| Just Another Priestess |
[Aug. 27th, 2008|12:46 am] |
(for Hazel-Shea and Sam)
I grew up on stories of Sharon Doubiago
when I was a child-bride at nineteen
listening to Barry Eisenberg
call her the most beautiful woman in the world.
Now at 28, having a sorrow-packed miscarriage,
I am strapped to the bed for at least 48 hours
by a country doctor with a bottle of brandy
and a copy of Hard Country
which soaks my heart as deep vermillion
as my underpanties.
"Descendent of the most beautiful woman in Ducktown,
she wrote amd makes me see in this spilled blood
the faces of my own ancestors
weeping their Irish masks and my other half
belly-laughing their alcohol-dancing Indian heads
flung back at the stars and his unknown Swedish half.
i wonder what my face looked like
before my parents borned me...
I wonder what this dead baby's face
was gonna look like:
which one of the ancestors
would have risen from the grave
and made the lines in the palm of the hand
tell new fortunes I take back all I cast off
I want to know the relatives in the blacknwhite photos
in the books back home
even if I don't like their politics.
And the spilled blood of the unseen child
fell at first drop by drop then torrential
onto the asphalt parking lot
where the bus drops off oldest boychild from school
--it was the same exact place where two days before
that first child and I found dead
but still warm young sparrow
which I carried home in cupped hand
and we buried in then plaster of paris statue
of Mary mother of Emmanuel.
It's now I cry to that mother,
now it's one mother to another insisting,
But I grew his eyes within,
even though it was too early to have made eyes or fingernails
or anything but a faint steady heartbeat
the color of the Hard country life.
After coming home from the clinic
i spent long night staring in the dark bedroom;
the wall next to the window was painted by the moon
with the thin branches that showed up in black streaks
like the blood vessels inside the eyeballs
when you rub the lids hard against the retina
to stop the tears and in my mind
I saw Denis Flemming's painting of 4 or 5 bums
huddled around the trashcan in southside Chicago
and the emptiness on their faces is like my belly.
Like one too many gray misshapen river stones
the lies of modern medicine sit heavy below the belly
as a sweat-soaked blood-stained rag.
there are drugs to prevent miscarriages.
they cause cancer in the daughters.
there are fertility drugs
which cause more than one soul
to journey to earth through the birth canal.
We don't need them.
there are drugs for everything except the sorrow
of losing the unborn child.
Just another priestess says,
There is no drug or lobotomy to cure mysticism.
Robin Rule, from "Porch Language",
poems from award-winning book
California Arts Council in Literature for 1989 |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Sep. 26th, 2007|08:10 pm] |
|
In an entry I wrote SEpt. 21 I wrote, "I walked around the blocked with my sheers looking for floors to steal"---hahahahahahahahahah. i win the award for the stupidest mispeeling!!!!!!! |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Sep. 26th, 2007|12:46 am] |
Autumn is so complicated. I spent most of today either at church or in the garden, the other church.
I forgot to ask the doctor how much time early in the morning i am supposed to garden. The first day I worked from &:30 a, til 2:30 pm. I have a feeling that's wrong. Too much, but i love it.
I love to walk at twilight and I forgot to ask if that's ok. Me and my cat Capt'in loves to walk around the churches and vacant lots of which one is no longer vacant. The baptists sold their lot, but unbelievably, kept the three apple trees. It is a very huge, ugly rich mansion of no taste and I bet it takes a long time to sell. It has much acre for a town lot. I am furious. That was my lot. In the spring, and in December, the grass would come up two inches high, an emerald green velvet softness, that I would lay my cheek on and the Capt'in would sit on my back as if it were a ship and he was in the crow's nest," Ahoy! No pirates today Jane", he would miaow and come down to tickle my cheek with his whiskers. How I love this gentle little tuxedo cat. He is the only cat that comes in the house now and sleeps with us. Sooty has taken over dan's office outside and the neighbor lady gave me one of those little circular beds that have a sheepskin lining. He loved it right after I put a slip of mine in it I had been wearing for a few days. he has a little english teatray with three matching bowls and is quite content to come and go through the window. Frenchie is doing very well for those of you who has followed this feral cat's life. His ears are completely healed of ear mites, but I did notice I have to keep up on the medicine and he hates it, so he is leery of my love now. That is such a sad thing. Also his eyes weep, and the drops I give him I don't think he minds, but since i have him, I always treat the ear mites. One might say, do it at two different times, but you have no idea how hard it is to catch a feral cat once. Or rather coax one to come close enough to to grab them by the scruff of their neck, 1,2,3, wipe his eyes, squirt them with drops and then turn him left, squirt the ear med, turn him like a popover, do the other ear, make him stay for at least five more minutes and listen to a love song in very bad french while i rub his head, so he knows that this is all for his own good. Now he runs when he sees him and that's too bad. We were just gettin a relationship. I moved his bed to the back yard with the other cat-flats and then all last evening , he sat on the front porch and looked expectically at me even though he has eaten and slept back there for several weeks. His fur has grown thick and soft. He has a bit of a heft to him, instead of all skin and bones. I have loved his sickness away. You can do that to people as well as cats and dogs, even though they are in no way similar. The human being is infinately more valuable. But much harder to get to trust.
I believe my garden is going to be ready for winter. I am going to finish painting the book cases matte black and two coats of urathane that need it. The caboose is turning into a sweet little home after six years. I am giving things away right and left. When it is done I have to redo my will. There will be not so much to give. And even science doesn't want my heart... |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Sep. 21st, 2007|06:38 pm] |
THE HARD WHITE BONE THAT IS POWDERED
& PLACED UNDERNEATH RHIZOMES in WINTER;
THE SOFT CLEAR FLUID OF THE MOON CALLED TEARS
1. Things that Give Excitement
While Eating Them
Fat ripe cherries which burst
dark juice on white page of book.
Mango running down chin.
Fresh coconut: sharp chips of white sweet.
2. Small Things that Watching, Give Pleasure
The jenny wrens soon to be here
in the first snap of October.
The robins coming in on the bitter wind
and getting drunk on the fermenting hawthorn berries.
An old woman's hand carrying thread to needle.
A book of poems so thin the spine
is a cricket's back in Autumn.
The bobwhite's call across the fog.
A young woman in her first tightly-laced bodice,
the lace turning her nipples into small stones.
3. Things That Are Annoying
A dog next door that pits herself
against the chain link, over and over.
Without a whimper of feeling.
Cats, who in the middle in the night,
dip their paw into my glass of milk
without a degree of tidiness.
Being awakened before the alarm,
even if it's close, but for no good reason.
4. Surprising Things
While sitting in a plum thicket,
the sudden rustle of a grosbeak.
