jarvenpa's notebooks

There aren't cards for the dying

2010-10-10T14:25:00.000-07:00

There aren't cards for the dying
The leaves let go now

no epitaph
Not so easy for us

We want the flocked swans
an italic verse

the hallmarked time
so gravely pocketed

The Lies I Used to Know

2010-10-10T11:50:00.000-07:00

I miss them, the safe stories.
You couldn't fall

out of those happy endings
legs tucked under

The doors open to sunlight
& cornered gardens

brick paths, lilac & stinking privet
those transparent organdy kisses

I need a novel with no last pages.
Here was that truth

of rage, the burning sofa
the nights of smoke

My whiskeyed dad & Cinderella dancing
past dying. I was never sad.

Not Much Left

2010-10-10T11:46:00.000-07:00

Things disappear
I'm on my knees again
cleaning hair & dust
from the rug garden

fraying I learn
the knotted pattern
four arched heart
wild geese flown

The sand I built upon
blows through the weft

If We Had the Dominion of Dust

2010-10-10T11:38:00.000-07:00

If we had the dominion of dust
principality of glaciers
though ice shatters
though the Isaac eyed children
peer from newsprint
though we can't stop explosion
we might go hand in hand
a cut paper chain
singing our way wholly to paradise
those ivory & gold gates
the boarded walls of chrysophase
where birds fly up shining like oil slicks
& the dead rise from the mass
grave of our longing
lamb eyed, & so young

(untitled, still toying with this)

2010-10-10T11:27:00.000-07:00

Setting choke, pulling chain. Sweat.
Hey, my love's kerosene & sweat & the bills
to pay. She sings sweet as the meadow
lark, late & noon, my sharpened tool
all through these tough woods,
despite them fools & their black masks.
But one day, as I recall, the light cut through
the grove, sharp as glass, green glass
& sliced my heart. That little wire fern
right where we called that timber down
I moved it, took it, sweet green.

---

There is too much gone now. I tried to tell you.
Here the morning opens like ripped silk
with the slash of copters. There is still grace
the varnished leaves of the poison oak
their own perfection, & the small lichens
a pointillist delight
across our mother's torn body. Sudden
as a heart attack the trees are falling
& the hot grass explodes
The quail have surely their own quick prayers
Diesel stench & the pulled chains
Setting choke,riding cat. At the end
all elements fly apart. I want
to hold to this tough ground.

(Well, yes. Living in the north woods, being part of the struggle to save the last redwoods, I met a lot of people on both sides, including some very interesting loggers. One guy told me about saving a wire fern once, and I've thought and thought of the counterpoise of stories. But probably poetry is not where this energy is going to best spin out.)

Grief's not the blank screen

2010-10-10T10:38:00.000-07:00

Grief's not the blank screen
I tried to tell you, but then
love's not the black phone

the missed connection
Rain blows in
You liked my southern perfume

the bruised gardenia
your sweat slicking my skin
a storm of recollection

landscapes & torn pillows
the hot, bent yarrow

the lives we ended

Concrete Has No Memory

2010-10-09T22:19:00.000-07:00

Goodbye. Give me back the photographs
of home, fragrance of cedar & balm
Let's close this house of straight chairs
& let the gardens go under

Concrete has no memory.
But remember the white cups
painted with red flowers. Remember
our bitter coffee & fugitive touch

moths or kisses against
the broken screen. We were aware
of burning. It was a time of war.
Pretend, as we close the door

ours was a grave romance
flamable & stern, inevitable
as numbers. At your cuffs
the buttons are tarnished. Yes

love too hangs by a single thread.

All I Can Tell You

2010-10-09T12:18:00.000-07:00

for M.C.

You asked for my message from the war zone
I can tell you the peach trees have come
once more to their paper doll blossom

You asked for my message on fear
When the thunder sounds from the west
my child wakes up shaking

The names of the dead
are broken glass, shining
these shattered windows

Will I see you another morning?
All over the troops are massing
leaving wheatfields and dogs

You can't forget the babies
those little fingers, those heads sweating
that smell of milk

that smell of burning

Where the Fox Cries Out All Night

2009-11-29T11:07:00.000-08:00

1.
Festivals pass, waving flags. Children
go from the hills, taller, not looking back
I give up counting

what doesn't matter or matters too much
Hold to what stays
framed by the window or my two hands

knowing your face too well
& all I can't
keep. Small animals

come again, nudging shreds & petals
white footed
mouse, skunk with her flower stalk tail

lean deer, flocks
of birds
Sweetness

to all we give away

2.
Ben tells me bluebirds migrate along the ridge
here in the summer washed hills
old oak, six named grasses, the river

far below. We compare names of our dead
& guess the names of roses
beautiful women, old friends. Once again

you don't come into the room
through the far door flanked with roses
your dark hair wet, your eyes

green invitation

3.
I write you margins
green blue map, country
we never saw

contoured under my hand
your finger's whorls, folds
& intimate soles

our feet pressed to the separate dust
Here is a new language
the awkward reach

our hands unbuttoning
these white pearl dusks
slide of manzanita flower

sheets dried in the fir sweet air
If I meet you here it is only this
mountain lion loping the hot air

desire a clean kill

(an older and far from perfect poem. Ben, who is my friend Tui's husband--one of my few matchmaking successes--always loved the line about the bluebirds. And they do indeed migrate along the ridgetops here, bright bits of blue light).

An Open Window

2009-11-28T17:54:00.000-08:00

Cloudy day. An open window.
I didn't want to catalog
the dead We missed each other
There was no shelter

in the burning gardens
all the browned roses, heavy
dahlias, scentless afternoons.
I did the best I could

child's hand in my own
a twisting fire. Heart
I have been pulling free for so long
wishing only the air pillowed

my plunging body
but small things keep me
faithful, earth
& my restless children, pure as knives

each one sucking a thin milk, love
& suicide, those fair heads cradled
against my scars &
all this world's howls battering

the doors. Pain is the simple geography.
As for me, I too sucked grief down
with my mother's milk
Loss was the gleaming legacy

goodbye the witch's charm, &
my innocent refugees
here I pass it on.

(no, it's no really finished or without flaws, and it is a poem from the time of the Possessions one--well, maybe a bit less old than that. Another grappling with life and death and love and obligation and what one hands on. That was a hard year.)

Possessions

2009-11-28T16:21:00.000-08:00

for Tui

It's not that the dead go away
so cleanly, dawn absolute
as a steel knife

reflecting the driven clouds
& that we wake
our arms stretched out

the bed flat, smelling of mint
& starch, white
as those notes we never sent

The door slams.
There are funerals in far cities
a line of golden poplars, &

see now what they leave us:
sweaters & crystal, knives & rings.
They leave us possessed of things

with their hands held out
tossing us their coats, their old shoes
the bottled pills, the torn music

this terrible stillness

The first version of this poem was written 10 years ago, when my friend Tui, herself a poet (her real name is Anna, but we've known her as Tui for years and years now)--when Tui and I both went through a series of deaths and aftermaths. One of the things we remarked on was all the--remainders and reminders. The original version rather prosaically catalogued some of the things we'd each been left--I had some poignant lines about a sweater beaded with tears, but in revising took a lot of that out. I don't think I'm finished with this poem--or with the theme. I find I often try to write the same poem around 10 or 12 times before I get to what it should have been all along. Like life.

Fourteen Names of God

2009-11-26T01:13:00.000-08:00

Sometimes we are given maps
just a few blue lines

like the veins on our mothers' breasts
Green curves, a lizard

curled in your warm hands
this secret, all we own

Now in my dreams we set out again
towards each other

over the mine fields of this life
breathing the sweet air

For more years than you lived
I have tried to learn the words

the grasses tell each other
on summer nights

guarded by fireflies
as in that Tokyo sunset

when you tied my sash
& ran, though braced, still laughing

through the pyrotechnic flowers
towards happiness

I see you still, waving to me
far across the starfields

You have released the balloons
The ribbons slide from my hair

But I hold your faithful map
to the places of dragons

to that tender lair, the far
mountains, the acres of longing

Happy Endings

2009-11-26T01:08:00.000-08:00

It is the season of new growth
Violets quirk their ears alert purple
& sunlight is better than found money

Your son is secure in his candy-red
world, one more glad somersault.
Let's believe in happy endings.

Winter lasted too long
though the snow glittered.
Let's believe in wishes

granted by new fir candles.
Let's think it's a joyful
procession, this life, climbing hills

upward, & across wood & water
for a clear view. The sea here
marries the land, the mist the sky

If you walk through fire
still you always come home
to this ocean ringed truth

to this springtime life
supple with blesssing
loving each other.

Black Swan

2009-11-26T01:02:00.001-08:00

The black swan out of the north came
all warm feathered, eyes red, the setting
sun & all our dead were therefore covered

No, it's not like that, but I like to think them
held, those complicated loves. I like to think
them more than ashes or the squared

elements we return to finally, fire, ice,
the river you think I am. The old ones
knew this too, this ache, these small things

so it's not a new story, loss & loss. The moon
stays with us. The cats survived
the blaze. You say it was the house of love

burnt up utterly
& burning still

The Way Home

2009-11-21T14:30:00.000-08:00

In this place joy is our birthright.
We don't need to kneel all night
on the closed stones, paying our way

with tears. Come to the clear light.
The wild irises stand on the slopes
each one holding her breath. We can fly

arms open, empty handed, into this story
where the stars catch in our hair
& banners are haven, glory, heart's rest

Nothing else to remember.

(it was printed in a little magazine out of the Mendocino region called Sojourn Magazine, not to be confused with the fine Christian activist magazine with a similar name. Reading this poem now I see I owe quite a debt here to Mary Oliver's poem about how one doesn't have to be good.)

the museum, the prison, the madhouse

2009-11-20T13:58:00.000-08:00

in some long still dance of pain
you come to me
in a stone ship, your name undone
to pictures on the prow:
the lion, the hawk, the musician of the court

you stare at me with your blank eyes
and hold one hand free
waiting for the falcon to descend
or a blessing to bracelet it
litanies for suicides & priests

though I cover the mirrors
you are everywhere before me
in the leaf vein cup
of my hands, in the weathered stone
with its face of human grief

in this last asylum you turn
& turn again, bringing feathers & harps of bone
in this dream my lover, in this a death--
the delicate choosings; murder, prayer--
we are both dead beneath our masks

yet in this last we run
like the fallow deer
through the mist on the glass, the brier,
in the mouth of the wind, the wind month
where only the gulls are crying

(the acceptance from Hilda Raz of Prairie Schooner of this poem was waiting for me when I came to northern California many years back. The poem was written during my time in England, a time of many...dramatic life events. I used to spend a lot of time writing in the British Museum, in front of an Egyptian statue. The poem later was anthologized in one of the Borestone anthologies.)

Closing the Beach House

2009-11-20T13:42:00.000-08:00

Turning back like a window
set to the change of weathers:
inside, old cabinets; the phone
pulled from the wall, roots hanging
bare

I am come strange
a rootless garden

Only slowly words surface:
ghosts with sad mouths moving
staring in blank soil
and in the unclosing
wind

hard conjugations, lies,
the dead

windows where we cried
at the flood-
time, the seedlings bent, all
leaves like feathers,
blood tipped

marriage an old house
empty

Somewhere, Malibu, perhaps
the fish flap
silver bellied on the sand
moon spawn, fire
gutted on your spit

here my eyelids close
over my own

death
it is all fragment
an archaeology claiming
by touch, by pain
the doorsills, the dry rot

eating the heartwood
hollow

(this is a very old poem; it was printed in kayak. It was one of the first poems of my apprentice years that I really liked, that felt sound. I was touched to receive an email a few years ago from someone who teaches poetry who said this poem had reached him when he was a young man and going through a difficult time. He'd taken the poem and done a watercolor and framed them.
To know that for decades someone had cherished my words, reading his life into them, was a remarkable gift.)

In This Lace Orchard

2009-11-19T22:10:00.000-08:00

With you I learned to live in bed
& mirror, resting this gift
this salt & water: body
against your own
more drunk than fragile

& knew all roads were glass
& our grave nights reversal
since all comes back at last
silk of the turned apple leaf
hollow of finches

so I hold out my hands: noon
& I stand in my shadow
in this country of blown leaves, desire
in this lace orchard
where you are the light

(this was a kayak poem--that is, printed in that odd and lovely magazine edited by George Hitchcock back in the day)

Hexagram 36

2009-11-19T19:07:00.000-08:00

Darkening of the light. I haven't seen you
for weeks. Meadows unfold brocade
acres of embroidery, brodaiea

& meadowlark. Even here, back to the sun
I keep thinking I could meet you
Yellow book says: Be crazy

If there is no bread, taste the stones.
Suck this bitter stem. If there is no water
wait. Rain tastes of tears or kisses.

Missing your life, find it. Throw it away.
Hawks fly from the dark daily
double winged, single hearted.

Here in this mountain town

2009-11-19T19:03:00.000-08:00

Here in this mountain town
I think of you still, filling
shaky cups with milk

clearing the table
interrupted by voices
of owls & children

south wind on my face
rain bringer, one who rips
early flowers like sent letters

This wasn't your destination
blue starred hyacinth
above you, little daughter

(no, never sent out, one of the miscarriage poems)

November

2009-11-19T18:57:00.000-08:00

We read the words of the dead
poets, love or grief, pale roses
crushed in their still jars

quick steps, quick vision, the final dark
& all these separate pangs
a simple breath, and ice

the smile tossed back
as daughters run ahead. Death closes
all the books we turn at last.

What final word? The days grow short
& all our woods are bare
my life, though still the quick

birds come
where all the aching summer shone

(yeah, I've written a lot of poems titled "November", possibly for lack of imagination. It's an iconic month.)

In the Dark

2009-11-19T18:50:00.000-08:00

And the black car comes again
slammed door & wailing

in the dark, at the window
at the edge, in the street
by design or sorrow
in the act
of crying by fear, by love
by her own
hand, against the last wall

with their lost names
sweet against the dark, warm

with my last breath
with secrets
in pain in longing relieved
holding on letting go
in the arms of strangers
in known beds
with your body near me

2.

They all die. Are you used to it?
You tell me the pretty names
of illnesses, speaking Latin
against the coming dark your warm hands

testing the pulse. Spring was a long time
coming, shouldering her way
through all those snowed valleys
My love

the irises are once again
open, holding their hieroglyphic sweetness
They last a while, rain on my mouth
Touch me again

3.

In the dark, in terror, in silence
Reading this last poem hearing
the broken cry : towhee or black
raven Laughing with your heart
stopped With your hand open
Looking for someone Crossing
a street the room a bed Going
somewhere else

with you always before me

(no, of course this one never saw print elsewhere. I was pondering the various ways one dies.)

hold in the palm of your hand this

2009-11-18T20:26:00.000-08:00

one leaf
its own galaxy
how the doors of the wind wheel open

how your pulse blinks clear
entire
histories of birds, your cousined cells

applauding: green: sap: feather
all this kin
bright as our accidental time

or nebula
or blessings of this
joined deliberate flesh

(it was published in kayak, long ago)

Small Rain

2009-11-18T19:05:00.000-08:00

It was, I think, our fourth
reconciling
the shut house swept
& lanterned. Light escaping

through the leaves, the hinges, our
laced fingers
the crushed sweet briar
which smells of apples

Turning, returning
on my spinstered bed
we slipped the old
knots

you with your wrists of oak
& the winter spring
bound in its narrow culverts
poured out, & that

continual rain
drenching the juniper, the cloud
grass, the sorrel &
our joined & disbelieving mouths.

(one of the many long ago poems published in kayak)

Holding Your Name

2009-11-18T18:56:00.000-08:00

I have stopped numbering my pages.
The calendar curls back against the wall
blameless & white
repeating always the same day, the month
open, a smooth bed, empty

Empty the weather passes with your step.
I am always opening the door.
The rain comes in, blank, faithful as breath
holding your name. I have stopped
pretending reason; love is no safe room.

Though the stones are speaking I cannot
hear. The wind tightens on my face, the sky
broods its dull warnings. Grief
that mild bird has turned its head; O my dear
we cannot stop dying.

(and long, long ago, the Iowa Review printed this one)

In this inconstant heaven

2009-11-18T18:53:00.000-08:00

In this inconstant heaven
stars glitter like hooks; tense
as flame the alders tremble
all their edged leaves fallen

I have walked from you on these
closed eyes, thin mouths.
They tell no shelter, though the stars open
or the stones say their hard comfort

In the hollow of my throat
in my mind's bending, you are;
beating my one pulse
inescapable as light.

(yes, see the semi-colon? very early. Printed in the Christian Science Monitor long ago).

November

2009-11-18T18:48:00.000-08:00

Lines repeat like branches, barely
moved in this stalled air; all
your small deaths have entered
bone into bone, fine as ice

Your patterns crystalize: the harvest
mouse throws his life
pure from his own three wounds.
You will replace his blood

with river; give us back
tears neat as pods.
What loss are you growing?
What must we give

for our drowned hair; the rainbow
in our cells; this stellar cancer
intricate as Brahms; our graves
with their stopped mouths.

(very early poem. You can tell how early because it was printed in Yankee magazine back when they actually printed poetry, under the editorship of Jean Burden who was always encouraging.
And...from the overuse of semi-colons!)

You showed me the dissolution of desire

2009-11-17T21:19:00.000-08:00

You showed me the dissolution of desire
your unstrung body scattered on the waters
I have been falling for a long time

here, & without you, in this vertebraic land
rain as a rosary against my breast
& my heart its own drum. You gave

your skin to light the numbered passions
your hair for the warmth of sparrows
your blood for the orchards flowering &

at last the bitten apples, at last
the naked tree
this solitude of bone

2.

Is death a permanent address?
I thought the country visible
just beyond those blue hills. There were deer

wearing the sunlight to keep warm
there were the lost children of the bobcat
The creeks pulsed with minnows

the ridge with small paws & ripples
I would give my heart here, a glad lantern
a cup of succor

to know the path where all I have loved
keeps vanishing

3.
Yes, grief moved like the mist
over the yellow hills of summer, a banditry
that veiled your mouth, that covered

your blue eyes, and from this place
& from this place only the questions
echo & when will the rocks speak

when will the broken rocks speak
to answer again, to answer again
this heart's asking

4.

No one else
could meet me there.

