"My mistress' eyes are nothing…"
Happy to announce that a poem that grew out of the poetry half marathon, the kick start to an avalanche of creativity, was published in Rebelle Society today. I previously published the poem here on the blog but appreciate the continued support to generate views :-).
View here.
Peace,
The Gaze
Credit: Leslie Alejandro
Even the Supreme Court surrenders to something larger than itself. We all must give in, be a part of the fabric of an order, principle, and/or belief not only for the sake of facilitating justice to those around us but for ourselves–to be the justice.
Labels define merely to confine. Lately, yoga has been taking a hit in the news. One Congress person dismissed it as religion that he did not want to see endorsed or foisted upon him in our nation’s participation in the celebration of International Yoga Day last week.
Schools resist implementing yoga classes for a similar anticipated outcry despite the fact that teaching children to listen to their bodies and minds early cannot but be beneficial for adulthood when life speeds up and they, like so many, will lose touch with themselves, feel alienated, ill and angry at “others.”
Yoga is more and less than religion. The responsibility the practice teaches benefits everyone. Please enjoy my essay published in elephant journal on a singular definition of yoga, not exclusively mine, but culled through my experience.
Peace,
the Gaze
credit: thememeguy.com
Espresso shots, Open tables, a shoulder-slunked mind in a cafe quips:
Sighed out on Dating sites with their Show me yours I’ll show you mine.
Only I don’t want to play that Gut exhausting, Happy sapping game.
The one of Cliché’d glass cases with a mime Silently howling inside.
The trick is this, I’m told: Be direct or be alluring, No in between.
Play the sex card or go fish, for All else covers as time wasting.
So practically practical this world, A missing blessing, A cursory look.
Human exploration dead, Gone the way of humanities–disrespect.
The machine pumps all now, Post people-ism, Peddling wares of wear,
Faces incomplete, Bodies disembodied, Intentions at Cross sections.
Arms hugging an example, a harried voice, wincing thought, clarifies
That which makes him/her/it/us/them truly tick, Gather up and hallelujah.
Just once, Wanting to reply a brutal truth-biting of words honestly pled:
Not wanting to down you, Respondent, Just that friends don’t do friends.
Can you Be a being, like me, like you? Exist with me just for a while?
Feel the feeling of feeling? In a combinatory presence, Can we just walk?
See how the air circulates, By and between us flaring Scent and Sound.
The air does. See? In the gaps of words, We speak, While we walk
In sensorial immemorial blind sight of touch-less touch–My dating site.
A man with a short face, not from chin to forehead but tip of the beaky nose to upper lip–not enough distance. The topography of his face is flat as if the effort of blooming a nose and plumping some lips was abandoned half way to finished. The eyes are photoshopped Cancun ridge of the sea blue, but paler, far too brilliant for his age in a hand’s decades, no dullness to the liquid gaze, like polished museum or Madison Avenue marble flooring–a splendorous richesse of gloss. The face is proportionate to the rest of him, distant soccer player traces of a cut angle just below the scapula, a rounded sternum suggesting the brim of a broad chest but for the expansion below that arcs convexly far more than it should beyond the belt. But the semblance of a prime physique resides, the residuals of fitness imports a belated youth to his figure. His name is Beagleman.
A recent return from the edge of a self-inflicted, imploding dual-minded fury left him enervated and his tawny fatigued suitcase paupered.
The train traveled far today so the whistle sounds faint
tired, perhaps, of the snow-muffled shrill of un-restraint.
A cool stove lay undisturbed, cool iron clean, all the day
while the ground leaked, forming my father’s bed a lake.
Two daughters slept and awoke to buy birthday boy gifts,
then flew home the helicopter, remote, controlled, adrift.
A husband fished for answers in a plumber’s busy way
only for rejection’s sake he pleaded dearly for his case.
For tomorrow can right itself in rhythmic steel drumming
and pulse below a calm repose in boredom’s humming.
For neither burst of pipe nor creativity’s pace may shatter
the week end’s closing call to the summer’s opening gala.
The hours longer and shorter still when poetry awakes
in bed the daylight long with trains, pipes, snow, skates.
An inspired screen tortured hard frozen bits slow falling
while thunderous trains traveled ever on, never stalling.
Words dry up, writing sours, turned to poetical blather
time to gather up my wits and return to other matters.
