Psalm 91:4

"He will cover you with his feathers. Under his wings you will take refuge. His faithfulness is your shield and rampart."

World English Bible translation

"faithfulness" in place of "truth"; "rampart instead of "buckler"

rampart: fortification, bulwark

Paralyzed with Paralysis

writing as work is not for me.

Dialogue until I

V1: I'm ready for another adventure. I would happily get on a plane to anywhere, tomorrow.
V2: Isn't that what you're doing?
V1: Yes, but. Maybe alone? Alone, alone. All alone. To Europe, or South America!
V2: You only want to be alone for an afternoon. Then you always get lonely. You want to share the journey. You asked for them. They materialized. And now that they are here and happening, you cringe, you want to run.
V1: I don't want to hurt them, to bring them down; I don't want to see them suffer.
V2: Suffering is part of the game. None of us asked for it, but it's what we get. But we also get laughter, and cream cheese, and sunny wintry mornings with lesson birds and pine trees.
V1: I like all those things. And they're here, why should I stray from so much beauty and magic and everyday wisdom? There is more to explore. right where I am.
V2: There's only one way out of this. You have to go straight through. Even when you're muddled, you have an endless well to draw from.
V1: This love is so big. I'll stay with it, shepherd it, watch over it and let it grow. I won't go. Unless they go with me. We are in this together. We're home and she's almost here. The world will wait for us.

Quotation

Beyond happiness or unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity; it does not give us eternity but life, that second in which the doors of time and space open just a crack: here is there and now is always.

Octavio Paz

dear a,

Remember when we went to some Carolina and walked a narrow boardwalk through marsh and mangrove, looking for birds, and there was nothing to think about but looking for birds in the early heat?

Angry

angry at Old Navy. angry at Best Buy. angry at Target and Home Depot. angry searching the sidewalks and storefronts of cheerful Brunwick. I want to unzip my skin and run very far from my internal organs and everything. Hoping tomorrow I feel less like an ungrateful, itchy monster.

The Discoverer

The one who brings corn, or fire, is not necesarily the most intrepid. She need only heed the call. The unknown comes in the night, from the corners of our consciousness or imagination. Some might dismiss it, roll over and go back to sleep. But if you hear, and are willing to listen, there may be adventure in your future, frought with destiny. Legends knock thrice, then expects the uninitiated to follow into dark woods without question or complaint. Are you already in the margins - you may be closer than you think to mystery and integration. Give chase to the sacred animal, the thing you thought was beyond man's grasp and commune with it, do what it asks, bring it back to the hearth circle of your brethren, whether or not you are wanted there. You are not an explorer, a shaman, or magician. You have been the wandering hermit, waiting on the word.

A Still Point Flute Player Among the Flyers

In Veracruz four voladores climb a sacred pole, behind them follows the one songmaker. Armed with nothing but colored fetters, these fearless practitioners of ritual begin their descent slowly, inverted near the top. They spin. And twist. And tumble down, controlled. They do not make the rules but perform admirably as birds fulfilling a holy rite of atonement. Their sun is a sign of unstatic stability overhead. Voladores flirt with earth, coming down from their vertical plight. While the piper, the croucher at the apex, he who sets the pace and makes holy melody remains fixed aloft, though spinning like the axis he interprets. I want to be that still voice playing.

Tir na nOg

I went, but not immediately, to the bird sanctuary. It's where I hover and eventually land in a copse of memory and desire. In the tall grasses it is restful, by the stone table, with ocassional wide wingspans blocking out the summer sun. Woods and fields are before and behind me, but I don't have to choose. I stay as long as I wish, half-slumbering, safely kept.There, I made some of the only wishes, some of which actually came true. Maybe that is why I fly there when guided to go to the most peaceful place.

Winona Ryder Getting Older, A Meditation on Mortality

Winona Ryder getting older is a reality none of us thought we'd have to confront. It's terrible, our aging whimsy and consummate mortality. She cannot bear the bright light, as we, being stricken, turn from her fallen cheeks, no longer capable of such winsome elocution. All of us, having been born unto this generation, neither lost, nor why, will quit this mortal coil as we threw off our flannel and Doc Martens. She is our herald and original. She crumbles before us, back into ashes and ether and dust. She came first and will be gone forever soon enough, as will we eventually.Winona Ryder, please don't make a return. I could not bear to see you as a wronged first wife, or editor.

Reading

Desire of the Everlasting Hills by Thomas Cahill and The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris. Who historical Jesus knew and how to know archetypal Jesus/yourself better through monastic living, respectively.

33 Weeks

and my bikini line is no longer accessible. it's all downhill from here.

A Winter House

Gathering
light on the wide wooden floorboards...
it's the slow sun filtered through bare limbs and gray branches
muted, tempered, diffused.
within the farmhouse hours and walls comprise the days
no idea but the thing?
The thing

The List of Lost Things

• my three wedding dresses


• my mother's green ring and blue stone bracelet


• the camera that captured the only picture of our Clinton marriage ceremony


• my engagement ring


• report cards, Christmas ornaments, dance recitals, diaries, awards, and all my childhood memorabilia


• a sleeveless black muscle shirt with a cat face made in rhinestones

I would give everything I have left for one of these precious objects. Where have they gone? How have I lost so much?

The Spectrum of Truth

You can tell the future from beads or cards amd leaves. You can tell your history with words or yarn. The pieces of furniture arranged methodically, with care. The truth of our life will be told by her, who will both be and reflect the light. Weaving narratives as we go. Our journey unfolds unsteadily and is left behind as reds, yellows, greens, blues and violets.

Videos of The Dead

In a tower of tapes, only one contains his moving image. All the rest are hours of HBO and some light porn. But in this brief, one-way encounter, so much is captured. Mannerisms, gestures, familiar, idiosyncratic habits of a life. How he wears sunglasses and chews gum, in a flannel shirt, below deck, taking measurments and plotting the tugboat course. It was a sunny winter's day. 1988. He was so alive, the way we are alive, with nothing but time ahead and ocean all around. Seeing it this way, is the memory of him diminished? Should we not indulge our necrovoyerism? To love looking upon a face and laugh again with his antics. Should we all be taped all the time, for future generations to cherish and be reminded? How can such vital animation end and what are we supposed to do with what remains? I miss all of them. Loss, loss, a slow expected stream of grief and suffering over a lifetime; they will never know how much they visit us. Why?