Through an open garden gate,
a view of sunflowers in bloom.
Three cats following me down the alley,
their eyes at quarter moon.
Boys on bikes spilling around the corner,
handlebars catching my hair.
5. A List of Things That Change:
Babies. Leaves. The Price of Gold.
The longing for one thing
that becomes meaningless in old age.
6. A List of Horrible Things
Old lonely dogs barking though the night
or puppies whining before dark.
Footsteps on marble floors
in the train station.
The scuff of a suitcase case.
One's husband crying in harsh
uncontrolled sobs at a memory.
Hearing a voice that reminds a woman of her mother,
causing the stink of fear to roll down her armpits.
The spaces between a baby's breath.
7. A List of Grieving
A withered mouse the cat left behind the stove:
and its empty sockets.
The accidental loss of a friend.
The hard silence after apologies.
Watching an ugly callous form
on a once tender foot.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
22 September 2007
I've just come in from gardening in pitch-black, watched around the block with garden shears to steal floors for a clean bedroom, new furniture, beauty upon beauty. Alone. Dan is at his college course of auto mechanic. it's cheaper to do the labor yrself and just buy car parts.
I'm so tired all the time I tremble; can't sleep, don't stop to eat. This is the fourth art
show I am working toward this year and I am so tired, but I can't sleep, just lie staring at the ceiling or out the window at a single star if that's the turn of the universe. Otherwise...
I think I've had that many and a few more poetry readings: trying to memorize,focus on my intonations, timing the poems, giving the heart to the voice and the voice to the heart... This is all to the good. This is what I desired in high school and trained myself for; this is why I mentored with certain older poets, because I wanted this to be my life. All the people in my family are artists. ididn't believe I could until my mid thirties. I never believed I could do it and then I met a woman who is an incredible artist in 1990 and she said there is no reason you cannot learn to put yr visions into the world and so I have and so I am. What I am doing now I am so pleased with. I hope I can take photographs and post some when I am done. The show is October 20 for any of you in the Bay area. (I will send you a card chiclet-girl on time). I am spilling myself into the paint, into the found objects. I cannot believe I actually found a tiny pair of metal handcuffs the size of one's thumbnail. It made me giggle to find them.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
23 September
Right now, the atmosphere is red. The whole sky right down to the earth is a eerie scarlet light. I had a root canal yesterday. I went to a doctor today who said the key to sleep is to get up the same time each morning and make it an early hour. Even if you stay up til two in the morning, still you must get up at whatever time you agreed to get up. I usually get up at six thirty and take my heart meds which according to bio-rhythms, work best in the a.m. My long-acting morphine is the same way. The doctor said, my exercise should be done in the morning to facilitate sleep at night. This sounds like agony, but tomorrow I will begin.
I have discovered the red. There's a forest fire somewhere. The whole town gets scared when this happens. We have a volenteer dept and it's small. It takes a while for the county CDF to arrive up here. This is why Fire Towers. This is why those endlessly bored, but brave men and women sit month after month with a set of binocs looking, chasin' down a whiff of smoke...
The doctor tells me to start my day with gardening, cuz he knows I love my garden and it'll not just be good for me, but kick the light endorphins in to make me happy. He says that's half the battle. I, of course, need more things to plant. I have about eighteen bulbs and that's it. I intend to go to my ex husband's and see if I can body-snatch some chard plants. When we were married, I planted about twelve and now there's around 50. Over a year ago, I took 18 and they bolted in the hot ugly weather after about a year and a little. These new ones I intend to shade and make them last far into the winter and into next year. My landlord has a baby tractor and he says, "ya wants some naked ladies? hold on. Ya wants some daffodils, just a minute and he digs and scrooges and scrabbles and lifts up a bucket full of bulbs I take home and plant in my part of the hankerchief garden. I just realized I can divide my iris. I have alot that have crowded themselves into a fine amount over the last four years.
***********************************************************************************
24 September 2007
I hurt all over, every joint, every piece of skin like a sunburn or a brand new tattoo. My garden paths are naked. I need to fill them up with little ground covers and johnny jump ups and ...I forget this garden is only a few years old. And I've made mistakes, which are time consuming and costly. Every year my Youngest Brother gives me a gift certificate to the local nursery at Christmas and one at my birthday. I dream and plan and change my mind and study library magazines all winter until I have a Plan of Action. Which often gets changed at the nursery when I see something so exotic, so sexy that i just have to have it.
Tonight is the 24th. I put this post on hold because Dan and I had to run down to San Francisco yesterday and pickup some Chinese furniture some friends of ours have wanted to give us. The wife is Chinese and these are things she brought over when she married her husband. They met in China at a Dog Stew Party. I know, it sounds foreign, well, for petessakes, It IS, to us. But it is normal in China. She said it is good for arthritis.I don't hold with animal parts used as medicine, but herbs are good things. Anyway, we are nobody to turn our noses up at real Chinese furniture. The set is two bedside tables with two drawers each and a tall thin dresser of drawers. Each corner has a brass accoutrement for lack of a better word. (hardware Robin, hardware...) and the pulls are ornate brass. I look carefully at them and realize they are in the shape of bats. They are etched with flying bats! The furniture sat in the children's room. I haven't looked very carefully at the set yet because Dan needs another guy or strong woman to help him get them out of the car, so I don't know how much boy-damage there is on the wood parts, which is a bird's eye kind of maple.
If they are very scratched, I plan to take off all the brass and paint the wood flat black and lacquer it four or five times so that it appears as if you are looking through water and then I'll put the brass back on.
They are not very scratched. I polished them and they gleam in the warm autumn sunshine. The wood soaked up the oil and pushed out the lemon scent into the room. It's exotic and lovely. There are many cupboards and drawers on the tall dresser, which will go into my studio. I opened the first cupboard on top and on one side are four little drawers, with these little bat pulls.Next to them is a small ish space that has an piece of wood that can make the area two shelves. I need to find ittle plugs at the hardware store, so right now it is one space just right foe my smallish Remington typewriter. My huge Underwood fits on top. Underneath this little curio area are five drawers. So many art materials will fit in this dresser. The bedside tables just don't work for the bed, because we put the bed on a slant coming out into the room. My friend betty from Church is going to give me her Grandmother's metal head and foot board for th it and in the triangualr space behind the head board, where all this light abides, I plan to buy a tree of soem kind. Dan says, "I can build a platform for storage for summer clothes and the tree can sit up there and lean over our bed. Our Youngest Son sez, "Put white Italian Christmas lights on it." What an Idea! So, the bedside tables. One I put in the parlor next to a hundred year old small leather chair with the phone, a repro antique clock that stands tall and a plant in a 9 inch tall pot my favorite Chinese green. It is so simple, so clean. On the wall, are three smallish framed pictures of Dylan Thomas: one alone, one, with his wife Caitlin walking in a Welsh lane and a playbill from the twenties announcing the coming play "Under Milkwood". A part of me says I should have hung one simple Chinese print I have of "The Flute-Player in Feather Coat". The nice thng about keeping house, is you can play dress-up and change things around and put old things in new places.
