered. The rusty iron garden marker I made garnered a blue ribbon, and so did my kite (see post below). My floral arrangements did well, and I was happy to see firsts on six out of ten, including the one above, representing “On Golden Pond”…

and this one, representing “Indian Summer”…

But it was my big fair-theme exhibit, illustrating “Mountains of Fun,” that really knocked me sideways. Using things passed down to me by my mother, I made a “mountain” camping scenario with flower arrangements in her cast-iron frying pan, her Dutch oven, her old coffee pot, and her old gray-wool blanket. I found it covered with big ribbon rosettes: First Place, Best Fair Theme Award, Judges Award… I don’t have a photo of the whole exhibit because I constructed it there at the fairgrounds, but here’s the frying pan with its batch of “eggs”…

I sat on a bench and wept for the resilience of the human spirit. For the grace and mercy of God, who brings healing after a long season of sorrow. For the great blessing of my parents, who, in spite of their imperfections and the tragedies of their deaths, helped make me the person I am today. For the tenacity I’ve learned in Alcoholics Anonymous, to discover myself by simply being willing to put one foot in front of the other in pursuit of dreams. The ribbons meant more than just a prize; they represented rebirth. They proved to me that you can accomplish meaningful things if you're willing to just make a beginning. And everything that happens in your life, both the miseries and the untold many ordinary events, combine to enrich you and bring you joy if you make the smallest attempt to view life with eyes of hope.

Epiphany after Winning a “Best of Show” Ribbon at the State Fair

I was taking a piss in a bathroom stall
at the fairgrounds when everything changed
between God and me.
Dad, I said,
inexplicably since
I was raised with Almighty God
on the Judgment Seat,
Dad, I said, you’ve been good to me.
I’m a sinner and a cheat but you don’t knock me
upside the head & say, To hell with you!
You say, Here, sweet thing,
is food & water
& more than you have wished for.
I have a drug addict heart but you see
the thing in me you made on a good day
when your creative juices
were pumping up a storm.
You see me with love that says,
You are really something,
my blue-ribbon child.
I left that toilet a woman changed
just because
for reasons I don’t understand
I called him Dad.

Nocturne

2011-07-17T10:58:00.000-07:00

Insomnia is one of the loneliest disorders. At 3 a.m., it’s just you and your head while the world seems peacefully sleeping, your sleeplessness an affront to the natural order. It might be nice if somewhere in my little berg there were a 3 a.m. insomniac support group, with low lighting and hot milky chai, water fountain, futon sofas, soft music, dark rooms down the hall with futons to lie down on should sleep seem possible.

One of my complaints about having insomnia is the ever-present sense of hope that sleep lies around the next bend of the clock. That hope prevents me from saying screw it, turning on lights, electronic entertainment devices, writing the next great American poem. Instead I hopefully practice “good sleep hygiene,” foregoing the blue computer screen, the blue television light, both known to stimulate the brain. The only light I turn on in desperation for the company at least of a rather boring book is the lamp by a chair.

I can’t take prescription drugs for sleep or the anxiety produced by not sleeping, because my body recognizes the drug and wants more of it, not a good situation for someone who cherishes her sobriety. For years I used tryptophan, a reliable friend until it was removed from the market early in the ’90s. Then it was Tylenol PM, until it stopped working. Then the psychiatrists introduced me to Seroquel, an anti-psychotic and powerful sleep-inducer. It added 50 pounds to my small frame and raised my cholesterol sky-high, and after five years, I severed my ties to it. From January to April this year, I hardly slept at night despite a pharmacopeia of herbs promising slumber. It was a very hard season.

Finally, after lots of research on the web and consultation with my psychiatrist, we changed my depression medication and I started taking mirtazapine, a tetracyclic anti-depressant with few health-threatening side effects. It’s taken almost three months to adjust to its soporific effects. I felt like sleeping all the time, and often simply did. At last, now I can stay awake all day and do the things that a normal person does, and usually I can sleep at night. In my gratitude journal, begun a few months ago at the suggestion of a new AA sponsor, there are lots of references to the joy of sleep, even for an abundance of it.

This week’s Poetry Jam has us humming the tune of insomnia (or, alternatively, odd modes of dress [hm]). Poets have produced lots of good work about insomnia, which is the companion of many people with fine minds. I have a number of poems referring to sleeplessness myself. But here’s a new one.

Night Sight

The moon is a white eye
cloud-lidded
in a broad blue face
and it peers over the humpbacked hill,
over the giant supine silhouette
of some black, some dozing beast.

I stare right back at it, fierce
as an itch that won’t be quelled.
My house is full of people
tucked in dark rooms.
No one knows
I crouch here on the couch
eyeballing the moon.

Everyone sleeps, safe, secure
like they were last summer
while our old mother and I
fought for her death,
three nights and days that bled
into each other. Tonight
I learn how much I gave her
simply being
awake. The moon must know.

Black and blue, the bruised sky
hours later cracks open
slowly for the sun, still
just a thought, or a memory below
that humpbacked hill, coming to heal
those bruises.

But Can They Fly?

2011-07-16T11:23:00.000-07:00

This winged wonder is the kite I've made to enter in the Mid-State Fair coming to my area this week. It's a triangular box kite variation on a conyne design, using vinyl shelf liner and photos by Ansel Adams from last year's calendar. Will it fly? Hell if I know. The fair's handmade kite competition doesn't require a flight.

The fair always comes up with some theme each year, and in the floral design competitions we'll have to find ways to illustrate the theme in flower arrangements. This year's doozy is "Mountains of Fun" and I nearly scratched from the kite business because of it. Easily overwhelmed, poor me.

But I'm a member in good standing of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the program does NOT advocate giving up when the going gets tough. I did what a good AA ought to do when she has signed up to make a kite and now thinks it will be too hard: call on her sponsor. Sponsors handle all kinds of odd problems.

I was reminded of that ever-so-helpful Chinese proverb: The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. What's the first indicated thing to do? Prayer is usually a smart idea.

Now, God is probably very busy with serious issues. But in AA I'm allowed to access a Higher Power of my own understanding. While the God of my fathers is far too tied up with enormous global and individual crises to care about kite anxiety, my own Higher Power has wiggle room to handle challenges of every sort. So I dialed my spiritual hotline. Next thing I know, that old Ansel Adams calendar comes to mind, with its beatiful black and white photos of mountains. Ha! It happened on the 101 freeway heading for an AA meeting. If anyone tries to argue me out of believing in my Higher Power, I will show them this kite. And I know it will fly even though it doesn't have to.

And here's a photo just for fun of my newest garden acquisition. The 30-inch curving top piece, headed with an iron butterfly on one end and an iron weight on the other, is simply balanced on the stand of stones on a quarter-inch ball welded to the top piece. The large butterfly and a smaller one partway down the backside catch the breeze, and the whole things turns gently on the stand. I wonder what would happen to the betterflies in a gale. Would they fly?

Busy Hands Are Happy Hands

2011-07-13T10:30:00.000-07:00

If it’s true that busy hands are happy hands, my hands are rolling in ecstasy.

The skeleton of a Conyne-style box kite is drying on the floor of my office. Drying on trays in the guest room are five kinds of herbs. The dining-room table is covered with flower vases and ikebana practice arrangements in the moribana and nageire styles. In the garage are three large silk-flower arrangements ready to be delivered. Out on the patio is my version of a Picasso face made of rusted iron hinges and bits of machinery.

The regional state fair begins next week, and I signed up for competitions in kite making, flower growing, dried and fresh herbs, vegetables, garden signs, and floral designs. All I do all day long is make things and do the prep work to make more things during the 10-day run of the fair.

The weather is glorious and I make mad forays out into the garden to keep things groomed and growing out there. The triple-digit heat vanished, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. The tomatoes aren’t ripening, and the sunflowers haven’t even set buds yet. The dahlias are dallying, which means I have almost no flowers to work with right now. There’s only a week before the flower competition begins. I got the bug infestation under control, but only God can make flowers bloom, so I’m starting to sweat a little.

In getting my work space prepared, I went through some boxes of my mother’s things, shoved into the garage willy-nilly last August when she died. It was an occasion for gratitude. I read her little scribbled notes, marveling at her valiant attempts to cope with her dying brain. I found the last little bits of quilting she was able to do before the skill of sewing left her. I read the random newspaper articles that she cut out of the paper, wondering why those particular subjects caught her attention. It all made me realize how much healing has taken place in the past year. Handling her things gave me pleasure and I felt joy again. Her idiosyncratic habits made me smile. I’m thankful for my mother and for what I learned during that painful last year of her life. I love you, Mom.

I dug out some photos of my floral work from two years ago to inspire me as I do prep work this week. This piece won “Best of the Day.”

This piece won “Best of Show” among both amateur (my class) and professional work.

This bride’s bouquet took a first.

This is a cake made of flowers.

The "Purple Tiger" rose at the top of this post is faithfully blooming and has taken blue ribbons in the floribunda rose class. And here is my entry in the garden sign category. It resembles how I look after all the work this week.