If a Novel

If a novel begins with a dream, is the narrator necessarily unreliable?
Just started Helen of Troy by MargaretGeorge.

I shouldn't be surprised, but I am disappointed. Back to the drawing board.

All Souls

The Color of Lent and Advent

Strong seasons in the Roman Catholic calendar are corridors for shifts in consciousness. Preparing for birth, for death and resurrection is a journey in which we hope, pray, fear, and cast. In these long waiting weeks, we read and remember stories that guide us through dark times. We light candles. We fast. We alter our inner and outer environment to match a psychological process, as well as what is going on around us with nature, with weather, temperature, and light. We follow the sun. Vestments are violet during both these antecedent periods. After each holiday the temporal calendar is restored to ordinary time. But we are never the same, for having gone through the transformation, if it is practiced mindfully.

Together

You were with me when we drove the mountain route north from Cambria to San Francisco; we sailed past Big Sur. That pacific is sublime. I hiked along the coast and went to Muir woods with you.

I dance every week - sometimes it's just ass-shaking, liberating fun. In other classes there's wellness coursing through every movement, love energy and hope for change with knowledge and joy.

We moved to a farm with goats and apple trees and other trees and peaches for two weeks and New England barns and slopes of grass and flowers I cut and vased for the house. I bake things.

It's autumn and I'm home in Clinton - to the town beach, Hammonassett, marina, secret place, libraries, and bird sanctuaries. You are more active all the time. This is where I really started.

Maybe none of this matters. But I hope that it does, in an infinitessimal or fundamental way, because there has been so much laughter and beauty, I want to impart to you, from now until always.

I'd rather be active than impotently angry

I'd rather be angry in an unspecific way and act on my vehemence and find like-minded people to hold hands with and make signs with and shout, into a vaccum. Only, it is a movement now, with a captive audience. I don't believe there will be direct impact, but there's intention. It's in the air. To me, that is enough. People are finally doing what is most truly American: taking to the streets with a collective voice of dissent. There is a cohesive, overarching issue and of course thousands of smaller, local, particular, petty, personal problems that are also finally being delivered to the light.

Quotation of the day

"Maine is so beautiful and the weather is so fine in the summer - that's why I come here to rest and to paint a little, too."

Edward Hopper

Vessels and Bells

This afternoon in the rain, I went to the Bowdoin Museum of Art, for the Hopper paintings and was pleasantly suprised by the upstairs exhibit of art from the 14th Century BCE Yangtzi river region of China.

It was their Bronze Age and on display were inverted bells and vessels for washing prior to a sacred ritual. It's a small gallery and in the next room were slabs of carved stone from 900 BCE Nimrud, Renaissance and Mannerist paintings from Europe, and a few Greek amphoras for good measure.

I saw small, dark, elemental landscapes Hopper painted in Maine during summers spent on our coast. There was more impasta and impressi0nist influence, but always the sunlight, shadow and shade and perfect geometric lines of composition.

These images contribute to my sense that I know this place and was destined to arrive here. Lovely/lucky.

Vulnerability

In college I wrote an essay on handbags. I don't even like the word.

Of Human Consciousness

The curse - an ostensible gift - of human consciousness is work, which inevitably breeds dissatisfaction. Why do we have awareness after all?

Reaching Out/Reaching in

Two days ago I went ot the post office, bought a book of stamps and mailed envelopes all over the country. Belated birthday cards, thank you notes, a CD, and hellos I had written and collected, unable to get them sent off for whatever reason. All was well; I felt sunny and busy and ran errands, did my volunteer work, did therapy, browsed at Cole Haan and went to Zumba. Yesterday I woke up to lassitude. Couldn't get out of my own way, slept and bathed, languid as a odelisk. Torpor turned to melancholy and I was out of sorts until I slept. Today dawned with a question mark. Would I feel more optimistic, more energetic? What would Friday bring? And then I thought about the responses that were already arriving by email and telephone call. Had I or the universe known that I would need comfort and reassuring? Coincidence or synchronicity? We send out our desires as well as our fears and hopes. It can be more intentional. Hear our pray. I felt gratitude and wondered about these mysteries.

So, it has come to this

all the unfulfilled intimations, the longing to nowhere, the sense of a road not built, led me to this place. finally.

"she slips through time, like zebra in the striped forest"

i carry your heart

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) I am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

ee cummings

Women: A Rant

Women who make pregnancy a Very Big Deal are the same women for whom everything is harrowing and stressful. Yes, it can be physically taxing. I know how lucky I am to not have been sick so far. Mentally and emotionally, however, I felt very weighed down, and at times so panicked I thought I might faint, or die from fear. But it honestly, it is what you make it. Your pregnancy is your own creation. If you want to worry about every little detail, every symptom, every anathema food item, it certainly can be all-consuming. If you are the sort of pain in the ass, high maintenance woman who demands back rubs and ice cream and needs everything just so in order to be happy, then pregnancy will be terrible for you and worse for the poor son of a bitch who married you. I would just like for once to hear someone echo my sentiments. Which are, essentially, it's fine. It's weird. And wonderful. Thrilling and paralyzing and bizarre and miraculous and beautiful and gross. And also, it's totally natural and what we are designed to do. I expect to encounter difficulty. Pain and discomfort and uglier manifestations of this other life beating inside me that makes it a little less lovely to walk around in my body. But acting so put out is nothing more than an act some women have adopted. I happen to have a different act. An "aren't I funny and one of the guys and aren't bitches crazy and dumb" trip that makes my life harder in some ways and better in others. But someone needs to stop perpetuating the notion that you stop being a normal person once pregnant. Because you don't. It's fine. I'm fine. You're fine. Think of anything else for a whole minute, read a book not about babies, listen loudly to music, have a shout at the sky, and stop complaining.

Books

I finished late summer reading weeks ago, and have begun Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (on kindle), and The Art of Travel by Alain de Bottom.