*********************************************
Back to the Garden and the here and now: I have dug up about fifteen iris and broken the rhizomes where the roots seemed a good place and I planted them in different settings in the garden. I have no idea which colors will come up where, so it'll be a surprise come next spring. I also plan in February to hard prune my one rose tree and move it to a bed that is built of bricks like Italian terrace beds. I will plant small stuff around the base of the tree, to keep the cats from digging the dirt and you-know-whatting. I am so effn' tired of picking up catshit. I can't tell you strongly enough. I also want to buy at least a hundred violas and pansies and plant them in every naked place! Will I be able to? NO,no, and no. But I believe in The Big Maybe. I truly do.
I believe bad things can go away and good things can return. I believe in flowers as a form of love-making. I believe in friends making up with each other. i believe that the front door of a house is a great big smiling mouth that opens up when you knock and it says, "Why hello there!
Come right in and sit down. The Mrs. went into the kitchen to put the kettle on for tea. She saw you walking up the lane and you looked tired." My back door says, "Ah, don't go in just yet. Go out and admire that tiny garden the Mrs made and sit down. She'll bring you some iced tea and some lemon cookies in a moment. Smell those lillies, woncha?"
And when I come out with the tall frosted glasses on the tray and a plate of cookies and I see yr weary, but shining face, I'll drop the tray and run right up to you and I take you in my arms, and I will say, "I am so glad you came back. I have missed you like the dickons." And capt'in will rub up against yr ankles until you pick him up and he'll whisper in yr ear, "I'm glad you found the Major", you needed a pal. And I'll be his pal too." And we'll start all over again, but this time, going into the caboose and making hot chocolate because I forgot it's Autumn here. Time doesn't matter with real friendship. I discovered that waiting. It seems like forever. And you might make it forever, but I can wait, because I'm yr friend and I love you. |
|
|
| 5768-L'Shana Tova |
[Sep. 14th, 2007|11:13 pm] |
I have asked forgiveness for the cracked cup of angry words,
and the moon, thin shards of that cup is just right for cutting
out the chaotic rage of those words and making new ones
for a new year.
I have gone to the window, looking for
that young moon which has come and gone;
but left a memory so strong:
a woman wearing perfume
who has come into the room and departed.
Robin Rule
Sept. 14 |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Aug. 13th, 2007|10:49 pm] |
There Are Limits
A friend of mine from the early seventies and our crazy-wild Kerouac days of waitressing late and then open miking poetry late and howling down the streets of Berkeley and San Francisco called me yesterday as I was weeding the broccoli and told me she had up to a thousand dollars to give me to come visit her on Washington's rain forest peninsula. Just add up the gas miles my old and i mean old, bench seat American car would need, plus a cuppla nights at a motel and some food to get up to her little town that had less people than my little town has. I thought about it, I talked to Dan about it and then I went back to working in the garden. I started cutting down the evening primrose and tiger lily stalks and then I stopped and sat in the tree house and read some more of "Sons" by Kafka, because it was time to do that again now that my two sons are adult. Then I stopped, my mind went blank, like a television screen and I saw my brothers as children with their pants down around their ankles leaning over the couch filthy with the hair grease of my step-father and I watched him beating the shit out of them for nothing, they had done nothing, and my skinny little arm couldn't pull his arm away from its motion and finally he slammed me up against the opposite wall so I could see my efforts were pointless...
After pulling up all the stalks in the garden and cutting them into a size that I could make a small bonfire with in the autumn, that night in bed, hardly able to move because I had fallen the night before so hard on the crowded wet laundry room floor, that I honestly thought I'd broken my knee caps, I remembered how when I woke in the night as a junior high school girl and the absolute terror of living, just plain living, came over me, I would crawl into the lower bunk bed of my brothers', even though it was wet from his urine, and I clutched his shoulders as I carefully kept my hips and belly as far as I could away from the warm wetness, while grasping as much comfort as I could from his bony collarbone and his slight snore. I stared for hours out the window at the street lamp covered with moths and saw how relentless that kind of light was...as eternal as the light at the cop shop where I knew I couldn't go even though the second story roof of our apt had a drain pipe I could slide down and run a few miles and TELL; I knew it wouldn't make any difference. They would maybe call whatever version of CPS there was back in the mid-sixties and someone might come out and investigate, but if they left me alone with my mother and the step-father, or even just my mother if they took the step-father away and put my brothers in foster care, that death I thought about when she beat us? It might happen that night. She honestly might lose the control she was convinced she had and maybe she did have a certain amount of control and maybe I was lucky she hadn't lost it one of those other nights. I wouldn't have grown up to be able to tell anybody about this just one-of-many-incidents, that I needed to talk about. She always prefaced an evening of hell with "And I don't want the neighbors hearing you or you'll get it worse, do you hear me?" So we were as quiet as we could be as she flailed us with kitchen utensils and sauce pans, madly leaping out of the way in pain, as a st. vitus dance overtook us to find air clear of torture tools.
It stopped when I was fifteen and she wrapped my down-to-the-waist hair one,two three times around her fist and started in with the big spoon, calmly, as hard as she could on my ass, and I stood there, stock still, not a move, not a sound, and she saw for the first time, I wasn't gonna be broken, no matter what. It was then that I knew I could undergo anything. Because when she finally let go of me, more out of weariness than anything else, and saw my dead face,void of any emotion, she knew it was over. I had won. I let my hair cover my face like a shiny wet greasy shower curtain and I allowed myself a tiny smile of victory. I dared not give away more than that. But I needed some satisfaction, I needed to say "Mick, you lied."
And I told Dan the next day as we inched into the gas station for one gallon of gas, "Hey hon, I don't wanna go to Washington. Do you mind?" And he shook his head, he knew my home was my sanity, was my yoga, was my Bible story and I needed to stay close...I had addresses for my sons, for my brothers and they were all within a few miles of me. |
|
|
| String Creek Again |
[Jul. 28th, 2007|10:46 pm] |
This late afternoon, a friend came by and picked us up to drive up to String Creek for The McHone's Annual Family Reunion. There are usually 80 or so family members camping about the land. Dennis and Nancy's cabin was built by the son of the one we lived in until five years ago. I had even briefly lived in their cabin before they bought it and completely refurbished it. Ours is 173 years old and theirs, of course, younger, but you get the idea of massive redwood logs adobed and a pitched roof for the snow to slide down...Oh, the beloved valley of my teenhood and then again in my middle-age... Two different times of my life I can hardly believe the stories are of the same woman's life.
