My husband calls me the Border Girl cuz our caboose is parked in such a manner that we have bits and pieces of land around us where I can garden with bits and pieces of vegetation. I have nearly completed a three or four foot wide and twenty feet long border up against a fence that's full of foxglove, winding rosemary, not the stout roman soldier kind, three ever-bearing raspberries, iris, jonquils, a wall flower I have to watch everyday lest it take over completely all mixed up with four columbines, three feverfew for migraines, a myriad of wormwood, poppies of a pale lemonade hue, strawberries that are bearing right up to Christmas with little grape hyacinths tucked inside the leaves. There's a nice healthy clump of marjoram that blends into a lemon-lime moss, two unknown beautiful somethings and tomorrow my neighbor is bringing me over a section of his tuber rose which I took care of when no one lived in his house.
The house next door was lived in for years by a woman who raised a buncha of children and a yard of crazy flowers which is where the tuber rose is coming from. She died a number of years ago and the kids all grown and speed freaks, who sold the place and none of them could see a flower growing, until Marc. I pray Marc stays forever. He is a fine gourmet chef and loves to garden. He's the one I explained to what a tuber rose is, so he wouldn't cut down those woody stalks and sticks, cuz come spring, it's gonna be a beauty of scent and rich flowers. I can't wait to plant this little bit he's giving me. Mimi Farina was right when she sang of Bread and Roses. We do need to have both in our life. Marc, in a way, is a male version of myself. I call him my brother. His house is full of collages, some movable, some glued. He never happier than when he has dirt under his fingernails or food in the middle of a recipe. Before he moved in and his house was empty, I gardened the borders of his house, taking a bit of this, a piece of that in payment for my work.
I had too many daffodil bulbs, so I planted some of them in his eastern border and they are blooming now.
I have to tackle my eastern border, but it's a bit daunting. The Jerusalem artichokes have taken over and every time that happens, so come the potato bugs which I really hate......
Tuesday, August 28, 2018
Sunday, August 26, 2018
The Secrets Children Carry Because Thet Don't Know How To Put Them Down
I've just finished reading a Stephen King novel," Lisey's Story", who I read every once in a ten years or so and I've been in bed for two days, which is why I can read a whole book in one day. I've the time. When I went to the doctors a few days ago complaining about my joints aching, (if the rest of my bodily aches and pains and diseases weren't enough), he wants me to go get a Lyme's test, as I've lived in the deep Woods for so long and in town not so very long. This King book is not one of the won't I just won't read like the ones about rabid dogs, or haunted houses and cars that are alive, I like the 'nice' ones and I thought this was going to be one of those and it was not, but it was so close to home, I couldn't not finish it. It was about mental illness to be summed up in one sentence. But it was also about the magic places one can 'create', or go to to be safe. And I don't know if those places can exist without someone making them, or if they are like, "If there isn't anyone in the forest, and a tree falls, can it be heard?" kind of conundrum.
My mother and my oldest brother (who is younger than me) are both , shall we say politely, 'over the edge'. I say it this way, because there are times when they have been loving to me and I hold those few moments precious. But That's the sadness, they are so few. My mother's illness, as well as my brother's is well-lubricated with meanness and that's the hardest part to take and the hardest part to break on through to the other side as Jimbo sang, into love. I don't know where my mother's came from. I know that my brother's illness came from my mother's treatment of all of us children and on into adulthood, and he didn't have the strength that my little brother and I have to combat the meanness, the abuse, the down-right scariness of cruelty.
I do know I can love them only because Jesus. There are people rolling their eyes as they read that and I don't much care. In fact, I don't care at all. I know what it's taken to keep me from the fear-monster and that's enough for me. Also, He has taught me how to NOT be one sonnuvabitch, when it would be so easy.
King's book talks about that concept. Oh, he doesn't use Jesus as his method of strength, but he talks about the capability to love when someone on the outside lookin' in, would say, "you are one crazy woman to waste an ounce of love on that kinda treatment.". Well, I'm not wasting any treatment on anybody. My mother is a person, not just her actions and I can pull a few, not a lot, but some memories out of my hellhole of a childhood that indicate something that is nice. I won't go so far as to say it was love she was offering me, but it wasn't mean-ness at that moment and that's always a relief. My brother, I only hold responsible for ugly behavior when I know sure as shootin' well, he could have controlled it, if he had just put out some effort or listened. But I could be wrong there and I'll never know.
In Lisey's Story, the man does what a lot of decent sensitive men do when they come up against things like mental illness: they look for someone to partner with who is just the opposite of the mental illness they grew up with. And that's what Scott did in Lisey's Story. Women , I've noticed, in myself, as well as some other women, tend to marry what they are familiar with and as a teen, I married a paranoid schizophrenic. When the violence came out, I skedaddled just as fast as I could, with a baby in my arms. I think I took longer than I should have, but we did live in the Deep Woods and he would steal my shoes or clothes and when it was winter and snowy, eight miles to town can be dangerous if
no one comes by and you have to run through that woody place that is close to the road to get out into if it's not his truck, but remain hidden in the woods if it is his truck. It was a tricky roll of the dice. I called it playin' Chutes and Ladders while wearin' a Snuggley (tm) up against my breasts with a sweetbreath baby in it.
There was a sweetness about that man that was tormented by his illness, there was a genius inside that flabbergasted a number of people and when he died prematurely just a few months ago, people flew in from other states to the memorial I put together and my son, at 32, was an upstanding gentleman, who had several bad encounters with his father and I don't think any good ones.
My mother's illness includes a great deal of violence placed on her children as well as permission for her husband (not our Father) to mete out violence on children too young to understand why, just as mother herself meted out violence on me when I was as young as two. She has a fine line between what is real and what is her idea of real. That's the most frustrating part, now that we are too big to beat up. There was only one time when all three of us children were, as adults in the same room with her and corrected her idea of a reality story and her frustration at 'losing' out to her false memory was profound to watch. To watch the mentally ill, is both sad and frustrating to the sane. We can't cure her.
She's a psycho-path, which is scary and she's also a Narcissist. Us grown kids ten years ago decided to leave her alone and save ourselves. Though, this last year September after ten years of silence, I called her on her birthday to see if there wasn't a way back through to love and she told me never to call her again. Apparently a nephew had told her a horrific lie she chooses to believe rather than understand that he was hurting her to hurt his father. So I realized, the meanness, which is different than the actual mental illness, has come on down the line like a freight train out of control.
My mother and my oldest brother (who is younger than me) are both , shall we say politely, 'over the edge'. I say it this way, because there are times when they have been loving to me and I hold those few moments precious. But That's the sadness, they are so few. My mother's illness, as well as my brother's is well-lubricated with meanness and that's the hardest part to take and the hardest part to break on through to the other side as Jimbo sang, into love. I don't know where my mother's came from. I know that my brother's illness came from my mother's treatment of all of us children and on into adulthood, and he didn't have the strength that my little brother and I have to combat the meanness, the abuse, the down-right scariness of cruelty.
I do know I can love them only because Jesus. There are people rolling their eyes as they read that and I don't much care. In fact, I don't care at all. I know what it's taken to keep me from the fear-monster and that's enough for me. Also, He has taught me how to NOT be one sonnuvabitch, when it would be so easy.
King's book talks about that concept. Oh, he doesn't use Jesus as his method of strength, but he talks about the capability to love when someone on the outside lookin' in, would say, "you are one crazy woman to waste an ounce of love on that kinda treatment.". Well, I'm not wasting any treatment on anybody. My mother is a person, not just her actions and I can pull a few, not a lot, but some memories out of my hellhole of a childhood that indicate something that is nice. I won't go so far as to say it was love she was offering me, but it wasn't mean-ness at that moment and that's always a relief. My brother, I only hold responsible for ugly behavior when I know sure as shootin' well, he could have controlled it, if he had just put out some effort or listened. But I could be wrong there and I'll never know.
In Lisey's Story, the man does what a lot of decent sensitive men do when they come up against things like mental illness: they look for someone to partner with who is just the opposite of the mental illness they grew up with. And that's what Scott did in Lisey's Story. Women , I've noticed, in myself, as well as some other women, tend to marry what they are familiar with and as a teen, I married a paranoid schizophrenic. When the violence came out, I skedaddled just as fast as I could, with a baby in my arms. I think I took longer than I should have, but we did live in the Deep Woods and he would steal my shoes or clothes and when it was winter and snowy, eight miles to town can be dangerous if
no one comes by and you have to run through that woody place that is close to the road to get out into if it's not his truck, but remain hidden in the woods if it is his truck. It was a tricky roll of the dice. I called it playin' Chutes and Ladders while wearin' a Snuggley (tm) up against my breasts with a sweetbreath baby in it.
There was a sweetness about that man that was tormented by his illness, there was a genius inside that flabbergasted a number of people and when he died prematurely just a few months ago, people flew in from other states to the memorial I put together and my son, at 32, was an upstanding gentleman, who had several bad encounters with his father and I don't think any good ones.
My mother's illness includes a great deal of violence placed on her children as well as permission for her husband (not our Father) to mete out violence on children too young to understand why, just as mother herself meted out violence on me when I was as young as two. She has a fine line between what is real and what is her idea of real. That's the most frustrating part, now that we are too big to beat up. There was only one time when all three of us children were, as adults in the same room with her and corrected her idea of a reality story and her frustration at 'losing' out to her false memory was profound to watch. To watch the mentally ill, is both sad and frustrating to the sane. We can't cure her.
She's a psycho-path, which is scary and she's also a Narcissist. Us grown kids ten years ago decided to leave her alone and save ourselves. Though, this last year September after ten years of silence, I called her on her birthday to see if there wasn't a way back through to love and she told me never to call her again. Apparently a nephew had told her a horrific lie she chooses to believe rather than understand that he was hurting her to hurt his father. So I realized, the meanness, which is different than the actual mental illness, has come on down the line like a freight train out of control.
Ghosts
My father died Dec 31, 2000 and I have a habit of seeing my Dead. I have been seeing my father everywhere and it drives me crazy and hurts because I miss him so much. The weird thing is he and my husband have the same birthday, they both have blue blue eyes and are built like Marlon Brando after "Street Car", but not quite as heavy as "Godfather"; more like "Last Tango in Paris".
I remember when I was five and we lived in Maui nearly in the rainforest area, you walk five feet and bingo! we are in the jungle. Hawaiian houses have a special feature because of the weather. There is a room called The Lanai and it often doesn't have glass in the window, for the breeze to sneak in.. Sometimes folks have wooden shutters, because it rains nearly once a day or night on Maui Nui. The roofs are usually thatched with palm leaves. At least the ones I saw.