The Dark Side of Flowers

2011-07-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

I have forgotten how to be hot. A high-pressure system parked itself nearby and we’re having triple-digit temperatures day after day. It has been so long since we had 105-degree afternoons that I don’t know what to do with myself. My office isn’t air-conditioned. I find myself looking around the house, wondering what to do. Do what you’ve done before, I tell myself. But last year’s summer is a terrible smear of memories of my mother’s slide into death, and I don’t know what I did.

One major accomplishment this past week is a new manuscript of my poetry. I submitted the previous manuscript to a few competitions and it didn’t make the cut, so I’ve shelved it. June 30 was the deadline for two competitions hosted by small presses, so I cranked, with the help of my daughter Milo, who sorted through stacks of poems for me with wonderful ruthlessness.

Letters from a Distant God, I titled it. I arranged it in a loosely chronological order so that it tells the tale of struggling to come to terms with a long sense of disconnection with God. It begins with a frightened childhood and an alienated adulthood, then plummets into depression and hospitalization, struggles through my mother’s ballet with Alzheimer’s, and finally arrives in my scarred but hopeful midlife, grateful to the God who has been sometimes so very hard to trust but who has blessed me.

One of the poems I originally included, but later cut from the final draft, is suitable for a place in this week’s Poetry Jam. Jam maestro Poetikat requires dark poetry with a floral theme. I’ve been carefully tending my dahlias for months so they’ll make a good showing in the regional fair's flower competition in a few weeks. The original version of this poem was composed while on a similar mission two years ago.

I Thought I Was the Breath of Life

Planting in my garden
I had thoughts of myself.
I am the breath of life, I thought.
I speak into the soil
and flowers bloom.

Like God I touch the earth
and living things spring up.
I plunge dark matter into the dirt,
and beauty sprouts there.

Blood drips from my hands
and sweat blinds my eyes.
This living sacrifice
calls forth the dahlias
and they rise from the dead!

When the gopher
burrowed into my yard
I became the whore of Babylon
hell-bent on destruction.

I thrust poison into the soil,
my precious soil.
I pumped gas, planted bombs,
baited pincher traps.
Screw nature.
I throbbed with blood lust.

Until I found
that soft brown body
terminally squeezed,
I never knew death
could be so hilarious.

Music Opinions, 2 cents' worth

2011-06-26T00:11:00.000-07:00

Music is the most powerful form of art. It beats out painting and poetry and all the rest of the arts, in my opinion. Sometimes I base my opinions on study and research but with music, my opinion rests entirely on my emotions because that’s how music communicates with me. The sound of it bypasses my intellect and goes straight to the beating heart. That’s why I rate music as the highest art form. Minds are such dicey things.

I don’t deny an intellectual awareness of a given piece of music can enhance your experience of it. I’m thinking here about Leonard Cohen and some of Bob Dylan’s work. But my brain is not required to lift a finger as music evokes those powerful emotions ~ sadness, joy, spiritual uplift, melancholy, peace, whatever. The succession of notes creates an emotional response.

Sometimes I’ve wished that I could compose music instead of poetry. The composer doesn’t have to worry if the words he used to paint a scene strike the right chord or not. The poet has to contend with the fact that every word and statement will be filtered by unknown readers, and she is powerless over those filters. Poetry is heavily dependent on the conscious awareness and mental processes of each individual reader. Take the simple word “mother,” for example, in a sentence like “the mother stood at the sink / contemplating her hands.” I might mean it to be a meditation of the labor of motherhood, but your history with a sharp-tongued, very vain mother, for example, will arouse a completely different miasma of feelings.

Anyway, this week’s Poetry Jam is musical and directed by Brian of Waystation One. He asks that we write a poem inspired by a song or using a line from a song. I offer a piece that was inspired by Sarah Brightman’s “Il mio cuore va.” I didn’t know what the words meant when I wrote the poem since I don’t speak Italian and I didn’t know the English translation of this love song from the Titanic (“My Heart Will Go On”) until I Goggled them this afternoon. Her voice, then, was an instrument like an oboe or a cello creating an emotional reaction to the idea of long-term love.

Look at It This Way

this is you
this is her
twin threads twining in space
up and up andupandup
sinuous as snakes
the dance of the double helix
making life grow high

this is you
this is her
round notes soaring
high and round as the moon
in a purple sky
full of light a bird in flight
a waltz of wind and feather
mounting waves of air

this is you
this is her
a swelling-rising-rearing-
crashing wave
shatters on the sand
and the sand soothes
calms and suckles
a soft sighing washing smooth
the rough edges and the fury

this is you
this is her
strong arms gripping
across the precipice of loneliness
strong limbs bowing with the wind
strong lines moored in heavy seas
above all holding fast
in the face of all storms

Invasion of Disgusting Bugs!

2011-06-25T01:20:00.000-07:00

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.
~ Victor Hugo

So there I was, getting ready to go to sleep in peace after my first, full day of being “up and at ‘em” since getting sick. I thought, “Just a quick glance at the basil pots, see if I’ve missed any snails.” So out to the patio I shuffled in my slippers, flashlight in hand.

A strange sheen on the leaves of the potted plants underneath the crepe myrtle tree greeted me. Hm. I reached out and rubbed a finger on a leaf, an act that met with sticky resistance. Oh, dear. I got a bad feeling about this. I aimed the flashlight up into the crepe myrtle, and OMG! An infestation of something insectoid, adults and eggs all over the underside of leaves, dripping with bug juice.

There went my desire for sleep. I wish to don my black leather killing gear and launch an all-out assault on the crepe myrtle. If those bugs travel to my dahlias, it’s over. But reality chimed in: It’s late and you’re tired, Chrissie-poo. You don’t know what they are or what treatment will destroy them. And no, you may not grab the axe and chop down the tree.

So there I am, hitting Google, sleuthing with anxiety. So there God is, awake as promised by Victor Hugo. God is a gardener, did you know? The original gardener. My sorrow ranks among the small ones, so I ask him please keep an eye on things. I’m going to have to let this go until tomorrow. I will wade into the insect army single-handed at dawn, Backyard Ramba with both barrels firing!

About the photo: Not copyrighted, not taken by me, not even the insect that infests my tree, but something similar is afoot.

Epiphany in a Parking Lot

2011-06-24T06:15:00.000-07:00

It didn’t even occur to me that I was sick the past few days, as I slept a great deal and spent the waking periods in physical discomfort. Preceding all of this were a couple of unusual events: first, I cleaned house like mad in a late spring-cleaning frenzy, and second, I had two incidents of intense nausea. The latter I attributed to low blood sugar and the former I blamed for the ensuing physical discomfort, although what house-cleaning has to do with gastrointestinal distress, I don’t have a clue.

Then Wednesday evening, a friend mentioned her husband had been laid low by some sort of contagious bug. A friend of his had suffered from it earlier and apparently passed it on. I asked what the symptoms were and learned they were precisely what I was experiencing.

I guess I’ve been sick. But I seem to have slept as much as my body can take for now, so I tackled a poem that I’ve been wanting to post here, about an epiphany I had in a parking lot recently. With a little whack, whack, it has become a tale told in 55 words, as required by the Friday Flash 55 club hosted by the world-renowned G-Man, Mr. Knowitall Himself. Hie thee over there to see how succinctly people can tell stories.

The sign on the van
DEL MONTE MEAT CO.
with its giant capital M on MEAT
like a shark’s yawning mouth

made me remember how badly
you wanted to devour me
on our first date

and there at the Mobil gas station
I realized I escaped
in the nick of time
oh so long ago

About the photo: Just an odd sculpture I saw on my trek to Northern California last month.

The Day My Mother Said Goodbye to Me

2011-06-21T18:05:00.000-07:00

I found something wonderful in my document file today. I wrote it a year ago, after discovering my mother had been trapped in a hospital for five days without the notification of her family. When I found her there, I showed the treating physician her Advance Directive, and he promptly ordered hospice care for her (she had developed pneumonia while at the hospital) and released her back to her care home. This is what I wrote on the afternoon of her release:

Out of these five long years spent by you in the relentless grip of Alzheimer’s Disease, when mostly what I’ve known of you is summed up in “disintegration,” I want to remember how you glowed today as we made plans for your dying. Your small, dwindled self lay curled on your bed and barely rumpled the spread, but your face was beautiful, in its ancient joy to see me. You stared up at me in blue-eyed brightness, as you listened, heard, and answered in your right brain, not your wrong one. You smiled and smiled at me, and at the staff that attends your death, and over and over you said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

I asked you how you felt, and you said, beaming, “It’s wonderful!” It was wonderful to have you back among the living for those few hours, after we had signed the orders to let you die. You laughed about eating ice cream for lunch, and you held my hand.

At one point you looked up at me, as I leaned over you saying something to you, and you reached up both hands and laid them softly on my face, cupping it in your hands. We smiled at each other. Were you saying goodbye, Mom? I understood your message of love, and gratitude maybe, or maybe just a cherishing of me. It made my spirit soar. I will remember this, Mom.

After Alzheimer’s destroyed you,
you had one glowing day, clear as sunshine,
when your blue eyes twinkled at me.
Your face was beautiful in its ancient joy.
You reached up and cupped my face
in your hands, smiling and studying me.
It’s wonderful you said, and I knew
what you meant.

