Year: 2016

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Coffee Trees


“I wanted to grow into a tree when I was five because the trees around my house looked like they all had arms that reached to the sky or really high places like rooftops, and my arms were so short I could not even reach the counter to steal back contraband my mom confiscated: cookies, silly putty my brother and I fought over, and fake clip-on earrings snuck from my mother’s jewelry box.”

I stare at her perfectly halved hard boiled egg chin as she speaks, mesmerized by its perfect oval shape.

“The Wizard of Oz kinds of trees all bramble and sparsely leafed. Not because they moved or were threatening but because they looked like outstretched arms. I wanted arms to heaven.”

I laugh. “Sounds like you’re going to break into song or start a book Elizabeth Gilbert might write. You know transformation…arms to the heavens…that sort of thing.”

“No, I’m serious,” she counters. “I wanted to grow up to be a tree, a coffee tree. That’s what they were in my mind, for some strange reason. I have no idea what a coffee tree is, but that’s what they were. And for the longest time I could not shake that dream, had literal dreams of being a tree like some Greek goddess. Who was it, Diana? No, Daphne, escaping Apollo, only I wasn’t running from anyone into tree hood. It felt natural, like I would evolve organically into a tree, starting with my fingertips elongating into thin spikes with wispy leaves drooping from the tiniest reaches of the branches that my arms would become. I could almost feel it then…even now, a little. I can summon up that feeling.”

“How curious, specific and lovely,” I silently acknowledged. “I wish I had imagined that as a five year old. But I was too busy wondering if God could wipe out nightmares for me or if I could somehow fly without wings or nun’s habits like the flying nun did.”

 
Credit: fineartandyou.com

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I want to be Esther Perel

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She is just so cool and says everything I need and want to say.

Commenting in Salon last month on Beyoncé’s Lemonade video that grapples, in part, with her cheating partner (“I know you’re cheating on me.”), Esther Perel in the article titled “Grief sedated by orgasm, orgasm heightened by grief”: Beyoncé, “Lemonade” and the new reality of infidelity“, applauds the singer’s frankness and platform used to plunge the public into the taboo infidelity, a conversation which Perel believes should be opened repeatedly. In fact, she believes that’s her job as a therapist and author–to help couples find themselves and their options past the ravine that betrayal opens between partners.

After noting the European and American moralistic difference in how couples suffer infidelity, she suggests Americans need to lose the strictures on discussion and judgment of both perpetrator and victim (think Hillary Clinton for staying when she could have left), which shames and thereby stifles examination of and learning from infidelity to repair,  renew or reject relationships shattered by infidelity.

After profiling American attitudes about the subject, she exhorts:

Given this reality, it’s time for American culture to change the conversation we’re having about infidelity—why it happens, what it means and what should or should not happen after it is revealed. The subject of affairs has a lot to teach us about relationships—what we expect, what we think we want, and what we feel entitled to. It forces us to grapple with some of the most unsettling questions: How do we negotiate the elusive balance between our emotional and our erotic needs? Is possessiveness intrinsic to love or an arcane vestige of patriarchy? Are the adulterous motives of men and women really as different as we’ve been led to believe? How do we learn to trust again? Can love ever be plural? 

These are important questions to begin the healing and ensuing path in any relationship that is pierced with this not always fatal rending. As Perel states, infidelity has existed longer than marriage, though she does not justify it as right for having lasted. She merely points to the reality of its persistence.

And just as Beyoncé is fire and ache, Perel is compassionate logic and measured reason, which is her (both) allure.

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Polaris


Heather backed bramble

Craving Polaris

She bends to painful changes 

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Bait

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Baiting, he says, “You’re a procrastinator.”

I ignore it a full three seconds and then bite:

“Some people have more to worry about than themselves.”

To which he replies, “You’re full of shit.”

I abstain.

“Why do you have to push everything to the last minute?  You know we had to get gas before we leave for the doctors…”

Just keep driving, eyes on the road, I insist to myself. I know he’s baiting.

I know how he deflects the dissatisfaction of an 82 year old man who needs to be driven to doctors now, and I pray for patience and composure to rise above my own self pity.

“I mean, it may be okay for you who always runs out of gas…” 

“Dad, I haven’t run out of gas…oh maybe once, but…”

“Yeah, don’t give me bullshit; you run out of gas the way you put everything off.”

Fucking traffic at 7:00 in the morning…it’s my one day off before I work tonight…

“You like living like that but I don’t like ruining cars like you do…”

“The car did not need gas; it was not even below a quarter of a tank, and your fucking neurotic obsession about insignificant bullshit doesn’t change that fact!!!”

“Yeah, sure, you know best. I’m not as smart as you. We all can’t be as smart as you.”

Shaking my head in silence, the anger spat out of me like a solar flare, scarring its landing like the faint white stitched line just below my abdomen ever reminding me that we evolve, leaving behind ancestral appendages no longer useful to us as outgrown beginnings. 

Baited, I bit. Again. Just waiting for the flip side…and three…two…one…

“But I appreciate everything you do for me. Really I do. I can’t thank you enough.”

And so it goes, we two relics, this dance we substitute for conversation underneath which lies halved relationships lost to time, decay, disorder and disease. 

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Surfing Past 50

At 50, I learned to surf in the warm waters off Puerto Viejo,

A gift I’d promised myself if ever I flew the six hours across the ocean.

My birthday plus one day found me old enough to balance

Feet, thighs, hands and shoulders with a bouyant survivor’s jubilation.

