Short Story: First Paragraph

The house always smelled of frying food and rose oil, a heady, Catholic combination that sticks to your hair. We never had money for haircuts and the bathtub was full of whip spiders, but I didn't think anything of it until the day that Daisy died. I came home from school, dropped my backpack, coat, and boots on the landing, and ran up the stairs feeling the thick carpet under my toes. Every day I went through this routine, and for five minutes I felt free. Unburdening myself, my eyes on the kitchen cupboards, anticipating a snack of three soft batch chocolate chip cookies and a glass of tepid water. Most kids preferred milk with their cookies, but I hated the way it coated my mouth with a rancid feeling, like the aftermath of a vomiting episode. Cookies and water in front of the television. Sitting on the floor, splayed on the brown carpeting that continued through the living room and down the hall to the bathroom and bedrooms, watching cartoons I was too old for. This was my bliss. For five, maybe ten minutes I was alone in the house and it was quiet. My brothers were still at school activities, and my mom, who worked as a crossing guard for the little kids at elementary could never quite make it back before my bus. I was so grateful I said a daily prayer to the gods in charge of this orchestration of events. As I finished the third cookie Mom would come in running, out of breath, fear across her forehead, the sleeves of her turtleneck pushed up, as if every afternoon she anticipated the worst.

Poem for River Girl

Mariachis always show up at bedtime.
With bulbous instruments, accordians they squeeze
and tug, guitars that mourn ecstatically, in matching black suits with flopping red ties
and hats that aren't absurd in their hometowns
somewhere north of here.
But in this cement house where I sleep irregularly
in a bedroom facing East to the sea,
outside in those splitting, convulsing streets
these players are joyless music makers
impelled to play all night
by some patriotic sense of duty
that keeps them bellowing in harmony
with tom cats, zorros, and other nocturnals.

Opening Sentence

If it was possible to induce a miscarriage simply by submerging oneself in a very hot bath there would be countless women and girls emerging from a steamy soak with scalded legs and pelvises. Housewives with too many children already, maybe even only one; naïve girls posing as virgins, Catholic virgins confused about the logistics of intercourse; college students, twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings, and the occasional perimenopausal forty-something anticipating no longer requiring birth control too soon.

Archetypes in Seuss

The Cat in the Hat is a classic trickster. He arrives unbidden, when you need him but don't know you need him. When circumstances seem bleak but you aren't aware enough to just ask. You can do that?! You can cry out, call up the godhead with complaint or supplication? Sure. Go ahead. Try it.

His moves are sudden and limbs akimbo, one minute he's juggling your fish and the next he's unleashing Things that run even more amok than he. They are chaos in dual aspects. He controls them; they are his minions. He is inciting a riot, an epiphany of unreason.

There is no control, or nothing to control, we learn over the course of an afternoon with The Cat. Our sense of order, tenuous at best, as expressed by the scolding Fish, is baseless. So why not let go, let it all unfurl into the atmosphere around us, with cakes, cups, and ships flying free. The Fish is constantly hectoring the children, reminding them of the specter of their mother, who must be The Unmanifest.

He tempts. He jokes. He makes no sense. He speaks nonsense. He riddles and makes ordinary things appear in other orders, for that is the reality of Reality. And that is why The Trickster comes to us, to children alone in a house on a rainy day, to a hero on his journey, a girl alone at the well.This manifestation of the divine psychological process is important because we seek to elude confusion.

Nomads

Maine fulfilled its promise. It was a safe and comfortable place to land. It was where we got our bearings. In Camden, there is a library on a hill overlooking the harbor, where I first imagined being a mother walking with a small girl, that place turned out to be more than fantasy. I lived a dream, which has never happened before. I believed in a life before I saw it, I had faith and that faith was a prophecy come true. Hand in hand. We are building it, we are making it real. And now, here we go again. again-again. We're off. To the West. To pursue. To earn and achieve and make one last stab at adventure. Before the next time we do it all over again.

I've been more tired and more afraid. I am ready to go in the most American direction of destiny. To sift through chaos and have the unknown become familiar territory. Which isn't to say I no longer want roots. A house with a garden, a room of my own. Every time we move I have to create that space all over again. Seek out the best place to write and work and make each house a home. A home, there's no place like home. There's a Wizard of Oz exhibit at The Farnsworth. A collection of the movie's memorabilia. Behind the museum a replica of Dorothy's house as it looked when it landed. Disheveled, having been through a twister and murdered a witch. I know how it feels. I have been that Kansas house in Munchkin Land.

California, here we come. Away we go to Lotus Land.

Two Worlds

Malcolm recently observed that in The Way, Way Back the young protagonist moves from one world of crazy adults into another, in order to gain insight. You must return to the world of you birth. You have to go but you can't stay. There is knowledge to be gained outside the walls of your ken. Is this the heroic archetype? Plato's cave?

