Resetting the heart

I was at the library the other day actually browsing, which I haven’t done in a long, long time. (Maybe before Christmas I went to see what the Friends had for sale.) Our library has been open, with heavy restrictions, for a while but I get the majority of my books via interlibrary loan (get notified, step in, pickup, check out, done) or through Hoopla or Overdrive or Libby (all those wonderful apps that let me access so much). But this day I was actually on a mission looking for some things; double masked and keeping my distance I lingered. I found the three or four things I was hoping to find and then, because it is April, I went to look through the poetry books. I don’t know what happened or when, but that section has been weeded quite significantly. ☹ I know, I know if books don’t circulate, they have to move on, the library has finite space, but it always makes me sad (and mad at myself for not periodically upping the numbers and checking out ten or twenty at a time). I did find Entries (First Edition 1994, Pantheon Books), by Wendell Berry so nabbed it and as I was checking out downstairs it came up as “not found in the system” – I almost missed the alert – then I paused and thought, I’ll just go with it and when it comes back the record will be corrected. Having worked in the library though, I knew this is not how to do it. So, I waited the extra few minutes it took to allow it to be taken to the back (I love mystery of “the back” in any business) as it was readded to the catalog.

At least this book gets a new start, like resetting your heart after a hurt.

Speaking of heart resets, I was a guest at the SHAPE International Library YA Book Club today. My friend, and former colleague, Sophie, invited me as they were reading a book in verse called The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta. In the book the main character, Michael, reads a poem at an open mic” I come from”. (Here’s the author reading that poem.) So, I thought that would be a good jumping off point into a prompt.

I sent some more examples of poems in this type format and two of the members of the book club wrote poems of their own and read them. Very nice work too I have to say; I’m hoping they’ll send them to me as I’d love to read them again. It was a really fun morning, and one of the participants was someone (and her family!) I remember fondly from my time in the SHAPE community. We also talked poetry, poetry publishing, creating your own canon and not worrying too much about your audience, just write, write, write. 

Post 100, a litte more creative non-fiction

Hive Mind

The wasps took residence in the barn the year I was twelve. The first hot morning after school ended, we noticed them, hundreds around the barn door, where a baseball had cracked the siding, they moved in and out in deliberate and mad delirium. Dad said, “Leave them be, they’ll leave in Fall.” So, we went the back way into the barn, past the unused milking stanchions to the granary for chicken feed or oats for the hogs. This small room which had formerly been used for separating milk was the inside wall where the wasps lived. Here you could sit on the floor, press an ear to the roughhewn planks and listen to the furious rush of noise like a horse’s breath after a good run.

The insects worried the dogs, chased the cats and stung every one of us at least once that long summer. I was a repeated target, I felt, and had a handful of wasps’ stings after failing to check the underside of the gooseberry bush. Before reaching for a large bunch of the jade colored berries I had minded the thorns but ignored any other warning. When I dropped the fruit and saw the two black and yellow bodies, I stomped everything into a pulpy mash. My hand ached and itched long afterwards, and when volleyball practice started it seems the stingers punished me again every time, I slapped the ball.

But as the colder days and nights came, fewer and fewer wasps buzzed in our world.
Right before the first snow in the valley, long after the logging roads were frozen, Dad home from a day in the woods, pried off one piece of siding, pulled the nest out of the wall and burned it with his welding torch. As it began to flame three golden wasps crawled onto the ground and curled to miniscule question marks.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thirty years later at my first house my husband and I patrol the yard, flip small paper nests off the house or power wash them from below the deck. We try to stop them from decorating the second story beneath the eaves, as well, but with cedar siding attacked by woodpeckers, the creatures find their way in. Until far into summer, when we must concede the back of the house to them, we feel in charge. Late September, as we sit inside, or prepare dinner, the wasps crash into windows or bounce off the outside walls, little soldiers looking for a breach.

