Water returns to water, dreams return to sky

A little note from last week, a few days along the ocean, a few dreams.

The moon last night was a half globe of molten light. Over the water it lit a shimmering path toward the town, the city. The rushing waves caught every speck of light running up and back along the beach. All night they sang, gently mostly but at times an aria came high and loud. This morning a ribbon of scarlet and gold foretold the arrival of the sun. A trumpet of color, a herald of what was coming. It is cold out and breezy and yet people are at the edge of the water waiting; the way you wait for a late child or a lover long away. There is no pacing just a long (a longing) look toward the east.

Draw back the curtain

I had my alarm set for 3AM so I could see the eclipse, I was in the warm bed thinking and then, suddenly, it was 4AM and I trundled down the hall to my office drew back the curtain and pulled the blind and there it was like a sampled cookie. Jerry had wondered if I was going outside at three to see the moon, but I told him only if it was hiding behind a cloud. The forecast was for clear skies so I was certain one of the West facing windows would let me see the globe and shadow. The beauty was the huge wave of a cloud that was under it, after I’d gazed a bit with my binoculars, the cloud drifted up to cover the glow.

I was looking for a picture of the solar eclipse I had taken in Belgium but I couldn’t find it, perhaps never saved. But then the news of the day drifted in and it sort of didn’t matter anymore.

Here’s a poem from my chapbook, the title poem. Be safe, be kind.

The past is clean

There was only one black man
in our white county, and though
we knew that Selma and Johannesburg
were a universe away (and that we were not
oppressed beyond class and sex) none of us knew
the loneliness or caution of his life.
The notion that one may need to flee
at a given moment.

Our past was clean,
even our parents didn’t know
of the massacres, deep in the canyons.
It took years to clear up
the misunderstanding, that our ancestors
had not waved farewell and good luck
to Chief Joseph or that men from China
had not simply gone missing, and some-
where their gold waited to be found.

I know my uncle disappeared there,
left my cousins and a note; his brothers
sent to find him. I still don’t know
the mystery of that search.
He came back, packed the kids
and faded into Alaska’s coast.

Now my father simmers
in twenty-four years of silence.
No matter, I know now the history,
have hidden his ambiguity
like a third thumb. I have found
that the parallels he sees between
my life and what he imagined is as faulty
as our collected history. Still, like others,
in the barn, I keep a canvas bag that holds
a can of dried beans, some caked-flour,
and a jar of matches, safe from the rain.

Fly me to the moon

I went with Jerry to the VA yesterday, he asked about my book as we walked in, “You’re not bringing one of those books that will make people uncomfortable, are you?” I laughed, no it’s a memoir of an artist (a dissident artist, but innocuous all the same). But then we saw the man with the Fuck Biden mask and I took my sweater off happy I’d worn my Obama Hope t-shirt. Weird little things. Just this week a town in Missouri was named the population center of America. (“The calculation of a population center, released every 10 years after the decennial census is taken, identifies the average point where Americans live. If every person in the United States weighed exactly the same amount, the population center would be the point at which a flat, rigid map of the country would balance.” from The Hill) What’s interesting to me is that the sign welcoming you to the town has the flag of the United States and the Confederate Battle Flag (good old Missouri Compromise); the town was nearly destroyed in a Civil War battle in 1863; what was learned?

Speaking of things that live in shadow, there’s a lunar eclipse coming up this week. I was trying to remember when I last saw a good eclipse and it had to have been in Klamath Falls. A lovely full red moon, nice star shine to witness. I’m hoping our forecast holds and we’ll have clear skies, I always like to see some of the moon notched away. Here’s a poem I wrote about my last eclipse.

What umbra brought

In the moment of second night
when shadow finally swallows moon
the sky turns to myth, to time
before fire or name or death.

What umbra brought: fevered
chants, every voice quivered
as the sky boiled scarlet.

We still fall to the same superstition,
drop prostrate to darkness,
make bargains and promises
to the light. Never mind the science
that has mapped the brain,
the heavens, the heart. Night
is long and cold, full of unseen
creatures who thrive in gloom.

What gift is reason to dumb animals?

