In winter
I dream of such greens/
in lazy pools and streams
of shadow,
indolent,
sleepy,
like deep breathing
of quiet ocean/
in yellowed splotches
of summer’s hooray,
warm with memory
of sprinkler jumping,
chigger scratching,
shrilling
ready or not!
from neon popsicle mouths,
like the clover-drunk
sun-crazed bees
in happy ferment/
until,
panting,
we fall into that shade pool
and the green seeps into
our dreams.
Well, dear reader, here it is again: writer’s block/slump/wasteland — call it what you will. I’ve been a big blank for over a week now. Yesterday I spent hours on a thought, trying to transfer it to words. I think I wore out the delete key.
What a mystery writing is. Not that I’m telling you anything you don’t know. Why do the words come and why do they not come? Where do they go, for heaven’s sakes?
I’ve not caught a glimpse of my muse, except perhaps in a particularly muscular buzzard, a.k.a. turkey vulture, hauling roadkill into the woods. Usually she’s a hawk, but she could have morphed. Right now I’d happily call her a buzzard. Now there’s a word. Don’t you love words that mean something just by the way they sound? Have you ever seen the book “Sound and Sense” by Laurence Perrine? My tattered, moldy copy dates back to my college days in the 60s. It says it’s about poetry but I don’t think so; it’s about the way the sound of a word makes it the perfect choice. Meaning isn’t the whole of it. The word must sound with the meaning. That’s prose, too. Just ask Sam Clemens.
I hope you are well, dear reader, and can still cling to sanity.
I see many references to isolation and aloneness these days. As an introvert, I’m comfortable with aloneness. Usually content with my own company, I do not crave the madding crowd. Aloneness isn’t always loneliness.
But I haven’t been with my family since March 6. No hugs for three months! There’s loneliness in that, as many elderly (and not-so-elderly) know.
It has recently occurred to me that there is another dimension to my aloneness. My close friends vary in age, but all of us have experienced family death in our parents’ generation. However, among my friends, I am the only one to have lost the sibling connection to the past; I’m the first to be The Last. This hit me as a revelation. Unaware, I’ve been grappling with a sense of aloneness among my friends.
I am an old single parent who is also The Last One of the family she grew up with — those are my particular circumstances — but I think most of us are grappling with some kind of aloneness, and maybe loneliness too, at this time. It doesn’t mean we have the same life experiences, only that we are in the same human condition. Human, but dangerously corrosive, all the more so swirled as it is with anger.
As I’ve said before, I think writers write about two things: what is, and what could be. Sometimes we can’t write about what could be until we write about what is. For me, this is what is.
Upside-down-ness
above below
gives me doubts
and vertigo.
I fear my eye
misapprehends
if sameness is
my constant lens.
I can sometimes
see anew
when things are toppled
all askew.
From eye to brain
zig-zaggety:
what I think I know
from what I think I see.
Many years ago, while I was caregiver to Dad, I audited Beginning Drawing at a nearby university. I couldn’t finish it because Dad grew so much worse, but even in that partial semester I learned immeasurably more than I can tell you, dear reader. One assignment was to draw something upside-down. Life was upside-down anyway, so why not? It was for me an astonishing process. It is one thing to draw something as you see it; it is another thing entirely to draw something as you don’t see it. When I was forced to turn an image upside-down and draw it, I was also forced to think differently. It was surprisingly uncomfortable.
A snoop amid the boughs
beady-eyed, proctorial,
sizes up my gardening
with aspect territorial.
Yesterday I had a moment in a paint store that sent me into laughter which almost suffocated me because I was wearing a mask. Afterward I thought about it.
A man was buffing the floor, likely enjoying the sauna behind his mask as much as I was enjoying mine while I maneuvered with my usual grace amid shelves and social distance markers. The COVID pas-de-deux. As it happened, I ended up apparently in his path: my assertion that I was trying to not be in the way was met with his “Well, then, MOVE!” This hit my funny bone hard. Thus my suffocation.
We all have our gifts. Mine is to be in the way. My dad had variations on “you’re in the way,” the best of which was “go tell your mother she wants you.” The man with the machine yesterday would have fit into my family perfectly.
As I chuckled my way home, I reflected on the mask as a new wrinkle in such a moment (pun intended). He was wearing a baseball cap so all I could see was a bit of grey hair and his eyes. Maybe MOVE! was grumped at me. I don’t think it was, but how would I know? We did not see each other’s faces — this should be remarkable. It isn’t! What a weird world we have landed in.
Sunday brunch al fresco
never better was
with family all decked out
in finest feather and fuzz.
In sonorous melancholy
from twilight until dawn
continuo of bagpipe
goes on and on and on.
His one note is perfected
in infinite repeat
in melody deficient
but heartfelt in its bleat.
He cannot sleep for want
of something he calls for
determinedly insistent
it just takes one croak more.
In solemn grace
amid death’s drums
something beautiful
this way comes.
With thanks to Shakespeare
and to whatever benevolence
sent the swans to the pond.
In no way, dear reader, do I intend this to be some saccharine comment
about how things aren’t as bad as they seem:
things ARE as bad as they seem.
But sometimes there’s a moment of reprieve.
Ubiquitous low-tech invention,
the always-ready stair,
instant cardio workout
almost everywhere.
Its function is well known,
we never have to guess:
does it go up or down?
the answer’s always yes.
It’s good amid the chaos
when everything’s upendable
to have a little fragment
so handily dependable.
Indeed, dear reader, there comes a time
when taking the stairs is but a wistful memory.
But still there they are.
More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg.
Oddments 