DEDICATIONS, PLEDGES, COMMITMENTS. "For the past. For my own path. For surprises. For mistakes that worked so well. For tomorrow if I'm there. For the next real thing. Then for carrying it all through whatever is necessary. For following the little god who speaks only to me." ~ William Stafford
I stood out in the cold and wet for a long time, letting the water freeze on my face, waving my arms and blowing out clouds of warm fog.
Then, inside, I sat at the window for a long time, watching the wind blow waves of sleet across the road. It was a super storm, loud and flashy, the kind that lays ice on telephone wires and turns tree limbs to crystal. The boys sat on my lap, all of us warm and quiet together, until it was too dark to see.
Something happened then. A high, better than any drug-induced high, a feeling that almost burst my mind apart. I can't find a name for it, that feeling of intense awareness and content. What a joy it is to be alive!...
...We made paper snowflakes and hung them in the window.
The view from the front yard, and from the back yard. The moon looks so small you might mistake it for a star. The wind is warm and blowing in a storm from the northwest. It's supposed to SNOW today! See how the color of the sky changes in a very few minutes as the sun begins to rise. Now the entire sky is white, waiting for the snow to fall....
Okay. FIrst there were things, small children's things-- poems, or spelling words-- on wide blue-lined paper. The paper became dirty snow, where two young men, dressed as 17th century peasants, caps, blousy shirts, dark, rough pants-- were sleeping. They appeared to have been drugged, or poisoned. I thought they were French or Italian, but from another century. A modern Chinese soldier in a brown army uniform had dropped them off from his vehicle, and now wondered if he should kill them, or let them live. He sometimes let them live. But not this time. He took an ax he carried and neatly and gently (as easy as cutting through butter) sliced through the belly of each man. At first there was no sign of their wounds, but then bright red blood began to gush. The two men sat up, seeming unaware that they were bleeding to death. Then one of them began to sing a nursery song, very softly, in English. Their deaths seemed to me to be very humane and painless. I thought how if it was me, I would rather die outstretched, face upward, so the very last thing to fill my eyes would be the sight of the blue sky, and I would die filled up with blue, and that would be good. Then it all went back to the words on the wide, blue-lined paper, words some little child had written-- was writing-- even as I woke up.
So. Figure that one out, Islanders.... I've heard it said that in dreams, you are every character, as well as every object, etc. I am the dying peasants, the Chinese soldier, the ax, the child, the paper. A poem:
ignis fatuus
in the illustrated conceptions that happen each night as the curtain behind my eyes rises fugitive people move catbirds of life changing skins under my closed eyelids under my quiescent hair on the pillow
skimming inscrutable geographies of words like flat stones across the grey- green water of mind that sprays like sea
or resident birds that babble across an overflowing of bells
I sleep in ciphers that no one explains mutable, exploding at the pinions self-propelling
Of all his music papa played Mexicali Rose the very best. Now the saxophone lies on a high shelf in the dark of the closet. The last notes are departed, the reed split, the keys are stuck in old times. Yet, I sometimes hear those slurred notes in the wind, in the wide cave of night. Someday he'll take it up again, and then every earthly thing will change. And all my dreams will be aroused to his slow music, a long lost voice.
Sir Kingsley Amis (he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1990) was the author of 2 dozen novels and 6 volumes of poetry. He wrote the first two James Bond novels: The Bond Dossier, and The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007. I had no idea! It's been rumored that he wrote part of Ian Fleming's last book, The Man With The Golden Gun. Amis wrote under the pseudonym Robert Markham. I didn't know this, either! Flemings wife disliked Amis, calling him a "left-wing opportunist." The copyright owners of Fleming's Bond books had the brilliant idea that other writers would continue with Bond, all writing under the same pseudonym. It never happened.
Poor health convinced Amis to give up smiking, but he carried on with his reputation as a "boozer" of scotch and gin. He once said, "If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing." He died in 1995, at the age of 73, from a fall.
Here's another Kingsley Amis poem:
SOMETHING NASTY IN THE BOOKSHOP
Between the Gardening and the Cookery Comes the brief Poetry shelf; By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology Offers itself.
