gratitude

It's not easy to 
write a clue for inward (try)
but it's easier

than birthing a child
for twenty plus four hours
redefining love

I would not emerge
until a child emerging
broke my containment

I found my new voice
a worshipful profane growl
for the child in me

she's fiercer than I
could ever have imagined
her silence darker

while the child, fifteen
devotes this hour to Snapchat
a bored miracle


 














 
 

The Struggle is Real

What is the struggle these days?  

I struggle with my own reactions to raging ego, the ineffective and humiliating mechanisms I go through to dampen the intensity or consequences of a rager's self-centered explosiveness.  Typically I just play along with the false premise that the source of the outrage is a big deal, just to quiet a mother fucker down. 

The mother fucker is an entity who stalks me, wearing different masks, not always a man's mask, in fact just as often a woman's.  Don't assume I'm talking about my husband, my boss, my employee, my mother, my father, or my best friend.  It could be one, all, or none of those entities on any given day over the last 50 years or so.

To be clear, though, it's never been my son.  He's consistently kind and forgiving, like me, god bless him.  We two shall inherit whatever's left of the earth.

It is not and never will be, by any objective measure, a big deal, this editor's disagreement with your correction, the fact that someone drives too slow in the left lane, the fifth telemarketer not honoring the no-call list, the dishes piling up in the sink, the car not starting, the cat shitting outside of the box. 

Here's the thing.

IT'S NOT PERSONAL.  NOBODY IS TRYING TO MAKE YOU FEEL DISRESPECTED. 

Can we be mildly annoyed?  Rational?  Solution-oriented?  Generous?  

An inauthentic self arises in me when I pretend that the thing you're raging about is as important as a nuclear disaster.  It's like I'm acting in a play, and I'm somehow getting paid for it, but I haven't figured out my motivation so I'm just delivering lines I've rehearsed and am relieved when the scene ends.  I learned as a child that you just agree with a rager and things calm down sooner.  I'm learning as an adult that there's no end to it, just no fucking end to it, unless I learn to do something different.

I just don't know yet what that something different is.



 

Dream noir

John Lithgow died somewhere in my house, in his sleep, while visiting us.  Maybe in the basement?  It's not my fault.  But it is my problem.  The longer I wait to alert the authorities, the worse it's looking, the more complicit and criminal and indefensible my inaction will seem to be.  When a bad thing like that happens, you don't just wait three days until it's convenient to call the authorities, but that's what I've done.  There's just a lot of other shit going on right now.  

For example, there's a party happening, and I'm the hostess, preventing sleepy-seeming teenage boys from stumbling toward the guest bed in the curtained-off cellar corner.  

I can see a huge, inert human shape under blankets on that bed, in the dim cellar light.  I've not actually examined or confirmed that it's the larger-than-life famous actor.  I'm trusting what I've come to believe, but you couldn't pay me to go lift that blanket.  I just keep hoping the shape will be gone the next time I look over there, like he wasn't really dead after all, and got up and left on his own.  

I'm aware that perhaps people are even now beginning to look for John Lithgow at the hotel he was supposed to check out of several days ago.  They'll be asking the taxi driver where he got dropped off.  So, like, it will not look good if I haven't made the call before that search party arrives at my door.  

What am I going to say about this thing though?  What lie sounds more defensible than the truth, that I just didn't want to deal with it and hoped it would go away?

And yes, I am also sad about the loss of this fine man to the world.  I do feel that.  But it's not the dominant anguish.  I'm seething, because this should not be my job right now.  I should not be held accountable for hiding an unwieldy dead body, nor should I be punished for delaying its necessary revelation.  I didn't invite this burdensome man into my home, and I am not the one who killed him.  

He just died, and I'm probably gonna hang for it, because I'm sure a woman must pay the price for John Lithgow dying in her house.