(in my actual notebooks this is marked "in progress"...but I will not return to it. So I release it).

Touching the Edges

2009-11-17T20:05:00.000-08:00

I was in love then with the easy light
that slipped through the shutters of that rented room
touching the edges where your body vanished
into light or Florentine landscapes
each with its winding road-to-heaven
& that blue sky, tender & dissolving
I tried again, a kind of sugar & water
solution. Nothing came together
tears weren't glue
we were in those days young, unfocused
as my breath misting the glass
you held out to me. I wanted
to let go, to step out into that light
beyond our bodies' separate galaxies
along some braid of time turning back
again & always in that breath held space
before the angel's gesture or the fall
of petals on the perfect Botticelli grass.
Decades later the planets are still
turning while those inevitable orads
wind away & the summer birds
flare all through my distant woods
in fragile generations: no, here nothing stays
you are still gone. Over & under
I braid my daughter's hair
the light catching, again, for a time
on her skin, on my outstretched hand.

On the Climbing Bars

2009-11-17T20:01:00.000-08:00

On the climbing bars
my daughter stands & balances
long yellow hair in the clear wind

this seventh drought year
her sixth year
she straddles the iron

flopping over, hands wide:
Look! A bird!
By night she finds the Pleiades

& asks me what will happen
when the world ends
will there still be moths

& bats, soft faced, umbrella winged
Will the spring frogs sing in the mud
& the hazels rustle

Small bird, I don't know.
But we hold in this life
to thin air & light

(oh, I have so many of these domestic poems, and I rarely sent them out, and only a handful were ever printed. But I needed to write them at the time. Daughter of the poem is now 24, so this was long ago indeed.)

Another Grimm Story

2009-11-17T18:22:00.000-08:00

I am wearing your pink sweater
this month of the deaths of mothers

color of stolen roses & unscrewed
lipsticks, smelling of powder

& Faberge. I can't walk in your shoes
those rhinestoned stilettos

knowing the stories you murmured
night after night by my oak bed

the slippers danced thin as the new moon
the swans wings & nettles

This life's a glass mountain, truly.
It's a forest without roads.

Your sweater unravels. Your granddaughter
frowns into a dark mirror

smoothing her chopped hair. I stroke
this pink wool with my pricked finger.

(another never printed poem. I loved fairy tales).

Confession to the Agent

2009-11-17T17:03:00.000-08:00

I have concealed weapons
& books you can't read
pressed roses from Algiers
sand on my black wool

with this needle I have
knotted coats & covers
I have lists of names
& I remember

In childhood I sat at your table
my hair a fused grenade
poetry a weapon's belt
You gave me calendars

of foreign landscapes
A pretty child, my seaglass eyes
slid to buckles
& fumbled fingers, the last stain

Watch me carefully
I cross the borders

(another one never sent out. It is true, however, that I grew up with agents.)

Though I Held An Insurrection of Grief

2009-11-17T16:09:00.000-08:00

We didn't have the tongues of angels
but I wanted to stay
in your sunflower world, watched over
by the always-turning, madonna

with goldfinches against the blue
thrilled sky, & risen
heat. Yes, I wanted to stay
near your mathematics of sparrows

You believed every hair was counted
& so were you, translated
in the fluorescent corridors
of the very wakeful Trinity

& yes, with the hospitable clangor
of gongs & all the joy of cymbals
surely you danced then
to some coded, chemobright heaven.

(this one was published in the North American Review; it was written on my mother's death).

Long Before Your Face is Touched

2009-11-17T16:05:00.000-08:00

Long before your face is touched
by this summer wind
you can hear it, the sweet breath
of this world, yes

appearances & vanishings
words on the backs of photographs
the bright dead
we loved here by the damaged river

I should have known then
when I guided you along the ridges
wild oat & star thistle
when you braced your body against my hands

our breath stays together
breathing with this earth
despite the broken summer
the paths grown over

(never published, never sent it out; slight music).

The Small Things Hold Us

2009-11-17T10:34:00.000-08:00

The small things hold us
to this earth.
I wash the dirt from the baby's face
on his head the hair turns

a small nebula

Under my hands
he comes up gasping, astonished
in the fall air
trusting the light will hold him

if I cannot

My girl picks up the dead
butterflies like worn flowers
at the edges of the road
California sisters & painted ladies

she has learned to name them all

This hungry year
we cut pictures from the papers
she is learning to read: war, grief, fire
she makes houses for butterflies

lined with hard words

& her brother spells them out
in this fall, fighting free
of childhood as he fought
from my body

through the bright blood

That long ago blue wail
fixed me to this world
certain as nails: I am here
no betrayer

The road is narrow

past my cabin
lined now with the dead
leaves & next year's
young raspberries

they grab my hands as we walk

Come visit; I will show you
how these things
passing leaves, a child's hand
heart's blood

hold the door & keep me here

(never published, and I don't think I even sent it out, because it felt too discursive. But here it is; a poem that might be subtitled "and my kids keep me from killing myself, darn it!". A few years after I wrote this I did walk the edge again, for what I hope was the last time.)

Family Album

2009-11-17T10:29:00.000-08:00

Across the silvered pages
our shadows come
those small children
holding comicbooks & violets

grinning into the hard light
hand in hand as in the old story
At night, all night, they wander
brother & sister along the trail of rock

& crumbs, scattering some message
like the flight of wild doves:
gone. The air is bright
with absence. We were so young.

Leaning across the book
you tell me it is nothing
silver on paper
tears in wine.

(never published, as old as my daughter. It was written the year she was born, and the year my brother was released from prison. )

Letters from Nineveh

2009-11-17T08:34:00.000-08:00

1.
When the tower fell I was there
in my oleander dress leaning
from that high window
rimmed with rose & jasmine
not having your body to lean against

Here in Nineveh death takes a long time
also love, that clean unveiling
& the unfanciful bounty, body's truth:
when the skies fell how could my broken
hands not be open

who sought you so long
against the shattered daylight

2.
The days go by in Nineveh
& the sharp nights
Last week the sea birds flew
here by inland light &
I could taste again the salt
dried on your skin

Then it was always summer
we tried words
on innocent tongues: apple
peach, plum; bird in the wet grass
sleek hair, my new breasts
in your hands

To reconcile
death, lust, grief, love
takes such a long time
In these long dreams
I meet you, holding out a glass
empty or full, sweet, bitter

I can't guess where we are
to meet again; some white room
or garden, some pleasant hell
accustomed as my cards
cups & swords, king here, lost queen
lost summer skies

How was it so easy once?
Now at the boundary
I hold to what is left, the broken
light through these plum trees
the empty air, the unmade
bed, door open

3.

Against the boundaries
of our broken lands
I look for you, still water

these long times
In the south gardens
the early fruit is gone

& the foxgrapes come
& quince, scenting
the bare rooms

& unripe persimmons
bitter lantern
in the open woods

My children hunt for earthstars
the white angels, & the good
chanterelles

which smell of your skin
Rain settles
its familiar touch

on these intimate
bends of river, crevices
of sandstone

With my hair blown
across my wet eyes
how will I know you, my life

walking these dark roads

(this one was also printed in Prairie Schooner, back in the day. I wrote a number of Nineveh poems, but this is my favorite)

What We Know

2009-11-17T08:23:00.000-08:00

In the woods the summer birds
learn to fly, testing the air
& careful through sun & leaf the quick
fawn steps & stands
lured by roses and ripened plums

What we desire we cannot have

I know this; all my life
comes to this still moment. Between rocks
water wells up: call it spring
or miracle you say
smiling into the sun

on this hilltop where the hawks cry out

& the children pain
with stems of dried grass and wildflowers
making hearts & their names
on white cloth
your darkhaired daughter laughing

All my life these summer birds

have put on feathers & flown away
If I were
to touch your wet skin
to drink your clear water
dear my life, what could my hands

hold to

(Once again...and we shall see how this goes...I set out to gather up the poems of many years in one place, before they are all scattered and rainsoaked. This one was printed in Prairie Schooner)

The Weather Changed

2009-07-03T19:57:00.000-07:00

The weather changed
from that cold sunlight
babies in palm frond hats
crying girls
starfish hands & painted buckets

filled with sealight & breaking
glass possibilities
We woke with salt lips
lust a silica statement
gritty & sifting
in every crevice, in my long hair

Now jars of beach glass
smooth edges
grown children
I don't show the scars.

Love the Crevice

2009-07-02T15:48:00.000-07:00

In this insistent summer light
I am rehearsing adultery, the naked
sun heating your bare legs. Yes, all night

your wife has covered you. The lake
seems very pure now, our children floating
on bits of rubber, bright as sucked

candies. The sweetness isn't faked, but
don't trust me here. The snowmelt
brings flood again this year, scouring

the last rare flowers from the edge.
Love, the crevice is very near. Falling
still I watch your mouth, your beautiful

slipping feet

To Give Everything Away

2009-07-02T15:23:00.000-07:00

Perpetual beginner, it was love
you wanted to tie to all the worlds

patterns of fir trees & sunlight
running stitches & knots

donkeys browsing the hearts
of thistles. You sewed certainty

across the lifelines of your children
the prayer rugs of desire

At this distance we can cover
everything with our outstretched hands

the moon, the home, a childhood
of whispered secrets, oh goodbye

we learn to give everything away
here on these moving waters

Last summer I thought I'd tuck many of my poems here--and then we moved the shop, and then my computer died, and my files were lost...Time intercedes, life crowds in. It's been...3 years? 4? since my sister-outlaw died, telling me with her last breaths that it was all okay, it was all right, and how beautiful the flowers were.

SUMMER VACATION

2008-07-03T09:52:00.000-07:00

In dreams I go back

The fence posts peeling in my hands

hollyhocks with their spired yarns.

Lamplight. A scrawny cousin calls us in

free. I do not run.

The cedared doves ask

how much how much how much

They are fat with dark, with cherries

Moths beat out their lives

against the screen

Inside our aunts play gin

& Brahms & you

push back your skim milk hair

to read aloud

from books of maps & tourist lures:

o welcome to the heart

this old poem of mine was published long, long ago by George Hitchcock in kayak

IF THIS WORLD WERE THE BOOK

2008-07-01T18:47:00.000-07:00

When I came back from the far country

your gold beneath my tongue, yes

I fell again to loving

all the first things. I saw

through my half open door

the white lilacs glowing, entire

tangled constellations of lovers

clustered on each branch, and

through the windows of your body

my dear hell or that lost map

to heaven. I surrender, my life.

Stay me here with plain words.

If this world were the book

I have been reading

over & over I was only

looking for that turned & returned

story: lovers, gold, the simple rain

my body the page you print yourself upon

BROKEN DAYLIGHT HOLDS THE FULL SPECTRUM

2008-06-29T17:57:00.000-07:00

The fabric stretched at last

& tore, that patterned silk

When I open my hands

no one is hastening

in risk of rain or traffic

to come to me

Instead this expectation

of disappearance only

a list of what we see & lose

in the refugee summer

when the street names

are on my tongue like dark

honey, wine, & peeled almonds

I remember

your body’s comfort

the bones beneath the skin

IN THIS AUTUMN LIGHT

2008-06-28T16:19:00.000-07:00

I wanted only good news, angels

from a blue sky, gentle

rain on my face: your intelligent fingers

I wanted news from all

directions, silver papers full of stars

confetti & confections & all signs

declaring Yes

pure happiness is possible

clear as a cup of spring

water, inevitable & shining

but my astrologer never visits me

& mail, all purple stamps & promises

takes a wandering course

through the countries of despair

& desire’s canyons. My first love

writes from Paris “Le Volcan is still

here, & the bakeries & gleaming

fruit stands” He sucks the sweet

pulp of blood oranges

in the cool Parisian sunlight, his love

squinting for the camera, juice

running through their fingers. “Yes

hold it!” I call across the oceans

“it is too precious to throw away”

meaning orange juice mornings & wishes

true love, hope, & all the heart’s

brave confidence in this temporary life.

With chemo her long bright hair falls

Across my bed I scatter all the cards

like the blackbirds’ flight through morning

I long to read your face

to learn the transient & lovely

blaze of fully greedy bodies

in this autumn light. More rain.

No news, my life, from you.

So, no, it isn't really autumn. But with the fires burning all around me as I type, it does feel like a smoke filled, hot early autumn day. Rain would be good.

IN THE PARKING LOT OF DEATH

2008-06-27T10:11:00.000-07:00

For H.S.

My beautiful daughter stands

like a painting by Rosetti, red hair

stealing the light by the stars

of the Chinese mallow, blooming

even in the parking lot of death

this sullen century. She is

a generous lantern, here in

the troubled garden, young as we were

in the Asian war when we loved

each other in innocence & lust.

It’s a long time, decades

like told beads, & you watching now

by the body of a dying woman

by the breaking of the bones

by her disconcerted living & her

morphined dreams, by her pain

crying, by her scarred & tender skin

by her lists of doctors & the light

of morning, by her windows of departure

by the sparrows of kindness

by the small leaves falling

by your hungry soul, by the questions

of wires, by the tubes of desire

by the circles of the final flights

& see, here, beyond us all

in this moment

the blue heron still spreads out her wings

like a last breath

never published, not one of my best, though I like some of the lines in it well enough; it was framed as a passing prayer for a first love who was at the time watching his companion die a long and slow death. Oddly, when I sat with another dear love a few years later, helping her make her own passage, I told her when she wondered if she could do it, if she could die, that as the moment came she would have no trouble. "You will just lift away, as the herons do" I said. As she passed I had stepped out with her dog, to allow her daughter to be with her at that last moment. The dog and I walked by the river, where as the sun set and we turned to come back a heron lifted up, stretching its beautiful wings, and I said goodbye to my dear friend.

FIREWALKER

2008-06-26T09:23:00.000-07:00

Letters come from you

in the slanted afternoon

when I lie with my small daughter

turning bread to milk

You are chasing dream lions

with your lover

through the fogs of Vancouver, marrying

friends with artifice & fire

You call me again, after the winds slam

all the doors closed & the sun sets

in perfect position for your statues

Constancy, Desire, Loss:

shall I say I loved you

when the stars fell, when we spoke

through museums of innocence

& painted our house sky

Shall I say now I was faithful

standing beside you, playing tricks with knives

& baskets of forced lilies

in the snowlocked winters of that country

where I learned to lie.

This is sleight of hand

I have lately learned to master.

You write of beds, I answer

with roses: snowfire, the last time

& with the ballast names

of my small children. When you reply

love, the oldtime, that scarf of wind

binding all transformation

& I walk through the fire again

wide open we will have nothing left

but this asbestos calm.

Yes, obviously an older poem...the time does go on, doesn't it, and the small girl in the poem is now off on her own. I don't have my records at hand as I post this, but I don't believe it ever met an editor who appreciated it and printed it. The theme of it--reconciling old love and new reality--is one I have pondered all my life. I read Sara Teasdale on the radio last night, because every so often I have the urge to connect the younger generation to the fast fading poetry of the early 20th century, even--or especially--those romantics with their Aprils and their seascapes and the rain beating at the windows.

YOUR DAUGHTER DRAWS OWLS

2008-06-25T22:16:00.000-07:00

Careful, indelible, your daughter

draws owls for me

leaning her blonde head

on one inkstained hand

making her white paper a serious garden

The ink runs in groves

& crossed fields. Here in the feathers

she has made a hedge: looking

too closely I see hawthorn

& dog roses: summers

& that fall of owls.

Staring at me now she talks of dances

& the coming rain: here by own eyes

she has made dry roads.

Here is an empty house, & her hair

sweet lantern

& her eyes through the dark

a meticulous clear copy.

this is an old one; came out in kayak one autumn.

A Space for Lightning

2008-06-24T15:16:00.000-07:00

It’s not the end yet. Yes, I read

all the smudged papers & these

quires of tests. Love was never

a clear chart, square after square

with a space for lightning to tear

the heart. The glow of barium

is safer than this story but you come

straight from the ER

no sleep, trauma, cardiac

arrest, & rest here, a simple act

as I smooth your hair, fingering this & that

No clothes, no grief. You deal in accident

random collisions of cars & these soft

human bodies, cellular tests & touch

Let’s not face facts. Somewhere stars burn

& fall through the thin air, somewhere

a naked night continues & the world

is hinged with bliss. Love, meet me there.

BECAUSE YOU ARE DEAD

2008-06-23T15:44:00.000-07:00

They told me you can walk on water

on the path of white flowers

balanced on the surge, now in the full

moon. They say you will gather

because you are dead & know the way

now, where ashes do not matter.

Before you died the room was full of flowers.

After you died the flowers were still there

leaning this way & that, some touching

some not. Before you were dead the sun

blinded us, & went down. Now you are dead

noon & midnight hold their regular dance.

Do you really know the way home

& the undersides of everything? The old cat

sits at your bed & purrs. Your son

sees strange shapes, rainbows

& people going far away, their backs to us

on the petalled ocean, each step further, no rush.

This poem was written a few summers ago, never published. A friend told me that the local tribes believed that at the full of the moon, when the path of light is on the ocean, the dead follow the path to the land of flowers and the world of spirit. It would be nice to believe this.

THE YEAR OF THE MOUSE

2008-03-02T23:02:00.000-08:00

It was the year of the mouse

everywhere, sleekfooted & with bright eyes

& meaning—something—your mother said

& my own dead, with all her fears

as the petals fell, that dreadful blossoming

of bomb & missile. It is surely now

spring & death, beloved, as they say

in Kosovo, picking up the shattered

under the plum trees. I try to count

the broken bridges & soft bodies

mice in the walls, delicate-boned & busy

Surely it means something

your daughter with her bandaged wrists

mine violet haired & dancing. I am dizzy

with chance that takes so much away

the sky torn open, & our own hearts

mouse-still & trusting here

in this world’s feline, lovely glare

It is always a source of amazement that old poems turn with events. This was written years back, but here we are in the year of the rat, with Kosovo again in flames. And of course the plum trees who haunt so many of my poems found their way into this one too.

NOW THE BODY IS FOUND

2008-02-04T20:07:00.000-08:00

Now the body is found

I want to change the ending, blue

veins scribbled on her skin

that final note. Erase

the story: a girl runs

the highway of heat & longing

You can smell the diesel

& the unripe fruit, hard bitten plums

I want to start over.

