A home in winter

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I am not much use with my hands. I have bent them to work in an office on computers. They are weak, sore, pitiful. I hold a needle to a quilt a short while, the fabric and batting gathered and bunched in my left hand, the needle a steel splinter of my once-magic wand arm in my right; then my hands collapse, in pain or icy numbness, in the calico on my lap. The most basic tools have no moneyback guarantee.

But once, after the supremacy of Sunday morning church and dinner, these hands of mine built a home. I was five. I had three construction assistants in the yard between the house and the church — ages nine, eleven and thirteen; male; also inexperienced builders. It had snowed; the snow was deep. Then it snowed some more. It was January, the snows piled like ancient stone-dust cities of the Holy Land pilgrimage our parents showed us in slides. Then it rained on our cotton and wool hooded snow suits and on the snow; the rain froze. The black metal clasps of my red rubber galoshes froze shut. If we were very delicate, we could walk atop the crusted snow. With straight-edge machete fingertips, from the large age thirteen size to the small five, we punched out big rectangular snow bricks. Deep, deep I still feel the way of precision, my fingertips in wool mittens slicing snow stones from the whole quarry yard for layering in the masonry of igloos. No one taught us this. When the walls were an inch higher than the thirteen-year-old, my brothers placed the plywood ceiling and finished the exterior with a roof of ice-and-snow slate. We packed white mortar in each gap; smoothed with pearl-iced mitten-index fingers: a ten by ten closet or a small bedroom where the four of us could lie side by side hidden in mystery in the expanse between our father's parsonage and the church. We slept quietly in our civilized and insulated imaginations. We could live there, and survive. So warm; so home. So temporary.

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Baking banana bread

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In the caramel drop of a second about thirty minutes in, reading deeply in your chair, the oven puffs a whisper from the kitchen, you remember you have a nose, and you wonder What else have I forgotten in my body of senses? What not seen, like the attraction of the word swallow on the page; What half-heard, like the varied timbre between the hiss of burning log in the wood stove and the wheeze of rain on the gravel; What not savored, like your lip, cool and warm, against the ceramic mug before you lick it, and after; What not felt, like the broom on the floor, drunk crumbs ferried, the broom and dustpan perfectly back on the hook, the basement door clicking closed, insulating mitts on your hands holding three hundred fifty degrees of now-solid food; What have I not considered and worshipped for too long?

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Last night I saw through the wild eye of fear

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A poet read at the open mic: an old bright star. As a child her small eyes and mouth were shuttered in the Warsaw ghetto. Then she was passed off like a loaf of bread on a black train, first to be hidden from the danger of the camp to where her family was cargoed and killed, then shuttled from village to village on more black trains until she was fifteen to work in fields like a beast of burden.

It is easy for my mind to glaze over in numbness when I hear another story about the holocaust, until I meet a survivor. (Have you seen and touched a forearm with a tattooed identification number?) I drove home under the magic silver light of the old Jewish poetess, hearing her speak through that wide smile, line after line, her child-slow English spoken in staccato sibilants through beautiful teeth, until a key word in her second poem, one bead of mercury: the Polish word pamiętaj: remember.

Pamiętaj the wound, I thought, not the fear. I followed her silver star and drove home in the dark, wondering, where from, her bright and clear joy out of so much darkness? When suddenly a doe from out of the farmer's dark field appeared and shocked the windshield and me, the reflection of my car light in her eye a shooting star! In a second her umber-and-ivory-hided body jerked into a dancing constellation with my silver spinning car. The star you are following is suddenly everywhere, rays splayed to the horizon. She dives into the moment of you, the moment after fear, just before the wound blossoms.



Listen to me read this piece here.

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Tesselating

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Our days run on in mundane, ordinary echoes of each other.
But think of honey from the tessellations of a honeycomb.
Consider the patient migration of a turtle in his symmetrical coat of arms.
What warm energy pushes within facsimiles and repetitions?
And what do their tiled borderings make possible,
like the scales of a snake’s skin that enable him
to undulate like an S of smoke sideways across the grass?

Eaglehawk Neck in Tasmania

one of the rare natural tesselations on the earth's surface;

see what natural movement formed it here.

Photo wiki commons

Drawings of symmetry by M.C. Escher; more here.

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S.O.S.

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Through the window this morning, flickering behind poplar leaves, the sun rose. Was it S.O.S. he coded? I was on the phone, but I wanted to end it, someone else was calling. What if I, and only I, were the last hope of the sun, losing his way? Now tonight, three flaming candle wicks in glass duck and bob in the corner of this dimly lit bathtub like ladies urgently gossiping around a red tablecloth. I can almost hear them lisping. Yellow heads beat toward each other, but not toward me, and too rapidly and quietly to be comprehended while I am submerged, steamed and exhausted into stillness—eyes fixed on them and nearly hypnotized into sleep. I am an outsider, the last to know, and then, slow to respond. Is it urgency when poplar leaves twist and flutter like drowning hands? Or are they not drowning, but waving? Earthy sheaves of leaf and flesh lace over what burns and glows. Even just atmosphere alone flips the flame into frenzy. Glimpsing, we see some truth of it. But the light is still, in itself, and does not need rescuing.

