I should explain to you that sometimes lately I go back and rewrite these posts. And its probably annoying but I swear it is worth it
Because I realized today I thought I should put this photo here: it is the face I make at jenfox when she is really upsetted and needs to see it on my face that I believe her about big problems. it also looks like the face I make when I know how to trust you and hope you trust me because we are both here, present as well as we can be and this shit is serious but that is okay.
And then she made a little book for me and somewhere around the 20th page it goes a little like thisish: "moods don't last. It is their chief charm."-Oscar Wilde and you have to figure that if the OWilde is going to go on about something like that, then it is probably just fine for me to encourage you to accomplish a great many things (like coping, staying married, keeping up with the news or fashions, writing decent prose, going out looking crazy, believing confidence is the new black, etc.) I have not yet managed well. And then Jackson borrowed another book of Reihnard poetry, because that is pretty much her signature move by now. John Reinhard writes
Last Ride Down the Whiskey "So arfully do the Fates untwist the threads of our life."-Montaigne If herons spoke in ways you could write down, what would they say? I am afraid of heights. Of the tickling feather. Of blue weather that washes our colors right out of the sky. This is my translation. In front of me a heron scares a few feet above river. The Whiskey's brown from swamp creeks and soil that would not stay. The heron teases water with strokes of wing, then lights a hundred yards ahead, always solitary except in a few odd dream where I've seen the mass of herons, thousands of great blues huddled on marsh, necking like teenagers at the drive-in movies before the cost of land went up and owners went bust. The herons mate for life. Then fly off alone, one of them to guide me down this river one more time.
Everything bends at the spear of land called Widows Jump where wives remarry the spirits of husbands who fell under the wieght of trees. My oars settle in whirlpool. I wrap it around me for an instant then pull hard at the river. The heron leads me further. The high water darkens. It was here Pere Marquette looked to the savage for salvation. Columbus tried to sail over the edge of the earth. And I wonder, What death is it that kills us? What is it that makes us well? I've heard the land is rife with cures. The healing scars and trees that I could name like sons. Medicine transmuted into stars that shiver before me on the rutted water. I have lived most of my life and have little idea what stays. I take a long drink of the Whiskey. Let it flow through the channels of my veins. Then I pierce the surface, once again hope to propel myself forward to where the heron seems to break through the night on extraordinary wing.
~~~~~ And now a little intermission poetry and some musics about drinking, or not drinking, or not swallowing at least (try not to let your dirty little mind wander too much over the terrain of that last bit, okay?) in the form of this, a little poem I made today when a couple really good things happened at the same time (Joe L sent a link to the video below and D*Rock "Hey there, Kid!" Norris showed up not like a Christmas but perhaps a followingmiracle) and I don't know who to aim at for that... so I'll just issue glad tidings and introduce him around (Derek, this is everybody I like; Everybody, this is the man who introduced me to Rainer Marie Rilke) and we'll all carry on according to something we may have imagined about a possible normal.
Is it really you, after all this time? I spit hot chocolate in your general direction because I was gulping it down, drinking it in, right before everything and couldn't contain myself when it all got crazy.
4 ways to get out of bed, same quantity as we have seasons... and this one goes for when you're a little edgy and feeling up to the big tasks, like biting the big apple of your troubled, stubbled life-story geography.
I'm a little obsessed with this song lately. Dangerous, I know. Especially given that I've never been anywhere near the Empire State, geographically speaking that is. But get a good look at Alicia: she means it. And the JayZizzle, who's gonna stop him? They sing this like they know what it takes, what it means when the lights of the city mean love and hate at the same time and in my mind, if not in theirs, it doesn't have to be about a place I've never been, because it feels like a place we've all been.
As thirty approaches I think more and more about the things I want to do and see, the places that seem to call my name and have done for some time. I think more seriously about clearing out all the shit so I can get what I need. I think of the way they talk about the bums and brats in San Francisco, the street sounds and ghetto superstars in Oakland: talking tough, looking tougher, scrapping, running, screaming across the double decker Bay Bridge or suicide lanes of the Golden Gate and getting, getting gone.