(and so ended my poetry half marathon)
Old friend, we’ve gone this route before,
you, witness, wag shaking by the door
seeking, waiting, leaping and running
never late nor early, always just coming
arriving just before me, eagerly unsure
hot and breathing heavy, somewhat sore
when we go long and distant, you, me
running by the beach, cooled by the sea
those days we both were stronger then
me with solid knees, you, a leaner bend
back high and haunches thickly sturdy
unlike now as we hack and sweat dirty
dripping salty stains down our backs
your mouth sweating along the tracks
we no longer run, you and me, my pal
my faithful fan knee high wagging tail.
I call you witness for a nose knows all
those you wait for, scraps to ever fall
side by your keeper, quiet, ready sight
the world tethered to sense and fright.
We who savor your riches watch you
watching us awaiting the familiar cue
“Come to me, Kiah.” Let vigilance rest,
in settled dreams, my furry ever-guest.
Photo credit: Chris Clevely
Resounding pounding booming voices,
we walk as tribe towering through town–
big women, muscular and thick.
Known for our beakish noses and long necks,
the women in our family walk tall and short
thin and squat, spoon and saucer, some
tea and coffee drinkers, sweet and savory,
all manner of political persuasion, religions
zealots and atheists all, strong and quiet
loud and soft, self-realized and delusional,
married and single, childless and family’d,
but we share too bountiful brows and thin
lips or thin, hairless arcs with thick bottoms.
No one escaped freckles, some splotched
others speckled like paint splatter, touched.
Hair painted blonde, brown, blue, red or rust
from birth or bottle, we live color and light.
Our faces trace aspect of notable signature
only ours and fragmented chromosomal bits
of all those big feet that marched soils’ exile
from Siberia to Spain’s royal anti semites
of centuries past onto gypsies roaming free
dancing to the colors of a rhythmic breath
breathed in noses shaped for soaring flight.
Please visit Rebelle Society to read “my intimate journey to self acceptance” which has been published today. I hope you enjoy it.
Peace
Evan was not my first love. My heart framed in poetry books, I sought love early. By fourteen I had had my first heartbreak and by sixteen, I was initiated to the world of embattled sex my mother fear-burned into me: woman as fortress and men as invader.
It was the 70s and free love was the slogan but not the practice. I was not the only young woman who paid the bodily price of losing what I did not understand I had–self-love, real love.
So when I fell in love with and married a French man a few years later, love was permeated with heady visions of Romantics like Byron and Wordsworth, but sex was informed by the attitudes of Plath and Sexton, hardened and cynical.
In my mind, love and sex were distinct and only the former was indispensable.
I loved Jean-Marc, but we were not so much “in love” as we were good friends. To me, that was more important.
Besides, it was clear I was not his physical type. He had had a girlfriend when I met him in college, a French goddess of natural beauty, as if she emerged from the heather, golden smooth skin delightfully coating her delicate bones and showcasing her eyes of sea blue.
She was the essence of what I deemed poetic femininity at the time. And I was nothing like her, not delicate, soft, supple, petite or graceful. I wasn’t French. I was New York, bookish and big.
But several years into our marriage, I grew thinner, more athletic. I struck a lean, tall figure with improved grace and balance from running and tennis. I had transformed the book worm smoker of pubs and diners around New York to an outdoorsy athletic competitor in California.
When I separated from my husband, I was in the best shape of my life, 28 years old with a hard body everyone noticed but me.
That is when I met Evan.
Evan taught me to love my body. I met him after my husband confessed that he was in love with someone else, a friend he had grown up with in France. Even though that relationship did not pan out, both of us needed time to sort things out.
In reality, the separation between us occurred long before, had been growing inside me. Jean-Marc’s vision of me affected my own. I was a rebound, the consoler and good friend when the goddess dumped him one New Year’s eve.
I was no beauty, but I was comfort.
His eye for aesthetics and style were distinguishing features of my attraction to him but also the very features that attracted him to others, beautiful, lean, olive-complected men I later came to find out.
So why did I choose someone who could not love my body? Over the years, I have considered that question.
Perhaps the body-mind division I fixed early on, prioritizing the intellectual over the physical sublimated my bodily emotions–etched the picture of an unlovely woman in my mind.
But I imagine, poor body image grew out of many seeds: my parents’ relationship, genetics, cultural dictates, social influences and my own love relationships.