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Skin

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deer hide near the road where we bike

You lay your skin aside like a towel, to dry, until next time. You return to it and find it stiffly weathered, caked with rain and air.

What did you feel while it was hanging there, removed from your body? Did you notice how the rain seemed to tap on every cell of you, each drop on your moist flesh a pinprick?

The breeze was a flame, not a drink quenching your skin’s thirst for refreshment. Your eyes and ears remembered, longing to share the pleasure with your cheeks.

What did your lover’s fingertips feel like, unable to slide like the wind down your back, curling up and over sun-warmed peaks? Their touch burned and halted, antagonized, wounded.

What did you long for while your skin was off? You asked to hurt less, and feel more. To read pain in the news and heal with just your bare touch. You said that you would lie under boards of a stormed and crumpled house, waiting to be rescued, if only you could put your skin back on, and feel the weight, the darkness and mystery of what it is to be found, alive.

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Turkey Vulture

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My leather clogs are soaked with dew and yesterday's rainfall through to my socks, and my backside is damp from the roughhewn rain-sodden bench, which is unsteady on the soft ground of the meadow. Low sun shines on my back and on the path’s thick wet grass that needs mowing. In October, the mower forgets his way through goldenrod that have lost their stars. White and yellow moths have flown away. Bees have no flowers to woo and have disappeared. The fire of sumac is flickering out, flame by flame. Yellow leaves on the tallest poplars around the pond applaud the parade of clouds marching past. Oh look! They have never done that step and roll before. Clap-clap-clap-clap-clap. Some in the meadow are falling asleep, unimpressed, while the chickadees keep fee-beeing and squeaking their high pitchpoints, and tree swallows treet their trits then swallow them in gurgles.

What have I come here for? Where is my place? A tippy bench at the center of things. So like a human. It takes long to quiet, shoulders hunched, hands warming under my thighs. Ah, just relax, kid. You think too much.

I don’t hear him coming, no treets, sqawks or screeches, but a shadow betrays him, like my brother’s thumb-hooked hand silhouette on the projector screen. I’ve seen them for days, since the neighbor bow-shot a deer and gutted him, leaving the entrails for wild animals in the field. I have seen them from the kitchen window, perched in the highest poplar branches like hunters in blinds, patient. But this morning, they are six-foot kites crisscrossing a gentle sky, scouting. Silent as arrows. He, my personal turkey vulture, could be scoping me, in my black crow hooded jacket, still as death. But I do not imagine this is so. Instead, I am certain that he is showing me how to scout, scope and scavenge. Why else does he arc over the pines and back under the sun, like a slow motion boomerang? Why tip and turn just there where the cloud parade ends, showing off the flourish of his wing-tip baton? What possible reason could he have for spreading his wing feathers like a sumac branch directly above me, floating down so close I swear I can feel him tap a message of longing on the wind’s drum? If he does not mean to demonstrate the silent way of seeking sustenance, why are we here?

You can listen to a podcast reading of this piece here.

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The air down here

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When the air is clear and dry, I don’t notice it, the air I mean. In September I notice instead the light, the way it falls shadowed on the drive next to the catalpa tree, or the way light inhabits leaves, along with their veins and squatters. I notice also the steady rasp that floats in currents and waves from the poplars by the pond. I stop, for that. I hear the screech of blue jays at Bishop the farm queen for being who she is, for they are who they are. I note the sun, the way it butters the meadow in its season of goldenrod and lace. I see white moths flaking the air, and countless, nameless flyers barely visible to me. I take note of the wind, the sensation of hair rising and falling on my neck and forehead as I watch sumac leaves rise and fall around swallows spiraling up. Sometimes I notice a stench, when a dead raccoon has begun decaying, and turkey buzzards circle down to commence their beautiful role, out of hunger, then preen for thirty minutes, later excreting what has been cleansed in them before delivering it back to their Earth.

But air? When it is July and humid I notice it, for then I lag under the oppression of moisture. But this substance I breathe in September, that would kill a glinty, sunny fish, what is it to me? Am I mindful that it is Life? When someone asks, If you were stranded on a desert island and could have just three things . . . do I think of air? The toupee of smog that hovers over Los Angeles where we lived when the children were born is a visible reminder that I live free and unhindered in a sheer garment that alters itself to my movements without scissors, stitches or darts. Without its molecules carrying vibrations to me, I would not hear the sounds of leaves, cicadas, birds, a stick snapping under my foot, a loved one speaking, or the strings and winds of Fauré's Sicilienne. I sleep, I breathe. I chop, cook, eat, I breathe. I read, write and speak, I breathe. I touch, smell, hear, listen, and I breathe. I walk and run, I breathe. I feel, I love, I breathe. I fall and ache and cry, I breathe. I think. I breathe.

And what do I give to this air that gives me the infinite and portable floor, walls and ceiling of my life? An exhalation: Thanks.

Post script: Today I messed around with GarageBand and recorded myself reading this piece. If you're interested in hearing me read "The air down here", go here. I prefer my voice with headphones.