My Dad took us for a drive on his thirtieth birthday up to Haleakala` because the Century Plant was nearly in bloom and he wanted us to see it. My Dad had from a very early age, male pattern balding. I was five and sitting in the back seat leaning into my Dad, (it was the early Sixties, most cars didn't even have seatbelts) and watching his face in the rearview mirrow with a smile on my face. I truly loved my Dad. He caught me grinning in the glass and grinned back. My mother also caught it and said, "Sit back, Robin" ; but it was too late. The love had already passed between my Dad and I.
Rest Father as you never had been able to in daily living and don't forget how much I love you.
I remember when I was five and we lived in Maui nearly in the rainforest area, you walk five feet and bingo! we are in the jungle. Hawaiian houses have a special feature because of the weather. There is a room called The Lanai and it often doesn't have glass in the window, for the breeze to sneak in.. Sometimes folks have wooden shutters, because it rains nearly once a day or night on Maui Nui. The roofs are usually thatched with palm leaves. At least the ones I saw.
My Dad took us for a drive on his thirtieth birthday up to Haleakala` because the Century Plant was nearly in bloom and he wanted us to see it. My Dad had from a very early age, male pattern balding. I was five and sitting in the back seat leaning into my Dad, (it was the early Sixties, most cars didn't even have seatbelts) and watching his face in the rearview mirrow with a smile on my face. I truly loved my Dad. He caught me grinning in the glass and grinned back. My mother also caught it and said, "Sit back, Robin" ; but it was too late. The love had already passed between my Dad and I.
Rest Father as you never had been able to in daily living and don't forget how much I love you.
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
21 August 2018
The Caboose on Catherine
The fires are finally about 85% contained. These last two years have been a virtual hell of fire and brimstone. Just terrible smoke and flames and frightening realities of "pack the hope chest with photographs, art, poetry and be ready to grab the cat. I wish I lived in a cool damp place like Scotland and don't tell me I would hate the cold: I love the cold weather so much more than this horrible destruction. I wandered here as a teen and just never left except for a few trips to Paris, Italy, Mexico, the Canadian Shield...Now I'm content to stay at home, especially in Winter when the birds come home and stay through the Spring and summer. It seems only in Autumn do they take off for climates that aren't relentless with rainy storms. It's mild enough that not all the birds fly south for the warmth down there. Down there being Mexico.
Cold mornings reflect a summer sun,
a shiny red ball of flames
and starry girls dancing in dresses of fire;
how is it that we can never loosen
our hold on the fear of summer sparks
that consume acres of trees,
skeletal bodies of deer, rabbits, small birds
lying in the shadow of that last tall Douglas Fir.
We are brave and then, we are not brave.
We just don't know how long it will last each year
and we relinquish our idea of control
as we bow our faces into the ashes
and pray for rain.
The Caboose on Catherine
The fires are finally about 85% contained. These last two years have been a virtual hell of fire and brimstone. Just terrible smoke and flames and frightening realities of "pack the hope chest with photographs, art, poetry and be ready to grab the cat. I wish I lived in a cool damp place like Scotland and don't tell me I would hate the cold: I love the cold weather so much more than this horrible destruction. I wandered here as a teen and just never left except for a few trips to Paris, Italy, Mexico, the Canadian Shield...Now I'm content to stay at home, especially in Winter when the birds come home and stay through the Spring and summer. It seems only in Autumn do they take off for climates that aren't relentless with rainy storms. It's mild enough that not all the birds fly south for the warmth down there. Down there being Mexico.
Cold mornings reflect a summer sun,
a shiny red ball of flames
and starry girls dancing in dresses of fire;
how is it that we can never loosen
our hold on the fear of summer sparks
that consume acres of trees,
skeletal bodies of deer, rabbits, small birds
lying in the shadow of that last tall Douglas Fir.
We are brave and then, we are not brave.
We just don't know how long it will last each year
and we relinquish our idea of control
as we bow our faces into the ashes
and pray for rain.
Monday, June 18, 2018
Fledglings and Flowering May
Yesterday I heard those familiar noises that young jays make when they are learning to fly. And I went out and saw in the back garden, a short-tailed bright blue-winged scrub jay hop-hop-hopping and squeaking to beat the band. Today I went out and actually found him, picked him up and held him close to my cheek. (the olifactory sense is the dullest one on birds. People always have this misnomer that if they touch a baby that the parents will not come back to it, because it smells of humans. Actually, they can't smell the human-ness at all.) It felt so delish to nuzzle his body up against me and listen to his beating heart and small chirps. I don't know if the parents are encouraging him to "get the hell out" of the nest and don't come back! or what. Sometimes a bluejay hangs about our garden eating bugs for longer than they need to, or maybe they are doing me a service and I love everything about them but that ugly ungainly squawck! I have several bird baths, one for water and one for seed, so I put him in the seed one and let him eat a bit, though I think they prefer things like potato bugs and then I picked him up again and put him in the water bath and he loved it, washing under his wings and flicking the droplets over his head, it was so very funny to watch.
Spring Comes To Mendonesia
18 June 2018, Monday *****Spring Comes to Mendonesia
At last, Spring has come to Mendonesia and all the gardens are a palette of wild and mad color. Now being legal in our state, the cannabis farmers are getting their plants into the earth and the research for pain management is moving forward. What a blessing.
What I want to do is drive down to Central California and watch the yellow-billed and yellow-stockinged magpies. While the black-billed ones say, "Mag mag mag", the beautiful and rare yellow-billed ones say "Reet reet reet" and are so friendly. They even seem to remember me when I've gone back only several times a year. It's hard to travel very much now due to two reasons: one, the gasoline prices are dishonest and too high and two, my health isn't getting any better, so its hard to stay in a moving vehicle for hours on end. I wish we had magpies right here in our little town.
Currently I've been typing up a selection of poems for a publisher and while I'm glad he's interested in my work, I truly want to get earth under my fingernails out in the garden. My tiger lilies have dropped their green heads, but it will be awhile before they actually bloom open and show me their orange turbans all freckled with black. I've always hated the color orange, but ya gotta admit, the tiger lily is an animal all to itself. I'm planning on getting a spray of them tattooed on my right forearm this summer. Last summer I designed a bit of poetry by Kenneth Patchen to form a sort of bracelet with two swallows and the last bars of Mister Dylan's song, "Father of Night" on one side of our poetry logo the gypsy girl. On the other side of her is a space for the first bars and a clef of the song and a guitar that artist Donna Nassar carved. The kid who does my work is remarkable. Will took a look at some old work and said "Let me clean that up for you and I'll keep it reasonable" , so that's what we did, adding the other stuff. I realized I had sixteen tattoos and none of them were for my husband, so since we both love Patchen's work, I pulled a line out of my favorite love poem he wrote for Miriam,
"...for you are bird and summer sky and all I know of home..."
and Will found a beautiful font to ink it into my skin.
This entry is all over the place simply because I've been away so long and now getting back to writing just blather when I need a break from the 'serious' writing.
And now on my fifth box of "Trailer for Rent" selling like mad. I am so happy.
At last, Spring has come to Mendonesia and all the gardens are a palette of wild and mad color. Now being legal in our state, the cannabis farmers are getting their plants into the earth and the research for pain management is moving forward. What a blessing.
What I want to do is drive down to Central California and watch the yellow-billed and yellow-stockinged magpies. While the black-billed ones say, "Mag mag mag", the beautiful and rare yellow-billed ones say "Reet reet reet" and are so friendly. They even seem to remember me when I've gone back only several times a year. It's hard to travel very much now due to two reasons: one, the gasoline prices are dishonest and too high and two, my health isn't getting any better, so its hard to stay in a moving vehicle for hours on end. I wish we had magpies right here in our little town.
Currently I've been typing up a selection of poems for a publisher and while I'm glad he's interested in my work, I truly want to get earth under my fingernails out in the garden. My tiger lilies have dropped their green heads, but it will be awhile before they actually bloom open and show me their orange turbans all freckled with black. I've always hated the color orange, but ya gotta admit, the tiger lily is an animal all to itself. I'm planning on getting a spray of them tattooed on my right forearm this summer. Last summer I designed a bit of poetry by Kenneth Patchen to form a sort of bracelet with two swallows and the last bars of Mister Dylan's song, "Father of Night" on one side of our poetry logo the gypsy girl. On the other side of her is a space for the first bars and a clef of the song and a guitar that artist Donna Nassar carved. The kid who does my work is remarkable. Will took a look at some old work and said "Let me clean that up for you and I'll keep it reasonable" , so that's what we did, adding the other stuff. I realized I had sixteen tattoos and none of them were for my husband, so since we both love Patchen's work, I pulled a line out of my favorite love poem he wrote for Miriam,
"...for you are bird and summer sky and all I know of home..."
and Will found a beautiful font to ink it into my skin.
This entry is all over the place simply because I've been away so long and now getting back to writing just blather when I need a break from the 'serious' writing.
And now on my fifth box of "Trailer for Rent" selling like mad. I am so happy.
Thursday, November 23, 2017
New Book review "Trailer for Rent"
24 August 2017
I have yet to have a public reading of "Trailer for Rent", (tho one scheduled for September 7, 2017) but the new book, a collection of short stories has sold so well just walkin' down the street carrying five books in my over-the-shoulder satchel, I have had to order three boxes just to keep ahead of the buyers. What a feeling of satisfaction. In about twenty books, I'll be opening that third box and start running them. I have a reading at the local library on September 7th, 6pm to 7pm.
My most prolific, and best student, when I was a creative writing teacher, Erin Mallon, now an adult and working on art projects in Switzterland with her new husband, designed the cover and photo-shopped a photograph of my 91 year old aunt as a child into the doorway of an Airstream trailer, holding a mandolin because after all, the book is called, "Trailer for Rent", and the heroine of the stories, eleven year old Redbud Jane Barrett, is smilin' big-time and wants to play the mandolin after she has saved enough money to buy one more than anything in the whole wide world. She lives at the Sunshine Motor Lodge Trailer Park, which is not as pretentious as the park's name seems to indicate. I spent a summer and last autumn writing and editing thirty stories about our heroine who, in this Young Adult set of stories lives in a rather decent trailer park, but still they're one of the worst places to live in terms of American living quarters. I'm gonna try and put the interview Carla Sarrett wrote for me for Amazon.com down below to give people an idea of what I'm planning P.R. wise.
I have yet to have a public reading of "Trailer for Rent", (tho one scheduled for September 7, 2017) but the new book, a collection of short stories has sold so well just walkin' down the street carrying five books in my over-the-shoulder satchel, I have had to order three boxes just to keep ahead of the buyers. What a feeling of satisfaction. In about twenty books, I'll be opening that third box and start running them. I have a reading at the local library on September 7th, 6pm to 7pm.