She puts on her pink sweater

to go home, not this sprawled

star, green car speeding

the happy radio loud, no racket of grief

Take away the crying

mother & the tables of wilted flowers

Set the clocks back

Tape their clanging mouths

We have too many broken wishes

Even the newspapers fly away

magpies of joy & sorrow

We could say she ran inside, thirsty

Not a drop spilled

He thought he’d cut their throats.

The jukebox had bright rows

of lights, like the ones that blind

the deer, so softly stepping

in the background of the printed forest.

You know terrible things

happen. The moon still rises

her scarred face desperate

as any opened heart

THE TRAGEDY ISN’T THIS RENDING OF THE HEART

2008-02-04T20:02:00.000-08:00

The tragedy isn’t this rending of the heart

sleepless nights, torn letters

& all the pretty adulteries, the parts

we posed & held, the crying kids, the wife

understanding no one. All this life

of call & response, call, no response

all this life of screeching tires

& someone else is leaving, launched

into thin air, into that broken fire

It’s not the aching & the rut, the honey

edged knife, but that we tire

of it all, & turn, & wash the stains

laundering passion, ironing out grief

It’s that we sit here, eyes on the blue screen

& yawn, & stumble to our dreams,

ready to sleep, & when we touch now

my heart is steady, the curtains drawn

all of my children wanted to fly

2007-11-25T17:41:00.000-08:00

GARTH IN THE SLANTED RAIN

Garth in the slanted rain

says arms bend at the rainbow.

3 years growing: his own spectrum.

Take off my feet, he yells.

Bird need wings.

Take out the stars. Give me some.

In the wet grass

he marks constellations:

maple leaf, mushroom, twig.

Footprint, he says: Rain

walk here. Where rain home?

Questions easy as water

& already I can’t answer

We fast forward a few years here. This one was also a Christian Science Monitor poem (and bought the kid in question some new sneakers). Entering fully into the world of my children was always a great delight and a great challenge. This past Thanksgiving, which we spent at this son's house overlooking the mountains and the river valley, I reflected a lot on my blessing in having my three, each one a challenge and a delight in his or her own way.

and another of the baby poems

2007-11-25T17:34:00.000-08:00

GARTH’S LULLABY

The simplest of nouns

feed you now, a world

of yellow sun & blue sky.

You are my primary

color

I carry you, find you

to balance at

one bucket of seed, gold

wheat bag, an armload of fire

wood in wet weather

Under the plum trees

you will learn walking

& the snails bring their houses

for visits, & the sparrows all be

royalty, with bright crowns

We will have waltzes in the garden

& the river bring red sand

& blue feathers: soft feet

the wind will teach you polkas

while you sleep.

yes, another one. This one came out in George Hitchcock's kayak. The last line in the first stanza originally read primary/easy rainbow and I think I like the rhythm of that better, but George liked color best and for once--usually I fiercely resisted and resist editorial advice--I agreed. I go back and forth. I was so struck, with my first child, by those soft, soft feet that had never touched ground.

then poetry and babies mixed themselves together.

2007-11-25T17:19:00.000-08:00

FOR GARTH AT THREE WEEKS

Overnight the leaves have turned.

Yellow birds, brown, the thrush, the gold

crowned sparrows, chipping sparrows, wren

have gathered in their light & flown.

Being part bird you hold them

still in your dancer’s hands, light

boned with the star’s geometry

& all the fine wind come resting

after long labor, all

bright sky in this foxed autumn

leaf fire, storm candle

my loud October sun.

It's a poem that is...30 years old now, as is my firstborn. It was published in...let me think..yes, it was the Christian Science Monitor that for a while supplied little checks that went towards baby necessities and cut flowers in return for poems like this one. My baby poems are not my best; it is hard to pull out of sentimentality when the adored infant is drooling on you, and in this particular one I'm not sure about that last pun. But the poems I wrote the autumn and winter of my first child's birth felt like triumphs. So many stupid people said to me "how nice that you will have a baby to take care of--then you won't need to write". Since pregnancy was not a good time for poetry--my listening mind went inward too far with each of my pregnancies, and while I could write fiction and newspaper columns, poetry seemed impossible--I was terrified that they might be right, that I might perhaps have to trade the gift of my child for the gift of the muse, or vice versa. Any poem that came to me in that time was gratefully and humbly received.

THERE IS A SILENCE NOW, BEYOND THE FIELDS

2007-11-12T13:55:00.000-08:00

There is a silence now, beyond the fields

behind the boundary of firs

where the river shudders & smoothes

passed over by herons, troubled by fish

I thought I called your name

with each hard breath

I thought your steps, though you stumbled

would bring you home at last

The woods fill with shadows.

In town I can’t see the stars.

Is there something here still

something forgotten

what bright thing guides us

here where the world keeps ending

Got a report back from the recent WS Merwin (and Robert Haas) reading down south a bit; seems Merwin was asked to limit his reading to poems about land and such. I ask you. My informant said he seemed annoyed, but read with full intensity, particularly the latest poems. I am envious; would have loved to have been there.

WHAT WE KNOW

2007-11-06T17:18:00.000-08:00

In the woods the summer birds

learn to fly, testing the air

& careful through sun & leaf the quick

fawn steps & stands

lured by roses & ripened plums

What we desire we cannot have

I know this; all my life

comes to this still moment. Between rocks

water wells up: call it spring

or miracle you say

smiling into the sun

on this hilltop where the hawks cry out

& the children paint

with stems of dried grass & wildflowers

making hearts & their names

on white cloth

your darkhaired daughter laughing

All my life the summer birds

have put on feathers & flown away

If I were

to touch your wet skin

to drink your clear water

dear my life, what could my hands

hold to

an old, old poem. It was printed in Prairie Schooner--oh, it must be more than 10 years ago now. Sometimes the road not taken does haunt one. The person this was written for will be in town this weekend with one of the children of his latest marriage. Wistfulness arises.

the yellow dog poem

2007-10-20T22:12:00.000-07:00

YELLOW DOG INVITES

The yellow dog invites my animal

body back into this world

though we are older, white

at muzzle, gnarled of muscle

We run the dirt roads

under the hawk flash

& over the green fields, tongues

red in the sun spiked air

Such perfume of skunk & dung

So much rejoicing, mud & sprout

& our live blood pounding

The yellow dog says we need this

to leap like deer

to risk everything

I have a poet friend who says we all write at least one dead dog poem. This was a live dog poem, in honor of Buddy, written years back. He died today, very peacefully, nearly 16 years old as near as we can figure.

WHITE FREESIAS

2007-08-31T15:12:00.000-07:00

Somewhere a child is crying

All night the rain

Steps passing

Los desparacidos, the vanished

Heart in time of birds:

My son grown taller leans against the wind

Las madres, the mothers,

walk their circle of question

Und du, mein kind, wo bist du?

White scarf

in a woman’s hand

Will this shield you

from the wind, the firestorm

Voices in the night

J’ai faim, j’ai faim, j’ai faim

Hungry one, can you suckle the stars

Yes, at night with their dark mouths

Yes they come

with the words I do not know

& bring stone & their tears

and in Africa sing before dying

and in America sing before dying

and in Argentina, Biafra, Sudan: bleeding

Heart in time of birds:

yes, each month my harmless blood passes

between my legs

feeds the apple trees, the roses

But what of the mothers, walking

I saw him die, it was a long death

(her child of twelve) I saw him die

it was a long death

(her son bleeding) I saw

Yes, at night. I do not know the language

My child sleeps

in a rainbow blanket

Today I bought white freesias

Honey & pepper with their hearts-of-gold

& put them in water

safe from the wind.

I have a bowl of milk, a mirror

a white scarf, a paper of salt:

small things of the world:

the child turns in his sleep.

Small hands, of flowers

My lover says they do not smell of funerals

An old poem; it did come after night after night of waking with words in foreign languages in my mind and needing to speak out on all this. The countries may change, the sorrow doesn't. This was printed in kayak back in the day; George Hitchcock's wonderful surreal poetry magazine in which you never knew what odd collage might face your poem.

THE SUMMER OF THE EXIT

2007-08-27T18:26:00.000-07:00

When the mustard bloomed

crayoning our wet hillsides

I thought I’d see you

you who walked out so long ago

one step into the drunken traffic

metal & flesh slammed together

a famous story

I couldn’t make sense of

whiskey burning my unkissed mouth

Love, here’s the delayed letter

full of marriage & longing

& escapades of small children

bright flowers moving

with each exhaled breath

on another morning in the summer

of the exit of paradise

At the Barrier

2007-08-25T18:57:00.000-07:00

The languages are hard to translate

as we stand at the barrier

We know house, leaf, bed

We have learned the names we give

each other’s children, how to call them

home out of the dark sky

lit up all night with falling stars

When your daughter says

you are leaving, she gives me this

small rose of cloth & wire

for luck & memory

I slice open the bread & melon

We speak our careful idiom

in which the tongues of sorrow

are replaced: salt, bread, water

Here are her sandals

Don’t tell me forever.

Listen, even the stars fall

at last home to each other

On these black roads, in the dark hours

2007-07-31T18:28:00.000-07:00

ON THESE BLACK ROADS, IN THE DARK HOURS

On these black roads, in the dark hours

as we try to reach home the wild

animals are there again, with their caught

eyes & their fur not yet touched

& I think this life after all has been

a series of rough collisions

all startled fur, all muscle

stretched for a last great bounding leap

& I think this life after all has been

ringed by so many witnesses

the great eyes staring

& this transparent wing, grief

like a question, that slammed meat

against the wind

shield, oh this damaged clarity

reaching toward us, not quite breaking through

in answer to a challenge

2007-07-28T00:30:00.000-07:00

THE LETTERED GHAZALS

Dark nights. When you moved beyond the last

rings of stars & oceans, there were no letters.

Even the fir trees lift their arms to dance

when the wind spins messages, these feathered letters

Write to me, I said. I don’t have your touch.

Everything is gone, this alphabet of nerve, these letters.

Yes, those were good times, the sunlight crossing

our bed, the bright windows, spring’s love letters.

Only the past hurts, that amputated limb

the failed transplant, the flesh stapled like your letters.

Goodbye. You had, you said, enough of this

alphabet of pain & longing, this world in 26 letters.

You can’t keep things in cages. They escape. And so

the best prayers I have for you fly out: just letters.

Don’t you think I cried enough? So many years

walking dazed with lust, with your name’s few letters.

All night the cat plays with the mice. They run

& toss, reminding me of us, love, this life’s smeared letters.

Dirt on my hands. Another lettuce row, more flowers.

You liked the dahlias best & the foxglove’s curious letters.

Okay. The lilacs never bloomed. The children left.

You won’t remember me, having burnt my letters.

It’s no one’s fault, the way the soul jerks out.

I learned to love like this, shaping the letters.

Before, all was the word, I’ve read, inscribed

on flesh & leaf & stone. Do you believe god lives in letters?

I try to praise it, this breaking life. Someday

this body too will find earth’s envelope: dead letters.

I wrote this poem some years ago when challenged by the poet friend for whom the Reading the Files poem was written. Technically it isn't a ghazal; I later learned more about the requirements of that verse form. But at the time the deal was "write a poem in two line segments, each line ending with the same word, each segment complete in itself, yet connected to the whole" or something along those lines. It was fun, of a heady sort.

the poem strays into the light

2007-07-23T20:06:00.000-07:00

FOUR BOUNDARIES

Bloom breaks again all

along the greening

branches, bitter plum, apple

the fuzzed quince we can’t eat

without long fire & stilled

sweetness

The blue pulse

keeps its sharp time.

I turn again in the long garden

book fallen from my hands

Spring’s great wheel

will turn without me

bright hurtling world

hawk-plummeted

Love it for me then

In the rivered days we talked of water

My lips were still dry

When the rains came down

I left the doors open

If I hung mirrors

it was to find you

passing in the moving air

Where my child lay buried

I watched those small flowers

white violets eyelids of waking

I learned to hold the pieces

I learned to throw them away

It doesn’t take much time, my life

When I go down in the orchard

stunned with the breaking flowers

I look to see you clear light

my eyes blind with your sun

(I have been fascinated by the edges of things all my life, and the transitions between things. Where one thing turns to another. This is a poem that has lived in my notebooks a long while--my paper notebooks, that is. Time to let it come to the light for a bit.)

a poem after diagnosis...

2007-07-06T15:09:00.000-07:00

READING THE FILES OF THE SUMMER OF DEATH

Say it several ways: a cloud

small, in the distance, across the bruised hills

or the intimate smudge on this negative

fusing a scanned secret. White masses

blind us. Laboratory files

refuse grief. Say the stars are forming

at a centered galaxy. Say love has a shape

you’d know, beautiful & wounded.

Now the pain

is distant, let’s talk, say, of your gardens

the white valerian, the arch of ivy

Say there is a place the soul comes to

Say death takes our senses

takes your breath away, that beauty

the woman in her red dress. Say

it makes a certain sense, the lines

of white birches, the blasted lesions

like fireworks exploding

through the brain. They’re pretty.

They could be a row of daisies.

This could be the storm breaking

This could be the falling tower

Your hands tremble

Your nerves are naked

Poetry is the last resort.

I read this poem at a local college, upon request, a few years back. One of the other folks turning out to have been asked to read a poem (oddly, about my bookstore, though I hadn't met him previously) gave me a ride to the rehearsals...and turned out to be an off duty highway patrol officer. "yeah, in my job I have a lot of time driving, and when an idea hits I just pull over..."

The poem came from an inadvertent breach of confidentiality when I was sorting mail for a local health center and a report, complete with x ray, fell out of a package. As I picked it up I saw the name of one of my dearest local friends, a poet. And the diagnosis.

She is still living, and managing her condition okay, with the help of poetry and her dear husband.

another poem

2007-06-30T23:26:00.000-07:00

IT’S TIME TO GO IN

The summer sun was bright

sweet as licked candy those hot days

Cooling our bodies in the green waters

We closed our eyes. We believed

even the sunlight loved us. All our games

were dotted over with stars. We shone

in each other’s light & turned & turned

our hurts minor & kissed away.

It has been dark now for some time

shadows taking our hands. One

by one our friends are not here

I can’t see who it is, there, far

in that cold shade, the golden leaves

fallen all around, such tired children,

who in that darkness calls us in.

(too tired now to figure out where I first published this; I think Prairie Schooner in the last few years. will correct later if I am wrong; on deadline, but felt like flinging a poem to the winds)(well, my sense of who published this is correct, but the timing is off: this one is in the Fall 2006 Prairie Schooner. I think my sense of "a few years ago" has to do with the time between acceptance and printing; though in the case of this poem, there is a longer journey: Yankee accepted it just before their poetry editor was informed that no longer would they have a poetry page; thus it came home, and went out again, and again, and again...till resting in the friendly pages of PS)

yes, plums sneak their way into many of my poems

2007-06-22T19:55:00.000-07:00

THE YEAR OF BITTER PLUMS

Smoke on the mountain

you don’t come back to me

these nights of breaking

Ours was a china passion

doomed to edges

willow leaf or crow’s feather

We did not imagine this

blue distance

landscape of blackened roses

in the year of bitter plums

They fell too early

We pretended they were sweet.

Wild Plums

2007-06-20T23:48:00.000-07:00

For Frank

Plums ripen, greengage & saintrose

dangling worlds

in the leafed shade, staining

my daughter’s white dress

drawing the summer wasps, the ants

Between breakfast & lunch in this ordinary

daylight the sky splits open

or the spine, as a book.

Death changes meanings.

The end is not the same

If I were to hold you now

how light, a film of salt

& ash on my wet palms:

my young children

weigh my arms, those plum bushels

& though I look for you

straining my eyes against the late sun

& the wasps’ flash & sting

red rover, from your dark country

no one crosses over

(it is a bit like sending little paper boats out along the gutters, this flinging of old and new poems into the internet world. And I never really liked the painful game Red Rover. This was one of the poems printed a long while back in Prairie Schooner; it was on my mind because of the recent deaths in my life, including the death of the father of my highschool love. The man never liked me, for many complex reasons, yet I found I cried when the news came. And it will soon be the anniversary of dear Frank's death as well. The year has intricate memories).

Marly says one never stops revising (or something like that)

2007-06-18T21:04:00.000-07:00

IN THE SEPIA PHOTOGRAPHS OF HAPPINESS

In the sepia photographs of happiness

you stand in your unaccustomed suit

married now to the heart of a new city

wearing an orchid on your lapel

We think it will last, happiness

You told me of that boyhood

shooting arrows, killing doves, brown

& sweaty among the lathered horses

When you squinted at the sun

shadows fell behind us. It’s the church

of high noon, the dazzled orchard now, &

yes, I too grew up. It’s a dizzy toss

rice and confetti, bullets & roses

your scheduled seductions

In my high cabin I repeat

the voluptuous histories of light

where morning jewels the clouds

glinting like pigeon feathers, my soft life

still iridescent, shattered, & still warm

(somewhere on her own Palace at 2:00am blog she noted that..that a poem isn't ever quite finished. Marly Youmans, that is. Now, as for this one...well, some things are still not quite there...a bit too precious at some corners, and perhaps a bit too...well, I don't know. But I like parts a bunch. )

yeah, another poem

2007-06-10T16:07:00.000-07:00

HEXAGRAM 36

Darkening of the light. I haven’t seen you

for weeks. Meadows unfold brocade

acres of embroidery, brodaiea

& meadowlark. Even here, back to the sun

I keep thinking I could meet you

Yellow book says: Be crazy.

If there is no bread, taste the stones.

Suck this bitter stem. If there is no water,

Wait. Rain tastes of tears or kisses.

Missing your life, find it. Throw it away.

Hawks fly from the dark daily

double winged, single hearted

(I did a series of poems based on the hexagrams of the I Ching; Hexagram 36 is indeed "Darkening of the Light". This one was published in a relatively local magazine called Soujourners (not to be confused with the excellent spiritual/political magazine of the same name printed, I think, in DC and edited by Jim Wallis. I think.)

some of the nineveh poems

2007-06-07T19:39:00.001-07:00

my dear reader Marly (who is a superb writer, both a novelist and a poet) notes how difficult it is to read poems on a screen. One wants to hold them in a book, with the sunlight dappling the beautiful heavy paper and read them in some distant and lovely place, looking up now and again to watch--oh, I don't know, to watch one's lover smile or one's children playing or the way the clouds drift against the hillsides. But failing that, I am continuing to toss a few of mine up here on this screen. The one below, in three parts, was published by Prairie Schooner a long time back. There are others in the Nineveh series, but this was my favorite.