First Day

On Wednesday I went to Thornton Hall for my first day sitting with the old people. The Garden residents are an Alzheimer's population, with a median age of 75. One woman, Rite, short for Magarite, sat next to me and really listened, focused, reacted in real time, sang and recalled songs. But Sam my guide told me later she likely wouldn't remember any of it. Most of the others were near catatonic, though one woman, I think her name is June and missing a few front teeth, was happily chatting inanely as a madwoman before being taken away to her appointment at the beauty parlor.

Earlier that morning I found the Topsham Public Library, a new building with enough novels and a lot of light and picked three selections to bring, hopeful but uncertain. An Andy Rooney diatriabe, perhaps a little cliched but germaine, seemed like an ice-breaking opener. I found one that was self-evidently obervant, in his fashion, but that I liked; it was about names. Next, I had already decided I would read The Lady of Shalott. Whether they liked it or not. I like to read this poem aloud and for once I had a captive audience. I thought if nothing else the rhythm and cadence would be pleasant music for their ears and I got to use my very important poetry voice. I concluded with a Time Life collection of photography from the 1940s and 50s. Nostalgia and imagination, photographs that are literal but open to interpretation. We read about the rise of adolescent culture during World War II, teen dance and fashion trends. Some of them smiled.

I felt very comfortable from the beginning. Much like when I was so anxious to teach my first Nia class and then was completely in the moment and at ease during the hour, I was a little trepidacious that morning but it all cleared and was serene as soon as I started introducing myself. What luck! And what a revelation. It was so nice, even though it was frightening, and desperately sad and unbelievable what can become of an individual life and her once so strong brain. A sort of Zen exercise - immediately over and gone as soon as I'm done reading the words, if not sooner. It happened, but is fleeting, and when I am gone I've disappeared though the sound may linger. Does it resonate, or reverberate, or disappear into the ether altogether? I hope they experience a flash of peace or joy or relaxation. Maybe it's nothing like that at all.

Already Witnessed

It's not that I've been here before, but that everything is as it should be. I may have wished it into being back at the bird sancturay and only discovered here now. No one is more surprised than I am when happiness turns out to be true. The theophany of matters, great and small.

Paradise Found?

Yesterday-sleepy-Saturday-morning, I crawled back into our sunny, birdmottled bed. He said, and I quote, "this is paradise."

And isn't it? Isn't this the heaven on earth ideal of bliss and perfect happiness! In love and surrounded by a thousand wondrous things.

An unborn manifestation of all that we've invested and intended, the best of us both, we hope, resides here between us, within me, a source of light.

For that instant eternity, we shone with divinity and were given grace. Please let the gnosis of One Moment inform all the rest of our grateful days.

amen

Circle

It recently occurs to me,
as I sit among friends in the long, sweet grass,
that I have returned to something essential of my youth
just as I embark upon the middle phase of life.
what bliss! to move forward and come home.

This morning I:

walked the dog a mile on Augusta road, getting wind-blown by long distance trucks, counting caterpillars (6), capturing farm-field-blue sky vistas with my camera mind.

began Swann's Way. again. found an old passage I underlined but don't remember reading. Actually liked and related to the language and sentiments.

unfurled my favorite old tapestry to stretch and read and watch the dog under the ambivalent trees between me and the sky. The wind rustled leaves and I almost slept. remembrance.

cooked and ate the lunch of a 75 year old Italian grandmother: spinach, egg, tomatoes, cheese, bread in garlic and olive oil.

filled out therapy paperwork with thoughtful, honest answers. no easy task.

made the bed. I love those crazy birds!

organized silverware into three pleasing containers.

now I have gone to work.

made the bed.

Companionables

Reading The Year of Magical Thinking and Just Kids simultaneously, by accident. Two couples, both alike in artistry, in New York or California, where we lay our scene. The women are writing for the men, who are dead. Remembering and making an elegy.

The Disease of Addiction

is the most boring, cliched phrase I have read to date. And that says quite a bit now that every nincompoop with fingers can contribute to the ongoing human dialog. I am sad that Amy Winehouse is dead because I enjoyed looking at, and listening to her. The article in NYmag by N. Abebe about fetishizing fatalism for art and artifice sake is the best thing I have seen on her life and death. "There's no point in fighting the sadness..." he writes of the worldview she shared with Billie Holiday and others; but you have to fight the sadness. It is possible. Compelling, even. I believe I have that heroic capacity. And that there's value in it. For some reason I may never know, I have faith. I look forward to seeing the other side, even only in glimpses. RIP Amy and Artex.

The Trouble with Baby Books

is that they are written for people who don't otherwise read.

Son of a Fabulist

everything he told me turned out to be true.

Sunday mid May

Invisible airplanes defect from the sky.
I don't mind the steady Sunday morning mist,
so long as there's an Escher canopy of green -
Spring green! - the gravestones turn themselves over in their field,
seeding new life in the bone yard.
walking up the western promenade with Olivia, and.
The sound all around isn't deafening
but confusing if I didn't know an airport
was just over south bridge from here.
Portland, fortunately, looks fine in the rain,
built of snug brick, empirically,
by robber barrons, presumably, on vacation.

a night I loved

The year was 1990, the summer before seventh grade. I had just made my Clinton Town Hall stage debut as Moth in a professional production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I had a crush on blond Lysander and longed to be as elegant as the dancer who played Titania. After the last performance a cast party was held at a house on High Street, in the garden. I had never seen anything so lovely.

The grand old house was white and gauzy, doors flung open to the outside. I did not have the vocabulary to describe its effortless art, so many rich, beautiful objects assembled, living together, surrounding the lucky, lovely people. Most players/revelers were already outside, of course, as we were all immersed sylvan creatures after months of rehearsal and a week performing Shakespeare's green world tale of comedy and confusion.

I loved everything about this sparkling, silver night. There was wine and coquetry, masks and dancing. New lovers planned a parting in tucked away gazebos and directors bellies swelled under full moon. Summer was ending, school was starting; I was growing up. I did not want to leave a creating life, full of wonderful things and interesting people. I was transformed that magic evening, reading a wealth of pretty possibility in my static home town.

week in review

Monday: dragged myself to Nia after work. We practiced Butterfly and I figured out how to swing my arms and legs, keeping them straight to complete the clapping, lunging move. A satisfying dance class, chatted with a lady named Bess - which is a great name - about Yogave.

