Love Is a Miracle

A miracle is in progress out in the yard. Despite freezing nights, despite drought in our part of the country, buds burgeon on plants that winter stripped of every living thing. The life force is stronger than all the adversity this winter has thrown at it.

Another miracle: I'm at home with the man I love on our 20th Valentine's Day. We two, who have six marriages between us, have survived everything those 20 years threw at us, in part because No Matter What we kept the promise we made all those years ago: not to run, not to stuff things down, and not to lie to each other ~ not a very elegant promise, but an effective one for us.

Poetry Jam focuses on miracles this week. The past year has been my time of learning to see the small miracles that happen in everyday life and be grateful for them.

You Could Use a Cheap Miracle


“The quality of my life is so poor –
no money,” you said, counting the obligations that

Loom, while penniless you worry –
tell, instead, the last miracle you saw, and what

It cost you. Did you view it from a window
? or did that small fire flare in your chest when

In the half-dark he reached for you even
in his sleep? The whimper of thanksgiving

Is as good as a hymn
but easily missed – better than meat

After days without food
when your soul is starving.

My Curious Guest, Revealed

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!

War Wounds

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.

To Bee or Not To Bee

A busy bee on a Wordless Wednesday.

Here's the Wordless Wednesday home page: http://www.wordlesswednesday.com/newhome/

What Do Tamales Have to Do with Marine Biology?

Yesterday Syd commented on my post something really stupendous that I want to share:

"Thanks for writing this. I am a marine scientist and have been 3 miles down in the ocean. My dissertation was on deep sea organisms. I appreciate the census of marine life and currently have a project that participates in this program. We know so little about our own planet. And we are slowly destroying it."

That's something worth thinking about. If you missed the post, here's a recap:

This week's news reports that marine biologists have recorded 17,650 species living in the ocean depths where the sunlight ceases. They are weird shaped and living on the snow-like decaying matter that drifts down from above.They hope to announce by the end of the ongoing census that a million or more species remain unknown, in addition to the 235,000 living in the extreme ocean depths, which they thought was a desert until this plethora of living things showed up. On land, they’ve catalogued 1.5 million types of plants and animals.

I was pretty stoked about that. We live in an awesome world.

And you are wondering what the heck tamales have to do with it all.

Well, the whole thing made me write a poem at nine o'clock last night, and here it is:

Tamales Rise Above the Depths of the Sea

While I ponder the news of over 17,000 new species
discovered in the ocean’s deep black depths,
the tamale guy rings the doorbell and his wife
waits in the car with tamale spice rising from her hands.

Ten dollars I will pay for six red chicken tamales
and on these we will feed for three days at least.
In the pitch-black depths of the sea, outlandish
creatures feed on snowflakes of decaying matter,
including bones of whales and methane gas.

At the point where sunlight ceases, life begins
for countless mystifying living beings.
The tamale guy couldn’t care less about oddities
living miles beneath the sea. He wants to sell
his wife’s tamales, piping hot and redolent of
chili. It matters not how life revolves around

the planet, when tamales are the nourishment
that keeps us humans ticking for another day.
A catalog of 1.5 million types of plants and beasts
are known to share the earth with us, with more

than a million mysterious living beings not known
in the uttermost depths of the black sea, a guess,
a conjugation of organisms unknown to man.
My hot tamales are the substance of known matter,
of chicken, of chili, of masa and corn leaves

which I eat with tremendous relish in my home
where light blooms in the darkness, and the living
beings are simple dogs and simple cats, one loving
husband, and a planet where the sun will rise
tomorrow morning, on the lush landscape
where I live.

Chris Alba © 2009

Photo of Enypniastes courtesty of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute