You may have the universe if I may have Italy

Garganelli

A man is making pasta, a volcano of flour
is filled with a dozen yolks sprinkled with salt.
He whisks these until every egg is broken and blended
into a smooth golden cream and then the sides
of the cone are folded into this center. Once
every dry ingredient has become moist he kneads
the mass smooth.  He forms the dough into a ball,
cuts a third of it away and feeds it into a pasta press.
These he refeeds until he has a
saffron sheet that looks like fine cloth. From here
he works like a seamstress, cutting equilateral
squares no more than two inches per side.
The blend of sciences then become art as he
takes a corner, spools it around a dowel
and then rolls it across a board
called a comb that creates grooved
tube of pasta. And like that he has food. 

Science, magic, precision. Mangia!

I was reading a travel article today from the New York Times about Capri and Procida. Capri holds a special place in my heart because that's where Jerry and I went on our first date. In 2015 we went back and spent a weekend to mark the 30th anniversary of that date. Procida, I never visited but I sent a money order there every month for our first year in Formia as that's where my landlady lived.

The article mentions Ischia, which was an island I also visited a number of times. During one of the best visits, my friend, Kathy and I, stayed in a hotel that was run by a couple born in Italy, then they went to the states and spent forty years and then returned to Ischia and ran this very small hotel and trattoria. They were fantastic. Their son was a Marine and so they were very happy to have two sailors stay. The first morning we were there (we’d come in late the night before on a small boat full of German tourists) they woke us early so we wouldn’t miss any beach time. And when we came back from the beach, they had lunch ready – and finally we were able to get some sleep during riposo.  We spent that evening talking to them on their balcony, even though the father, call me Papa, was trying to get us to go out dancing (no, not with him!) because we were young and in Italy and the local boys were so nice. But we never went out dancing, we went for gelato, we listened to some families singing, we went and slept well before Papa came to get us: the sun is up, the beach is waiting, the sea is calling!

By morning I was charred

Yesterday, at dusk, under the huge umbrella of the maple, fireflies tangoed, intense and bright. Then as I walked through the house closing curtains and blinds, I noticed that over on my neighbor’s lawn a whole disco ball had exploded and the shimmy and shine was fantastic. Highlighted, at the edge, in one of the raised beds, was a Cosmo just opened. Fiery orange it caught the eye like a struck match, a flare against the fading light. These bright hues held me. It’s like when the Ruby-throated hummingbird sits on the fence around the sunflowers, a guardian preening, flashing scarlet, stop and go as it turns. There is always a second hummingbird near that is zipping just above, a mad pendulum making that racket that only that little zealot makes, a high chirp that could be used to crack truth from spies.

This morning at 0435 the highlight of the fireworks, the Grand Finale, arrived: lightning struck the Lonesome Pine in the front yard. When it hit, when it crashed us awake, our Ring security system called “Motion Detected at the Front Door”, already the rain was lashing the house in a deluge and so as I looked out the window all I could see was the flash of water. It wasn’t until later in the morning that I reviewed the App video and saw the moment the tree was hit and the shower of sparks. The upper reaches of the tree are still incased in the dead vines of ivy and we’re curious if helped the tree during the strike, the rain certainly had its way with any fire.

We went out this afternoon when the sun came out and walked around the tree touching its great trunk, noted some burns and a place where sap is spilling out. Some of the vine remnants have a definite char. Poor old tree I said. It survived the ivy, it survived its partner tree dying, it branches and roots untangled from the other, now I will have to wonder if it will survive this as well.

I had to hunt for this old poem from Klamath about another lightning strike, that certainly held worry in another way. One that worries me (always) about the west and its massive drought.

Lightning Strike

The fire never quite made it over the hill
boiling smoke hid the tree line
and bloodied the sun.

All night the scent of burning pine crackled
through the window and into
my dreams, by morning I was charred,
and dusted with ash.