Tuesday: I have no recollection of Tuesday. It's possible we skipped Tuesday this week.

Wednesday: practiced Opal on the morning, to teach this coming Monday at the railroad building. Walked Olivia up the hill and all was turning green. I had forgotten, when I was far, far away and dreaming of a break from the awful heat that autumn brings, longing for a quiet, dying ing season, I had forgotten that spring is fantastic. fantastic! The trees are budding yellow-green reminders of life and many colored simple flowers are brimming up from front lawns. it seems unpremediated, but it must have taken a lot of work and waiting. Birds chirp and the air is brimming.

Thursday: interpersonal neuro biology in therapy. my brain is malleable and everything can be reshaped, unlearned, and repatterned. But I can't skip steps. I love the lavender counches in her 3rd floor office and,even more, I love the transitional, womb-like waiting area with unstuffed couches and fat brown bears. After work we went to see Fast Five. It has a rakish charm I enjoyed. Also, Merlot at the bar. Also Paul Walker. rraor.

Friday: 9:30 am Vinyasa Flow at Yogave. I sweat on my plum colored mat. Outside thw window were trees and birds reflecting our calm, and inside the yellow studio serious women - and one man - breathed audibly. I worked hard to bend, breathe, and balance. It challenges me in every way and will enhance my Nia practice.

a quiet weekend at home is planned. reading, writing, walking, and practicing Nia. Maybe a drive up the coast for house-looking and lobster roll having. Hooray may!

Breakfast Dishes

Dinner dishes are gross and insurmountable. But breakfast plates, tackled straight away, are objects to meditate on, and not a chore. Sponging yolky yellow. Drying orange juice glasses with a sunny towel. Wiping down the counters with vinegar and lemon. A light meal of poached egg on toasted bread, a brief repast before the day begins in earnest. Sitting at the country table, standing at the sink. Lavender dish soap, as our morning sun shines in through the windows, incentive for the herbs to grow. I am thankful for all that I have. Amen.

Relentless

Day after day, the unintentional sun burns steady, without respite or coquetry.

Anna's Apartment

In this weather - spring streaked gray sky tempered by new-green shoots - I can't stop thinking of afternoons spent visiting my great-grandmother with my mother and baby sister. Anna lived in a highrise by the highway, near St Patrick's in Bridgport. Her small apartment was well-appointed and smelled distinctly of the elderly. She always had a liter of 7 Up on her lace-covered kitchen table when we went for lunch.

My mom was more relaxed here than she was with her mother, Josephine. We would listen to the very old lady tell stories about her life while eating a frittata or Danish butter cookies from a purple tin. Somtimes I would wander out into the hallway, wondering about the other octegenarians, living out their last days all together alone. I worried about dying, then went back into Nonni's for another glass of lemon lime soda.

Good Friday

option 1: after forty days in the desert reflecting, we give ourselves up to suffering and death.

option 2: the god who is always sacrificed if sacrificed again.

option 3: knowing that there is resurrection, we still grieve mightily the dead.

option 4: burial of the dead. (a cave-like tomb, the earth's own womb).

option 5: the union of brahman and atman - the drop being wooed by an ocean.

option 6: triple union, which includes compassion, the comforter in the holy trinity.

option 7: anticipating rebirth and renewal of Mother Earth, we are humbled by God, Death, etc.

Blossoms and Revisions

that is all.

Quoth Rabindranath Tagore

"I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung."

In the Graveyard

There aren't any signs of spring here. Many stones are crooked, faded markers marking time until eternity. So that'll be awhile, I suppose. Families reunited under the ground. Lavina the wife of a captain. Mother, Father, side by side, with no sign of children in their plot. What about the guy who owns the fenced-in obelisk? Was he a guarded loner before the afterlife? Maybe he prefers leaves to roots. I stumble over brambles and fumble with the aperature, looking at the sky. blue sky. elsewhere crocuses are coming up. It's about that time of year. Renewal for those of us lucky enough to live. I breathe in the brisk April morning. Again.

The Interim Years

What have we been doing all this time? Or better, what should we have done? Instead of moving swiftly from courtship to nuptials to baby time, many of us spend the ten years after college working, drinking, traveling, developing interests, cultivating hobbies, sometimes turning into douches, sometimes not, and pursuing other, assorted distractions. Almost immediately, I went to New York. When all seemed truly bleak in Brooklyn, I took the train back to New Haven. But M wasn't happy there, and neither was I; we weren't fulfilled. The idea for a move to Mexico was born out of boredom and family foresight. M needed a place to caretake his ailing father. I longed to escape my fate, and despite having read Oedipus, I thought I could. Now that we're back, I feel the years we lost most acutely. Nothing was saved, only rearranged, as a surly science teacher used to deride the changing of the clocks. And certainly no one has changed, least of all me. All my fears are still here. But so are my friends also. Finally, a new phase is upon my generation. I don't want to mourn time. We spent the interim years the best way we knew how. I wonder what will happen next, and when.

There and Back Again

Exit 64. To turn left would be a true paradise, the only place I feel complete respite. I dream of driving under the green canopy and walking through stiles into a sanctuary for birds. But I cannot go today. I turn right at the blinking light, toward town and empty houses. 17 Partridge Lane looks the same, half desolate-half cheery. How it always was; I am happy that is unchanged. The tree where I scraped my knee is as imposing, still. I linger, think of stopping, introducing myself and idiosyncrasies about the home, but I don't, I won't, I will wait another ten years for that awkward imposition. To grandmother's house I go. Right on Liberty, left on Glenwood. I never meant to like this house and am surprised by how much I miss her presence in it. The last decade of events we wished weren't happening, or happening elsewhere, or including those who couldn't be here any more with us, all have memories here now. I am so slow to learn that my expectations for my family will never be fulfilled, and I mind less, and accept them, as awful as can be, they are mine, and I am theirs. Josie's never coming back from the hospital. Never going home to this place, my last home in this town. Unless you count the cemetary stone at the beach, which I do not.