The first time I lived on String Creek the cabin was a small Depression piece of squalor I cleaned up and turned into a home. (In my pictures is one of me in front of it washing my first baby in an old wash tub.) The second cabin, of great beauty and antiquity was also full of holes in the floors and stoves that didn't warm it quite enough, but then I had quilts and rugs. The poverty was not so vast. And there was always food to eat the second time and after a while, there was Daniel. My dear Dan who loved me enough to marry me "just because".
To the reunion, I brought a box of hats that I knew Leafy wouldn't care about. (Oh no, I've given part of her surprise away.)Nancy and her daughter Megan went crazy. They are going to a wedding back east this autumn, a very fancy family Jewish wedding needing three outfits for different occasions, they can't wait to match the hats to dresses at the Thrift.
There was so much food on the BBQ and ice chests and I feel like I'm getting Dan's flu, but I was on String Creek and so happy to wander among the apple trees and listen to the frogs in the creek.
One girl brought henna cones and all the girls and some of the boys were painting their legs and hands in the beautiful patterns of the mid-east. I wanted one too, but I had to get my fill of the String. Someone had stuck a toy horse about a foot high up on the side of the embankments going deeper into the valley and in Steve and paulette's field was a small chair with a stuffed puppy next to it. It's always a gas to see the silliness of our people.
Coming home, the big fat moon guided us down the mountain and into the valley of town. I need to tuck myself in bed, but I'm so glad I went home for a little while... |
|
|
| scrub jay |
[Jul. 28th, 2007|12:01 am] |
That almost-ready-to-leave-the-nest that the wildlife lady told me to put back on the ground and let its parents show him the final way to fly and find food? well, kids, he didn't make it. A neighbor's cat killed it after i trusted the wildlife lady and i know she's right, but damn it, i needed that bird to live. I have been getting ready to paint our bedroom, so i put the carcass in the freezer in a plastic bag and continued on sorting, packing, throwing out stuff, giving stuff away. Today I thawed him and cut odd his wings and then buried his sweet little body. In two years or so I'll dig him up and mount the bones. The wings I use in my collaged hand-made books that teach people aBOUT BIRDS AND THE IMPORTANCE OF THEIR CO-EXISTENCE IN OUR LIves (oops) on the planet. I think I shall go to bed til about four and then continue packing. last night i got up at 4 and scrubbed the kitchen floor and appliances. i am looking forward to gettign this caboose in order. I can't wait to see the fresh paint, sew curtains for the new laundry room. (i am putting my writing desk in my studio and the ironing board in thelaundry room. now that makes sense, yes?)
i need juice. i have taken on a tad too much, but if i don't do it before Winter comes, i'll be shit out of luck.
There is one more young scrub jay left, lets say some prayers for the lil feller, what? |
|
|
| worship |
[Jul. 22nd, 2007|12:34 pm] |
The whole time I have been in San Francisco, I have been concerned with how to find a church to go to on Sunday that wasn't too far from where we were staying. I am giving myself plenty of time to find somewhere, instead of last minute and not being able to go anywhere. I ask my hosts who tell me there is a Chinese church just around the corner. I am a bit amused about going to a church I won't be able to understand a word of the service, because i know exactly three phrases in Mandarian and that's it. But I decide I am going anyway, because "where two or three are gathered in his name...
I walk over to the church on Saturday afternoon and there are six kids of various ages and sexes playing handball up against the white stucco of the church and I ask politely when does church start tomorrow and they amusedly tell me 9:15 a.m. They also are wondering how I am going to understand the service, I assume. If I knew How to speak the Chinese, I woulda asked them in Chinese what time to come.
So, I set my alarm for seven a.m. which will give this slow and sleepy woman time to take a shower, but not wash The Hair which doesn't need it and get dressed.
I walk down to the church and I watch many many Chinese people walk into the building I really can't tell the size up, but I am to discover it's huge once I get in. A man who I guess is an elder asks me with a twinkle: English or Chinese and I reply with a twinkle, English. When I get in I have to sit in the last sit in the last row because i see the room which is quite large has speakers and i don't want to mess up my pacemaker with the magnets inside the speakers. I soon discover this church seats 3oo or 400 people and they sing the same modern hymns that we do and i am so happy i find i am crying through a song. Not noise crying, just a nice salty single tear down my cheek and that's a rarity for this salty old dog.i am truly happy.
The parish is just like my own. I feel so at home. |
|
|
| work |
[Jul. 20th, 2007|11:15 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | san francisco | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  touched | ] |
| [ | music |
| | mozart | ] |
1.
Just like last night: I'm the only one up, burnin' the candles, listenin' to the poetry in my head. We had a splendid crowd, read a great many anti-war, pro-peace poems and at the end, a young man stood up and laid some rough light brown pieces of thick paper that has some substance to it on a table. I asked him what it was and he straightened up and I read on his Tshirt the words, "Iraq Vet for Peace", and then he said, "my uniform."
Through many processes, he had turned the cloth of his desert cammo into this paper and the letterpress people were getting ready to publish a peace poem on each piece of 'paper'. I thought it was one of the most brilliant ideas I had ever heard of. I told him of our Veterans for Peace and their bus which they travel around doing things for people like those who live in Covington Mississippi and were devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
The next afternoon:
The man we are staying with (and his family) is playing a grand piano right now. It makes me want to cry it's so gentle and healing. I have spent the last few hours working in their garden; they don't understand I like to so very much get my hands in earth and also say thanks for letting me
stay in their beautiful house while I work. |
|
|
| san francisco |
[Jul. 19th, 2007|09:59 pm] |
Right now I'm in the basement of a house in the sunset district that was a speak-easy in the thirties and when the tenants moved in, they found photos down here of the people who sat around of an evening drinking bathtub bourbon. They bought it with contents and it's an incredible place, gorgeous furniture from 'back then'. Everyone's asleep but me and I've left a window open so that the distant smell of ocean can drift in.