My father told me little about swarming things. He was a logger, he allowed me to know timber, but not always trees. This seemed short sighted and there were times this lack of seeing the bigger picture limited me. I live in a town where I listen to people like I use to listen to the wasps through the barn wall. In Safeway I try to understand the language and signals they use. How this dance keeps the hive together. As my husband walks through the store people seldom respond to his greeting and then they turn to stare. A black man and a white woman still disturb some and it is those mad bodies I watch closely, never knowing what will stir them to swarm; I must see all the signals.

           

April is cruel

The two dogs, like twin rag dolls, loll
under the table, too large anymore
to be comfortable. Eventually they army-
man crawl and fall into a spot
of sunlight, head-to-head, shoulder
to shoulder, rump to rump, one’s tail
thrumming a brief hello as I walk by.
 
My children use to lounge this way
their small arms touching, one’s head
against the other’s shoulder as they read
or drew or shared some seed of laughter;
naming things in their secret language.
The spoon and ladle or lid transformed
egot, lipsoduckle, sploon.
 
At night we curled into stories, poems,
songs. Their bodies stretched on mine,
two lizards, two creamy cats, drawing
warmth, seeking the proximity of my heart.
 
I should have never slept.

Swirling of seeds*

   ** Say their names... 

From The Slowdown, this poem is called Wedding Poem and it is the sort of joyous glance at the gentleness of the world we need today. Peace and love, be safe, be kind. Here's a goldfinch that kissed a sunflower long in my yard last year. The link above the poem is from the website of Renée Ater, I highly recommend it.

Numbers

Today we became a fully vaccinated household. Both of us have had our second shot. Truthfully, I did not expect this day to happen until fall at the earliest. Even after President Biden was inaugurated and made his 100 million in 100 days, I thought (based on what we had seen prior) that he’d overpromised and that other factors would go forward to slow progress down. Not only are we vaccinated but those we love and look forward to seeing soon have had their first or second (or, in one case, one) shot.

During the Spanish Influenza of 1918-1919 it is estimated that 675,000 people died in the US. Right now, from COVID-19, we’re at (about) 564,000. Every day I watch the numbers of US vaccinated, those infected, hospitalized and deaths. Even when a low number like 256 deaths was reported the other day I said, that’s Lostine or Ukiah or Halfway. It’s Ellis Grove or Verona or St Johns. Little towns everywhere. People that have families and friends and had plans. It ripples and ripples and ripples.

Well.

Here’s a flowering tree I passed on my walk yesterday. Be safe, be kind, please get vaccinated.

Daydreams

I spent a lot of time daydreaming on my Grandmother Warnock’s porch. The house my Grandfather built was (still is) in Imnaha Oregon beside the post office. The house was on the main road and was shielded by two trees and a long hedge. The porch was wide and shady and complete with a swing, the yard full of flowers and birdsong. You could hear people as they came and went to the post office or into the General Store across the street, but unless someone came to the gate and looked in the yard you couldn’t be seen. Even in the heat of summer, and there was scorch down in that canyon, it was a good place to sit; best if you’d just swam for a while in the river and needed to dry off. I remember when my sister said she was going to get married I made that sudden connection between all the pictures and stories of others and saw how this new story was the future.

My grandmother taught me how to make corn fritters one summer when I was staying with her. I think it was one of those weeks she needed some help so one of the grands was dispatched. (She was a low-key task master, liked to “watch” her programs in the afternoon and doze, so there was time to swing and think.) We lived out in the valley, about 30 miles over the river and through the woods. 

With the fritters I’m pretty sure we had fresh tomatoes and green beans and a piece of meat. There always seemed to be some sort of meat to add to a meal. But the highlight was the corn fritters that were hot and greasy and the corn was sweet (and we had syrup with them). I thought about those fritters today as I finally hung the potholders that use to hang in her kitchen. They had been in my kitchen in Klamath Falls, though I didn’t use them, and then when we went to Belgium, I left them in storage. Today seemed a good time to break them out finally and get them into view.