Don’t Tell the Children

2011-06-20T02:37:00.000-07:00

The summer solstice is a cruel irony. I spent an hour with my aged Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (copyright 1987) after writing that sentence. I love words to the point of obsession sometimes.

Solstice is from the Latin “solstitium,” meaning “sun + to come to a stop.” The summer solstice in the northern hemisphere, the day when the sun stops its day-lengthening climb in the sky, falls officially on June 21. I looked up “irony” as well. The meaning I was after was listed as definition 3 a (1): incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result.

The 13-line explanation of “irony” is the longest definition of an “i” word in 16 columns of words between “inversion” (14 lines long, a reversal of position) and the final word, “izzard” (a noun, probably from Middle French, meaning the letter z). I discovered a good new word in there: irrefragable (of Latin origin), meaning “impossible to refute or to break, as in arguments or rules.”

I’m joining the Poetry Jam today, which is why the emphasis is on summer. With the solstice, summer begins, but from this point onward, the hours of daylight begin to recede. For some reason, I feel a tad cheated by that. You’ll find more summery attitudes here.

Children do not know
cruel irony underlies
the summer solstice
like the grass
beneath the sprinkler
through which they run
screaming with joy
in the hot June sun.
Summer’s freedom
has begun, stretching
out as far as they can see
in its eternal
light.
In truth
the solstice
marks the end
of growing light.
From this apex
summer days begin
their inexorable march
to autumn and its equinox
a clandestine waning
of the sun.

Suicide’s Collateral Damage

2011-06-16T01:52:00.000-07:00

When I was in a psychiatric treatment facility for major depression five years ago, I was appalled by a terror tactic used by one of the docs. He had asked me, “Do you love your children?” and I had said of course I do but they had nothing to do with my depression. He then informed me that the offspring of parents who commit suicide are statistically more likely to commit suicide themselves, and he asked me sternly, “Do you want that legacy for your children?”

Hell, no, I told him. He told me to think about the statistics next time I was suicidal. “If you don’t wish suicide on your children, don’t wish it on yourself either,” he said.

I thought he had a pretty unusual approach to dealing with my depression. He didn’t do a thing to help the depression itself, but that was the last time I gave any serious thought to offing myself. So his method of suicide prevention was 100 percent effective.

Two years ago, a friend of mine killed himself. He was a brilliant guy, and he had kids. On Saturday his teenage daughter killed herself, using her father’s method, after her boyfriend broke up with her. I just saw her death notice in the paper.

Just now I did a search on the “statistics” referred to by that doctor. I found them in a Johns Hopkins study of 300,000 Swedish kids, published in 2010. Those who had lost a parent to suicide were THREE TIMES more likely to commit suicide than offspring of living parents.

If just one depressed parent reads this and, like me, forsakes the idea of suicide as a solution for a living problem, then maybe my friend’s daughter’s death will save another child’s life someday.

I wrote two poems when my friend died two years ago. One of them, titled “Collateral Damage,” addressed his suicide’s impact on his family and it is too horrible to read now. Here’s the other poem.

How Much More Loving Did You Need?

We met in the park
two hundred people
maybe more
who loved you

The sun blazed
in the blue sky
Big white clouds
drifted by
It was March
cold in the shadows

One of your family
read Kaddish
You never told me
you were Jewish
You never told me
many things

I waited to read
my eulogy for you
It would have
made you laugh
Then I saw
that park bench
where you
made me laugh

I know you would
have stopped it
if only you had seen
four hundred eyes
loving you

I know I would
have saved you
on that bench
if only I had known
you needed saving
from that black
hole your heart
dropped into
while I laughed

Cat Humor

2011-06-15T04:00:00.000-07:00

I am simply blown away by how many little flying bugs are out tonight. When I came home from dinner with friends at twilight, a plague of no-see-ums was waiting at my house to assault me on the short walk to the front door. Their little bodies had weight, too, striking my face like tiny kamikazes.

Even my cat Kate was wondering the hell was flying around as she took her ease on the couch in my sunroom. Outside was abuzz.

Inside was abuzz.

What the heck was that?

I am grateful as all get-out that someone invented screens for windows. Otherwise, I would have to flee.

Pick My Cherries, Please

2011-06-12T16:30:00.000-07:00

This is not what my cherries look like, but it's the photo prompt I picked for this week’s Poetry Jam session.

Prayer to My Cherry Tree

Cherry, cherry, quite contrary,

why do you in my garden grow

apace with a snail made merry

on Quaaludes with boulders in tow?

It seems your ripening has stalled

as the days till summer have flown.

I’ve stood so long my head’s gone bald

and several deep wrinkles have grown.

I feel as if I were drowning

deep in my salivary glands.

I sure wish you would quit clowning

and put some cherries in my hands.

The cherries in my tree make me salivate.

Prayer works. These are the cherries plucked by my hot little hands.
Thank you, tree.

After You Left

2011-06-09T05:00:00.000-07:00

After You Left

My dog whines for you
After you have driven away
In a fit of rage
I hit him on the head with a book
And insanely yell
STOP WHINING!
I walk away with the sound
Of the collision
Roaring in my ears
I shoot the dog a look
Feeling mean
He ducks his head
His brown eyes go dark with something
I don’t want to know
But I do

***

Inner Weather

2011-06-07T14:40:00.000-07:00

Around here in June, they say if you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes. I thought about that today, not because of the outdoor weather, although it’s been reliably irregular, but because of what it’s like to be a human being.

My inner weather is whimsical, affected by the least little breeze stirred up by outside circumstances. One of the things that attracts me about Alcoholics Anonymous is its promise that I can lead a life of serenity in spite of what happens around me and to me, if I stay focused on gratitude and helping others.

Live in an attitude of gratitude, they told me as a newcomer. You don’t just have a drinking problem; you have a THINKING problem. Your head is not your friend even though it’s attached to your neck. Address the problem of the mind, and you’ll straighten out, physically and mentally.

All of that, I’ve found in my experience to be true. But it does take work. Ten minutes after an uplifting AA meeting, I can be a sad sack all over again because a foul breeze blew in from outside. Someone looks at me wrong, my shoelace breaks, I have to do something that I don’t enjoy.

This week a woman said she fell into a bad place in her head and it made her start isolating at home, where nothing got any better, surprise, surprise. A man said he got a bill that was higher than he expected, and he was bummed out about it big time.

It takes so little to make our emotional weather go south on us. I have a lot of aches and pains this week, I’m fatigued by a new medication, gosh, life is hard. Next thing I know, I’m oblivious to all the grace in my life.

I’m working with a new sponsor, who has assigned me the task of maintaining a written gratitude list that I add to daily. I’m not batting 1000 in that area. But it has made me conscious of my inner weather. Today, I’m grateful for food in my refrigerator, for the way cats’ eyes change in the light, for living in a home that has flowers blooming in the yard. A foul breeze may in the next instant blow that gratitude all to hell, but hey, I can start all over again!

Each day brings its own bucket of challenges. I’m grateful for the 12-Step program tools that keep us going when life happens. I couldn’t do life alone. Without my AA fellowship, I’d be stuck in my head like a shoe in a dryer. I haven’t had a shoe in the dryer in a long time. Thanks, God.

The photos in this post are snapshots of northern California taken on my trip to visit my niece. Thank you, God, for landscapes.

The Diamond-Seeking Cat Updated

2011-06-05T16:08:00.000-07:00

The fickle sun popped out of the clouds for minute, so here's a look at the ice. Thank you, Pouncer.
This is Pouncer. He’s a diamond-seeking cat. I would show you all the diamonds I found last weekend at my niece’s wonderful house except that it’s raining here, in my neck of the woods, so the light’s not good for a photo. But I’ll show you the cat at work.
Receives instructions from his mistress.
There are diamonds over here.
I saw some over there last week.
Follow me. More diamonds this way.
Wait. I’m lost.
Oh. There you are.
Here’s a nice little gem.
Mistress directs skip loader to load the goods.

Enough of this. It’s time for a poem. Dana of The Bug’s Eye View calls for water, for swimming or something like it, for this week’s Poetry Jam session. I worked on something I started two years ago on the last day of a vacation at Club Med in Cancun. I like thinking about the Caribbean, so I offer this:

Moon Over Cancun

A silver road on black water
leads from our balcony to the white ball of moon
hovering over ghostly cruise ships that plow
to and fro on the horizon.

La luna de miel
said our guide in Tulum when I asked
What is the Spanish for honeymoon?
He gave me the literal moon of honey
and I savor it tonight
as the laughter of others
dialogues with palm trees
rattling their fronds in the warm breeze.
Northward the city is a necklace of lights
that launches diamonds into the sky
with the roar of jet engines
followed by the wink of stars.

You are el sol, the guide said to you,
and to me, You are la luna—
two separate, who make One complete.
He cradled his hands on his chest
and sighed for us. We have been married so long
I had forgotten that.

Now I remember. We have spent days
in turquoise water
and our skin is still hot
with the equatorial sun.
We have been together so long we don’t care
if we touch. Longevity has freed us
from the lies we once told as lovers
to inflate our value—You’re the first…
the only one…Before you I never…
We have spent days on the white sand
passing shells between our toes
and we have not told
one lie.

