Infanta Marina

By
Wallace Stevens

Her terrace was the sand
And the palms and the twilight.
She made of the motions of her wrist
The grandiose gestures
Of her thought.

The rumpling of the plumes
Of this creature of the evening
Came to be sleights of sails
Over the sea.

And thus she roamed
In the roamings of her fan,
Partaking of the sea,
And of the evening,
As they flowed around
And uttered their subsiding sound.

Stationed/Stationing

"... any experiment of interest in life will be carried out at your own expense.” 

― John Wilmot

   Every once in a while someone posts a quote or a poem on Facebook, sometimes just a few words, sometimes in its entirety, and it finds you, like an oracle whispering the words of the gods.  It's a form of bibliomancy, divination with words and books.  Sometimes those quotes, those poems, strike like lightning, shocking you into some realization.  Sometimes, they come more peacefully, words finally put to those vague feelings troubling you.  

     The above was one of those latter bits of wisdom, come after my first Thanksgiving away from my daughter, my dogs, my old life.  It was a much more eloquent summation of my own thoughts just a few days before, crying as I sometimes do in this new life, wanting my cake and wanting to eat it too, wanting what I had and what I have, knowing you can't exist embodied in two different universes, but must be a ghost in one or the other.  Crying that Wednesday before, missing my daughter, knowing I had chosen this path, understanding at the core of me the price I have paid, I steeled myself with the thought that everything has a price.  Isn't that what we learn in fairy tales, that happiness demands its sacrifice, its blood and bone, its pound of flesh?  It is, I realize, a Grimm philosophy, but one oddly suited to my Greek ancestors and those cold, hard-scrabble kin of my father's trying to make a farming life in the unwelcoming earth of Massachusetts.  And maybe there's a touch of regret in that quote, or perhaps it's just the bit of perspective you'd expect from a man living at the start of the Enlightenment.  It's hard to tell with words out of context uttered hundreds of years before.  Maybe it's why we turn to them, for their malleability so can make of them what we hope or fear.  

     It's a good quote for deep, dark waters of this Mercury Retrograde in Scorpio getting ready to station, to pause before going back into the light.  There is in it, perspective and courage, the realization that change is inevitable and that we are responsible for our own fate, our happiness or unhappiness.  Again, the perfect philosophy for those heady times when science seemed like it could provide all the answers, when Decartes could utter, "I think therefore I am" and not be considered a blasphemer.  Me, I lean more toward a philosophy of co-creation.  I like to think that life is a work in progress, my masterwork, and that many hands have made it what it is, Life's and mine, but not just.  And there is in this quote, something a bit more positive than punishment and payment, which suits me at 54 living in  this new world, a continent away from the old.

     The whole point of Mercury Retrograde, I think, especially in these frenzied times of 'do, do, do,' is to force yourself to pause, to reflect, to dream a bit, to catch your breath.  We don't make the time and so this time makes us, either by choice or by force, pause a bit to get our bearings.  And there is something of life in this pattern of retrograde and direct, something we seem to match in our planetary wanderings.  I feel it, my own stationing, my own equinox, that point of revelation, of balance, before it begins again, our orbiting.  

     So as Mercury gets ready to station, and I do as well, this quote seems a good summation of my looking back this three week span.  There is always a danger in reflection, Narcissus' obsession with himself, Lot's wife's salted regret.  However, if as above, so below is true and we are wanderers, like the planets, then onward is our destiny with only these brief moments of pause and ponder.  I am content to be a good scientist, to risk myself and my hypotheses, in the pursuit of that which Socrates, the wisest of men. called us to: Know Thyself.  May it always be so.

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart - Finding Words

I've come to a place in life where only poetry will do.  Poems are the only baggage I want to carry with me to sea.  Those words, distilled to their essential rightness, meaning as close to their intention as words can anymore, maybe as they ever could. I can't explain this thirst for poems beyond that there is something in them that tells the truth about this journey we call life.  It's my own particular bias - poetry - and my own particular need - authenticity.

I pay attention to poems when they find me.  They speak as the gods might have if these were the times when they spoke truly, made visitations, communicated with mortals as they did back in the times of myth and magic.  And woe to the mortal that did n't listen to the gods when they talked. It never ended well, which is why I pay attention to poems when they find me.

This poem was a gift, a surprise, as the best kind of gifts often are.  I am beginning to feel the pull of this place and the writing that it asks of me, a different kind of writing then California asked, and this poem somehow touches on that difference, gives the first voice to the me I'm just discovering.