  

Oppression

A late September dream that should probably come with a trigger warning not fully conveyed by the title.
__________________

He's barely conscious, and he's taking up all the space on our king-sized bed, crushing me.  Maybe he's dreaming, maybe he's drunk, maybe he's dense.  But I can't get him to wake up and be aware.  He persists in crushing me, and when roused he's like an angry bull about it.  I'm so sensitized to gently managing his inert self-interest that I can extricate myself unobtrusively, moving over to his side of the bed when he rolls over me to occupy mine, at which point he falls half off the bed.  He can't even stay on the bed he's so unwieldy and restless and out of it.  I can't ever get out from under.  Every time I free myself, he rolls to where I am.  When I try to help him get back on the bed, and I get out of the space he's trying to occupy, he begins to wake and becomes enraged.  The light is dim, but I can see once he's got me pinned again that he's silent-rage-screaming an inch from my face.  I become absolutely still.  I can't fight back.  All I can do is hope he doesn't kill me.  He's much larger than any human, though his face is much like one I used to love.

 

 

Logo

I'll be changing my logo.

First, I need the old logo.  
Make it recognizable, but no longer right.
Betty Boop's face, or a ladybug.

We need a new logo that says:   
Magnificent In Her Reckoning

and an old logo that says:   
cute! no trouble (-:
  
I'm changing my logo.

Not to the "om" symbol, though I like the design.  
I can't scream it.

Not the equation for the speed of light, though I like the calculation. 
I can't scream it.

I'll become crow by night,
screaming.
I'll become crow in swan's clothing by day,
dreaming.



 

 






 

  




 

 

 

 



 

Detonated Diary

"Detonated Diary" is the title I gave that piece I wrote when I was 25 for a "Vietnam and the Artist" class in college, which I re-read a month ago when I was 53 (before letting my dad have a copy), and in which I re-encountered forgotten material about the lover who died obscenely young of cancer after telling me we'd be friends for life but also admitting that I'd never be plan A for him.  (Plan A was a married woman named Tricia.  That part's not forgotten.)  While looking for that piece, I also rummaged through old diaries and saw a sketch I made from memory of that same guy, because I had no photograph of him and liked him that much, not because he was not long for this world, which I didn't know yet when I made the sketch.  I also wrote down his birthday, December 26, 1959.  

And on my knees in the basement unearthing all this I muttered under my breath... "fucking Capricorn"

He was good though, a good friend, and I sometimes still sense his infuriatingly platonic presence and love for me, like he'll meet me on the bridge, he'll be there when it's my time, all smiles and teddy bear warmth, with those brown eyes and those biceps.

(but I'm still not plan A, I get it...)

Maine-bound

driving into storms
"wimple-shipers" slapping time
(the child in her sings)

she grew in this place
of grim pilgrim settlements
quaint villages now

white-steepled churches
in wild terrain or in towns
blueberries and god

rosehips and seaweed
pidgen-speaking lobstermen
ancient new english

we breathe salt, eat fish
admire authors, work hard
and keep to ourselves

we were bound for Maine
and to it, and then away
too restless to stay



 

 


 
 




 

Totality

I was born three weeks late on a full moon.  I mean, it was full if you looked at the sky.  But it wasn't quite full.  It was 10 degrees shy.  

Shy, but luminous, imminently full without attaining the real deal, existing in that state of anticipation just before you step onto a stage, when your heart is in your throat, and time stands still.  I don't have to perform yet.  I don't have to abandon a secret joy or cope with a disillusionment when everything's suspended like this, in suspense, pending.

I like it best when the gift is in my lap and I haven't yet pulled the ribbon.  I like it best when the roller coaster is about to crest. "There's more to this story" is music to my ears.  Ambiguity is at the heart of all my favorite poems.

Shy is the neutral ground between performing and self-destructing.  Anonymity is the refuge, until I see that I haven't ever been seen, that I'm disappearing (without a trace). 