Just before

A four word prompt: This was just before. An older poem that has me thinking about things. And look, me in 8th grade I think, based on the choker. 

~~~
This was just before.
This was just before star fall.
Kelly stepped onto the lawn
and the owl flew so close her hair
was brushed by wingbeat.
This was just before
we crossed the lawn listening
to the horses cropping new clover.

Watching over Mount Chief Joseph
for UFO’s, signs, fresh frontiers.
This was just before bats darkened
the horizon, covered the red glow
of the fading sun with shadow
their voices a chorus over the fallen alfalfa.
This was just before that
while we were still inside
our heads together learning a Druid chant,
our bare legs thistle and sun burnt,
our faces sun bombed and our arms
covered by mosquito bites and cat scratch.

This was just before her parents moved away
leaving her and her sister and brothers in the care of the hired
wrangler – so no care at all. This was just before that
when summer stretched forever full of horseback rides,
swimming, the annual fair, the rodeo, the long sunsets
green with the dust of harvest.
This was before that.
This was just before high school.
This was just before then.

The height of healing

About a year ago I tried to use the last letter my father sent me as the basis for a series of erasure poems. I think I got three or four done, then I sort of lost interest. The planned last poem was a blank page. Eye-roll. There were moments that I got peeved and there is one Thanksgiving memory where I honestly had hurt feelings as my sisters and brother and their families were all together, at our parent’s. But, as long-range estrangements go, or went, have gone, this is well, history; the father poems are boring. And isn’t that the height of healing to move into a room of general indifference?

This morning the wren woke the neighborhood with her big ass song. It was a song of cool air and a breeze and a drop in humidity. She sang of Otto and Olive the groundhogs that live under the deck (and the neighbor’s shed and the tremendous wood pile just made for groundhogs and snakes), she sang of their incredible appetite for clover flowers and high-speed shuffles over the lawn.  She sang to mock the Blue jays and the cardinals, knowing that her cinnamon brown blends with so much more than reds and blues and morning colors should ease one into the day, something soft and brown. That a song should be as big as the sky and heavy as the rain clouds that circled and sputtered. She sang of the wind that blew overnight and the thunder that cascaded through the trees before dawn and the air that arrived like a gift. Her song was gift. She knew her song was gift, so she made it louder, she shifted from tree branch to eave and then to the little bamboo frame on the geranium right by the bedroom window. Her gift of an earsplitting song that made me laugh out loud. What can you do? Father’s Day has come and gone, my father is gone, any spare song is a gift.

And here’s (what may be) the final poem about my father:

A hum that passes

Two years dead my father returns to apologize
but because I forgot the open door, I was in another
part of my home and missed his shadow.

Even in the last days of his life, those I spent
helping to pack up a house that I had finally
stayed thirty plus years after he said I was dead
to him, he said little and I did not ask as he spent
his days barely breathing, barely there.

So now, his presence in that empty space
became just another hum that passes
and makes me stop, thinking I’d heard something.
I shake my head; I was dead for so long
why did he think resurrection was possible?
 

A pondering of time and space

There are two things swirling in my mind today. One is an incident that happened years ago (years and years) and the other is a pondering of time and space (again) based on an announcement I saw for an open mic.

Recently I saw a headline about Beach Blanet Bingo. This sparked this memory, the incident, that involved a life-size cut out of a woman, a joke among co-workers and weird opportunity. At the time I was in Naples Italy in the Navy working an exhausting series of watches that, combined with living in the barracks where there was little peace and quiet, lead to a heightened and maniac type of humor and joking. One of my coworkers, let’s call him E. was also my supervisor or in the Navy lingo, our LPO (leading petty officer). E. was a skinny guy with a buzz cut and a dark beard. He had the classic military issue glasses (fondly known as birth control glasses), he walked with huge strides and sort of resembled the “keep on truckin’ man” of Robert Crumb. He was wickedly smart and had a subtle, though dark, sense humor. He was planning a trip somewhere and had made mention that he was hoping to get some quiet away from us and find an Annette Funicello “babe”. Of course, the word babe opened him up to our immediate ridicule and mockery. Because we worked shifts (two twelve-hour days/ two twelve-hour mids and then ninety-six hours off) we sometimes didn’t see E. for days at a time. But we kept the joke going by messages left in our mail boxes. (Messages in mailboxes) Shortly before E. was scheduled to leave my friend Kathy and I saw the Navy Exchange (NEX) had a life-sized cut-out in front of the building, a Kodak display of a woman in a bikini and we hatched a plan to “kidnap” this young lady. So as Kathy drove slowly past the NEX one evening well after closing time, I leapt from her Fiat put the cut-out in the backseat and we drove it back to the barracks. Later that night we took it across the quarter deck of the Admin Building, up the elevator, where the Marines asked way too many questions about what we were doing – anything to break the monotony of their watch – and we placed the bikini clad lady on the computer room floor with a Beach Blanket Bingo redux sign for E. As we later found out, E. took one look at it, folded it in two and carried it away. He went on his trip, he sent us postcards, Annette was never mentioned again, as were babes or bikinis. I hope now, all these years later, the Kodak campaign at the NEX did not suffer, after all, we were always buying film. At the time of the abduction, we had fully intended to return it to the NEX atrium.

