Bountiful Poverty

You know you live in a small town when the front-page news includes an announcement that Bob's Big Boy is coming to downtown. Don't know what a Bob's Big Boy is? It's a coffee-shop chain that considers itself an art form, using words like "dramatic," "striking," and even "breathtaking" to describe its architecture, which looks like this:

Its diner fare includes the "vintage" double-decker Big Boy burger, along with fried chicken, fried fish, fried steak, and the "classic" chili spaghetti. I can't wait to try that one.

Chili beans used to be a staple in my family's diet, not because of our ethnic background (my dad was from Oklahoma and my mom was from a Norwegian farm family), but because we were poor. In 1966, my parents had suddenly uprooted our family of five and plunked us down in a dinky travel trailer behind a little market on the edge of some sand dunes in the Mojave desert. They had no savings, but Dad had found a job in his trade that was just enough to support us.

We'd left almost all our belongings behind in our old home town. We three kids slept in sleeping bags. For entertainment we had a transistor radio and a deck of cards to fill the evenings with family games of gin rummy. A couple of times a month, a library bookmobile parked beside the little market. Mom's older brother and his family lived down the road, so a couple of times a week all 13 of us gathered there to watch TV. On Sundays we'd all hop into my uncle's World War II Army surplus Jeeps, with my cousins on little motorbikes, and we'd go out in the desert, "boondocking" as my uncle called it, exploring canyons, abandoned mines, traces of old homesteads, and searching for wildflowers in the spring.

Dried pinto beans were cheap and Mom bought them in bulk. She cooked big pots of them, sometimes just plain pintos and onions, and other times with chili and a little ground beef added. We ate many meals of beans with homemade white bread and fresh oranges for dessert. We hadn't had a stay-at-home mom in a long time and not a lot of homemade bread either, so it seemed like a treat. The fresh oranges were wonderful too.

Today I'm thankful for a child's spirit that saw, not the poverty, but the small pleasures that arose from it, and for my parents' ability to make do with what resources they had, even making it all seem bountiful and adventurous. There might have been times I felt deprived, having no privacy, having to adjust to the strange new desert world, but what I remember is goodness.

And the memories make me smile: discovering the desert in bloom, listening to the new band called The Monkees on the evening radio, the taste of butter melting on warm fresh bread, the joy of getting white go-go boots ... even hearing my father use the word "shit" for the first time, when he gathered the three of us kids to announce we were driving our mother crazy, and we were to stop it immediately if we didn't want her to leave us.

"If she says 'shit,'" he told us at the end of his speech, "you say, 'Where and how much?'" That was frightening and funny at the same time. One of us, I don't remember who, actually said that to her the next time she said "Shit!" and got back-handed for the literal interpretation of Dad's edict. But it became a legendary family joke, and I'm grateful for a child's sense of humor in what might have been a scary adult situation. The look on my father's face, when he was called to account for his child's smart-aleck behavior, was priceless.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Damn the Leaf Blower

I left for the hospital on an ordinary day. I have returned to extraordinary autumn scenery. But the damn leaf blower has just begun howling in my yard. I was peaceful. Now I am mad. Leave my leaves alone!!!!! I holler this in my head only. The leaf-blowing fool would not take kindly to my criticism. So I write to him a poem full of wrath. He will never see this. Ha! It feels so good.


You May Not Have All of Me

Luscious red berries wait for the cedar waxwings
to swoop down and gobble them up
to strip the branches bare of berries
like I wait for you to swoop down and gulp
me up like a lukewarm latte, not delicious
perhaps but finished off, the cup stripped bare

Yellow sycamore leaves fall like a congregation
of large butterflies fluttering from the sky
one after another tumbling down in its last dance
before landing on the grass in final rest
The lawn wears a yellow blanket of leaves
and I wait for you to tire of them, to roar
your several engines designed to suck up
dead butterflies because you cannot stand the mess

The red berries are safe from you bushwhacker,
waiting for the cedar waxwings who are late
this year, because the fence protects the shrubs
from your finishing touch, your need for order
and finality. I love you but the wild things
tumbling in my heart cry out against you,
you finisher of things blind to butterflies

