I’d temporarily forgotten that February 13 was the date my mother died until last night when a photo of her and my father tipped over for no apparent reason. Hi Mom!
Coming down the stairs for coffee this morning, it struck me that perhaps all the missing blog photos in the year 2009 can be chalked up to my sister. That’s the year she came back into my life after a nearly ten-year hiatus and inserted doom into my daily fare. Is that you Noreen? Not quite done fucking with me? If so, nice prank.
Enough of that. It’s Valentine’s Day and so I offer you a Valentine’s Day poem. A couple of weeks ago, my Thursday class writing teacher gave the villanelle as a prompt. One very famous example of the form is the Dylan Thomas poem, Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night.
Valentine
Love lost, love found. It’s one big ocean. We fold our clothes, we make our meals. Spelling care with simple acts, there is no commotion.
You may envy the grand gestures of devotion. Abelard and Heloise, Tristan and Isolde hold appeal. Love lost, love found. It’s one big ocean.
Do not gather relics and affix labels like some sort of museum docent. Tidy the house, run one another’s errands and reveal that when Spelling care with simple acts, there is no commotion.
Don’t keep a tally of sums, multipliers, and quotients, Lest your feelings harden, wither, or congeal. Love lost, love found. It’s one big ocean.
Remember the pleasure of the bow, the box, the gift well-chosen Let that ripple outward with warm appeal. Spelling care with simple acts, there is no commotion.
And you my dear mate, through the ups and downs of fortune Have taught me patience and rubbed my heels. Love lost, love found. It’s one big ocean. Spelling care with simple acts, there is no commotion.
Even when lids shut, the tissue aquiver — the scroll of light rolling on, a form ofdamnation.
I want to go through my days, my nights, like a rib cage. Each curving spear connected at a central pole. Sure in form, sure in purpose, protecting the two wind lobes and the single beating fist — lungs and heart safer for the bony embrace.
Instead, a vibrato of uncertainty.
How has the non-tactile flow of damage gained ascendancy over sinew and nerve, crowding out all the places in the body that crave silence?
One day those ribs will spear dirt and crumble. Shouldn’t the body being Hand Maiden to Death wake us out of stupor now and then?
Let me eat a cracker with a smidge of butter. Let me sweep the steps free of snow and then sleep under a blanket that whispers ‘hallelujah.’ Let the sun falling on tabletops stir gratitude.
The Solstice is here. Let ‘standing still’ mean something.
Personal update: the bad news is live-in caregiver up and quit. The good news is that I got to see my brother walk.
The boxes arrive like secrets waiting to be heard. The beauty of forgetting. Memory herded and exploited the stuff of scholars, but let’s not neglect the joy of a blurred-out past. What did I order, exactly?
The slicing of tape like ripping cloth. One violent jerk with a blade. Last time I jabbed my thumb and bled all over the fur of my new boots before I knew of the wound. Some injuries come like that, stealthily, all consequence and no memory of impact.
The time before there was no blood, just mystery. What did I order, exactly?
Opening, remembering — a pre-ordered deck. The American Renaissance Tarot. It winks in promise. Remember? Remember?
It is still a stranger to me, this collection of 78 cards but already I thrill to its character – American, not Egyptian, not medieval European. Say it again, the breath rising, cresting, enunciating with the power of recognition, four syllables:
A-mer-i-can.
There’s Harriet Tubman! Edgar Allan Poe! Oh, and look, Moby Dick and Frederick Douglass. One figure teaches a young Black boy to read, another upholds a sacred root. Hawthorne, Stowe, Harriet Jacobs. They’re calling to me and they’re calling me home.
Hello. Been writing a lot and editing even more and they somehow take away from showing up here.
We got a little snow last night. The cooler temps make it seem like December. Almost nothing else does. More on that in the next days.
Speaking of offspring, here’s a lament written during the summer writing retreat.* I can’t remember what the prompt was — maybe something about emptying your mind?
Golden rod tug slightly in a breeze. Higher up, the rustle of maples. And everywhere: insects. Bees and flies and stinging pests. How sweet it’d be to merely lament the season coming to a close and not the earth herself melting, collapsing, churning, with the Ring of Fire activating quakes up and down the coasts on either side of the Pacific. Which one will open up under Brentwood, Pasadena, Korea Town, and Studio City and gobble up great edifices of society not to mention, people: Brother, Son? I could never have been the mother who said, ‘No. Do not go.’ And even if I had been, he’d not have listened which is how it should be, but still — a bigger worry added to the usual worries.
And then there’s the plains of Nebraska, the river banks along the Mississippi, the lower reaches of Missouri — should so much land be under water?
And how can the potential destruction of, say, one American Western city compare to all of Greenland’s ice melting, Paris and London frying under a merciless sun? Or colony collapse, the bees giving up the ghost, along with whole caveloads of bats, unable to fight the poisonous fight any longer, tongues and nails, slab and tourniquet. What place, then after?
When we look at the data, we also look away, preferring to note how a grasshopper landing not five feet away says something about summer ending and the memory of other summers ending — times when bikes, hoses, pools, bare feet were the signifiers. Our poor brood when little watched nature show after nature show offering up news of habitat decline and species extinction and people wonder why millennials are anxious?
We wonder why the young refuse heirlooms of any kind, but especially have no interest in the Rosenthal china, the Royal Doulton, the Strawberry Wedgewood. ‘Will we have a home or air?’ they wonder — the inability to afford the former a trifling but inescapable concern compared to the latter.
‘We have ten years,’ they keep saying, trying and failing to sound the alarm. ‘Ten years’ means something different to the young than it does to my aging ears. Gone are the days when insects present as cute and annoying pests. Not when closer scrutiny might reveal how numbered their days are. How connected they are to everything else.
Even if we all rowed in the same direction, what a monumental challenge! But with lies the prevalent currency and corporations granted all ascendancy, we first have to clean house and by then — I’m sorry, the thought is there — mightn’t it be too late?
How many monarchs migrated to the milkweeds, those perennials standing proud and erect, proper in their heliotropic course, casting lozenge-shaped shadows, offering praise to sun and nourishment to caterpillars? How many? Less than last year? A tenth of the year before?
It’s easy to shrug at the extinction of some two-toed sloth or a miniature lizard with nocturnal habits literally never seeing the light of day, but what about ALL of the passerines? Polar bears and reindeer? What about us? If we’d cared more about the two-toed sloth all those years ago, would we be better situated today — able to enter the “Wild Kingdom” programming, sponsored by Mutual of Omaha and hosted by some hokey and corny know-nothing, instead of learning about floating islands of plastic the size of Delaware and about Colorado burning for half a season?
* It turns out that the response to the prompt mentioned yesterday became a chapter in the book (working title: •Blood and Indigo•). That means I’m precluded from ‘publishing’ here (seriously, with 100 hits a day?) What would happen if I ‘published’ it, left it up for ten days, and then tagged it private? SShhh