My most prolific, and best student, when I was a creative writing teacher, Erin Mallon, now an adult and working on art projects in Switzterland with her new husband, designed the cover and photo-shopped a photograph of my 91 year old aunt as a child into the doorway of an Airstream trailer, holding a mandolin because after all, the book is called, "Trailer for Rent", and the heroine of the stories, eleven year old Redbud Jane Barrett, is smilin' big-time and wants to play the mandolin after she has saved enough money to buy one more than anything in the whole wide world. She lives at the Sunshine Motor Lodge Trailer Park, which is not as pretentious as the park's name seems to indicate. I spent a summer and last autumn writing and editing thirty stories about our heroine who, in this Young Adult set of stories lives in a rather decent trailer park, but still they're one of the worst places to live in terms of American living quarters. I'm gonna try and put the interview Carla Sarrett wrote for me for Amazon.com down below to give people an idea of what I'm planning P.R. wise.
I have needed to write this book so badly for so long, as a gift to ten to fourteen year olds, though all the adults who have read it, love it, understand my goal, my gift to young people. These thirty stories
are a gift to myself, reflecting on child abuse, (yes, I was), parental alcoholism, child neglect, (yes) poverty (yes) and not always enough to eat or decent clothes when it was a peer necessity. Some of these things may seem unimportant; but to a child's self-esteem, they are crucial. I have readings lined up from Willits CA to Sacramento, so far.
When I get addresses, I'll post them.
are a gift to myself, reflecting on child abuse, (yes, I was), parental alcoholism, child neglect, (yes) poverty (yes) and not always enough to eat or decent clothes when it was a peer necessity. Some of these things may seem unimportant; but to a child's self-esteem, they are crucial. I have readings lined up from Willits CA to Sacramento, so far.
When I get addresses, I'll post them.
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
The Idea of Friendship
The Idea of Friendship
One of the hardest things for me to accept is a friend deciding they don't want to be friends any longer. As if I am no longer important. And maybe I'm not... I remember the first time I was four and my parents were rather Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald stylish, so the other mothers in the tract home neighborhood didn't like my playing with their children. Almost as if my parents' behavior would somehow rub off from a four year old. Once when playing with some neighbor girls, their mother called for them and they stuffed me in the toy box and told me to be quiet until their mother went away.
I remember being in the seventh grade and having a crush on my journalism teacher who when I once walked into what I thought was an empty classroom, I found her crying on the window sill. I was so distraught with grief for her. A week later, was one of those stupid pep rallies and we were all required to sit on the bleachers and watch the cheerleaders flaunt their panties and watch the football players flaunt their tight ends. I saw my favorite teacher and said to my girlfriends, "Lets sit by Miss___________" . They called me Lezzie and walked away never to speak to me again in the six years we were at school together. I didn't even know what a lezzie was, but I did know i preferred girls to boys. This went on throughout school and even after school when I lived in Berkeley, one of the finest Lesbian capitals of the world.
I believe I was too intense for most girls, even the ones who had the same interests as myself. I really wasn't interested in changing my preferences. I just wanted some friends. i preferred the daisy-like slender pretty girls which was my own description, and it was the more butch girls who wanted me.
What a dilemma. I was so lonely. The only thing i was sure of was that I was going to be a poet no matter what and in fact was one already, just then at 22, getting good at writing. And so I moved to a two room Depression cabin with cold running water, a wood stove to heat with and cook on and lived alone one hundred and fifty miles north of Berkeley. I wrote and wrote and wrote and learned and read and read and was so lonely I hitch-hiked into town for provisions once a month finally discovering the small country town I had chosen purely quixotically, was a town of lesbians. Sometimes loneliness guides us to where we need to go. Somehow I was seduced by a man and had two sons. The irony was not lost on me. There are maps and plans for people and one cannot always choose which map to follow; they are guided along whether they will or they won't.
One of the hardest things for me to accept is a friend deciding they don't want to be friends any longer. As if I am no longer important. And maybe I'm not... I remember the first time I was four and my parents were rather Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald stylish, so the other mothers in the tract home neighborhood didn't like my playing with their children. Almost as if my parents' behavior would somehow rub off from a four year old. Once when playing with some neighbor girls, their mother called for them and they stuffed me in the toy box and told me to be quiet until their mother went away.
I remember being in the seventh grade and having a crush on my journalism teacher who when I once walked into what I thought was an empty classroom, I found her crying on the window sill. I was so distraught with grief for her. A week later, was one of those stupid pep rallies and we were all required to sit on the bleachers and watch the cheerleaders flaunt their panties and watch the football players flaunt their tight ends. I saw my favorite teacher and said to my girlfriends, "Lets sit by Miss___________" . They called me Lezzie and walked away never to speak to me again in the six years we were at school together. I didn't even know what a lezzie was, but I did know i preferred girls to boys. This went on throughout school and even after school when I lived in Berkeley, one of the finest Lesbian capitals of the world.
I believe I was too intense for most girls, even the ones who had the same interests as myself. I really wasn't interested in changing my preferences. I just wanted some friends. i preferred the daisy-like slender pretty girls which was my own description, and it was the more butch girls who wanted me.
What a dilemma. I was so lonely. The only thing i was sure of was that I was going to be a poet no matter what and in fact was one already, just then at 22, getting good at writing. And so I moved to a two room Depression cabin with cold running water, a wood stove to heat with and cook on and lived alone one hundred and fifty miles north of Berkeley. I wrote and wrote and wrote and learned and read and read and was so lonely I hitch-hiked into town for provisions once a month finally discovering the small country town I had chosen purely quixotically, was a town of lesbians. Sometimes loneliness guides us to where we need to go. Somehow I was seduced by a man and had two sons. The irony was not lost on me. There are maps and plans for people and one cannot always choose which map to follow; they are guided along whether they will or they won't.
One is the Lonliest Number
May 2017
One is the Loneliest Number
Loneliness is a terrible disease. I don't, do not, feel sorry for myself, but I do wish some things were different. I read books as a child about orphans and thought I knew what that was all about. Now that I am an orphan, I know my earlier notions were romantic stories I just read. I didn't actually know the absolute feeling of being a singular person in the world without bloodlines that go backward. Thank god I have two grown children. No, I don't have the overwhelming need to have procreated in order to have continued my gene pool. But I do love the stories my grandmother told me about a relative who had walked the Trail of Tears and I always felt sad that the Irish came out so strong in my genetic make up. I think because there are so many Irish in the world compared to the Cherokee of my father's side. They were not well treated, but then, neither were the Irish. I love the Irish stories I heard as a small child. Poets have such a struggle taking sides, so I've decided I'm not going to. I am going to accept that I'm an Irish-Cherokee woman who knows how to eat out of the forest, weave a basket that can at least hold fruit or acorns, certainly not acorn mush or water and I can, or could before I had an accident with black ice and Winter, step-dance while rather drunk.
I've discovered I absolutely cannot live in a City. I become anxious immediately, so I've relished living for the last forty-three years in a town so small and many many of those years in the forest. I only moved to the outskirts of the town after my doctor told me that the heart condition I was born with would only worsen as I aged and I ought to be closer to a hospital, not that I would stay in one for any length of time. If I'm going to die, I decided as a teen , I would die in the woods, or if it's Winter, I'll die in my cabin with a fire in the stove. I miss my cabin, even if this town is so small and not filled with a lot of people, it does have a brand new hospital. I want the MDs to continue patching me up and sending me home to read or write poetry on the tiny front porch and watch the deer come up the road to eat green things. I didn't understand that aging would be like this. I am going to be sixty-two in less than a month and I'm not done yet I holler out to the sky, the clouds, the rain, the wind.
I find myself rather furious with English teachers who told us Henry David Thoreau was such a purist. He may have built his own cabin, but i repaired mine built in the Depression days and he only lived in his for eight months. I counted it out. I have him over a barrel and isn't it just like a man to make a big deal out of living in the woods for less than a year and eating dinner every Wednesday night at Mr. and Mrs. Emerson's house and Sundays with his mother. He may have chopped wood, but I dragged a 1957 Chevy hood into the forest and filled it with fallen dead wood and never once cut down a living tree. Two scores on you Henry David!
I have a new book coming out in a few weeks and another one in, I hope, a few months. The first one is thirty short stories and the second is a collection of poetry. I have in my file cabinet, four other manuscripts or is it five, that I want time to clean up the spelling, the phrasing and get them published as well. This has been my dream since I was twelve. I only have five books published now and I'm greedy. I want to shout out to the world all the words I have collected over the years that translate into my heart's language. I remind myself I have to hurry. I also have to save my burial money. I don't know if my sons will bury me. I think they will, but I'm not sure I can rely on them. No one called me this year for Mother's Day. I had explained to my children that Mother's day was not a Hallmark Greeting card holiday, but one that Julia Ward Howe, Author of Battle Hymn of the Republic (get the dichotomy of that title Battle and then Hymn.) They often forget Mother's Day, my birthday, Christmas, what would be so strange about forgetting to bury a woman the County could just as easily dump in a Potter's field. I'm strong, and I'm not strong. My inside heart is all-giving, it's only the cardiac that is falling to pieces. Countless surgeries and now a pacemaker. Ever since I was ten I've had a heart condition. I was born with Celiac's Disease but no one knew it until my pacemaker kept getting infected. Thank god for my doctor of forty-two years who researched me til two in the a.m. and discovered that was what was making me so sick since I was two and started eating 'people' food instead of baby food. I ought to have been born Japanese and lived on a rice based diet. The Celiac's is why I got breast cancer. You get sick, in the gut, then cancer (I lost my breast) and then you die. My MD saved my life again. When I was 19 and my heart was beating 300 times a minute he injected inderol right into my blood stream and I started dying. I saw Y'shua who told me to turn around and go back to where the schitzophrenic (sp) husband was holding the four month old son. This is why I love God. He saves me over and over. My body that is falling apart and isn't it supposed to do that when one gets to a certain age? I was born with so many things wrong with my body that I resent the fact that I cannot live like my Aunt Iris to 91 years old and publish all those books that are in my beautiful oak filing cabinets. If only ..If only...I refuse to feel sorry for myself. I refuse that emotion..And now I shall stop, because I'm starting to feel sorry for myself and I won't have it.
One is the Loneliest Number
Loneliness is a terrible disease. I don't, do not, feel sorry for myself, but I do wish some things were different. I read books as a child about orphans and thought I knew what that was all about. Now that I am an orphan, I know my earlier notions were romantic stories I just read. I didn't actually know the absolute feeling of being a singular person in the world without bloodlines that go backward. Thank god I have two grown children. No, I don't have the overwhelming need to have procreated in order to have continued my gene pool. But I do love the stories my grandmother told me about a relative who had walked the Trail of Tears and I always felt sad that the Irish came out so strong in my genetic make up. I think because there are so many Irish in the world compared to the Cherokee of my father's side. They were not well treated, but then, neither were the Irish. I love the Irish stories I heard as a small child. Poets have such a struggle taking sides, so I've decided I'm not going to. I am going to accept that I'm an Irish-Cherokee woman who knows how to eat out of the forest, weave a basket that can at least hold fruit or acorns, certainly not acorn mush or water and I can, or could before I had an accident with black ice and Winter, step-dance while rather drunk.