Critical, and with nothing else to do, I scan the Contents page, Relieved to find the names are mostly new; No one my age.
Like all strangers, they divide by sex: Landscape Near Parma Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex, So does Rilke and Buddha.
"I travel, you see," "I think" and "I can read" These titles seem to say; But I Remember You, Love is My Creed, Poem for J.,
The ladies' choice, discountenance my patter For several seconds; From somewhere in this (as in any) matter A moral beckons.
Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart Or squash it flat? Man's love is of man's life a thing apart; Girls aren't like that.
We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff Can get by without it. Women don't seem to think that's good enough; They write about it.
And the awful way their poems lay them open Just doesn't strike them. Women are really much nicer than men: No wonder we like them.
Deciding this, we can forget those times We stay up half the night Chock-full of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes, And couldn't write.
The first country to die was normal in the evening, Ate a good but plain dinner, chatted with some friends Over a glass, and went to bed soon after ten; And in the morning was found disfigured and dead: That was a lucky one.
At breakfast the others heard about it, and kept Their eyes on their plates. Who was guilty? No one knew, But by lunch-time three more would never eat again. The rest appealed for frankness, quietly cocked their guns, Declared "This can't go on."
They were right. Only the strongest turned up for tea: The old ones with the big estates hadn't survived The slobbering blindfold violence of the afternoon. One killer or many? Was it a gang, or all-against-all? Somebody must have known.
Each of them sat there watching the others, until Night came and found them anxious to get it over. Then the lights went out. A few might have lived, even then; Innocent, they thought (at first) it still mattered what You had or hadn't done.
They were wrong. One had been lenient with his servants; Another ran an island brothel, but rarely left it. The third owned a museum, the fourth a remarkable gun; The name of the fifth was quite unknown, but in the end What was the difference? None.
Homicide, pacifist, crusader, cynic, gentile, jew Staggered about moaning, shooting into the dark. Next day, to tidy up as usual, the sun came in When they and their ammunition were all used up, And found himself alone.
Upset, he looked them over, to separate, if he could The assassins from the victims, but every face Had taken on the flat anonymity of pain; And soon they'll all smell alike, he thought, and felt sick, And went to bed at noon.
\ Some things are worth dying for. Some things are not. Some things are worth killing other human beings, some things cannot ever be worth that. Maybe it's a subjective matter, deciding what a life is worth, and what is worth a life. World War 1 was supposed to be the War to End All Wars. It didn't work out that way.
When the Armistice agreement between the Allied forces and the German Army was signed at 5 am on the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, in a boxcar in the middle of a French forest, some unremembered official thought it would be a good idea to wait until eleven am for the agreement to take effect. He thought 11-11-11 had an esthetic ring to it, something for the history books. As a result, during those six hours, another 2,738 men died. For nothing. 320 of those were American soldiers. The carnage went on until the final minute. For nothing.
Today there are still "wars, and rumors of wars." Young men and women are still dying in foreign countries for whatever reasons. Only they and their families can decide if the reasons are worth their lives. I abhor what is happening now in the Middle East. People on both sides are dying for my freedom to drive an SUV. (I realize this is a simplistic view of a complex ideal). Nevertheless.
I salute the men and women who have chosen to serve their country, to interrupt their lives and make sacrifices for their ideals, whatever their reasons. Would to God this would be the War to End All Wars.
These are the warriors in my life: my uncle, who served in Iran during WWII, my husband, who served in the Navy, on Guam; my brother, who served in the Army, in Germany and France; and my cousin, who served in Korea. God bless, guys!
Chiefbiscuit, of As It Happens, has awarded me a Shameless Lions roar. I'm (I would say flattered by this, but I notice that in my thesaurus this is followed by flatulence, and flaunt) genuinely delighted! I'm to list 3 things I think are essential to good writing, and pass this award on to 5 others I believe demonstrate these qualities. They, in turn, are to pass the Lion's roar on to 5 others.
So. My first thing I would say is necessary for good writing is relevance. Our primary concern ought to be with experience--with real life. Whether it is beautiful or painful, noble or ignoble, strange or common, good writing should offer us life. Second would be imagination. The images that give words their incandescence. And, last, focus, which my little red thesaurus defines as core, heart, nucleus, sharpness.
