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.