I've discovered I absolutely cannot live in a City. I become anxious immediately, so I've relished living for the last forty-three years in a town so small and many many of those years in the forest. I only moved to the outskirts of the town after my doctor told me that the heart condition I was born with would only worsen as I aged and I ought to be closer to a hospital, not that I would stay in one for any length of time. If I'm going to die, I decided as a teen , I would die in the woods, or if it's Winter, I'll die in my cabin with a fire in the stove. I miss my cabin, even if this town is so small and not filled with a lot of people, it does have a brand new hospital. I want the MDs to continue patching me up and sending me home to read or write poetry on the tiny front porch and watch the deer come up the road to eat green things. I didn't understand that aging would be like this. I am going to be sixty-two in less than a month and I'm not done yet I holler out to the sky, the clouds, the rain, the wind.
I find myself rather furious with English teachers who told us Henry David Thoreau was such a purist. He may have built his own cabin, but i repaired mine built in the Depression days and he only lived in his for eight months. I counted it out. I have him over a barrel and isn't it just like a man to make a big deal out of living in the woods for less than a year and eating dinner every Wednesday night at Mr. and Mrs. Emerson's house and Sundays with his mother. He may have chopped wood, but I dragged a 1957 Chevy hood into the forest and filled it with fallen dead wood and never once cut down a living tree. Two scores on you Henry David!
I have a new book coming out in a few weeks and another one in, I hope, a few months. The first one is thirty short stories and the second is a collection of poetry. I have in my file cabinet, four other manuscripts or is it five, that I want time to clean up the spelling, the phrasing and get them published as well. This has been my dream since I was twelve. I only have five books published now and I'm greedy. I want to shout out to the world all the words I have collected over the years that translate into my heart's language. I remind myself I have to hurry. I also have to save my burial money. I don't know if my sons will bury me. I think they will, but I'm not sure I can rely on them. No one called me this year for Mother's Day. I had explained to my children that Mother's day was not a Hallmark Greeting card holiday, but one that Julia Ward Howe, Author of Battle Hymn of the Republic (get the dichotomy of that title Battle and then Hymn.) They often forget Mother's Day, my birthday, Christmas, what would be so strange about forgetting to bury a woman the County could just as easily dump in a Potter's field. I'm strong, and I'm not strong. My inside heart is all-giving, it's only the cardiac that is falling to pieces. Countless surgeries and now a pacemaker. Ever since I was ten I've had a heart condition. I was born with Celiac's Disease but no one knew it until my pacemaker kept getting infected. Thank god for my doctor of forty-two years who researched me til two in the a.m. and discovered that was what was making me so sick since I was two and started eating 'people' food instead of baby food. I ought to have been born Japanese and lived on a rice based diet. The Celiac's is why I got breast cancer. You get sick, in the gut, then cancer (I lost my breast) and then you die. My MD saved my life again. When I was 19 and my heart was beating 300 times a minute he injected inderol right into my blood stream and I started dying. I saw Y'shua who told me to turn around and go back to where the schitzophrenic (sp) husband was holding the four month old son. This is why I love God. He saves me over and over. My body that is falling apart and isn't it supposed to do that when one gets to a certain age? I was born with so many things wrong with my body that I resent the fact that I cannot live like my Aunt Iris to 91 years old and publish all those books that are in my beautiful oak filing cabinets. If only ..If only...I refuse to feel sorry for myself. I refuse that emotion..And now I shall stop, because I'm starting to feel sorry for myself and I won't have it.
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Blue Fledglings & a Gallant Eye
Blue Fledgings & a Gallant Eye
Today the scrub jays began fledgling, hop-hop-hoping throughout the garden and I was nervous of the cat. I finally discovered him fast asleep on the corner of the bed that we made fresh this morning.
I picked up the bird and rubbed his feathers against my cheeks: so soft. I discovered from a bird-woman that its a misnomer that birds won't touch their babies if the scent of humans are on them. The olfactory sense is the dullest of them all it turns out. This one's feathers are electric they are so bright. I caressed him and he lay in the palm of my hands, looking up at me, almost as if he were saying, "Are you my mother?". I finally set him down in the quiet green and sprinkled some raw sunflower seeds at his feet. Then I went and finished watering the new columbines and chard seedlings that have come up.
This year's garden is going to be the best. But I say that every year I suspect.
I have made a barter with Bill Bruneau of Bountiful Seeds (part of John Jeavons' gardening business) to trade some of my poetry broadsides for some seeds for this year's garden. I am so glad because this has been a hard year for so many of us in Mendonesia. Bill plans to frame the poems for the office that stores the seeds and puts out the catalogue.
I plan to have Kentucky Blue Wonder Green Beans and Thai Long Beans. The Snow Peas are already in. I want the Blue Wonders to be Pole beans because I make huge tipis with three seven foot bamboo poles and as the beans grow up them, I decorate them with wild turkey feathers, shiny tinsel left over from Christmas, colored yarns with silver and gold threads in them to scare off the birds and it's beautiful as well. I also want bush beans, but we'll see what kind of room I'm talking here. Because I must have my eggplant, both Italian Globe and Japanese Long. And then there's tomatoes. There is nothing like a hot firm juicy tomato cut off the vine with grandpa's sharp pocket knife and eaten right there in the garden. And we have to have so many different kinds. Roma for making paste. which we no longer jar up, though I think we should jar some. Last year we froze it in ice cube trays and when they were frozen, we popped them out into a freezer lock bag and filled the trays over and over again. The same thing with basil, both Italian giant leaf and Thailand's stream-lined flavor packed into a thin firm leaf all smooshed up in the blender with the nuts and some kosher salt, but no garlic or cheese because they don't freeze well. When I want to make some pesto, I will defrost a cube or two and add what's needed.
There are flowers everywhere and so beautiful. Six foot foxgloves, both giant and knee-high columbines, strawberries running through the herb bed and this year we've put in red and white currants and raspberries. This is a happy spring.
The Art of Needle and Thread; of Soap and Water
On the day before Fat Tuesday, I took a ceramic bowl from the stack on the shelf in the caboose's laundry room, the room in winter I call the "Rainbow Room" because in the wide picture window I have hung on fishing line and clear push pins, all the crystals and chandelier pieces my sons gave me for Christmas when they were boys."Forever Snowflakes" we called them. Only in the winter, in this particular window does the sun rise to just the right meridian and catch the cut glass facets so that the Prism Effect is evoked. Such delicate magic that is added to by gently spinning each piece of cut glass on its line and the room swirls with rainbows...
So I pull a medium size bowl from the white white shelf and go to the table where I hold my soaps and spot removers and bleaches and ironically, my teas of different strengths. Not good drinking tea, but cheap strong and light teas I can use in dying cloth. This time I mix only a small amount of soap, stain remover and just a whisper of bleach and then cold water. I mix it with a whisk.
Then I drop into it a lace collar made long before World War 2 by a woman's grandmother. The length of buttons on this wide collar is too numerous for me to want to count right this moment and I have counted them before. A child's hand could easily button them, my peasant hands are of little value with this delicate work, but I still manage to hook each mother-of-pearl button into its crocheted receptacle. I even have a button hook! I swish it around for a few moments, rubbing silk against silk gently and then I let it sit for two days in the mixture. Today I have rinsed and rinsed it and finally let it sit in clear water until tomorrow when I will rinse it many times again to get out the chemicals that would eat it away. I wish I could afford more organic properties to wash things in, better for the environment, better for my few nice things.
I bought many many pieces of Belgium lace and crocheted work from a woman named Elsa that I knew briefly in Berkeley for $25 in the summer of 1975, right before I moved to the hills outside of Willits in Mendocino County. I had a job at that time washing dishes at, now I have heard closed, Smokey Joe's Cafe.
I made minimum wage and a good meal. And my boss Ned was very kind to me. I have carried these lace and crocheted collars with me all this time, and never have I washed them. I found at a thrift store a beautiful denim jacket made by Lauren's line called Chaps. The background of the jacket is the same color as the lace and then it has faded flowers splashed all over the fabric. It's beautiful, soft to the touch and almost makes me cry to see it hanging face out on a nail in the wall. But then, beauty always makes me cry. I prefer going to art museums alone, so I won't embarrass my date. When the collar is rinsed and hung to drip from my child's clothesline with the old whittled Gypsy pegs into the sink below, I will spread it on a thick cotton towel and shape it to dry. Then I will use tiny gold safety pins and pin it to the collar on the jacket. I have done this already and that's was when I noticed how dingy with time the collar was. So I had to honor it by washing it.
This is how I make my clothes. Or rather the things that go with the clothes that cover my nakedness. This is the art of my warmth and other things in the summer to promote coolness. I inherited some pieces of mink that are also collars, one quite sumptuous and wide at the middle, tampering down on each side. I have pinned that one to a small jacket, also a very exclusive name, that is taupe with a black pattern of swirls and paisleys on it. The pattern is quite dense so that only a small amount of the taupe shows.
I like to describe things of beauty and things of squalor. It's because the adjectives are so rich in their ability to make another person see what I am holding, or admiring. I have so few clothes that I have been able to hang everything on coat hangers someone made covered with pastel silks of many different colors, some with small round mother-of-pearl buttons sewn onto the edge of each side of the hanger so the garment doesn't fall off. Such attention to detail. Except for its spareness, my closet looks like it belongs to a rich woman. That makes me laugh. When I return from my train trip to visit my family who I haven't seen in twelve years I will return with some skirts made from beautiful and rich fabrics I have been collecting at thrift stores for years. I have been wearing rags for nearly two years and have grown ashamed. I don't seek much, but what I plan to do is sweet-talk my cousin Lin, into sewing pieces of beautiful fabric into skirts. I wish she was willing to make some blouses, but it is difficult work and she would rather make quilts. My loss. She is a magnificent seamstress I understand. I have gorgeous fabrics bought at thrift stores for a couple bucks each. Lucky me!
These simple woman tasks occupy my time until the rains and cold stop and I may return to the Other Church, my garden. I love my garden until it borders on adoration. I have to be careful of that, which is why every Lent I try to give up something I clearly love. This year is butter. On Fat Tuesday the last buttered thing I ate was popcorn. Such fun to watch the cat bat a little cloud of corn around the bed and then lick off all its delicious butter. I am so charmed by his health, by his antics of pure joy, that I am filled with well-being, despite this terrible lung disorder I have been carrying around, nearly coughing my head off. If I don't leave the caboose except to sit in the sun for twenty minutes each day bundled up in quilts, I won't infect anyone and I can watch the daffodils push their pale green heads up through the surface and eventually turn yellow and open into an explosion of petals. Today has been a good days despite so many hours in bed.
