The Secret Language of Diaries

It seems I've spent the beginning of this year mostly in bed, but I've put it to good use, albiet slowly.Our crafty green poet has been a huge help and she doesn't even know it. Lying in bed day after day and almost but not quite starting to feel sorry for myself, I read her post about journal re-vitalizing and it reminded me of a 'chore' I love to do. So I , with some help, put some things like glue, scissors, needle and thread and pans of watercolor and a pot of glitter called twig which is an amazing color between brown and gray with a smidgeon of green in it, and three small photographs from an old magazine, took an ordinary, plain covered journal and made a beautiful, if not simple diary. Sometimes i get carried away and make symphonies of them, but this felt just right. But then it took three days to begin writing in it, because I was worn out. cry babby! I am presently making a three-D birthday card for my eldest son's god-father with a very surreal theme, it's unusual and unlike anything I've done before. I worry I might have taken on more than I planned. But I am enjoying it immensely. {warning: my 'j' button often doesn't work, so if you see a word like ust, figure it's just.} I found this fabulous painting of a young girl watering from a watering can, cups of tea that are sitting on tall stalks. She's very delicate and Richard does drink a great deal of tea. I long to return to 'delicate'.

All at once, the firetrucks are going off, hence the dogs are following suit, so it sounds like a rabbit is loose somewhere here. Everyone is miserable, but i'm sure, mostly the people whose house is on fire.

When I was a teen and young at that, my mother always looked at my things under the bed. My diaries, my letters from Viet Nam, my poems. I always wished I could write in the French she made me take, (i was coming along nicely in Spanish, but it was too plebian for her and she insisted I change over), because then she wouldn't have been able to read the poems, the diary entries. After awhile, I stopped keeping a diary and kept my lousy poems with me. When I left home and found myself in delicious Berkeley of the oh so cool and beautiful weather, I began again until I was married to my sons' father, who also was a snooper. I kept a 'safe' journal in those years. Now I can write anything I want and my husband of fifteen years wouldn't dream of looking. It's so pleasant to relax. I love , absolutely love the concept "to relax".

Later:
I went to the cardiologist's office yesterday. What an arduous trip. But he said I was doing well and that I looked well, (even though the vanity of me hates that the, he called them steroids,has put some weight on me.) My face still looks nice I guess. It's nice when a doctor compliments one. I forgot to tell him that the day before my heart was absolutely haywire. I think he might have run my pacemaker and seen that. Well, it will show up the next time he runs a strip and sees the flips and trapeze swinging my heart beat was doing.I have spent enough time on me, i think i shall move on...

Two Women Sharing a War: Why Do We Have To Still Keep On Doing This?

For the last several months, I have been corresponding with a woman in North Africa who speaks Turkish, French, Spanish and lastly, the kind of English, she, I suspect, does not dream in. I’ve been told, if you don’t dream in a language, you don’t know it well enough to grasp the intellectual overtones, and under currents and I have found this to be true for my own self. I have dreamt in French, and alas, not understood a single word I listened to in the dream. Almost comic relief, I know. So we are almost, not quite, but almost able to discuss the political issues I know we are both going through. She has exhausted my French, my Turkish is limited to two poets, and so we are stuck with a kind of English that inquires daily about each other. As time goes on, I see we ARE learning to talk deeper and deeper to each other and that feels really good. We both are furious about the way the Palestinians are being treated and I'm married to a Jew and consider myself both Christian and Jewish, practicing the traditions that Y'shua grew up with. And she is a Muslim. The deeper we delve into the outrage and grief we both feel, I can tell the closer we are coming into friendship. I can tell from just the little we have discussed, that this is a anger we both share. She is just as frustrated as I am.

There were a few weeks there when we couldn’t communicate at all, and it wasn’t until this late night that a message came through in French which I often find myself sending on to a friend in Montreal for a translation with some depth, but this one, I could, after a few re-readings, get the gist of, as we say here in America. There is often no explanation for her silences, or at least no explanations she can write down for me. And I worry that much more about them.