At 15 I wore the cigarette and the flannel shirt with unlaced boots of the girls who weren't good, but I was good.  I hated Aerosmith and pretended to like them.  I knew every Joni Mitchell song by heart and feigned indifference.  I was ambivalent, and I could become anything, for anyone.  I loved a guy madly, secretly, but I was eclipsed. 

Monday I will celebrate turning 53 during a solar eclipse.  I like how this is a new moon, and maybe I'm coming full circle with this one.  Maybe I can imagine being full finally, and holding onto that fullness.  Until then, I will make shadows here.






 

different

He might be all of 18, my slave.

You think this is another dream.
It's something different.

He has something to say, something to sign.
My arms are full but I happen to be empty. 
So I'm already listening before he speaks.
Today for no reason this stranger is different.

You seem so different he says. 
By different, he means kind. 
Kind is different (though they're antonyms).
I'm kind of different, for my kind.

Write your number down right here he says
pointing to a line on his petition.
if you want me to be your slave.
?? (smile)
Oh I know you ain't like that.

This kid.

He doesn't know that I am like that.






 

The Ex

Spent an hour with the ex (and others) this week.  Remembered everything, what I love about him, why it wasn't sustainable.

He's so very bright.  He's so very embittered.  He's so very funny.  He takes up space.

But yeah, I keep seeking that out anyway, in new contexts, new faces, and making sparks with it.  That's some kind of sustainable after all.  I'm better at filling my own space now.
 

Driven

I'm in what should be the driver's seat, but I have no steering wheel. He's in what should be passenger's seat, driving confidently, as if we're in England and always have been in England.  I think we're like besties on this road trip, ever so close, and getting ever closer, with me just kicking back enjoying the scenery, him being charming and driving well, but in the next scene he says a thing that makes me completely doubt my understanding of things. 

We're at the destination, a bed and breakfast, settling in, affectionately I think.  He's moving clothes from his suitcase into a dresser like the orderly, organized, ready-to-be-present-where-he-is guy (whereas I always just keep my suitcase packed and voila! I'm also ready... to escape at a moment's notice).  I notice there's only a single bed in this room.  Yay, I guess we'll be cozy?   

"It's clear from that drive that there's no 'we'," he declares calmly.  Even kindly, like a teacher.  "But at least we're connecting."  

Whoa.

The implication is that I should not have been so passively content with being driven by him.  I'm challenged to also drive-choose-speak-steer-dare-risk and in the end *unpack* if I want him and me to be "we". 



 

omg

oh for this embrace
my listening heart dilates
god breaks me open

oh in love's caught breath
my speaking heart cursing "you"
god leaves me broken





 
 

 

Summer

I saw my father in the summertime only, between age 6 and age 12.  Those Grand Rapids summers felt like a separate timeline, as if the airplane were really a time machine.  My big sister and I would get put into the time machine just after school ended, and two hours later we would find ourselves in a different family with a different mother and little sisters who speak Latvian, in a hot, rudely racist city instead of the politely racist, lily-white boondocks of our schooldays in rural Maine.  I'd pick up right where I left off, as if I'd never left these alternate best friends nine months before: sweet, clever Beverly across Sutton SW with her geeky, curly-haired big brother and her kind, boozy single mom in the stereotypical house dress, and nasty talking Janet on my side of the street with her buzz-cut hooligan brothers and her terrifying (dare I say menacing) evangelical parents.

It was always steamy and sizzling back then, unlike now.  Are summers milder?  Or is it just that back then we cooled ourselves in front of fans, most of us, while talking into the spinning blades in that way that fragments sound, just to amuse ourselves and pass the time.  Janet's family did have a huge air conditioning unit in their living room, the only one in the neighborhood.  But their blinds were always drawn, and neighbor children were rarely allowed to enter the house.  I remember enduring a dim, chilly bible-reading in that cool, dark room one time, the price of admission.  It felt like a funeral parlor, like you could almost see a coffin, and I never went back.  Usually we all met outside, on porches and in the street, where summer is meant to be lived, and I still prefer a living demon humidity to a dead god chill because of my memory of that room.  I still don't like AC. 

