2020 2021 does it matter?

 

The man I’ve known for thirty-seven years is having cookies and ice cream and watching a bad movie. This year ends and another begins. No resolutions needed or required. This past year has been unprecedented, but only in the way every year is, aren’t we're always encountering the unknown? Disappearing from the past; unknown by the future. Time would be difficult without the persons we know and love. We can reach out, send our words, share pictures and poems and books, jokes and help hold up one another’s defeat and grief. Thanks, and thanks and thanks again for the love. Be safe, be kind, be strong. 

Two poems and a Haibun, three pictures of starlings, Tuesday of the Cold Moon, watching this year draw to a close

 All that glitters

Starlings stop at the wall,
find my offering of bread
crusts and seeds.
 
In the fading light
they shine as though brushed
with gold leaf.
 
Thanks enough.

                 Anti-twitcher

The term "twitcher", sometimes misapplied

as a synonym for birder ~~Wikipedia

 

Starlings invade each spring

black bullet of rat-on-wings,

short-tailed speckle,

dog-diving blemish,

songbird plagiarist,

dirty hangers-on;

they own the wall

wing-flutter like heartbeat,

that drives the cats wild.

Murmuration

When the man walks into the room, seventy-three women breathe in as one. It had been five weeks since any of us had smelled a man, and he is clean, soap and cedar, a scent that wafts through the barracks, is fresh and dangerous; looking across the aisle at Bridgette, she closes her eyes and inhales deeply as he walks past. But he is not here to bring us back a part of life we have shut out.

Our CC’s, two slight women who both share the same last name, Riley, have become our warped den mothers, here to make us sailors. They are present to help this Chief, who is here to get us ready for an inspection. Today’s lesson is how to make us work as one team, one mindset as we prepare for this assessment and to help us to become that component we’ll need to be as we move on in the Navy. 

His first order is for us to remove our duty belts, thick, white web belts with a metal buckle that we wear as accompaniment to our dungarees. Then he tells us to push our bunks and lockers to the bulk head. As I’m pushing my rack I’m reviewing the order, settling it into my head; this is not to be a review of how to fold our blankets and t-shirts. Then we hit the line, stand at attention as he walks back and forth reading names, looking us in the eye, a movement we do not return. 

He barks, “Do you want to pass this next inspection?” 
As one we call out, “Sir, yes sir!”
“Are you ready to do anything for the sailors in your unit?”
“Sir, yes sir!”
“Are you prepared to help each other through this training?”
“Sir, yes sir!”
“Then drop to the deck and give me twenty!”

Bodies drop into push-up position and we call out, “Sir, one, sir! Sir, two, sir! Sir, three, sir!” Raising and lowering as one animal to the bright tile floor. At twenty, we rise, back into our lines, back to attention. He paces past Bridgette again, and she can’t help herself, she breathes in his scent, like succor. I try not to smile, and must duck my head ever so slightly to avoid her look at me across the aisle.

“Is there something funny recruit?” Petty Officer Riley asks, popping around the girl next to me.

“No, ma’am.” I say. She looks me over then walks on, getting people back on the line, stopping to listen to Recruit Garcia’s ragged breathing. Garcia is from Texas, some rural enclave where she lived with her grandparents and younger brothers. Joining the Navy was her grandfather’s idea, he needed her to get out in any way possible. She is barely eighteen and scared. She is so afraid she’ll be sent home, she literally shakes every time we line up. After Riley moves down the room, I whisper, “Deep breaths. Deep breaths.” She clenches and unclenches her fists, but her breathing evens and she relaxes before the next command is barked.

“Duty belts on, straighten those racks and lockers!”

We do as we’re told a blur of motion and then we’re ordered outside into formation, then "let’s do some marchin’, " the word is spit out, hits us like a knife edge; away we go left and right, left and right, flanking, flanking, reverse direction, left and right. All the while being assaulted “you are a unit, you will work as one” from all sides. We are halfway down another pass on the grinder we hear “to the rear march” and as one body we turn.

shadow on the sky
starlings wheel 
wings in one motion

Blackbird fly

 

I stop when wings whisper above me.
I look up I follow flight. I follow acrobats
through trees, I follow their color flash
and song stutter as they swing from branch
to eaves, rooftops. I lean back and
watch as the mockingbird and jay rise
high in the pine and meet the morning sun.
Sparrows bicker and Cardinals titter. A long
rope of blackbirds passes over me, one
minute, two, three and then four, five before
they clear, over the trees and gone.

