A double portrait of Beethoven as a young man. (left) Oil on canvas. (right) Oil on silver projection screen material. The picture on the left has been aged. The tooth of the silver projection screen material was interesting to work with but somewhat difficult at first.
The paintings were done for Ron Maltais, the music director here at UWC-USA, in exchange for piano lessons for Broadus.
I’m here to find the simple truths that I knew as a child. The dogs make a game of me, the cats curl and sleep upon my body. The daffodils await the rising of the sun. They draw their color from the world arriving. The world I watch now takes its color from the setting moon.
These February trees excite me. I crave their dark and frozen zig-zags, the hardened lightening strokes of trunk, leader, limb and branch. They pierce the moon, seem to snare it, over-lace it, hold it fast – but look again and the moon has moved. The bare trees darken further at the rising of the sun. My hands know this simple way of waving and releasing, too, but too often I want to hold onto the passing things. What is this restlessness?
A candle burns inside the house. It represents things I cannot name. The spaces in the weaving, the colors I have yet to see. It also speaks to me of the way that fear takes loving hands and turns them into weapons. The mysteries of anger, joy and sorrow, love.
Here comes the sun. A mockingbird screams. A shaking leaf transforms into a mourning dove, an explosion of flight. The river below has the look of ice, spilled from the dawn and frozen.
And what of intentions? Do they spill from the sun, from the moon, do they rise out of the wide space in between? Do we find them, recognize them, or create them? I need gloves; I type without them. I need money; I work. I need love; I share it where I can.
Every tree, bush, stone, dog, person, is a mystery deeper then I can fathom. All the particles of being dance to a sound the whole makes. I am only a moving part of the dancing machine. Oil me, I am squeaking. I try and tune myself and listen. I try to catch the rhythm and move deliberately, in keeping with the pace and pulse and measure of the music that moves through me. I think more of my ancestors, I say, “I love you”, more often. I look differently at my mother, my father, my son. My friends are intriguing, strange, mysterious and enchanting. My hands absorb and hold the sunshine. I feel it circulating. The moon makes me turgid. It rocks me. In the rise and fall I see the flotsam and jetsam of my life. Wreckage and raw material are the gifts of the currents and tides. We draw beauty in with our eyes, and our senses. We find it and recognize it. We hold it up and name it, call it our own. We set it down and wonder where we left it. There is beauty in hatred, love, grief, and war. In the way the morning comes, the people go. Fear and cruelty are passing. Love carries and bears up under it all. We all know this. Our stories will be spun out, and all our stories, all that we have ever known and done will be recycled. No other thing makes sense.
So this is recovery, you claim
you found something new today to name
but all I hear is birds, birds, birds. Last week’s New York Times
sits still unopened. You were interested, you said.
The schizophrenics you have known all led front page lives. The one
or two you tried to reach succumbed
to misery, or death, or sleep.
TEACH ME DEATH you say they dreamed, yet
you dreamed of fish. Now it’s birds.
Birds, birds, birds. All I ever hear is birds. Ain’t
you got no sense? Sometimes Frankie I think the Devil got you.
I think you think too much or not at all. How come
Frankie all this talk of names? EVERYTHING HAS DONE BEEN NAMED
already, Frankie. We both know that, except these damn
birds your house is full of. It ain’t enough to name them Zimri
as a bunch like that. How they tell themselves apart? That’s how
schizophrenics get their start, end up calling theirselves us. How you think
that feel, a whole damn flock within one skull and furthermore, Frankie
The streets of time are mapped and filed under glass, in a house of glass, made from the sand it grows from. Entry is through an hourglass, of course, a glass with killing arms, whirling blades and a bad bearing. The wires hum with seed syllables.
Outside are bones, lots of bones, finely ground with oyster shells, feeding the world its daily dose of calcium. Water surrounds. Water is the sound of small boys throwing stones and chunks of iron and old bones into the ocean. It is the sound of bones dissolving. Water is a black sound. Is there a blacker sound?
“Who goes there?” asks the moon. The moon had been sleeping in the sun, just the crescent of its eye is open.
“We do,” say the neck bones.
“We do,” say the vertebra along the upper spine.
“We do,” say the plates and blades and sticks of bones, the ligaments, the balls and sockets of the shoulders.
“Hold us up,” they say to the moon.
“I can’t,” the moon replies. “The threads are broken.”