I've read a bit about Jack Gilbert.  I'm not really sure what a man who in his later years counseled small pleasures and limited hopes can say to someone who has made such a change at such a time for a life that is more than small pleasures and small hopes.  I wonder if there is something in his search for words to call things into being, finding words that mean almost but not quite, maybe not finding the words at all.  And what about the need to call things into being?  What do we do if there are no words or if we can't find the right ones and what we call isn't right at all?  I don't know what Florida has to teach me, but I think I may be starting to find out.


The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
by Jack Gilbert

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
Get it wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not a language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.

"I Remember You," Part 2

    Earlier this year, or maybe it was last year, a string of Facebook posts, in the form of letters to our younger selves, filled my news feed.  They were heartfelt, gentle, encouraging missives.  They were worded hugs sent backwards across time, for the purpose of easing sore hearts.  I wondered though then, and still, what letter those younger selves might have written to us, at middle age, the end of our lives if not in view, there just over the horizon, every course we chart leading us irrevocably there and to whatever lies beyond.  Would we have written, like in the Bradbury poem, "I remember you," an enigmatic phrase bringing to mind the sort of time travel from present to past and back again that Proust undertook?  What would the younger me have said to the one on the edge of a heart attack, recovering after, the one that at 53 found herself thinking death was not such a bad thing, ready to let go of this world whether that meant something more or just a dark blanket of endless sleep?

     Mercury is retrograde in Scorpio, which makes this a prime time for such deep musings.  And while I have always focused on reflection at such times, somehow this particular Mercury retrograde, on the water, a huge change separating my old life and this new one I've made, so they are almost unrecognizable one to the other, seems the perfect time to consider the obligation I owe that younger me to live life, to make it glorious, to reach out and to take chances for what she dreamed, what I dreamed.  Would she have been happy with me and my life at 52?  Definitely not.  As deeply interior as she was, to her the world was a symphony that filled her ears, thrilled her soul, drove her forward every day, urging life and the living of it, fully, completely, even simple days of around home and the backyard made magic by the thrill of a world so generous with Her gifts that what choice was there but to be generous too.  Would she approve of this life that I have made hers at 54?  Looking at her, sunglasses donned, beaming, sunny and sure of the happiness present in every moment of life, even when her parents argued, threw things, hurt each other unforgivably with hands and words, I'm pretty sure she would be, is.  I think she might be sitting there still in Milwaukee of the very early sixties, catching a glimpse of the water, the boat, the man, the life we live and the dreams we hold, and part of that smile is for her future self, the one that learned to live and love and believe in in the midst of the worst, that the best was there too, just as present in those hard moments but invisible, waiting to be called.

     I'm not sure the younger me would have had the words to speak her heart to the older me, that one stuck, the one near death, the one on the other side of it, the one trying to figure out how to love the gift of life she was given, the one trying to live after years of not.  But maybe her whispers across the years are enough, the reclamation of this sunny self after decades of a more melancholy bent.  Maybe this is how they talk, in remembrance and reflection, in these pauses we take trying exacting our past, not rewriting our history as much as find some sort of archeological evidence that makes us completely re-think our views of a time, a place, a people.

     During this Mercury Retrograde my you be blessed with the kind of remembrances which fill the soul with joy and hope, love and life.  So mote it be.

   

The Spells We Cast

It’s entirely conceivable that life’s splendor surrounds us all, and always in its complete fullness, accessible but veiled, beneath the surface, invisible, far away. But there it lies, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If we call it by the right word, by the right name, then it comes. This is the essence of magic, which doesn’t create but calls.

―Franz Kafka, from his diaries

     I never know where my collages come from.  I do not know if they are prayers, predictions, messages or dreams.  I know they want to be a particular way, insist on it, that sometimes they sit and wait weeks, months before the right image comes to finish them.    

     Recently someone posted on Facebook a new way to make caramel apples.  The traditional way, dipping a whole apple into caramel sauce, letting them set, the mess in the making and eating of them, has often kept me from making them.  And then I see this new way, apples cored and hollowed out, bowls of apples filled with caramel, after they set, cutting them into slices.  Such an easy solution, and one I never thought of.  How easily we get locked into one way, and one way only, thinking that's the only way, that thinking coloring all of our approaches.  

     Like magic.  I think of the Tarot card, the Magician, drawing from above and below to manifest here on earth.  I have always thought of him creating from nothing, but what if that isn't how magic works.  What if it waits to be named, waits somewhere between worlds, or in this one, just invisible.  What if wants to see if we know what it truly is, if we care enough to know it's name, not just what everyone calls it - love, prosperity, health, friends, power, etc.  Maybe for each of us love has a specific name - fidelity, amity, adoration, passion, piety, tenderness, worship.  And maybe, if we find that right name, our name, and call it out with intent, drawing from the ethers, drawing from the earth, maybe then magic happens, maybe then it comes when named, recognized at last, and blesses us.  