Today I set free the seashells
collected in these days on the beach,
released them to the waves grasping at the shore.
See them scurrying back to the sea, you said.
I remember now
in the light of the moon of honey,
the truth about you,
why I married you eons ago.
If I told you that I walked on water
you would say yes my big beautiful girl you

Geysers, Glasses, Gray Skies

2011-06-02T22:00:00.000-07:00

There's a geyser in this photo. It looks like a small cloud-like tornado in the mountains in the upper left quadrant. This is the view my niece and her family are treated to at their home in northern California. They have diamonds on the ground (see previous post below) and geysers in the mountains, and it's all very beautiful. I wanted to stay with them longer, but responsibilities called at home.

While I was lounging on their deck, I remembered something I heard last week, and I wrote a poem about it. The poem just happened to be 55 words long and qualify as a Friday Flash 55. If you want to tell a story in exactly 55 words, post it and go tell the host with the most, the G-Man.

Confession of a Self-Aware Man

I own my own darkness
he said
I don’t blame it on you
It isn’t your fault
I see the glass is half-empty
though spring water
gurgles around me

In the blue mountains
with the green valley
spread out below
it is the gray sky I see
pushing me down
into the darkness
underlying everything

Diamond Hunting

2011-05-29T23:44:00.000-07:00

I'm hunting diamonds up in the California mountains, as I visit my niece and her family. Diamonds lie on the ground everywhere on her property, or occasionally in rocks as I found them above and below.

Most of the diamonds I find are scattered brilliant points of light. In the photo below, there's a largish diamond on the far right, and smaller ones in the upper left and lower left.

If I didn't aim my butt at it, this view below is what I would see.

This is Pouncer, the guard cat.

This week, the Poetry Jam asks for poems on forgetting. I've written the piece below about a psychotic breakdown I watched my mother suffer as she was dying of Alzheimer's disease. During the breakdown, my mother fell and sliced her forearm, requiring stitches. All the verses are in Haiku form with 5-7-5 syllables. You'll find all the other Jammers here.

Blackout
or
What Happened to Your Mother?

Fear dims memory
You have been here before this
Don’t you remember?

Put up the “closed” sign
Shut the windows. Pull the blinds
Step out. Lock the door

Assume a blank face
Take the elevator down
Walk into the street

Sleepwalker shuffling
Bare feet wade through broken glass
Crouch. Howl like a dog

Train tracks hum a tune
Freight train rockets through the night
Rattle clatter bang!

Duck your head and run
For the dark house down the road
Slam and lock the door

Darkness is total
The silence reverberates
Outside, a cat screams

Curl up in the bed
A blanket over your head.
Shiver. Block all thoughts

You’ve done this before
Your fear is a panting dog
Don’t you remember?

Shut out the memory
Grit your teeth. Clutch the blanket
Don’t answer the phone

Lie still in the dark
You don’t know who is screaming
It could be yourself.

Wounded animal
A dog howling Cats yowling
You’re safe here in bed

Glass slices the flesh
Needle stitches the wound closed
Mama wildcat screams

She’s out of her mind
Lights on but no one is home
Don’t you remember?

You’re out of your mind
Is it your fault she’s bleeding?
Don’t answer that door

Tanks for the Memories

2011-05-21T16:06:00.000-07:00

Fatherhood is a blessed business, even though the man himself universally is hardly holy.

I post this weekend to honor my father, born May 1930, who died at 52 of brain cancer. I’m older than my father lived to be, and I’m proud of who I am today in goodly part because of who my father was and what he bequeathed me. He was an interesting man, and I still don’t approve of his absence from my life. This photograph of him was taken during the Korean War, when he was training with the National Guard. I love you, Dad.

Requiem for My Father Following New Evidence of God

My religious education was not your fault
but I begged God for your life with every
book, chapter, verse, creed, catechismal
question and answer I knew. I bargained

for your life with mine, with my future
happiness, I swore to God He could keep
that future good husband and I would do
without wedded bliss or children if only

He would let you live. I swore off drugs,
men, intellect, pleasure of all kinds if He
would hear my prayer and save you. On
my knees I begged, through choking tears

with loud beseechments, calling on His
Holy Name, His mercy, His holy book,
His past behavior with humankind, every
nickel and dime method I could conjure

to touch His hallowed heart. I knew I was
pathetic, not nearly eloquent enough to earn
a miracle. I confessed I was by nature sinful
and unclean, deserving of His temporal and

eternal punishment, mea culpa, mea culpa,
I don’t deserve it, I confided, but please
let my father live. I did not pray in faith but
in desperation because you were in fact

my god. I was 28 years old and did not grasp
the fatal truth of His claim to be a jealous
God who suffers no other gods before Him.
My very prayers stung His jealous ears.

Visit the Poetry Jam site at http://poetryjaam.blogspot.com to visit other poets pondering fathers.

News of the Weird

2011-05-19T23:14:00.000-07:00

There are days when I open the newspaper and feel like Alice after tumbling down the rabbit hole.

"We're all mad here."
~ Cheshire Cat

First up today is the news that circumcision of male children could be banned in San Francisco this coming fall. The proposal put forth by a group of “intactivists” got enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot, and if the initiative passes, it will prohibit circumcision in all males under age 18, with no exceptions. If you’re wondering, as did I, why on earth anyone would want to dictate such a thing, the Wall Street Journal reports that the measure’s supporters believe it is mutilation without the permission of the child and has no health benefits. Hm.

Next, astronomers think we may have a whole mess of rogue planets floating around the Milky Way galaxy without a star to steer them by. They’ve identified 10 big gaseous balls, similar to Jupiter, wandering around unsupervised, apparently not orbiting any star. This news astonishes astronomers. How did the gas balls get there? Why are they homeless? Are they in fact homeless? Were they thrown out of orbit for insubordination? Are they gas bubbles burped by a baby universe? Hm.

Finally, we might not have time to ponder either of these news stories if this Saturday unfolds as predicted by Harold Camping, who expects believers in Jesus Christ to vanish from the earth in a phenomenon known as the rapture. Mr. Camping’s calculations of the Biblical timeline leave no room for doubt, he says: On May 21, Jesus Christ will gather all his faithful followers into heaven in the twinkling of an eye, and the last days of Earth will begin. Hm.

According to the Associated Press reporter who submitted this news story, “most Christians don’t believe in [the rapture]” and “the Christian mainstream isn’t buying it.” He doesn’t cite sources substantiating those declarations, so I assume he’s confusing his opinion with something called “facts.” I’ll just point out that “most Christians” I personally know do believe something similar will happen one day, at a time unknown by anyone.

But I think it wise to keep my ignorant nose out of things that might or might not happen in the future. There’s work to do here and now, so I’ll just keep my feet right here in the present. Actually, at this hour of the evening, my feet will carry me off to bed.

Cheers!

Poetry Jam Theme for May 23

2011-05-17T16:39:00.000-07:00

I have shook off the rain that soaked us here (who knew the power of a poetry theme could be taken so literally by the Weather Man in the Sky?). We have et us some good grub and we await the arrival of our Poetry Bus rider friend Rachel, et al, here in not so sunny California. Mi casa is a pit stop on her USA tour. Maybe if I keep our theme simple, she will take time from gawking and dash off a poem.

I asked to host the Poetry Jam blog for the upcoming Monday, May 23, for a reason: my long-gone father's birthday falls on May 24. Dad was a child of the Depression, a self-made man born in Oklahoma and transplanted to a small town in rural California. He was a poet in his way, a honky-tonk poet. I'm posting a photo of him in his prime.

The theme for our Poetry Jam this coming Monday, then, will be your choice of two wide-open topics, fertile ground for the Muse:

1) Write a poem about Father, fatherland, daddy dearest, your experience of fatherhood, the father you never had, your father or your own fatherhood, or the father of your children, or the father of your father, or your Heavenly Father, or go father afield and do what you will with the notion of fathers.

2) Write a honky-tonk song. Wikipedia's discussion of honky-tonk music is here.

Visit the Poetry Jam site at http://poetryjaam.blogspot.com to link up later this week. Hopefully, I'll be able to figure out Mr. Linky's foibles.

Tempestuous Sky

2011-05-16T20:24:00.000-07:00

I’ve been a bad blogger but a good gardener thus far this month. My surgically altered and mending hands have created a veggie garden for my daughter Milo and I to share. They’ve rejuvenated drip lines and sprinklers. They’ve tended all the dahlias and roses painstakingly, and they’ve repotted, transplanted, pruned, and fertilized everything. They've made one gopher R.I.P. They’ve pulled millions of weeds.

I apologize to all my blog friends for neglect. I’ve poured all my energy into the soil and the plants. Six weeks ago the doctor diagnosed a severe vitamin D deficiency and I’ve sought the sun for help. A new anti-depressant, cheap and non-toxic, has solved my insomnia problem, thank God, but it has a grogginess side effect. It’s a time of transition, and I’m happy about an evolution.