The swish and swirling chuckle of the ocean as it sucks the marrow from the bones and grinds them down and pulverizes them into smaller and smaller pieces?
A sound like distant church bells ringing from the sandy cones of anthills. A pure sound, with tiny undertones of gravity, spilling sand, and rain approaching.
Rain through fig trees, rain through broad leaves, rain through palm trees, rain through sand, washing nutrients from tired bones.
“What of our addition? Our subtraction?
Our multiplication? Our division?”
“Your calculus is sand, your sand is glass, your glass is time, your time is mine,” the wind hisses through teeth closed against the rain.”I am coming for you now. Are you ready? Get ready then.”
The old guys hoot and cackle as the wind removes their arms and legs, their livers and at last, their heads. Without heads they can’t remember anything.
“Begin again,” the moon suggests. “Start with a rocking motion.”
“One starfish from the ocean, two starfishes on the sand, three turtles and a house of glass, an hourglass, a box of time. A zero moving in a stream. A little thing. A rose. A rose is missing.”
“Where is my little rose?” I asked the moon. I was with the other kids tossing things into the ocean. I had found a piece of bone which reminded me of something. Raised threads ran across a surface etched with fine lines. Minute breaks and cracks and indentations seemed to represent star patterns. One end was sheared off. Inside were hidden chambers, hollow rooms, supporting columns. None of us thought much about these things, but I felt something. I knew the wind laughed. I knew the moon winked at the wind. I chucked the thing into the ocean but I had heard the sound a grain of sand makes when it separates and falls, featherless and mostly round, through the hourglass when the glass is opening.
“Where is my Rose?” I ask again.
The moon says nothing, it seems saddened. The wind puts bow to string and turns. His audience is the universe that I am standing in. I cover my ears but I cannot help but hear the sound. Sad notes run down the string and I am crying.
“Why am I crying?” I ask the moon.
“Your Rose,” the moon prompts kindly.
“Hush,” says the wind. The wind is always hushing someone.
Now the scene has changed. The boys are gone. Gone the ocean, gone the beaches, gone the sand. Water is a black sound where creation was. Water is an opening in the wind. Water is a mindless thing, a circus flea under glass, performing. The wind is endless repetition. Water is oblivion, my hearts longing.
“Chide me, then.” I say to the wind. “Say something.” Willows weep around me but they are water trees, like cypress. They were meant to weep and go on weeping.
I can’t ask the moon for answers. The moon won’t answer direct questions. Focus on the crashing breakers and the star above their sound.
“I want to know who you are.” I say to the star.
It danced with coquelicot and amber through horizons layered without end, and mists that were the final breaths released by friends, by enemies and lovers and companions. Endless generations of pleading, bleeding, joy and supplication. So many alters built, so much sacrifice, so much destruction and still that single point that burned its fine opening through every one. Just for a second I see the connected dots and lines and then the mist rolls in and flatly conceals them. I reach and see my hand dissolve.
“Dissolve the rest of me,” I demand, but the wind refuses to hold coherent sound. The mist and all that it contains rolls away again. I have my two hands, my thoughts, my emotions. I have my sense of dread and my well honed sense of longing. I have air that lets me live but will not carry words.
“You carry screams,” I charge. You carry snorts and sneezes and hiccups and chuckles. You carry laughter, you carry giggles. When you want to, you carry prayers.”
I was upset. I know it carries prayers. It is so hard, using prayers when I want to tear words out of paper and paste them on the sky. But I understand. What are words? The seed syllables are full of power but no arrangement matches the power of the original vibrations. And every new horizon brings a concerto of popping strings.
Each time I return I see my star and I say, “Come here, come home to me.”
“I am home,” the star sings. “I light a world, and I can’t leave.”
“You are a coward”, I whispered into my tin can. “You are not brave. You should not do this to me.”
She did not answer. She did not leave, she drew no closer, nor did the pattern of stars around her change.
“Leave them!” I cried.
No answer. I turned to the moon.
I explained my situation. I said, “No power here, I have no power.”
“Neither you, nor any other,” said moon to flower.
“And I don’t feel like much of a flower.”
“You are,” said moon. “You are.”
Tell me, how can I believe I am a flower when the life I breathed for is such a dim star, so far away, over so much water?
And I in my heaven
you in your hearse
rainbows between us
and mountains of earth.
The faces of children
and none of them,
not even one of them cursed.