Also during those Michigan summers, my sister and I attended the local pool for Red Cross swimming lessons and free pool time after.  Either the water was kept icy, or I was just very susceptible to cold.  Ever the free-range child, I rarely remembered to bring a towel or a change of clothes to the pool.  I would get blue-lips shivering with cold, being what even my friends called a "shrimp," and leave the pool from time to time craving warmth and finding no towel.  So I'd crawl to the nearest dry patch of concrete, immediately plaster my face and body against it, splayed out, cheek and chest and wrist warming to the radiant substance beneath me.  I loved that sensation no end.  I'd close my eyes, soak up the heat, and breathe in that distinct smell of chlorinated water, summer skin and baking concrete.

The poolside warming ritual came back to me in a rush the other day when I smelled that smell.  And I missed her yet again, that girl I was when summers were alternate yet endless.
   
 



 

It's all written down in the book

The caretaker is a warm, nurturing guy who safeguards my interior spaces while I'm gone and warns me away from certain dark subterranean areas when I'm exploring.  Or he might direct me to a certain locker or shelf to retrieve something I need for my travels.  There is always the understanding that he'll water my plants and care for my orphans (a pet or a child) if I'm gone a while, or even if I never return, which is always possible.  He appeared weekly in my dreams last year, less often these days.

The shopkeeper is a very helpful business woman who keeps accurate records of things: she knows the provenance of every item in her shop, and what its value is.  She is young, brunette, buxom and bright, at ease in her role, and literally in charge of gifts.  Her shop is always a gift shop filled with ornate novelties and tiny treasures.  She has helpers, but also many customers.  If things go wrong I can go to her for help, but I'll have to wait my turn like everybody else.
 
I do a lot of sorting in my dreams.  In this morning's dream I'm absent-mindedly sorting unredeemed, highly valuable gift certificates someone gave me for safe-keeping into a carousel of unpurchased gift certificates at the gift shop.  I'm distraught when I realize my fault, and unable to retrieve most of the certificates from the carousel, as other customers have picked them out.  They're gone.  Mother says disappointedly, "How could you not know this was a priority?"  Husband gives the familiar eyeroll of contemptuous judgment about my lack of focus on what's most important.  Father is silently oh so sad I squandered these precious gifts.  

But my shopkeeper, God bless her.  She recognizes my distress and appears by my side.  "These certificates are just pieces of paper" she says warmly.  "They can't be redeemed by anyone but the intended recipient.  If they're lost, just come up to the counter.  It's all written down in the book."  

I burst into tears of grief and relief.  My shopkeeper, she patiently smiles like Glinda telling Dorothy that she's always had the power to return to Kansas.  

Good dream.

 

 





 

Iron

it's industrial
it's in the blood
my deficiency shows

iron woman's the iron maiden
to my eye
my open eye

(yes, like Margaret's fish hook)

it's the stuff of ships and shackles
of pregnancies fortified
red meat, dark greens
stew pots and frying pans

she's tough as nails
hobnails and thumbnails
she's driven, like nine-inch nails into teak
she's driving with muscular thumbs

she's all thumbs and nails really
(I like to think)

my deficiency shows

I'll sleep.
when I'm done.
spitting nails.
 


 

 



 

 




 
 

WYSIWYG

I'm never expecting the crone I see in the selfie mode of my phone camera.  The sagging flesh, the wrinkles, the pouches, the stray eyebrow hairs, the blotches, the frizzy wild hair.  The mirror in my deliberately under-lit bathroom usually compromises while I gaze.  Make me 32.  No, but I'll make you 42, how's that.  

I don't work that hard, mind you.  I'm not applying makeup.

I did the thing where you try different angles with the phone to see if I could see something other than the dreaded crone.