Nothing to Excess

There is such a thing as too much pleasure, which leads to indolence. I am fat, lazy and exhausted from weeks of slothful eating and excessive drinking. I have been so lucky, so lazy, so indulged. But now I need discipline, books, and quiet time outside. still looking for the answer. Still lost.

Zelda

at least she wrote a novel, even if it was second-rate. at least she lived to dance though she was far too old... she may have been brilliant, made herself hyperbolic or portrayed as hysteric; maybe Zelda attempted all the things they said she did. her own story was told in words I only half-remember. She was a woman we should admire. Because she would not. stop. living. until she would.

The Second Part of Our Mexican Vacation, In Which We Return To Our Haunted House

We crossed the invisible border. Everything appears bone dry. An intake of breath, not in exhile, but an excitement to be closer to our house, the one we built on the beach, too close to the high tide line, then filled with comforts and trinkets and dogs. I take a pill and wait. The scrubby trees and shabby concrete cottages are all the same. It seems brighter because I have a ticket back to Maine. I don't know if it's Ativan or autonomy, but I am happy to be here; the sky above Chelem is saturated blue. David, the caretaker, is sweeping the concrete patio like a Mexican-Jain wraith. Or more accurately, like the ghost of Mac Bedell. I feel sick. Tripod! She smiles with her entire stupid albino body and I get down on the ground supine so she can lick me like a spazz. It's all a dream. It's like Pompeii. It's aftermath and unconsciousness. I know where there are small steps down and how to turn the lock in key precisely. All the things that were once my entire world, chosen tiles and closet doors built to our height and standard, are at my fingertips. Renovation was a wedding gift we gave ourselves. But it never felt like home. This made my husband resentful; our first year of marriage was the worst in a decade. I went back to make amends and reclaim. I was meant to acknowledge the blameless and faulted. I forgave everyone, including myself, crying, walking, figuring out what to do with all this beach and freedom of movement. Going for a swim in the primordial Gulf.

March 2011 Vacation in Playa del Carmen, Part 1

I wasn't worried, but neither was I sure I wouldn't go totally crackers from the heat and heavy memories of all the years living as we did in Mexico. I am on vacation, after all. It's nothing but a party if you can leave. Humidity has an odor, like wet concrete, pork always sizzling somwhere on a plancha, chemical cleanliness hovering close to the density of jungle, never far away. Scented fever dreams make amends and I can be healed whole. Not without sadness and anxiety, but what adult can go anywhere without nostalgia wringing her heart in her hands, mingling desire and gladness from the past with strains of death and ghosts of who we had become without intent. Today, I put on my bathing suit and swam in the turquoise drift. I fought the current close to shore and finally surrendered, floating on my back but still kicking my fins like a siren whose song is always sinking like a stone.

Reconciling

patterns, habits of mind and current behavior. the implicit and explicit memory. it's time to do the work.

Most of the Time

Most of the time
I can't tell if I'm already ending
or just about to begin.

This age is weighing heavy;
so much grief has happened,
while much is left unseen.

Though there are moments
when hope tells of happiness
I am as yet unable to conceive.

About Deb

She was fifty, on or about her death. She had been a teacher, but mostly a mother and housewife.

By the end of my life, if all goes well, she will have only seen a fraction of who I am .

Deb was dead when he found her on the bathroom floor, we just didn’t want to know it yet.

We waited in the room designed for patience, not much more than a hallway, a bright white space at Yale New Haven Hospital. For five days, we prayed silently and separately, and back in my dorm room I asserted her ultimate survival. I had no mental language for the possibility of a motherless world. When the phone rang I knew what was I was being told even though what was being said was babble. I remember wearing a red tank top and walking downtown. But would I really have been alone then? Next my father gripped me as I gasped over him telling me it was time to pull the plug, there was wailing in the grieving room. Old Josephine, young Christine. Chick and I. we walked around the hedge that went around the building where we ended my mother’s braindead suffering, if she was suffering, or if all that had already ended before decision time. I elected not to see her in the hospital bed. I wish I hadn’t seen her face in the coffin, those horrible hands, waxen and caked with covergirl.

She has not an age or occupation, only in my memory she lives and is busy keeping us. We left her for dead - when she was fifty - on the bathroom floor of our house. The last time we got out alive.

Ash Wednesday (TS Eliot)

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

Quoth Thomas Merton

Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life/and life to thought/in such a way that we are always growing,/always experiencing new things in the old/and old things in the new./Thus life is always new.

The Earliest Ending of Winter

Probably it will snow again. Today, though, it rains and spring seems inevitable, if not willing. And suddenly everything looked different again, warm air descending onto brick and broken shufflers, bringinghome bags from shopping. it's an atmospheric alteration and I wish I could quantify this sense that it affects my percetion and mood. But what would be the fun in that? If I am making steps they are so small as to be imperceptible to anyone but myself, but I've applied to something and started reading two new books. I spoke to my grandmother, who is lonely. There is water everywhere, a safe deluge for changes and harbingering. Auspicious enough without birds. Endings are happening to begin.

J Crew Haiku

shorts shopping in March
thrilling and terrifying
spring brings white fat thighs

A Beautiful Afternoon

It was spring. Or late summer. We were on found time, as usual. There wasn't anyone else around. I was wearing sandals; I know this because they broke, and this fact is a critical element of the story. It was a beautiful afternoon. I know this, because I remember it fondly. We were in Milford, at a beach recently discovered.

The tide, like all tides, comes and goes, according to its own will or plan, or by the coersion of the moon, but we don't always see with our eyes the world as it happens. We had walked out to a rocky island, a very Connecticut spit of land. To get there was easy, the return more trecherous. This isn't meant to be poetic, simply what occured. A jetty connected one shore and the other, more tenuous sand. Once around we went, laughing, I would imagine, as that is what we normally do. And when we came back to the point of departure, we realized we would have to move fast. It was getting late, and worse, the water was rising. But my sandal had snapped and Malcolm had to carry me, never an easy burden.

It was sandal season. But a month when you want a sweater come late afternoon. We were young and in love and harmlessly reckless. There was betrayal in our near future, death in the distance, and travel to foreign destinies in the space between. We didn't know any of that then. A liminal afternoon at a beach is now is an axis for other more memorable events, and yet, this moment seems important enough to recall from the depths of my contray memory many years into the present. I'm always wishing it were another place in time.