On the passing of Barry Lopez

“Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of the moon and the colors of the dawn and dusk.” ― Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

I read Arctic Dreams in Norfolk or San Diego, one of those edge of an ocean Navy towns. It was an introduction to Barry Lopez. It would have to have been one of those occasions when I had a chunk of time to myself. So, Jerry was either deployed or we were still separated from one another by a whole country. Those long months in "foreign surroundings" were perfect for Lopez's work.

I was fortunate to hear Barry Lopez read, once at Fishtrap in Wallowa County and then again in Ashland at the Chautauqua Poets & Writers series. Over the years I dipped into his work or just stumbled across something that floored me. Those words will always be there. I love this quote from Love in the Time of Terror that originally was published in Orion and I "stumbled" upon via LitHub: "...is it still possible to face the gathering darkness, and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?"

Be safe, be kind, love and embrace fearlessly this burning world.

So this is Christmas

Be safe, be kind, wear your mask. Remember to ask,
 Are you okay? Then listen. Listen.

The studied notes of our genome

My son, my epiphany, was born at 0300 December 24, 1990 at Balboa Hospital in San Diego. I say my epiphany because I was not prepared for the amount of hit-me-in-the-heart love I would feel. I liken it to the moment the Grinch’s heart grows three sizes. Yesterday I was reading a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa and there’s a line, A hundred doors spring open and I thought yes, that’s it. 

My son has become a conundrum rolled in a cloak of silence. He was a happy baby, a happy boy, a loving child. He was teamed perfectly with his sister. She was (is) bold and headstrong and he was restrained and calming. Both smart, creative and full of laughter and light: children.

Both are grown now. Both have made their own marks in the world, their own lives, in wildly different ways. You think that you’d always feel any hurt like a web vibrating to the fly’s touch. But the news of disappointment comes the same way, if at all, dribs and drabs, piecemeal. I guess it feels like what Ellis from No Country For Old Men says, “What you got ain’t nothing new.” Families are tentative.
 
Here’s something I wrote recently, called Palindrome, that thing that is the same forward and back. You can’t get back what was taken, you can work to repair what is still possible. My son is thirty and silent, my father is dead; I’ve never shut the door to possibility.

PALINDROME

One of my warmest memories of my father is when I am three or four. It’s evening, my father is home from a day in the woods. He’s settled into his chair smoking a pipe and watching TV. I curl up in his arms my head in the cradle between his shoulder and chin. The tobacco smell is sweet, he wears Old Spice and the remnants of this smell is always on him. He bathed after coming home from work; he does not shave in the afternoon. When I move my head or he speaks his whiskers graze my cheeks. He wears a flannel shirt which is line-dried and smells of apple and sky. I feel his heart beat, I hear his breath.  This memory ends there, because I always fell asleep.