One of the transitions involves the world-famous Poetry Bus. It has trundled off to the Bus Yard in the Sky. Its poet riders have formed the worldwide Poetry Jam in retaliation, jamming on Mondays, with our new blog site linking us all. You’re welcome to join in.

This week’s theme is Thunder and Lightning. In a nice synchronicity, my bit of California is enjoying a tad of that this week. However, the muse has gone mum with all the gardening, I guess. So I’ve pulled a stormy piece from the archives to offer as my riff. But first, here’s a little relevant artifact from my family history, invented, perhaps, by my father:

Thunder roared and lightning flashed!
A tree fell down, and a frog got smashed!

And now for some real tempestuous weather. Today is my 19th wedding anniversary, and let it be known that the narrator of this piece is NOT moi.

Invasion

The wind stirs in the leaves of the trees—
sounds like a stream chuckling down a stony shoal
sounds like surf supping at the shore
sounds like kindness if I can conjure that stream, that shore

In truth, menace rises beyond the window
violence edging over the horizon
and stalking this way. I have silenced the radio
and shuttered the television, and now I lie

my eyes closed on the sofa under the window
I have drawn the shade so I am not tempted
to see, may rather remain in my reverie
of the wind susurrant in the sycamores, murmuring

its love for me, and not your red rage roiling
down the road to burst into this house with all the glee
of an invasion, and not your shoddy rape
of what little mercy lives in me, your beloved wife.

Tonight's anniversary supper ended in chocolate decadence cake with lime sauce (for Joe) and creme broule (for me). I now lumber happily off to don elasticized pajamas and ponder wedded bliss...

Photo credits: unattributed work found via Google

It’s easier to eat crow warm while it's warm

2011-05-11T08:30:00.000-07:00

I made a mistake in one of my magazine articles last month and I had to write an erratum for the upcoming issue. For fun I looked up quotes on the subject of being wrong:

“When you realize you've made a mistake, make amends immediately. It's easier to eat crow while it's still warm.” This is attributed to a gent named Dan Heist and seems to be the only thing he’s noted for. I couldn’t find anything else about him.

And then there was this from Yogi Berra, who knew whereof he spoke: “We made too many wrong mistakes.”

I especially liked this one from British broadcaster John Peel: “I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones.”

My blunder was just sloppy research, not clever, but it got me thinking about a recurring topic in my household: How can two people with opposing viewpoints hold a courteous discussion, supposing one of them thinks the other is mistaken?

After two decades of discussing things with me, my husband, Joe, has a viable answer. In fact, he often is asked by friends if he will perform marriage counseling services for them (he politely declines). “The four most important words in a marriage,” he says, “are ‘Honey, I was wrong.’”

He’s right. I’ve forgiven him countless times. And vice versa. I know his method works because we celebrate 19 years of wedded bliss next week. Ogden Nash put it this way: “To keep your marriage brimming, With love in the loving cup, Whenever you're wrong, admit it; Whenever you're right, shut up.”

Mistakes can be useful in personal relationships. They give us the opportunity to be wrong for a change, which is restful since we all work so hard to be right all the time.

I’ve noticed we’re pretty quick to tell somebody he or she is wrong, especially when it concerns politics, religion, and family matters. This is based on faulty logic, that two people can’t both be right at the same time. It’s the gunslinger in us. “There’s room for only one opinion in this town, and that’s mine.”

In an AA meeting last week, a friend of mine said, “I often mistake my values and judgments for the Truth.” I think we’re all very nervous about ourselves, and we soothe those anxieties by insisting we harbor our beliefs because they are “true” in terms of reality or fact. If our views are right, then views that differ from ours are wrong. We even feel led to convince each other of such verdicts.

We mistake our opinions for facts. We also don’t know how to coexist with divergent perspectives. Even our language reflects this adversarial thinking. People have “opposing viewpoints” and “conflicting opinions.” From the get-go, we’re opponents in a boxing ring. Starting out as adversaries doesn’t bode well for discussions between husband and wife, parent and teenager, or any other duo. Pretty soon everyone will be blaming everyone else for being wrong, and dedicated to proving it.

I think we all need lots of reassurance, and we all find reassurance hard to give. It takes enormous effort to put our defenses on the back burner and encourage the other person. And getting both parties to do it at the same time? It’s a wonder our relationships survive. Many times Joe and I have tried to talk to each other about a prickly thing, each of us trying to choose our words wisely, but then I interpret something he said in the light of my own defensiveness, and immediately I stop being willing to reassure and become devoted to proving him wrong. Many times I have carefully used “I” words but he heard those blaming “You” words, and we wound up in the boxing ring again.

But I’ve learned that if I work at it, I can suspend my commitment to being right just a little bit more. We human beings respond well to loving reassurance that what we feel and think is important. I’ve got to give that reassurance if I want to get it. I’ve got to model it in my own behavior. I’m talking with someone I care about, for Pete’s sake. You’d think it would be easy to remember that affection even when we’re in conflict. But no. I’m too busy mistaking my opinions for facts again.

Joe and I get the best results out of our “discussions” if we give each other plenty of strokes, like admitting I am overreacting, admitting I am overly worried about myself and forgetting to think about him, admitting my flaws and my vulnerable feelings, admitting my love, my ignorance, and my desire to understand. It’s hard work, being loving, isn’t it?

About the photo: Yes, it isn't a crow; it's a blue jay. But it's eyeballing a crow, a warm crow, just out of camera range.

This Bud's for You

2011-05-05T09:30:00.000-07:00

Breaking news in the California wine country where I live: The vineyards have experienced "bud break"! That's what you see in my photo above...the new shoots have shot forth and the grapevines are reborn. It's cause for celebration in my region, makes the news and everything.

It IS wonderful to witness the renewal of things. It makes me downright cheerful, a state of mind I sorely needed after the pity-party I threw two weeks ago. Here's a snapshot of how things stood then:

I haven't been a happy camper inside my own soul. In that quiet place where I've found contentment through the years, a few words from a few unhappy people and a few sad situations wormed their way in and started putting down roots. [Here's the rest of "Hanging Pictures in the Sewer."]

Titanium over at Element 22 had something to say in response to a remark I made in that post, i.e., if I fall in a cesspool, pretty soon I start hanging pictures because I start feeling comfortable there. Here's what Ti had to say about that:

"There’s something in these dark places, too. Like bulbs wintering over in a cool cellar, devoid of sunlight, all we can see and smell is the desiccation, the decay, the frailty of our own wintering-over. It is a season of the soul, this dark place- and one that will feed the source of the green shoots that are soon to come.

"Without the winter, the dark, the stink- there couldn’t be new growth. Sometimes we have to be cut back and cut down completely in order to return full of life. The green shoots are coming through the soil with these words of yours and soon the sunlight and gentle rain will coax flowers like you’ve never seen.

"In truth, if each one of us is NOT a troubled soul, we are not stirred in any way. Try to see ‘troubled’ as a transitive verb. See it as the transition that it is, the agitation of soul that stirs change and growth. Sometimes even the unkind messengers are prophets unknown, harbingers of change that was already blowing in the wind."

What are your thoughts on Ti's equation: agitation = growth?

Tunnels, Tsunamis, and Fake Moby Dicks

2011-05-02T00:30:00.000-07:00

My left hand is in a cast from surgery last week. Dr. Don'tcha Luvme sliced the carpal tunnel and released the guitar strings that help my hand make music. My right hand, one month post-surgery, is now the Big Bopper again. I've done little but piddle around and write a few poems. I have my eye on a gopher tunneling in the neighbor's driveway flower bed, perilously close to my own. The critter seems content to dine on the neighbor's poppies so far, but if he moves east two feet, he'll discover my scrumptious dahlias. Then I'm afraid he'll meet his end. Savor your poppies, little rodent.

Meanwhile, the photo today is of Morro Rock in the harbor of a small town called Morro Bay on the California coast near my home. Geologically, it's the core of an old volcano. Historically, it's half the size it was before entrepreneurs quarried it in the early 1900s. Spiritually, it's significant to the local Native American people, who are now the only ones who may climb it, except for a few rangers who track the rock's peregrin falcon population. Oddly, a tsunami from the Japanese earthquake entered the tiny harbor last month and destroyed some fishing boats.

Fish or Cut Bait

I’m through with you, log
Done hauled your ass
From hell to kingdom come
And still you won’t be moved
Been days I hunched here
In this dinghy thinking
I would reel you in
You beast
I was a fool
Believing you
Were some big fish
I hooked, dived deep
And running strong
You weren’t
No Moby Dick
I know and now
My arms be
Rubber bands
Of weariness
I cut my line
And point my bow
North for home
Across the green lake
Wiser
Free

What I Saw When I Closed My Brain (Revisited)

2011-04-25T13:00:00.000-07:00

What you are about to read goes over the edge of reality.

[If you've already visited to read the poem, skip to the end of it if you're curious about its animal symbolism and today's additions.]

It's a vision I had during a meditative hour on Saturday. I offer it as my Poetry Bus ticket, which this week was to be something in excess. It's excessively long and excessively full of creatures. You'll find more excessive work on the Science Girl's blog.