I am passing this Lion's roar, in no particular order, to:
pam, at Mind Trips wendy, at Quiet About A Lot Of Things Rethabile, at poeafrika pris, at Songs To A Midnight Sky Melissa, at Poet With a Day Job
...with all my respect and admiration!
(To find out more about the Shameless Lion's Writing Circle, visit Chiefbiscuits blog for a link.)
My friend from down under, Chiefbiscuit, says that the matching chapter and verse in the BOOK OF PROVERBS of the date you were born is often meaningful in your life. So, being born on the 15th day of the month, I looked up Chapter 15, verse 15, which says: All the days of the afflicted are evil: but he that is of a merry heart hath a continual feast. So, I am going to use this for my AS #7 (even if it is one syllable short and starts with a conjunction--is "but" a conjunction? I forget).
But he that is of a merry heart hath a continual feast.
I have lots of "unforgettable" things in my life. Lately I forget a lot of things: doctor's appointments, returning phone calls, where I've put my car keys, and leaving WalMart--where I've put my car! But most of the important, really important, things are unforgettable: The blue of my dad's eyes, the freckles on my mother's face, the sound of their voices, the day my husband proposed to me, the birth of each of our five boys...when the boys were little, at bedtime we had a litany of songs. This is one I sang to them for years and years. It's a poem of William Jay Smith's, and we had a recording of it on an album by Carly Simon called "The Lobster Quadrille." The cover was red. It is "unforgettable."
A PAVANE FOR THE NURSERY
Now touch the air softly, Step gently. One, two... I'll love you till roses Are robin's-egg blue; I'll love you till gravel Is eaten for bread, And lemons are orange, And lavender's red.
Now touch the air softly, Swing gently the broom. I'll love you till windows Are all of a room; And the table is laid. And the table is bare. And the ceiling reposes On bottomless air.
I'll love you till Night Rips the stars from his coat, And the moon rows away In a glass-bottomed boat; And Orion steps down Like a diver below, And Earth is ablaze, And the Ocean aglow.
So touch the air softly, And swing the broom high. We'll dust the gray mountains, And sweep the blue sky; And I'll love you as long As the furrow the plow, And However is Ever, And Ever is now.
(Even as I type this, the melody still runs through my head. I would be interested to know if any of my boys still remember it, too?)
Did you know this is National Friendship Week*? Three cheers to all of you, my cyberfriends: Hip-hip, Hurrah! Hip-hip, Hurrah! Hip-hip, Hurrah!
*Actually, nobody really seems to know if there is a special week for this, or what month we should celebrate it, or which week of that month...but, what the hay! I say this is as good a time as any. So CELEBRATE!
Noodles, my old dog (gone to her reward) and a ghost haunting our living room a few years ago. Here it is, from two different angles, unseen by me, the photographer, but looks to me like she saw something scarey.
What IS it???
I think it might be the ghost of Richard Nixon. Or Jimmy Durante. (But you guys are all too young to remember Jimmy Durante....)
GOODNIGHT, MRS CALLABASH, WHERE EVER YOU ARE!
And finally, a poem, an old one, but, whatever....
Liaison
This house is all enchanted. Wild things disturb the air behind the polished cupboard doors and underneath the stairs--
a tremolo of whisperings of drowsy, sleepy love, a hungering of haunted springs that foam and boil above
the gentle whorl of fingertips on cups of tea, the toast and jam, a fever under lock and key that burns a withered epigram.
This house is all enchanted. Wild things disturb the air behind the polished cupboard doors and underneath the stairs.
(This mornings newspaper had a story--back on page 8--headlined FEMA is sorry it staged briefings and it continues to say that the Agency's No. 2 official Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson apologized Friday for leading a staged news conference concerning the California wildfires, in which FEMA employees posed as reporters while real reporters were barred from asking questions. "We are reviewing our press procedures and will make the changes necessary to ensure that all of our communications are straightforward and transparent," he said in a four paragraph statement. "We can and must do better, and apologize for this error in judgement." "It was absolutely a bad decision," continued John "Pat" Philbin, FEMA'S Director of External Affairs. "Certainly...I should have stopped it."