                                           Anti eclipse fireworks, Mons Belgium

Night things

Two planets and a portion of moon outside tonight; a swish of a cloud that looks a whale breaching. I wish the cloud would stay highlighted by the moon until some stars appear like plankton blanketing the sky: food for dreams. And it is cold out there. The feeders were emptied today and the weatherman mentioned the S-word. Mid November, this is what should be happening.

I spent a good portion of the day helping my cousin as she packs her apartment for a move. We both chuckle over the fact that she is moving to a town with the same name as the town I live, except in Missouri and about 50 miles from me. We did our whole cousin visit while packing, taking some things to her new place and then having lunch at a lovely small, local coffee house, Alpha & Omega, near her new place. We both have plenty of moving expertise so looking at items and then boxes and then getting it all packed is satisfying and fun.

Here's a little poem from long ago that mentions the moon/sleep/dreams/Phil:

Insomnia

Sleep exits in a roar of silence.

Somewhere in the house Phil,
my daughter’s twenty-pound cat,
is scratching his neck, the tink-tink
of the bell on his collar makes
the darkness larger. You gurgle
beside me in your dreams, a diver
steady on. I’ve been released
from slumber, so move pass
the other two cats and navigate
down the hall.

The crescent moon is bathed in mist.
Fog off Round Lake rises enough
to shade the pine, catch on
the barbed-wire. Something
is moving near the garden, something
squat and square, I watch for awhile
until it stills; in the faint light
it is now watching me. Phil
presses against my leg, moves
the curtain with his big head, growls
and hisses. Whatever is there, scoots
toward the house. If there are legs
they’re too short for definition.
Phil steps back, still growling
I reach for the outside light, think
better of it, return to the bedroom,
dive in beside you, hoping to drown.

Erik Muller, one poem

In May 2008 there was a poetry reading in Klamath Falls that featured five Oregon poets and pie. One of those poets was Erik Muller. I first met Erik through the Oregon Poetry Association; he was one of the poets who helped nudge me into being a poetry community organizer. Word was passed today that Erik has died. The world has lost a kind, wonderful man and a great poet. For today, here is a poem (originally published in Cloudbank #3, 2010) from Erik’s book Steps:

THIS SCAR

 
With a tool you might get
at Office Max to pry staples
from a cardboard box

my surgeon’s nurse bends
to her work, saying sorry
with each staple pulled

for I am no cardboard box
and the scar still raw
not yet hard and knobby.

Sorry, she repeats, while I watch
her hand moving down the row,
each pull a shrill pain,

the high note of a flute
just about inaudible.
I breathe out, OK.

Now as I look at the scar
as a possession not quite mine,
a fair prize affixed to me,

my tattoo, my piercing,
I think about the surgeon’s
hand inside the incision

removing what he expected
and found, then an officious
machine planting staples.

Happiness, my happiness,
it wraps around my life,
something he did not touch.

It can never be taken from me.
Nor can I ever say to you
as with this scar, See, here it is.

                                                            Photo courtesy Erik Muller

Rumor, just an old poem about Turkey Buzzards

 

Rumor

The sun breaches the horizon
and an adobe building turns orange,
a color previously reserved for Fall leaves
or certain butterflies that migrate
when the equinox moves them.

I huddle close to the wall
as though the flush will create heat,
watch the stand of cottonwoods
looming over the creek bed, dry these
summer months, and wait
for turkey buzzards.

                                    They arrive
as the sun starts to give off warmth
they land as delicately as doves
onto the branches. From this vantage
they watch the desert waken. From
here they rest, hunched as old men
over their soup, black feathers soaking
up light as though that too was part
of the diet.

There will be some death somewhere
here today, some miscalculation that will
allow them to depart, lead by the scent
of carrion or perhaps something fresher,
which they will gather around like a ladies’ tea
pulling apart their meal like gossips.