     It changes things, this different view of magic.  It takes us back to the importance of words, of naming.  It reminds that nothing is new to this world and nothing dies.  It promotes discernment and self-knowledge.  When I speak of love what am I speaking of?  Is it fidelity, lust, passion?  Is it the Chinese Yuanfen (destiny), the Norwegian Forelskt (the euphoria felt when when we first fall in love)?  Do we even know or is it just dumb luck that some of us get what we hunger for?  Or perhaps it is as the old adage, be careful what you wish for, you just might get it?  Maybe we call the love we're ready for, or the love we think we want.  Of course perhaps it's as the Stone's sang, we get what we need?  I don't pretend to know.  For now it's enough for me to ponder this new vision of magic and how we must stir the waters like the Hebrew's God, and with breath and words name the world, our right, true world, into being.  So mote it be.

"I Remember You," Part 1

Remembrance

by
Ray Bradbury

And this is where we went, I thought,
Now here, now there, upon the grass
Some forty years ago.
I had returned and walked along the streets
And saw the house where I was born
And grown and had my endless days.
The days being short now, simply I had come
To gaze and look and stare upon
The thought of that once endless maze of afternoons.
But most of all I wished to find the places where I ran
As dogs do run before or after boys,
The paths put down by Indians or brothers wise and swift
Pretending at a tribe.
I came to the ravine.
I half slid down the path
A man with graying hair but seeming supple thoughts
And saw the place was empty.
Fools! I thought. O, boys of this new year,
Why don’t you know the Abyss waits you here?
Ravines are special fine and lovely green
And secretive and wandering with apes and thugs
And bandit bees that steal from flowers to give to trees.
Caves echo here and creeks for wading after loot:
A water-strider, crayfish, precious stone
Or long-lost rubber boot --
It is a natural treasure-house, so why the silent place?
What’s happened to our boys that they no longer race
And stand them still to contemplate Christ’s handiwork:
His clear blood bled in syrups from the lovely wounded trees?
Why only bees and blackbird winds and bending grass?
No matter. Walk. Walk, look, and sweet recall.

I came upon an oak where once when I was twelve
I had climbed up and screamed for Skip to get me down.
It was a thousand miles to earth. I shut my eyes and yelled.
My brother, richly compelled to mirth, gave shouts of laughter
And scaled up to rescue me.
"What were you doing there?" he said.
I did not tell. Rather drop me dead.
But I was there to place a note within a squirrel nest
On which I’d written some old secret thing now long forgot.
Now in the green ravine of middle years I stood
Beneath that tree. Why, why, I thought, my God,
It’s not so high. Why did I shriek?
It can’t be more than fifteen feet above. I’ll climb it handily.
And did.
And squatted like an aging ape alone and thanking God
That no one saw this ancient man at antics
Clutched grotesquely to the bole.
But then, ah God, what awe.
The squirrel’s hole and long-lost nest were there.
I lay upon the limb a long while, thinking.
I drank in all the leaves and clouds and weathers
Going by as mindless
As the days.
What, what, what if? I thought. But no. Some forty years beyond!
The note I’d put? It’s surely stolen off by now.
A boy or screech-owl’s pilfered, read, and tattered it.
It’s scattered to the lake like pollen, chestnut leaf
Or smoke of dandelion that breaks along the wind of time...
No. No.
I put my hand into the nest. I dug my fingers deep.
Nothing. And still more nothing. Yet digging further

I brought forth:
The note.
Like mothwings neatly powdered on themselves, and folded close
It had survived. No rains had touched, no sunlight bleached
Its stuff. It lay upon my palm. I knew its look:
Ruled paper from an old Sioux Indian Head scribble writing book.
What, what, oh, what had I put there in words
So many years ago?
I opened it. For now I had to know.
I opened it, and wept. I clung then to the tree
And let the tears flow out and down my chin.
Dear boy, strange child, who must have known the years
And reckoned time and smelled sweet death from flowers
In the far churchyard.
It was a message to the future, to myself.
Knowing one day I must arrive, come, seek, return.
From the young one to the old. From the me that was small
And fresh to the me that was large and no longer new.
What did it say that made me weep?

     I remember you.
     I remember you.

Mercury Retrograde

For the upcoming Mercury Retrograde, a time of deep reflection and contemplation.  May we find our way forward through looking back.

Mercury in Retrograde

BY SHERYL LUNA

The day ended badly with a broken ankle,

a jinxed printer, and a dead car. The dry yellow grass

against the sunset saved me. Roosters

 

pranced across a lawn of shit, proudly plumed

in black feathers, bobbing before the gray goats.