The Last Good Days in Mexico

• we had just bought the low rider honda (civic?) with cigarette and burgundy interior; it felt both safe and familiar, compared with the expletive jeep. I burned a beatles cd and drove somewhere by myself, just because I could without fear of breaking down. I listened to "I've just seen a face" over and over and sang out the windows, into the wind and palms.
• we took missy out on the boat, in the morning, before work. we trolled away from civilization, toward Sisal if you travel far enough. The water was flat, almost glassy and we each smiled in our own direction, riding parallel with shore and horizon. Eventually, malcolm tangled us in mangroves, and we thought we might ge stuck. but we weren't.
• swimming to the pier and back, completely boyant in the absurdly salty Gulf. overhead birds. dogs on the shore, standing sentry. in the near distance, our charming ruin of a house, steps digging into the strand. nowhere and everywhere, happy to be floating with practice.
• walking single file on the uneven sidewalks of centro, under the direct heat of a despot sun, peering inside dusty American renovations and the damp coca cola courtyards of families who count generations in threes. among simultaneous building and crumbling, there is a permanence.

something's always wrong

don't worry, it's only the title of a catchy toad the wet sprocket song - no, not the one playing during rayanne graff's meltdown - the other one. the mellow one. I wish that was my nom de guerre. I wouldn't like to go to war, but I would like a reason to fight. I feel so tired. looking for something to love as everything I have been doing seems pointless, dull, and not a welcome space for me to unfold. I just have to keep at it, in spite of myself. it's the only thing I can think of, besides that other thing, which we all know isn't a good idea at all. more books and baking, baths and bedknobs.*

*ran out of uplifting, soothing, elegant lady b-words.

blowmonkeys, bildungsromans, bayonets, bindis, buskers, berliners, ballyhoos, bangarangs, blood-diamonds, bananagrams, bales, christian

the end.

wondering what it is

it could be, among other things, the weather. I just learned the adorable mash up word, "sniss", which is, of course, to sneeze and piss, and this is what the sky seems to be doing about now. It's the precipitation equivalent of incontinence. February is too gray and sick to br cruel. It grimaces.

Genre Studies

I've never been very good at writing fiction. My long history as an accomplished liar doesn't suit me well in this received form. Maybe memoirists are the tellers of tall tales and novelists seek the truth through parallel universe narratives. Authors of stories that never happened live in other worlds while we here in the nonfiction section are testing out various versions of things we actually did. Or think we did. Or meant to do. As William Miller said in Almost Famous, "the truth just sounds different." The truth is a very large concept and I am only a girl with too many memories and not enough time. Or do I have too few recollections and a surplus of hours? The world may never know.

archiving today

wearing: plaid shirt, jeans, furry hat, bare feet
reading: the age of innocence on kindle, a world lit only by fire (still)
listening to: wavves
thinking about: moving into a little house on the water in maine or Ct
wondering: what to get a master's in
looking forward to: driving to new haven on Friday
contemplating: seeing a local band cover cake's fashion nugget cover to cover
waiting for: calm and inspiration, tomorrow's appointment
resisting: the urge to run
loving: pesto, bedroom fireplace and slippers, into the west from netflix
leaving: for mexico soon

A Cautionary Tale

M was a roommate of mine. On Withers Street, within reach of the BQE, towering above Strega Nonna's vegetable garden, he lived in a shabby sheet two bedroom apartment, with peeling linoleum and cockroaches in the sink. It was obvious he was sad, but so was I; I thought we would help one another. And for a time, perhaps we did.

The first night was walk up hot and I felt nowhere, alone and itchy. Angela stayed all night and in the morning we all had breakfast together at the Kellogg Diner. I started finding affinity in this quirky neighborhood already. And every night after work, M and I would drink 40 oz beers and eat mangos and watch 7th Heaven or the Gilmore Girls.

We were both spiraling out and down, but he presented well to the outside world, worked hard, then came home to smoke bowls and eat burritos in bed. It becamse an addict's apartment and I hid in my room, smoking, stealing peanut butter, writing all night because I had nothing else. I wanted desperately to be something but felt less than ever like a real person.

M wandered ghostly in the mornings while I layed awake and waited for him to be gone. I sailed to beaches on the outskirts of Brooklyn in a borrowed Volvo that drove so well. We hardly met after that. I owed him money. He would not clean. Bugs became a problem and when the toilet clogged and I called up the landlord, he saw the state of things and demanded that we go.

What other choice did I have? We divided our books on Buddhism and lesser vehicles, such as Against Nature, which we both enjoyed. I wrote M a check we both knew would bounce. We never saw each other after that. I moved in with my boyfriend in a much better neighborhood, a few stops on the G train away from SANE and SAME.

I heard he's gone. completely away. forever. And I think it could have been me. I'm sad. I try not to make the same mistake. I am the living one, the lucky one, I guess. How can two such smart and sensitive people fall so slowly on their own swords? I am able to be more chances. But those Williamsburg babies could have tried harder, could have tried harder if we did.

Santa Lucia Square

every Sunday even though I am not there, couples, mostly old ones, dance on a rasied platform, under the arched bark of ancient trees and concrete ceilings. Little musicians all in white stay shaded and play until I don't know when. I always became tired, and overheated just watching, while they made eternity keeping time. They are the backdrop of the gods. Antique sellers selling crosses and lanterns in the sidewalk footlights, families pedaling fringed orange cycles, marquesita venders, old men pushing ice cream carts. A half moon rises over all the Meridanos. God bless equator dwellers; they bring glory to the sun and all His animal humanity.

Drawing a Tree

I don't recall what year it was in grammar school when we were taught to draw a tree. We were told this was significant, advanced. No longer finger painters and stick figure simpletons, this was a lesson in realism and growth. Instructed to make a trunk from two straight lines, an inch or so apart and within this rooted width we made a vee. Two from one and four from that, the limbs reached in to stretch outward and up. It wasn't until years later that the word heliotropism was explained. But in that sunny artroom, where we wore out father's tattered blue shirts backwards, a group of children became artists, thinkers, and world watchers. Because of a tree made of vees.