What I Saw When I Closed My Brain & Opened My Eyes

Beneath the oak tree a century of decomposing leaves
softer than a mattress and malleable, sweet scented
with a sheet of new grass, cradles me as I lie down
above a swift-flowing stream rich from winter rains.
A snag of sodden limbs and twigs rises in midstream
like a shattered tree regretting its dissolution.
Three bickering crows alight on the far bank,
screeching their malcontent and striking one another
in a cacophony of bitterness that belongs elsewhere.
I reach with searching fingers for a stone but hear
Watch, and here he comes, my resurrected Christ
crunching through the mat of leaves in long white robes.
I bade him come but thought he wouldn’t, yet here he is,
dressed for someone else’s dream. No white robes,
I say and look away at the terrible crows, gone
quiet now, and I see in the sunlight the shining
green among tar-black feathers as they sedately sip
at the water’s edge. In worn blue jeans he reclines
beside me, shoulders broad in a tight T-shirt,
sandaled feet in the brown leaf mulch. His hand
touches my shoulder like the tentative nose of horse.
Watch, he says. I look again at the mournful snag
and I see there where the stream parts a rainbow trout
surfing the current, and just behind it, a smaller trout,
their colors glinting in the light. Upstream bushes
rustle and a brown bear lumbers into the water,
slogs unerringly for the snag and reaches a paw
for the trout as if it knew the trout were there.
With a small undulation, the first trout meets the paw
and the paw encloses the trout, and I see the two,
the bear and trout, agree to feed and to be fed.
The crows lift off and a white owl settles
in the place they left, fixing his yellow eyes
on me. We stare at one another like old partners
suddenly met in an unexpected place. Beside me
a lynx has crouched to watch the owl. A cougar
slinks down the bank upstream and dips its head
to lap the water, resting on a rock. I don’t know
what my Christ is thinking. The owl says something
in a soundless voice and waits with me, the lynx,
my blue-jeaned Lord, for whatever happens next.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Meanings & Symbolism

I was interested in all the animals who appear in this meditative dream, and so I looked a little into Celtic and Native American animal symbolism.
Among six animals there are:
12 references to insight and intuition
2 bearers of power and courage
2 guardians
1 guide
1 messenger
and a crow times 3

The facilitator of my meditation group uses no descriptive words, only such verbs as "breathe," "observe," "listen," and "be." She's a psychoanalyst and she tells us that the process of observing will allow the unconscious to speak. I asked what this meditation might be saying to me, and she just laughed. That’s what you have to figure out, she said. So here’s what I think:

What I Saw When I Closed My Brain & Opened My Eyes

Beneath the oak tree a century of decomposing leaves
softer than a mattress and malleable, sweet scented
with a sheet of new grass, cradles me as I lie down
above a swift-flowing stream rich from winter rains.

[The surroundings are serene, but a bad attitude affects my interpretation of the view in the lines that follow:]
A snag of sodden limbs and twigs rises in midstream
like a shattered tree regretting its dissolution.
Three bickering crows alight on the far bank,
screeching their malcontent and striking one another
in a cacophony of bitterness that belongs elsewhere.

[I see brokenness and regret, dissonance and discontent, but how true is my vision? The crow, despite my annoyance, represents a mass of good things, such as metamorphosis, clarity of vision, bearer of light and understanding, keeper of mysteries and wisdom. I don’t see any of that until my spiritual guide appears, wearing the wrong clothes.]

I reach with searching fingers for a stone but hear
Watch, and here he comes, my resurrected Christ
crunching through the mat of leaves in long white robes.
I bade him come but thought he wouldn’t, yet here he is,
dressed for someone else’s dream. No white robes,
I say and look away at the terrible crows, gone
quiet now, and I see in the sunlight the shining
green among tar-black feathers as they sedately sip
at the water’s edge. In worn blue jeans he reclines
beside me, shoulders broad in a tight T-shirt,
sandaled feet in the brown leaf mulch. His hand
touches my shoulder like the tentative nose of horse.

[This is a wonderful interaction to me. Like many of us, my belief system was instilled when I was small with simple picture books and complicated nuances. The 12-Step program is emphatic that we must come to a personal understanding of God, in whom we can entrust our lives and hopes. This scene tells me that process is at work in my life and my God is perfectly happy to “change his clothes.” His appearance in the scene changes everything for me.]

Watch, he says. I look again at the mournful snag
and I see there where the stream parts a rainbow trout
surfing the current, and there behind it, a smaller trout,
their colors glinting in the light. Upstream bushes
rustle and a brown bear lumbers into the water,
slogs unerringly for the snag and reaches a paw
for the larger trout as if it knew the trout were there.
With a small undulation, the trout meets the paw
and the paw encloses the trout, and I see the two,
the bear and trout, agree to feed and to be fed.

[The bear is a powerful guardian, with great courage and strength and a deep connection to the Creator. He also represents intuition and introspection, which is interesting to me. He looks inward with understanding and thoughtfulness, but at the same time he looks outward to protect and guard with his strength and courage. He represents healing, death and rebirth. The fish, an ancient symbol of Jesus Christ, sacrifices itself in a nourishing relationship with the bear. The snag stops being a mournful broken tree and becomes a shelter for the trout.]

The crows lift off and a white owl settles
in the place they left, fixing his yellow eyes
on me. We stare at one another like old partners
suddenly met in an unexpected place.

[The white owl has lots of jobs in animal symbolism. He’s a messenger that brings enlightenment, wisdom, or spirituality. Sometimes he foretells death. In this dream, it seems like we used to work together but our relationship ended. Now he has something to tell me but I can’t hear it, and so he waits with me ~ which strikes me as a kind thing to do, but maybe not.]

Beside me
a lynx has crouched to watch the owl. A cougar
slinks down the bank upstream and dips its head
to lap stream water, resting on a rock.

[The lynx joins me, taking a protective stance. When he appeared in my meditation I asked if he was a bobcat or a lynx since I didn’t know the difference between the two. He specified that he was a lynx, which I later learned is wonderful. In animal lore the lynx is both a guide and a guardian, equipped with keen vision and foretelling, and he’s the keeper of all secrets and mysteries. The cougar brings balance between strength, leadership, wisdom, and freedom, and is a sign of coming into your own power. I could use some of that.]

I don’t know
what my Christ is thinking. The owl says something
in a soundless voice and waits with me, the lynx,
my blue-jeaned Lord, for whatever happens next.

[In this meditation an awful lot of characters know things, except for me. But I learn something important ~ my perception of “life” is transformed when I bid my Higher Power to be with me. And all the possibilities symbolized by the animals who visit seem to be available somehow when my view changes from negative to positive. I don’t know how, but maybe I’ll learn more during “whatever happens next.”]

Have a great week, my friends. I’m going to try to meditate more without the facilitator, just to see if something happens next.

Hanging Pictures in the Sewer

2011-04-22T09:30:00.000-07:00

Well, hail. I've had an overdose of harsh words running around in my head, and it got so noisy and poisonous in there that I took to my bed, that refuge of depression.

When I wasn't seeking the oblivion of sleep, I was outside in the yard, working among living, thriving beings, or finding respite from orneriness in AA meetings. I haven't been a happy camper inside my own soul. In that quiet place where I've found contentment through the years, a few words from a few unhappy people and a few sad situations wormed their way in and started putting down roots.

When I was newly sober 21 years ago in LA, I heard an AA speaker named Joe G from Venice Beach give his pitch one morning. I don't remember a thing he said except one: If you got a resentment against me, and you're thinking about me, you're giving me free rent in your head. Thank you!

Another man named Joe spoke in that same AA meeting hall one night. He said, "I'm an alcoholic. If I fall in a cesspool, I start hanging pictures." I married that man because of what he said.

While I've been lying in my bed, sleepless or sleeping, I've been licking my wounds and hanging pictures. A loved one with wounds of her own recently told me that I am a deeply troubled person. I immediately without passing Go became a deeply troubled person. Some of us give the most amazing amount to power to others.

There comes a time when you have made all the amends you can make, done your best to bring reconciliation and clean up your side of the street, prayed all the prayers you can pray, and things still are bad. Either you start hanging pictures and giving up that free rent, or you walk away. You have come to the end of the line where your power to change things is concerned.

I went to an enormously satisfying poetry reading last night, where I heard a lot of good work by some fine poets. Everyone was at the top of their game. I was glad to be part of the night, to be one among such people. There is no price for gifts like this. There’s no price for the soul-satisfying act of being who and what you are, and proud of it.

Today is Earth Day and Good Friday, a whole bunch of redemption packed into one little day. I won't notice the goodness of heaven and earth if I stay in the cesspool hanging pictures. So I'm out and about where there is plenty of love to share.

Here is a Flash Friday 55-word poem about a different sort of thing putting down roots in your mind. Go see the G-Man, the G-force behind this Friday madness. I call this piece “Obsession.”

When it should come to this,
that I should sit like stone,
not uttering a sound,
not twitching a thumb,
as the hours pass and think
only of your dark eyes,
I will know myself
a fool, unglued,
that it is time to don
the round red nose and play
for nickels on the corner.