But he didn't. And it was not simply "a bad decision," or an "error in judgement." It was a deliberate, outright LIE. This, trying to reestablish their credibility and integrity after their debacle in managing Hurricane Katrina. White House Press Secretary Dana Perino then said, "This is not a practice that we would employ here at the White House."
Yeah, right! "They should ALL be in jail," sez I. And it should have been on the front page.)
Two Gallants Waves Of Grain Lyrics
Pray betray the deceased, such an infamous freedom, such a militant peace. How dare they distrust, do they know who we are? And Your progeny's brave, their tract houses waiting, pre-plucked and pre-paved: To the ends of the Earth, wife, kids and a car.
But oh no, no, I see them falling. Let's all pray for rain, Let's all pray for rain. And all your children are reared by panic and fear. But what when all your fields are rotten, your waves of grain, amber waves of grain? And your word is yet done: Inbreed us 'till we're all the same.
And Your collection of tongues, you keep framed in your parlour, with your bibles and guns, the fetus of Christ with a fistful of scars. And your vision is clear, while you blind your own kind in a curtain of fear, your words twisted skywards distracted by stars.
But oh, no, no, the sky is falling. Let's all pray for rain, Let's all pray for rain. And you pour out your prayers and weep 'cuase you care. But what when all your fields are rotten, your waves of grain, amber waves of grain? And you hide the dead while my friends head to die in your name.
And This playground is yours spoke God when you met, behind closed doors. Gesture your hand and the pawns shall subside And though you play alone, you never get lonely, you never get bored. Who needs a friend when God's on your side?
But oh, no, no, I see them falling. Let's all pray for rain, Let's all pray for rain. And even I can't pretend we're not near the end. But what when all your fields are rotten, your waves of grain, amber waves of grain? When your days are done, I hope you've had fun with your game.
And you accepted as fact: Behold a white horse, with you on it's back, a bow in your hand, a crown through your hair. And the oceans shall rise and slap on the shores of mountainsides. Great waves of progress shall wet the air.
But oh, no, no, the sky is falling. Let's all pray for rain, Let's all pray for rain. And you fools in the back with your heads in your hats, What when all your fields are rotten, your waves of grain, amber waves of grain? And my words won't be done, they'll never be done 'till the end.
When he was three or so his Pa whittled a flute slipped the willow bark to wood smooth and white as cream in a brown bucket
At twelve too tall for his stallion he remembers the secret bones of his small hands stretched to match the long wooden bones
Rocking he sang John Daddle he dreamed that his daddy was dead and his daddy he dreamed that John Daddle was dead....
He remembers shadows of clustering leaves across the scrubbed walls of his house rising and falling like dark fish in clear water he remembers a whistling of barn owls blinded by sunrise remembers the wooden horse lifting him far beyond the horizon of cornfields on wind whistling over the hills like a slip-bark flute
From: In Willie's House. The photo is of my dad, taken circa 1910.
After forty years Your face is one I no longer recognize Among other half-remembered faces Of children grown Lovers gone Friends departed
In your endless rage I know only The red wilderness Of burnt Mercury I would be glad For some small thing of Earth A red carnation
Once keep-away Was something children played Now I listen to you breathe You sleep in pieces This part of you That part of you Awake
I think how as a boy You hid a pocket knife In the top of your Commando boots Had a nosebleed at Grand Canyon And threw your unsold newspapers Into gutters
Now you lie buried Belly down in pillows Mouth open The outlines of your dreams Of Guam, of flight, of Halley's Comet And the end of the world A trailing current Of your death
Blood of my blood your name remains unwritten on church records school rollbooks letters of intent or love or sympathy:
Ariane.
