"My mistress' eyes are nothing…"
“Are you mad?” Much to my confusion, someone would occasionally ask me that question out of the blue. Apparently, my face looks unhappy and my attention elsewhere. And though I was not unhappy when asked, I was probably preoccupied. Always…
(One of my articles: Read more here.)
“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”
T.S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”
The dance is ongoing. It is presence. It never was nor will be but at the still point of our ever turning, evolving world–that is us. And the dance is lovely and freeing if you stay there.
“In love there are two things–bodies and words.” Joyce Carol Oates
And her rejoinder to me: “Our two bodies are our words–hello and good bye.”
With fever and chills, my father lies in a hospital bed and
fights invaders ransacking his cells while we, her dad and I,
Share ancestral history over wine and braised Brussels sprouts.
Her father pulls out an album of black and whites painting shades,
Faces that look like his and hers, she who hungrily leafs through
Her fore-figures shepherding precious genetic messages, DNA,
Carried on lines like cargo bins rolling down mining tracks,
Straight to the mountain’s core, our heart’s beating back minutes
Through rock and river, rice paddies and leper camps, continents
And decades all swum, waded through generations of race, religion,
Geography and cultural diaspora, lost at sea; my people roamed.
I tell her we were gypsies and exiles, imperialists and colonizers,
Journalists and piano-tuners, soldiers and artists, musicians
And doctors, lawyers, painters and prisoners; we sailed on ships.
She eats the images page after page flying and flashing ghosts
In pressing drive, primal ranging expansive lust for connection,
An answer to why she is, these cellular haunts flooding her veins.
She wants to know the stories that she belongs to, her threaded
Braide-links to French, Spanish, Vietnamese, Rumanian, Russian, Latvian
and German world walkers. She doesn’t know yet, which link connects them all,
all the grandfather’s fathers and their fathers’ fathers before.
She doesn’t know the whole story and she can never know.
One more I honor and pray will not be the last,
This poem, your day, awakenings to more days
Filled with complaints, facts, lies, jokes and sighs
Those last with mortal grimace and existential pain–
And celebrations.
No one fills your place, not before or after,
None who sits just where you do in my house,
Or my car, no one quite like you who inherited and grew
status, class, gender, race, trait, stance and ethnicity.
You made me.
One day you will unmake me just like the sun and earth,
My fiery Death whose smoke will awaken the ravens
Loosen charred Regret and Steam, neither life companions
On my walk, my rise and fall, blossom and decay, my stain
After you.
A word run rough shod over
centuries long rendering it
nearly vacuous, the emotion
contained within reduced to
pithy sayings and pathetic poems,
some I have penned myself,
and pretty memes inspiring
less than more by over exposure,
how can this word be explained,
described and painted accurately?
Perhaps a paragraph filled with
affectionate acts is enough:
a driver slamming the brakes
screeching at a near miss cat kill, or
the 80 year old’s collapse at his sixty
year marriage’s cease upon awakening
to his wife’s motionless body, or
the wide open daddy arms anticipating
embrace at the first steps’ trail’s end?
Too Hallmark, Facebook sentimental?
What about soldiers or police officers
arm in arm in solidarity, peril-pals
undying, or prom dates in wide grins,
shy shoulder-slumped and side glance
photos or sunset hand-holding clips
or tears and aching hearts and darkness
as corollary preceded by its inverse,
heart-pounding, heady ecstasy-like
near nausea and enervating hysterical
joy found only in the scent, touch and
sound of the key to a lock match tight,
the yes to the life-long approval sought?
Too banal, trite, common, overblown?
Try this:
What is the square root of a 24-hour
day that begins in darkness with a howl,
signaling the death knell to the dying wish
of a martyr–just one more hour’s peaceful
sleep–a howl that electrocutes nerve
endings everwhere, that only patient
tender care will quiet a defenseless being
suckling, emitting the sweet aromas of
new warmth baking mother’s milk like
raisin toast popping sweet and savory,
and a once eyes-for-only lover cum
zombie escaping grey-eyed and sallow
briefcase in hand out the door shut-grunt
leaving only wispy cool air in a dim den’s
stale morning stuffy exhausted eye-burn,
bone-weary sympathy for the life made
and lived now, nostalgia and hope stew
simmering on the stove daily, all repeat,
all gone now the glimmering show in
new leather pumps price-tag clicking
and tailored skirts tucking in silk blouses
hanging dusty in closed closets blear-eyes
catatonically fix on blindly automatonic as
day ends where it began, only now the
briefcase rests against the chair close
to the snores emitted from the dead man’s
sleep craved more than the man who
made this life leaked out exhaled in the
other’s breath and yours, theirs, ours hourly,
daily, yearly and ever so in smiles and frowns,
razored sight and heart, grim boredom and
coffee steam morning’s quiet contentment
and grasping an idea finally that endings
and beginnings are the same and conclusions
are illusions and passion is stillness while
death has always meant living, the chaos of
it the only order ever it was, patterning
a day-long life? The square root of it.
