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.

the other woman

if she's living my dream
she puzzles and she sings
while mountains are not
for climbing (necessarily)

lovers do the dishes 
and the gardening
unless we feel like it

in the best of dreams, she, being me
can say in five languages
fluently, with clarity
nothing but what she really means

and she has means, this other woman
who dreams as me
her beauty's in her energy
in what she's built
not in what she's lost 
disintegrating

(woman descending a staircase)

(other woman laughing)

she will not be the "other" woman
and I will not be the other other woman
not if this is our dream

The Whole She Bang

I just read the whole shebang backward, this blog.  So yeah, the early stuff is the best to relive.  There's a dwindling down, and then a slow grind to a halt, then a long hiatus.  So many reasons for that long break.  I was down to what I suspected was zero readers.  I was starting to repeat myself.  So I posted a pathetic, lonely-ass poem about my dead cat and my imaginary lover and closed the curtain for a while.  And stopped writing altogether, until the belligerent (not belligerent really, just belligerent for Tracy, who is the sweetest person, cute and adorable, but beyond sick of her own shtick) reentry of last Tuesday. 

Making puzzles, learning the discipline from someone truly caring, inspiring and uncompromising, moments of unbelievable grace, hoping for acceptance, to find my place in a sky full of stars, all of this was bliss.  Reading through 2012 through 2014 reminds me of the magic that was energizing my daily life back then.  My dreams were rich, my insights were exploding, synchronicities were piling up, and my poems were fucking fantastic (no seriously, I cannot believe I wrote those poems, Jesus).

Real life got more real.  My child became an over-scheduled, beautiful teenager in need of direction.  Puzzle-making became business.  I found myself with almost no time or space I could call mine without negotiating or paying an emotional price.  I started giving things up.  The nation itself seemed to give up all hope and dream, come November, and became this cynical embarrassment.  Most recently I quit singing, first the chorus, then the lessons, because my voice is just stuck in my heart these days. 

I think I'll just start writing again as a way of recovering my voice, but for me this time, no reader in mind.

Long Time, No See

I just cashed a big reality check
and I'm gonna spend every bit of the dividend on myself

For a long time, I longed
long into sleepless nights
dreaming and not dreaming
but now I see

through a glass darkly, yes
thanks for your help

this is not a poem
I just want to say a thing obliquely

but I also just want to say
fuck it.

You name it

At home, I keep this space clear on my dresser, in case my old cat jumps the gap from the bed to that spot.  And back again.  Like she used to.

At the hotel, I request a microwave for my room.  Popcorn for one.  I pretend to savor this time alone.
 
What am I missing?

A little orange cat, strong arms, sweet nothings.

You name it.

Dreams

Lately my dreams arrive with biblical bumper stickers.

My father's house has many rooms.
A little child shall lead them.

After a long hiatus, I'm back to dreams in which I liberate children who've been wrongfully imprisoned under false pretenses.  Often a teenage girl and her little brother.  I might become the girl escaping with the brother, with help that arrives from outside.  It's fluid, it's a dream.

Two years ago, in an unforgettable dream, a savior pulls up in a 1970s station wagon just when we need him.  He helps us get away from that awful institution in a hurry.  He's young, he's handsome, he's kind, he's strong, and he's existentially good.

He hands me a business card and says, with a smile of pure light:

"I am from the Church of the Northern Star..."

Since then I've felt that I have access to real help, the kind I need, when I really need it.