The next thing I’m pondering, still two days after I first saw it, is an announcement I saw for an open mic where poets get 5 minutes and prose writers get 7. When I asked the organizer why, they explained that poetry reads faster than prose when read out loud. (Please snicker, I did) What?

I’m wondering how much time prose poetry gets.

So here is a prose poem, a poem about Naples, a poem about those Marine guards.

After the Snow

Naples Italy, December 1985

The Stars and Stripes ran a photo of a fishing boat on the beach at Licola, blue and yellow, with three inches of snow like rich upholstery along the bow, and oars wrapped in fine quilting. The first snow in Naples since 1937 fell as sailors, far from home and snow, opened windows and leaned out, cupping hands where the snow melted as it touched, and we sang let it snow, let it snow. Across the city, buses and cars tangled into greater gridlock, Fiats sliding into Maserati’s, Vespa’s sliding over cobblestones, men and women slipping on the ice walkways. On the base in Agnano, our small volcanic crater, the Marines, who guarded our gates, who spent hours every day, if not on duty, then drilling, or running or polishing something – these boys, whose average age was 19 – were in the parking lot in front of the building where the Admirals worked, making snow angels. Even those from the Deep South, who had never seen snow, were on their backs, taking their cue from the staff sergeant from Maine: jumping jacks while horizontal. And those of us who looked at their indoctrination and zealousness as a weakness, shouted down to them, our blessings as fine as the snow.

(Randon Fiat in a snow storm 1985)

                                        

The smallest brilliance

 

An old poem, 1995 or so, and some lights that are visiting now.

Interlude

Fireflies between the olive trees,
our own little Leonid off the balcony.
The moon in her shy interlude with night
stares at her own bright face in the sea.

Our children doze, faces slack and beautiful
sure that the moon and all lights
have danced for them this night.

This is our sliver of independence
this weary day-end sleep that holds
them silent and still as night deepens.

Come, we have so little time
before day draws them back
to the center of our universe.

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Cat prayers

Ursula taps the arm of the chair she’s been sitting in, she then stands on the arm and lowers one paw until she feels something solid, the table between the chairs in what we call the reading room. On the table are magazines and books. It is a small round table. She steps onto its surface, checks the edge slowly, isn’t sure what side she’s on. She stops and listens. Whatever echolocation she’s using tells her not to jump off the side close to the mantel. She crosses to me and then taps the arm of the chair I’m in, steps up and into my lap. She has gained weight since her cancer diagnosis in September. We now refer to her as “pulling a Kiki” in remembrance of the gray cat who lived more than nine lives. She seems better most days, she is active and animated. She stays on my lap purring, I’m reading so I balance my book and rub her head, massage her shoulders. She stretches out over my legs and purrs louder. She has become a lap cat if only for a moment. She’ll never match Comet, the Queen of Lap-dom, but I’ll take this small gesture. Zora comes into the room and takes the chair her sister just abandoned. She assumes the Sphinx position and faces me. She half blinks, blinks again and then dozes. Zora is morally opposed to sitting on a lap, she doesn’t like being picked up, she hates a cuddle. Her time is always her time, did I ask you to touch me? she seems to say. But when she does want attention, she is demanding, under foot following you, doing her ack little meow. She likes to be brushed, but once again, on her time and when she’s done, she’s hurt your feelings done.



Ursula shifts and turns, she walks up, across me to get to the back of the chair where she stretches out and washes her face. I’ve turn just slightly to watch her. She wets the paw and then crosses her face; it reminds me then of something. I have visited a lot of churches over the years. I liked to sit in the wide arc of the cathedrals, those cave-like expenditures of human want, and watch people. If people were inside, praying or sitting quietly I’d come along a wall and sit far back. Many times people crossed themselves as they came to the nave, a curtsy motion, a genuflection, but the crossing was much the same as what Ursula does now, rote and unthinking. Something slowly repeated. Innate. This gentle washing. This cat blessing.

I love both the cats, maybe more than I should, and I sing their little songs to them throughout the day. It is hard to fathom they have been with us a year now. The pandemic year did change trajectories of space (not the Representative Gomert trajectories) and time. One year became many or was lost like dust. But in the plane of cat time, there is always an errant whisker, a dash of fur, a small round body print on a blanket; a cat who may or may not want you to pick them up. The successful cat lady learns to read the signs and alter her day, and her song, as needed.