You take me lukewarm and swallow the last
drop, not to waste a moment or a latte,
tolerant of my imperfections, loving me
despite the wild things making messes
in our house, our yard, my private places
I wait for you to tire of me as surely you must
when your desire for order overcomes your lust
for the red berries in my heart, untouchable
beyond the fence and safe until the waxwings
come

The Trees Laugh

Early October

A new wind blows in from out of town somewhere
and sets the sycamores dancing. Their leaves flutter
like flocks of green birds rustling on the branches
and every leaf is the wing of a bird flapping. The cat

in the glass room stares up at the birds and everywhere
is a new bird landing. She slinks, little yearling lioness,
from couch to table to desk to table, yellow eyes wide
in that up-tilted head, bewitched by the spectacle

of birds, birds everywhere, everywhere she looks.
She does not remember last autumn, when the new
wind blew in and the sycamores started chuckling,
waving hello until they shook off those leaves.

She does not remember and so it is new, almost
more than she can take in, but look: a bird falls!
The cat freezes at the sight of prey and when
it lands, a dead curled leaf, she cries.

I Fought the Rose and the Rose Won

A Cecile Brunner rosebud

I went to war against a Cecile Brunner rose yesterday afternoon and I'm not sure who won. Today I'm injured: three stab wounds in my hands, one in my arm, two festering thorns in my fingers, and a new, incredible pain that shoots from my lower back down my thighs. The Cecile Brunner looks fine. It's an antique climbing rose with canes that arc up and over the garden fence, and it's trying to take over the patio.

It started out pleasantly enough. I'm on a pruning binge after neglecting everything since my mother died. All the herbal shrubs, the sage, rosemary, and lavender that were outgrowing their spaces, got whacked in half. The stringy-looking rock rose shrub now looks like a bonsai tree, with its gnarly little branches all tidy and peppered with specks of new growth. Next to it, the Cecile Brunner flailed all over the place and seemed to beg for discipline, which I, with my pruning shears, gladly supplied. And supplied. And kept on supplying.

My husband emerged after dark to ask why I was out on the patio yelling "You suck!" every ten minutes. Cecile Brunner is a "nearly thornless rose" as they tell you in the garden books, but when you are wrestling with them, they pull thorns out of nowhere and stab you. And those thorns, I swear, are coated with some sort of poison that burns like fire when it penetrates your skin. So every time the rose stabbed me, I yelled, "You suck!" in pain.

But Joe's question sobered me up. Why was I out there after dark having a sword fight with the Cecile Brunner? I was a madwoman, that's why. The more the rose hurt me, the more I hacked at it. I had turned a helpful, peaceful act into a battle of will, and of course I was losing.

In the zen of pruning roses, you and the rose cooperate. Your job is to study the rose. The rose reveals its structural lines and you help it to grow along those lines. In struggling to dominate the Cecile Brunner, I had broken the law of thermodynamics. (Just kidding.) I had broken the social contract of the gardener and the rose, and I was being an idiot.

Living in recovery has made it possible for me to admit when I'm wrong. Likewise, when I recognize I'm doing something insane, I can stop it. Trying to exercise my will over a rose is just as disrespectful, and just as futile, as trying to exercise my will over a human being.

So I put down my shears, went inside, and nursed my wounds. Even my back feels better now. It feels good enough, in fact, now that I'm up and around, that I'm going outside to make amends with the Cecile Brunner.

This Is About Love, Not the Weather

I’m disconcerted. The season changed today. That abruptly. Yesterday it was over 90 degrees here. This morning at 6:30, the sun hadn’t dawned yet. Autumn happened overnight.

This has been the strangest season. The weather was odd, cooler than usual. The roses bloomed all spring and summer long, not taking their customary July and August break. The dahlias don’t know what to do. Every single one of the two-year-olds looks like crap. Only the hardiest of old faithfuls thrived. I made a choice back in June: Not once did I fertilize. “You’re fending for yourselves,” I told them. “Do your best.”

I’m a competitive gardener. I tend flowers carefully so I can enter them in the regional fair each year. This year, when I looked at the entry forms in June, I had a strong premonition, precognition, intuition—it told me to take a break. My mother started dying during the 10-day fair.