LETTERS FROM NINEVEH

When the Tower fell I was there

in my oleander dress leaning

from that high window

rimmed with rose & jasmine

not having your body to lean against

Here in Nineveh death takes a long time

also love, that clean unveiling

& the unfanciful bounty, body’s truth:

when the skies fell how could my broken

hands not be open

who sought you so long

against the shattered daylight.

The days go by in Nineveh

& the sharp nights

Last week the sea birds flew

here by inland light &

I could taste again the salt

dried on your skin

Then it was always summer

We tried words on innocent tongues: apple

peach, plum; bird in the wet grass

sleek hair, my new breasts

in your hands

To reconcile

death, lust, grief, love

takes such a long time

In these long dreams

I meet you, holding out a glass

empty or full, sweet, bitter

I can’t guess where we are

to meet again; some white room

or garden, some pleasant hell

accustomed as my cards

cups & swords, king here, lost queen

lost summer skies

How was it so easy once?

Now at the boundary

I hold to what is left, the broken

light through these plum trees

the empty air, the unmade

bed, door open

Against the boundaries

of our broken lands

I look for you, still water

these long times

In the south gardens

the early fruit is gone

& the foxgrapes come

& quince, scenting

the bare rooms

& unripe persimmons

bitter lantern

in the open woods

My children hunt for earthstars

the white angels & the good

chanterelles

which smell of your skin

Rain settles

its familiar touch

on these intimate

bends of river, crevices

of sandstone

With my hair blown

across my wet eyes

how will I know you, my life

walking the dark road

I Return Your Secret Names

2007-06-03T21:00:00.000-07:00

I Return Your Secret Names

It is still raining here at the western borders

drop on drop pelting the circled waters

The coltsfoot’s sweet spires flare out

beside the crossroads. Once, remember

we cut wood together here, rain sluicing

our naked faces. You were perhaps innocent

as your children. I was no more innocent

than the snake gladly in spring weather

spreading my body over the warm stones

luxurious & now & then shaken

by the seductive poisons of this world. And now

it is the time of marriage, your second wedding.

Your bride is lovely as a fig tree, a blond country.

You ask me for the angles of cold stars

You hope for stellar certainty, a silver

future, you who once crossed

this body of earth with gold, & do you

remember that savaged landscape?

I return your secret names, my life

written under your eyelids, my taste

of fir sap & young bitter ferns

erasing itself gently & forever

from your mouth, from your seeking tongue

(this poem came out some years ago in Poet Lore. And what can one do but let go, sometimes. )

Love-in-a-mist, and a poem

2007-05-29T19:02:00.000-07:00

You Thought My Mouth Your Remedy

You thought my mouth your remedy.

Well, the world survives even kisses

& tears & comes again to its own

birthday in a blur of white

The hyacinths are open, those sugared

flowers, star pillared

& temporary & the crocuses

licked with flames. Oh yes, I was shaken.

But it’s worth it, living

to watch these hills again

with my clear eyes, to see

the once-mated birds come back

all along the branches

I thought it was death, the dark

wood, but look: everywhere

These spinning Catherine wheels

this sexual present, petal

& stamen, unwrapped so perfectly

(yes, the flowers, although they are very much Catherine wheels, and are named the devil-in-hiding as well, are far from being the poem's hyacinths. But we take botanic license in my region. The photo is by my daughter, at the edge of the parking lot garden.)

a rose is a rose

2007-05-28T21:53:00.000-07:00

This is an experiment, totally, in my young crones learn how to do new things effort. Daughter took the photo of one of my favorite roses (it is a David Austin rose, Teasing Georgia). Let's see if I can make the photo appear here. You know...it looks as if this might work. What fun! The rosebush is part of my parking-lot garden (and sometime I may link to my post about that).

Waiting For Spring in the Continued World

2007-05-26T10:58:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking, brother, of the white peonies

that bloomed that spring our mother died

a ragged splendor along the boundary line

having survived so many hard winters

& being green fires, green bonfires at midsummer

despite the North Dakota storms, holding their own

electricity & stubbornness. Not, you understand

that they are symbolic, or anything more

than their own growing miracle, under which

sometimes the smallest birds sheltered

& other things as briefly defenseless.

They were beautiful. We did not own them

especially at the end, while the hospital

machines shuddered, while the lights went out

& the clear hearts broke open.

(some notes to this: it was published a few years back in Boulevard. I felt like tossing it here now, because I have just passed the day which brought about the writing of this poem.
Won't be long before my mother's birthday, when my brothers and sister in law and I gathered in a North Dakota cemetary to gently place my mother in her grave. Yeah, my partner has always complained all my poetry dwells on death and/or love. Well, gosh, those are the pivotal points of the universe.) I wrote a bit about my mother on my other blog, here.

another poem

2007-05-22T15:06:00.000-07:00

Thinking about the post I last made in my outside the windows blog, about Eden, made me consider how many poems I wrote over the years involving those miscarried children.
The one below appeared years ago in Yankee magazine, out of New England, before they ended their poetry page, much to the regret of the lovely editor (who lived, pardoxically, in southern California). And to my regret as well.

The princess in the lost forest

Late spring rain.
The two children of my house
watch at the windows
stir the cats, read books

full of bright pictures:
monkeys & peacocks, other
children with the sunlight in their arms
impossible animals, dragons of snow

or wind, bears dressed for tea
the princess in the lost forest.
Sometimes we turn the pages
together, their heads gold & gold

leaning toward my arms
& they ask about endings &
ever after or where in the woods
the goblins might still live

The third, who was like rain in my fingers
never tugs at my hand
or frightens the cats
She sits very still under her cover of earth

& no one names her.

Not a list, an old scrap of poetry

2007-02-13T18:23:00.000-08:00

I was pondering old love poems today, and lines of this one, written long ago to someone dead now, after a time of mourning and in a time of renewal, came to mind. It was published in the Christian Science Monitor of all places, long ago.

Into the Summer Light

Drinking cold water in the blue air
you spread your hands
which have entered the flowers

All night I was browsing here
spring on my lips, I gave you
clover & sweet violet: now

everything opens: there are doors in the leaves
there is a stairway of roots
& these catkins, pillars to the gates

Where is my winter of closed gardens
the still bouquet
all questions & black stems

Now there is only pollen, flecked hands,
clear meadow
where the trees open & the green shoot ascends

the autobiographical clothes closet, part second

2007-01-07T18:27:00.000-08:00

Thinking of the brocade dress and my young would be poet ,who did in fact go on to publish much poetry, and write enormous tomes of cultural history, and appear in Time Magazine years after we parted--a magazine waved in my face by my father, who had not much relished my illicit relationship with the guy, but who did respect the glossy magazines--thinking on this makes me recall another dress of the time, and another encounter with my poet-love and his family.

The dress was pale green slubbed silk, and simply cut. Yes, my mother made this one as well. I wore it to my first Passover seder, an event which that year--the year I was 17--coincided with Good Friday. My love's parent's had invited me. It was the first time we all dined together--my love, his parents, his two younger brothers, and me. I can only recall one other time in all the years we were together that his parents joined us at dinner, and that was in a London restaurant.

His father was a chemist and a brilliant man, with burning dark eyes and a clever, mobile mouth. His mother, a nurse, had the eyes of a wounded fawn and the kindness of--oh, of shade on a summer's day. His mother and I loved each other dearly; his father, alas, did not love me. Not even a little. It was my first experience of being hated impersonally: as the representative of a different culture, a different religion, a different life. Had I been Jewish, his father would say to me years later, he might possibly have liked me a little.
So there we sat, at the beautiful white table, the damask tablecloth spread, the little dishes of what were to me exotic symbolic foods: the haroset made of apples and wine and nuts and raisins--I think there were raisins; the bitter herbs; the shank bone of a lamb; the salt water. And the wine glasses, and the deep red wine.
And we went through the telling of the flight from Egypt, and the family kindly explained everything, and I tried hard to sing the appropriate chants and follow along, much moved by the ceremony and the history behind it.
And reaching for my glass of unaccustomed wine, nervous in my pale dress, I knocked it over.

Well, it wasn't quite as bad as the River Nile turning to blood, but it seemed close. A deep spreading stain over the white expanse. I murmured apologies, I tried to blot it up, I felt tremendous shame.

Across the table my love's younger brother, the middle one, two years his junior, met my eyes and smiled. Holding my gaze he gently pushed his wineglass. "Seems to be a night for clumsiness!" he laughed, as his wine mingled with mine on the white cloth.

It was the purest example of kindness to a guest I've experienced in my life, and I cherish him for it. That brother now lives in Israel, and has taken up some of his father's prejudice, and would probably not speak with me now; but I think of him with great fondness.

As for the dinner in London, yes, I recall what I wore then as well: a gray velour dress with a high collar and pearly buttons, my favorite dress during most of that decade. It was a pleasantly shallow dinner conversation we had--about theatre, as I recall. I remember thinking how well the evening had gone. No one had shouted, no one had cried. I was pleased to see my love's mother, and could not repress the ever hopeful heart that liked his father as well, that thought if we could speak to each other politely we could surely love one another, surely he would see my great virtues and my love of his son and all would be well.

After that meeting the kind brother of the wineglass wrote to report his father had returned full of anger and despair; the hatred he felt towards me having become even more intense, more personalized. I cried then, and wrote and did not send letters, and wrote very bad poems.

I think now I must have had an emotionally sheltered life in many ways, to have imagined all one must do to be loved was to be, to be open, to be oneself--even if one were, as I must have seemed then, an emotional young woman so very focused on her own life. Well, it was the year of my brother's trial. I probably did very well to keep up my end of the conversation, there in my soft gray dress.

What I usually wore in the British years, as I wrote and walked and haunted museums and bookshops, were very American bluejeans, with whatever sweater I managed to pull out of my closet. It was a style of dress that certainly marked me as from over the pond.
And sturdy shoes. I longed to wear the sandals I was accustomed to, but it was much too cold for my Californian feet.

And sheepskin gloves, bought at a fair in...where was it? Some town outside London, where we had journeyed to visit yet another museum and have yet more strong pots of tea and talk about life and love and writing. The nice man selling the gloves looked at my small hands and brought out the children's sizes, which were much less expensive. With the money I saved I bought a huge bunch of daffodils in bud--and surely it was only January then. Daffodils were a life saver.
And the gloves were too, coddling my fingers, keeping all of me a bit warmer.

I don't think I've ever been so cold as I was in England, so perpetually chilled--but I hadn't learned then what I know now about layering, and silk long underwear.

It was the cold that made me make a strange purchase on the docks of a huge and hairy coat. I paid 8 pounds for it, which was a lot for me at that time, the equivalent of, oh, somewhere around 30 dollars when that much money would have gone far. Brown fur, and I was a tender hearted vegetarian (and am still). Brown, unknown fur. I think now--maybe--it was bear. It was an old coat ("antique" claimed the man hawking the vast pile of strange coats and other wares) and bits of the fur were strangely rubbed. It clasped with rusting metal hooks.

At the time it seemed a good idea. It was warm: imagine a large bear wrapped around you. It was heavy: imagine a large bear sitting on your back as you stroll about a huge city. It was a very nice shade of dark brown, like--well, like a bear. I could never wear it long, and I finally gave it away to someone who, for whatever strange reason, thought it was lovely.

(Maybe the bear who visited me this year was simply coming in retribution for his long dead ancestor, like something from a child's campfire story: "where is my coat? WHERE is MY COAT?")

The next major attempt at warmth was a down parka in stunning, screaming blue ordered from a company in...I think..New Zealand. My love ordered a black one at the same time. I wore mine a couple years until it was stolen, with my garnet and opal rings in the pocket, from outside the motel room I was cleaning.

Though before that there was the shawl. I finally threw away the shawl this summer: moths had eaten it, and mice used bits for nesting. But once, long, long ago, it was very beautiful.
It was made in Edinburgh, where I discovered it in a little shop. It was the color of the sky in summer, with weavings of dry-grass gold through it. It was mohair, and softly scratchy. It was expensive. It was my birthday--it would have been my 23rd, I think--and my love of the time offered to foot half the bill. All of the cost would have been excessive, he said. I accepted.
It was a wholly impractical thing to buy; I wore it, awkwardly, two or three times. In various homes it lay beautifully over a chair, or on a sofa, until it was finally stored away--and nibbled, and nested in, and finally thrown away. But it was indeed a thing of beauty, and for a time, after the birth of my first child, I would line it with a soft flannel blanket and use to to keep my little one snug, noting with delight how the blue of the shawl and the blue of his wide eyes matched.

the autobiographical clothes closet/ Part one.

2007-01-04T16:21:00.000-08:00

People who know me well would think I am the last person to think about clothes; for years I wore socks in whatever combination they happened to appear from my drawer: red with green, white and black, now and then, surprise, a pair that matched. From a very early age my daughter perfected the fashionista's stare and the "Mom, are you going to town looking like that?" cry, which was simply a variation of my own mother's affectionate despair.

And yet...if I were making a list (and indeed I am) involving things to wear, there would be a number of outfits, dresses, little hats, shoes and other bits and pieces that still stay in my mind, in a perpetual closet of the past, like the imaginary painted dresses of a favorite childhood book (100 Dresses) given me by my aunt.

She gave me one of the first dresses I remember with love: the fabric was probably nylon, given the era, but I thought it silk, and it was creamy white printed all over with a pattern of tiny blue flowers and ferns. The sleeves were puffed, and there was a plastic, black, shiny belt. But best of all there were five buttons down the front, black plastic also, but starred with little rhinestones.

I was four years old. I thought it one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen.

From the same period there was a dress that shows up in the first kindergarten snapshot. The photo is in black and white, but I recall well the colors of the plaid: a red background with lines of sky blue and grass green and thinner lines of straw yellow. That was pretty, but best of all was the wide collar, with a strange fringe of--it wasn't rickrack, and it wasn't lace, and it wasn't braid--just little tabs of extra fabric kind of hanging down. I thought it lovely. The same seersucker plus tabs trimmed the two pockets.

For some reason this dress reminded me of my heroine, Dale Evans. I called it my cowgirl dress, and wore it with a belt that had jewels in it--three big glittery glass gems set in the worked leather. On very good days I hung my holster and cap pistol from this belt--though mostly, as I played cowboys and Indians with my rowdy pack of boy cousins, I wanted to play the virtuous Indian maiden.

Probably because I thought having long, thick, glossy black hair would be wonderful. My own was dandelion light and thin and stick straight except when painstakingly curled by my mother.

If we fast forward to my years in Japan all I recall are a series of pastel dresses: mint green, pale pink, pale blue--they all had sashes, they all had puffed sleeves, they were all of polished cotton. None moved my heart, nor did the saddle shoes I wore, black and white, with socks slipping down into the shoes as I walked through puddles. In those days what I most loved was the times I could borrow my brother's jeans and striped t shirts and ramble free, untamed, unconcerned with whether my sash was tied or my dress neat, through the wild woods and villages near the air base.

But I do remember a hat, because it was soft dark blue velvet, and fit to my head so beautifully, and had a decoration of tiny pearls. The pearls weren't real; one of the early lessons at my mother's knee was on how to tell real gems from paste, real gold from things merely plated, real silver from other shining metal. On special occassions I could wear my velvet hat.

And I recall a very frilly, lace embellished pair of underpants, sent to me by the aunt who gave me the blue floral dress. They were the prettiest things I'd ever in my life seen, a far cry from my usual modest white undies. They were like whipped cream, or something found in the chambers of a well loved princess.

I scandalized an entire schoolroom by innocently sharing my joy in this garment with the class during show and tell. It might have been then that my father began wondering about my moral fiber--what well brought up and virginal daughter would stand in front of a class and lift her skirt to show her beautifully made underwear?

In mid school years there were larger saddle shoes, and in the summer rubber sandals, which were cheap and worked okay after you got over the blisters between your big toe and the next one. And there were, the year I was 11, the red shoes.

They had black buttons on the side. They were well cut, shaped to my narrow foot. At night I would wake up and go to my closet and take them out, simply to look at them, to touch them, to admire their shine.

They were to prove totally unfashionable, and caused the in crowd to whisper that I was an odd one, and more hurtful things, but I did love them. And I was odd, wandering the playground murmuring poetry, carrying my New Testament in my pocket, trying to figure out the world there on the sand scoured desert lot.

That was the year my mother made all my dresses: one in black, with gold designs and lace at the neck. One with a high waist, in a pale blue cotton. One in green gingham trimmed with white rickrack. A red plaid with long close fitting sleeves. They were all ankle length, exquisitely sewn, and totally out of fashion.

When I look at photos from that time I see what I didn't see then--that the dresses suited me, and were more elegant, more beautiful than the tawdry fashions of the time. But then I writhed, feeling so out of place, so poorly dressed, longing for something storebought and trendy.

And we passed on to plaid skirts and pale sweaters, to a lilac party dress embossed with white flowers, to another party dress in pale pink with silver threads and a green sash, to yet another party dress, sewn by my clever mother, in a teal brocade with a hem that was scalloped and a little jacket to match. That dress I wore into college, and at the party in highschool at which a dark young man diffidently approached me and blurted "You look like a chair".

He amended this somewhat alarming statement by saying he meant, of course, a Louis the 14th chair.

We fell in love, and had a tumultuous relationship that lasted through highschool and college, through wanderings in Europe, and beyond. We still write to one another, all these years later.

And perhaps we should close the closet there for a while, leaving me in a brocade dress in a chair in a room lit by a candle, sharing my life story with an awkward and intense young man who wanted to be a poet. That dress was pretty magical.

five things meme

2006-10-23T08:45:00.000-07:00

The redoubtable (a word I have always longed to use) Marly Youmans, whose wonderful Adantis books will be out in paperback soon (and none too soon--I wanted them in the springtime, but publishers are as slow and recalcitrant as bears, it would seem), and whose blog, The Palace at 2:00AM is over at this place:http://thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/, has tagged me with the "Five things people do not know about you" meme.
Things in lists fit quite well over here in the notebooks. This meme is a bit like one I answered long ago--only I think there were more than five points in that, but let me think. Having lived in a small rural community a very long time I'm not sure there is much that is unknown here. Or at least placed into wonderful made up stories (small town gossip is more creative than most fiction). But the random reader may not yet know that...