Self-Infliction

I used to make a habit of hurting other people. Now I reserve this routine for myself. It happens when I am nervous. I thought I would stop feeling nervous. I need to remember to breathe.

Quietly, Hopefully

to say that everything is encased in ice is hyperbole, and not particularly poetic. but it's only ever shortly after the fact that I realized how much I miss warm skin bird singing picnic days. and it is beautiful. like a scrubbed and scary folktale by Hans Christian Anderson. I do long for days stretched out on scented tapstries, alone with a musty penguin novel at the beach. and I do wish back longingly, look back lovingly, though I don't want to live presently on road trips with cigarettes and strangers. my life is sweet. and I am just going to wait, or maybe meditate. so I don't have to remember when and wish I cared more. The snow piles higher outside the windows and it's friday and I'm healthy, and that's enough.

Nuns and Tears

waiting in the car for my husband in a post office, I watched an elderly, habited nun getting out of her compact car and attempting to cross the snow-banked and narrow street, and I cried. I wish I could be her.

Live To Tell The Tale

What began as light and late youthful adventure ended in tragedy. Our lives were irrevocably altered. I went to escape loss and death and what more appropriate place than Mexico to be confronted with the reality that there is no freedom from the real macabre. My husband grew gray, creased and wrinkled, watching and waiting for the patriarch to finally fall. And he fell on numerous occasions, but the final blow was slow and wheelchair-bound. An exit at the airport, we saw him off on his last adventure, the only one he wasn't departing for happily. Now the rest of us left are shaken but mending. I know how long it takes for the pain to lessen even to this discomfort degree. Even as we stretch, miles away from the everlasting days of those terrible events, this is when we experience loss most acutely. It smarts though the wounds grow closed and new adventures loom on the wintry horizon.

I Woke Up Laughing

Light snow falling and more than a foot predicted for tomorrow. It''s cold and gray and I'm sleepy but everything is alright in our little world.

All My Closest Friends in a Sinkhole

It was three days before my wedding and I was lost in Yucatan. And not just me, but three cars full of friends and close relations. I was convinced the road to Cuzama was right instead of left at the second pueblo outside of Merida. I think my internal map needed readjusting. I was stressed and the sun, as almost always, was blazing overhead, which makes thinking near impossible. In a caravan of cool maneovering, all three drivers managed to back up on the highway and take the correct exit south toward the region of cenotes.

...

reading

little women (on kindle, before bed), the witch of blackbird pond (in the bathtub), the ancestor's tale by richard dawkins (in front of the bookcase), a world lit only by fire the medieval mind and the renaissance (on weekend afternoons), and the crying of lot 49 (in theory, ifnot inpractice).

last night, the sky

looked bruised all over, right before predicted snow
every other west end house was lamp lit from within,
like fairy kingdoms magnified and furnished.
an old gentleman on his porch pipe smoking,
otherwise, quiet, quite still, and darkradiant, so
I could see all the way to the edge of portlandtown.
last night, the sky
was limitless until this morning,
when daytime always imposes its borders.

Gratitude and New Jeans

I get to dance all the time now. Full out, leotarded, leaping dance. I might try some layouts and tour jetes, if I can get off the ground. Ankle weights are a good idea. When you work with them you gain strength slowly so when you remove them your jumps appear powerful yet are almost effortless. It's like magic. My knees bend better and I feel more firmly rooted in the ground. I am dancing Nia unshod, the opposite of man in Gerard Manly Hopkins's God's Grandeur. I will feel the soil with my feet.

Brand new levi's arrived last night in the mail. They are dark denim, straight legged, and slim but not skinny cut. They feel like dungarees for another century, made for work, but work made stylish by the wearer's casual integrity. Wearing never washed but fitted new pants feels sort of transforming; they make me want to be a better woman. It is the experience so idealized by the shopping seeker, you fear it may not truly exist. But it does and I will wear them with boots!

A Novel Idea

Wit! Wordplay! Whatever!

the idea that I had (in the bath, a very good place for ideas) is for a story about a girl piecing her childhood back together after all was lost in a dumpster. this would be the most literal, autobiographical route, but liberties and license could, and probaly should, be taken with the plot details. It came to me that I would love to see a diary I kept when I was 12, but which, as well as most of my things from the first 20 years of my life, was banished to the sea of forgetting by my grieving, half-mad (Lear, yes) father upon the death of my mother. No one was there to save our stuff, Christmas ornaments we made in Kindergarten, grade school report cards, crafts, journals, photographs, scrapbooks of playbills and assorted awards. And we were flung out into the world unmoored without past, present, or future hope. Ten years later, finally in recovery, remembering what I was made to forget, I want to retrieve and remake those sentimental objects, to reconnect with my childhood self and nuclear family. Renumerating, re-animating, return.

Weekend Report/Plotting the Next Five Days

This weekend was a gift, and as an unexpected present sometimes is, was slightly underwhelming. We had mixed up our dates and instead of staying with friends in Brooklyn and seeing Aziz Ansari at Carnegie Hall - which is happening this coming weekend - we were left alone and without any promisng plans or inspiration. Actually, M decided to go up the coast to drink with one of his oldest friends on Saturday night, leaving me to my own devices, which, as it turns out, is just not as thrilling as it used to be. I walked the dog under a slow-falling flurry, which I knew wouldn't last from the size of the snowflakes. I drank some Effen vodka on the rocks, ate my new snack vice: lightly buttered water crackers, and watched An Education, some of the Miss America Pageant, and SNL. I also spoke on the phone to my grandmother, because I am wild like that. Undrunk and unsatisfied, I went to bed around midnight and read chapters of Little Women on my Kindle. Salacious.

Sunday I woke up already bored, which I hate, but could not quite ameliorate or alter all day. I walked the dog to the store for the Sunday Times, which I unpacked while I cooked thick cut bacon, slow scrambled eggs with chives, and buttered oatmeal toast. We watched Sunday Morning, took another walk, I took a bath and read Vanity Fair (magazine), started a book on the Medieval Period, A World Lit Only By Fire, which is written in a coloquial yet scholarly, therefore interesing style. I read the paper (must get the new Colm Toibin) and made prosciutto and basil pizza, which we ate while watching the Golden Globes, which always makes me feel somewhat worse about my life. Yet I love those shows, for their self-satisfied glamour and pats on the industry back. Pretty ladies and Ricky Gervais! How else to end a sluggish weekend. I don't feel depressed. Boring, perhaps, rather than bored.