.
Hearts that had danced
while the playing sticks knocked
and the rivers that splashed
pin the tail, pin the tail,
rocked on in the dark.
.
The great foolish male
who lived in his shoes
crushed smell of the jungle
crushed taste like the blues
shorn of sweetness.
.
The howl of the Amazon
chatter at the heart
pride in aloneness
safe in the art
of wishing.
afraid of the dark.
.
The hearse traveled nowhere
the heaven contained.
And iron wheels roll
in the rain, in the rain.
It was, to tell the truth, a house of sighs.
Red sighs, blue sighs, yellow sighs.
All the primary sighs.
Glum trees shaded the house
and thick dust laid upon the eggshells.
Muffled reports were occasionally heard
from small rooms with closed doors,
but never was there an investigation.
Footprints grew more childlike,
then disappeared altogether.
Years later the house fell in upon itself.
How trying living in a world of nonsense.
I would wear skirts and talk to chickens,
grow fundamental daisies upon mountaintops,
spook an old house,
listen in on sneaky little children.
The truth is though,
the world contains us well.
I line my pockets with your giggles
you line your house with turtleshell.
Our hands and thoughts move as they will.
She came, she bathed, I asked, “Are you an augury of love? Or love itself?”
At that she laughed, she made a splash. Downstairs a door was cracked and in the sudden draft I saw the legions tramp across her back.
Under glint-eyed standards each man drew and poised to hack with brittle swords or spears or axes flesh sweet and tender, made for kisses, slow hands, trickled water – not for mindless harm, stupid excess.
With that I cupped my hand and swept the scene away. I drowned the legions, all the colors, standards, pikes and horses. Again she laughed.
She said, “I cannot tell the future dear, nor predict it from your fits. Am I an augury of love? Or love itself? Who knows?
Accept the present, dear,
And dear, accept the gift.”
portrait in oil on silver projection screen, 2.5′ x 3′ approx. For Ron Maltais in exchange for piano lessons for my son, Broadus.
And if once or twice,
and now and then or later
you, hell, or i, find it
standing among the hens
and swallows, somewhere
under eaves and gables
rooms of boxes boxes
silk and closets
chests of drawers
too full of old things,
and photographs
too shortly bathed
and too poorly fixed,
and spiders,
kiss it once for me
and
little most wonderfully
discreet and round one,
when I find my voice
I’ll sing a song for you.
I wrote the following nonsense/sound poem for fun. The “translation” was something I did to squeeze a little more fun from the silly-talk:
Keepers of the Evergreens
The keepers of the evergrees
doyen, duyan, dogun, dees,
pitched a frighted battlefrees
and smacktossed Lesley.
Ser she bauble, ser she fried,
Ser she mackentoshed
(she lied.)
Ser she mint un Wilber frowed her
Eft er ober issen olster.
(Smashed begonias, il ber datsun issen tolder!)
MAKEN, MAKEN, MEKAN… SMOLDER!
SMOLDER FRIKON, SMOLDER DAKEN, SMOLDER BOSH
AN SMOLDER FREKON!
Is ma el tom dick and Jason
bitte ta doty, MAKK do trisson.
BOSH?
Si. Bosh ed dism tody. Mary frankensense… smell ‘em!
Smell ‘em. Mary, smell ‘em!
(Translation through line 14 follows)
The keepers of the evergreens,
old women, frightful, hair in patches,
half undressed, in tattered slinkies
(pale blue, mauve, olive green and violet)
bound to softest, whitest, oldest flesh
with ties of braided nylon.
The sharpest of them, breasts crossed
and pressed by blue acrylic, arms akimbo,
hands on hips had spent the morning
sweeping from beneath the trees
the fragments of the moon
that overnight had lodged there.
Painstaking work when every shadow
tries to hide a bit of her.
Who could blame the last that tried
for giving up?
It had seen the others crucified,
lashed and torn from root-sides,
hollows. All the grateful places
that the sun provides were brushed
and scourged,
her strokes were sandstorms, locusts,
desert frosts.
The last remains of cried-out moon
drops would spring to life again
at first touch of salt water.
But dust must call for rain, first,
then roll the long way oceanward.
______________________________________________
In my mind the poem and the painting fit somehow. Maybe because the painting reminded me of children’s book illustrations I grew up with. Sometimes I’ll look at a painting and wonder, where on earth did that come from? Then I’ll open some old children’s book, one of the Childcraft* series from the ‘50’s, say, and see a border illustration around a page and think, hmmm, that’s where they come from.