This particular memory loomed when I held my son when he was small as he placed his head beside mine or rested where he could hear my heart.  By that time my father had excised me from his life and my son would only meet him once, though I tried to tell each of the other in halting and strange ways. They would have gotten along. My son would have loved the endless tools and building, he would have taken to welding (which he did later in high school) and mechanics. My father may have found someone who was content to sit and learn. To learn the names and ways of all the tools and motors. To be content in the silent hum of machine and a man.

~~~

And here, also, a poem. Indulge me, it's a tough day:

A semi-explanation for our continued disorders
 
Here is stardust disguised as bone:
vertebrae, wrist, cup of hip,
time secreted in tibia and femur.
The moon’s shadows have nothing on us.
 
Things that hold the half-life of joy
stay buried deep in the marrow;
we carry this as our inheritance.
A collective grief waiting to be stirred.
 
Here where wonder hesitates, dreams
pretend to sleep. Who knew sadness,
was a recessive gene? Inertia like a hidden
blood disorder, shyness passed down like a lazy eye.
 
Better to believe in prayers and spells
than the studied notes of our genome.
I can apologize in advance but I cannot
give you the cure that will heal us.

~~M.E. Hope

Music and lights

This morning the alarm was set to play Charley Pride. When Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’ began playing, I said Take it Jerry! And he confessed he does not know Charley Pride’s music. He said they did not listen to country music. Of course, they had a few more options and weren’t really tied to the 12 hours in-valley broadcast of KWVR. Granted you could occasionally get a station from Lewiston or Walla Walla, we could hear American Top 40, but you had to want it. I had a friend in the Navy who, when she’d mention a song and I’d say I don’t know that, would yell at me, Yes, you do! But I didn’t. She was from Philadelphia and could name songs and singers and groups and the years they had hits. I was culturally “deprived” by listening to instrumental, country, the curious “music for the dinner hour”, the farm report and Swap and Shop. But I knew Ferlin Husky and Dolly Parton, (oh we knew Dolly) Sons of the Pioneers, Chet Atkins and Porter Wagner. Now I need to teach Jerry one Charley Pride song and why not his biggest hit?

Well people may try to guess, the secret of my happiness
But some of them never learn it's a simple thing
The secret I'm speaking of, is a woman & a man in love
And the answer is in this song that I always sing

And it’s the Solstice! Jupiter and Saturn are closest to earth that they’ve been since 1623 and, per an article I read, the closest observable since 1226. The convergence. At dusk, as if on cue, they showed up low in the southwest sky. There is also rumor that tonight during the longest night the Ursid meteor shower will be peaking. All this celestial wonder comes after a bright and sunny day. When we went out for our afternoon walk, I mentioned that the sun was at the point in the sky that it rose to in Belgium and then sort of skirted the sky before it disappeared. Days shortened in chunks you could see and feel and then Winter Solstice hit you could feel it rewind until you were closing the black out curtains in the summer to cut out the light.

Shadows

 

Goddamn Google, don’t put up something so a sad when I’m in such a fragile state! Sunday's Doodle paid tribute to Sudan, believed to be the last northern white rhino born in the wild. I just got weepy, I didn’t even know Sudan, but I knew of him.

Sigh.

The shadows will only get one day longer and then begin back the other way. Solstice eve and the sun burns itself out minutes quicker than yesterday, not as fast as tomorrow. A lot is promised at the end of the year, a lot more to be parceled into the new year. Some people this past year have paid more attention to the days as their normal distractions were hidden. Others only counted toilet paper and body bag as markers. Grief and commodities. They counted anger and lies, disappointment and death. Each day was another breath, another meal, another day still inside a seemingly safe space until no space was safe. Fire, fever, heat, skin color, conspiracy, hurricane, tornado, on top of COVID and food insecurity and loneliness and fear and…well, you’re paying attention, aren’t you?

Be safe, be kind, be careful. Look for a quick day and a long night, look for the planets on the horizon. Happy Solstice. Let’s keep ourselves together and heal, for Sudan.

Noble Nobel, a prompting

A poem written after Louise Gluck was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Sunlight to darkness

Summer arrived, then autumn. The leaves turning,
the children bright spots in a mash of bronze and sienna.
 
            ~~~
The children held hands, leaning
to smell the roses.
They were five and seven.
                                    ~~Louise Glück, A Summer Garden
 

After school we walked behind the apartment
to the small park on Via Andrea Ciardo. Shadow
and sunlight fell in equal shades of jade and emerald
and then every version of lush green that Fall afternoon.
There was a long tunnel built here to play
on and over and through. While I watched they
slid from sunlight to darkness, the day quickly
cooling to dusk.  Issac and Justine were flowers
in the garden, then cats hunting lizards
and then careful gatherers collecting cicadas.
Inside their bug houses the new tenants
climbed the scratched walls. Once home
they documented their finds, offered small
lids of water and crumbs, placed them on the balcony,
where they joined lizards and beetles that had spent
the summer feasting on cheese and fruit
and any unfortunate grasshopper that came about.
The agreement was every being would be returned
to their wild home, even the rhino beetle that had escaped
in the kitchen by working its way through
cheese cloth only spent a day or two in captivity
refusing any foods offered. My heart
tightened with each release. Knowing that this agreement