Woke up bloated this morning, after eating like an undergraduate marauder for days. Must begin a better regimen. Will begin healthier practices after hitting up the Miss Portland Diner for lunch, in compliance with our blog obligations for the week's assignment. Patty melt + onion rings, yum. I am preparing nothing but chicken, soups and quinoa this week. Tonight, taking Nia with Maggie at the Railroad Building - that group of women is so warm. Tomorrow, I must renew the dog license at City Hall. It is so America there, I love it. Marble, vast and valted ceilings, imposing and cozy, smelling of decades of cigarette smoke, bureaucracy, and freedom. Wednesday, a brow tint and hair consultation. I do wish to cut it all off again. Perhaps not yet. Thursday, I teach Nia at noon, and before class practice freely in the yoga studio. Friday morning I have a meeting to discuss the possiblity of starting a new Nia class athe YMCA and that night, we fly. Here I go.

Aikido

The way of unifying with life energy. A Japanese martial art. Most importantly, it is characterized as self-defense that protects the attacker from injury. Aikido redirects the force of attack, using that energy and momentum. Learning to fall and to roll are first practices. Relaxation, flexibility and endurance are emphasized, as well as whole body movement and balance. Meet attacks with confidence and directness, mental preparation and maintaining ki, defined as unified mental and physical intention, also understood as life energy.

Refrain

verb: to abstain from an impulse to say or do something.
noun: a phrase or verse recurring at intervals in a song or poem

I really must drink less wine.

Josephine Falco Schopp

Josephine so values her independence that her body is failing, now that she can definitely no longer live alone. She is not a demonstrative woman, neither strong nor composed, but she has been brave, competent and even occasionally funny as she confronts life alone in the twenty-first century. She has been a widow for more than a decade. She outlived her eldest daughter. She functions highly for an octagenarian who broke her back, arm, leg over a period of years, and who elects to smoke instead of exercise, to watch the Lady Huskies and Dancing with the Stars instead of joining a senior citizen center. She expresses disbelief that working people would vote Republican. She and my grandfather, children of immigrants, who had their own business, briefly, supported Democratic candidates, labor unions and social reforms. She wants to talk, but has no one to listen. Another daughter who only calls. Doctors who only hear her babble. If I saw her feebly buying a newspaper at Stop and Shop I would wonder why no one was minding this old woman; and yet she smiles to her everyday companions, the pharmacists and adolescents who never left their after school jobs. I have grown to admire her and like her much more than I would have expected. We drive around my home town. She showed me the beach I've known since I was a toddler swimmer. We talk about food and black and white movies. I discover family stories I'd never been told. I will miss her old bones when they are gone, and they are going, she is soon to be among our any dead. I will miss her very wrinkled face, raspy voice and unexpected wisdoms. I wish I could believe she and my mother will be together in heaven. There is no comfort in such a lack of faith. Only, I do think I have swallowed some part of her, somewhere between now and my birth. I hope this knowledge provides some solace when Josephine is finally, forever gone.

Reviewing my Twenties, Part I

It very recently occured to me that I have been selfish. The last four years are seeming more like a dream every day. The time has passed as in a modern novel; I can flash back to the events but am wondering if there was any meaning. It all ended in such a shitshow. I was a nervous wreck. My marriage almost ended. I trembled. Instead of feeling fearless and accomplished, I felt flung out into space, without home or self or ground beneath my feet. I am still recovering from this spoilt adventure. And I am angry about this, because this trip was supposed to save me, but it's almost as if the journey pur growth on hold. Though there are more than numerous moments I can recall that were joyful and enlightening, that cracked my world open, right now all I have left is feeling lost. Being back, I feel connected with the old emotions, but also detached. I wonder how I let it all get away from me. When I lost my ambition. Why no one questioned my torpor and lack of discipline. I was unemployed. broke. aimless. drifting. depressed. strange. It didn't bother me; I was in a fog, sometimes contented enough. I feel angry for this lapse. I could have been doing so much more. But I didn't. I waited. I remained tight in a bud. And then I tried to blossom. But that also stung and I got strung out and all was terrible. Here's another opportunity. And yet I feel so behind, catching up with myself, as well as with my peers and contemportaries. I suppose I have to follow natural time and my own true path. I am striding toward the horizon once again, looking back quizzical, forward momentum finally mine.

The Foreshadowing Pinata

where was I? Oh yes, standing in the doorway of a dormroom decorated just for me. At the center of a cluster of my closest friends, including my future husband, hung a colorful (is there any other kind?) pinata, in the shape of a donkey. Or is that some kind of alpaca? Its shape is distinctive, classic Mexican, so maybe it's a burro. No matter. It was glorious. And after drinking copiously from my garnet whiskey goblet, I busted into my prize, or is the pinata the keeper of prizes? From its paper flanks flowed tiny wrestlers, matchbox trucks and golden wrapped hazelnut candies. The boon was courtesy of Malcolm via the Group W Bench, a local legend headshop where we both spent time behind the cluttered glass cases. I never would have guessed that eight years later we would be married and living in Mexico, and I would be battling another birthday pinata from the front porch of our beach front home. Was it always meant to be?

Collective Birds

a parliament of owls
an exaltation of larks
a watch of nightingales
a covey of partridges
a nye of pheasants
a congregation of plovers
a murder of ravens
a host of sparrows
a building or rooks
a murmuration of starlings
a venue of vultures
a herd of wrens

a writer without a plot

writing every day, according to bird by bird is the best way to become a better writer. It's why I started this blog. Feeling frustrated and frightened. What a waste. or maybe not. I already squandered so many opportunities. Perhaps I need to start again with a morning regimen of writing at the library. Why am I not inspired? Why do I have nothing to say? What am I afraid of? I need to get into a writing program. Perhaps before September. But what if I'm the only one there without drive or inclination? Why do worse writers have more to say? oh, Fuck all.