Let mortal tongues awake

I’ve been reading a lot lately about Critical Race Theory (CRT), folding it into wider thoughts of race and privilege, class and history, history and truth. To see CRT played out so perfectly through Nikole Hannah-Jones ordeal certainly makes it real and (now) not just theory. It’s these real-life moments and insight that lead to “wokeness” for some. And then there are whole collections of instances that lead me to despair, but not the despair of constant ignorance, hatred, or indifference some face as they walk through life. (Imagine wondering if any place was a safe place? Your home, your car, your neighborhood etc.,) I don’t see those things. I know them, know of them, witness them but I don’t have a lifetime of the aggressive and the passive aggressive insult or the simple colossal moments of, I see you and I will ignore you. Yesterday while I was looking at Instagram, I saw a picture from my “hometown” paper, The Wallowa County Chieftain, and I was shocked by it. It’s an innocent enough picture from the 4th of July parade, but the implication that no one at the paper would have thought to not put this picture up is what concerns me. Yes, Wallowa County is low on the diversity scale as far as population goes, but there are a lot of people there that (must) know what is insulting and what is not, what is culturally inappropriate and what is not, what is racist and what is not. I am encouraged that the comments seem to be that the child in the photo did nothing wrong, but it doesn’t make the costume right. And those commenting are trying to educate those who are using what has become the cliché argument against: bullying, snowflake, leftist, wrong-headed, woke. As though being woke, in all its iterations, is something to be ashamed of – I know I am constantly waking and reawakening, being shaken. It’s a process.

And then there is Texas. Still fighting the Alamo and history. This article from the Austin-American Stateman is a nice summing up of the whole hypocrisy of who owns history and how we think about what not teaching that history does. I think that the quote late in the article, “The Texas story and the Mexican American history taught in schools hinges on the old narrative about the Alamo. “It says who counts and who made Texas the wonderful place it is,” González said. "And for most of this time, the answer has been, ‘Not you, not Mexican Americans, not your family … If anything, you’ve been a problem.””

“It says who counts.” That continues to be a powerful and needed aside, as it has been for years, but it needs to be taken from the ones who see only themselves (as the counted) and their hurt feelings and their fears in these truths need to be put aside. Truth. The truth shall set you free. Let freedom ring.

Just one day out of life, Holiday!

Otto the groundhog (O’Fallon Otto!) is out grazing in the yard, popping clover blooms into his face like popcorn. Whenever anything out of the ordinary moves he runs back to cover, a fur coated slinky. Then he’ll be out again, gobbling. Two days ago, the neighbor’s cat was out chasing Otto, they are about the same size so I’m not sure what her master plan is; he ran from her but not in the save your life kind of way. They both share the same shade of brown, a rich chocolate, but the cat has a fine variations and wears stripes. When glanced from the edge of your vision you’re never sure if it is cat or groundhog. I’m sure somewhere the cat overlords are incensed that this would ever cause confusion. And somewhere the groundhog oversight committee will be sending hate mail as well, “We look nothing like cats, madame, thank you very much. Take it back or your tomatoes are in danger!”

Speaking of tomatoes, two of the cherry tomatoes of my heart came over for the weekend: the girl and her betrothed, drove their brand-new to them car from Ohio and we had a fabulous visit: walking in the parks, an hour at our local “farmer’s market”, grilling some flesh and plant-based sausage, eating out and outside at a fun restaurant in Saint Louis and (and!) a mini art crawl. Oh, and we also celebrated Ian’s birthday early...hugs galore and too much ice cream. The only one not thrilled with this event was Zora, but she’s already recovered from this perceived indignity.

 

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)