Other movies that fit this model include:
Girl Most Likely
The Lifeguard
The Kings of Summer
The Wizard of Oz
Alice in Wonderland

Does every film work this way? Are they all quest stories?

A Utopian Moment And The Age of Imitation

Sixty degrees, the twenty-third of October in Rockland, Maine, at noon. Fewer than a dozen very young children and their parents on the playground under a wispy, filtered sky. The mostly-gone leaves are orange and crackling with the end of their energy cycle. It is neither warm nor cold. The children are all scrambling up walls and down slides, swinging and hiding. The parents are following, seeking, laughing with their own and others and each other. Some join the group and some go. Everyone is wearing sweaters. It feels like a village. When I realized what was happening I tried to live down deep inside it and save it in my memory forever. It was ideal happiness. A moment of perfect bliss.

Syllogism

God is love.
Violet is love.
Violet is God.

I see so clearly in her, my child,
that every single one of us carries the chip, the shard,
the piece of the puzzle that makes up the nameless name of God.
By definition always moving, shifting, in constant flux
and creation. It is movement. God is going, coming, gone.We are each this. We are all this.
love

Edited Sentences

Mid-Coast, between artsy-foodie Portland and the barren
nether-region of the northern counties. People here fish for a living.
Winters are long. Grange halls feed communities pancake breakfasts and
bean suppers.

Morning/Light/Water

She says:

All the world's water is sacred
because it is the beginning of all life

The Hindu have their Ganges
and Christians the baptismal font

but as I watch this child drink tap water
from a metal bowl
holding it with both hands
in the strong eastern morning light

I see it so clearly,
as arising from the same source

Shanti Shanti Shanti
Amen Hallelujah

The Spinners

There are ladies who sit at their wheels like Fates, spinning carded wool into yarn.

Busily their feet tap the pedals as their hands thread the simple machine that changes the wool into yarn

They chatter in a circle, as you would expect, with great straw bags beside them overflowing

They work to keep up with the universal mind

and in the summer demonstrate their craft at fairs

At Lake Chickawaulkie

One of the last places to hear dialect, if you're from away.
Girls with stretched legs and boys with furrowed brows call
"Mummah" from the floating dock thirty feet from shore
"Watch us race and swim like fish"
"Do you see the ducks, Bubbah?"

at the lake's edge
we watch them, ready to dive in,
hands forming a visor over my eyes
I look out to the other side -
the shore where a boddhisattvha sits

she blesses this little pond
and all the mothers and their babies
who, for this summer, watch each other
holding us in a gaze of complete tenderness
we don't know what next year will bring

poaching

I just found out that hungry neighbors drive their pick-ups
down into the valley
to illegally shoot deer at night.

Whose needs take precedence?  this is not the garden of Eden; are there kids nearby without dinner?
What can I do: an idea for action. Still, my heart breaks for innocent wildlife running free until its eyes are frozen in F250 headlights.

Faith

One
after another
white-tailed deer disappeared
into the forest's corner pocket
from the field where they play

I am watching from a window
as I draw my bath
and hold my breath
so those dear creatures don't know
that they are being observed
here

To the Wonder

two good lines

the love that loves us
cradling him to contain himself

Jesus loves you. This, I know. as does Mary. And all the saints. and Brahman, And Atman and every one of the 100,000 household gods and incarnations and regional, rural manifestation of that mystery of India. and and and the spider trickster coyote and YaHWEH  does he love us> does he? The love that loves us comes from somewhere out there> transcendent transcendence> or is it immanent? Allah, what's he up to? Of course. Rumi told us about His love. He knows. and that reminds me of that beloved psalm. there are hymns and songs of love all around, not from the birds in their unfeeling trees, but some other force that is so quiet it is beyond our listening, but we can hear we can be called we can understand, if we long to, if we wish. The love that loves us is unfolding under our skin.

34 1/2

Now is when I would run
things are getting too familiar
and though it's what I've said I wanted
it induced anxiety, an impingement
on my freedom and anonymity
because if they only knew...

but we're settling into this adult life
in a conventional setting
and it's hard and we're not very good at it
and I wonder if we're still special and adventurous
and what she will think of us
and how she will judge her childhood

can't escape. must create more space
expand time, fill every moment
which is going to require work
work to beget work
which allows play
which maybe we've done enough
the onset of adulthood at age 34.
holy shit. 

Let's Make Some Goals

Ok! Here we go...for the first time ever. EVER. in 34 years. Now setting objectives/plans/dreams/ambitions/

maybe we should qualify or categorize this, like, what kinds of goals. weight loss goals. short term goals. motherhood goals. career goals. Career? Money goals. How do I make this shit happen? Where did everyone else learn this stuff? Am I retarded? Seriously, am I slow or stupid or impaired or disabled? I am differently-abled, when it comes to adult behavior. That much is obvious. Now is not the time to ask why. Now is not the hour for analysis. Now is the time to do. Or, at the very least, decide what to do. Then I can try to figure out how to go about getting what I want. I need an action plan.