1. When I was quite young I had an imaginary turtle who went everywhere with me, and took responsibility for all my lapses of sensibility and decorum. Why a turtle? I don't know. But he was a most convenient imaginary companion to have.

2. When I was 10 and 11 I spent much of my spare time reading the Bible, particularly the Book of Revelations, and trying to make sense of it, having been told each word was true, and being a literal minded child.

3. I have cloven feet. Well, not really--what I have are what my dear mama called "twin toes", toes that are joined as they leave my foot. Both my paternal grandmother and my maternal grandfather had this odd twist of genes as well; none of my children do. I have always liked my odd feet. They serve me well.

4. My birth was predicted by a fortuneteller to whom my desperate mother went. It took no great insight to predict that the young, heavily pregnant woman was going to give birth (my mother thought she'd been pregnant nearly a year at the time, due to ignorance and an early miscarriage followed by conception), but the...in family tradition...Gypsy fortuneteller predicted the day and time of my coming, and that I would be born "with a veil". I was born, yes, with the birth sac still intact. ("wrapped like a present" said my sentimental mother later).

5. I taught myself to read before I was 3, yet saw my first library when I was around 11, and first bookstore much, much later. It is not true that I was born with a book in my hands (my younger brothers used to speculate this must be true), but I think I was born craving the magic and consolation of words, an obsession that has never stopped.

So...Marly's post includes what she terms a mandatory thing:"PLEASE LEAVE THE FOLLOWING IN ALL ‘PEOPLE COLLECTION’ POSTS Remember that it isn’t always the sensational stuff that writers are looking for, it can just as easily be something that you take for granted like having raised twins or knowing how to grow beetroot. Mind you, if you know how to fly a helicopter or have worked as a film extra, do feel free to let the rest of us know about it ."

And as to whom I pass this on...well, there is the young Tourmaline whose blog is at http://thepointatinfinity.blogspot.com/
up in frosty, complicated Canada. She surely has more than 5 odd things to tell.
And my crafty friend Dido over at http://www.fivegallonbucket.net/
(and/or either of her interesting daughters...aha! tagged three at once there!)
and perhaps Livewire, over at http://livewire7.blogspot.com/--because, I think, she was the first to tag me with a similar meme, and one should return gracious favors.

a list of houses

2006-09-07T16:29:00.000-07:00

I realized the other day that I have left a number of houses, apartments, places throughout my life--and I never remember a moment in which I turned and said goodbye to that house or corner of my life. I was always traveling onward, forward to the next place and the next adventure.

It's something children raised in a military family know well.

I started thinking, then, of the places I'd left behind, never turning to see.

At the university gardens of the place I went to college there was a statue, just about life sized, called Lot's Wife. Yes, she was turning to salt, and sadly gazing back. Perhaps I feared to turn to salt if I looked back.

But now I can, and do, as so many of those places are doubtless long gone, held only in my mind.

I have no memory at all of the first place I lived, for I was there only 4 months. A small studio apartment, all my parents could afford. The train tracks ran in the back yard. For 4 months, therefore, I must have heard the train whistles day and night...indeed, perhaps for longer than that, as babies hear within their mother's womb. Might explain why the sound of trains evokes such longing and nostalgia in my heart.

The next place, too, I have seen in photographs but do not recall: an apartment near my grandmother's house, where my mother and I could be protected and cared for as my father flew planes over snowy wastelands and rescued people. The photos show me on concrete steps, hugging the neighbor's dogs. Walking about with an Easter basket. Trying to totally engulf a rosebush. I have dim memories, my first ones: my grandmother, gardens, mud, the black bristly fur of my grandmother's dog, Butch.

I think I recall the marble floor of the post office, the speckles, the little brass boxes that opened with tiny keys...but that might have been from later, for my grandmother would live in that region a long time.

We went on to yet two more homes; they mix in my mind, in the cold regions near the Rocky Mountains. I recall the garden shed of one place, and the afternoon with my dog Toby. I recall the lilac hedge at the other, where I spent my days happily hiding out, watching the sunlight come through the heart shaped leaves.

A vacant lot, spring mud, pink flowers, a striped snake.

A beautiful caterpillar, offered to my mother in my eager hand. I was inconsolable to find the beautiful creature a smashed jelly-and I was under 3 then. Death made no sense at all, certainly not death I had inflicted on something of beauty and magic. I cried for hours and hours.

The mirror my mother sat at, with her creams and potions and perfumes and wonders.

But not the house, not really--just the steps up to it. Our minds hold on to odd things.

From there to another place, another state, near a beloved aunt and her children (my father again away, flying). And again I recall--the lawn, and the sprinklers, in which I was sure fairies lived. The peppertree at the corner. The beautiful Martha Washington geraniums in the courtyard. Not my bedroom or my house at all...only the flowers, only the tree, and the play room at my aunt's house, where my cousins and I acted out plays I invented.

And to Japan for a long while, where the woods were my home more than the houses: first an inn in a village, where we slept on the floor in traditional style and my mother, brother, and I would walk through the village. How amazed I was to see writing that I couldn't read, how much fun it was to play with the little girls I met in the courtyard of the inn. We'd play dolls and tea parties and climb the huge boulders in the garden and eat strange little sweets offered by their mothers, who wore such lovely kimonos. I am certain my friends were speaking Japanese and I was speaking English, yet we'd play all day long, happily, fully understanding one another.

I missed them when we moved to the airbase, but then I gained the woods, with their violets in the spring time, and their little creeks, and the odd corners where I wasn't supposed to be wandering. Here a train ran, again, in our back yard. I'd amuse myself by staying up near the tree on the corner with its bell shaped white flowers like snowdrops, waving at the trains as they passed.

That house, a duplex, had two stories and a staircase my brother and I would sled down on pillows when we were left in the care of my Japanese maid, the ever supportive, ever indulgent young girl who would care for my heart and soothe my nightmares. There was a linen closet big enough to hide in; a space under the stairs with a tiny door, screens on the bedroom windows that my brother and I would loosen so we could sail comic books down to our waiting friends when we were supposedly napping.

But mostly--the woods. The pines, so huge and so comforting. The wild azaleas, the hillsides.

The place was surrounded with fences. I've never in my life let a fence stop me, and then I simply crawled under and went to the nearby village, where as in the original one I was greeted with tenderness and kindness. I brought what I thought of as great treasures to my friends: comic books. They talked with me, I talked to them. Again--surely they spoke Japanese, surely I did not, not beyond the simplest polite phrases.

And the winds of the typhoons, that nearly lifted me from the ground.

And the sight, every day, of Mt Fujiyama, snow crowned and perfect. I still dream of that mountain.

Briefly, for--what--a week perhaps--we stayed on the 3 by 5 mile island, Wake Island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. For, journeying back to the United States on a cargo plane, with my parents and my baby brother and my other brother, I couldn't sleep. My seat was over the wing of the four propeller airplane, and I looked out to the stars--I have always loved flying--and then saw the fire. Outside my window one of the propellers had sparks and flames coming from it. I thought it one of the most beautiful things I'd seen in my life, and woke my father so that he could enjoy it.

I thought he looked a little serious as he went to talk with the pilot. And then--another of the propellers started doing spectacular things. Both of them on my side! What beauty! What fun!

In all, three of the four propellers caught fire that night. It is a testament to my father's training and self control--and to my innocent mind--that I wasn't afraid in the slightest.

Fortunately the pilot was able to make a crash landing at Wake Island, where we were fed shoestring potatoes and canned prunes. I thought that was fun as well.
It took a while to get the airplane repaired, and in the meantime we stayed in a tiny house on the island, and spent the days walking the beaches. There were ships from the second world war; there were machine guns, there were signs still vivid of terrible loss. My father told me stories as we walked, stories of death and bravery and loss and honor. The ship--it was Japanese--yes, all the officers died there, rather than surrender.

I think it was my first real sense of what war was, though certainly Japan had had its hard memories, and Korea was raging then.

I picked up sea shells and stared at the perfect ocean.

The home we next found was a tract home in Southern California: row after row of identical houses on bare earth. Probably there had been orange groves there before, but now there was dust. I had a corner bedroom with window boxes (very nice for sneaking my cats into my bed come nightfall). My mother planted a Japanese garden in the front yard, astonishing the neighbors.

And again--I don't recall the house as much as I recall the plants outside, the canna lilies along the side of the house, the garden in front. Perhaps plants have always mattered more to me than interiors.

From there to the desert, to two houses: one on a street lined with elm trees, whose seeds covered the rutted roads in the autumn--or whenever those seeds fell--spring? fall? I don't know. A brick patio and a pyracantha, red berried, against a wall. Clover in the grass. My mother was so lonely here, I was lonely as well, uprooted. Down the back alley lived a girl my age whose mother was Russian. The mother read Pasternak to me in Russian, and told me to read Dr. Zhivago, which had just been translated (and I did; ever eager for a new book). The daughter was sullen and sad and loved to pull my long hair fiercely at every opportunity--I stopped visiting, but missed the wistful Russian mother a lot.

And then to a new home, overlooking a stretch of sand and Joshua trees. I had a room painted pale yellow; there were sliding glass doors to the yard. My mother planted a red rose and a white rose. I planted an apple tree with my brothers. We trained honeysuckle up the bare walls. Could I tell you how the rooms of that house were laid out? No. Could I describe every plant we put into the gardens? Of course.

And the hills beyond, desert hills, where I'd walk, disturbing jack rabbits and deer, finding strange flowers and plants, longing for the ocean.

After our next move we rented a very cheap apartment in a beach town. My brothers and I took turns sleeping on the floor or the one bed. There was an ugly magenta throw rug in the hall, and a few overdue library books left by the previous tenant (we returned them).

A more elaborate apartment: two stories, a corner room whose windows looked into the palm trees, where I would live for a time. And then a house, Spanish style, with fruit trees and garden space. I barely remember my room there, but I do remember the trees so well. The old apricot tree was my refuge and my writing space. The tame blue jays would sit with me there, and my white cat would pace below, quite disgusted with the feathery company I was keeping. We had orange trees, and an avocado, and I planted daffodils and forget me nots and mixed flowers of every sort, a riot of flowers.

Three rooms in a run down part of another town. The rent was low, I could pay it and pay my bills for college. The sofa was ugly plastic, the bed was lumpy. The kitchen had green tile. If you stood on tiptoes in the bathroom and twisted to one side you could see a square inch of the ocean.
I put up bookshelves, put my books in place, and was at home.

From there to a small cottage on the edge of a canal. I loved this house dearly, and it is odd to think that I do not recall the moment I walked away from it forever. In the front yard was a huge acacia tree. The main room had windows all around, and I made deep orange curtains. My lover of the time (a sad, sad story that) and I had a mattress (covered with a orange spread). We had a picnic table as a combination dining room table and work space. I bought a small graceful table to place near the little fireplace, and put flowers there. I sewed a stack of giant pillows, because we couldn't afford chairs, and we put straw matting down for carpeting (shades of my Japanese childhood). My lover's television was banished to the little alcove off the miniscule kitchen.
I planted flowers, all sorts of flowers, in that sandy soil. I put up bookshelves. I loved every corner of that crumbling cottage that so shocked my father--the peeling linoleum the cracked walls. I loved my lover too, but with the curious detachment that sometimes comes over me I realized the relationship had no real future. He was on a very...structured path. I was a radical, a poet, and would be, ultimately, a disadvantage to his career.

That lovely little white cottage saw storms of tears.

For a time my home was my grandmother's tiny apartment, as I saved money for an escape to Europe to join..yes, another lover. (My family was shocked, again). Such a perfect little place she had, but what was better was the evenings talking with her as I worked on a quilt.

The places of the first European adventure: a London apartment where I wasn't supposed to exist (I spent my days wandering London and at night slept on a mattress that was hidden during the day). A left bank hotel where my love and I shared a bed that must have been stuffed with horsehair: it was lumpy and hard and dusty. My first day I took all the bedding off, and scrubbed the place top to bottom. There was a desk looking out to the courtyard, hot water in a tiny sink, ugly curtains. I covered the walls with my paintings and bought plants to sit in the window: my Parisian garden.

Brief stays in a number of other countries--the steep Amsterdam steps, the place in Berlin that was shared with a guy who worked nights and was...kind of odd. The Bonn hotel with feather beds. The Florence place with the window that looked out--to a wall. The crumbling place in Venice, where light danced on the ceiling. And most of all, Portugal, where the air was washed with such light, and our tiny room was full of insects of all sorts, but the ocean was pure--and the food delightful.

A month on the floor of a friend's library room in Boston, then a house in New Haven, with a secret room at the top of the building and a long hallway. We painted everything sky blue.

A house in Kent, with apple trees and roses--another house that caught my heart so completely. And yet--I don't recall at all the moment we left it, shutting the door, going to catch a train and leave the village after more than a year...

The tiny cabin by the river, a house in town: Miss Murphy's garden. Another riverside cabin, and then...the cabin in the woods, hand built, now being ravaged by the bear visiting. We'll reshape and rebuild.

But still--how odd that I never paused, at any time, on the threshold of these homes, to say goodbye.

cat-alog (okay, bad pun)

2006-05-18T16:52:00.000-07:00

My cats have been gazing at me lately, sending thoughts like "so...you went and listed all those dogs. What about the cats in your life? What are we, little dust rags of the cosmos?"

And certainly, my life has had cats in it. Cats sprawled on my bed, cats following me to school, cats pouncing on my toes, cats perched on the computer monitor now as I type, and try to move their kitty tails out of the screen view.

My first kitten was a gift from my aunt. I was four, the cat was tiny, grey, striped. I was in bed with one of the zillion childhood diseases that hit me in my 4th year, while my father was far away once again and my mother and little brother were staying in a small apartment owned by my aunt and uncle, right next door to their big house, where my four rowdy boy cousins also dwelled. My aunt--her birthday is coming up in a couple days, she will be 89--coddled and adored me as the daughter she had wished to have, but never did. I was bored, fretful, scratchy (it was chicken pox or measles or something like that; I had one disease after another during that year). In walked my beautiful aunt with a little bundle of spitting, clawing kitten liveliness.

I named her Katie (I had a book about Katie the Kitten, and this one looked like the gray striped cat in the book). I thought she was a lovely, elegant, and wonderful companion. Katie, alas, was hit by a car not far from our apartment; I remember one of the neighbor boys saying he saw my cat, dead. I remember my denial, and my tears.

My aunt, resourceful and loving, produced a second little striped kitten. Her name was Lucy. Lucy loved to sleep under the covers, waking to pounce on my restless feet as though they were little mice. When we left to join my father in Japan, Lucy went to live with my mother's stepmother, where, I was assured, she would be loved and coddled, and when we came back to the US I could, if I liked, reclaim her.

But Lucy too met a sad end, under the wheels of that gentle grandmother's car. I learned of her end one day as I asked my mother what dear Grandma Ellen had to say about Lucy. Long pause, and then the story--Lucy had run to greet her, Ellen hadn't seen her, she'd slipped beneath the wheels. I tried very hard not to cry.

In Japan we had goldfish, who jumped from their too small bowl, and a parakeet named Cleo and a canary named Marc Antony.

When we did return, after some years away, to the U.S., it was Grandma Ellen who introduced me to my next cat. Or cats, for there were two cats, two kittens whose mother was the blue eyed, long haired white Daisy, beloved of Ellen. The big black and white kitten was for my brother, the small white one, with a smudge of pale gray on her forehead, was mine. And she was mine, wholly mine, though my brother's cat was quite a sweet cat, vocal and fluffy, demanding and clownish. He was called Blackie; the long haired white female I was so excited to have for my own I called Mitzi. She had green eyes, and as she matured lost the baby smudge on her forehead, becoming purest white. Blackie wandered to a neighbors driveway--and, well, cars and cats in my life never mixed well. My brother and I, walking the long blocks to school, saw him lying there. "What a lazy cat you have!" I teased, and we walked up to get him.
I couldn't stop sobbing all that day at school. My teacher, concerned at my grief, offered me a little stray calico kitten to take home. Mitzi would have none of this, and the calico had to go back.

Mitzi moved with our traveling family from post to post, from house to apartment, across the state, indignantly yowling in cardboard boxes held on my lap as I murmured to her "It'll be okay, you'll see". When she first came to our family my father had insisted that cats should live outside. Many a night I took the screen off my window and called the cats in to sleep in my bed; after a few weeks of this, and some tearful conversations with my inwardly soft hearted father, Mitzi, and Blackie till he died, were permitted to be indoor cats who went outdoors when they wished, and only when they wished.

Mitzi was my confidante, the first listener to my poetry, the subject of many of my drawings. She was poised, elegant, and supremely confident. In one place my room was on a second story, facing into palm trees where doves nested. Mitzi spent many afternoons in full on attack-stalk mode, muttering bad kitty curses to the birds outside. The birds ignored her.

My mother pampered Mitzi. She didn't eat regular catfood, but special bits of meat from the butcher, and little dishes of peas, and tastes of melon. She could detect a pastry from the other end of the house and would arrive to demand her share.

Like all the cats I've known, Mitzi had a sense of proper placement for admiration, and when we had visitors would strike elegant poses against darker backgrounds, which showed off her silky white fur.

When I left home at last, I left Mitzi in the care of my mother, who, truth be told, had done a lot more tending of her than I had. Oh yes, she was my cat--but my mother washed the cat dishes and looked to her comfort. And my life was pretty uncertain; I thought Mitzi, then..what, 12 or 13--would feel better in her house with the orange trees in the back garden. Much much later I would learn that she had the habit of strolling down the row of fences to taunt the basset hounds who lived with one of the local librarians. (I would learn this only after Mitzi had long since passed to other dimensions, and I had met and worked with that librarian, befriending her family, and moved to the far northern area in which I live now. In a random conversation she refered to that damn white cat...and we realized we had lived only houses away from each other).
After my parents' divorce the house needed to be sold. I was far away. The woman next door, who was an invalid, confined to her home, had befriended Mitzi, or vice versa--she'd dart through the windows and sit with her. This woman gave my lovely white cat a home until the end of her life--Mitzi, still coddled, still adored, lived longer than most cats, happy to listen to whatever secrets her new friend cared to share with her.