I've had my first real bath in maybe five years. I don't count those dinky puddles in motel sixes along I5. This one is deep and wide and if it weren't late, I could have unbraided the hair and washed it under this swan-neck faucet. I plan to do that in the morning when there's sun and time for the hair to dry. I've noticed I've started referring to my hair , as The Hair. Like it's either a separate entity or a biblical story. Rachel. Deborah. Esther. Rebekkah. Leah. Miriam. Tabitha. Priscilla. No wonder Paul told us to cover it in Fellowship. It IS distracting. It's beautiful, it's glorifying. I usually cover mine at church, but a Poetry Reading is another kind of church-is glorifying the gifts He gave me. San Francisco is abundant with churches. Catholic, four square, evangelical, storefront. This Sunday, I'll probably be going to a Chinese protestent because it's around the corner. And I will probably not understand a word of it and I'll probably understand every word of it. Tomorrow night we read, morning-day we plan to play. I want to go to bead stores and paper stores. I mean, we don't have any money really, but I love to see what's out there.
I brought a buncha long and short raven feathers down. Sometimes in Willits, I stick them in my one-over-the-under-in-the-back braids at odd angles and it's my power holder. It's my play. These feathers are my poem-holders, each feather carrying the words of the poem I'm going to read in my twenty minute set. I walked in the door with a briefcase of poems and a long vase of feathers and one of the tenants' boys, seven year old Ty, exclaims. He also collects feathers and shows me his raven feathers, which he calls crow feathers. I have to tell him, we have raven here, they're a bigger bird and he likes that. I promise to mail him some more, plus some peacock and a flamingo feather. I had a friend whose ex worked at the San Diego zoo twenty or so years ago and she gave me some of the feathers he would clean out of the ponds and aviaries. I have a parrot feather which is bright blue on one side and bright yellow on the other. The flamingo's pink is shameless. It's like a ju-ju dress at Mardi Gras in the old N'Orleans day. This child was dancing with feathers to the music inside his head. I fell in love.
After we read we'll both get checks for $100 and hopefully we'll sell books too. That's what I reallly want and then go buy beads and paper. With money I've earned with my tools. My voice. My mind. My hands. |
|
|
| Kathleen Handley & The Blue Jay |
[Jul. 14th, 2007|09:30 am] |
I don't sleep much since I was 15. Last night was no exception, except maybe worse. As if I was sitting watch over a dying person. And I was.
One of the most important women in my life battled losing her sight for the last ten years, and then lung cancer. This woman wasn't a smoker, hadn't been in something like twenty years, but in the end there's no blame really I believe since the Industrial Age revved up its tiny motors that got increasingly bigger and bigger. In fact I think I read somewhere that every seven years our lungs regenerize themselves. So I blame most cancers on the IA. I don't mind growing my own food and carding my own wool, (alright's its been since high school and 4 H) but i can do it and throw the cars away, i say. if i die, i die, the planet will be clean. sigh..
I met Kathleen at a bible study group at her house. She couldn't see but shadows, and the house was always immaculate. I asked her if she had a maid and she laughed and laughed. In fact, Kathleen's main form of communication was laughing. She was filled with more joy than any person I have ever met in my life. It was her genuine everyday experience.
I remember once I had a short machine-gun tirade about my anger toward my mother and she interrupted me and asked me to say the Lord's Prayer outloud and there it was, right smack in the middle of it, "...forgive me my sins as I forgive those who sin against me..." I did not want to hear that. I was cuddling my anger the way some peole cuddle their self-righteousness. But I couldn't forget her words. I asked her if she had had a good childhood and she said "No", and in fact when her mother was dying, she and her sister went to help their mother die out of a sense of duty rather than love,but they had forgiven their mother all her hell-on-earth behavior. And in that story, she made me realize I too should to that as well. I think. i keep trying. i don'tthink i have yet.
So that was just the other day and this evening, I hear the two Jakes, as we call our two scrub jays, screeching and squacking as if they were dying or they had bet heavy at the races and lost. I went out into the lane under the cork oak trees and there on the ground is an almost ready to, if not-already-to-leave the nest, young blue jay and a cat has stripped its tail feathers off, so while not exactly injured, it has no ballast. So I pick him/her up and cuddle the bird in my tshirt and go into the caboose where i have the "bird -healing kit". I have pipettes that i let them drink from and lucky for my little patient, we had chicken, which is quite similar to potato bugs i understand. i am quite sure i heard Jake One say H-mm tastes just like potato bugs when i threw him a bite the other day. So here we are having chicken AGAIN and the youngster's still in a bit of shock and only interested in water. i put some seed in the cage and i have a huge nest collection, so i choose a scrub jay nest and put him/her in it inside a plastic cat carrier box with screen door, (the irony is NOT lost on me) for aeration,(SP) so I think he ought to make it til morning. We have a woman in town who really knows birds and she, i hope, will raise it til its tail feathers grow back.
So, this is the planet. Death one day, and a close call the next, but still gloriously alive. The wheel continues to turn, to grind its way into entropy ,if you will, and i can only stand in awe and love what i see around me that is good and hate that which is pain-inducing and hateful. It may not be a very intelligent or sensible way to live, but i am a passionate woman who hates injustice and loves birds to fly and women to laugh. Goodbye Kathleen, hello you little bird.
God Bless you both. Amen |
|
|
| Poker |
[Jul. 10th, 2007|10:18 pm] |
When I was in my mid -wenties and married to the judge of this small town, he played poker every few months with a group of guys I called the City Fathers. They were carpenters, electricians, pot-growers, lawyers, firewood cutters, you get the picture...
Well, one night, K. was down by a good bit and was getting desperate. He refused to bet the house (14 room Victorian on 3/4 of an acre right in town), he refused to bet the 20 foot mahogony double dingy salmon boat, so he bet his wife. The picture i use as my default pic is about the time area. Come on, I was a babe. Well, He "lost" me to John M. who graciously told K. that I could continue to live with him and raise our children. It was always a funny joke, it would surface every few years at a game and everyone laughed,including me. I had known John M. since I was a teen, so there ya go. He had a dog named Charlie who sat in the front seat of his truck when he went to build a house or put counters in someone's kitchen and he'd leave his lunch, like a hamburger or a roast beef sandwich right on the truck seat next to Charlie and she wouldn't eat it. She really was one of those special dogs in the world. She died a few years ago at an old and happy age.
Tonight I was walking Main Street in the dark, working on my long poem in my head when I ran into Tom and Sara who said, "Hey John M. is in town; he's at the pub right now." Needless to say, I ran like the dickons and walked in a bit breathless. He was sitting with L. and shootin' the shit. He saw me and exclaimed, :"I don't believe it!" Now, L. is a relatively new comer to our town so he didn't know this quirky piece of history and i thought I'd blow his mind, so I put my arms akimbo and said, "Wha? you don't recognize yr own ex wife?" and we both laughed and fell into a big old hug. He said, I have never seen you this radiant, this beautiful, what's up?"