I have big plans to see for myself, you know? Intiendes? This is una jovena planning to get some things done, si comprendes o no.
Or at least that is why I got out of bed today... we'll see about tomorrow.
In case you are heading out to the skating rink and can't remember your favorite song to request.
whoever posted this on youtube says: "ayeee, lol, yall are funny. some of things this song reminds you of is crazy. everybody leave a comment a say what this song reminds you of, or what you were doing with your life when this song was..."
memories have been creeping in, seeping in lately, and with gusto and obviously the poems come too.
After thanksgiving Remember the roses pruned to look like trees replaced by junipers--no less prickly? No. This is not a question although my memories often pose themselves as such, their voices lifting upward at the end like a branch, inquisitive and question ableto throw us all into a reflection pool of quaking and quandry (query and qwerty). The scene of it a well tended English garden... Or! thanksgiving leftovers wrapped in a gentle tent of aluminun foil O! those roses, arms akimbo restingfleshy flower fists on their healing hipsprotecting their thorny fingertipsbossing gently--don't touch they say, offering blossoms to noses not hands And I grabbed anyway at that soft flesh, shakinghands and came away clenching blood red petals goodfor tossing to the winds of the transatlantic trade route. A young chemist said to me today"the right mix of practicality and theatricality" I blew my nose into the scarf around my neck like an unkempt gypsy asked do you dance and he said no but I could, then accidentally composed a poem, myself. ~~~~ I do not deal well with fear, really none of us do. And my insides shrink and it is like looking into the sun. Make no mistake: loneliness does kill. It has killed other people but it hasn't killed me. It hasn't even killed the best parts of me and I have been living with it for a long time, much longer than anyone I thought I would. But I am afraid of it nonetheless. And I am sure it is some kind of default or if not de facto then at least a fault. I am afraid it will always find me, catch me off guard and I won't remember any of my skills or tricks for dealing with it. I don't remember even though I know how to write about it, sing along about it, use it, embrace it, wrestle it to the ground, drive it to my mother's house and leave it at her front porch, where it belongs, where it came from... and leave a note that says you taught this to me, brought this to me but it is not good for me so please keep it here and never send it back to me. Or mail it to my father's mailbox with a letter enclosed that says I learned this from the absence we both abhor and regret and it is no longer useful so just take it from me, put it in storage with my other childhood toys: the nightmares I clung to even when you worked so hard to fend them off with your snores as I slept against your chest, and the security blankets and cigarettes and road trips and death defying fights you never knew about. Or perhaps I shouldn't write to my parents, I should just write loneliness and tell it off: Dear loneliness you are not the only feeling. You are not even the biggest feeling, you are just the scariest and I refuse to keep you; you cannot stay here. Do your best but I will win this game.
Even as I write a cat stranger keeps me company, pretending to explore the frozen fallen leaves but really he is watching me. Then I scratch my knuckle on the cement stair chair beneath me when I shifted my weight so my butt will freeze evenly. it hurt but not that bad and then bled all over everything.
Yesterday was awful. Most of the days have been awful because the difficult conversations keep coming also. Tom Lombardo, my sixth grade teacher gave me this advice: Look to the horizon. Look up, he told me. Elevating your head sparks or triggers a response in your body and you will feel better. So its not just a Native American suggestion--it is scientific.
A tilt of the head means everything, changes everything.
~~~~ Love seems like a reason to hold off on the apocalypse, don't you think? Just hold on one more day to one more lovely memory of an apocalypse like thing that didn't ruin us: The Leonid meteor shower comes once a year, do you know about this? Apparently a comet left behind some of itself and every year we pass through the mess as we orbit the sun. We went out one year to watch it over the tops of a Gravenstein apple orchard. We looked up over and past the horizon and waited for all those shooting stars. It wasn't the end of the world but it marks an explosion of meaning. It wasn't an answer to any of our questions but I still remember it fondly--as though maybe one day I will ask a question and the answer will come to me like that memory or in it perhaps. I'm not sure what we were meant to see that night. We hoped for stars to fall like rain (which would have been a terrifying thing and would have caused a hole in the very bubbling layers that protect this crazy blue-green orbiting rock we call home) because we had imagined such a thing was possible. Those were days when anything was possible (life and death by fireball!) and that fact too is woven into the skies of the memory... all that possibility we didn't know we imagined. Perhaps we were disappointed, but the memory is so comforting in spite of that because, I tell myself, we went. We hoped for more than we saw and I am still hoping one day to see it: the Leonid or some other miracle like that in the middle of the night.