                                

I have this story I wrote quite a while ago, called Grandma’s Rose that is 90 to 93.8% “true”. Creative non-fiction, I guess. 😊 

Grandma’s Rose

On the far edge of the Wallowa Valley there is a road that goes up past old farms and pastures and then plunges down to run along Sheep Creek. It’s the highway to Imnaha; a small community of people, built in along the rim rocks and wide areas of the Imnaha River as it continually carves the canyon on its way to the Snake. It’s a Temperate Zone in the Northeastern Oregon January, a lore laden winter home of the Nez Perce and a perfect greenhouse for those plants not hardy enough to survive the valley’s cold. Here my grandmother lived in a cavernous house built into a hill and surrounded by a yard that covered two acres from river to road above. Cherry, apple and apricot trees stand just through a pasture gate, none pruned down for over twenty years and inside the yard a rich and varied assortment of plants; a garden that produced enough for three families. I hadn’t missed it until one-night thousands of miles from home I watched an old movie and as the sun set over a desert, I clearly saw reflected the same shadows that filled the Imnaha late summer nights; and I went back.

That last summer I saw my Grandmother she was 84 and though the term elderly was not in either of our vocabularies she seemed to feel that ‘old’ could. ‘Don’t get old’, she’d admonish as though somehow, I’d been granted that power longed for and sought over the centuries. We sat on the back steps in the evening watching the last tips of sun down the canyon as they brushed over Chesinmus Ridge; the rim rocks slowly turning from gray to purple. The temperatures, which had easily tipped 105 during the day, eased with the fading sun and we emerged into the yard like lazy cats; curious and relaxed after the hours indoors. Then we began the mediative process of watering the gardens and flower beds in and around the yard.

My favorite plant, though long past blow, was an old lilac bush now as high and deep as a room. Inside it could, and had, sheltered me as I had played, just a few years prior, throughout the large yard exploding bloom-filled beds thrown haphazardly on the hill where my Grandmother’s house sat. I always took the sprinkler by it first, so that as the surrounding flowers got some welcome liquid that its shaded roots would drink too. I’d missed its last four harvests when the branches bent down with heavy blooms and I would sit within its arms and escape on fragrant thoughts. Part of what I had missed settling so far away from this land had been the early springs that came to the Imnaha and let us pick flowers in April and May before the valley shook off its last frosts and snows. Where each Memorial Day we could fill a pickup truck bed with flowers and drive the county roads laying boughs and bouquets on graves each stop a story and fingerprinted treasure of memory.

My Grandmother would set the big rain-bird near the raspberries, ensuring each row of the vegetable garden was hit and then she would go to the front yard. There just below the porch outside her bedroom window was a rose garden. It grew three colors, yellow, pink and red and though she had other roses throughout the property this was the only place where they flourished. Each year the vivid heads were a favorite take home of guests and grandchildren alike. She was in front when I came about the house passed the stone chimney made of river rocks and the ivy that clung to it stringy and pale. She wore her gloves and had been digging with her small hoe. Even in the coming darkness I could see a yellow rose glowing far back from the rest and I heard her talking, “Just like the first one he saw”. She turned and beckoned me over and then held my wrist while she told me about the yellow rose.

“Your Grandfather Jess, planted these roses here. He had seen the yellow one somewhere in New York before he left for France in World War One, he wrote me a letter, though we weren’t even courting yet. A lot of the boys wrote to me during the war.” She looked me in the eye when she said this, she was a beauty at 17 and I had seen the letters she’d saved…some marked with the dates the “boys” had died either in the war or the training to fly in Texas. “He said its color reminded him of the afternoon sun here and when he thought of that he thought of me. After he’d come home and we got married he made the plans to build this house and for a garden of yellow roses. Aunt Rita was back east then at school and she sent the roses here for our wedding, the roots wrapped in old newspapers and grain sacks. He kept them in a corner of his parent’s yard, down the river. It took two years to finish the house and yard. He brought then down here on the tractor.”