extended to all the guests: lizard, beetle, praying
mantis, child. One day all doors open. One day all
beings go.

                               ~~M.E. Hope

Equal measure

Each day is another lesson in patience and calm, worry and absurdity, in equal measure throughout the day. Taken with a heavy, heavy acknowledgement that we are okay. We are not sick. We are not without a home, or worrying that we could lose our home. We have food. We have money for food. We have healthcare. We have each other and we laugh together – perhaps, at times, about things we shouldn’t laugh over. And yet, living will slam you down but, that is not for this forum.

This morning we woke up to snow, just a tiny dusting that lasted a few hours and quickly melted away. But it brings the birds that for the most part don’t come to the feeders as long as there are fields to forage. The starlings were across the street behind my neighbor’s house doing ballet and dance on the power lines – the only power lines in the area near us as everything else if buried – but they were landing and rising, fluttering and skittering. There’s a small swale behind their house the birds were very busy. Yesterday they were in our front yard briefly but left quite quickly when a hawk cried.

 

Some blackbirds did arrive and made themselves at home around the feeders. Usually, the blackbirds cross the skies in long clouds of song. A snippet of a poem I wrote this spring says:  

As blackbirds pepper
the clouds – west to east mornings
east to west of an afternoon –
 
I pause to listen to the wave
of wings; their cries
soft bells against the leaden sky.

But this morning just a few showed up and were in no hurry to spend the morning foraging in the fresh fallen snow. They spent a lot of time sitting, like unwelcome guests, in the bare lilac bush. Poor things.

This afternoon, geese crossed over the yard while I was out, wings whispering in the dying light. A sliver of moon was nearly caught in the lonely pine’s arms and the cold was just turning from eye watering to bitter. Tonight will be clear, tomorrow sun will arrive and we will walk into a new day, rested and ready for every new gut punch.

Scrooged

It’s that time of year when I usually have a good dose of Scrooge hit me. A lot of bah and humbugging and the double wham of bah humbug. Typically, it has to do with the weather and commercialism and false cheer. This morning though dawned brilliantly bright and cold. The cardinals had dipped into their winter gear and were especially red and bright against the sky. Jerry had an errand to run so I went too because I needed to look for “something” at the same place. We laughed when we got there and I said, I’m going to look for that caramel corn we really like, and he confessed that was his reason for being there as well. My shopping habits as of late have a bit of Supermarket Sweep added in as I try to get in and out of stores as quickly as possible and if I can have zero interactions with anyone in the store so much the better. I love self-check and I have one or two stores I go to most often that allow this; I plot out shopping by aisle and make my list accordingly as well. If someone said you need to fill your cart with avocados, tofu, curry mix, oatmeal and shredded cheese, I’d be able to get everything in under two minutes. Nothing to get famous doing, but it distracts. 

And look here's a picture taken four years ago in a land far, far away.

Winter rerun

 

 Celebration
 
 There is a reason we save this time
 of the year for celebration,
 this time when we need sun or star or flame
 to take us through the axis tip;
 when we need snowfall and miracle
 and warmth and song to carry us through
 till spring.  There is a reason
 we search the sky, listening for wingbeat,
 verse, the sound of doves hovering
 in the shelter of pine. We look toward
 one another, rather than away,
 pull in toward the hearth
 the sturdy chair, take the arms of one
 so loved, we could not go on
 without them, and in this
 pause, we pull in the world.
 The long winter night fills us:
 a renewal, a radiance, a reason for waking.

~~M.E. Hope

Seditious cowards

These are the US House of Representatives that have signed on to the lame-duck's treasonous cause. These are the cowards and the boot lickers; these are the men and women who believe that the constitution is without merit; the electors voiceless. These are the people that could not block enough votes so would like to cancel those cast.

Signe Wilkerson Cartoon

Objects may be closer than they appear

It was a beautiful Spring day. The beach was soft in the April light and too cold for students from a nearby college to shed much more than their cares. We had come from Germany via Oregon (-20 to 50 and back while we visited) and the sun and the beach were wonderous. Our first purchase was shovels and pails for master class worthy sand castle building. In the picture Issac is perched on a quickly crumbling fortress. A smile lights his face. Justine is off to the side, digging away.

During the three years we lived along the Bay of Gaeta about a third (or more) of that time was spent at the beach. The summers were long, some days we arrived as the sun was rising, staying until lunch, or if we brought lunch until midafternoon. We lived close and carried everything we needed in two beach bags: towels, toys, sunscreen and two light umbrellas. Beach attire was swim suits, shorts and T-shirts. Sunscreen was slathered on at home and then again after the first dip in the water, T-shirts and hats went back on around 9:00; there were plenty of breaks under the umbrellas. If we went home for lunch there was a total beach wash off. Sometimes we went back to the beach in the late afternoon and watched fishermen row back in, or couples taking a light walk after riposo (Italian siesta) before heading back to work for a few hours. Afternoons we rarely swam, but walked and searched for shells and good driftwood. Or launched a boat that had been worked on for weeks: a box with bottles and tape, lots and lots of tape.

 

 Was this paradise? It was one.

 

 