There is the idea that even a tiny amount of nurture can start to unravel neglect.
So I have been lighting the prayer candles and muddling through the spanish prayers on them. Santa Clara (always pictured with a lantern), ángel de la guarda (usually huge and beautiful in the paintings), La Virgin de Guadalupe (The Mother of Mexican Identity) stand proudly on the bookshelf and I sometimes think they are glowing even when they aren't on fire which I think means that I believe those candles are helping--no matter what.
As you may know today is St. Nicholas Day. I have a friend who has never had a real Christmas Tree. He admitted recently that there were years when his father simply lit a Santa Candle and called it good.
And that got me thinking...
There is a man in our congregation who spends every Sunday of the year looking eerily like Santa Claus in a choir robe. He has been known to dress up like St. Nicholas upon request and carry a basket of candy canes around during coffee hour.
As annoying as these holidays are I can't help but tell you that the story of today's Christmas miracle (yes, I suppose I do believe in Christmas Miracles even if I hate Christmas--I really like miracles) is about him.
During the children's word Pr. Bev dressed one of the acolytes in a glowing red robe and satin costume mitre. She explained the way Bishop Nicholas of Turkey snuck gold coins into stockings hung out to dry so that even the poorest children of the fourth century underworld wouldn't have to go hungry on his watch. She then led all these postmodern, anti-traditional, sufficiently clothed and fed children to the Narthex where they each abandoned one shoe, just to see what would happen. All those kids in sock and shoe marched back into service, across icy December sanctuary tile and then eventually up to the cushy purple carpet around the altar. I have to admit, they seemed relieved to finally be on the polyester weave and they knelt at the communion rail with their families as if celebrating Eucharist insufficiently clad on the coldest day of the year was, if not the most familiar or holiest way, then at least the most reminiscent-of-snacks-at-home way to deal with the host.
Just before the benediction the children were invited to stand around the advent wreath one last time before bolting out the double doors to retrieve solo sneakers and lonely patten leather. Pr. Hoffman told them the light from the wreath must be carried out into the neighborhood and who better to carry it than the half-shod? He lit two scrawny white candles from the two giant blue tapers on the wreath and handed them to acolyte line leaders.
I scooped up a tiny four year old and we both pointed our index fingers in this little light of mine fashion. We began the recession and I heard the benediction through the speakers so I used my light to cross her, in the name of the Father Son and Holy Spirit as her tiny shoeless foot bounced against my thigh. I thought of casual worship, and how easily one shoe is so often lost in a closet. I thought of cold toes and Mother Goose's Diddle Diddle Dumpling and how often I slept with socks on because I was cold and lonely in bed, even as a child. I thought of the rare luxury of warm extremities in my childhood and the pain of frostbite. I remembered the sight of my great Aunt Hett's foot: missing the big toe. I knew these children felt lopsided and vulnerable and thought of desperate parents hoping against hope that their son had miraculously changed his socks for the first time this week.
When I finally looked up toward the Narthex door, I saw him.
Saint Nicholas stood there, large as life under the florescent lights, wearing the robe and mitre we had seen earlier on one of our favorite 9 year olds. I noticed his face, red and a little tense but not angry. He seemed to sigh, or almost heave and then rested his forehead, just for a moment along the curve of his bamboo shepherd's crook and clenched his eyes closed in a long blinking moment. He was regal but surprisingly emotional and it dawned on me that the sight of the children bearing these little index finger lights, coming at him reverently rather than wildly, sure of our purpose and pomp, in awe of his very existence and trusting in his benevolence and existence, hoping he was real and generous... it must have been overwhelming to see belief wash over those little faces.