So I pull a medium size bowl from the white white shelf and go to the table where I hold my soaps and spot removers and bleaches and ironically, my teas of different strengths. Not good drinking tea, but cheap strong and light teas I can use in dying cloth. This time I mix only a small amount of soap, stain remover and just a whisper of bleach and then cold water. I mix it with a whisk.
Then I drop into it a lace collar made long before World War 2 by a woman's grandmother. The length of buttons on this wide collar is too numerous for me to want to count right this moment and I have counted them before. A child's hand could easily button them, my peasant hands are of little value with this delicate work, but I still manage to hook each mother-of-pearl button into its crocheted receptacle. I even have a button hook! I swish it around for a few moments, rubbing silk against silk gently and then I let it sit for two days in the mixture. Today I have rinsed and rinsed it and finally let it sit in clear water until tomorrow when I will rinse it many times again to get out the chemicals that would eat it away. I wish I could afford more organic properties to wash things in, better for the environment, better for my few nice things.
I bought many many pieces of Belgium lace and crocheted work from a woman named Elsa that I knew briefly in Berkeley for $25 in the summer of 1975, right before I moved to the hills outside of Willits in Mendocino County. I had a job at that time washing dishes at, now I have heard closed, Smokey Joe's Cafe.
I made minimum wage and a good meal. And my boss Ned was very kind to me. I have carried these lace and crocheted collars with me all this time, and never have I washed them. I found at a thrift store a beautiful denim jacket made by Lauren's line called Chaps. The background of the jacket is the same color as the lace and then it has faded flowers splashed all over the fabric. It's beautiful, soft to the touch and almost makes me cry to see it hanging face out on a nail in the wall. But then, beauty always makes me cry. I prefer going to art museums alone, so I won't embarrass my date. When the collar is rinsed and hung to drip from my child's clothesline with the old whittled Gypsy pegs into the sink below, I will spread it on a thick cotton towel and shape it to dry. Then I will use tiny gold safety pins and pin it to the collar on the jacket. I have done this already and that's was when I noticed how dingy with time the collar was. So I had to honor it by washing it.
This is how I make my clothes. Or rather the things that go with the clothes that cover my nakedness. This is the art of my warmth and other things in the summer to promote coolness. I inherited some pieces of mink that are also collars, one quite sumptuous and wide at the middle, tampering down on each side. I have pinned that one to a small jacket, also a very exclusive name, that is taupe with a black pattern of swirls and paisleys on it. The pattern is quite dense so that only a small amount of the taupe shows.
I like to describe things of beauty and things of squalor. It's because the adjectives are so rich in their ability to make another person see what I am holding, or admiring. I have so few clothes that I have been able to hang everything on coat hangers someone made covered with pastel silks of many different colors, some with small round mother-of-pearl buttons sewn onto the edge of each side of the hanger so the garment doesn't fall off. Such attention to detail. Except for its spareness, my closet looks like it belongs to a rich woman. That makes me laugh. When I return from my train trip to visit my family who I haven't seen in twelve years I will return with some skirts made from beautiful and rich fabrics I have been collecting at thrift stores for years. I have been wearing rags for nearly two years and have grown ashamed. I don't seek much, but what I plan to do is sweet-talk my cousin Lin, into sewing pieces of beautiful fabric into skirts. I wish she was willing to make some blouses, but it is difficult work and she would rather make quilts. My loss. She is a magnificent seamstress I understand. I have gorgeous fabrics bought at thrift stores for a couple bucks each. Lucky me!
These simple woman tasks occupy my time until the rains and cold stop and I may return to the Other Church, my garden. I love my garden until it borders on adoration. I have to be careful of that, which is why every Lent I try to give up something I clearly love. This year is butter. On Fat Tuesday the last buttered thing I ate was popcorn. Such fun to watch the cat bat a little cloud of corn around the bed and then lick off all its delicious butter. I am so charmed by his health, by his antics of pure joy, that I am filled with well-being, despite this terrible lung disorder I have been carrying around, nearly coughing my head off. If I don't leave the caboose except to sit in the sun for twenty minutes each day bundled up in quilts, I won't infect anyone and I can watch the daffodils push their pale green heads up through the surface and eventually turn yellow and open into an explosion of petals. Today has been a good days despite so many hours in bed.
Notes From The Rain Factory
Willits from Halloween 'til Easter is rain rain rain. So now I have
my Paris cafe in Willits, and almost enough rain. We're ten inches short of
last year and that worries me. But still, let us pull on our wellies and run
outside into the rain and kiss the clouds, let us lift our hands to the sky and
reach for things that have no name, but are thrilling just the same or familiar
things like chevrons of geese so soaked and cold that they are looking for a pond
to land in and hide in the bushes and pussywillows. Let us pull the clouds right down onto our heads and make hats of them until we
are ankle deep in puddles that water the vineyards and the little gardens all
over our town..Why, I'm wearing mine
right now...
Illness and Fear
10 February Sunday 2013
The Caboose on Catherine
Still feverish, hacking like a Welsh coal-miner, my canary sure doesn't sing these days... I'm missing church two weeks in a row, but at least I'm out of that dark night where watching the flames' shadows on the wall make faeries dance was my only form of mad entertainment. It was all so George Mac Donald that first scary week of 102, 103 temperature and the hallucinations of my childhood with all the connotations of the step-father and the upraised fist and the holes in the cheap apartment walls in the parlor and the rising flesh, so now, so many years later, I need to be able to let it go, go far away from that place into my relatively comfortable now.
And why I would be flooded with these memories while in such a weakened psychic state, I don't know, except that I have also allowed myself back into the True Myth of Destry James and Alabama, and those days come fraught with memories that are so deeply embroidered, almost like cattle-branding, that those picture poems beckon me.
The occupation of "Poet" is a lonely one and I think we prefer it that way, except for those after-a-public-reading when we gather in a cafe or a bar or some kind benefactor's living room and just talk our heads off all those ideas, dreams, plans and hopes we clutch to our hearts.
Having recently survived cancer, a bronchial cold ought not frighten me so badly, but that's what has happened. I see the possibility of relapses everywhere. I'm not used to being so vulnerable. I rather like the reputation of tough girl-poet, even as I am now a poet in my fifties, a poet with great heart I have been called. If I don't look at the calender or in the mirror, my tongue can wrap itself around good poetry and snarl, "get out of my ways" as the street person I used to be. But my heart is no longer in it. I am kind to single mothers and small animals. The Good Book says to visit orphans and widows. I try never to go empty-handed.
The Caboose on Catherine
Still feverish, hacking like a Welsh coal-miner, my canary sure doesn't sing these days... I'm missing church two weeks in a row, but at least I'm out of that dark night where watching the flames' shadows on the wall make faeries dance was my only form of mad entertainment. It was all so George Mac Donald that first scary week of 102, 103 temperature and the hallucinations of my childhood with all the connotations of the step-father and the upraised fist and the holes in the cheap apartment walls in the parlor and the rising flesh, so now, so many years later, I need to be able to let it go, go far away from that place into my relatively comfortable now.
And why I would be flooded with these memories while in such a weakened psychic state, I don't know, except that I have also allowed myself back into the True Myth of Destry James and Alabama, and those days come fraught with memories that are so deeply embroidered, almost like cattle-branding, that those picture poems beckon me.
The occupation of "Poet" is a lonely one and I think we prefer it that way, except for those after-a-public-reading when we gather in a cafe or a bar or some kind benefactor's living room and just talk our heads off all those ideas, dreams, plans and hopes we clutch to our hearts.
Having recently survived cancer, a bronchial cold ought not frighten me so badly, but that's what has happened. I see the possibility of relapses everywhere. I'm not used to being so vulnerable. I rather like the reputation of tough girl-poet, even as I am now a poet in my fifties, a poet with great heart I have been called. If I don't look at the calender or in the mirror, my tongue can wrap itself around good poetry and snarl, "get out of my ways" as the street person I used to be. But my heart is no longer in it. I am kind to single mothers and small animals. The Good Book says to visit orphans and widows. I try never to go empty-handed.
Monday, February 11, 2013
Grief Is Another Word For Looking At The Stars
Grief Is Another Word For Looking At The Stars** February 11, 2013
This place here is my old tree hollow dug out by the rain over many years until, I can curl up and close my eyes or look up at the stars and count the ones with tails. I've been depressed. No, I haven't. I've been so sad it's an ache in my side, like I've run too far, too fast. A dull ache. Certainly not that gnawing in the bowels as if a rat were in my gut and working his way out. It hasn't been a Christ-like pain; I don't credit myself with that. It's a very human sort of stitch in the side. It's the pain of loss. I know it's human because I can name it.
My best friend died. And I know it will lessen with each day; it already has, and thankfully my husband has been patient and caring. I'm old enough to carry a bit of wisdom in myself and know how to recognize the depths of what I feel. When I was younger of course it was more like a puppy's knowledge that something is wrong; but she doesn't know what. A puppy whose been weaned and given to a nice family, but never the less, knows something is wrong, is lacking. And that of course is the puppy's mother. This has that sort of feeling to it.
James was a painter and to begin with, a lousy poet. But I'm a retired poetry teacher and we wrangled backnforth with what sounds good, what is good and how to make what isn't good, better. And it didn't take much. He was so close to the center of what makes a poem a poem that I didn't have to much more than teach him how to tweak his own lines and line breaks and metaphors. We were colleagues.
This place here is my old tree hollow dug out by the rain over many years until, I can curl up and close my eyes or look up at the stars and count the ones with tails. I've been depressed. No, I haven't. I've been so sad it's an ache in my side, like I've run too far, too fast. A dull ache. Certainly not that gnawing in the bowels as if a rat were in my gut and working his way out. It hasn't been a Christ-like pain; I don't credit myself with that. It's a very human sort of stitch in the side. It's the pain of loss. I know it's human because I can name it.
My best friend died. And I know it will lessen with each day; it already has, and thankfully my husband has been patient and caring. I'm old enough to carry a bit of wisdom in myself and know how to recognize the depths of what I feel. When I was younger of course it was more like a puppy's knowledge that something is wrong; but she doesn't know what. A puppy whose been weaned and given to a nice family, but never the less, knows something is wrong, is lacking. And that of course is the puppy's mother. This has that sort of feeling to it.