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Wheat

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I am sixteen, and I am driving the once luxe 1966 Country Squire station wagon passed down to my parents when Grandpa Reuben died. It's black, with faux wood siding, power tinted windows, air conditioning and power seats of red vinyl. On this day in 1973, the beast is a rusted out heavy metal piece of beautiful junk, my wheels. My brother Bennett has trained me to drive country roads whenever possible, avoiding highways. Michigan's back roads feel wild and rustic, even when the fields are cultivated, with islands and peninsulas of maples and oaks resembling silhouettes of vintage roller coasters on the horizon. I am sailing along in my boat on a hot summer day, heading God-only-knows where, listening to Smoke on the Water, windows down, the regular beat of the wind through the windows keeping time with Deep Purple. AC off, my long amber hair shimmying above my shoulders like riotous ribbons of smoke. Farm fields are radiating all around me. Endlessly. I am a teenage loner, so maybe I am just sailing for solitude. And listening to rock and roll as loud as I please. Then, in my speed and abandon, I hear a whisper. I ease my foot off the gas. Click the radio knob off. There. Again. The whisper. Slow, slow down, girl. 60 . . . 50 . . . 40 . . . 30 . . . 20 . . . 10 miles per hour. Stop. Dead still. Not on the road's shoulder. Not in someone's drive. But in the middle of the two lane road, the tanker is stopped. Parked. Anchored. Not another ship in sight, fore, and aft. I quiet my hair behind my ears, to better hear the breathing air.

"W - h - e - a - t  .  .  . w - h - h - h - e - e - a - t  .  .  .  w - w - h - h - h - e - e - a - t - t - t  .  .  . " Ocean waves of wheat on both sides of me rasp, swell, surge and oscillate. Swishing, flashing, pushing, rushing, splashing, shifting, shining, swaying, shivering, hushing. Languishing. Perishing. Replenishing. The strands of my hair peacefully float and fishtail, while the wind braids them into grains of wheat.

Listen to me read Wheat, here.

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another kind of tea bag

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. . . "for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at."

T.S.Eliot
4 quartets
p 14

Looking in my fluorescent magnifying mirror,
dabbing dots of concealer on the bags
under my eyes as the magazine for aging women
who want to stay beautiful shows,
I suddenly feel the register in the room's music
deepen and know that my Auntie Sue is sitting behind me
on the worn chair that was Aunt Edith's. O both these women
had eye bags to beat the band.
"Aunt" Edith, my mother's stepmother
with that gene that creates these features on your face
like a nose or a mouth or a chin but that don't
start growing until somewhere after 40 about the time earlobes
also seem to have grown longer,
Aunt Edith whose pedigree and provenance I know nothing of
and never cared to because I didn't like her. But
Auntie Sue, my dad's sister, was different.
The woman had the most glorious eye bosooms
in the history of womankind,
reminding me of the women gathering tea
on the hills by the Black Sea,
their soft burlap tea bag carried in front
like one large breast
growing as they stuffed in more leaves.
I wish I'd had more time with her,
because what she carried in her eye bags was fragrant,
like that black tea, not poisoned like Aunt Edith's Chernobyl tea bags.
Auntie Sue whose humor was her pedigree and when you aimed
a camera her way said she'd break it,
whom all of us adored and never had enough of in her 92 years.
She might as well have lived by the Black Sea she was so far away
in Virginia where tobacco leaves grow but here she is, sitting behind me!
- smiling her wryness as I try to cover what we got from her mother,
and she says: One day you won't be able to cover them Ruthie
but just be sure that what you carry in them is fragrant.


*Note: On April 26, 1986 the worst nuclear accident in history occurred in Chernobyl, Ukraine (then USSR) and the radioactive cloud it released contaminated the tea growing along the Black Sea in Turkey, which was while we lived in Istanbul. There was a tea crisis, and the tea already in stores sold out in a day.

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New Yorker magazines

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i was going to lug them all to work
let the students take them
or professors
whoever
from the help yourself book table
because they appear in our mailbox at home
every week
and get stacked
in the hopeful piles
waiting to be read
and this morning i remembered being in high school
i used to go to the library at lunch
take the new yorker off the shelf
just leaf thru
look at the ads and the photos
images
cartoons
read the poems
and that was all
and so this morning
i thought
what if the main value to me is that -
get back to what i did as a child
just the images
and so i opened the new issue
and they just touched me
immediately
those photographs
poems illustrations
paintings drawings
even ads
just like then
it was a revelation
i have to get back to who i am -
you know?
have to keep reminding myself
whenever it was a couple of years ago when i was worried about
how i wasn't writing poems
i was obsessed with taking pictures
and in my mind they were separate
and suddenly
it dawned on me
they need not be separate things
they could connect
and that's when i started beginning with just
some visual
and letting it go inside
inspire
and then i could write from it
we all have to find what it is that excites
it might not be the same as anyone else
and some people it will be ten things
all seemingly unrelated
but in that one person
they are mixed and fused
in such imaginative beauty!
and we just stare
and wonder
how we didn't think of it
oh it just makes me weep
for beauty

sometimes a window opens
and it will be like we just

danced
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All photos shot near Holland, Michigan, May 2008
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