Delirium

2011-04-17T20:57:00.000-07:00

I spent the day with macro lenses on my eyes. With my camera, I stood among the low branches of the dwarf Gala apple tree outside my sunroom as bees lumbered around me. Then I meandered around the yard, finding happy bees everywhere. I finished on my knees, pinching the last and smallest weeds between my fingers among the dahlia shoots, having an imaginary conversation about trust with our oldest granddaughter. With your Tata and me, I told her, you are innocent unless you prove yourself otherwise.

She’s going to be 18 next month and she’s delirious with possibilities associated with legal adulthood. Her parents are strict. She has never been on an unchaperoned date even though she’s about to graduated from high school, and she wants to leave home to be the mistress of her own fate. I love her very much and I want her to live with us if she believes she must leave the fold. She’s a beautiful young woman, smart and motivated to be a teacher, worthy of trust. Her grandfather, my beloved, tells me we can’t intervene. I told the weeds that we will.

Spring is like this girl, ripening. The topic for this week’s Poetry Bus is Spring, ordains NanU, guest driver and science writer. My fellow passengers are linked here.

Beests

Who bee the beests upon the blossoms that bee upon the apple tree?
See thou what I mean? There, upon the leaves?
They bee everywhere, upon the tree, the bush, the lavender—
Busy little beests, with bulging thighs of pollen,
Harbingers of Spring.
Oh, sweet bee, where is thy sting,
Drunk amid the blossoms
Burgeoning on the tree?

Dirty Power

2011-04-14T06:00:00.000-07:00

When I’m feeling blue, it’s nearly always because I’m powerless to change something. This time of year, though, there’s a great antidote out in the yard called gardening. It might more truthfully be called weeding or soiling, but whatever it is, it boils down to power. I have power in the yard that I don’t have in the rest of my life.

I’m as ineffectual as a wet noodle in a lot of ways, but out there, I’m a goddess. With my hands alone, I can transform things. Today it was a piece of crap plot of ground. An hour later, it was a rich little garden bed ready for seeds. My whole attitude was transformed with it. I hauled those blue feelings off to the green-waste bin along with three huge bucket loads of weeds.

Lest I get a fat head singing my own praises, I remember that the sun, the rain, the spinning of the spheres aren’t mine to command. The essential force in power-gardening is the Creator who transforms the seasons in the first place. I’m thankful that He lets me work in concert with Him to turn weeds and dirt into flowers.

One of the major things I’m powerless over is another person’s ill will. Along with the weeds I yanked out of the ground today, I fiddled around with the toxic byproducts of an unhealthy relationship. I had fun whacking it with my metaphorical machete until it was no more than a Flash 55 for Mr. Knowitall’s Friday bash. See what others can do in 55 words over at the G-Man’s place.

Bad Blood

When you said I hate you
I saw a dam fracturing,
all that fierce water
surging down the gorge,
your accumulated
tragedies churning
like broken houses
in the flood.
I imagined a drop
of your venom
landing on my skin,
shivering there
before my pores
opened like a rose
and sucked it in.

A Good Day for Flying

2011-04-13T17:08:00.000-07:00

My local newspaper made me smile this morning when I opened it (not a usual occurrence) and saw its little list of historic moments. On this day in history, in 1742, Handel's "Messiah" was performed for the first time in public, and Dublin was the chosen city. I like the "Messiah" very much and I'm glad Handel channeled it from whatever angel gave it to him.

Also, on this day in 1970, Apollo 13 had nearly reached the moon when a mechanical problem erupted and threatened everyone aboard. But the disaster was averted and the men returned safely home. I like endings like that.

My newspaper's "thought for the day" proves that nothing new is ever thought of under the sun. In the 1700s, French philosopher Charles Louis de Montesquieu pondered happiness and decided:

"Happiness is not the absence of problems but the ability to deal with them."

That sounds like something I heard in an AA meeting last week.

And on this historic day, April 13, 2011, a flock of cedar waxwings paused for breakfast outside my sunroom, as they migrate north again with the coming of spring.

(P.S. The fine photo of a cedar waxwing is from a far better photographer than I but it didn't come with a credit.)

The Honeymoon Is Over

2011-04-11T08:09:00.000-07:00

The bandages came off my right hand last week. Without them, the wrist had full range of motion and my palm was exposed.

My hand realized something traumatic happened in its carpal tunnel. Why does it now hurt so much? I asked my surgeon. The honeymoon is over, he said. Now the real work begins.

I’ll have to strengthen it, but my hand is beautifully, thoroughly alive! I put it to work, writing like a madwoman to meet my magazine deadlines yesterday.

Now I get to leap onto the Eejit’s Poetry Bus, on tour today under the wild command of the Bug’s Eye View. All poems, Dana ordained, will begin with the same five words. All of us miraculously have different voices. Mine addresses Alzheimer’s.

The End of Our Life
As I Knew It

I am a crooked line in your mind
I end in a pathetic dribble
near the inlet of your spine
I dangle on the tangles
that insensibly wind
in the miles of your brain
and there I pine.

The Strange Story of a Goddess’s Daughter

2011-04-03T02:13:00.000-07:00

Meet the archerfish. This wonderful creature watches the world above the surface and shoots down insects with jets of water spit from its remarkable mouth. The archerfish (genus Toxotes) is a physics and ballistics expert, able to hit an overhead target up to six feet away.

I happen to be an archery expert myself. At the age of 33, I won a crossbow-shooting contest in the Swiss Alps while under the influence of a large amount of slivovitz. I’m not kidding you. I have some kind of animal-horn blower thing to prove it. It’s true the competition consisted of a bunch of American journalists on a European press tour, but still. I was three sheets to the wind and a dead-eye shot.

I met the archerfish because I had to write a poem about one. The famous weekly Poetry Bus, invented by an Irish poet who calls himself the Totalfeckineejit, which he isn’t, is busy touring the animal kingdom this week.

This animal thing is the brainchild of Titus the Dog, a fine poet out of Scotland who is not a dog but a human named JoAnne McKay. She’s making a poetry booklet about animals to raise funds for humans who have arthritis. My dearly beloved beagle Riley has been crippled by arthritis. Someday maybe we’ll do a poetry booklet about humans to raise funds for animals who have arthritis.

So. On to the archerfish. This fish has very sharp eyes very close together by its snout, which allows the fish to hang about right at the surface of the water and look upward, without creating any telltale disturbance of the water’s surface. There, it slyly watches the overhead vegetation for the movement of insects.

It has a tongue-and-groove kind of mouth that can form a narrow tube and spit a forceful jet of water, but first, the fish somehow calculates complex physics problems that I know nothing about, regarding the refraction of light through water and the curvature of the jet of water as it is pulled down by gravity. Then the archerfish changes its firing angle to compensate, and whammo! The insect, struck by the water jet, is knocked into the pond, where it disappears into the fish’s mouth.

How am I to tell you all this bizarre engineering stuff in a poem? I decided I wouldn’t. So I turned the fish into the daughter of one of history’s greatest archers. You’ll find the rest of the animals roaming at Titus’s place.

The Archerfish Tale

I saw your daughter today, Artemis,
hunting with your bow and arrow
in a mangrove swamp. You would be proud
of Toxotes, if you had seen her stalk
her prey with your own cunning,
disturbing not even a ripple of air
as she moved. Your daughter is fierce
and graceful as you once were,
Artemis, when you served this earth ~
Goddess of the hunt, of wild creatures
and forest lands, She Who Brings Light
to the night, Slayer of men, Avenger
of maidens. Your daughter Toxotes
is the huntress now, the Bringer of Death,
She Whose Aim Is True. She honors you,
daughter of Zeus, daughter of Titans,
Mistress of the Moon. Take pleasure,
Artemis, in your child, the Archer
unsurpassed in all the kingdom. Tell
your friend Orion, your brother Apollo,
that the skill of Toxotes is supreme.
Her arrows of water, shot from the strange
bow of her muscular mouth, unerringly
find their mark. I watched her, Goddess,
as she bent laws of physics and gravity
to her will, as she conquered light itself
bending at the boundary of water and air.
She has your shrewd eyes.
Smile, Artemis, in your retreat
on the moon’s dark side.
In your daughter, you live on.

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

Don’t Insult the Doc

2011-04-02T01:13:00.000-07:00

My dearly beloved has a birthday today. Please don’t tell him about this post.

My orthopedic surgeon flirts with women. When he fixed a tear in my hip two years ago, we saw a lot of each other beforehand, mainly because he had performed my particular surgery only once, on a cadaver. He was eager to have a live patient, and I trusted his hands, but the hospital was not eager to let him have a go at me, him not having actual experience and all. He got the go-ahead about three months after I first saw him, after he went down to L.A. to watch the surgery performed by its master craftsman and studied several of the surgeries online.

The morning of my ground-breaking hip surgery, he paid me a visit in the pre-op area. I had a visitor sitting with me, a beautiful Amazon of a woman from my AA fellowship. He flirted with her outrageously, ignoring me totally, for a very long time. They looked like Jack Sprat who could eat no fat and his wife who could eat no lean (just saying, not because I was jealous, even though I, really, was his ticket to a new lucrative specialty, and I was his FIRST, after all, but I am short and she is tall, and for Pete’s sake! she towered over him, being as he is a little guy, but he probably didn’t know that since she never actually stood up so he could see she was inappropriately tall). [gasp!]