James was a painter and to begin with, a lousy poet. But I'm a retired poetry teacher and we wrangled backnforth with what sounds good, what is good and how to make what isn't good, better. And it didn't take much. He was so close to the center of what makes a poem a poem that I didn't have to much more than teach him how to tweak his own lines and line breaks and metaphors. We were colleagues.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Destry James and Alabama
February 10, 2013, nearly 3 am. update 27 May 2017
The True Myth of Destry James & Alabama
Destry James and Alabama
Since I was teen and living in Orange County, I have been carrying around the poems of my first boyfriend, though I'm not sure it's even fair to have called him my boyfriend. We were both so shy. He named me Alabama after mention of that state in Neil Young songs and the fact that I wore woolen mens' suit vests over 'wife beater's t shirts (STELLA!), didn't shave my underarms or legs and was a hillbilly and Cherokee from the Carolinas originally by blood. I wore old lady dresses that buttoned up the front or 501 jeans with a girl scout Tshirt. My grandmother who had been terribly rich at one time had given me some beaded sweaters that I wore in the winter and felt lush in. But really, it was Des who made me feel lush and wet and full of the vocabulary of sex. The language of skin-poetry. Later, after graduation, he found me living through the manipulations of a terrible-now-deceased-uncle as an indentured nanny for a passel of children where I received no money, not even to buy tampon. Des lit up my life that day. He kissed me, asked me if he could hold my breasts and I trembled at his touch, oh god, I felt my skin's hair rise like Robert Grave always said it would under the influence of poetry, the Muse, and I melted into his chest. Why did I leave? Why didn't I ask more questions? phone number, address...Why didn't he offer it? I was determined to be a poet more than anything, but I wanted him with me. Pretty please, I asked God every night, sobbing into the bunk bed I shared with a five year old girl who wet the sheets.
I finally ran away to Berkeley and San Francisco with a box suitcase full of poems and a library copy from the fifties of Jack Kerouac's On The Road stolen from a public library... and Destry's poetry he had given me. I have held carefully onto that work like a vestal virgin carries a lamp of oil shining out into the darkness of a savage world. I stupidly married two times, producing two wonderful sons. When I went home, single, in my early twenties, for a visit, I looked through the yellow pages for Des's father's church; for Destry's name himself (his father was a preacher and I thought it might be a way to find him.) If Destry was married, I could at least give back his poetry. It hurts me that he might be yearning for this beautiful work. A conversation between Thomas a Beckett and King Henry and another long one of a journey up the side of a shiny mountain with his best pal Puppet. And a few others. They were of course in those days seeking Illumination I believe. Like I was. My education is all my own, though kind poets gave me books and names and books bought in used stores or found in the free boxes of Berkeley. I learned to read in open mics and stop trembling at the knees, the paper, the hand after six months or maybe a year. I shook like a child, like a leaf, like a wild glacier coming down a Finnish mountainside when I first began...
My love, Des, was a miracle of a poet. He also played a beauty of a guitar. He wanted me to sing harmony with him, But I had no voice at all to sing. I wasn't even allowed to sing in the church choir. Neither of us knew at that time my performimg voice would ripen into the throatiness of Peggy Lee, as poet Larry Beckett, one of America's finest once said to me.
I felt married to Destry at thirteen in the eighth grade when he would play with the ends of my hair from the desk behind me in Honors English, play with it so delicately I nearly came mid-class. We were both Believers in Jesus and so we were honorable unlike any other schoolkids I knew. He had a girlfriend (I prayed not to hate her or be jealous at least) and when I had a boyfriend, he was more than polite when I would have rather he stole me into his arms. We were together to a degree in junior high at Fremont Junior in Anaheim in the late sixties. We would stand at lunch or breaks in classes and talk Neil Young and Crazy Horse, our hero. We would talk about poetry, Christ, his friend Puppet, and stare at each other. He gave me an abalone shell I wear as a necklace. I used to just wear it on a string around my neck and then I found an old chain and two old silver engraved beads and I drilled a tiny hole in the shell because the one natural hole I had been using, finally broke through. I keep it now in a small gold box with our names written inside. Then I got paid for reading twenty minutes, and I went to a jewelry store and bought an honest-to-god sterling sliver chain that the abalone hole was big enough for the chain to go through.
When I was a little older we found ourselves in summer school together. I was always failing math, and one day he took my photograph at La Palma Park, Anaheim, which I still have. My son will put it up in this here blog for me someday he tells me. Oh, that summer of everyday in his presence! I remember one day in junior high, a clique-y cheerleader type made fun of him mending a hole in his black stovepipe 501 jeans with white thread and I bristled like the little wife I considered myself. I defended him, I believe I might have punched her if she didn't quit her teasing, but I believe she saw the glint in my eye...
We'd meet at bible studies on school nights at cheap apartments across the main street from me and I would I dream about him even though I am married to a good man who has saved my life so many times. (I have had a heart condition since I was ten years old.) I love Daniel and am faithful to him, but he understands. He had lost a companion of twenty years who was afraid of doctors and so died of ovarian cancer perhaps six month before we met. He once told me that anyone with the cool name of Destry James deserved to be loved by one of America's best poets. My dear husband thinks that well of me and I am filled with gratitude.
I have nearly died so many times that my only real goals are to make sure Destry gets his papers back before I do die. If I am lucky to have someday done that and had more than four chapbooks published and a number of CDs with musicians behind my words, I will feel my life is complete. Also an almost 200 page book of thirty stories about an eleven year old girl named Redbud Jane who lived in a trailerpark. I used up a lot of years raising two fine boys, raising them the way my mother never never seemed to have had time to raise us. Long chapter books at night, art projects on raining days. We had a thicket behind the Victorian and we played Elf Quest back there, costumes made of bits of fur and leather; beads and colorful string, exotic cloth from foreign counties via the thrift store of a hippie county, Mendocino.
When the ability to recognize a soul mate comes over one like a rush of waterfalls or silent tears, I believe it's a terrible tragedy to ignore those feelings. That's why I've never forgotten Destry James nor turned away after the poetry reading in Gualala when Daniel said he wanted to talk about my poems. I would have missed out on all these years of companionship. We be going on thirty years pert'near.
The True Myth of Destry James & Alabama
Destry James and Alabama
Since I was teen and living in Orange County, I have been carrying around the poems of my first boyfriend, though I'm not sure it's even fair to have called him my boyfriend. We were both so shy. He named me Alabama after mention of that state in Neil Young songs and the fact that I wore woolen mens' suit vests over 'wife beater's t shirts (STELLA!), didn't shave my underarms or legs and was a hillbilly and Cherokee from the Carolinas originally by blood. I wore old lady dresses that buttoned up the front or 501 jeans with a girl scout Tshirt. My grandmother who had been terribly rich at one time had given me some beaded sweaters that I wore in the winter and felt lush in. But really, it was Des who made me feel lush and wet and full of the vocabulary of sex. The language of skin-poetry. Later, after graduation, he found me living through the manipulations of a terrible-now-deceased-uncle as an indentured nanny for a passel of children where I received no money, not even to buy tampon. Des lit up my life that day. He kissed me, asked me if he could hold my breasts and I trembled at his touch, oh god, I felt my skin's hair rise like Robert Grave always said it would under the influence of poetry, the Muse, and I melted into his chest. Why did I leave? Why didn't I ask more questions? phone number, address...Why didn't he offer it? I was determined to be a poet more than anything, but I wanted him with me. Pretty please, I asked God every night, sobbing into the bunk bed I shared with a five year old girl who wet the sheets.
I finally ran away to Berkeley and San Francisco with a box suitcase full of poems and a library copy from the fifties of Jack Kerouac's On The Road stolen from a public library... and Destry's poetry he had given me. I have held carefully onto that work like a vestal virgin carries a lamp of oil shining out into the darkness of a savage world. I stupidly married two times, producing two wonderful sons. When I went home, single, in my early twenties, for a visit, I looked through the yellow pages for Des's father's church; for Destry's name himself (his father was a preacher and I thought it might be a way to find him.) If Destry was married, I could at least give back his poetry. It hurts me that he might be yearning for this beautiful work. A conversation between Thomas a Beckett and King Henry and another long one of a journey up the side of a shiny mountain with his best pal Puppet. And a few others. They were of course in those days seeking Illumination I believe. Like I was. My education is all my own, though kind poets gave me books and names and books bought in used stores or found in the free boxes of Berkeley. I learned to read in open mics and stop trembling at the knees, the paper, the hand after six months or maybe a year. I shook like a child, like a leaf, like a wild glacier coming down a Finnish mountainside when I first began...
My love, Des, was a miracle of a poet. He also played a beauty of a guitar. He wanted me to sing harmony with him, But I had no voice at all to sing. I wasn't even allowed to sing in the church choir. Neither of us knew at that time my performimg voice would ripen into the throatiness of Peggy Lee, as poet Larry Beckett, one of America's finest once said to me.
I felt married to Destry at thirteen in the eighth grade when he would play with the ends of my hair from the desk behind me in Honors English, play with it so delicately I nearly came mid-class. We were both Believers in Jesus and so we were honorable unlike any other schoolkids I knew. He had a girlfriend (I prayed not to hate her or be jealous at least) and when I had a boyfriend, he was more than polite when I would have rather he stole me into his arms. We were together to a degree in junior high at Fremont Junior in Anaheim in the late sixties. We would stand at lunch or breaks in classes and talk Neil Young and Crazy Horse, our hero. We would talk about poetry, Christ, his friend Puppet, and stare at each other. He gave me an abalone shell I wear as a necklace. I used to just wear it on a string around my neck and then I found an old chain and two old silver engraved beads and I drilled a tiny hole in the shell because the one natural hole I had been using, finally broke through. I keep it now in a small gold box with our names written inside. Then I got paid for reading twenty minutes, and I went to a jewelry store and bought an honest-to-god sterling sliver chain that the abalone hole was big enough for the chain to go through.
When I was a little older we found ourselves in summer school together. I was always failing math, and one day he took my photograph at La Palma Park, Anaheim, which I still have. My son will put it up in this here blog for me someday he tells me. Oh, that summer of everyday in his presence! I remember one day in junior high, a clique-y cheerleader type made fun of him mending a hole in his black stovepipe 501 jeans with white thread and I bristled like the little wife I considered myself. I defended him, I believe I might have punched her if she didn't quit her teasing, but I believe she saw the glint in my eye...
We'd meet at bible studies on school nights at cheap apartments across the main street from me and I would I dream about him even though I am married to a good man who has saved my life so many times. (I have had a heart condition since I was ten years old.) I love Daniel and am faithful to him, but he understands. He had lost a companion of twenty years who was afraid of doctors and so died of ovarian cancer perhaps six month before we met. He once told me that anyone with the cool name of Destry James deserved to be loved by one of America's best poets. My dear husband thinks that well of me and I am filled with gratitude.
I have nearly died so many times that my only real goals are to make sure Destry gets his papers back before I do die. If I am lucky to have someday done that and had more than four chapbooks published and a number of CDs with musicians behind my words, I will feel my life is complete. Also an almost 200 page book of thirty stories about an eleven year old girl named Redbud Jane who lived in a trailerpark. I used up a lot of years raising two fine boys, raising them the way my mother never never seemed to have had time to raise us. Long chapter books at night, art projects on raining days. We had a thicket behind the Victorian and we played Elf Quest back there, costumes made of bits of fur and leather; beads and colorful string, exotic cloth from foreign counties via the thrift store of a hippie county, Mendocino.