The painting itself was part of a series, in that they were all painted at roughly the same time. I try to do it that way – to always have multiple projects going – to protect myself from the tendency to torture a painting to death when I have only the one in front of me. With multiple projects I can turn from one to another when I run out of ideas for the first, working on the second, or third, or fourth, or fifth until ideas and a sense of direction for the first piece returns, or a sense of completion sets in.
* Childcraft: hours of serene, happy, absorbed, enjoyment: projects, mythologies, stories, poetry, games, how to, and more.
Childcraft is also, I found after rediscovering the series 10 or 12 years ago in a thrift shop, easily recognizable as part of the institutionally racist, mid-century, white male dominated culture insinuating itself into every aspect of the lives of those of us growing up in the good old U.S. of A at the time.
Which is to say, it was invisible. To me, anyway. Like Crayola’s pink crayons, which were called “Flesh”, and the dusky red/burnt sienna, which was called “Indian Red”. Quite likely invisible to the authors of the series, as well. What am I overlooking today?
Hmmm… let me delete the angst and reframe this rant about Bush.
I wish he had turned to recovery, instead of to religion. There is a lot to be said for a generic god.
(We try to make sense of things at the talk machine behind Burger King.)
Wasting time at the takl machine
my dollar card broke in two.
I haven’t got a penny now,
that’s why I’m calling you.
The penny I had was red and was round
and my niña had drilled it through.
I carried it tied to my nickel stick,
beside the picture of you.
A piece of blue ribbon
A bit of red twine
A nylon thread
A silver line
A monkey named Altair
A cat named M’Goo
A feathered invisible
memory of you
You fell east
and I fell west
when my dollar card broke in two.
Talk Machine laughed
to see such a sight
and nickel stick thumped
and the monkey took fright.
And I and my niña
with what hurt and surprise
saw separate, and faraway
with angry new eyes.
And penny trailed ribbon
across the new sky,
and Kerplunk! in the ocean.
Kerplunk! and goodbye.
Now you’re in the Andes
And I’m in Tibet.
I’ll count the Lamas, the Sherpas,
the yaks.
You count the llamas,
the Incas, the Aztecs.
While tissue-roll-trails
thrown by Saturday clowns
rain from the hillsides
and bounce to the towns.
I name the colors
that spin from each bounce.
It’s a job, since you’re gone.
It’s a job, little else.
You gave me my color
you gave me my crown
you taught me to love
this mingling of sounds.
And Isabel rides
on a gray-black background.
And Isabel’s sighs
are a river of sound.
But it doesn’t make sense!
You said and you laughed.
But mi vida, chiquitica, was charmed
as you might have guessed.
What harm
when the uttermost
peaks of distress
carry our flags
remember our bootsteps?
If you cry for water
I pray it is water you get.
Not penguins
or polar bears
or footsteps that fade
as they pass.
Innocent water,
kind wings in the darkness.
Innocent water, mi vida,
chiquitica,
mi niñaness.
Flags of ruin hung on bearpoints,
driven screaming into the thorns,
tattered and cracking like ratty old flags caught,
like any old spook in the hawthorn caught,
damned with ears nailed open, always open
to the shreiks and howls of the wind, the stupid,
mindless, arrogant wind delighting in howling.
Silver trumpet notes wait there to die.
The bright souls of the green leaves weep and shudder,
offer water to one with a hole in his belly.
God never saves the right. All have died.
This rolling world takes us with it, regardless.
We are blind in the abyss, coughing in the dust.
The stars fine white threads too long exposed.
No true north, the Pole Star a whirly-gig out of control,
astrolabs, sextants, children thrown off.
No. When I die let me die among my own.
Not among these fat trees, howling winds,
water on its way to nowhere,
these green leaves without hands.
Jody speaks and pours his heart out. My heart, which swims with knuckled things and twisted wrenches pours out
and empties. How can that be? We share one heart? Eighteen feet away he sits, a gesticulating black-haired doll
Tapestry
Oh, it is a quiet world for an old man used to the city, surrounded and jostled by the shields and bucklers of fundamentalism. I would rather that people bumped into me, murmuring an apology or not as they hurried by. I wear a threadbare coat and rattle like a stick of dry leaves in the warm amber wind of this still unfamiliar South. Passion has freckled the backs of my hands but none here would know it. If they see me at all (other than to preach to me) I am sure they believe I am spotted as they are, by the sun.