I’m thankful that I have flowers at all.

Today I’m hopping on the Totalfeckineegit’s Poetry Bus (go here for the tour). Our task is weddings, not the weather. Yesterday I edited my entire manuscript of poems and discovered not one sweet love poem in it, although there is a sexy poem about the weather.

So I wrote a poem suitable for speaking at a wedding, if it were my wedding and not your wedding.


Without End


I don’t love you
as your dog loves you
with mindless devotion
I love you
with every firing synapse
relishing your humanity
aware of my own

I don’t love you
as your daughter loves you
with blinding need
I love you
with passion on purpose
and I choose you
with eyes wide open

I don’t love you
as your mother loves you
with future hopes
I love you
with a blend of flesh
and mystical not-flesh
exactly as you are.

I love you
with the ferocity of lions
with the immensity of space
My love for you
is immeasurable
forever, amen.

Today, Live on the Radio

Joy

A rain of lemony leaves
backlit by the sun
falls gently on the green grass
forming a yellow pool
lapping at the black trunk
of the tree
and a little black cat
dashes madly through it
as you wish you felt
on this ending sort of day.

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

I'm insanely thrilled to be a reader on today's local public radio station program called Ears On Art. There will be several us telling stories and reading our poetry at 4:30 p.m. West Coast time.

If you like, you can listen on your computer to the live broadcast at this link:

http://www.kcbx.org/Pages/Programming/listen_live.html
The link takes you to a live stream from the station programming. You can click on any of the four live-listening streams. If you have a media player, you can share this experience with me. I've never heard my own voice reading my poems, so I am totally excited.

You just need to account for your time difference in regards to U. S. Pacific time.

If you can't listen today, there is a link on the same website to the program archives, where you will find the archived Ears on Art program in a couple of days. Say a prayer for my peace of mind as I sit in my living room with a few AA women, drinking chai tea and eating hubby's wonderful scones. I'll be nervous as hell.

Yesterday morning, after my posting of the poem regarding red berries, cedar waxwings, and control-freak hubby, a huge flock of cedar waxwings, the first of the season, flew in to feast on the red berry bushes. I was jumping for joy at the sight. Then I heard my dear hubby fire up the leaf blower, and I ran out to beg him not to blow away my leaves. We compromised: He could clean the sidewalks, and leave my lovely leaves alone on the grass.

If that isn't synchronicity, I don't know what it is. I do know that God has blessed me richly today. May His blessings be on you, too.

Redemption

Redemption

The morning after the great storm
as broken branches litter the battlefield of lawn

a titmouse finds the birdbath
brimming with stormwater

and all sorrows cease
as it bathes.

Chris Alba © 2009

Blooming in the Gloom

Equinox

One wakens to find an autumnal gloom
has lowered the boom on summer.
The bright yellow days segue to grays,
and the loins that ran rampant grow still
Yes, autumn is crisp with colors in the mist,
with apples and pumpkins galore, but still –
And not the least of all are the colors of fall
and the riotous joy in the trees. But please
let the haze drift away and the sun
warm this day, and don’t let the winter
come soon. For one’s bones are brittle
and they ache a little, and one’s brain
doesn’t bloom in the gloom.

I wrote the Equinox poem last year, when we actually had autumnal gloom in September. Now it's November and each day has dawned sunny, clear and cool. I'm thinking of all of you who have spoken of the fallen leaves and the gathering mist of autumn, and this poem is dedicated to you.

The photos are of the forest at Patrick's Point on the far northern reaches of California. Even in that foggy place, brilliance grew.

I've learned this autumn that one's brain can indeed bloom in the gloom, if one's heart has courage and one's eyes are open to possibilities.

When I was hospitalized, I thought I would never find my way out of the black tunnel of despair. Then I met people worse off than myself, people in deeper miseries than mine, and with them I took a look at my various troubles. I remembered something I heard in a meeting:

If we put our lives, woes and all, in a paper sack and placed it on a table beside everyone else's sacks of troubles, we would gladly claim our own sack again.


Chris Alba © 2009