When the ability to recognize a soul mate comes over one like a rush of waterfalls or silent tears, I believe it's a terrible tragedy to ignore those feelings. That's why I've never forgotten Destry James nor turned away after the poetry reading in Gualala when Daniel said he wanted to talk about my poems. I would have missed out on all these years of companionship. We be going on thirty years pert'near.
Friday, September 7, 2012
the fingers type into tomorrow
The Fingers Type Into Tomorrow
Sometimes it just hits me upside the head so hard I am brought to my knees. The Death of James.
I don't know what to do when I'm blind-sided by grief that quick, that...without warning except that once my knees hit the rug, the hard wood floor, the garden walkway, the lane onside the house under a copse of Flowering May hanging down, drooping like tears, like a great gush of tears over the path until the damp earth is mud again even though it, the planet of this region, had almost stopped raining a week ago and the neighborhood had begun drying out, just enough to make weed pulling easy.
Once my knees hit the earth, it is nothing to allow the gravity of grief to pull my chest into the damp wet of the mud where I am held up only by the points of my elbows and then, my elbows slip and I am down, face into the clean mud where I cry and cry and cry. I can't help it. It is the way of grief, it is the way of loss and there is no map to guide me. I am hit by the grief, I fall, I am in the mud, I cry. It's that simple, it's that agonizing.
And there's the sorrow of my ex-husband, the father of my oldest son. It is a more subtle kind of remembering good little moments of living in the two room Depression cabin and all its rube-goldberg-put-togetherness. It was filthy when I moved in alone and I cleaned and scrubbed and painted and almost wished I could live alone that he wouldn't come up from Berkeley, that he would get lost, because the schizophrenic behavior was so difficult to live with until I discovered a plan of healing that worked until his brother the other schizophrenic came up with the oz of coke and destroyed all our hard work, all of John's newly acquired sanity, that even our doctor said was clear and pure as a bell. Him, I have intimate from the Other Side conversations with that are both frustrating and intimate in their shyness. You see, I have come to know more than him now. I am older than him now. I was a teen and then early twenties wife and then I had to take the baby and run and he remained still, always nine years older than I. But with his death, he stopped and I grew. I know it hasn't been long enough to acquire years of growth toward I am older than he is now, but there is a certain amount of he-has-stopped-on-the-planet and I keep moving on in my growth, aging and perhaps one day I shall be older, wiser than him. When we divorced, he was thirty-one and I was twenty-two and now I am fifty four, soon to be fifty five in late June and he will always be sixty. I wish I had gone over to his studio flat and brought a chicken, a book, a bouquet of flowers during those last almost twenty years. He couldn't couldn't hurt me psychically any more and I don't believe he would have hurt me physically any more. He was tired. He was ready, in many ways to leave the planet I am sure. His pain was beyond redemption, and yet, I read and I understand that with Y'shua, there is always redemption, if he had only known how. His father had poisoned his mind so greatly is why I believe there was the feeling of no redemption for him.
All this grief. I am so tired. Is this the Winter of my Discontent? Will joy come in the morning?
I have spent the last three days sleeping most of the day and most of the evenings, waking in the middle of the slow cold burn toward dawn where I ache with the chill as I sit at my old beautiful desk and write in my diary, or this electronic diary that it appears only one person reads and that grieves me. I had to let my space.com go, oh, it's still there, but it was so bound up with James, a damn fine friend and no lover, but not needed, our words and poems shared were far and away enough to make us lover of a kind. But it was that seeing his old posts and poems after he hit the carpet of heart attack or stroke, no one knew, that made me have to come here to a foreign land Blogspot, so the pain of loss and separation would not burn the skin from my fingertips. Solace comes when I sit and talk about him to my now-husband, his genius, kindness, his awfulness, but one ought not expect one's husband to keep alive the memory of another man. And it appears only one person deciphers the scribblings of the scarab's feet across the sand that blow with the wind and disappear in this pathetic place called Diary of a Magpie Woman.
This studio was beautifully laid out , little boxes and drawers and tiny shelves in Chinese cabinets, floor to ceiling shelves with labels on the front and through the maelstrom of an artshow after James' death and the whirlwind of my desperate anger and grief, it is a terrible mess now and i don't have the strength nor the money to hire someone to help me re-organize it. It's these moments that fill me with madness. I am crazed by what if I died in my sleep, or like James, fell to the rug with the heart pain of the world. I made my will years ago based on an immaculate studio, which no longer exists. How could Dan find the little suchnsuch to give to sonso in this mess of all messes. And as I get ready for another art show first week in June , (or is it the second?), I plunder the mess and realize I am out of titanium white acrylic paint. When James first died, his daughter asked me what I would like to remember him by and I replied, a good paint brush and a tube of cadium red because that red is so expensive and I just can't afford it, little knowing I was out of white because of the mess. There is a part of me which would like to give away all art materials and stick only to poetry, but unfortunately, art makes more money than poetry and we are now even out of short grain brown rice.
Sometimes it just hits me upside the head so hard I am brought to my knees. The Death of James.
I don't know what to do when I'm blind-sided by grief that quick, that...without warning except that once my knees hit the rug, the hard wood floor, the garden walkway, the lane onside the house under a copse of Flowering May hanging down, drooping like tears, like a great gush of tears over the path until the damp earth is mud again even though it, the planet of this region, had almost stopped raining a week ago and the neighborhood had begun drying out, just enough to make weed pulling easy.
Once my knees hit the earth, it is nothing to allow the gravity of grief to pull my chest into the damp wet of the mud where I am held up only by the points of my elbows and then, my elbows slip and I am down, face into the clean mud where I cry and cry and cry. I can't help it. It is the way of grief, it is the way of loss and there is no map to guide me. I am hit by the grief, I fall, I am in the mud, I cry. It's that simple, it's that agonizing.
And there's the sorrow of my ex-husband, the father of my oldest son. It is a more subtle kind of remembering good little moments of living in the two room Depression cabin and all its rube-goldberg-put-togetherness. It was filthy when I moved in alone and I cleaned and scrubbed and painted and almost wished I could live alone that he wouldn't come up from Berkeley, that he would get lost, because the schizophrenic behavior was so difficult to live with until I discovered a plan of healing that worked until his brother the other schizophrenic came up with the oz of coke and destroyed all our hard work, all of John's newly acquired sanity, that even our doctor said was clear and pure as a bell. Him, I have intimate from the Other Side conversations with that are both frustrating and intimate in their shyness. You see, I have come to know more than him now. I am older than him now. I was a teen and then early twenties wife and then I had to take the baby and run and he remained still, always nine years older than I. But with his death, he stopped and I grew. I know it hasn't been long enough to acquire years of growth toward I am older than he is now, but there is a certain amount of he-has-stopped-on-the-planet and I keep moving on in my growth, aging and perhaps one day I shall be older, wiser than him. When we divorced, he was thirty-one and I was twenty-two and now I am fifty four, soon to be fifty five in late June and he will always be sixty. I wish I had gone over to his studio flat and brought a chicken, a book, a bouquet of flowers during those last almost twenty years. He couldn't couldn't hurt me psychically any more and I don't believe he would have hurt me physically any more. He was tired. He was ready, in many ways to leave the planet I am sure. His pain was beyond redemption, and yet, I read and I understand that with Y'shua, there is always redemption, if he had only known how. His father had poisoned his mind so greatly is why I believe there was the feeling of no redemption for him.
All this grief. I am so tired. Is this the Winter of my Discontent? Will joy come in the morning?
I have spent the last three days sleeping most of the day and most of the evenings, waking in the middle of the slow cold burn toward dawn where I ache with the chill as I sit at my old beautiful desk and write in my diary, or this electronic diary that it appears only one person reads and that grieves me. I had to let my space.com go, oh, it's still there, but it was so bound up with James, a damn fine friend and no lover, but not needed, our words and poems shared were far and away enough to make us lover of a kind. But it was that seeing his old posts and poems after he hit the carpet of heart attack or stroke, no one knew, that made me have to come here to a foreign land Blogspot, so the pain of loss and separation would not burn the skin from my fingertips. Solace comes when I sit and talk about him to my now-husband, his genius, kindness, his awfulness, but one ought not expect one's husband to keep alive the memory of another man. And it appears only one person deciphers the scribblings of the scarab's feet across the sand that blow with the wind and disappear in this pathetic place called Diary of a Magpie Woman.
This studio was beautifully laid out , little boxes and drawers and tiny shelves in Chinese cabinets, floor to ceiling shelves with labels on the front and through the maelstrom of an artshow after James' death and the whirlwind of my desperate anger and grief, it is a terrible mess now and i don't have the strength nor the money to hire someone to help me re-organize it. It's these moments that fill me with madness. I am crazed by what if I died in my sleep, or like James, fell to the rug with the heart pain of the world. I made my will years ago based on an immaculate studio, which no longer exists. How could Dan find the little suchnsuch to give to sonso in this mess of all messes. And as I get ready for another art show first week in June , (or is it the second?), I plunder the mess and realize I am out of titanium white acrylic paint. When James first died, his daughter asked me what I would like to remember him by and I replied, a good paint brush and a tube of cadium red because that red is so expensive and I just can't afford it, little knowing I was out of white because of the mess. There is a part of me which would like to give away all art materials and stick only to poetry, but unfortunately, art makes more money than poetry and we are now even out of short grain brown rice.
The Mourning Doves
There are two ring-necked doves in the Cypress tree in the back garden. They are mad with sex. Soon they will start building a nest when the female feels her uterus fill with eggs. I am not sure they will stay though, because the neighborhood cats are relentless in their pursuit. This twilight I heard the cry of a bird in the holly underbrush. I couldn't see anything in the gloaming. But I have a feeling something is dead or injured. In that hour of twilight, I saw in the back garden, one robin on the fence, one unknown small brown bird with a speckled chest in the bird bath and the doves.
Sometimes the culprit is my cat and I hate him for awhile. And in a way, it all comes back to mankind. You can say, "But you feed them well" and I can reply, "yes, I do..." even though the cat lived here when we moved in and after seeing mouse scut in the silverware drawer, I understand why the people before us had a cat. Still, I love birds and hate the death element. But the cat food sold in America is by and large made in China and just plain bad for the cats my vet tells. He tells me, in particular, "Don't feed them the fish flavors." And so I don't. But we are not well-off and do our best to give him good food without poisoning him. None of the cat foods seem to be healthy for cat. I have given him chicken's livers cooked in butter. No better luck. And when he makes a kill, he doesn't always finish it, I suppose because he is used to...I don't know what. Lately he eats the new flavor of dry cat food my son brought over when we were out of any.
It is the beauty of the doves that make me cry when I hear the small cry and the heavy silence. I can find no answer. I told my husband, when this cat dies, I want no more cats. No more "fall in love with the fur against my cheek in the night and the little paws pushing against the heat of my belly in delight." I am weary with grief. Too many men, too many cats...
