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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