A picture poem of the morning. Quote by Eileen Mayhew.
Riddle me this, kid:
This little riddle kid
next to a scrap can
sleeping on a lid.
A half protected
little girl
cresting on
a sea of garbage.
Now the question is,
can thoughts from
a prayer world
produce a pearl
from heartache?
the immorality of groups. (Jason Bruno, this is for you.)
Father swings through the trees, he wrestles crocodiles, white men,
personal demons. I see a small jewel,green hills and blue ocean,
rotating inside the compass of heaven. Fine silver threads
in circles and spirals, fractured pinpoints of gold, ruby and emerald
hang in a canopy of velvet. The absence of light does not equal darkness,
sight shatters on far-away anvils and leaves hammer shards, finally silent.
Through transparent eyelids I watch as a sandstorm covers the sun.
Twilight rides not on light but whips around from darkness, a rude wind
marshaling vast killing wings. Between sight and knowing are clear
jelly curtains and outside, the mean blur of teeth.
The wind is an iron-framed plow; it is a rusty, steaming, oil -flecked stallion
with shoes of blue steel, throwing up sand, clacking, spitting and clattering.
It is a torn accordion, wheezing and whistling, entropy compressed
and then tortured through ripped leather fittings.
The wind hits the dunes with cutting fists of diamond. It is here
that my mother nurses her husband. She waits down the wind,
the triumph of darkness, the blowing sand peeling skin, carving bones.
The wind grinds the rocks down. Mother swings Father onto the wind
and leaps on behind him. She seizes a good night not to go gentle in
and leans to the stallion’s ear hissing: is this the worst you can do, evil thing?
A maniac riding a maniac wind, heels hard in its ribcage, fists in its mane,
holding a man who is dying. She drives her heels in and spurs the wind on,
into the well of souls that they come from. The wind sends it’s unrest,
it’s hornets and locusts but nothing remains here to kill or consume
except death, and death is dying.
Time has unrolled to it’s end over nothing and no new myth comes.
No milk streams through space from her breasts, no planets or galaxies
spring from her forehead or crown and he’s just crazy, with crazy thoughts,
like: the boy beside the elephant is so small, yet the elephant obeys him.
Higher now than she has ever been, she holds her husband through the driest time.
The black wings of another wind sweep down around them. The ground turns upside down and vanishes and. The stars take their place in the sand. Silence and stillness replace sound and movementand now the unteaching, in earnest, begins.
Holderlin is a hard act to follow. I’ll put something light up here today. Something like…
heron in sunshine
sky wishing to rain
grey marsh a kingdom
he surveys
i on my doorstep
counting the ways
everything matters
everything fades
the children are sleepy
with rain in the air
the house smells of pancakes
nobody’s there
sylph in a hickory tree
just out of reach
drops nuts on my head
and puts me to sleep
RIPENED THE FRUIT…
Ripened the fruit, in fire cast, baked
And tried on the earth, and it is the law
That all go back into it, like snakes,
Prophetic, dreaming on
The hills of the heavens. And there is so much
Like a burden
Of logs on the shoulders
That has to be borne.
Though the roads
Are not right. For discrepant,
As horses, go the tethered
Elements and the immemorial
Laws of the earth. And ever
A longing strains after the fetterless. But there is so much
That has to be borne. And one must be true.
Let us look not before, though,
Nor after. May we be rocked, rather, as
A boat is cradled at sea.
Friedrich Holderlin
Translated by Kate Flores
.
.
Let me just sit and feel the morning change into her winter clothes again. Summer’s breath just passed across my hands, undulating like a line of pelicans above the dunes and hollows of my palms. I have become my age. I can do anything. I watch the cats, I listen to the winds that drive the surf onto the island. My front porch sings the songs these front line mainland trees sing. They keep the twists the winds give them and no one shouts my name. My lifeline takes a little break this morning, a little pause between serenity and pain. The cats refuse to keep me warm. The morning is for sitting in, not writing.