He seemed to clench back tears and whether any actually fell I will never be mean enough to ask. I don't need to know about that because what I do know is this: it made perfect sense that he would cry at the sight of us. It made perfect sense that we meant that much to him. It made sense. As we came near to him with pure adoration in our eyes he seemed to feel the weight of our hopes and his hopes for us. It made sense that something in him would release and he would be overcome with emotion.
I leaned into the little bird alighted in my arms and told her, "There he is. Do you see him? I think he is feeling a lot of feeling right now because he sees us." She looked up into my face and filled the space between us: proclaiming in a voice equal to that with which the official benediction had been offered, she let out the most confident little "Okay!" I have ever heard.
There is just something about Saints, especially Nicholas. There is something to be said for the way we light candles in their honor or under their portraits and raise a firey hope toward them. We point our petitions or best efforts in their direction, we march toward them in stocking feet and hope they will look down on us with tears in their eyes and be overcome with compassion and holy desire for what it means that we are approaching.
So if you still have that Santa Candle, go ahead and light that motherfucker up, give the jolly bastard something to smile about, light a fire in his belly because even the tiniest movement toward an adulterated version of Holiday Hope or Sacrament can move something inside you to remember the way all this mess was started so beautifully long ago.
And then there is this: all these seasonal greening (decking the halls with boughs of holly and all that rot we are supposed to do this week) are really based on ancient Druid-derived, pagan rituals. Yule logs, Christmas Trees and Wreathes garner their status from the same traditions that taught us to plant the Yew and Holly Trees strategically around the church property to fend off evil. There are things we do this time of year even if we don't know why and it can really suck ass. But putting ourselves through the motions is bearable if we look for hope in the details (notice the smell of the cedar boughs, the sap on the pinecone stem, the bits of bark the yule log sheds, hope the holly berries don't bleed even for all their nestling among the prickly leaves, listen for the sound of needles falling off the dried out tree we dragged into the house). It might be all we can manage so it has to count for something.
Learning how to listen is about discovering more meaning behind less words. Papa used to tell us that "it would all come out in the wash" but we are second language learners (thank God) and the cliches are reappropriated more often than not (read: another reason for gratitude). So when you read it you probably thought he was referring to stains or filth but I figured, even very youngly, that he meant that things would even out somehow. He said it so often and each time I found myself hoping (trusting him, really) that all the injustice in the world will somehow get stirred around, tumbled until its head aches, and its wonky sense of fairness will be adequately flopped over so that when we take the laundry out of the machines and give it a good shake and fold, we would find it was all there but a little more clearly. I thought he meant that the little lost socks caught in the sheets would be found or the coins would fall out of the rich man's pockets and I would find them at the bottom of the dryer drum and I would be rich.
But even more often than he told me about the wash, he told me Be Good. and sometimes I think he means I should behave myself you know: listen to wisdom, weigh the facts first, tell the truth or wait quietly, be careful, obedient and do my best. Other times I think he means I should be good you don't know: sometimes listening is impossible, the facts betray the feelings that follow, the truth doesn't arrive in time, careful is a myth and being obedient is not the best I can do. These days neither of us knows what it will mean for me to be good. Instead we trust that I am good, that I am the good I was created to be and that I should be that, only that, just that. I should just be. Be myself, even if it means I will be by myself, I will at least be with myself and he will be thinking of me with a far off loving look in eyes below a troubled brow, and lit up the way they were even only by the very sight of me, the thought of me before he heard me cry for the first time, before I had done anything to earn his trust or break his heart or make him laugh or make him cry, lit up by the hope he has always had that I will heed his words and whatever they might mean to the woman I have become in his care which is why he keeps telling me--now that I am too old for admonition his words have become premonition: and I hear him say it like a sort of benediction sending me out with a blessing to go out there and be all the good I want to be because there is a lot of good out there for me a lot of good to be.
