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.

Memorial Day

                                         (Flanders Field American Cemetery, Waregem, Belgium 2013)

Warrior

Wagoner Higgins watched his chargers:
manes faded to flaxen; sorrel and rust; browns
neither bay nor chestnut, tinged by blood
and sulphur. Beasts turned
to dark magnets of mud and hair.
Their eyes burned blue and amber
through the gas and flame, their bones
formed taut tents of hide beneath the harness.
Battle tested long faced and wise
too much sense to play or shy.
When too scarred, or scared, to go on, they fed
a company’s hunger, those last ounces
of usefulness in soup and stew.

These were brutes who crossed
rivers and canals where bridges failed
drank their fill and then passed through
villages and muddy farms. Not gifts
or special pals, just grunts like everyone else.
Wagoner Higgins rests where Belgium earth
was churned by the war to end all;
we’ve beaten the peace like horseflesh.

Along the playa

Friday May 14th, at Playa

There’s a little fold of darkness cleaning up the last of the stars off the pond. In between it devours whatever insect will feed its minute body. I finally have slowed its movement, its near pattern, to identify bat. Off to the side a duck makes a noise like a stern uncle, a deep tsk, tsk and then, as though on cue, a body splashes into the water, muskrat I say. The sun seems reluctant to rise with so much song, so much movement. In this predawn ring of light and darkness over the pond the sky is mirrored in perfect contour and I grow dizzy trying to remember which way I stand.

The playa smells like France when the tide goes out (sans fish) or France smells like playa in spring (sans coyote scat). The cracked bed of sand and grit and alkali rolls into cups the closer you get to the lake and under each the world is softer and softer until you sink a bit as though everything underneath wants to escape or swallow you.

 

The alkali dries into ribs
& spine, long bones
along the playa
 
just this morning
as I walked as far
as the wet
would allow
 
I saw long lines
of things running
above the water
geese or crane or
something prehistorically older
 
dragon or another
beast lost to myth
& then the whale jaw
whole, reimagined
out of dust
 
surfaced among barb wire
rust & fence posts
covered white