Replenish me then, and when I’m ancient, take me home. When the skin of my heart no longer holds the things I’ve seen and done collect me, carry me in your arms back into the changing room, lay me out among friends and empty me of witness and experience. The six lifetimes in one you gave me this time broke the doors of my heart down, broke the doors, the bones, the mind. You do rough work. I know it was invited but your hands are rough, sometimes. Yes, I begged the wide experience. “Make me a proper vehicle!” I cried. That’s okay. I’m just telling you that your old truck is tired.
The right side of the morning brings the sound of bird calls. Work sounds cross the river from the island. Chain saws cut pockets in the wind, carpenters fill them with nails and hammering. Behind it all the rocking ocean sizzles through the sand. Now a storm collects gray wind. Something you said has gobbled up the sun.
The left side holds the silence in. I am divided down a center line. One side full of words, the other full of quiet. You speak of small miracles. I speak of time. You speak of mystery and remind me of the cost of pride. I remind you that I know it’s price. You ask me if I’m tired. You know I’m tired. You touch my wrist, you slide your palm beneath my palm. You are a whisper across my skin, I try to breathe you in, I try to leave my bones behind to meet you. You say, stay, watch the rain.
The rain has many fingers and plays to me so quickly, hitting every key so many times, striking wave, and dune, and island. It comes ashore, hits the trees, surrounds the house and drowns me. I could be the pelican, or the duck out on the river. I could be the single drop of water at the very end of my cat’s chin whisker, or the way she watches the world beyond. I could be whatever mauled and blinded her. Instead, I am the finder and the keeper, the one who gets to feed her. The old cat healed her. He snarled and hissed, he circled, he hated her. She sat calm and quiet at the center of his attention. Two days later he was nursing her. What do I do with this rain?
I say, Mr Einstein, there is nothing in my hands.
You say that’s okay.
Tell me about the seven lives, I say.
You’re on the sixth, says he.
I’m thinking, thirty more years of this. I’ll sleep more, I’ll exercise, I’ll give up cigarettes and learn to like water. The rain is a curtain around my porch. Someone on the island drops a stack of boards and the flat sound carries through the rain and across the river.
I am lucky, I have always been shadowed by love. In this my sixth life I am especially blessed. It seems my fate and destiny, my job perhaps, to recognize its presence. The rooms of my life are filled with love’s magnetic images and icons. The day is a gray shrine. It is filled with bird calls, pelicans, gray wind, rain.
A blind kitten, hissing suspicion, the river, the ocean, the distant sounds of boards dropping, of hammering, hammering, nailing up the wind.
Teach the children paradox,
ubiquitous, and equinox.
Teach them how to shadow box
and sing the praises of the dark
and deadly ways of memory and love.
Teach them also how to snarl
how to drive a lover wild
when to laugh when to talk
when to drive a lover off
how to leap from straddled fences
how to tuck and roll and stop.
Show the children how to sketch
a monkey’s life, a monkey’s laugh
Show them how to face the light
how to tell the truth from lies
and how to live through sorrow.
Let them hear you call them
Buttercup, or Noodletoes,
or Pumpkin,
let them see you kiss,
hear you weep, watch you fix
a precious thing you’ve broken.
1.
You can’t see the dancer in my belly, can you, mister?
I didn’t think so. And I don’t have the icon to describe,
much less, to explain her.
You say, perhaps the moon has brought her?
(She’s in the fire, in the trees, in the shadows.)
You say she’s not real.
I say, no, but she has tiny feet, and hands,
and they are sharp and hurt like hell.
2.
I move to the edge of the woods,
find a house, close a chapter, start another.
I live beside a river, outside a small town.
All day all night I hear the sounds of the ocean,
the squirrels and geese, frogs and cats, chickens,
lizards, dogs, hawks, herons, ibises, bats.
I have plenty of company.
3.
Jill works at the video store.
She wears her hair in dreadlocks.
Five movies, five days, five dollars, she says.
I say I’d like to order something special.
Okay, so tell me, says Jill.
I say, she should be about so tall, single, available,
a little bit homely, a little bit beautiful.
Not too young, not too old, talented,
creative, strange, brave, and capable.
Jill says, strange? How strange? Strange as me?
Or is different okay?
I say sure, different, that might be okay…
just not deeply troubled.
She looks at me. Where do you think strange comes from?
She tells me: My boyfriend overdosed on heroin
and died, the night before we were to leave the city..
Last year someone killed my sister.
Here, in this backwater fucking county
and no one is looking for the killer.