I reminded him, "You signed the papers, you signed me off to marry Daniel, Does it look like I married the wrong guy?" But also I was so puzzled. I said, "John, I'm taking medication, I'm chunky, I have seven inches of silverware colored hair; i'm 52, what do yo see?" And he proceeded to love me with words like only an old friend can do. It was a real boost to my, is "ego" the right word, or is "self-esteem" more accurate? what ever it is, I was made new and feel good now even though he's long gone, driving back to santa rosa to his wonderful wife who I adore. these moments are to be treasured I have come to discover...I'm a lucky rabbit's foot! |
|
|
| Mortification w/out the cat o' nine tails |
[Jul. 10th, 2007|04:16 pm] |
PREFACE:
The other night I was interested in doing two pieces of sleuthing in this Ghost Train Diary, one being about who reads me here in The Land O'Live Journal and I counted ya all and there's not a whole hell of a lot of you "that I know about", but enough to feel like I have an audience, but I really wanted to find the rest of the story chapters of "The Diary of the Magpie Woman" which is what I call that great long chapter-a-night Dickonian series I wrote in 2005, and while finding them all to edit and mebbe make something of, I also discovered I had over a hundred entries (which isn't alot when I looked at some other Inkslingers) in this convoluted thang called Live Journal, called the Ghost Train, called my diary, which is just a chicken-shit way of saying what I really felt when I put it online which was The Holy Ghost Train, but never mind my lack of courage back then or large amounts of stupidity, I found, thanks to Leafy, that I could tell my story, I could talk and not have to duck lest i get smacked, slapped, belted across the face by an adult called Mother or step-father, or any other relationship a child might have thrust upon them. I could write poems, complain, wonder at the joy of stray cats, holding hummingbirds, nursing acorn woodpeckers, loving my sons, loving the world, and a buncha you that are in it, holding peace vigils, whining about high bills, etc etc.
And I have written I noticed these last nights at least four great big huge heart-naked essays about telling the truth, because this was the place I could do so. Now, the stupid part comes in by the using of my own name, but I tried in the beginning when leafy set me up to have a false name like most of you, let me amend that, not false, but secret poetic name, because it's not my place to call you false or not and shame-on-me. I wanted, oh how I wanted to be , "Jane Red Shoes" or "Redbud Jane" cuz redbud is a basket-weaving material and it grows right here on our Tomki River as well as back in the Carolinas where my family lived happily before they were forced to march in that damned Trail of Tears and the Cherokee in me sings for it, and "JANE" is one of my favorite girl names; but I just couldn't write true and clear and real, so I had to gulp, take a leap and scribble right out here for the whole world to see, (as if they were lookin') Robin Rule, little knowing people could google my name because I DO have a bit o' fame and well, I most recently WAS googled by two of the people I admire the most in the world.
A woman who shall be called Tea, cuz that's what her loved ones call her and she's a national letterpress typesetter who is gonna make that tryptych I mentioned a week or so ago with a poem of mine, Dan's and one of her own and sells them to universities for hundreds of dollars, AND THEN, googled by this semi-elderly gentleman (How's that for half a description, Harry?!) who i thought I might get to know in the more regular old-fashioned way, like he walks by my caboose with a friend and I show him my garden and then I bring him some cuttings of stuff for his garden and then we'll have tea (but I had that molar out) and I have sort of known him for a year or two, as his daughter used to be my boss when I taught at a different school and his daughter and I share the same birthday and she's a long slim cool drink o' water and beautiful and dignified like an elven queen, and man, I wish I were like her, but I'm not. I'm the rough-n-tumble gypsy girl whose hair is always gonna be mussed up (I'm always gonna be like Marie in Twelve Night) and my skirt, like Jo March's, will always have stickers on it or a burn or a teastain, honestly ya can't take me anywhere... anyway, this is all just a preface of finding out about Harry finding out about me
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
So, today's been one of those hot muggy days which looks like it wants to rain, but it probably won't and I'm watering the garden, because if you water, it surely will rain and I see that my English lavender has finally begun to bloom and I have to start cutting it back. I cut Raingirl a huge swarth, which I do every year and mail, and I like to put some in Dan's sweater suitcase against the moths. You see, when we first moved into the caboose, there were no shelves and Dan, being an absolute stone shelf builder, made shelves in the bedroom that looked just like luggage shelves in a train room. Come on, you've seen a movie or two where you walk down the long train corridor and there's doors and a tiny window with curtains on the inside and ya open the door and there's two bench seats and shelves above them where ya put yr hat box (yes, i have hatboxes) and yr luggage...well, dan built some shelves like that and I bought old fat suitcases from the forties (and wish I had more) to put my clothes in. Boy, how I digress.
Well, there's still lavendar, so I think Harry will want some of this, because he is one of the most elegant men I have ever seen. And Dan agrees, as he had to take my hand-written note to him when I had to stand him up for our afternoon tea the day of the molar extraction . He came back and said, "He twinkles." I said, "Yes, I know. That means something, Dan". Harry also dresses in the most beautiful silk feeling white dress shirts that are soft at the sleeve and the back with the most delicious looking chambray trousers or just really old soft blue jeans. I do not exam too closely when I am shy. But it's definately his eyes that knock one into a modality of kindness and truth. I don't believe I could tell a lie in front of that man if my life depended on it. At any rate, he was counseling a couple (oops! and I knew them, which could be embarrassing I guess. I hope not.)and I didn't get to stay as I had hoped. I said I brought you some lavander for yr sweater box against moths and a book of my poetry and one of my hand-made books which I have to mail to Raingirl (he'll be careful raingirl I just know it) in order for you to get to know me better. And he twinkles, tells me he's googled me. Now, my name comes up a kinda buncha times if you look long enough, (through all those round robins. gak!)And the first thing that comes up in my mind is: My BLOG! and he says, yes, he's been reading my blog. oh my oh my oh my. This is the beginning of all those essays about telling the truth. It's now time to put my money where my mouth is and accept myself as that rough-and-tumble gypsy girl that someone might be interested in reading. Or NOT. Harry might decide I'm too rough for his taste. I DO have excellent tea party manners. Leafy can attest. But since my father died (and i DO NOT look at Harry like a father, though I sure as heaven wish he WERE my father),and since Dan's father died I haven't enjoyed an older man in my life and I DO like an older man in my life. I am quite sure it IS because of growing up with no father and Fathers seem like foreign Heads of State or a ride on the Orient Express. But I like to talk and I like to listen to interesting people. I never went to college, and I like to learn and this man is definately a learned soul.
This man has been a fighter pilot, a Prespytarian (sp) nnnnnnn minister, a councilor (still), from the looks of his garden and parlor, Buddhist, he likes poetry and several other things he told me and I forgot. I want to talk to the minister and the gardener, but I am curious about all of him. He is courtly, lives in the house I have secretly always wanted to own in this small town (it has beautiful grounds) and I haven't even seen the whole of the inside. But when our dog The Duchess was alive and well, Dan and I would walk these streets and play, "what's yr favorite house".