It was the first day I saw god in the quiet,

 

and found a mustard seed was very small.

There I had been for years cursing “why?”

and all the gold in the sun fell upon me.

 

There was a white mare in the midst

of brown smog, majestic in the refinery

clouds. Even the radio wouldn’t work!

 

My mother limps and her hair falls out.

The faithful drive white Chevy trucks

or yellow Camrys, and I’m here golden

 

on the smoking shock-less bus.

I lost language in this want, each poem

dust, Spanish fluttered

 

as music across the desert, even weeds

tumbled unloved. The police sirens seared

the coming night, dogs howled helplessly

sad.

 

Lo I walk the valley of death, love

lingers in my hard eyes. Mañana never

comes just right. I mend myself in the folds

 

of paper songs, ring my paper bells

for empty success. Quiero Nada,

if I sing long enough, I’ll grow dreamlike

and find a flock of pigeons, white under

wings lifting awkward bodies like doves

across the silky blue-white sky.

Spring Tide

For a time growing up, I lived on Sunset Island in Sunset Beach.  I had no idea it even had a name, that island.  Every year, in spring and in autumn, the spring tides would come and the streets would flood a few inches sometimes, sometimes a few feet.  Spring tides have nothing to do with the season and everything to do with the equinox and the moon and the nearness of our only natural satellite to earth.

It's been a long time since I lived in a place with spring tides.  I hadn't even thought Fort Lauderdale was that kind of place.  And then October comes and the new moon, and I head out to work one morning and the water is over the docks.  I'm walking in four inches of water, fish darting around my ankles, and it comes back to me, those mornings when the spring tide rose over the bulkheads and flooded the streets.  I feel young again, which may be this new love, this new life, certainly is all this possibility that stretches before me.

It's strange at 54 I find myself in place that is in some ways so much like where I lived when I was in junior high and high school.  Strange too that I find myself with a man who knew me during that time, loving him as I might have back then, the future stretching out before us, as if we have all the time in the world, even at our age.  I wonder if all of us need inundation now and then, if spring tides have a purpose not just for a land, but for the people who live there.  What's the message in these seasonal floods.  And is there a message in the timing, the full circle of childhood spring tides to these of middle age?  I know there is, so the question is what is that message for me?  I don't know, but I'm thinking I might at last find out.  Until I do, though, here's a bit of a poem by Emily Dickinson about the Spring Inundation:

THE INUNDATION of the Spring
Submerges every soul,
It sweeps the tenement away
But leaves the water whole.

In which the Soul, at first alarmed,       
Seeks furtive for its shore,
But acclimated, gropes no more
For that Peninsular.

Knowing My Place

The day it became the vaguest possibility I might leave Sacramento, I started to walk the place I had called home for twenty years.  For almost ten years, six days a week, sometimes seven, I circumambulated my neighborhood and learned it as intimately as a woman can learn something she loves.  I saw it in every season.  I saw it at different hours.  I knew how it grew peopled with the weekends and the cooler weather, how cold and heat made it silent as a graveyard.  I knew what birds came when.  I knew my place even as I was questioning my place, wondering if it had ever been my place, wondering if places could change, if we could change.

I will admit there were times I thought I was walking myself so deeply into that land and life that there would never be any escape.  And there were just as many times when I wondered if I was walking every bit of that place out of me so I could be free to find my self and my place now, not as I was when I settled in Sacramento, on Sacramento, back in the late seventies, but as I was now.  In fact I will tell you that I wasn't at all sure which it was until one day, I knew almost without a doubt I was unraveling myself so I could go.

Those of you who know me, know I had a dream in the hospital after my heart attack, a long dream that came with every sleep cycle, lingered even when I was awake, walking the halls as they make you walk, to set the return to life they've given back to you.  In that dream I walked the desert for days until I came to a ring of stones, white as chalk, oddly shaped like blocks on thin stalks.  I passed at the ring for long time before I understood what I was to do.  And then I began walking counterclockwise, past each stone, past each marker of my life so far, back to my beginnings, so I could walk it again, as if a life was truly a labyrinth and we walking the same path, finding ourselves back where we started, knowing ourselves, as T.S. Eliot wrote, for the first time.  I had many interpretations for that dream, and like all great dreams, powerful visions, it continues to advise and inform me still, years after my heart attack.  I see that I could not have made the leap to love, to a new life, to do it as fresh as 54 can be fresh, new enough, malleable enough to come to love willing to do things differently this time.