New York spit me from an empty and I skidded to a stop
in a place where every second person is named Varnum,
Varnam, Bellamy, or Holden,
and all of them think I have bugs in my hair.
She hands me my tape. We share the same birthday.
We were made for each other.
We are still a long way from hurricane season.
This year, I want to be prepared.
A woman enters the store.
She’s beautiful, but hardly strange.
Jill unwraps a piece of candy.
I’ll see if I can think of someone, she says.
4.
You are in the fire again when get home.
Get out of the fire, I say.
It’s my fire, and I don’t want you there.
You say, leave me alone.
I settle in. The cats come home
I set up to write; it’s time to make up stories.
The moon is a yo-yo rising over the marshes.
I don’t have to look, I know it goes up and down,
I know it’s played by a left-handed woman who waits.
She plays with the river, the tides, the ocean.
This close to the ocean, the river has perceptible tides.
They go up and down, up and down.
5.
What shall I do about you? I ask.
(She’s in my fire, she has no manners.
When I try to speak to her she vanishes.)
I say it to the air, where devils dance.
Sometimes I mock them with the damper
just to hear them roar.
Now she’s dancing closer to the door.
You are pathetic, I say.
She hears that I’m addressing her and vanishes.
6.
Heart is courage, I say to the empty door. Heart is fire.
Heart is why we love, heart is why we go to war.
I study the empty place where my heart lived.
I say, you can leave any time you want.
The flame is empty of your image now.
My prayers are quieter.
We know, by theory and by observation
that people are the better off for talking.
Here, take this icon. Your silence kills me.
Drove this morning with Steve, Robin and Broadus to Los Alamos, to visit The Black Hole, a most unusual place and met its most unusual and inspiring owner, Ed Grothus. Ed recycles the equipment and hardware from the Los Alamos labs and sets it about his warehouse and premises for sale and display. The place is part salvage yard for things as varied as 5 inch think slabs of lexan, microscopes and optics, centrifuges, bomb casings, cast off atomic equipment, stainless steel rods, a camera that takes 100,000 pictures a minute, equipment used in the manufacture of biological weapons…
Ed says he offered that piece of equipment to George Bush for $2000,000. He thought that since George couldn’t find any weapons of mass destruction on his own, he might want to save face by buying it and flying it to Iraq, where George could conveniently arrange to have it “found”.
The kids loved the place. What kid doesn’t love a scrapyard? Continue reading
| AANN BUNTING-MOCK | ||
 Aann Bunting-Mock died January 3, 2008, from cancer. She was 57 years old.Aann leaves behind the loves of her life — her family members: Bruce, her beloved; all of her wonderful children — Logan Mock-Bunting, Susan Mock, Bruce and Paola Mock, Hadley and Walter Heath, Sarah and Josh Van Der Puy; her grandchildren Bruce III, Walter V and Jarrett Eavey; her stepmother Anne C. Bunting and her special former son-in-law Greg Eavey. Her mother, Ann Beachy Bunting, father, Robert Logan Bunting, and sister, Susan Bunting Cairns, preceded her in death. Along with her immediate family, she leaves behind an extended family filled with wonderful cousins, nieces, nephews, great-nieces, great-nephews, and friends, all of whom were the reason she believed in goodness. Aann’s belief in God resulted from her awareness of the order and magnificence in nature and the blessing of experiencing so much love in her life. The gift of sobriety formed her vision of the world and inspired her to lead a good and decent life, even if she was not always able to achieve such a lofty goal. This way of life was demonstrated clearly by her sponsor, Mary K. Because family, friends, acquaintances and strangers came and went in her life, helping her try to become a better person, she wanted to express her gratitude for being touched by so many wonderful people. As Charlotte explains in E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web: You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that. Aann loved her dog and enjoyed books, travel, intimate conversation, fabric, and electronic toys. Aann wanted to thank God for her life, repeatedly stating that she would not have traded her life for anyone else’s. She was the “wealthiest woman” she knew and wanted to remind people: “It is not how many breaths one takes, but the moments that take your breath away. Life is for the living. Live and let live.” A memorial service will be held at the Fort Fisher Aquarium on Sunday, Jan. 6, 2008, at 6 o’clock in the evening. Memorials may be made to Lower Cape Fear Hospice, 2222 S. 17th St., Wilmington, NC 28401. Published in the Star-News on 1/4/2008. |
||
mine enemy grows older 