So, we talk a little bit longer and i keep trying ti leave, because i know a therapy hour is fifty minutes and I don't want to be rude, but he's casual, puts his arm around me and i put my arm around him and (that's when I felt that shirt, oh that is a grand shirt)he just keeps talking putting everyone at ease and then I 'escape' because of the couple. So now I have his phone number and I'm to call and come for tea, but I'm so shy and I got home and there was a message from the furniture store about moving our bed in, which we have paid alot on, and hopefully get the check from the woman who bought my $1,000 book to finish paying for the bed, and then, maybe I can have time and even invite Harry over for tea. What a day. |
|
|
| Frenchie, ze Tuxedo Cat |
[Jul. 9th, 2007|02:30 am] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | the Alley | ] |
| [ | music |
| | the cat came back the very next day | ] |
A month ago, I had some money so i bought at a chain supermarket which shall remain unnamed, an inexpensive dosage packet of ear mite medicine which i saw by chance. i thought wothehell, lets see if THIS is the poor blacknwhite cat's problem and ya know, i was only able to give four out of six doses before Frenchie decided he had about enough of that stinging stuff, but i think it's worked and i only feel bad i didn't try it two years ago. i just didn't know. i heard ear mite medication was mucho ducats and i left it at that, trying herbal things instead, which were useless.
He appears healed and doing pretty good. Except this loss of trust which IS getting slowly better. he doesn't let me pet him as long, but maybe i was scratching an itchy place and that's why. BUT, maybe i was justhurtinghim as i was healing him and he's comin' around slowly. it's a small victory, but a good one. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jul. 7th, 2007|01:47 am] |
it's been a hellish over a hundred degrees in my part of the country and i don't care if yr part of the country is suffering as well, i live 17 miles from the ocean (as the raven flies) and there OUGHT to be a effin' ocean breeze. but there is not,because there is a huge mountain range in the way. of course i care, i just had to throw a little temper tantrum...
i have need of a secretary, a maid and a gardener. and no i have no payroll and no "place to crash". i, who have prided herself on her poverty, (because it's always been to help someone else) is feeling a tad needy, and tomorrow we give the poetry marathon for the Vets for Peace, so I have to get my little Dorothy Day attitude out front and center. we got the best Bingo! prizes organized. we color-copied lurid paperback book covers (except for one truly beauty Saint Bernardette) and i will look around for other worthy prizes in the a.m.
this was my goal in high school: to be a dorothy day kinda figure when i reached fifty, so here i am wallowing in "it's too hard", it's too hot" and not doing a damn bit of social work for anyone right now, but i will soon, like tomorrow. i will rip myself out of this pity suit and put on the nun suit, or the Wild Girl Scarf or The Able to stay up hours reading poetry and listening to poetry, both good and bad suit or Charity is a Love Girl Frock; because i like the way it fits. its only at night, when everyone is asleep and i am rocking in pain, that i cry out, Jeepers, who do i think i am trying to make someone's live better? i am nobody and maybe that's the way it's supposed to go. i'm going to bed now. i wish i drank or smoked pot or something fun and exciting. i hardly even eat ice cream. oh well. tomorrow i have to be all brash and coax money outa people because Charity/agape is a long pearly robe with many pockets that people can dip into when they need.
i wanna wear the robe and make someone happy. i do. i do. |
|
|
| computer |
[Jun. 23rd, 2007|02:16 am] |
no doubt if you've read anything in here for the last odd months, you will have known my computer was in the boneyard. well, thanks to a friend of my oldest, for 80 ducats, my computer has two new harddrives and works like a charm. (one of the hard drives is simply a back up. i mean for 30$, why not since i had it.) i am working again on one of two long poems that some of you gave me good feedback about. and i think i am going to try and do something with that long urban faery kind of serial story i was writing a chapter a night a year or so ago that people really liked.
But my best news is that the College museum is doing a rather odd project and i've been invited to participate.
The woman who has organized it has , (like me) collected anonymous old photos for years and she is allowing certain writers and artists (and i'm one of them!!) to use several and 1.) write a story about it and 2.) make a
3-d construction using the photos and my own words. well, i've been doing this for years and selling them. so i am very excited to be doing this for a museum. i found four photos from the forties of a sailor, a mad woman, a nine year old girl and a two year old boy and they are ALL BLURRY. the story is coming into my head. my story with changes. i can't help but cull from me who i know best. i am happiest when i am working.
also my mentor, larry beckett called me today and we talked poetry for a good long while. (he doesn't know he's my mentor, he thinks i'm his publisher. i am i am!)
and dan and i went to the annual solstice reading at coloredhorse studios tonight and had a gorgeous time.
now, if i had a housekeeper to help me get this place ready to paint, my life would be perfect, has anyone of you, ever felt like yr life was perfect? this is a gift, a lovely lively gift! |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jun. 18th, 2007|10:30 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | the back garden | ] |
| [ | music |
| | birds in fruit trees, sprinklers whirring on sidewalks | ] |
Once Upon A Marriage
Though the day was hot, blazing-through-the-circus-hoop hot, the evening carried a breeze from the western sea and the salt air turned everyone's sweat to a thin sheen on their arms and shoulders that now begged for a scarf, a sweater, anything to protect the freckles from the chill. Dan and I walked to my sons' house, their childhood house where I raised them, where their father lives upstairs in an in-law flat and when he's not taking antabuse, he drinks. It was so depressing to go over expectant of fun cherry-picking and find the ex at the door pretending he still had a cold, but I could tell he was drunk. We went out back to the now massive cherry trees we had planted before the youngest child was born, and subdued, started picking the dark little circles of sweetness by ourselves. Finally a small black cat joined us, stretching his frame against the dark limbs and scratching the bark with his noisey claws.
My youngest has been depressed for the last few days and I couldn't figure out why. Now I know. He hates it when his father drinks and is scared because his father has diabetes and has to give himself shots and alcohol is so dangerous with diabetes. I looked around the massive backyard and saw how so much of my landscaping had been obliterated by tall grass, overgrown rambler roses, mint, trees taken down because they had been forgotten to be watered and pruned. The only thing good was a lawn my son had put in last year. He had a futon, a candle and a tin of sugar cookies lying under the shade of one of the cherry trees. I could imagine him watching the stars through the dark leaves as he waited for sleep to overtake his imagination.