A pause

There's been a dull blank spot looming in the area. It's the time of year, the way the sun comes up and stops sort of skirts around the trees and then goes down. Or disappears. Just this last few days before Solstice sets things back the other way. Sets things right. So on that note here is the elusive Tufted Titmouse. I love its eyes. The little cap is jaunty and the gray is exactly right. 

Looking up

The geese held the Moon for ransom this morning and even once they'd gone on to their lakes and ponds the Moon stayed, settling into the blue when it should have been hiding. It even became shapeshifter as we worked through the morning once too close and then suddenly a dime against the Sun's weight. Eventually it tired and crept off to bed, weary of a sky that offered no cover, no clouds, no early dusk.

 

Playtime

 

During fourth and fifth grade, when I wasn’t playing horses or tetherball or, occasionally, Four Square, I was involved in a very detailed and elaborate game with friends (Audrey, Dawn and Teresa?). We were a weird family of weirdness. I think our last name was Go-Go or something like that; all our first names rhymed with our last. Our home was the jungle gym. This was in Enterprise, Oregon where I attended two years of school after we moved back from the Southwest and before we moved to Joseph. The fact that this particular game went on through two school years and only existed at recess fascinates me now that I think about it. We had situations that arose, we had relatives visit, the occasional classmate who joined us and then left. We traveled extensively, so that our house became a castle or hotel or rocky outcropping somewhere. I believe we were interchangeably dogs and cats as pets were needed.

                                 *   

Audrey and I were good friends. She lived on Alder Slope with her grandparents, parents and two older sisters. They had goats and chickens, a couple of ancient horses and property littered with old cars and machinery. My favorite was an old DUKW boat that somehow had ended up in Wallowa County. In the winter we played through the woods and built snow forts along ditch banks, sledded down their driveway and when we got too cold went in and warmed up with hot chocolate made with goat milk. Then we’d gather all the various dolls in the house and create new worlds. When Audrey’s sisters would play this would sometimes take a dark turn as Ken inevitably was arrested for indecent exposure and went to jail. Sometimes Audrey’s chihuahua, Cookie, was the jailer and was allowed to chew Ken’s leg. After each arrest, Barbie moved on; off to see the world or build a rocket or organize a school. Something that said the one male doll is not really needed for anything here.

What made me think about this was an opinion piece today in the New York Times “Learning from ‘Leaf Town’”.  It made me hope that more children are creating these intricate worlds, using their play to make something better or subvert the norm, somewhere where imagination can just wander. 

*Picture from Insh.World

Pining again

Cutting the pine
 
It is as if a ribcage has lost a lung.
The body and the world note an absence.
The cavity empty of song;
the sudden change in breathing.
The birds fly by, their muscle memory
shifting up, or down, didn’t I land here
yesterday? The squirrel in his endless
accounting has lodged a complaint
sitting in front of the house loudly
scolding. Beside the stump, where sawdust
and bark are scattered, the partner tree stands
awkwardly. Like a long-wed companion
who doesn’t know what to do,
with an un-held hand.

Google Earth image June 2013

 

The tree on the right is the one that was cut, I thought I took a picture, but I can't find it. Even in this picture from 2013 you can see the vines all the way up. And the giant print of the stump and vine. Vines like elephant toenails. 

 

Don't pine for me

Cardinal, Sparrow, Blue Jay, Carolina Wren, Carolina Chickadee, Dark Eyed Junco, House Finch, Tufted Titmouse, Downy Woodpecker, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Northern Mockingbird, Robin and Dove. 

They arrive before dawn, in the cold, and work on the seeds I spill as I take the birdfeeders in at night. And then they gather in greater number as I put the feeders back out as the sun rises. One suet feeder and one of seed on each side of the house. Then I sprinkle sunflower seed and peanuts. Back inside I like to listen for the Blue Jays; the peanuts go fast.

Today the tree guys came to take down the dead pine. I was sorry to see it go but worried how it might fall, our roof, or our neighbor's, too great a target. This crew was here at the beginning of the pandemic to trim another tree in the backyard. I like their work I like that they are from this area and that they come in and chop and clean and joke among themselves as they work. The tree that was lost was one of the two pines in the front yard that had ivy to the top. It took a lot of years for this parasite to take over these trees, some of the old vines were four inches in diameter. We’ve successfully stopped the ivy. Jerry did the bulk of the cutting around the trunk and I patrolled the ground all year and have seen no new growth. But we lost one of the trees. Both trees were filled with vines, now dead, and the birds loved the trees. After the tree guys left birds zipped around in the empty space, and we went out and brushed sawdust off what is left of the trunk. Maybe tomorrow I’ll try to count rings or take paper and crayon and do a rubbing. As we were coming home from our walk, I noted how the tree still standing looked lonely, kind of bare on one side where it had had a partner for so many years. I’m trying to think what kind of flowers to plant next year to help a tree in mourning.

Be safe, be kind, hug a tree.

One small thing

The Sun Magazine arrived yesterday and this poem stayed on the kitchen counter all day. As I went back and forth throughout the house I stopped and read it, again and again. I've looked for more work by Cordaro and found her debut here in The Apple Valley Review.