But here are two women who long to sit at a small café table on the patio of a North African coffeehouse drinking good thick coffee and discussing our daily lives, our dreams, our inability to reach through that door of language and touch each others’ hearts with our concern.

With men and boys, they can ‘tough it out’, ‘suck it up’ as they say these days, while we women and girls are left stoic, but uneasy inside, fretting about the fact that America has become a third world country, that there are people, not just women anymore, or for the most part, who are tortured, starved, cold, wearing rags and needing medical attention, because of men, whether they be soldiers or not. It is mostly men in congress and they are not voting with humanity in mind it feels to me. It seems to me to be the money game. And my men friends: some of them know exactly what I’m talking about and don’t think I have this hidden agenda of men-hating and others are so impatient with me and ask me when I’m going to get out of the Sixties and stop fighting all the time. I tell them if they think striving every single day for communication between the sexes where at the end of a conversation, there are big smiles and long hugs is fighting, well, I don’t plan on ever stopping. Because I believe in working it through to the bittersweet end. I long for those moments, hours, days and years, oh god yes, give me the years, where men and woman can fight bigotry, poverty, disease and shameful acts of torture on one human being from another until finally these acts are disappeared completely.
My friend is rabid about the Palestinians not having enough to eat or items to stay dry or warm with, and I am that way with my small town and other small towns in American and inner city ghettos, only because I can’t reach out any further than that. The Europeans and Mid-Easterns have an easier job of helping each other in some instances I’ve noticed, because they live so much closer to each other. I saw that when I was reading political poetry in Europe. I could skip out of one coffeehouse and pass through a bar to actually get on a train I wanted to and therefore into another country for another reading if I were willing to travel so light , the heaviest item in my medium-sized backpack would be a seven pound maclap as I call my snow leopard. (We haven’t known each other long enough to introduce each other by name and of course that’s a girl thing to do. My last laptop was named after Don Quixote’s boney horse and when she blew up, I mourned deeply, grateful the week before I had used those little magic sticks to save the tirades and love poems to a nation.) Of course it was a woman who lent me this lovely thin MacBookPro, knowing full well I was going to “shake the dust from my feet, cuz the times, they are a-changin’ and move on, always a column ahead written by someone else about what’s happening in YR neighborhood…

That’s what my friend in North Africa and I do for each other and for the world we hope. We write essays and articles about the outrages we see in other places or in our backyards and how can we change them, and when we see each other getting dark and despondent, we send each other little gifts like Patti Smith singing “Power to the People”, and enclosing a vid of her just reading the words so my friend can understand them better. And she sends me Jacques Brel who I love, shouting out against his war, and it makes us both feel better. We are the cornerstone for each other sometimes without a syllable of language between us. The one or two consonants that get by our ignorance, become our machine guns of poetry and the warmth of our belief in each other, becomes a strong piece of cloth that can be used to do so many things with from drying our asses after bathing, tearing strips for binding wounds, strips for sewing on the rip in jeans, for tying back a braid of hair because the metal on a hair tie can sometimes glisten like a compass to the enemy about our whereabouts. Make no mistake: we use words like bullets. Music is our gun. Poetry is our soup kitchen.

A Poem I found While Cleaning Out a Large Cardboard Box

And God, the mast of my ship:
tall, thick, true, leads me straight
on, by eye, to the North Star,
His Son by mouth, the allelujah
of starboard! And by dream,
pulling rope hand over hand
in a measurement of heaven,
I reach into my pocket of infinity
and pull out an anchor.