Then there were the two kittens given me by a boyfriend with whom I would end up living for 9 very difficult and heartbreaking months. In kindness he gave me the kittens--two little calicos, one silky gray, one brightly splotched. I called the gray one Daphne and the bright one Bruji. Bruji vanished from the cottage I was renting; Daphne got pregnant and produced a litter of kittens I gave away. She would be my last unspayed cat. She was a sweet cat who deserved more than the distracted and distraught person I was during that time; when I fled to Europe a casual friend took her, and I do truly hope she had a good life. My boyfriend of the time turned out to dislike cats--though lately I have recontacted him and found cats did take possession of his heart at last after all; he has two indulged Persians.

There were, briefly, two calicos on the east coast with yet another live in love--and again, he, who disliked cats, was the one who brought them in from the street and called them unpronounceable Mayan names (he was reading Charles Olson that year). When we returned to Europe the two went to live with a pair of tweedy women who studied Ancient Greek.
The cats of England, none of them my own, ran heavily to black and white ones in Kent, where I was working on a bad novel. I used to come on them while out walking, and stop and talk with them--I've never resisted a conversation with a cat.

Once on the northcoast, having disrupted my lifeplan and settled into a quiet existence, the cats showed up in droves. Often pregnant (Daphne may have been my last unspayed cat, but I have had many a desperate mother come into my life). There was Celeste, a brilliant tabby. There was a calico who went between my little house and the mansion on the hill owned by the richest man in my area. Of course this calico--yes, pregnant--had her kittens at my place. There was little black Calamity, who was seized by a hawk--a strange and upsetting thing to witness. There was Felicity (I thought I'd better give my cats more cheerful names). There was Gwendolyn who came with Tasha the wolf dog. Gwendolyn was quite an amazing cat. She was so enormous I thought surely she must be pregnant, but she wasn't. Gwendolyn would sit in my bird feeder, fluff birdseed over her fur, and draw sparrows into her mouth by sheer hypnotic will. Once I realized what was happening I removed the bird feeder, but Gwendolyn was amazing, and lethal. And there was poor injured Cherie, with her damaged spine, who gave birth to a litter of kittens. They died, except for the black Willow, whom I bottle fed as her mother lay at the vet hospital, where the kind doctor stayed up all night watching over her. Cherie lived, though she never had control of her bladder or back legs much after that, and Willow became a huge and beautiful cat.

Willow died of rat poison. All my neighbors denied using such things. I have rarely been so angry and so sad and so powerless as when I watched over her death.

And there were the 16 cats my partner had when I joined him in our cabin in the woods. At least 16. All abandoned waifs of one sort or another. Tutty, the gray male; Apache, Groucho, Nicole, Pan...I wonder if I asked him now if he would remember all their names. Probably. Nicole, an orange and white female, mother of a batch of kittens (she'd been pregnant when dropped off on the road near the cabin) had feline leukemia, which raged through the group. My cats didn't fall to the disease, despite my grave fears as we joined families.

And with the birth of our daughter, some years later, somehow more cats came. My partner's original tribe of cats had pretty much died off; Gwendolyn remained, until one day she simply died of what seemed to be a heart attack, strong till the end.

So my daughter grew up with Perdita, a little calico, who took her as her own. There were also Gretel and Oliver, a pair of grey and white siblings, and Rose, who was found in a drain pipe. Rose was black, but had red highlights in her fur. And Windy, whose gray fur, said my girl, looked like the wind in the clouds, and Radish, who was orange.
Perdita followed my daughter like a shadow, slept on her pillow, brought her dead mice. When, at 17, my daughter went away on a two week trip--her first trip away from home--one day Perdita came to me, sighed, turned around, lay down, and died. I've never seen a cat die so quietly, quickly, and with determination. It was as if she was assured her girl had grown up, left the nest, and her job was over.
Telling my daughter was one of the harder things I've done.

There was Princess Meow. A scawny, starving ugly kitten she darted into our bookshop one day holding a squeaking mouse in her teeth--or so we thought. She dropped the "mouse" and ran out. It was a kitten. She was, though hardly older than a kitten herself, the desperate mother of three kittens, all of whom she brought to us. But traumatized and starving, she didn't seem able to nurse them. We tried to feed them, but one by one they died. The Princess herself we patted, and fed, and arranged to have spayed--but before we could she astonished us by giving birth to three more kittens, healthy ones this time. She nursed them with ease, and further surprised us by turning out to be a Maine Coon Cat, with a vast mane of fur. We kept one of her kittens and gave the other two to our longsuffering friend who ended up taking one of Jamaica's puppies later. One of those cats is still alive--now 18 or 19--but the Princess and her daughter Annabelle have both left this realm.

And briefly, there was Fuschia, who came to be a bookstore cat and died under mysterious circumstances. And Vita, a silver tabby, who was a bookstore cat for 16 years, till just last autumn when she, who loved to be indoors, insisted on going out, and never returned. Vita had been a 4th generation feral cat, the sole survivor of a litter of brain damaged, nerve damaged, fragile kittens. We knew her mother and grand mother and great grandmother, though they were so feral we never could approach them closely.

And Mehitabel, another Maine Coon cat, who came and went as she pleased. Mehitabel was her own cat, but deigned to hang out in the bookshop from time to time over a number of years.

And Static, the lively black and white cat, who loved to dart around and one day darted, alas, into the path of a truck. Static used to love to ride around on the back of my big yellow lab, the most patient of dogs.

There are always the cats on the fringes--these days I am still feeding and visiting the cat who had adopted my friend Red, who died a year ago, and a little black feral cat known on the street as Dart.

The feral Penelope, and her shy brood of kittens: Daisy and Basil and Pirate Lola and Violetta, all living in the cabin in the woods, spayed and neutered. We had intended to tame these and find them homes, but they never grew to trust any humans but my family, and enjoy their time together terrorizing mice.

And in the store, the elegant Destiny, who has always reminded me a little of my childhood cat Mitzi, and Pippin the brave, who survived the laundromat and pneumonia and starvation to become a cat of culture and literary flair.

And, temporarily, my daughter's pair of kitties: the orange Meatwad, the gray and white Jesus (my girl loves to shock, I tell my more staid friends the shy cat is called...Gigi...).
We just built a cat perch above the door of the bookshop. From this suitably lofty perch they can scold the blackbirds but not harm them. My partner believes we can teach Meatwad to murmur "come buy books...meow". So far, though, he only has the "meow" part down pat.

the dogs continue to wander through the list

2006-04-23T17:19:00.000-07:00

6. We called her Sephie, but it was short for Persephone. She was an Australian shepherd with attitude and determination who arrived in my life on a very significant morning; the dawn of the day in which my long term partner and I consummated our relationship. Yes, there is a soap opera sort of story behind that, but it doesn't quite belong in the dog list.
Sephie, then unnamed, was waiting on the cabin steps. And then she disappeared, and came back with a puppy. And again, and again, and again, until there were four pups and their mother. We would later find that she had been wandering the hill for some time, and had not been cared for since her pregnancy. She was confident she'd come to the right place, and despite the exasperation of our landpartner, who was wont to chase strays from the land, Sephie stayed a while. A long while.
The new romance, with all its complications, now included five dogs. This was still in the time of Phoebe, and I was still living by the river in my tiny cabin with my son. For a time, when the pups were old enough to leave their mother, they came to live with me. Four puppies. Four enormous puppies. My dearly beloved and I spent all our spare time finding homes for these foundlings (Sephie had made her home happily with him, despite landpartner's exasperation). Two were black, showing some evidence of a laborador father--I called them Aquarius and...I think, per my son's advice, Blackie. One was tricolor, and she was named Diamond. The fourth--oh, forgive me fourth lost pup, I don't recall you at all, only that you were given away, and I hope you led a happy life.
Sephie befriended Tasha, when we moved to the land, and was willing to travel the woods with my son, happily making certain he was safe and returned home after each adventure unhurt.
It puzzles me now that I do not recall Sephie's end; it must have come while I was focused on my daughter's babyhood and distracted from the dog world. Sephie was my son's companion. I do know her grave is near the cabin, where the white rose grows.

7. It was during my pregnancy with my youngest that a friend brought me the ugliest puppy I had ever seen. Sephie and Tasha had gone on to wherever dogs go in the universe when they leave their bodies; we had many cats, but no dogs. It was, I thought, okay that way. Daughter was 3, my hands were full and my days busy. I didn't need a dog, much less a tiny puppy too young to leave her mother who had inexplicably been abandoned, found beneath my friend's house, eyes barely open.
She was white, with spots and speckles and close together squinty blue eyes that were barely open. She squeaked and squealed a lot. She looked like a wombat. She was probably, like the departed Sephie, an Australian shepherd mix.
Yes, I took her, yielding to my children's eager insistance that we needed, really really needed, this dog. They named her Pepper.
Her sister (for there were two pups under the house) went to a friend, and was named Silver. For many years we compared notes.
I undertook the every 2 hour feeding of Pepper, and in time she moved on to baby cereal and then to dog kibble. She was a very ugly, very patient dog. Her eyes looked small and piggish. Her fur was ever slightly rumpled. My children adored her, and she returned the favor.
Pepper adopted cats, and tried to herd the children. She was a Shepherd, after all. She loved to crush any particularly rare flowers I happened to plant. We had a mixed relationship, Pepper and I, but she was a gentle and forgiving soul, and in her last weeks taught me much about life and death. She died of congestive heart failure when she was 9 years old; it would be the same year my father died, and in tending Pepper, sitting with her staring at the stars above the fir trees, I worked through a great deal of grief.
When she died, Gabriel, who had been companioned by her since his birth, took part in the small ceremony. We put forget me nots on her rough fur, and wrapped a blanket around her, and dug a deep hole, and sang songs.
Two weeks later I found my young Down Syndrome child dragging a shovel to Pepper's grave.
"She wants to go for a walk now" he told me. We discussed death. Gabe still doesn't believe in it.

8. Leonard Woof came to us, briefly, during Pepper's time with us. He was an Irish Wolfhound, and the largest dog I've encountered. We never found out where he had come from, just a huge, handsome, intense critter. Leonard and I loved one another from the first moment, and during his time with me he followed me everywhere, sitting at my feet, watching me. He tolerated the others in my household, but seemed insistent that his place was at my side, always.
I wish he had remained at my side, but Leonard's life was changed, and at last ended, by two tragedies. One night he rushed one of our cats outside, and I heard my partner crying out. The cat, a black and white sweet female named Tippy, never the brightest kitty, ran into the woods. We never saw her again; perhaps the hawks took her body. While I took Leonard's part (it was instinct, not malice, I would watch him) my partner never trusted the dog again. And he ran away, down to the neighbor's yard, where a nubile female had just come into heat. The neighbor shot him. There are evenings still in which I feel the presence of the huge shaggy Wolfhound beside me, and tears fill my eyes.

9. You can read about my dear Buddy somewhere in my other blog (outside the windows). He is with me still, slowing down somewhat, barking at shadows, but ever beside me, my silvering golden lab, now 14. He deserved an entire post to himself.

10. Jamaica arrived as a skittish, starving dog eating from my compost pile. She was starving, a small black shepherd-looking dog. We heard she'd been used as a pot patch dog, tied out to deter would be marijuana theft. She was bad at it, and was supposed to be shot and killed, but had run away. She had been horrifically abused. And she was pregnant. She would run if approached. I spent many days trying to coax her to me, and at the end, her belly swollen with pups but her spine still showing, she came to me. She was one of the sweetest natured dogs I've known, grateful for respite from a desperate life. She'd probably become pregnant in her first heat. I fed her all sorts of supplements and food in an attempt to make sure the pups were okay, and on a snowy April morning took her into town, where that night the pups--five of them--were born in a corner of the bookstore. Rory, the first born, looked like a rottweiller and had his mother's sweetness plus a deep trust of people. He went to live with a little boy and his family; the boy had just had his 5th birthday. Skully (named for the x files character by my daughter) was an australian shepherd looking dog, grey of fur, bright of spirit, with blue eyes. My daughter loved her best of the group, but she was chosen very young by a young couple who visited her daily until, at 12 weeks, I released her to her new home. Cosmo was a smaller male, also grey and spotted, with a rakish eye patch and a sense of humor. Cosmo went to live with a young poet, and traveled to Pittsburgh, and then back to the coast. Cosmo, for a time, would come stay with me as his young owner traveled elsewhere. Kuma was a large silver and spotted female with a habit of hiding under things. The friend who took her renamed her Solita, and she still visits me from time to time. My friend says she is the happiest dog he has known. The last born was a small black dog we called Mai. From birth she looked upon this world with terror. And she is Dog 11. Dear Jamaica grew to trust us more and more, and loved Buddy (who tenderly helped with the puppy pile). My last memory of Jamaica is watching her run in the sunlit woods, her coat shining, her eyes bright. We'd had her spayed so she need not go through another pregnancy, and she'd put on weight, and glowed with happiness.
That night she ran from the hill and disappeared. Her body was found on the road. As with Leonard, I sometimes sense Jamaica, and am filled with regrets--but at least she tasted a bit of happiness in her short life.

11. Mai. Jamaica's lastborn was a fearful, trembling little creature from the moment she was born. I'd put Jamaica's fearfulness down to the abuse she'd suffered, but Mai, entering a wholly loving and protected environment, looked on it as though it was full of demons and dangers. Mai feared cloth. Mai feared sounds. Mai feared just about anything you could think of. And she grew to be a big, big pup, and then a big dog. For of course I kept Mai. Dog breeders whose advice I sought told me she had the potential of being a fear biter, and advised all sorts of training procedures. I enlisted the help of friends, who would visit and give her treats. But no, the world, for Mai, was still frightening.
So, while Buddy loves being at the center of store comings and goings, Mai stays home in the woods, in a carefully controlled environment, in which she is calm, and I think happy. She has a Maltese Cross in white emblazoned on her chest, and brown eyebrows, and a glossy black coat. She is fond of the cabin cats, and takes long walks with my partner to the springs. Sometimes, looking at Mai I see Jamaica, for of all the pups Mai most looks like her mother.
When Mai was 6 months old she vanished. It wasn't long after her mother's death, and I thought she was looking for her.
6 weeks later she showed up miles and miles away from our cabin, on the porch of the friend who had taken Solita, her sister, in. She'd been sighted over those weeks, but never allowed anyone to approach her. Solita's owner simply said "hi, Mai, let's go for a ride, shall we?" and put her in his truck and brought her home to me.
She'd never been to Solita's new home, and we wonder--did she track her sister over all those mountains, past the river?
She's a deep one, our Mai.

12. Who would have guessed there were 12. Champ the pitbull is the 12th. And, like Buddy, he has his own story on my other blog.

I'm humbled by how these beings have walked into (and out of ) my life. Each brought me a good deal more than I gave them, these four legged teachers of mine.

Dog Five

2006-04-23T15:05:00.000-07:00

Dog Five wasn't my dog at all.

5. Tasha was three quarters wolf, the rest Alaskan malamute. When I first met her I was wheeling my firstborn son in a stroller up a very bumpy hill enroute to the town that loomed above our little river cabin. Tasha stirred all my primitive wolf fears; I am certain my Finn ancestors had encounters with her species; I grew up hearing of carriages in snowy landscapes that overturned--and then, the wolves came.
So seeing Tasha, my first words to her were a sincere "Please do not eat my child" as I warily moved carefully around her.
Tasha merely blinked her gold eyes.
As the months went on I realized that all was not well in Tasha's home, where she lived with a woman to whom she seemed strongly bonded, the woman's husband, and a new baby. There were also a few cats.
Tasha's house was close enough that I could hear the angry voices, and the sounds of glass breaking, the terrified screams, and the silences that were scarier than the screaming. Another neighbor called the police. There were a few nights like that.
One night, baby in her arms, my neighbor came to me and told me she was running for it. She feared for the child's life. Her face bore evidence of a recent beating. "Please--I can't take the animals--do what you can for them, watch them". What was I to say but "yes, of course". I never saw or heard from her again; I trust she and the child made it to safety.
These were the days of Phoebe the basset, and my cabin was tiny, barely large enough for my son, myself, Phoebe and Gwendolyn the large tabby who liked to sit in the bird feeder, charming birds into her mouth.
And, as I say, Tasha wasn't mine.
But she came, day after day, to sit on my porch. And she brought me an injured cat, a pregnant injured cat, gently in her mouth. When I asked the man whose wife had left him about the cat he admitted he'd kicked it, breaking the spine. But that's another story.
And in time Phoebe met her end, and Tasha still came, and circumstances dictated that I move to the forest cabin.
My landlady said "and you'd better take that wolf with you, or I'll shoot her".
I spent several days sitting with Tasha, talking with her. She'd never worn a leash. I didn't know if she'd been in a car since puppyhood. I showed her the leash. I told her I would make certain she was safe, but she needed to go with me when the time came.
Dear, beautiful Tasha. I don't think she ever stopped missing her person. Our relationship was one of grave respect and tolerance. She moved to the forest with us, and so did the spine damaged cat and her surviving daughter. For many years she was part of our family, sitting during nice days staring into the woods, thinking wolfish thoughts. One day I was out tending the roses when she walked down past the garden and suddenly cried out, one short cry of pain, and was dead. We buried her near the place she fell, beside a lightning struck oak tree.

a list of dogs, first part

2006-04-22T19:37:00.000-07:00

An old friend, now dead a year and a half, used to make lists all the time. Sometimes I still find her lists tucked into books she gave me. I think of this now, because these random collections of moments, books, events...and now dogs. Dogs? seem to be a way of holding things in place. A collection, like the bits of rocks and minerals I used to keep, carefully labeled and placed on bits of cotton from inside pill bottles, in egg cartons: calcite, fluorite, obsidian, speckled granite, rose quartz...

I always thought of myself as a cat person, really, though these days my dogs follow me, and sit at my feet, and the cats come along as well. But I was guarded and somewhat raised by a dog, and learned to walk, as I mentioned in some other list of oddities, holding to his fur. He is the first dog.

1. Butch. Butch was a black, wide dog with a grin and a bushy tail, ever patient, ever protective. He had been, I think, my father's dog, but like my mother and me, came to stay near my grandmother as my father went off in the military. Some babies have security blankets. I had Butch.