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Neighbors

 

(Photo by Jeff Hall)

Yesterday morning the windows were all clouded from the heat and humidity and rain overnight, like stepping close to a mirror after a hot shower. On one screen a slug was making its way from top to bottom, on the window that looks out onto the front yard something had been writing asemic poems on the glass. Between sips of coffee and talking to Ursula I saw a movement like a shifting shadow outside the window, hopping along the sill. I picked up Ursula and peeked out. A Carolina Wren zipped from the window and into the tree. It hopped and flitted from branch to branch but always turning to look back at me, holding the blind cat behind the fog. Finally, it went up higher and then sang its clear loud song, a song that seems too brash for such a small being. A song I hear often and can identify and that makes me madly search for the body that sings it. And here it was, right outside the window, and the voice comes from this lovely wee bird. And it looks at me, holding my blind cat, the cat that is focused on the song, her tails twitching. The bird sang one more chorus and then disappeared into the morning. Soon after when we went outside for our walk I could hear the rusty brown wren singing far off in another yard as the day heated up.

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Over the river and through the wormhole

My great grandfather, John Murray Wortman, walked out of Nebraska sometime after 1888 to Oregon. He'd had enough of the Midwest apparently after the great 1888 blizzard. He left my great grandmother, Lydia Ann Etchesion Wortman, behind with nine (ten?) children. After he had established himself (bought a farm? got a job?) his family joined him; my grandfather, Ord Wortman, was born in Wallowa County in 1895.

With a little digging I’m getting information that they married in 1861 when he was 19 and she was 10. Hmmm. Then they married (again?) in 1872. Hmmm. No children born until 1873. And then if you follow the trail, it says they married again in 1878. 

When she died in 1922 she may have been married 60 years. They had 12 children. 10 survived to adulthood. John lived until 1926.

But what of that time when he was walking to Oregon? Did he go by himself? In one census count I see they had a border, in the chronological listing of children, a daughter, Cassie, dies in Oregon at age 16 in January 1892. Lydia and John have a son in August of that same year in Ord, Nebraska. This is Ancestry.com info. Looking to fill in some gaps, maybe help tell a story. A good story, a good tough pioneer story. John’s is good too. 

I’m more interested in Lydia. 

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Beasts we mourn

I’m grieving for a little cat that I wanted to be my friend, but she wouldn’t participate. Grendal, Ian’s monster and by extension, Justine’s, and by super extension, Prince Myshkin’s role model and antagonist. She was a beautiful creature, emerald green eyes and white and gray fur that glowed and spun. She will live on in film and literature, becoming immortal. Here is a formal portrait I received as a gift, painted by Ian. Good-bye, sweet kitty. Good night. 💔

Changes to blog subscription

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Enjoy your day!

Balance

Please hang on!

Still working the kinks out of this new system. 

The history of silence

Part of a larger poem:

Girls walking in single file

[British Museum, Elgin Collection (Parthenon Marbles) Block VIII (fig. 57-61) East frieze of the Parthenon, ca. 447–433 BC]

I was last, shortest of them all; head and shoulders
excised from time. Hint of fingers, feet just crumbled grit,
a body robed and sexless. Definition found in what we carried,
were allowed to carry. Incense burner, jugs and bowls.
For ceremony or libation or sacrifice.
Not for us, we couldn’t keep our faces, our tongues.
Nothing for us. Stone has become brilliant white, how else to survive?
Even our skin a lie.

Still working out the new email notification format. Test two launches tomorrow morning.

Notes on the weather

 Notes on the weather
 

My grandmother had locust seeds in a shallow basket
right by the window that opened to a view of the canyon
which yawned as far as the ridge at Chesinmus.
These long pods, the color of tanned leather, were polished
by our fingers, a slow mediation along the smooth length,
the play like prayer beads,  as we stood reading
her entries for weather, which she made five or six times each day,
noting the barometer reading, the temperature.
Outside the window hummingbirds fought along the garden’s
edge, sparrows looked for ways into the strawberry netting.
The pods weighed less than a sparrow and each vibrated
with seeds full of the dry heat of summer.
 
I wonder where these things are now, the notebook full
of careful records in a script no one learns anymore. Where
is the basket, a small hand woven object brought back
from New Mexico or Arizona. I wonder about the hands
that are touching them, or if they were long ago discarded
and no matter to the person who they came to. I often long
for the familiar feel of an object held so frequently
its skin became part of my own. Now I feel the heft
of my own heart is of no more consequence than the secret
weight of the salamander we found in the earthen cellar
one hot summer day waiting for the weather to change.