c. 2009 Robin Rule
*************************
Juliet, I realize this might not be yr spiritual path , but I want to ask you and anyone else, a question from a purely literary position: After looking at the poem that I wrote dec 2, 2007, I want to change it to "...I reach into my pocket of infinity..." because my relationship with the Holy Ghost is forever (since I was eight), but is
"I reach into a pocket of infinity and pull out an anchor..." (I left it "an", so you could see how I was originally thinking/feeling when I wrote this poem, but I am an intense editor, re-drafter and like to know in the end, that the poem is as perfect as i can make it. What say you, matey?

juliet's purple poem

dear juliet, i didn't know where to put a comment, but nevertheless, i felt the poem deserved its own blog. You made it come alive. when i saw the assignment, i groaned. I didn't think it could be done without being silly, but you even through in the ecology there which i'm a sucker for. bravo!Robin

How Birds Are Made When God Is Busy

How bright the gates look from the great inside;
how tall from out beyond the world.
We children play, then sleep
and in our sleep, we dream.
We sew the feathers real birds leave behind
to the shoulders of our shirts;
rub mud into our glorious faces;
and sing the sun hello.
We tell each other all our dreams
and comfort those who’d none.
This is how birds make themselves,
if they haven’t come from eggs.

All That White Stuff

It's snowing for the first time this year! Now that I live almost in town, snow has returned to romance. When living in the cabin a half an hour from town down and through a muddy pot-hole-y road all slippery and slide-y, I am so glad to be loving snow again as when I first moved to my String Creek cabin when I was a teen. At first, it was frightening, being all alone if I had to do something outside, because I knew if I slipped and fell and broke something, I could easily be snowed over and smothered with a white blanket.
Sitting next to the fire with a hot cup of tea, reading and even watching the snow fall from a window was far sweeter; but firewood had to be brought in and when I raised one goat for milk, she had to be fed and brought in, so these chores had to be started the moment I saw the first flurry of snow and finished definately before dark if it were an afternoon storm. Then I would run inside to load up the wood stove and fill the kettle up with more water. (I always kept water in it when there were a fire, so that humidity filled the air.)

Now, with this in-town snow, there was little to do. My pipes were long ago wrapped. Any plants that were delicate had long ago died back until next spring. Now it was simply time to enjoy all this white stuff.

I lie in bed and slipped the glass curtains to one side (which I thought looked like snow the way I had arranged four layers of them and crocheted lace pieces tacked to the wooden part at the top of the window itself when I first moved into the caboose) and admired the way the snow had fallen on the heads of my stone girls and filled their baskets and some had fallen in the criss-crossed arms of St. Francis and from a distance looked like he was cradling a lamb. It was a holy card in assemblage.
I have been in bed all day and watched the sky grow dark until I thought it was going to rain, but the thermometer kept dropping and dropping until I suspected it was going to snow and it is.

I love weather. I love to watch the garden transform itself with the changing of the seasons. Except now, I am so lonely. I couldn't even go to church this morning. I had sat up all evening on Saturday at the art opening and I think the metal chair did my spine in. I hope by tomorrow I can walk. When it hurts this much and even the morphine doesn't help, I am such a crybaby. Oh, it's all inside. I'm silent, but the pain is like snow on the hands for too long. And now it's dark and I can't see the lovely white stuff lying on the roses and the bricks, so I think I'll close.

The River I Carry In My Bones

The bones of my body lay long under the water
in summer, a trickle of creek so quiet it says nothing,
just the way my parents taught me to be: silent.
The anger in my blood is cooled by the silk flowing slow
over me. But in winter, the creek is a river and I can't stay in long
where the song is the roar of the current almost frozen.
Sometimes I lay on the long grass whitened by ice
and put my face under the water until my eyelashes freeze open.
I see steelhead fry suspended in animation, hanging in the water
like puppets held by strings as invisible as fishing line,
as invisible as my own child hands who could not help or prevent
the violence done to my brothers and I.

I have not been taught how to carve weapons from my tears,
my bruises, welts, broken bones.
I can only hope before I die, I learn to speak out loud
and let the silence drop from my flesh like unwanted clothes.