She stopped then and looked around the yard, “I could take you to each spot he tried them in over the years, they didn’t want to be here, they’d root but not prosper. So, every so often after a few seasons he’d move them, we’d never grown roses so we just thought eventually they’d find a spot. When he finally put them here your mother was already in high school …he’d been moving roses for so long…sometimes they’d stay for five years and then he’d be out digging them up again. Then he put them here. It was the same year Doctor Blackburn told him he had a bad heart and had to give up and smoking and drinking. Not that he’d ever been much of a drinker, but when the girls were little, he use to go off with Fern and Uncle Walt and they’d be gone for a few days…I wouldn’t know if they were alive or dead and sometimes, I didn’t care.”

I tried to see my Grandmother’s face now, hoping to see that this memory of my Grandfather, a man I remembered as a shadow of thought, wasn’t as bitter as the words. But she just stared at the flower and continued on, “I told him that if he couldn’t settle down then he could just stay away. That’s when he told me how frightened he was about the rose, you know I thought I’d married a fool then. Here I was telling him that if he couldn’t stay around with his wife and daughters and be respectable that he was not welcomed back and he was telling me about this bush! He told me that when he first saw the rose it was in a big yard by a big house and that he hoped that if he came back alive from France, he would build that house and own that yard and have me; and this rose. And that’s all he had wanted for those years he was away. And every time he moved the rose and it didn’t do well that he couldn’t make the dream his. That he felt as lost as the rose trying to find a spot to bloom. He had everything he needed sunshine and warmth and care but he couldn’t settle in. He told me that if I could hold on and keep trying that he would stop, but that every time he was out and drinking, he forgot about trying to stay rooted and just felt free. You know it hurt me too, that the drinking was more important, fed a need I couldn’t, but after he died, after he’d stopped drinking and long after he’d stopped leaving for days I understood. It wasn’t the drinking or me, it was his trying to live in a dream. He thought it would all be perfect this house and yard and life and when it wasn’t he didn’t know how to get by…so he went around it and away.”

She stopped in her story and got the hose from up the hill and we turned a small frog eye sprinkler on it and turned the water on. It was dark now and she set it at the edge of the roses. We began the walk back around the house, she took my arm stopping to touch a flower or looking at the stars. Then she said, “One year your grandfather took some trout up into the canyon where he’d found an underground spring and tried to transplant them. Over the years he forgot where they were and it became a joke around town about his fish hatchery. And every fall some hunter would tell us about these fish he saw in a spring and your granddad would ask him if he’d eaten any, because they were his… He was always trying to put things where maybe they didn’t belong. “She sighed looking at me, “Everything adapts though, if it really wants to survive.”

She went up the steps, into the kitchen and I watched her through the windows. And I thought how typical that each time we moved and got further apart someone would produce a flower of enduring truth and light and reflection and wipe out all the distances that had accumulated. I moved the water away from my sheltering lilac and marveled that my Grandparents had each moved and rooted until they found a place they could thrive and through it all had done it together, no matter the wait.

Long after my Grandmother had died, well into her nineties and years past anything she could remember as she succumbed to the haze of Alzheimer’s, I would see her standing at dusk in her garden watering the rose like a forgotten dream. And I would keep trying to settle and survive in whatever climate I was given.

                                     

   Jess and Hazel Warnock 1922

As an added bonus here's a Google Maps streetview of Imnaha.

Just a Tuesday

 

Today was voting day here in O’Fallon, Illinois. Mayor, Alderman, City Clerk, School board members. We went over to Saint Nicholas, which is our normal precinct, and it took about five minutes to have our information found and then ballots filled out. The mayor is running for reelection and is unopposed, so either he’s doing a great job (I have no complaints) or no one cares or no one wants this job.  Jerry thinks it’s a combo of all three. Aside from that my day was filled with prepping the flower beds for the finishing touches, rocks and mulch. I was putting weed barrier down when the local nursery let me know they could deliver today if needed (yes! please) so Jerry and I moved about a ton and a half of rock before we voted. Nothing gets you ready for the democratic process than some good physical labor.