2. The second dog came into my life sometime when I was around 2 and a half, or perhaps just before my third birthday (I can date things before I was three years and a couple months old by the presence or absence of my brother; Toby was pre brother). Mr. Tobias was a blonde, silky earred, feathery legged cocker spaniel pup. I do not remember the day he came into my life, but the story my mother told all and sundry, for years, was of how one day she took me to a dog breeder's farm, where they bred black Scottie dogs, a most popular breed of the time, so that I could choose one of the cute little black pups as my own. Possibly she was thinking the companionship of a puppy would compensate for whatever problems I'd have as the displaced eldest child once the baby she was carrying arrived. At any rate, she said there was, amongst the cages of perky Scottie dogs, one forlorn little cocker spaniel pup.
Yes, of course, that was the dog I wanted. It was probably the dog that caught my mother's fancy too, though she said it was my tearful pleading that made her take that one. Toby was a loving guy, lavish with kisses, always willing to sit next to me during meals (just under the table) to eat the bits of things I myself hated (even as a little girl I didn't like to eat meat, and my mother worried that I would not be healthy. It was the "clean your plate" days. Toby was happy to help me out.). I recall with shame, however, one afternoon's game with Toby, in which I locked him in the garden shed, and let him out (and delighted in his joyful bounding and barking and happiness at being out)...and locked him in once again. Well, of course he came inside with me when the game was over, but it was an early glimpse of imperious controlling tendencies in my soul.
The Air Force sent transfer papers soon after that. I didn't know that. What I knew was that one day a tall, dark haired woman who smelled of dusty roses and wore a green suit and a pretty little hat, and talked with an accent--my mother later told me she was French--came to the house, and Toby went away in her car, looking out the back windshield as I stood and cried and my mother tried to explain he couldn't come where we were going, he would be happy.

We didn't have a dog again, not after that heartbreak. I grew to think of myself as a cat person.

And then there was Belle.
3. She wasn't my dog, but the dog, one of them, of my list making friend. She was a golden bassett hound, and lived with two others of her breed--a sea of barking bassets. In my first summer, and the next complicated year of my time here in the lost coast region, Belle used to follow me into the garden, and sit and simply be with me. We took walks. When I read, sitting in a kitchen in her house, or over in my own cabin, Belle often came to lean against my legs. She didn't care that I was a cat person. Her dog companions, Maud and Suzy, were friendly enough, but Belle and I had some inexplicable connection. When, after a serious of melodramatic events that included lost loves, death, and temporarily broken friendships, I left my place at the river for a small house in a nearby town, I missed Belle deeply--her brown eyes, her sighs, her love of poetry. She was a very Elizabeth Barrett Browning dog, was Belle.
The story of dogs is inevitably also the story of deaths, and so it was with the devoted Belle. After I left she stopped eating. My then estranged and grief stricken friend didn't tell me. Belle died being rushed to the veterinary hospital in a collapse no one was ever able to explain. I still have a photo of her on one of my shelves.

4. Belle having opened my heart to the dog world once again, and broken it, I was ready for a pup of my own. I didn't know that, of course. But the sturdy woman who worked with me at the local motel (we were maids; I was good at cleaning, though anyone looking at my home would not know that) thought that I, obviously grieving something, living a mysteriously solitary life, so young, and bearing such sorrow, needed a dog. Her dog was a prize basset hound, a stud whose services were much in demand. And lo, Alexander had sired a litter due to be born that fall. They were born on William Blake's birthday, 13 of them. Three were female. My maid friend had pick of litter, and wanted to give that pup to me--whichever I chose. So I went over the far eastern hills to a little house in which an entire room was carpeted in newpaper and met thirteen 3 week old puppies, who swarmed and bounded and fell over their ears and dashed into corners. One of them came and sat on my boot. I picked her up. She'd claimed me.
When I actually took her home 5 weeks later (Belle's owner's daughter had purchased her sister), Phoebe Jane Wakerobin was oddly wobbly, and prone to strange moments of collapse. I took her to the vet, who told me I'd better choose another dog; Phoebe probably had a heart condition, or problems from being malnourished. Better start with a sturdier puppy.
Of course I ignored his advice, and fed her well, and took her for walks. Her sister, Dogma, was a frequent visitor. The two of them now and then would escape and wander...
Phoebe prepared me a little for taking care of my son, who was born the year after she came to me. She was a most helpful dog mother, trying to feed the baby by kindly vomiting dogfood near him. Tricolor, black and white and tan, Phoebe was a gallant and larky sort of dog who loved to bask in the sunlight and tried to chase deer, despite her short legs. When my son was 5 she was runover by a local electrician's truck. We dug her grave near a bigleaf maple at the turn of the river.
Now even the maple is gone.

Not a mere list, it seems, and taking long to type. There will be more. They walk into my life on their four paws and steal my heart, again and again.

part two of those shelves of imaginary jars of memory

2006-03-26T14:06:00.000-08:00

Water based contents:

a sixth jar: the green ocean stretching out to all horizons from the small ship, which has for weeks been avoiding storms at sea. Sunlight at last, and suddenly--a whole flock of flying fish, glittering, silver, amazing. I was five years old.

Jar seven: a canyon in Baja California. I have been walking a long time with friends, stumbling over the red-orange rocks, my legs aching. As we come over yet another hill, the creek is there, and has made rounded, smooth pools in the stone, carved by centuries of water. Hot day, cool blue green pools. And not too far away, hot springs bubbling from the red earth.

The eighth jar: carrying my then small first born I go walking through the acreage where my cabin sits at the top corner. It is spring, the honey scented bells of the madrone flowers are dropping from the trees, making little pools of whiteness under the red barked limbs. The trilliums, three cornered, surprising, light up the darkness of the woods. I am following the sound of water, knowing where one spring bubbles from the roots of a century old baylaurel tree, but hearing water sounds further on, mirrored by the water sounds of the mating ravens. The raven sound is like water being poured from narrow jugs. My baby smiles at the sound of it. As I stop for breath I notice the ferns thickly clustered at the steep hillside near my path, and there I see the pure, clear water gushing over white stone.
The bluegreen bit of rock I pick up is a bird point, a tiny arrowhead. I sit a long time thinking about the hands that made that point, and the families that walked here, and paused to sip the clear, sweet water flowing on and on.

imagined jars of remembered landscapes

2006-03-25T12:31:00.000-08:00

My grandmother, my father's mother, kept a cellar full of jars of preserves, pickles, jams, and other beautiful and glowing delicacies, neatly labeled and set on shelves.
The cellar itself was a strange place, dark and full of delicate spiders, but that's a different story.

I woke up the other morning thinking "what wonderful things I have seen in my life". And wishing there were some way to keep those moments, those glimpses, those bits of landscape and weather, so that I might take them out once more, and watch the changing of light and shadows. A list isn't a careful cellar; words are not glass jars--but I thought perhaps the list needed to be done.

Glimpse one: the light through the leaves of a white flowering lilac hedge. A very early memory; the hedge was my secret hiding place when I was 2 and a half or 3. (one of the virtues of having moved frequently throughout my childhood is that I can date memories with some ease, knowing where I was during a given time period of a year or two).

Tumbling the jars in no discernable order, glimpse two: Two white tailed deer bounding through dry, scrubby brush in the hillsides somewhere in the high desert. Beyond them the purple mountains, and a stretch of wildflower blazed spring, so orange-red the sky itself seemed purple blue.

A third jar: the beautiful, amazing blue of the Pacific held in a half circle of coral reef, on a tiny island that is merely a dot on the map (it is 3 miles by 5 miles, I think; Wake Island). There were terrible things there as well--left from the second world war; ships from which soldiers had jumped to their deaths, holes in which people had hidden and fought. But what comes to mind is the clear water, and the white shells scattered on the whiter sand, and the walk beside my father.

Jar Four: a wood on an English hillside, mostly dark holly trees. The ground carpeted with smoke blue bluebells, a sort of scilla that won't grow for me where I live now (the Spanish sort does, but not the English). Tender blue under the dark trees--and suddenly, a pheasant, golden orange, flying up and out of the woods to the nearby stretch of golden/green meadows.

And the fifth: another stretch of woods, these of mixed trees whose names I didn't know--some fir like trees, some maples, perhaps--but most of all, the violets carpeting the shaded ground. Deep purple violets and some bits of yellow violets. And the young saplings that I would climb, and think of as tree-horses, carrying me to a place of dreams.

Five jars. There are more. A second post soon.

the four wheeled ones

2006-02-28T17:33:00.000-08:00

I don't drive. It's one of the more peculiar things in my nature. During much of my life it was not a problem at all, because I lived in some of the worlds most lovely cities, where public transportation was a given and a delight.
Here in the country it has been another matter, but I get by okay.
Still, I never particularly thought cars were a category that got into my mind or heart very much. I'd be a horrible witness: "Yes, officer, it was--I think--a car. What kind? Oh, a one with four wheels and , like, a roof."

But we just adopted a new car. New to us, a 1994 Geo metro, with four doors, meticulously maintained by its only owner. Graciously paid for by a benefactor who believes in our political work and knew our subpoverty living standards wouldn't exactly free up cash.

Which made me think of the cars of my life. The little Geo will replace Harriet Tubman, a Honda Civic (1984) whose broken parking light is growing moss. Harriet came to us from a friend who had it sitting on his land after someone tried, and failed, to repair her. We bought her over a year's time, paying part in cash and part in books, and found a person who understood her mysterious innards enough to get her in working condition. We put in a new engine (well, a rebuilt engine) since it turned out she had blown her head gasket. I learned to read car diagrams and figure out where hoses went and wires connected. Harriet was a good one, but alas, about two weeks ago had her final breakdown. Yeah, we could have patched her together one more time perhaps, but the continual oil leak--no, not good. Hardly environmentally correct. Harriet will be scrapped.

Before Harriet there was the Mercury Cougar, a huge long car. I don't know of what era--the 70's maybe? Huge, ponderous, constantly needing repair work until the brakes went out completely along with other strange things. The Mercury was a brief thing--given us, I think, by some friend. It was copper colored.

Before that, and for a long time, a Chevy Malibu, silver in color. My partner's former partner (and therein lies a long and turning tale) inherited the Malibu from her father. It was an automatic. People said it would never take the dirt roads--but it did quite well. My eldest child put glittery stickers all over it, dragons and wizards and unicorns and rainbows. It wore a lot of political bumper stickers. It was constantly stopped by the police. Despite my nondriving I actually drove this one for about a month one summer when partner was off doing political things out of state and I needed to get from cabin to work and back. My eldest son, then around 5 or 6, would sit sedately beside me and gently talk me through the entire ride. "You can do this. It's okay. Slow down a little here". Otherwise I probably would have stopped the car and run screaming into the woods. I have far too much imagination to enjoy driving.

The Chevy was the location of my one and only experience of in-car sex, too, with my dear partner one night as we returned from a political conference.
Beds are better, but we still note fondly the place we'd parked.

I've never actually owned a car myself. But there are others, through the years, that I have some interesting memories of. A green VW that belonged to someone I was madly in love with: I would see that car everywhere. A white Toyota truck, also belonging to a person of passionate connection. I could always tell it was the right truck because the license plate hung at a jaunty angle.
A green MG, belonging to a college love. Such a sporty little thing. He replaced it with a ponderous red BMW.
A station wagon of unknown make belonging to my firstborn's father, in which we camped when firstborn was tiny--we camped in cemetaries and campgrounds and on beaches. My friend repaired it with bubblegum and rubberbands, I swear it. Our son inherited his skills at repair and confidence.

Childhood cars: a little rounded thing, of which there are family photos--it was, maybe, a Buick. Kind of turquoise blue. A pontiac, blue and white. A rambler, copper colored. An illfated little--was it a Renault--belonging to my mother, squished in an accident (no one was hurt, except the poor little car). My mother named cars, but I cannot recall now the names of those cars that made their way through my childhood, that appear in family photos, along with other things of which my parents were very proud: a television set, a new couch, my father's various airplanes, and every so often my brothers and I, standing and squinting into the sunlight, in front of a family car.

a list of the lost

2006-02-13T15:31:00.000-08:00

No, not people, and not animal friends--though I could list so many of each who came into my life and left my life. But objects. Possessions. Things gained and then lost, or stolen, or misplaced.

My grandmother said that lost things all go to the dark side of the moon. If she was correct, the jumble there will still hold:

my latest loss--a vase I bought a few days ago, and left in our car. It was inexpensive, yellow glass, frosted, with a dark blue swirl at the top. I loved the color, and imagined it full of spring flowers, or empty, sitting on a shelf, catching the light. In the paper bag with it were some packets of heirloom sweet pea seeds as well. Alas, we left the car unlocked in a big city parking lot, and one of my partner's bags, full of oddments of writing, though nothing he says he misses, was taken. And the paper bag with the vase and the seeds, and my little son's tape recorder, which he carries everywhere. I was grateful the thief left the bouquet of white Casablanca lilies, wrapped in wet newspaper.

a garnet and pearl ring, which my father gave me when I was six. One purply red garnet flanked by two tiny pearls. The ring was big for my skinny fingers. I wore it anyway...and it is now on the darkside of the moon, I guess.

red shoes. I didn't lose them, except to time, growth, and wear. Bought for school when I was almost 11, they were a dark, true red, leather, with two black ornamental, flat buttons towards the side, on the top. They were, I thought, so absolutely beautiful that I would wake in the night, go to the closet, and sit under the closet light gazing at them, sighing for the wonder of it. Perhaps it was the years of saddleshoes, black and white and laced up, that made those red shoes the wonder they were.

My beautiful, trusted, adored Mont Blanc fountain pen. It was dark green, with a gold nib, and wrote so fluently. I used it throughout my journeys in Europe; I have journals and books of fair draft poems written with it; friends still have letters I wrote with that pen. It was a generous gift from coworkers at an east coast bookstore (one in which I got into a good deal of trouble as a union organizer). One sunny spring day I was traveling to the big town to the north and stopped at a Texaco gas station, where I left the pen on the back of the toilet commode. It had gone when I stopped again that afternoon, and how I mourned its loss. I've had a number of other fountain pens, and settled as well for all sorts of new disposables--but I see my Mont Blanc in my dreams still.

Another ring. Indeed, another garnet and pearl ring, and a fireopal set in silver by a local jeweler, and a puffy blue down coat in the pockets of which those rings were tucked, so that I could clean the motel rooms unhindered (the maid job was the only one to be had then). The garnet ring was from the turn of the century, ornate, the garnet very dark and large as my thumbnail, surrounded by tiny seed pearls, a gift from a dear friend and lover. I came from scrubbing toilets and making beds to see the coat, left on a chair outside, gone.

A cameo from my grandmother, set in gold, pinned to a black sweater. Sweater and cameo vanished one day from my bookstore, never to be seen again.

My journal and poetry notebooks from my last year in college. How foolishly I stored them with the parents of my then boyfriend. When I was back again in the country they had no recollection of the box of books and notebooks.

And what happened to the glass ship? Blown glass, fragile beyond belief, with sails and rigging. A gift from yet another true love. It lived in the windows of many a place I traveled after I left him to his orderly and, I hope, happy life, catching the sunlight. Did I drop it? Leave it? Give it away?

It is probably in the same place as my grandmother's silver hair pin, the one that clasped my long hair for so many years, until I cut my hair short, and put the pin aside, and then...where did it go? The pin was oval, with delicate etching upon it, with a silver bar to hold slippery Finnish-straight hair in place.

And there are scarves, and umbrellas, and books generously lent and never returned, and jackets, sweaters, hats. I seem to go through my life shedding things...but missing them. Ah, my fountain pen...

the flavored world

2006-02-11T18:23:00.000-08:00

Proust may have had his dry, crumbly, literary madeleine (a disappointment to me when I finally tasted one); I have been thinking of my own list of tastes and moments.
It is an odd thing to list, since I am far from being a great cook, and have been mostly disconnected from such physical things as food for much of my life. Well, yes, I ate; I did not live on air; but I was prone to forgetting to eat, and during my youth frequently saved money by skipping meals. Of course, I then bought books with the money I'd saved--a more lasting treat by far.

But the first tastes, the strange tastes, the interesting moments--these have stayed with me.
And sometimes, with a rush of nostalgia, I recall them.

There were the slabs of black bread spread with sweet butter, and the new pulled spring onions, and the bowls of raspberries and clotted cream my grandfather served me, with delight that I would ask for second helpings and finish every bit of these treats. "She needs real food" he'd shout, hearty and proud. He was a big man, from Finland, who worked as a ship builder and carpenter and kept a tidy garden for vegetables and fruit and raised rabbits and turkeys as well. He held little store by the canned vegetables and puffy packaged bread that were the usual table fare at my house. I believe it was in his house I realized that food could taste wonderful. When I read Heidi I always thought of my grandfather, and figured he would have fed me melted cheese too, and had me play with goats on a mountainside, had there been goats or mountainsides around.

Gingerbread. Not just any gingerbread (though I like gingerbread of all sorts) but the chewy, pale gingerbread of Grasmere or thereabouts, bought and eaten on a walking tour of the Lake District many years ago. My love of the time and I were seeking out Wordsworth country, and clambering hillsides, and staring at daffodils, and getting rained on. There was good cheese there as well, crumbly and sharp and white, pressed on me by a bed and breakfast proprietor who was concerned that my vegetarian diet wouldn't keep me strong enough for those rambles.

And the lovely dinners in Sagres, Portugal, with baskets of strange fruit and little fishes (this was before I was a vegetarian, so I was guiltily gorging on goat meat as well, roasted with rosemary). The fruits were what captivated me, however. I'd ask their names in all the languages I know, and still do not know what they were. Perhaps guavas, or loquats. I'd come to Sagres, which is at the far southwest tip of Portugal, after several months travel and a surfeit of museums. The travel agent in Florence was very helpful as I said "I need to spend a month somewhere cheap, hopefully near the ocean, with no particularly touristy attractions". He said "I know exactly where you need to be" and booked a flight to Lisbon, with train connections all the way to Sagres. Since then I have heard the area has blossomed (or been blighted) with tourists--then only a few travellers knew of it.

And preserved quinces, which figure in two incarnations: as a sweet in Mexico, where I was helping build a school for deaf children (and cooking for two hundred over open campfires, another story). One of the fathers brought a great slab of quince paste as a treat for us, and doled it out in sweet, grainy slabs. And then in England, where I sat with an older poet and chatted about poetry and life and birds as she spread rose colored jam with amber bits over my crumpets. Quince preserves, she said. Enchanting, I said.