Sometimes the culprit is my cat and I hate him for awhile. And in a way, it all comes back to mankind. You can say, "But you feed them well" and I can reply, "yes, I do..." even though the cat lived here when we moved in and after seeing mouse scut in the silverware drawer, I understand why the people before us had a cat. Still, I love birds and hate the death element. But the cat food sold in America is by and large made in China and just plain bad for the cats my vet tells. He tells me, in particular, "Don't feed them the fish flavors." And so I don't. But we are not well-off and do our best to give him good food without poisoning him. None of the cat foods seem to be healthy for cat. I have given him chicken's livers cooked in butter. No better luck. And when he makes a kill, he doesn't always finish it, I suppose because he is used to...I don't know what. Lately he eats the new flavor of dry cat food my son brought over when we were out of any.
It is the beauty of the doves that make me cry when I hear the small cry and the heavy silence. I can find no answer. I told my husband, when this cat dies, I want no more cats. No more "fall in love with the fur against my cheek in the night and the little paws pushing against the heat of my belly in delight." I am weary with grief. Too many men, too many cats...
My Lady & The Morning; My Lady Becomes The Dawn And Then Rises
My body and mind are completely upsidedown. I sleep all day, or until between 4 pm and 5 pm and then I'm awake all night until 5am when I take my heart meds, some pain meds and go to bed. Starting at 4 or 5pm, I get up, wash my face, comb my hair, put on fresh clothes or change from pajamas to clothes and I start cleaning after several cups of coffee and sometimes an english muffin.
I've tried getting in bed early and sleeping, but I just lie there, bored, worried about disturbing my husband...Like now, it's 11:01 pm and I'm on my side of the bed with my MacLap and I've got my roses jammies on, but right below the side of the bed, are my grey slippers Danny bought me because he knows if I hear the cat, I will go and let him in or let him out and I have a thing about wet sox or even worse, crunching snails with bare feet or plain sox. I hate the creepy feeling on my skin of damp or wet sox. I don't know why, but it feels dirty, especially if it involves aforementioned snails. I could be working on Donna's graphic novel , but I'm still searching for a theme. I know she wants Pre-Raphaelite and that's a go for me, but I need a dialogue. I always have to have a dialogue with self when I make my books. I have researched the time period and it feels medieval, not that Rossetti and Waterhouse were painting in the 8th to 15th century, but their themes were depicting those people, those places and I need to stay true to my text.
Right now I am infatuated with the architecture of the those times: the castle keeps, the flying buttresses, the arrow slots, the roofs and gargoyles and even more important: the very shape of Woman as an architectural form of beauty that I can fit into the castle. Her hips as portals, her collar bone as the arch the knights ride through... Billowing in the wind are the banners and regalia that She gave him at the onset of the journey and now is battered, weather-worn, frayed, while his heraldry once filled with brave bright colors and his armor glistened like the magical, silver salmon in the rivers. She lifted his foot into the stirrup and handed him the cup of wine that would send him on the journey to Far Away and Far to Go Land in search of damosels needing rescuing, old kings replaced to their rightful throne, young princes returned to their kingdoms where they will grow up and one day rule, and eventually when all the stars are aligned properly as a tarot cross and only then, can he kneel down in front of his Lady, lift her tattered token given at the beginning of the Journey and now, mud-stained and wind-worn, kiss her, enter her, and if she is new to court, if she has been convent-educated and kitchen-taught, when he does enter her, she will bleed like the virgin she is. Her skin will stain like a fresh cut pomegranate and she will wonder what it all means.
These concepts will slowly enter her mind the way a water lillie opens in the sun-warmed pond and she will let her imagination turn into a faery tale. And it will only be the true beginning of Once-Upon-a-Time and they will live happily ever after.
That's the story I want to tell for Donna's book. Her husband is my dentist and they worked out a trade that I would make one of my collage books in exchange for thousands of dollars of work on my teeth. This book is just full of jewels and glitter and lace and of course, The Story.
I've tried getting in bed early and sleeping, but I just lie there, bored, worried about disturbing my husband...Like now, it's 11:01 pm and I'm on my side of the bed with my MacLap and I've got my roses jammies on, but right below the side of the bed, are my grey slippers Danny bought me because he knows if I hear the cat, I will go and let him in or let him out and I have a thing about wet sox or even worse, crunching snails with bare feet or plain sox. I hate the creepy feeling on my skin of damp or wet sox. I don't know why, but it feels dirty, especially if it involves aforementioned snails. I could be working on Donna's graphic novel , but I'm still searching for a theme. I know she wants Pre-Raphaelite and that's a go for me, but I need a dialogue. I always have to have a dialogue with self when I make my books. I have researched the time period and it feels medieval, not that Rossetti and Waterhouse were painting in the 8th to 15th century, but their themes were depicting those people, those places and I need to stay true to my text.
Right now I am infatuated with the architecture of the those times: the castle keeps, the flying buttresses, the arrow slots, the roofs and gargoyles and even more important: the very shape of Woman as an architectural form of beauty that I can fit into the castle. Her hips as portals, her collar bone as the arch the knights ride through... Billowing in the wind are the banners and regalia that She gave him at the onset of the journey and now is battered, weather-worn, frayed, while his heraldry once filled with brave bright colors and his armor glistened like the magical, silver salmon in the rivers. She lifted his foot into the stirrup and handed him the cup of wine that would send him on the journey to Far Away and Far to Go Land in search of damosels needing rescuing, old kings replaced to their rightful throne, young princes returned to their kingdoms where they will grow up and one day rule, and eventually when all the stars are aligned properly as a tarot cross and only then, can he kneel down in front of his Lady, lift her tattered token given at the beginning of the Journey and now, mud-stained and wind-worn, kiss her, enter her, and if she is new to court, if she has been convent-educated and kitchen-taught, when he does enter her, she will bleed like the virgin she is. Her skin will stain like a fresh cut pomegranate and she will wonder what it all means.
These concepts will slowly enter her mind the way a water lillie opens in the sun-warmed pond and she will let her imagination turn into a faery tale. And it will only be the true beginning of Once-Upon-a-Time and they will live happily ever after.
That's the story I want to tell for Donna's book. Her husband is my dentist and they worked out a trade that I would make one of my collage books in exchange for thousands of dollars of work on my teeth. This book is just full of jewels and glitter and lace and of course, The Story.
THE PERMANANCY OF LOVE
For months I've been designing a new tattoo, that my sons want to help pay for for my birthday. I just recently saw my son's girlfriend's latest of some Japanese artist sparrows and it gave me a great idea. I had planned on having a magpie tattooed on my chest where my breast used to be (see post Ink long time dried) but that's only a part of myself and kind of vain anyway. What I came up yesterday is in my mind, is not mine, but the Lord's. I want to incorporate those sparrows with some tiger lillies I also have pictures of and let them swirl over the skin with the 'wind' being shown/blown in the form of either Hebrew or Aramaic lettering of the part in the New Testament about how the lillies never toil nor spin and the sparrows do not fall, but are caught by God. I've been looking for a half an hour for the right text, but I have been so involved lately in the Sermon on the Mount, that I have forgotten where that part is and darn it, but that's embarrassing. I think this is a good ministry, because I have 16 tattoos and people always stop and ask me about them. This time, when I am asked, I can tell them the text in English and explain it and that's opening a door to talking about God and His glorious creation, the planet earth and how we should take care of it. We are the stewards of the planet. Just waiting til it's time to go home to Heaven, a place of course I can't explain or describe to anyone, but to be able to tell people about Christ's life, well, that is of interest to me. I remember dreaming of walking behind the Twelve and Y'shua in serial dreams when I was eleven and when the dreams stopped, I cried and cried.
The idea to have a "way in", I do not want to be one of those cracked people who get in people's faces and say, "Do you know the Lord?" Mainly because people turn and run in the opposite direction. But to interest them in a manner that is excessable today in today's language would give me the opportunity to open up the Living Word and share it with strangers as I have never had the courage before. I think I just need a "hook", a way in to speak to curious people. I know there are plenty of people who DO NOT want to hear about God in any shape or form and I have to let them go until maybe someone else can reach out, but I am sure there are some who are curious if they only knew how to listen to what is said. There must be someone I can interest in what makes me so content and so happy. Both sides make a difference.
And speaking of happy, the Western Flycatchers have found the water fountain. Before it was just one and the rufous-sided towhees, but now there are jays, flycatchers, and towhees. I am hoping for flickers like last year and robins. He was so miraculous in His creations; so in the giving of His son when we just wouldn't listen to His love, he was showing how deep and abiding His love is for us.
The idea to have a "way in", I do not want to be one of those cracked people who get in people's faces and say, "Do you know the Lord?" Mainly because people turn and run in the opposite direction. But to interest them in a manner that is excessable today in today's language would give me the opportunity to open up the Living Word and share it with strangers as I have never had the courage before. I think I just need a "hook", a way in to speak to curious people. I know there are plenty of people who DO NOT want to hear about God in any shape or form and I have to let them go until maybe someone else can reach out, but I am sure there are some who are curious if they only knew how to listen to what is said. There must be someone I can interest in what makes me so content and so happy. Both sides make a difference.
And speaking of happy, the Western Flycatchers have found the water fountain. Before it was just one and the rufous-sided towhees, but now there are jays, flycatchers, and towhees. I am hoping for flickers like last year and robins. He was so miraculous in His creations; so in the giving of His son when we just wouldn't listen to His love, he was showing how deep and abiding His love is for us.
Gardening the Wrong Way with my Body
I couldn't sleep last night and so around three a.m. I found myself outside in one of the herbaceous borders pruning, watering, raking up my messes as I went along, grateful that our bit of land is set away from the rest of the neighbors, otherwise I would be thought thoroughly mad as I did my chores, delicately sniffing the clean cool air and just plain enjoying myself. Oh, I knew I would pay for it in the morning, which meant, whenever I woke up, but it felt worth it because of the cleanliness.Whenever I woke up, I knew I would be refreshed and happy. (I hadn't counted on the sore cramping muscles if I stayed in one place for too long, which is exactly what I did.) So all day I've had to practice getting up and down and generally moving in new and practical positions. And I'm still not comfortable, just sitting here typing. It' s a trick learning how to move in ways which will make it easy to move around in.
So I take a hot shower when my muscles cramp up and remind myself that I'm the mother; I'm supposed to think wisely first before moving around. My right arm's nerves are not as strong as the whole of me due to the cancer and the mastectomy, but each day I get better and the columbine and foxgloves went to seed and now I have a lot of plants where before were just a few I cherished. Soon, the garden will be something new, just like me...
So I take a hot shower when my muscles cramp up and remind myself that I'm the mother; I'm supposed to think wisely first before moving around. My right arm's nerves are not as strong as the whole of me due to the cancer and the mastectomy, but each day I get better and the columbine and foxgloves went to seed and now I have a lot of plants where before were just a few I cherished. Soon, the garden will be something new, just like me...
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