Tomorrow I get my second dose of vaccine. Kind of excited. Making some plans already, looking West. More than that I’ll cover in email with select friends and/or family. 😊

Here's today's poem followed by the prompt:

Another poem for Ursula
 
The cardinals are ransacking the feeder, fresh filled
with sunflower seeds. They torpedo in and their sounds
ring against the house, echoing into the open windows.
My blind cat sits, answers their tunes with a cry
her eyes turned toward them, but it is only the nerve
recalling how to zero in on wing-beat and song.
I write this new poem and hope that what is killing
                                              her finds calm; will ask for more words.
 
  
Today’s prompt
Write a short poem (rhyming not necessary) that  includes each of the following 5 words (anywhere and  n any order). Poems should not exceed 7 or 8 lines:
                                                          write, beat, nerve, sound, cry.

Half-heathen, half-jester

This fourth day of April was warm, almost 80 here today, luckily the humidity is low. The birds were showing out, the trees blooming, church bells were pealing and Jerry called me a heathen for finishing my last bit of landscaping,  requireing blocks and fast setting cement, on Easter. Like I care, like he hasn’t gone into hundreds of churches (hyperbole? maybe) and NOT been struck by lightning as we enter. Yes, I do have a tendency to view these “houses” of worship as missed opportunities. I want to ask my neighbor so badly if the extension on her church is to house people. But I won’t because I would be obligated to go to the other churches and ask what they do with their tremendous amounts of space. And my neighbor’s church (literally she’s the senior pastor) feeds people every week and they scrambled to make it all take away for the past year. 

It’s all in half-jest. Amen.

Today I found another poem from the MOOC and it made me think, my brother doesn’t show up in a lot of poems, and I’m almost certain this might have been one of the first; I’ll spend tomorrow pondering.

Excercise 5 

We shared endless days of catch in the field
beside the barn. The smack of ball to leather glove,
what sufficed for sibling love, witnessed only
by crowds of cattle and the bored stare of lambs.
 
I had a super arm, a deadly rocket swing
but, being a girl, I never had a chance
to charge the plate or lead a team.
 
He went onto summer Little League, then an All-
Star in Babe Ruth. Of all those hours we worked
at play this truth still holds me hard, I turned away
and those innings I never saw. I turned away
from the game and in that turn abandoned him.

From slate blue to lavender*

From a MOOC I took once, I didn't remember the poem but I remember this process: And in fact it is something I should use more. Happy Poetry Month day three!

Exercise 2: M.E. Hope _ Repurposings_reduce/reuse/recycle

Some of these are darlings that have been cut over the decades, some are things that reoccur. Here are lines cannablized (repurposed) from other work followed by the draft of something new.

1) Like ether my warm breath
    on his neck pulled me to quick sleep
    sanctuary so wholly mine;
    his heart against my palm.
 
2) …and like a lost dog
    3,000 miles from home
    they come back,
    thin and bloody and just as familiar.
 
3) They scuffle across
    the floor & settle near his feet
    like subservient dogs.
 
4) The lamb shed was built 40 years before we arrived
     and through its thick walls, cradling sawdust, little passed;
     sound lay muffled on its dirt floor like a hostage.
 
5)  I am like the bee outside
     your hothouse window
     humming with patience
     for you to slide the pane.
 
6) where his steps are muffled
    in moon dust.

***Ex 2 Poem***

Memories like summer wasps tap at my window.
There are certain days of the year when a slant
of light, golden or olive green, will plant me
on a hay trailer at sunset. Sweat rills through alfalfa
dust on my arms and circles my neck, and for half
a second I’m there: the air, scented by cut hay
and gasoline, cools. The mountain rotates color
*from slate blue to lavender. A whistle sounds
from town as the mill marks shift change.