1.

the wolf and

The search for meaning

Only

Only I hear her first words.
"Hi" and "Bye" are oft-heard now in public,
sing-song spoken to strangers at the store;
and again and again to Daddy
as we sit home in our living roo
but it's only me who knows the secrets she says up close.
Is it my job to remember, to record for her?
Would they be lost otherwise -
pointing to eyes and saying "eyes"
"no" for nose and other repetitive phrases
that may mean see the birds or see the baby or
something else only you know.
only us in this world, for now.

5 o'clock

at 5 o'clock, we sat down to dinner at the kitchen table. Baby in her highchair, a mom and dad, sunlight in the valley, fajitas.

An idyll, this part of life. All of us happy. Together, alone, needing nothing but each other, laughing a lot. The small joys of our small family are overwhelming in their beauty.

I am trying

I haven't had my heart broke
in a really long time.
If you love me a fifth as much
I will feel irradiated by you.

The Morning of My Great Happiness

Is this the morning of my great happiness? The one I was told to wait for?

Damp February light filtered through every window - each direction brings its own blessing.
We were alone, quiet in the house, barefoot, warm, sleepy-headed, without plans.
I followed her as she followed whatever plan also guides birds and stars,
Patterns emerge which may or may not have intrinsic meaning-
As we observe the ritual meaning is made.

These thoughts coalesced as I sat on a bench by the kitchen door watching my daughter at play. Gather peace where it finds you.

Violet Monday

6:15 and the baby is crying, despite staying up past bedtime at a Super Bowl party. I pull her long, pajama bottom limbs from her crib without saying good morning, lay down in the guest room bed to nurse until she sits up laughing like a trickster Buddha. She looks out and around with a bright, turned up face, eyes slightly squinted in the first light, an enigmatic wavelength she intimately knows.

Currently Reading

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers.

The Empathy Thing

"I know, dear one" we say without thinking to our babies when they cry because we sense how important it is to be not alone. Empathy is understanding through experience, being at one. There, there. I've been there. You are, we are, going to be fine.

No One But Me

Many months ago, when Violet was new, I wrote, "there is no one to save you in the small hours" still thinking only of myself. Of course, no more than a foot from arms slept a tiny baby, who was with me at all times. I helped her and rocked her and fed her and changed her and photographed her and marveled at her and loved her, but I still was only thinking about me. Sorry for me. Worried for me. Who would take care of me? "If I cried out/who would hear me up there/among the angelic order?" Oh, Rimbaud, let's go to sleep.

But, of course, that worldview has all but vanished. I have shifted, or submitted to a shift in the cosmos. The existence of Violet means I must be busy doing the saving. When she's crying, when she's hurt, in the dark, in the night, when she is confused and wakes up from a nightmare she can't explain. I am here to save her in the small hours. When all seems bleak and hopeless. When terror sets in. And maybe, through this unforced action, through love which struck immediately and a gentleness which has developed over time, I will also learn to guide myself, out of deep water, until we all are sound.

One's Own

I left the baby in her crib to cry and work out her crankiness. I think she needed to be contained, first I hugged, rocked, and nursed her to lullabyes - why can't I spell lullabyes? - then I lay her in her crib to go it alone. Too much stimuli, perhaps, when you are one and everything is so much. Then I shut myself in the bathroom, sat on the damp bathmat and polished my nails, fingers and toes, warm from the radiator and the sunlight streaming in. It was all quiet. She slept, finally. I thought and patiently practiced the art of being alone.

Kitchen Buddhas

every day is the same.
we prepare, chop, carry
put up food, give some for ourselves, scramble and bow
at the end of the night we put every object back
in their places, and scrub and scour, dump and wash
and sweep and mop with water.

it should restore our humanity, rather than deplete it.
this is not mechanization, but necessary human work
the business of a lifetime.

Sunday 11:11

The soft-bellied sky hangs over Rockland,
blessed tidal village of the sea.
All is well with my three-fold family -
we have little else but love,
and we are, we are happily

A New Year

There is darkness around the edges, fear and anger I haven't expelled. I am better at breathing and action. I am trying to be more gentle with myself. But in some ways I feel the same as always. An adorable failure, falling ever farther behind my peer group. I want to buy a house and dig deep to make room for roots and stay and grow and build, down and up and up. I want to be the still point and strong center, who makes my family feel safe and protected. I want to create lovely things. And connect. And radiate so much love and compassion. I need more peace. I need more therapy and more dancing. What happened to dancing. I need a babysitter. And time away. For myself. I need to write more. And captain my fate. I need sobriety and transcendence of self-pity, for suffering is never going away, not until I die. And now, with Violet, I want that to not be for a long time. So I need a real retirement plan. But, first, a career. And stock advice. And confidence. And new boots. Is that a resolution? Buy good boots. There, that's it. Just be better already.