So now I am learning a new place, a place that is mine for now and maybe for a year from now, or two, or three, but then another place will be mine, and maybe another after that.  Perhaps I have come to a turtle place where I carry enough of home with me so that everywhere can be home and no place must be walked into the very bones and breath of me before I can feel safe and sound.  Perhaps I no longer have to know my place, set my life and myself in stone.  It sure would be nice to think so.  And just newly turned 54, I think that's what I'm going to believe.



 

The Lockless Door

The Lockless Door by Robert Frost

It went many years,
But at last came a knock,
And I thought of the door
With no lock to lock.

I blew out the light,
I tip-toed the floor,
And raised both hands
In prayer to the door.

But the knock came again.
My window was wide;
I climbed on the sill
And descended outside.

Back over the sill
I bade a 'Come in'
To whatever the knock
At the door may have been.

So at a knock
I emptied my cage
To hide in the world
And alter with age.

I've always been called by halls and doors.  This one called to me in New Orleans, not the most beautiful or ornate, but oddly compelling.  I stumbled on this Frost poem the other day, and remembered this picture.  I finally understand the poem -- the narrator's isolation and fear, how he would rather brave the New England winter than see whatever is knocking.  Forced into the world he leaves his cage and goes into the world.  We never do know what it was knocking on that door.  It can't have been too bad because the door was unlocked and yet it knocked.  Maybe it doesn't matter what gets us out of our isolation and back into the world,  Maybe it only matters that we do.

Saturday's Child

Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace,
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go,
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child must work for a living,
But the child that's born on the Sabbath day,
Is fair and wise and good and gay.

(Monday's Child, Nursery Rhyme,
     Author Unknown)


    I remember the first time I heard this nursery rhyme in elementary school. I was almost fearful to find out the day of my birth, as if it might explain everything. My parents had just divorced and Wednesday's child seemed my destiny. Of course I'm a creature of mind as much as heart and want to know the worse while hoping for the best. This is how I have handled everything from my beginnings through my heart attack and after. I can't remember if I counted back the years to find the day of my birth or found some chart during one of my journeys of exploration in the local public library. It doesn't matter, I suppose, each method telling you something rather essential about me, even the fact that I waited so long to figure it, tells you the fear that rules and the courage that fights to overcome it. I am not an impulsive woman although at times it might seem so to those that know me. There are months, sometimes years behind every decision. It's a bit like that Anais Nin quote: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." That's how it is with me, the fearful seed, the fierce blossoming.

I am Saturday's child; I work hard for a living.  As much as I would love to be fair of face, full of grace,  loving and giving, I'm the dutiful one that finds comfort and joy in daily routine, in duty, in putting in time, doing the work, and a job well done.  There are times I forget myself, though.  When I moved to the boat and decided to make my home here, I worried that I wouldn't be able to navigate the decks, to keep my feet when we were underway.  And, beyond a rather spectacular slip as the boat heeled in the Bahamas, spilling me and my hot coffee, I've done pretty well.  I'm no ballerina, but

So I suppose I could be forgiven then, if I almost believed myself, after months onboard with nary a fall, with this newly discovered grace, as Tuesday's child.  From floating docks to finger piers, I disembarked and came onboard as if I had been living on a boat for all my life.  Even as we prepared for Isaac, downgraded from hurricane to tropical storm, rain and wind and days of squall, I never fell, I never stumbled.  This day would be like any other day, every other day.  Only it wasn't.  The tide was a little high; my hands were full, but no different from any other return from work.  I was carrying a box that was a little heavy, a bit over-sized, but again not so different from any other day.  I suspect I was over-confident, feeling a bit like the world was truly my oyster.  So when I lost my footing, there was a moment of disbelief, as if the fairytale was discovered to be just that, a fairytale, a story, and not the truth of me at all.

I hit the stairs with breast and thigh, the dock with knees and hands.  I dropped the box into the water, my birthday gift, and remembering how quickly things sink and damned if I was going to lose it, I lunged despite the shock and pain and grabbed the box before it sank beneath the water's surface.  Mad and hurt, sorrowful at the loss of my illusion of dexterity and grace, I kept thinking to myself, "Saturday's Child," "Saturday's Child," beating myself up with what I am, no Sleeping Beauty, no Snow White, no Cinderella.  I'm the plucky sidekick, the faithful servant, the hard working handmaiden.  I get the servant, the butler, the companion, the faithful friend, but not the prince, never the prince.

Bryan is out on a deck in a moment, helping me up, taking the box, performing the delicate dance of soothing me while letting me seem strong, my burgeoning opening to dependance countered by my fear-based insistence on independence.  I want to be coddled and cuddled but I'm so damn afraid to depend on someone, to trust in 'til death do us part.  They may stay, but does the love burn as fiercely that last year as it did the first, not to mention all those years between.  Just because I haven't known that does it mean it doesn't exist?  The first leap to this new life was huge, but there are a hundred leaps after and hundreds, thousands more after that.  Some of these seemingly small leaps are far greater than I ever thought they would be, could be.