So. Anyway, the orthopedist is a flirt. A shameless one. And usually he flirts with me, but not, apparently, when I’m accompanied by tall, good-looking women. This has happened to me all my life, or at least three times. My theory is that short women are invisible to men when accompanied by tall, good-looking women. It’s one of the crosses we little ladies must bear.

The upshot of all this is that I didn’t invite my tall friend to sit with me in pre-op last week for my hand surgery. I didn’t even tell her about it. So when Doc Do-Little visited me in pre-op, he flirted with me somewhat briskly, wrote YES on my right wrist in permanent marker, and vanished for an hour.

When next I saw him, it was in operating room #4, and I was supposed to be knocked out by an IV drug, but I wasn’t, and not only that, but he was running two HOURS late. So while he did harsh things to my carpal tunnel, which had been numbed, thank God, I yakked with him and the anesthesiologist. He, the outrageous flirt, let fly with an innuendo in answer to an innocent question of mine.

I might have been a little crabby about everything. When he said what he said, I said something back that wasn’t terribly innocent. And because the stupid drug wasn’t working on my sober alcoholic/addict brain, I remembered everything, so I wrote this poem a couple of days ago. I’m toying with the idea of giving it to him on Monday when he takes off my bandages.

Don’t Insult the Doc

Are you done yet? I asked the surgeon
who was cutting up my hand
(I was supposed to be unconscious
and adrift in lotus land).
That is not a pleasant question,
he said with some hauteur;
it could emasculate a man
if he were insecure.
I said I know of an inquiry
that is surely more adverse:
Asking a man, Is it in me yet?
must be infinitely worse.
Oh, good God! cried the orthopedist,
with a vivid reprimand ~
and thus I learned to never insult
a scalpel-wielding man.

Death by Paper

2011-03-31T02:00:00.000-07:00

My carpal tunnel surgery is healing like gangbusters. I’ve been typing since Friday, the day it took place. My right hand is alive again. It feels like a stab wound on the base of my palm but I’m not taking even Tylenol (thank you AA!). The oddest thing about the ordeal is that the anesthesiologist couldn’t knock me out with a double dose of the usual stuff, and we will have to concoct a new cocktail next month when I have the left hand done. Recovering addict / alcoholic that I am, drugs interest me very much.

I’m limited in what I can do with my bandaged right hand. It’s 80 degrees here, following a great rain, and the weeds call me. But left-handed weeding is unsatisfactory. So I decided to participate in Theme Thursday, which today is paper. A memory came to me, and I wrote this poem about it.

The Roll of Newsprint

Seven years old and in love
with a kitten born to the anonymous
family cat, I came home from school
one day eager to see her as always
a girl is eager to see the ball of fluff
known as kitten, cuddly and somehow
near to being just like me, the me
I wished for, an extension of my psyche,
laughter and playfulness in a life
bereft of both. My stern mother said,
before I changed into the designated
play clothes, changed my awful shoes,
when I had just slipped in the door
wary as always of my mother’s
ways,she stood at the sink, working
as always, not looking at me
but responding to the noise of me,
Your kitten died, crushed by the roll
of newsprint in the garage that fell
on it. I cleaned up the mess.
I stood there in the doorway
not comprehending what I heard,
picturing the towering roll of paper
so much taller than I, leaning
on end against a corner of the garage.
My brother’s Cub Scout pack used it
once to paint banners that hung
on a truck in the town’s parade.
It was never used again, thereafter
always standing on end in the corner
and it was heavy, far more than I
could handle. How could it fall?
She was doing something
at the sink and she studied what it was,
and she never looked at me
in my school dress and Dr. Scholl’s
shoes, which I hated, she didn’t bend
down, she didn’t soften the blow.
She crushed me like a roll of newsprint
falling as a ton of death on my fragile
body, my laughter, my kitten self,
never cuddly again.

More takes on the theme here.

The Dragon Is Full

2011-03-30T10:20:00.000-07:00

We call it The Dragon because of its shape. The lake near my town is the Nacimiento, a Spanish name meaning birth or the headwaters. In these shots, we're standing at the Dragon's neck.

Built when I was two years old, the Dragon has this year filled totally up. It's famous for its 165 miles of unspoiled shoreline, its reputation for the greatest water skiing in California, and its white bass fishing. Bald eagles nest here. Joe and I went out there Tuesday, to take pictures of its historic level, more full than at any time since it was built in 1956.

The lake is so full it's pouring over the spillway of the dam, and the water force is a mighty thing.

This is Spanish moss.

Oak branches with lichen.

This is a sample of our stickery dandelion.

Along the hillsides, sage is blooming.

The drive out to the lake is buccolic.

World class horse trainers live out here.

It's a glorious place to live, and in early spring the grass and budding oak trees turn it into paradise.

Today's thought:

You can have anything you want if you will give up the belief that you can't have it.

A Fantasy

2011-03-27T12:36:00.000-07:00

Mata Hari

I have wanted to be five-foot-eight ever since fifth grade, when the teachers made me join the third and fourth graders in a rousing rendition of “I’m a Little Teapot” for the school’s spring musical. It was traumatizing to be forced to sing and dance with the younger kids such a terrible song:

I’m a little teapot, short and stout
This is my handle, this is my spout
When I get all steamed up, hear me shout
Then tip! me over and pour me out!

I never grew past five-foot-one. In my mind’s eye I was thereafter always short and stout, even when I went through an anorexic stage. Mrs. Gulbro, the culprit who traumatized me, was on my Fourth Step resentment list 25 years later when I joined AA. She might still be there, another 21 years later.

I’m giving you this backstory to flesh out the poem I’ve written for the Poetry Bus this week. When Muse Swings, our guest Bus driver, presented three prompt choices, the emotionally wrecked 10-year-old me automatically zeroed in on prompt #3, which was this vintage photo:

The Exotic Dancer

Look at this skin, pale as cream
and wish yourself entangled
in my long legs, wrapped in my arms.
Feel my lips murmur against
your neck as my strong fingers
trace the muscles straining
in your back. Marvel at the pearls
of my spine. Lay your head upon
the jewels of my bosom and hear
the thrumming of my heart
under the fine arc of my ribs
just before your plump wife asks
are you finished yet, dear?

~~~~

For a Busload of interesting work, visit Muse Swings’ blog.

Reborn!

2011-03-26T17:15:00.000-07:00

I discovered something useful yesterday during hand surgery. Apparently my constitution is resistant to the so-called "powerful" sedative Versed, which is used to induce a twilight sleep and erase memory during medical procedures. Even a double dose of it, combined with fentanyl, had no effect on me. I was completely awake through the whole thing and grateful that a) my hand had been numbed and b) I wasn't undergoing a colonoscopy.

Thank you for all your good wishes. I think the surgery was successful because there's just a wee bit of tingling compared to the usual burning pain. I feel like I've been stabbed in the palm of my hand, so I know it's not numb anymore. The price I pay for sobriety is that I don't get to take opiate pain medication unless I'm in dire need and someone else administers it. On the other hand, one of the blessings I get from sobriety is that I have a surprisingly high tolerance for pain now.

My hand therapist just told me to cut this short and rest my hand. I can't believe I can type already! But I will mind and will leave you with this wonderful message from Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

"To live is to be slowly born."

Strapped Down and Cut Up

2011-03-25T15:45:00.000-07:00

I’m going to be freed from my miserable right hand on Friday afternoon.

They’re going to strap me down, squeeze all the blood out of my right arm, and then whip out the scalpel and release me from months of anguish.

I LOVE the sound of that! No more days and nights fraught with fiery pain! Get rid of the bloody thing! I’ll have to learn how to do stuff left-handed. I considered practicing a few vital functions this week, like applying mascara or more fundamental acts of self care, but decided to savor the last few days with my dominant right hand.

I’ll let you know how it goes as soon as I can hunt and peck at the keyboard again. I look forward to the day when my computer understands speech and automatically transcribes it. All these years of interviewing people and scribbling in notebooks, transcribing tape recordings, or typing shorthand notes that leave out lots of words, I have wished for technology to catch up with my profession. It exists now, but I can’t afford it. Maybe when I get rich from suing the entire American medical industry for holding my demented mother hostage in a hospital for days….

Anyway, reeling myself back in from that fantasy, wish me luck. They'll be tunneling through my carpal at noon (and you thought they were amputating my hand ~ how grisly!).

Now for a Friday Flash 55 inspired by the weather here in California... Visit Mr. Knowitall for other examples of flash creativity.

Rain

After a long drought turned the riverbed to dust,
today the manna from heaven falls and the soil

laps it neatly as a cat. A sigh of satisfaction escapes
the mouth of the ground. Roots hum as their veins

swell. Pools rise in the riverbed, reach out fingers,
and link. The river’s muddy blood awakens.

~~~~
Postscript:

All went well although my hand is numb still from the anesthetic. I can't wait for it to wear off so I can feel the glorious lack of pain. Toddling off to rest now after typing this with both hands!