That, my dear, generates, defines and
encapsulates the engine and caboose.
Happy pledge, notice and honor to what makes us, us.
I went looking for my calling
until my calling found me
but forgot my name.
Before I could hear,
I wanted to be a
journalist,
teacher,
biologist,
writer,
mommy,
dancer,
artist,
dragon,
nurse,
sociologist,
tightrope walker,
doctor
and boy.
A few wishes called to me
and a few I summoned once
on a boring Tuesday afternoon,
or was it Wednesday?
Days go nameless
when your suit does not fit (unfit),
your business is none of yours,
and your words remind you
of the unspecified advice
given by that unnamed source
on a forgotten date or
something someone once said or
letters you read in a book.
Endeavoring turned out a total bust,
all that flapping and folding
just to breathe the same air we all do
and always have since birth.
And after so much wind,
when good fortune dropped in my lap,
I turned to the skies looking for the bird.
Where does all the world’s blindness come from?
“Who created the creator?” my father asked,
surprising me with the quality of the question.
We all were.
But the truth is,
the laurel crowns all word-walkers emerging open-eyed
envisioning the final curtain call
–as if there were a stage.
I bow to mystery.
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
Credit: http://ftw.usatoday.com/2015/09/the-50-greatest-yogi-berra-quotes
It’s five minutes before class begins and one student, a mousy girl who twitches occasionally and whispers answers to my questions after I respond to her half-mast upraised tentative hand that must be propped up by the other hand in order to give it any height, says, “I think no one’s here because of the shooting.”
The classroom is one third full, not unusual for the hour and time in the semester, about one third of the way through.
I wanted to doff off her suggestion as somewhat silly or illogical to assure her, actually, but as is always the case in teaching college students–or any students–sensitivity is paramount, so I pause a complete second. But in drawing up my response, I immediately flash angrily, “No, probably not. Why wouldn’t they be used to this sort of news by now? After all, mass shootings happen every other day now. It’s just become the new normal.”
I immediately regret my callousness.
This student has confessed in her second essay written for this class that she suffers from epilepsy, a recent discovery that has left her to picking up pieces, rescuing remnants of her former life that held nothing but unfettered future, the worst day up until then being when an elementary school kid called her a mop-head. She told me her medication affects her memory, slows her.
When she confided in me, I thought of my daughter in college two states north from home. She suffers from a recent sport-inflicted concussion, confused and depressed, her mind sluggish and stalling–going on too long now. She fears. I fear.
******
Last week at the head of the classroom, I repeated the line from a prose poem assigned for that day, “In the end, we are alone in the house of the heart.” I then asked the students if they thought that was true. Some thought so. Most did not know.
I offered my story of watching a cancer patient die, slowly, how, after months of gathering her family around her, then one by one sending each off not to return to her as she got sicker, she hunkered down inside herself the last three weeks, doing the difficult work of dying. It certainly looked like no one could help her do it, that she had to do it alone. To further illustrate, I likened that aloneness to being elbowed in the diaphragm, down on the soccer field, fighting for air. All of the hovering bodies above you as you lie on the ground can do nothing for you–you don’t even see them–as you fight the pain and fear of never breathing, diving deeply inside yourself for that will to bear it, to survive or brave surrender.
I thought the dying example was illustrative, poignant. Some stared in reflection, some in emergency-broadcast-test-pattern mode, others in churning liquid emotion. One young man gripped his head in his hands, face hidden, staring down the sheen of the teflon coated desk.
My heart winced.
Clicking, no ringing, not quite a ring but a hum.
My breath, I hear my breath…and my heartbeat,
flooding my ears with pulsing thrum, alarming yet calming.
Am I dying, an aneurism around the corner, pressure cooked?
Cyber facts point to clogged ears given my health history.
Simple fix, but something stops me from stopping the sound.
A comfort in hearing life, my life, in its rawest base components:
a heart beat and breath reminds me that I walk as mechanical wonder,
a miracle of meat and synchronized pumps and electric pulleys,
anima’s dusty coat of confectioner’s powder smothering the shine.
In the gaze of the other 