The heart is a concussed cardinal

No thing really needs us. Not the ladybug crawling on my wall, the stink bugs I continually throw out the door or the stunned cardinal I cradled and placed in a nest made of paper towels inside a shoe box after her collision with the window. Best to let nature handle it, to wait for her to “come around”. But because my yard is in the cat zone I had to go out after twenty minutes and move her. (I don’t need to start my month with that on my mind.) She didn’t try to get away as I spoke low to her It’s okay, it’s okay and then took the box to the garage where it was quiet and dry and warm. I set a timer for and hour and a half and Googled animal rescue and wild bird sanctuary in case she needed more help. When the men from the Salvation Army came to pick up a donation, I went to move her from the shelf in the garage and I heard one peep, two peeps and then a lot of box activity. I took her to the deck, put her down and opened the box, she hopped onto the edge. I left, showed the two men what they were here for, went through my standard banter: Do you like the job, are you staying busy, do you have a lot of pickups today. When they finished and drove off, I went back out to the deck. She was still on the box, facing the rest of the birds, I started to lift the box to the railing and that’s when she turned her head and looked at me and flew off.

Whew.  

Wouldn’t it be nice if it was possible to put all worries inside a box until they were ready to fly away? Maybe if we treated those worries like injured beings, we’d be kinder about them, more willing to look for how to help. I think about what size of box I’d need for some of these. Is the hardened worry about my son fitting for a ring box, it’s concentration and clarity closer to diamond than not; does it get the giant sleep-eating monster size box that Sweetums might require? Like the bird in a box metaphor would there be a signal when it’s time to open the lid? What’s the shelf life of estrangement? Is there an Estrangement Anonymous group? Can I start the EA charter? The heart is open in two sections, the old much scarred full of baggage and regret and the new full of fresh wounds and double regrets.  One part of my heart knows it will never have to beat the same, the other hopes it can, please, please beat the same again. Sigh.

The heart is a concussed cardinal nesting on Bounty and waiting to feel better so it can fly away.

That’s a sad poem. Here’s a another, that is sadder for that ending. 😐

Poem for a son, the T-shirt

The tag reads: “Wash in your mother’s tears.”
If you remember what her hands smelled
of as she tucked you in, perhaps your
own tears will well and spill. Don’t be ashamed.

Two vivid moments: one the joy, joy like bird
flight or that orange light of dawn after a hard
storm of waking to your smile. And now the opposite:
despair. What to say to hear your voice.

This is the soup of emotion the heart swims in,
despair that makes you write soup of emotion:
that kind of thing.

Welcome November

Last week I noticed that Dark-eyed Juncos are back. I love watching these snappily dressed little birds and now throw a handful of seed out for them, though the amount that is dropped from the feeders would probably be fine. And then Saturday when I was out giving the jays some peanuts there was a bald eagle making lazy loops very low, around the cul-de-sac, not something I see a lot in my neighborhood, usually I see them far off in transit. And then just yesterday the blackbirds that fly over morning and night are busy with their work. I wrote this last year:

I want to say the hundred blackbirds landing
on the golden tree and the too bright half-moon
hung over the pine and the breeze that feels
new and fresh over the world are positive signs.

And I suppose it is all about the coming cold (frost will be here tonight or tomorrow), the light that is already too late in the morning and heading home much too soon in the afternoon. Those ends of the year things we roll into are popping up too. Today we went to the eye doctor, our third in three years as we try to find “our” doctor. I think we found our guy. He and Jerry bonded over SEC football (his son is at Mississippi State, getting a degree as a golf pro, that ‘s a thing, we looked it up). And we liked the vibe and care in the office, which is slightly important too. I also like that the office is just about a mile away, so we can walk over.

And once home, I brought the plants into the garage that have been adoring the heat and sun all summer. I’ll cut them back, repot and then bring them inside, no cats to avoid this year.

All day I’ve been trying to focus on a residency that I’m applying for, trying to rethink how and why and what. I’ve relooked other statements I’ve written before, but this seems different. It’s like the nearly two years of being so away from the world makes it hard to consider getting back in…and articulate why. Trying to deep think it I was helped by the picture of the inside of my eye which resembles a fantastic river system or a weird tree. It seemed to lead me places. I must ask the doctor if I can have a copy. But I’ve a few weeks to consider how to do this. And so many long nights to dream on it.

Be safe, take care, welcome to November.