And in my childhood in Japan, chestnuts broken from their spiny cases and roasted over a candle flame, and dipped in maple syrup. A treat that was especially delightful, for being absolutely forbidden--the smuggled matches, the secret fort. My friend and I set my younger brother as guard, to watch for grown ups, and paid him in a chestnut or two, dripping with syrup.

And going back, further yet, sugar roses from a birthday cake, smuggled into bed, licked in the darkness, cherished. I was, perhaps, 2 or 3 years old.

Oh, and apricots, which fell from my grandmother's tree, which made a cool green tent. I could sit there for hours, sucking out the amber, dripping pulp. No fruit since has tasted quite so intensely golden.

I might trade a lot for just one, here in late winter.

& more books

2006-01-25T11:22:00.000-08:00

I did tell you my shelves were full, right? And that includes the shelves of my mind, as well as the shelves of my store.
So, some more favorites (and, as ever, merely in the order in which they jostle into my memory)

Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (yes, I read more than fiction). Dillard is a Pacific Northwest writer; Pilgrim was her first book and won lots of awards (possibly even the Pulitzer; I'd have to look that up). Exactitude in the Thoreauvian mode.

Also Sally Carrighar's nature books (particularly the one in which she writes of mice singing; she is the only person I have encountered in person or in print that wrote of mice singing--real mice, now--something I had noticed for years and years. Despite our cats we do have mice, lots of mice in season. And they do sing.)

And Barry Lopez (we seem to be on a nature kick today, don't we). Especially the one about ravens; birds that I live with and much like (It says much for The Curse of the Raven Mocker that I liked it despite the fact that ravens in that book are dread critters).

And, yes, Edward Abbey (though he doesn't have a high opinion of librarians and is a sexist curmudgeon)

Ann Patchett. Her novel The Magician's Assistant in particular, though Bel Canto is also good (I haven't read Taft). It is a mark of the niceness of my bookstore clientele that not only do they buy books, but now and then come in and thrust books at me, not for trade, but because they need to share a favorite. My copy of the Magician's Assistant came to me thus, from a guy who walks barefoot summer and winter and loves luminous writing.

Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. One of the most perfect, and saddest works ever. Roy has become a strong voice for the anti globalism movement, but I wish she had more time for her fiction.

Of course Barbara Kingsolver (she is so popular in my region that another bookstore I visit up north has a list posted in fiction: we might not have copies of Kingsolver, but maybe you'd like.....followed by around 10 other author's names). Poisonwood Bible is much different than her earlier works, and I had trouble getting into it (so much trouble I put it down the first time, thinking "Hey, Peter Matthieson covered this ground better in At Play in the Fields of the Lord). The second time I picked it up I somehow got in stride--and found it every bit as good as my many book loving friends assured me it was.

There are more (Robertson Davies! the droll Robert Benchley--another customer gift, and a selfless one too, because he realized by giving me one of those funny, funny collections of essays he was likely never again to see Benchley on my shelves--because I'd hoard them)...
But I'm supposed to be helping my next customer...onward (he looks like a Ludlum type...yep, off to the intrigue section)

The exceptional Marly Youmans, etc.

2006-01-23T19:12:00.000-08:00

It was a chance remark to Marly in the comment section of one of her blogs that led to all this listing. I was, and am, so stuck by her work that I said her books--particularly the two tales from Adantis--would enter my lifelist of odd and wonderful books.
She was understandably curious about the books that might rub shoulders with hers. Thus, the days of lists.
My daughter is currently reading The Curse of the Raven Mocker (and I hope she gives it back to me), the first of the two; Ingledove is at my elbow, with its wavery, aquatic cover letters and its cover illustration of two on a perilous boat. Both these books are coming out in paperback--I believe come spring. Now, Marly has written a lot of other books--a harsh and beautiful civil war novel for adults, The Wolf Pit, another two adult novels (I have yet to have these cross my desk), and a volume of poetry (Claire). The Wolf Pit and Claire are excellent. But the Adantis books took hold of my soul and heart.
I'm not sure why--I could give a lot of guesses--these books struck me so intensely. Archetypal, I said to Marly--they each have journeys, and strange people, and exquisite descriptions; they have darkness and danger. But there are many books one could say have darkness, danger, oddness, good description--
The Adantis books stand by themselves. They are listed by publisher and by librarians as "young adult" novels. Young adult, in library and bookstore parlance, means kids from about 10 and up; in my shop it means pretty much all the so called "chapter books". Many books in this category transcend it instantly; Marly's certainly do.
In these books (which stand by themselves; you need not read one first, I think--they are not sequels in the standard sense)--Marly weaves a sense of Appalachian lore (I think that's what it is) and Cherokee tales, and her own witchery. Adantis is a realm that coexists and yet does not coexist with the rest of the world. In Ingledove, which is set in more contemporary times, issues like dams that flood old lands come into play. There is an Adantean language. There is Marly's own vivid language, in which the streams of water off a hillside are "sprangled". There are brave and determined characters--children who are driven by vision, by a need to find--truth? home? lost places?
They leave one slightly dissatisfied--wholly satisfied by the book at hand, yes, but ready for another tale--what became of Bumblebee? Did the Witchmaster and the girl Ingledove meet again in another time?
In terms of iconic imagery, the books that Marly Youmans' The Curse of the Raven Mocker and Ingledove most bring to mind--at least to my casual mind--are George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin (and the sequel to them). There is the light and shadow, and the strong images in MacDonald (or is it McDonald? I am such a bad bookseller, distorting author names)--the rose fire, the beautiful, mysterious, spinning Grandmother, the caverns of the goblins.
But Marly's books really stand on their own. I have yet to read anything else quite like them.

in which we have a fifth of...literature?

2006-01-21T10:30:00.000-08:00

Yes, onward. I have begun to worry about the books left out (and not left out in the rain, though that has indeed happened in my life). And also about how very long it is taking to draw near to current tomes.

But again, in no apparent order (who would believe the shelves in my bookstore are carefully arranged by subject and author--and by my partner's concept of philosophic proximinity; whereby philosophy must be across the store from poetry, yet next to literary criticism, and natural history needs be beside biography)...

but revealing that I am fondest of stories, of fiction (though I read with indiscriminate gluttony)

more favorites

But first--an aside: my favorite thing to do with customers is to guide them to their next Perfect Book. It may not be mine; indeed it often isn't. But if they give me two of three of their own favorite titles, themes, or authors, I can usually hand them the next delight. Sometimes it takes a couple false starts. And over the years there have been a few readers I just couldn't quite suit. But mostly it works. Partner calls it "Jarvenpa's book therapy sessions" (although of course he uses my much less unusual given name.)

Old favorites: I read and reread Jane Austen, whenever all else in life fails, because she is funny and witty (not the same thing) and it is good to escape into another time in which people behaved with passion and foolishness, just as in our own. And the works of the Bronte sisters (yes, I made a pilgrimage to their bleak countryside once long ago). Wuthering Heights, that cruel, excessive, amazing book was a favorite from the time I first read it, when I was much too young--13, perhaps.

And when I was a senior in highschool I sat on a windowsill, barefoot, in the rain, during a break between classes. An extremely uptight teacher witnessed this thoughtless act, and sent me to the principal's office. I was weeping by then, hysterically upset. My perfect record, my honor student status, my recent acceptance at a good college, my entire life--destroyed because I could not restrain myself. Well, it was a high window ledge, third story up, with the trees outside swaying in the warm rain. And it was beautiful.
Principal shuttled me off to my counselor, whom I had last met as we reviewed the options for a fairly impoverished but bright student.
I was still crying.
He brought me a glass of water, gave me a moment to compose myself, and asked what the situation was. I told him: rain, trees, bare feet, wind, joy.
He went to his shelf and brought out a book by a man I hadn't heard of
John Muir.
Yes, I like the works of John Muir very much. My counselor was right--there is a kindred spirit. His stories of wandering the mountains of California, of sitting in trees through storms, of the loveliness of the wildflower abundance of the spring time and the harshness of the high regions are still delight and balm to my spirit, as they were when I was still a barefoot, impulsive teen.

Yes, we'll need a sixth post. And likely a seventh. I haven't even begun to come close to the works that started me making these lists--but you, dear reader, may check out her blog, for which there is a link at outside the windows--her's is that mysterious Palace at 2AM. Her books, The Raven Mocker and Ingledove, are remarkable. (so are her others, but these entered straight into my heart). More on them, and others, next time.

going forth into the book stacks

2006-01-19T21:10:00.000-08:00

Okay, bad pun. But here is indeed a fourth section of those favorites, again in no particular order. Or no conscious order, perhaps.

My partner and I read to our children a lot. Indeed, I read to my children before they were born, and while they were tiny babies (in those days poetry mostly; lots of Yeats). In the process of finding things to read we discovered a number of books neither of us had discovered as children. Yes, there were the stacks of picture books (I can recite Goodnight Moon by heart even now, and also the Runaway Bunny), but more fun by far were the so called chapter books, to be read a chapter at a time (but often chapter after chapter into the early, early morning, if a book was particularly exciting).

In this group were all the Edward Eager books (these, actually, I had encountered as a child--at least one, my favorite, The Time Garden); the Green Knowe series by LM Boston (a mix of magic, gardens, an old house, ghosts--throw in a gorilla and a Chinese boy as well); Susan Cooper's five book Dark is Rising series (they have their base in Celtic mythology), and E. Nesbit's fantasies (Five Children and It, and more). And LeGuin (her Left Hand of Darkness is a private favorite, maybe more about it later) with the Earthsea Trilogy. We also read Lloyd Alexander's series based in Welsh myth with a lot of pleasure, and all the Narnia books, which were not my favorites, but the kids gobbled them up. Gabe hated Tolkein. We'd read the series to my eldest and began reading to our daughter and Gabe; Gabe is 4 years younger than she. He'd hide the books, after the Hobbit (he liked the Hobbit).

The nice thing about spacing your children at wide intervals is that you get to reread all the wonderful things over and over and over again.

My partner ventured off on his own book passions: reading Alice to our daughter when she was a bemused two year old (she laughs and claims any oddity in her soul dates from those days); reading Moby Dick to my eldest son--though he never got far in that. Eldest son loved Tintin and Asterix and comic books, and learned to read by reading masses and masses of comics. The Secret Garden (Burnett) was a favorite of all my family--how could we help it? A walled, neglected garden; a spoiled orphan, an invalid, a wise old gardener....And the illustrations (Tasha Tudor's, I think) were charming.

My eldest was particularly fond of books in which poor families kept it together and loved one another despite tragedy or difficulty: the first of the Boxcar Children series, the Little Peppers and How They Grew, the Laura Engel Wilder series.

Ah, and The Wheel on the School (DeJong). Children bring the storks back to their little village by changing the environment. (not as sticky as it sounds; it is funny and thrilling).

a third wander through the book treasures

2006-01-19T15:21:00.001-08:00

And, I think there will be a fourth, if not a fifth. I could never really decide on a favorite color, either--so much to choose from.

In no order, save as they come to mind, some more of the quirky or influential books of my life:

Middlemarch, by George Eliot, surely one of the best novels ever written.

The Wings of the Dove, by Henry James. I love all of Henry James, with his thick, clotted cream sentences and his characters so delicately poised, and the deep tension of scenes in which much is revealed by the placing of a teacup. In my store, alas, it is rare that I can get anyone to read James these days. "Too many words".

Riders in the Chariot, by Patrick White. As with James, I do love almost all of White's work. He wrote a number of novels, and even won the Nobel Prize, and had a passionate life long relationship with another man, and kept little pug dogs...This one, though, is my favorite, with its disconnected, passionate, spiritual, crazy, heartrending characters. And that writing.

Walden, by Henry David Thoreau. And more than Walden, his letters, and his journals, which I have in two enormous volumes (still available, I think, from Dover in hardcover and very expensive). Walden was probably the most important book in my life in shaping a world view and desire for a life that made sense. The journals are wonderful, full of bits of nature lore and walks in the pouring rain.

The novels of Iris Murdoch. I think Nuns and Soldiers is my favorite. They have much repetition, once you gulp down several in a month, but are somehow deeply engaging, strange, poignant. I once summarized the typical plot of one of these as A loves B who loves C who is involved with D but actually wants to be a priest or desires turnips instead of humans. It is an overstatement--but not much of one.

The novels, and other writings, of Colette. Such sensuous detail. Yum. (and she also kept pugs. Interesting. No, I have never had a little pug, or any other little dog. All the dogs that come into my life are enormous.)

The novels of Virginia Woolf, and her letters, and particularly the little paperback Diary of a Writer or whatever it was called--excerpts from her journals, came out years ago. Of the novels I loved best The Waves. You have to surrender to them.

The writings of Virginia's friend Vita Sackville-West (many of her blithe, offhand garden writings have been collected in various books, some with lovely illustrations). Vita was an intrepid gardener-and quite a traveler as well, and a very engaging, vibrant writer. The book about her marriage (Portrait of a Marriage) is also interesting. (Yes, I am a Bloomsbury lover).

Frog and Toad are Friends (by Arnold Lobel). It's an early reader. I love Lobel. Frog and Toad have a special place in my heart.

More anon...

those treasured volumes, second part

2006-01-17T14:47:00.000-08:00

Still in the realm of childhood favorites:

The Book of Revelations (yes, from the Bible). I spent my playground time in my 11th year pondering this book, in my tiny New Testament and Psalms. I had been told that all the books in the Bible were true, to be taken literally, the word of God. I was a literal minded if somewhat fey child. This book puzzled me extremely. I read the rest of the Bible as well, Old and New Testaments. I suspect the language, if not the meaning, steeped deeply into me.

and yes, I did love Nancy Drew. What can I say? My taste was, and is, very undiscrimating.

Gene Straton Porter--ah, what was that book called? The Girl of the Limberlost, I think; it was the second of the Limberlost books, steeped in swamplands, melodrama, struggle, and--moths. My copy came to me from my grandmother's shelves.

Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (and all her work, eventually). Given me by my great aunt (who, by the by, had led a scandalous and interesting life in her youth, before settling into what seemed dour age). In my childhood circle of friends from say age 10 to 14 we always tried to determine which of the four sisters we wanted to be (I wanted to be both Jo, who was, after all, a writer, and Amy, who was pretty and got to marry Laurie. No one I ever met wanted to be Meg, the good older sister who got married and had babies. And darling Beth died...). I still reread Alcott in moments of self indulgence. Alas, my daughter and her friends found Louisa May unbearably oldfashioned.

Childhood blends imperceptively into adulthood; many of my favorites of the past years are actually children's books, discovered as I sought books for my own children--one of the blessings of parenting. And many of my childhood favorites were supposedly adult fare. At one point--I was, I think, 11 or 12--my mother interceded with the librarian at the tiny military library. Librarian had been scandalized by my checking out piles and piles of adult historicals---Thomas Costain and his ilk, and lesser known ones that these days would have shiny gold letters on them and ladies with clothes perilously close to falling off their heaving bosoms. Dear mother wrote, in her Spenserian hand, "My daugher may check out any book she pleases, with my full permission". There were certain perils to this liberality: when I read Lady Chatterly's Lover at 12 or 13 I wondered if people always ran about in the rain and twined forgetmenots in their pubic hair after sex. Since I was then living in the high desert it appeared the adults around me must be very deprived: it hardly ever rained there.

More to come...

those enduring books, part one

2006-01-16T21:47:00.000-08:00

I wrote recently to an author whose works are on this list that I had to add those remarkable books to my all time favorites.
But then the list was in my head, and scattered through years of notebooks and accountbooks.
And so, I thought, why not an adjunct blog, where lists, and oddments can safely live.
So, here it is.
You must understand that I write surrounded by books, books on shelves and tables, books stacked at my feet, books in my imagination...but there are, always in the lives of the bookish, some handfuls of treasures. Like beach glass gathered on the shoreline, translucent, luminous, forever lovely.
The Tomes of Childhood:
Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit. Because it was the first book I read, because I longed for chamomile tea, because I wanted to live at the roots of a tree, because the little paintings were so lovely, and Peter so naughty. (I went on, as a mother, to get all the Potter books for my offspring. They did not greet them with the same enchantment.)

Palgrave's Golden Treasury. It is not a children's book by any means, but my mother had a red bound copy with black and white drawings, and from the age of 3 I took it for my own. I still have it, this anthology of a peculiar slice of British poetry. It was there I met Wordsworth, and Keats, and Shakespeare. I memorized many of these poems, the good ones and especially the sad, bad ones. I used the book to tell fortunes, to determine if the boy I loved at 11 loved me. I scribbled on the drawings when I was 4, to improve them. This year I found a very early edition of Palgrave and gave it to a young man I know, the son of a dear friend. He wishes to be a poet; what better gift?

The Encyclopedia Americana of the year of my birth. My mother was convinced to use the rent money to purchase this for her four month old baby girl; by the time I was old enough to read it of course much was out of date--but literature wasn't, nor was early history, nor a whole lot of random amazing facts. Many a summer's day I spent reading a volume or two, purely delighted.

Easy Stories. I have no idea who the author of this was; it was a little brown paper leaflet of a book, given me by my Japanese maid (in Japan, post world war II). It had been designed to help the speaker of Japanese learn English. There were fables, and brief stories, all illustrated in black. Also of the time, and lost to me, was a collection of Japanese folk tales--the little peach boy, the badger who was a tea kettle, a version of Cinderella, Japanese style, and others, printed in green on soft rice paper.

All of Andrew Lang's Fairy Tale books--the Red, and Blue, and Orange, and Yellow,and so on. The school library when I was 10 had these. Pure dizzy delight.

Tennyson's Idylls of the King. This was my grandfather's book, and at his death came to me--but as a little girl I would sit for hours reading it, the stories of Camelot, of passions and honor and betrayal and loveliness.

Eleanor Estes The Hundred Dresses. It was given me by my aunt; with watercolor pictures; the story of a poor girl who wears the same blue dress each day to school, yet boasts she has a hundred dresses at home (and she does, in the triumph of art over life). I cherished this book greatly--partly because my aunt was one of the few who took me seriously when I asked for books. But alas, like Potter, this book did not impress my own little ones.

and more soon (including those come on most recently)