A few hours later, sitting watching T.V. with Bryan, dinner done, the weekend stretching before us, we laugh about something, I don't remember what, some bit of wonderful silliness.  Laughing is so much a part of us, even when I'm battered and bruised, worse for wear.  And I look at him and it hits me, my own blindness, that yes I'm Saturday's child, but I'm Tuesday's child too, at least in this man's eyes.  I'm fair of face and loving and giving, all the good things promised in this nursery rhyme, and so much more.  Sure, I'm the plucky sidekick, but I am the princess too, for the first time in 54 years, and it's partly because of this man I moved across the country for, but it's partly because of me as well.  It's a strange, wondrous thing to find yourself truly happy, the day in and day out kind, maybe even the happily ever after kind.

When I come to those places in my life that seem to defy words, I turn to poems.  Jane Kenyon's poem, Happiness came to mind as I pondered this new state of being of mine, happiness.


There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

Loteria Cards And Fortune Poems: A Book of Lives

A few weeks ago I discovered this artist and this book.  The artist is Artemio Rodriguez and his astonishing illustrations accompany fierce, spare poems written by Juan Felipe Herrera.  The illustrations and poems are inspired by the Mexican Loteria Cards, archetypal images that have spoken to me from the moment I first saw them.

I'm getting ready for my solar return.  I'm during 54.  For the first time in years I'm comparing where I was my last birthday and where I am this one, and the difference is so vast it could be another life, a parallel world.  And while such a change was never a goal of mine, was feared in fact as much as hungered for, it doesn't feel wrong, or extreme, or anything other than right. I feel reborn, more so than even after my heart attack.  Then I moved through death to life, but it was my old life, the one that nearly killed me, and so it was a triumph, but a minor one.  This was a leap made in hope and hunger, and healthy dose of desperation. And the resulting change is so huge that it seems small, as if I'm merely more myself than anything else.

Coming close as I am, to my birthday, I found this illustration compelling.  There is something young and tender about her, as young and tender as I feel now, green in the way growing things are green, soft in the way those growing things are soft in their beginnings before they grow stronger, more rigid and unyielding, change harder and harder until it's almost impossible.  There's no explaining it, really, how I can be this old and feel so young and hopeful.  And I love how she stands, naked and unsell-conscious, in the world and of the world, magic all around her.  I think I feel that way too, sort of, despite my 54 year-old body and battered heart.  I feel the pulse of the earth in this picture and feel that same pulse coursing through me.  I'm not sure this isn't just where I should be; it's certainly where I want to be.  I can't imagine a better way to start the next half of my life.

I Choose

I choose to be a figure in that light,
half-blotted by darkness, something moving
across that space, the color of stone
greeting the moon, yet more than stone:
a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.

- Adrienne Rich, from 21 Love Poems

A friend of mine is recovering from surgery, the kind of surgery that requires all your focus to return from, the walking through the valley of the Shadow of Death kind.  I've been there, done that, been to that place where all of you is focused on surviving minute by minute and you build your strength and stamina step by step, day by day.  At such times your soul is close but not quite with your body.  It hovers wondering if it should stay or go.  Only when the body is well on the way to healed does the soul begin to consider this second chance, this rebirth.  At least that's how it was for me.

Before her surgery, she asked me to collage her as a goddess.  It took me a while but I did, just before I left Sacramento for this new life.  I don't know if I made her as she was then, before her surgery.  I made her a moon goddess, peaceful, beneficent.  I wonder from from her, my heart with her recovery but my body far away, if maybe I made her as she would be.  

"Not everybody gets to be made into a goddess," she writes me before her surgery.  "You are a goddess, truly, not just made but living, breathing," I reply, not sure why I write it, only that at that moment I know it as truth, and I wonder as I write her after her surgery if maybe this is what happens at each of our rebirthings, if the goddesses we were must be abandoned for the goddesses we become.  Maybe this is why the Greek goddesses had so many provenances, reflecting their growth, all the deaths and rebirths, those endless becomings.

I died with my heart attack and was reborn.  I clung to what I was when what I should have done was place place the old me in the sea to be worn away, like they do at the Hindu Temple by the Sea, Bryan and I visited in Trinidad.  You don't throw away these forms that are full of divinity.  Rather, you let the elements wear them down, reclaim them.  The is what we do too, let the wind and sun, water and fire take what we were, what's no longer needed now, as you make your way as what you are now.  