I found a much younger version of myself by putting the camera over my head and aiming down, thereby reducing the visibility of my under-eye pouches while including a view that encompassed my tank top and jeans stretched out in an alluring, 32-year-old manner. 

Then I decided to linger on the ugliest views of my face too, while changing filters.  I spent maybe ten minutes doing this, ending with the crone, in chrome.  

I am what I am.  

Childlike, girlish, nubile, womanly, matronly, wizened, wise.  

Hideous, ugly, unremarkable, cute, beautiful.  



 

Free

Today I'm going to skip through puddles like way back when. 

With this hip, I won't straddle-climb door jambs barefooted to the top. But I'll remember when I was all skinny legs and buck teeth 
making that climb.  
I was every bit that girl, until I wasn't.

Today I'm going to sing about simple gifts, 
puff the magic dragon and the cat came back.  
Her songs.
  
I'll hold this aching close, as ever, but not in the song I sing.
Anyway not today.

I might even make a wish about the woman I'll be, long from now.
After the braces come off.

Now that woman can sing.



 









 

Angels

Angels come in threes for me, and by 11 am today I've encountered two.  They both said the same thing: do what you love, love what you do.  

The first was a puzzle synchronicity, the kind I'm most used to, the confirmation that working at puzzles is my prayer, my calling. 

The echo came in the form of a biracial fellow carrying a hedge-trimmer.  He's the real-life embodiment of a guy I often encounter in  dreams.  No, really.

I'm in my own little world, probably muttering to myself, when our paths intersect.  He says endearingly "Aw, you didn't bring me a coffee?"  I'm on my way back to work from the corner coffee shop, see, with a cup in my hand.  

He's little, like me.  In his too-large company cap and his red uniform shirt and his official capacity, he's kind of hard to see at first, like the guy in dreams, peripheral, then not.

"How are you today?" he smiles, and I say fine, and ask him back, in kind.

"Just maintaining sanity" he smiles, authentically. 

"And the hedges" I reply, uncharacteristically ready with my riposte.  I don't normally succeed this way, but there is a palpable magic happening.

"Those are both good things to maintain,"  I add, emboldened by my success.  Because he laughs for real, agreeing.  We're walking and talking, same direction.

"It's easy when you do what you love all day," he responds, and this stops me in my tracks.  "I really love what I do, I get to do it all day, and everything falls into place, life is good."  He's not walking now, he's just looking into my eyes, and he's being purposeful, really communicating.  He even adds a head tilt, and it's that head-tilt that gets me every time... although we've never met.  

(Right.)

Groping in my bag for my key fob, I'm thinking what the fuck is happening right now? 

In a good way.  It's just that, like old Scrooge, I'm not quite sure I want to know what the third angel will be like.  If I'm lucky, he/she will be as gentle a messenger.
 

 

Solstice

After a summer morning rainstorm subsides, I will want to take my time, walk my piece of the city toward where I work, thinking of the first morning, as in the hymn, where also blackbird has spoken (like the first bird).  These birds, in this millionth morning, are so full of themselves, full-throated, diving and arguing or singing those sublime songs god placed in them.

I can't remember whose poster it was, back in my childhood, but someone had that insipid 1970s sentiment prominently displayed, the one about letting go of that bird you love, that innately free bird, who might come back to you if yours or, alternatively, stay gone if not yours (the obvious, painful, necessary default).  As a child I liked the idea of a bird I let go coming back to me.  I felt that lovable.

That mirror tho

I'm reconsidering Suzanne's holding of the mirror, and my interpretation of that line since childhood.  The song says that Suzanne shows the enchanted poet where to look among the garbage and the flowers.  I now wonder if she holds the mirror toward him and/or where she's indicated he should look, so that the protagonist sees himself among the heroes in the seaweed and the children in the morning who are leaning out for love forever.  She's like "look at yourself, how beautiful you are, how heroic, this is how I see you."  Anything's possible.