Though Jean-Marc and I shared a love that made us grow in the comfort and safety of that umbrella love of young adults, he could not love me intimately, the way a lover sighs at the sight of his beloved’s nakedness. And we couldn’t talk about it for the pain and the guilt. But the elephant in the room nearly crushed me.
Eventually, I was flattened. I no longer had desire–until Evan.
I fell in love with him in a cafe in New York. He spoke soothingly about presence–being present in each moment–and though I had read my zen and Heidegger, I was witnessing the words rather than thinking about them.
He warned me beforehand and then he touched my hand and said, “You’re a writer; describe the experience of my hand.” Of course I didn’t know what he meant; I only said I wanted to be a writer–not that I was–and I was off balance with his touch.
So I described how I felt uneasy with a near stranger’s touch. To which he asked, “Does it feel warm? soft? rough? Can you feel the arced tips of the nails unforgiving yet pleasantly smooth?”
I hadn’t even thought of the physical sensation. I never did. All passed through my mind first and the physical was always sublimated, denied or ignored. Probably why I rarely saw a doctor, going about my business trying not to think of what ailed me.
Later, his first touch of studied tenderness opened my eyes and aroused passion I buried long before I knew its heat, its colorful flavors. He touched me, what was before his eyes, not a projection of me.
And then he took me on a tour of the secret vales and rich verdure of my body. It blazed real love.
Love–true love–is presence in touch; it needs no longing, fantasy, style, grace or poise–merely acceptance in being.
When I embraced my own beauty, uniquely my biological experience, replete with singular angles and curves, scars and splotches, I learned to be heart-wise loved by someone who could love me–all of me–and confirm I was worthy of another’s hand softly sweeping the hair off my brow.
My feminine, I learned, was desire—being—in touch.
How can we ever know how others sense the world? The question should evoke a yearning to find out without the hope of ever doing so. However, it is the practice–the focused being of and with others–that matters. It’s how we connect, avoid loneliness, while maintaining our own integrity.
It is how we find love, real love.
Touch led me from interpreting the world to experiencing it. Getting out of my mind, possessed with others’ formulations of love and sex, and into the moment–breathing presence; it brought me the fullness of acceptance, as a body, my body, with someone else’s.
No, Evan did not teach me acceptance by his touch; eventually, I was able to receive his touch by my own clarity–of space, moment, nearness of another’s presence becoming my own.
He taught me to “see” like the scientists and philosophers and lovers we are–empirically, intellectually and emotionally.
I wasn’t rushing headlong into someone else’s story for me. I had learned to better integrate my body and mind, which took examining inherited perceptions: those of my mother, husband, authors, and culture.
It took practice to own my body. It still does.
And being in the precise moment recalled by someone’s touch–healing in its grounding.
Evan lies next to me now, his pillowed head in the shadow of mine. I am reading, elbow-propped, turned away.
We are prone, bare, having just settled into bed for the night. Humid heat of a New England summer makes flannel impossible and silk torturously sticky. We sleep this way most nights four seasons long.
His body is serpent shape mirror of mine with inches of space between us, creating the comfort of a cooling air canal. We are art in symmetry.
His hand, open palmed, smooths across the contours of my hip, waist and shoulder, smearing heat like oil upon the line of curvy seas in the imagination of his hand–port to starboard to port again. The slow rhythm of his caress lulls my lids to half mast as the warmth and tingling skin sensors combine, dance me to lullaby languor. These are the moments.
I stop reading to softly lower my head to the pillow, ever so slowly, avoiding the slightest ripple in the water of his soliloquy wave. I hold my breath the whole way down.
Releasing, exhaling in measured silent wisps of warm air through my teeth and the pebble O my lips make, anchor hits bottom, the sync of his hypnotic oar undisturbed; it continues to brush the still of my anatomy’s ebb and flow.
I breathe just enough air to live, causing not so much as a flutter-by in the sheets. If I fill my lungs too deeply, selfishly, I will signal sleep’s onslaught, killer of this powerfully peaceful moment of breath, body and hand. No dream could be better than this. I own it–to the coral depths of fibrous memory.
Tree dropped oranges
blistered, rent, bloated sweet
nature blight pavement.
(This was hour 9, poem 9, and I needed a brain re-charge reprieve, so I punted–haiku)
In the gaze of the other 