An End and a Beginning

Bees dance when they have something to say. They came to my yard one day to show me how they speak. In this photo, a bee dances in the center of a crowd of listeners. Guided by some sort of spirit, a hive nearby knew it was time to split the community, and the queen took half her servants in search of a new home. They rested for a few hours in one of my rose bushes, and they showed me how the scouts direct the swarm to a suitable new hive, an amazing display of sustainable choices and a great mystery in the natural order of life.

In contrast, we humans tend to be rigid in our beliefs, convinced that our brains know the way of things. We often don't question our knowledge and indoctrinations, mistaking our judgments and opinions for a Universal Truth.

For the past six months I've been on an expedition, like the bees. There have been upheavals and discoveries, sadness and epiphanies. I wondered if my stories here had reached their appointed end. Today, like the bees that paused at my house this past spring, I'm going to dance my story.

What in God’s Name?

You can call God Max if you want to,
says the woman who mentors me
in matters spiritual and guttural
between phone calls to her oncologist
and shopping trips for still more hats
for yet another season of baldness.

I don’t mind being juggled between
the specialists and their repercussions,
a sunny yellow ball shining among
the dry-blood spheres of toxic doctors
and the baby blues of her infant head.
I have her here now, and laughing,
certain she won’t die today, not before
she finishes the job I handed her:
Find a God for me, the newly godless.

On the Fourth of July, she told me
God might dwell in fireworks,
a pyrotechnic atom all crackling red
and shimmering gold. Before that,
she said he dallied in the roses
for my clippers to unleash him,
and before that, she said he bided
at my mother’s, humming in the
sprinkler lines I mended, mourning.

I seek wherever she sends me because
I fired the irascible Judge with a clipboard
the day I found my mother up to her elbows
stirring turds in her toilet with a conviction
only the demented can muster. As I begged
the God of my mother to release his
faithful servant from her shitty life,
the scales fell from my eyes: Suddenly
I knew that old Curmudgeon suffered
psychological disorders, eons untreated,
and I forsook him on the spot. But I
was groomed since birth for God,
the fear of blasphemy embedded deep
in my reptilian brain. To be godless is
to be legless, sightless, hopeless, damned.

As my mentor fights for life, she leads me
through her curious garden, pungent with
the scents of anarchy and heresy, assigning
my tasks: Glean that field of God particles,
rake the fallen leaves under Tolstoy’s vine,
take cuttings from the tree of Martin Luther.
Here she has planted every rotten thing
that ever came to her, and made it bloom:
the young and dead, the broken, unjust,
the bitter losses and the insidious cancer
that tries to claim her every few years.

Here each stone and growing shoot
holds meaning, a miniature magnificence
that speaks of something so immense,
it can’t be grasped. But I reach anyway,
oh puny hand, for some divine, redemptive
purpose in my mother stirring turds
and all the other shocking shit of life.

You can call him Max, my mentor says:
Think about that. So I consider this
ludicrous thought: calling my new God
the name I circled in red ink in a baby book
so long ago, chosen for a son I never had.
Would I be free at last, I ask, of the tyrant
who ordains impossible standards knowing
I will fail, my eternal, horrid, raging father?
Hello, Max, I say, reaching out my hand,
and something brushes against my palm:
a weightless kiss of wings, or lips.

Ripples in the Pond



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.

Who Gives a F*** about First Place?

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

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.

What an Insinuous Day!

In the ongoing saga of odd words one has in mind upon awakening, I awoke yesterday with a word that isn’t even a word, but it should be: Insinuous.

Insinuous is the serpentine manner of something making its way into your consciousness. Unlike insidious, insinuous is not sinister, and unlike insinuative, cunning is not implied. There’s nothing pejorative about insinuous. A budding love affair can be insinuous, and a poem in its infancy can be insinuous. Alternatively, the dawning realization that your credit card company gives you nothing for free can be insinuous.