"Everlong" has been in my head ever since I heard the unplugged version the other day.  Funny how a rock song can become so tender when done as a vulnerable ballad.  These lyrics just want to be savored that way: 

Hello, I've waited here for you

Everlong

And I wonder when I sing along with you

If everything could ever feel this real forever
If anything could ever be this good again
 

The only thing I'll ever ask of you
You've got to promise not to stop when I say when

Breathe out, so I can breathe you in


I mean, when you sing "Everlong" gently with just an acoustic guitar and let the language speak in a way that's not drowned out by crashing cymbals and driving rhythms, it becomes everso what it wants to be.  In my opinion.

 

Cycles

Two cycles started turning in my life when I was 13 years old.  

First, I became fertile.  How grown-up I felt, how scared.  I still occasionally played with my Barbie dolls, but only half-heartedly.  I started wearing block-heel sandals with short shorts and floppy hats, plucking my eyebrows, and I bought my first pair of nylons. Boys ignored me but grown men were looking twice.

Second, I became daydreamily fixated on my middle school math teacher.   This second cycle has a wider arc, one that has continued throughout my fertile life.  Three years after the math teacher, I developed an unwieldy desire to be loved by my photography teacher, and filled two diaries with admiration of him.  I had the normal, ephemeral crushes on classmates and random movie stars at that age, fancies that I'd describe as romantic, even at times dramatic, but ... the teacher thing had a dense gravity that tended to become (downright) cathectic.  In the presence of the beloved teacher, I was mute and muted, could only ask for guidance, hope to be seen, giggle slightly and bat my eyelashes.  I never did master fractions or f-stops.

At some point (college) I discovered monogamy, service and work, along with the difficult, negotiated, competitive, but also productive and deep relationships that have formed my adult life. 

So... back to the first cycle.  I once hated that predictable bloody recurrence; now I miss it, though it's but half a year gone.  It brought with it vivid dreams, sullen rages, torrid passions and sometimes even murderous intent.  Good poetry fuel.  Now I see my body solidifying, my hair whitening, my disposition mellowing.  Rage has subsided into dull, manageable heartache.  Joy is in the little things, though I still (secretly) want all the big things I've always wanted.        

Mashup

My Indie 500 puzzle was a mashup.  Thematically, it was a musical mashup.  The construction process itself was an evolving mashup.  I'd have never arrived at the final concept without working through a sequence of alternative ideas, trying grids that wouldn't work with those other ideas, and then, weeks into this process, coming to an aha moment about what the puzzle was trying to be.  So it was many weeks in the making, if you count all the false starts and unyielding territories explored. 

At the same time, it wasn't everything it wanted to be in the end, just close enough to call done, like most organic creations involving real labor.  Eventually you must deliver because of the "deadline," just as every infant must be birthed or not.  There is no keeping your living, this-close-to-breathing baby in the birth canal when you've gotten that far, though you may find yourself delivering a beautiful monster or an ugly angel.

Life has a deadline.  Comes a time when you've got to publish (who and what you are) and/or perish.  This is more obvious to me at age 52 than it was at 25. 

As synchronicity would have it, I was tirelessly pacing on the elliptical machine Saturday, feeling mashed up, when Renee Marie's sublime "Suzanne/Bolero" mashup started playing on my iPod.

There was this part:

... and just when you mean to tell her

that you have no love to give her

she puts you on her wavelength

and lets the river answer

that you've always been her lover...

I'd like to have that power in selective cases, but I don't like or want to be Suzanne.  I mean, as Leonard Cohen would have it, there are heroes in the seaweed and children in the morning leaning out for love, and this seductive woman can't put down her mirror?  That's one man-made archetype there, the vain enchantress with no maternal instinct.  A woman would not write this song, though the poetry is excellent.

I learned the song when I was ten and still know it by heart.