I write it here a message in a bottle cast out with the wild grace of my hope all that's left before your veiled eyes flickering down the dark carry it away with them
I have been lurking around the neighborhood with my camera the last few days. Here are the mountains to the east I see every morning, waiting with Simon for the school bus, waiting for the sun to rise. Now that there is snow on the tops they turn bright pink at sunset. There is the church, a few blocks to the north, where (until this last year) I taught various Sunday School classes, where my children were baptised, where, in the hush that followed the choir's performance of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus one Christmas, my four-year-old stood up on the bench and announced in a loud voice, "Hallelujah! Hallelujah! What a DUMB song!" --where most of the neighborhood gathers for wedding receptions, basketball games, summer bar-b-ques, Halloween parties, Christmas dinners, the blessing of babies, funerals.... The canal, its banks lined with willow trees and weeds, runs just east of the church.
People in the neighborhood are beginning to decorate for Halloween. Pumpkins sit in doorways, people are mowing their lawns for what is probably the last time this year before it snows. They're fixing their roofs and driveways, and jogging through the leaves on the road. The giant sunflower in my backyard has become a banquet for the birds. Just seconds before I took the photo, there were three or four birds feasting and scattering shells everywhere. My neighbor whose house is just across the fence suffered a stroke two weeks ago that weakened his right side and took some of his memory, but lately he has been out sitting in the sun, watching while his wife and two of their grown daughters put his vegetable garden to bed. My beautiful rose reminds me of the rose in Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince, with only her thorns to protect her when the snow flies next week....
The streets here are named Village Green, Greenfield, Meadow Downs, Meadowbrook, Willow, Dawn Drive. I live on Cloverdale.
The boys were excited to get their new Halloween costumes the other day and were anxious to try them on. Simon is Black Spiderman. Jake is Darth Vadar (who he calls "Hopper" because of the sound he makes when he breathes. Inhale: HAAAAAAAA Exhale: PERRRRRRRRR...go ahead, try it! Worn out, Jacob sleeps on the end of my bed, his walking stick on one side, his other arm around the dog.
To be truthful, the two boys in the leaf piles are my grandsons who live far away in Minnesota, having fun in THEIR front yard. The pictures are from their dad, via the miracle of the internet. All the rest are mine. I had other pictures in mind-- my weathered birdhouse, filled with acorns Simon collected and brought home in a bucket--but my card was full! I'll save that one for another day.
My grandson Simon is six-years-old. He recently lost a loose front tooth, and if you look carefully, you can see the new tooth emerging to take the lost tooth's place. The body has a remarkable ability to defend and repair itself, it even has a magical ability to renew, in that, at a cellular lever, we are constantly dying and being reborn. Heraclitus is supposed to have said that one can never step into the same river twice, and this is because the water is constantly being restored by new water rushing in. And this is true of the body. Deepak Chopra tells us that 98% of atoms in our body at the moment were not there a year ago. "The skeleton that seems so solid was not there three months ago," he writes. "The skin is new every month. You have a new stomach lining every four days....It is as if you lived in a building whose bricks were systematically taken out and replaced. If you keep the same blueprint, then it will look like the same building. But it won't be the same...." Eventually, entropy takes over.
Physicists use the phrase "The Arrow of Time" to explain the fact that events in time can only move forward, and can't be reversed. When a glass shatters on the floor, says Stephen Hawking, it can't pick up its pieces and rebuild itself into a whole glass. There are some things that cannot be fixed. "Not for all our piety, nor wit, nor tears." All in all, I think simply being alive is a miraculous achievement. When I woke this morning, I thought of the tremendous change in my life once the powerful catalytic agent CANCER was introduced. I've come to feel a certain indifference to the few dark horrors that my mind occasionally offers up. Things go on. No one on earth can give me a signed and notarized certificate saying that I still haven't got this damned disease. But I can adapt. Every change requires some re-ordering to accommodate it. And I find a certain tenacious peace-of-mind in prayer--not as a greedy child whining to an indulgent parent, nor as a beggar, but as a sort of opening up of cosmic pathways into my mind.
A note I discover among some old papers: Adversity helps men to rise above themselves. Is that true? I think so.
Doctor Lewis Thomas writes in The Lives of a Cell: Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existence would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely out-numbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places...Each of us is a self-contained, free-standing individual, labeled by specific protein configurations at the surface of cells, identifiable by whorls of fingertip skin, maybe even by special medleys of fragrance. You'd think we'd never stop dancing.