It makes sense to me, the last two plus years, the change of life that had me wondering as well as those who knew me.  Why did I leap so quickly and completely?  It wasn't like me they said, and they were right.  It wasn't like the old me, but this was a new me, a form I did not really know.  It would take an odyssey to wear away what was me.  I couldn't give up the old form of me, although I didn't know it.  And so, I leaped out of desperation, out of a need I didn't know I had, so I could become, be reborn, more than stone, more than form -- woman, function, new goddess born of chaos and the sea.

This explains the discomfort I've felt lately, this trying to fit into my old life and my old way of doing things, and never quite being able to.  This explains my restlessness, the distance I feel as if I'm watching myself do things as I would have, react as I would have, and having it just not fit.  This new life requires the new me, not the old, and finding that new me hasn't been easy.  I've kept myself so cluttered, all the things I should have let go of and didn't.  

Somewhere out there I know there is a poem about these deaths and resurrections, these becomings.  This realization isn't new, although perhaps each woman has to come to it in her own way, in her own time.  We get so attached to that old form of us, the goddess we were, we have trouble giving her up, honoring the new form.  And that is my goal now, to honor this love but to see the leap and change as more than just the love of a woman for a man and he for her, but a love of the Self, of what we are and what we can be, will be, if we allow ourselves.  I think, once I get to know her, I will love this new me, the one who isn't afraid of new beginnings, of fresh starts, of travel, of wind and water, of risking everything for the chance of more, of everything I can be and am.  I let go of the old goddess.  It's time to open my eyes and see at last, the new.

For My Coming Solar Return

i thank You God for most this amazing

by e. e. cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

-- from E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962, by e. e. cummings

There And Back Again

At some point, here becomes there and what was home isn't any longer.  I separated from my husband, left my daughter in a state I had claimed as mine for almost 50 years, and sailed from the Virgin Islands to Florida with a man I hadn't seen since high school, a man I hardly knew in all the ways we think we have to know a person, but whom I knew intimately, profoundly as I find now and again with a sense of shock and wonder.  I leaped willingly, without hesitation, in the name of love but home, well that was still, despite days at sea and the clear, crystal beauty of the Caribbean, a tiny townhome in Sacramento, even though if you would have asked me at any point the last few months, I would have told you I was never going back.  I would have told you my home was this boat, this man, this life, and it was true.  And yet ....
It's the 'And Yet' that tells you the truth of things.

Over Labor Day I went back to Sacramento for my daughter's 19th birthday.  Chloe's dad was away at a conference and I figured it was a great time to have her meet Bryan and to celebrate with her a day I haven't missed celebrating since her birth.  We left after work, chased the day that was passing across the country, landing just before midnight in Sacramento.  It was a whirlwind trip, just a few days and two cross-country flights.  As happy I was to see Chloe, I felt unsettled, out of place.  Yeah it was the stress of first meetings, but there was something else.  When I went back to the house to get some things I needed for the cold weather I hope will one day come to Florida, it was both familiar and not, this house I had spent the last twenty years in, mine and not, house but not home, there but not here.  For about an hour I moved about this place I had lived for so many years and felt how little of me was left in the wood and plaster, the things that I left behind.  Here had become there, but where was my new here, my home?

I'm still living in Fort Lauderdale, still on Susurru.  Every morning I head to work; every afternoon I return.  We fix dinner together, do weekend chores.  We've gotten a cat.  I'm where I want to be but am I ready to call this home -- this man, this boat, this place?  This has become here and home and to be honest, I'm scared.  Yes I'm in love; yes I made the leap across a continent, leaving everything I knew behind.  But to put down roots, or to admit to them, to make all this home with all that means, to trust this man with the heart and soul of me?  Of course, this assumes that I have any control over roots and heart, that I haven't already built my home with this love as my foundation.  Isn't this what we always do, think we can be wiser this time, smarter, not give ourselves or our hearts until it's right?  I wonder sometimes if happily ever after isn't as much luck as anything, more luck than anything.  I get that we don't always get what we want but what we need.  I'm just not sure there's much comfort in that when you have given your tender heart to someone, built a home there, unsure of the trueness of your foundations, letting time prove what your heart only guessed at, hoped for, dreamed of.

Well, here I am, ready or not.  We'll see if the house I'm building is safe and sound.  May it be so.

Weathering

     On Tuesday morning the last few feeder bands from Isaac came through Fort Lauderdale.  Rain filled the early morning dark as I prepared for school.  Rain accompanied me to work but stopped somewhere in the faculty parking lot just before school started.  The rest of day was sun and clouds, peace at last after three days of inclement weather.  