I am sorry, but not regretful I am feeling sorry but These days you can't tell the victim in me that there is a whole lot left to lose. As I get used to all the ways people victimize and are victims the more I think about how much we have all lost along the way. And I realize I keep close to what could hurt me confusing it with what might love me.
What might love be, and where? There is no way to stop asking. I would be hopeless and lost without this question to anchor or rudder. It is the compass and the Northern Star hanging low over Alaska's Anchorage, the very place I was born: under this question. And you, my beloved, are caught up in it. Between the sails and the stars. Like the youngest stow away, crawling through the potato sacks of my story and loving every minute that takes us further from the familiar shore. Insight is not dispersed with any kind of regularity. the nerves and anger and anxiety will have to be managed, or at least embraced, as gentle friends come to warn--the chorus in a Greek tragedy, telling what we keep forgetting about the story and the ways it will go. But they are no more than that. They are not the players, we are, more important than what they portend or forebear. We are looking toward the end of the performance because endings are a great accountability.
So I have been thinking more about endings and reworking what I think about death. The death of a hatred is called love. The death of night means the world keeps turning. The death of a savior means resurrection. Death is not the end of the story. That is not how the story ends. The death of despair is hope The death of hunger is fullness The death of a tree in all its carbon glory is a fire-a pentecost and flames lick the heads of those called to hold one another, hold one another's feet to the fire. The death of a broken union is called a divorce. Death is a great accountability at times. It keeps track of faults and ending and frailties and beginnings. It is a vengeance brought about by a God who chooses life, makes it go on or go out.
So, no: I'm not thinking about suicide. I'm thinking about the way death is a part of life and that knowing this makes all the difference. There are so many things to see and find and places to put my self my whole self just as soon as I get it all there, find it there, right where I want to be and even though I thought I'd never make it to 30, or past that, I am excited and really hoping that I might!
All this time I thought I was afraid of the one big death and so I was living all the tiny deaths. I am, if I am honest, rarely afraid of dying because I see it so far off. Instead I am afraid of all the little deaths along the way: the ways I let go my biggest hopes, waking dreams and deepest feelings and best thoughts. Those are the deaths that seem to finish, seem like life is finished or at least fucking with me. These are only the little endings and mediocre dead ends that leave me maimed or scarred but very very scared.
I've apologized too many times wanting desperately to make loving me into less of a choice for you, to make you love anything or everything because I wanted you to love me too-- not best or first but at least, at last. I hoped it would be the last thing: that you would love me. That in some final desperate move you would love me but now I see that I could be first in some One's mind, part of the first thought and the last thought. That You can see me arrive and think first (feel first) that I am here, that I, me, my self (not only my faults, missing parts jettisoned, triaged ambitions) but my best whole broken mess is here. That You don't have to stop thinking of yourself--You can hold on to yourself and hold on, and still see me clearly.
It is as if there are hundreds of thoughts in the room and you know there are but they are not overwhelming because we are curious about each other--not displacing each other.
A chemical reaction happens when so many tiny pieces react to one another: I will learn to do this too:: to see your ideas and calculations on the chalkboard and among all of Einstien's equations choose to let yours matter, not before my story or my work but alongside it, part of it helping it along toward our greatest discovery-- the great equation-- the balance of all things bonded after breaking down because we added just enough of some mysterious thing to what was compounded since it all began and there will be breaking, splitting, new bonds and perhaps smoke or combustion from the friction of our mutual admiration. If we observe over night, donning safety goggles and tending the burners we may end up with nothing but the powerful powder of ashes: a new thing from ancient things and recognize it as love. You know the score: From ashes I have called you, dust to dust and all that and I think those ashes from that story must be some fancy goddamn ashes to have composed something so perfectly as us. Think powdered sugar next time you hear those familiar words, think a dusting of pixies: a little dirty, sticky, messy, unexpected, earthy and fantastic muddy, wild and grimy stuff from which we arose but in the end when the final word came: it is good resounded.
Don't watch the lyrics: there are discrepancies which distract. We're all going down to see him in all his dredlocked glory: Saturday 8p QCafe Interbay--Do come!