On the day, the actually turning day, I wept for journeying so far,

Directionless so it was after all, despite the doing drive of delivery,

Tenacity and 1000 steps winding a mountainous book-lined stairway, 

To the peak that, having surfaced from the well, revealed a bottomless sea,

The very one upon which I defied gravity and gods sailing to the sands

Upon a finned polyurethane prosthetic to landlocked quinquagenarians.  

  

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Atonality


We perform in atonal times, no guiding key.

Some allude to a world dystopian, technocratic oligarchs

And corporate heroes, when truth, politics and religion

Are pronounced (often spat) in acerbic yet nostalgic terms.

Truth? Irrelevant. 

Never a believer in absolutes, the relativity of all things

Now lapsed into the arbitrariness of myth or reality,

Falsehoods or evidence, justice or gamesmanship, 

I crave a concrete proven fact’s acknowledgement, 

A shared given or universal ‘yes ‘ we all nod to.

Power is what it has always been about, long plodding 

Or devastatingly explosively quick and slaughtering.

The one constant.

I’ve read that if we stop talking about race, patriarchy 

And binaries, they will disappear. 

No arbitrary superiority shall be pre-ordained.

Our children’s children will not know these prejudices.

But silence can also deafen the voice we hear

Inside ourselves, to assure us–even in the face of fools and fakery–

That we know the difference.

 
Credit: gillespiemusic.com

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Maze

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I lost perspective inside a glass where light specked the rim and stem.
In the grasp of an elixir’s fume, heady visions blurred a memory stream rolling the former incarnations of ourselves above the candle beneath the rose: younger hands,  one soft elastic skinned balmy palm cupping a glass while the other two-finger rubbed a furrowed brow far less ravaged with ravines and splotches. 
We were four then, you, me and the girls, sitting tensely at the table, your anxiety spewing noxious gases until we began to dance a lovely quadrille atop the table.
No, but that couldn’t be true.
These ghosts danced smeared putty-stretched hug-tight to the glass’ girth.
Passing cars flashed illuminated dusty rays sprayed across the windows outside, inflicting tenderness and wince.
Accidental brush of your thin, gruff finger tips across mine startled us both awake, forcibly focusing my lenses to the doubly reflected salt and pepper shakers, standing table top like four drunken rooks bent and leaning on a checker-less board,
While we two dined alone, each lost in enclosed grapey reverie, the candle light flickered the final scene ere the first course’s arrival:
Two of us, illusions backlit against scattered chronometric flares melting us buttered like toast and figs, foie gras oily on a tongue awash in Muscat, scalloped leeks across cellular cerebral connections as numerous as galaxy stars.
“Let me see that label,” I commanded.
“It’s a 2006 Pomerol,” he offered, “a very good year and it has a pleasant nose” and then we once again alit on common ground.

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In the winter of our spring: Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.

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I miss you each morning and night, each time I wish you “good morning” and “good night” 

To your near feature-less face, you who once held my gaze as the world’s. 

While you pulse, the one I see slowly vibrate the skin stretched thinly across your brow, 

Your words and eyes silently speak another story. 

I miss you, mom, more each day as you, cruel tease, walk us slowly–inching us through the doorway. 

The first poem I ever published was yours–befitting the logophile you were.
A Misty Mother’s Winter Birth Song

On a Winter Solstice morning I carry wood to the fire

and stoke the arcing flame’s urge to obliterate night.

Borean breath burns those bones of trees slant ways

fueling gulps of scorching air borne to the sun’s rays.
………………………………………………
Mother-child squats and stares her eyes pierced red

wondering where the winds have taken off the dead.

Her child-mother speaks no more of willow branches.

A baby gone old too, a sooty, sallow skinned witness.
………………………………………………
Sheltering arms of her wisdom’s rock a bye morrows

I miss, her torch words of smoked images we chose.

Mother mine of childlike mind your birth was foretold.

Alit on Winter’s day, a searing blame to mothers cold.
………………………………………………
With spoken mind’s hibernation, a wintry song is nigh.

Buried deep in fiery sleep is sensor twitching sunrise.

Yet a love surrounds her misty eyed daylight slumber

as Elven sprites spark shards shot of ember’d lumber.
……………………………………………..
She is my meadow lullaby cracking the icy pines now,

a cataract covered window pane framing a faint brow.

The pitter patterned words of incantations made flesh

are a witch’s brood of progeny, a sweep of stony ash.
……………………………………………..
The shortest light of the longest night brightens a sky

she never sees anymore in wheel chaired walk a bye.

Maternal flickers of the northern lights in babies’ arms

is left the love encircling a stormy eye’s chaos calmed.

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Pre-Mother’s Day

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My children are leaving,
Attending a birthday party
For the evening while their
Father and I dine on wine
By heating lamp on a blue-
Awning’d patio across town.

I wish them a fine evening
And they do likewise for me,
An amicable arrangement, but
I mourn the loveliness of us,
We four of the indominatable
Good middle class’ right luck.

When we were knitted kin, we
All in a bunch, toe to toes
Seated on couches watching
Princesses and Bambi, Barney
And doggies on two leashes
Herding babies on front lawns.

I picture them gone and grown,
Harvesting their own with seeds
Sown before knowing themselves,
Remnants of history forwarded
To Mother’s Days gushing love
Walking out the door waving bye.

Cruel witness to our days’ ends
My own mother sits motionless
Waiting for doors opening wide
Ready for her entry’s surrender
While nibbling-choking pear bits
Sucking air in to wind it down.

Stretches not cycles mark time
Willing us expand and contract
As the earth spins us like dice
Numbers arising lucky and lost
Tossed like mystery dryer socks
Ever seeking our missing halves.

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