     It was my first hurricane.  Early last week they knew it was probably headed this way.  Since we live on a boat, we began the work of getting her ready for the coming storm.  Bryan had been fighting the flu.  I had to go to work.  We did what we could in the afternoons and evenings, and when Saturday came, we spent several hours finishing up and then went to a hotel to hunker down and wait out the storm.  

     That's the thing about weathering.  Shit happens.  You do what you can to get ready.  You understand the limits - the boat's, yours, time, money, skill.  Luck of course, plays its part.  The gods always have their hands in our affairs.  At some point though, there's no more time for preparation.  At some point, the storm hits and all you can do is see just how well you weather it.  

     It struck me sitting in the hotel as waves of wind and rain pummeled Fort Lauderdale, that we all of us find ourselves weathering storms, literally and metaphorically.  And we learn a lot about ourselves about our relationships as we do so.  Oh the risk is high.  We may make it through in one piece but our home can be destroyed, we can be left with nothing.  We can lose people and things that are precious to us.  We can lose our lives.  But we can learn so much, although the lessons may not always be pleasant.

     I learned a lot about the ship I'm calling home during Isaac -- her strengths and the rough, hurt places she needs healed.  I learned about my new relationship -- our strengths and the rough hurt places we need healed.  I realized yet again that the call to know thyself is a life long task.  No matter how enlightened I think I am, how much I've grown, how deeply I've looked into my heart, there's so much more.  A lifetime won't be enough.  And as prepared as I am for whatever storms come my way, and the storms are going to come, at some point I just have to weather them and see how I fare.  I'm alive.  My "house" is still standing, although I'm not sure how sound it is.  Time will tell how I weather this storm, and the next one, and the next.

     Isaac brought to mind a different kind of weathering, the kind that comes with time and elements and wears us away.  This morning, in a startling moment of clarity, this poem by Fleur Adcock came to mind:

Weathering

My face catches the wind
from the snow line
and flushes with a flush
that will never wholly settle.
Well, that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young forever, to pass.
I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty
and only pretty enough to be seen
with a man who wanted to be seen
with a passable woman.
But now that I am in love
with a place that doesn’t care
how I look and if I am happy,
happy is how I look and that’s all.
My hair will grow grey in any case,
my nails chip and flake,
my waist thicken, and the years
work all their usual changes.
If my face is to be weather beaten as well,
it’s little enough lost
for a year among the lakes and vales
where simply to look out my window
at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors
and to what my soul may wear
over its new complexion.

–Fleur Adcock

I'm not sure yet when or whether I'll share what clarity came.  In the meantime, think about how prepared you are for storms, the literal ones and the metaphorical ones.  How will you weather them?  May you be safe and sound and strong.

     

Through Sister Water

"Be praised, My Lord, through Sister Water; she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure."
-  St. Francis of Assisi

Though I live a block away from the ocean these days, I find I miss deep water.  It's not enough to look at the ocean, to wet my feet in it.  Even a swim doesn't soothe me like it used to.  There was a time that the sound of the waves in my ear was enough to give me perspective.  Since my time offshore, though it's comforting, the ocean, but not enough to center me anymore.  

I understood the world offshore.  It was full of strange beauties as well as potential dangers, but it was simple.  There was just Bryan and I, the boat and the ocean, the course we charted.  The complexities of life, the should I or shouldn't I, slipped away.  My world narrowed to 44 feet of fiberglass, teak and canvas, and one man.  And I knew a peace and happiness I had never known before, my mind a far-reaching, ever-spinning spider of a construct, weaving endless pasts and futures, forgetting as I had done for years, the precious, fragile beauty of the present.

I've been back in the world now for a few months now.  I'm caught up in all the daily complexities of life.  I'm walking the beach, swimming, but I need deep water and wonder how, on the dock, going to work, making a living and life, how I'm going to find the peace and surety offshore brought me.  I think this is my challenge.  I've learned to be brave, to leap.  I've learned to dream and reach for those dreams.  I've learned what it feels like when I'm on course, aimed toward my true north.  Now it's time to find that peaceful place beyond the noise of everyday life, to the essentials, my essentials, that narrow world of me and Bryan, of boat and and ocean, and the course we have charted, our course.  May I find my way with grace, sooner as opposed to later.

They Came From Sand, They Go Back To Gravel

… The ocean,

cumbered by no business more urgent

than keeping open old accounts

that never balanced,

goes on shuffling its millenniums

of quartz, granite, and basalt.

It behaves

toward the permutations of novelty—

driftwood and shipwreck, last night’s

beer cans, spilt oil, the coughed-up

residue of plastic—with random

impartiality, playing catch or tag

or touch-last like a terrier,

turning the same thing over and over,

over and over. For the ocean, nothing

is beneath consideration.

From Beach Glass by Amy Clampitt