Our lamb shed was built forty years before we came
and through the thick walls cradling sawdust
little passed; sound lay muffled on the dirt floor
like a hostage. And here is memory again
caught up in the heavy dark, the accumulated
odor of straw and animal piss, ammonia and soured
milk, sheep drying after a snow storm or summer
rain. The iodine used for disinfectant stains time.
We slept here in lambing season, rotating shifts
each falling into the set up bunk, to the other’s
perfume. Even now, forty more years on, I catch a whiff,
Baby Love or Herbal Essence, and I am following my sisters (still).

But the hardest memory, the one that plays at the edge
like that lost dog, is of my father. Though he is gone from me
he exists, just like the old farm. Before sleep,
before dreams are allowed to collude with thought
I think of him, how when I was four he would hold me
tuck my head under his chin and like ether my breath
lulled me to sleep, a sanctuary wholly mine,
his heart tapping on my open palm.

The way it is

This morning I had a number of errands to run, I was glad it is Spring Break and quite cold, that keeps people in first thing in the morning. But after turning off my street I saw a dog running in the road. This is one thing I’ve rarely seen here, a dog out on its own. Last summer we had a young dog run up to us on Quail Run, luckily a woman we know, I was in love with her ancient dog Willie, told us the dog lived one street over and belonged to the daughters of the man who lived there. So, an easy return.

This dog looked familiar and then I realized it was, Joy, the black and white sheltie that lives behind us. I was immediately concerned as I’ve never seen her not on a leash. She’s always with one member of the family. I pulled over and tried to get her to come, but she headed toward home, so I followed a couple of blocks and then heard her person say Joy! Come! I got back to my car and drove over to their house. Joy was just trying something new, lighting out for the territories! Of course, the husband and wife were relieved, I was glad it was just a runaway and no one was down (they are older). They have three dogs right now as they are looking after their son’s two little mixed poodle cuties while he and his family are out of the country for six months. I did note that when I was out this afternoon checking the plants around the house, I saw Joy on a very long tether.

In cat news, my next-door neighbor believes he’s been adopted by the cat that lives down the block. He’s not really pleased, but he’s also intrigued as she brought a mole and left it on his front step. So, not thrilled to have the cat hang out, but he’s been working on getting rid of the moles for a while; and his almost two-year-old son loves the cat: conundrum. (Which would be a great name for a cat.)

And it’s poetry month, day two. I’m getting some words emailed to me from Center for the Humanities at Washington University as part of their Life/Lines poetry project. Today’s words were: burgundy, river, doorway, footstep and decision. Here’s my poem:


The way it is

The river is a doorway, a place where the burgundy-sided
trout sleep, silently waving in the shadows. Boaters dip
their oars like footsteps along the liquid trail which glows green
and gold: sunlight, snake grass, yellow headed flowers
that only grow here. This decision wasn’t made
but became the way it is.

Day here, an Egret watches her reflection, still
except for the water’s tell, the vee pulsing around her leg.

It's Poetry Month!

 

Here's a poem from Poetry Month 2005 :

My daughter wanted a poem about our cat but the poem turned another way

Snow is swirling around the basin this day. Three grey does come out of the slough & stand in the neighbor’s field nibbling sage as we drive past; the yearling steers rest heads down, tails to the wind ignoring the deer that seem to ignore the flurries. I imagine that we seem like the deer in our day to day roving, oblivious to the looks that come at us – a white woman with a black man – in a town where the echoes of internment camps and Indian wars still flavor unrealized slurs – “he’s working on Indian time”;” it’s a Jap cabin”; “don’t try to Jew me down”; “Oh, yes, he’s that Chinaman” – ask if they know what they say has meaning beyond metaphor, simile, injustice, lie. Somehow we ignore the ignorant and meet each storm head on; let the cattle turn away, stampede from the coming thunder.

~~M. E. Hope