The tree was so laden with fruit, it's lower branches touched the earth and I never-minded the ladders. I just reached over and picked six, seven cherries at a time into my satchel. We filled five satchels before we remembered we had to carry them across Main Street (hiway 101) and down several blocks to the caboose. We still had to make a simple syrup and pit and crush the fruit and stir it into the sugary goo and pour it, boiling, into hot clean jars. We had been filled with so much joy, and now, felt chastened, sad, reflective, and not even for the ex anymore, but for the grown sons. Before crossing the highway, we stopped in the music store where my oldest son's fiancee works, the shop that has a slot machine and lets you place a token in and if you pull three cherries, you win a free movie rental. I slid a handful of cherries on the counter and said, "Free film", she popped one in her mouth and grinned.
There are so many broken people in my life; it's so sad to watch them live out the rest of their allotted breaths, heartbeats. It makes me so angry to see the younger ones who are decent hard-working kids have to
watch this too. I'm a writer, I can distance myself. What is their armor? My son went to art school.
He makes masks out of all sorts of materials. Now I know why. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jun. 14th, 2007|11:48 pm] |
THE REAL GHOSTS
In looking back at my childhood and now questioning that which I couldn't then, didn't know how to, didn't know it was even to be questioned (!), I see now what my father was, how he preceived himself, against the way I preceived him. I couldn't get past the reality that I had been traded in for a bottle, that a 'beloved-child' had actually been traded for unlimited (until death) secretly stashed and drunk from larger and larger bottles of vodka. I thought that was the worst crime but he, being older, being inside his own skin, his own guilt, knew what the real crime was.
Like in the fairy tales where the weak father is convinced by the secretly cruel step mother to lead his children out into the wild forest and abandon them, so that her own children might reap the benefits of what food, what warmth there remained, I now realize the crime he was gulty of was leaving his children in the forest fraught with wild beasts (cruel, abusive step-fathers, mentally unstable biological mother)while he ran from that which he could not fight against and that was her essential evilness. He was weak, made that way by his mother, who was a cohert in the style we were raised in by our mother. HIS mother was the teacher on how to finesse our 'bad seed anyway', common, nearly white trash mother's inabilities to raise us . My mother's mother was not this common white trash female to be condemned, disgusted with, she was a naif. She was a good Christian woman who sought to save her children in the Depression of the Thirties in America by putting the youngest two in a Home for Children so they could at least eat and have warmth in the winter. It was a school and the children learned just as if it were a boarding school for the young of the more well-to-do,though of course the food was plain fare. I often wonder if They felt abandoned the way I felt abandoned even though she visited them all the time after work , after caring for her elderly mother with her elderly sister who also worked. Is this another abandonment issue I never saw before? I asked her elder sister and she replied, "No, yr mother was always the way she is", no matter what she received or didn't receive". What a disappointment.
My father's real crime was abandoning us to the cruelity of her and the small parade of evil step-fathers. That's why he drank. It wasn't until his death that I grokked that. When on my last visit with him, he asked why I had stopped calling, I told him it was an experiment to see if he would call ME. He didn't. I would have to run into him in a parking lot and confront him. He was always wary. Now I know it was he feared the accusation of abandonement, and he kept receiving the sentence of 'drunkard". How little I was able to see the situation in my hunger for a father to love me, caress me, tell me I was a good girl. It was almost as if he couldn't feel the rightness, to give me that. I now know he was afraid of my love, because it was so unconditional, except the drinking. I allowed him to live with my now ex husband and my family, but my ex, also an alcoholic, encouraged him after a long hiatus (FIFTEEN YEARS)of not drinking to "try this 25 year old bottle of a bordeaux or some such good stuff" to entice him into joining him as drinking buddy and thereby lessening his own guilt. Instead he merely created two closet drinkers and my heart finally altogether hardened like it had done in late teenhood when I saw that there was no breaking through into the real person who could be forgiven his neglect simply by being there now and not lost in great lassoo of self-trickery, like an inept Houdini.
All the men of his generation are dead now. All my uncles. A number of cousins from drink. It is only the women who have survived, fighting their own demons,but damn it,we are fighting. Our ovaries have become our testicles, as my first ex husband told me when I turned 19 on the String and sanded and stained a whole redwood floor because he forgot to get me a present, forgot to say fucking HAPPY BIRTHDAY and so worked my anger out by doing the floor and then taking the '57 chevy hood sledge into the woods and filling it with firewood from the forest floor.
It took me three marriages to get it right, to be equal, to accept loss forever if he were to leave me, or cast me out most discourtiously; and now, I would ache in my aloness but I believe I might be able to live without a man if it came to that, which I pray nightly it does not. There comes a time when a woman says I've had enough, it's time to change this pattern, this jigsaw of life into something I've never seen before, except in novels and yearned for all these long years. I think I am finally arriving, soon it'll be time to collect what little baggage I have collected from those novels and poetry and walk solidly into the fifty-second year of my life. I could have gathered my wisdom from loving parents. I will never know what that feels like. But my children do and for that I am grateful, simply, almost exhausted with the work of it, the attention it takes, grateful. And I think my children, now grown, know this too.
**********************
After I posted this and saw the date, I was struck by the laughable irony: if my parents had stayed married, today would have been their 54th wedding anniversary; talk about the collective unconscious... |
|
|
| Getting Ready to Turn 52 |
[Jun. 14th, 2007|10:30 pm] |
I was replying to an email to kathleen winters (magicfirefly) and decided i liked what i was writing. i haven't been writing lately and if it's a letter to someone that inspires me these days. i'll take it.thanks kathleen. *******************
I find now that i am almost fifty-two, that I am wishing I had had a daughter, I suppose instead of just all those boys. (I only had two sons, but they brought home with them starting in pre-school a dozen boys apiece over the years and still there are grown men in this small town who brag of having a toothbrush at "mimi's". (what my sons called me instead of mama.) I raised a town of boys and ironically fostered a dozen girls over the years, the last being the one who blossomed into a woman friendship, for which I am gratefully surprised and pleased.
I am enjoying the silver hairs which I thought I would not and discovering, like Jo March, I am a happy old woman. I cannot believe that who I wanted to grow up and be, I have become. There not many women who can say that, I fear. I suspect Kathleen is another one who is realizing her dream as a writer. I, on the other hand, have not had the writer part of my youthful dreams come out the way I intended, though I was just honored greatly at a college reading and lit-fest and have a reading coming up in S.F. in July. It's not the high note I wished for nor the acclaim I thought I wanted. It's quieter. I have found I have written alot of my poems in the faces of those grown children and suddenly, that's good enough for me. Of course, I hope I always write and publish, but it doesn't have the neediness attached to it I always felt. God bless you Louisa May Alcott for giving me a role model. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
robin_rule's journal
giddy