~~~

This is a poem about a place and time. The time was long ago and faraway, the place was my grandma’s house (my maternal grandmother). And this picture of us I just saw for the first time when I was in Oregon in May. On the back it says May 1983, but I know that is wrong because in May 1983 I was in Naples, Italy. It has to be from the summer of 1985, when missing the West, I flew home. I think it is my new favorite picture of my grandmother, she looks so happy and "conspiratorial": during that visit we shared a pony beer on the back step some evenings, or maybe she had told me something in secret, whatever it was I adore this.

Will it go round in circles

This is a test post before launching a new email subscription page since the Feedburner email service is ending. I just need to make sure this all works again. But in the meantime enjoy Billy Preston's Will It Go Round in Circles and then Zora, following the theme. 

Unreplaceable you

My grandnieces and grandnephews, my sisters’ and brother’s grandchildren are brilliant flashes of energy and light. Each a mirror to a family member as well as their own unique oneness. When I was at my Mother’s early in May I met the two youngest of these beacons and marveled at how they fill into the greater whole of our family and the world. To witness my nieces transformed and complimented by their own brilliance with the new title of “parent” was fabulous, even though they’ve been at it a while now. The love they have scattered over their nieces, their brother’s daughters, and then too, cousins’ babies, their friends’ children has been combined and magnified back to their own progeny. There is that old give and take like a solid dance move as they look after one another’s children as their own and continue to support one another, their parents, grandparents and friends, not to mention spouses and partners and their growing (and shrinking) families. Because I did not know them as kids – I was abroad, I was afar, I was estranged or apart for many reasons, seasons and miles and ways – I am just beginning to really appreciate and know all that they do and all that my siblings have done to raise these amazing, hardworking, smart, talented (there is a slight possibility I am biased) and wonderfully individual people.

The outreach of care was much the same way we grew up, constantly with cousins, visiting aunts and uncles, plunking down to play at Gran’s (my paternal Grandmother). We cousins were close in age and we teamed and unteamed as friends. Then too, my sisters and brother teamed and unteamed in the smallness of our house. Once we reached high school, maybe before, we unhitched, I think. Our friends and interests too different. Our pull to be individual overtaking our young lives.

This same sort of care and love, this community, got my sister through a life-threatening myositis-type disease when her children were very young. Her friends rallied to support her and from afar it was frightening to hear what she was going through. She was able to get treatment, apparently three doses was all it took (my memory recall…) to “cure” her; save her life. I’m glad not one of her friends or medical team said, “You have to die of something.”

My sister is a caterer, one who is very good at what she does. She also is a mobile barber/hairstylist. She also is very involved in her community or should I say communities as she is a part of many. She’s a great mother and a fabulous grandmother. In my sister’s day to day work she wouldn’t not keep food refrigerated or hot as that could risk people’s lives, she wouldn’t not clean or sanitize. She wouldn’t serve rotten foods. Even when you have to “die of something”, that something is preventable. 

I love my sister, I don’t know if she knows how much, we’ve certainly not been close in years, and I do not want to lose her. Of the people in the US dying of COVID-19 right now the unvaccinated are heading the list. The real danger for me, as I see it, is those unvaccinated carrying the disease to those who cannot be vaccinated those below the age of 12, those who are immunodeficient, those who are against the vaccine for political or conspiracy reasons or who love someone who is against it. I don’t know. I do know there are a hundred things we do that we could die of if we don’t pay attention or don’t care. I do know I don’t want to lose my sister; Annie, I love you.

 

Siblings

We share a tongue of memory
though we each speak a different dialect.

At times we nod in understanding,
and then at other times, we look

to one another for definition. I do not
recall the time Becky ran away, how Diana

cried over a cat, or when Tom flew.
And they know little of my time.

The same house was filled with walls,
physical and those unseen.

When we gather we speak of inane things:
weather, cars, jobs. The price of love,

its shared threads, are never mentioned.
At Liza’s wedding, we gathered on the lawn

the band played an old 70’s song, some tune
we all knew, and for a moment, like bees

we danced, hummed in the sunlight,
understood every syllable uttered.