(Most of this was written years ago, taken out of my book CHRYSALIS. And I am still here to tell the tale. The book ends like this: So, this is a portrait of a birth. The butterfly is finally emerging. The book is finished, and I am painfully anxious that it be good. I stayed up until two or three in the morning for weeks trying to finish the final draft. Now I need to move on to something else. Maybe I'll just think in iambic pentameter for awhile. Maybe I'll write another book, a children's book this time.
I am full. Let me stay like this forever, lullabied by family, by friends, by an unrolling of irrevocable love and intoxicant life. I hold it as carefully as mortal fingers will allow. Thanks. Everything is as it should be, and nothing will change, not ever, I tell myself. Encircled by sleepy children, Mark sings:
And hand in hand on the edge of the sand They danced by the light of the moon, the moon, They danced by the light of the moon.
A mere 20,000 light years from our Sun, is the nearby Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy's birth chamber of open stars, (I feel funny calling it OUR Milky Way, now that I know we might have been--kidnapped, actually STOLEN away like Sendak's ice baby--see previous post) that contains thousands of stars far bigger than our own Sun.
Surrounding this nursery are "natal clouds of glowing interstellar gas and...dust, sculpted by energizing stellar radiation and winds."
Photo by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Collaboration, J Maiz Appellaniz, et al, and David de Martin.
*Sigh* It would've made an awesome picture for the family album. Oh, well. Click it for a truly amazing view!
We were not born here! All this time we've believed the Milky Way galaxy was our home. All this time we've assumed that we're family.
We have wondered why we are not oriented to the galaxy's ecliptic, like everybody else, but hey, it's like having blue eyes when all the relatives are brown-eyed, right? Nothing but a pesky annoyance. Well, it turns out we're adopted.
You heard it right. Some scientists are saying we're adopted. The Milky Way is not our parent galaxy. We are from another galaxy entirely, one in the process of joining with the Milky Way-- being eaten alive, as it were. We actually belong to the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy. This explains why, according to Steven Majewski, head of a project called 2MASS (the Two Micro All Star Survey) going on at the U. Va. and the University of Massachusetts, the Milky Way is always sideways in the night sky! That odd angle shows our Sun (and us) are influenced by some other system, and for the last 2 billion years our real parent galaxy is slowly being consumed. We exist in a trail of debris surrounding the outer edges of the Milky Way.
Imagine 60 miles above Midway The silica tiles glowing At 2300 degrees Fahrenheit With a red light, or white Or blue like any other early Star, and somewhere Off the coast of Florida The sun rises and a flight Of pelicans waits inland For splashdown 36 sunrises after ignition The blue-flame engines burn Meteorlike, it falls
The birds fall and rise Above the blue-green glitter Of the tide Imagine 6-tenths of a second after The last bird dives into a wave The slight deceleration The last roll reversal at Mach 2.6 A tail of flame and a double Sonic boom Followed by a whir Of wings
(Photo: Brown Pelicans in the Sunrise, by Shuttershrink)
1. In dreams I am often young and thin with long blond hair.
2. In real life I am no longer young, or thin, or blonde.
3. My back hurts.
4. I hate to sleep alone. (Fortunately I don't have to!)
5. My great grandfather had 2 wives at once.
6. I wish I had more self-discipline. (I was once fired from a teaching position in a private school because they said I was "too unstructured and undisciplined." --Who, me??? Naaaahhh....)
7. I do not blame my parents for this. Once, at a parent-teacher conference, the teacher told me my little boy was "spacey." We ALL are, I told her. The whole fan damily is spacey. She thought I was kidding. I wasn't.
8. I used to travel with a theater reperatory company. My parents weren't happy about this.
9. My mother was afraid that I would run off and paint flowers on my cheeks and live in a commune, and grow vegetables. I once smoked pot. ONE TIME.
10. I don't drink or smoke. (Or swear, much. Well, I drink milk, and water, and orange juice, and stuff. Cocoa. I love Pepsi.) 11. Most of my friends are invisible. 12.
I am a poet and a writer.
All of my writing on these pages is copyrighted. Borrowing (without acknowledgment) is a sin.