I ran into insinuous first thing in the morning at physical therapy when Jason told me to do an exercise and to remember not to….(as he poked my trapezius) and aha! I had remembered subconsciously not to do that. Then I stumbled onto it again at the orthopedist’s office as Dr. Dreamboat explained that my spine did not require surgical intervention and aha! I understood that my active participation was the preferred means of treating my malady (continue physical therapy; revamp my work environment; lose weight; strengthen my “core”).

Then came a credit card bill, from a new promotional account that advertised zero interest “if paid in full by the end of the promotional period.” The bill included a “maintenance fee” of $0.99. Righteously indignant, I supposed that a “maintenance fee” was a ripoff. So I called and asked. The nice girl said the fee is what it sounds like it is. I looked up my customer agreement, the thing with thousands of words in five-point type that you get with your credit card. Certain I would not find the fee there, I found the fee there. The credit company insinuates a price for everything. My discovery of it was insinuous.

Insinuous often runs into epiphany downstream. The word jelled in the afternoon at an AA meeting, where I realized that the tendency to blame “he/she/they/it” for my troubles dovetails nicely into “the deliberate manufacture of misery” as described in the AA Big Book. My pain was the fault of my dilapidated spine, which someone else (Dr. Dreamboat) could fix, and then I would be fine. Aha! The victim mentality is hard at work in that idea.

Work, naturally, is what I prefer to avoid. I’d much rather hunch over my keyboard, subsist on stress, make no effort to exercise, and feed my pain sugar and poetry. That’s much, much easier to do than to engage my backbone in its metaphorical sense.

All in all, the day followed an insinuous path to enlightenment. C’est la vie.

Would You Like to Know the Future?

Twenty-five years ago I was lying in hospital room in Santa Monica, California, with my brand-new baby daughter.
It was stunning. I’d never thought about becoming a mother. Wasn’t in my cards, I thought. Yet here was a perfectly formed little human being, looking with those deeply concentrating eyes into my own as if I were some wonderful sight. I held her, she was mine, we were a new team. I had a great career. Now I had a baby daughter. Ah. How…?

Now I’m thankful I couldn’t see into the future. When I say that, I picture being told the events that would transpire in the next 25 years. What if someone had told me what would happen in my future when I was 25, like my daughter is now? This will happen, that will happen. Just the events only; not my inner life, not my emotional state.

It might look something like this: Your marriage will fail. Your father will die soon. Your child’s father will give you the boot. You’ll spend years alone. You’ll become an alcoholic. You’ll go on the wagon, marry a truck driver, get the boot from a wonderful job. You’ll live through a massive earthquake. Your best friend will die. Then your next best friend too. Your mother will get Alzheimer’s and lose everything in her mind, and then she’ll die. You’ll get pneumonia, and then…

Hey! What happened to “happily ever after”? The trouble with just knowing the events is that they don’t explain what happens inside you when they happen to you. The litany of stuff sounds frightening. If I had known what my future held, I might have simply adopted a dog and hidden from life.

But the events came and I adapted. Not knowing what lay ahead, I just kept getting up every morning. Hard times mellowed out. Good times came. They didn’t look eventful and probably wouldn’t have made the list of milestones. “You’ll go to the mountains and make snow angels with your daughter and laugh your head off and remember it for the rest of your life.” Would a crystal ball have told me that? “Many times you’ll look at your life and thank God for everything.” Would it have told me that?

I don’t want to know the future. I’ve heard it said that with one foot in the future and one foot in the past, you piss on the present. I like the present just fine. I imagine that I’ll be equipped, I’ll find the inner resources and outer resources to cope, when whatever lies ahead comes to pass, just as I have in the past. The worst happens, you think, and it doesn’t kill you. It does seem to make you stronger.

I like the photo I used for this post. As a marching band came up the street toward me at a Christmas light parade last weekend, I opened the shutter of my camera and exposed the picture until they marched past me. To me, the photo captures what the future looks like as it arrives: something beautiful, if you look at it in the right light.