stream

The place where everything went wrong,

where all the layers of madness heretofore resided within,

No Man’s Land as palimpsest.

And now, hermeneutics,

and maybe a delicate surgical procedure will be implemented,

in order to understand

this life

this pain

this healing

this awakening-

metanoia.

The raving man on the street said to only me,

“Once you’re pure, you never want to go back to the gutter.”

He understands the gutter is everywhere and all around.

One false move, one sticky trick of the mind

and it’s right back where you started, bud.

Even if you’ve been stripped bare by that pure fire,

even if you no longer fear death.

O Chiron, guard my gate!

With flaming sword and blaring iPod!

I can only be open to so much pain

and I no longer want to feel the fear of

abu Ghraib.

Where’s the switch to turn this off?

Cue the elegy!

If only we still had ticker tape

to throw out windows and watch as it twirls and swirls

to the ground.

Thirty-two dead in Virginia and the stock market hit 13,000.

Doesn’t this deserve a parade?

Intermission

We are such busy little bees.

We name our buildings,

categorize, label,

divide and divide again.

Otherwise,

we’d collapse under the weight of history.

Otherwise,

we’d come face to face with the fact

we are inconsequential.

My books are alphabetized,

my closet is in order,

it’s my thoughts that worry me,

they refuse to be filed under anything.

There are so many people,

and hardly any of them speak English.

One day we may run out of things for us to do,

except we just keep creating problems,

and problems need solutions.

So many people and not all of us made for greatness.

You either go to the world or the world comes to you,

and there will always be those who live off the crumbs of others.

Just keep on smiling,

no one likes a sour puss.

And what am I to make of the fact

that the productivity of this nation

lies by the side of a highway exit ramp in the weeds?

Maybe this, “Prosperity ripened the principal of decay.”

A gob of spit on the side of the road has as much life in it as you do-

it’s all allegory.

No land will save you.

No highway will save you.

No computer will save you.

No stock market will save you.

Fight for your life

as if your life depended on it,

because it does.

The American Dream is a myth.

Prosperity is a myth.

Decay is a myth-

we’re nothing but stories.

Manifest Destiny is a story

God is a story

electricity

television

wagon wheels and Hitler

Rauschenberg erases a de Kooning

Ronald Reagan ends Communism, single handed.

All stories.

Oh, but the stories I could tell you!

They must come out my mouth faster than my breath

in order to survive

this loneliness.

Years ago, someone told me,

“You weren’t born so much as your father spit you from his mouth.”

So I am my father’s story, too.

And his story lives on because I’m not dead yet, not really.

But the story is only as good as the teller.

So please, little bees,

gather ‘round my knees

and pay attention.

In my stories you will see yourselves,

the mirror cracked,

stigmata or stigma is for you to decide.

But I feel it’s important to warn you,

my love won’t save anyone

and my compassion will only make you fat and lazy.

And keep moving along

all you slack jawed, glassy eyed folk,

this story isn’t for your kind.

My kind.

My kind understands the needle

and the antichrist.

We understand the pills,

the ringing in the ears,

the knife,

the shadows and the voices that lead us to all of the above.

Our stories are better than yours, slack jaws,

but who the hell listens anyway?

You can forget about your A-rabs and their Allah,

the real war is against my kind and we don’t carry enough credit to win it.

We’re turned into ghosts who haunt the outer fringes,

our lips krazy glued together to stop

the outpouring of “how things really happened.”

But remember, the written word mimics speech.

My kind,

we’re not angry nearly enough.

Anger is good as long as you believe no one owes you anything

and righteous anger is power-

it turns those stories right on their ear and makes those myths stand to attention!

Tell the world to fuck off in the most obscene way possible,

there will be others around to love the children

and pick daisies.

You can spend your whole lives tackling the same problem from different angles

and never reach

apotheosis.

So quit acting like a martyr,

the fey little St. Sebastian tied to a tree,

penis limp;

that won’t get you anywhere.

Choose instead St. Theresa,

the Bernini version;

sexual ecstasy through enlightenment.

Arrows pierce her skin with excruciating metaphysical pleasure.

Just looking at her makes my nerves stand on end.

Can you feel it?

No?

You’re not trying hard enough!

Maybe she didn’t see God so much as the power of her own pussy but

Jesus was right; the Kingdom of Heaven truly is within us.

He knew, when the world’s too ugly to bear

look inward, inward, always inward.

Your skin will sag and rot off your bones

long before your mind catches up to all it knows.

Even the enlightened don’t know the full story.

The full story is nothing.

Creation and destruction, they have their dance to do,

we’re just along for the ride.

The trick is to gather as much light as you can along the way;

feast on light until you see the beginnings and ends of all things.

Until you talk in puzzles and dream the future.

Until you understand all is love

and you are all.

There may be a time when you, too

will explode out into the universe,

your self transformed,

and you, too

will have to forge ahead alone

into this new world of light and truth,

trying to find words for the wordless.

No Man’s Land as palimpsest;

awakenings upon awakenings.

More than in the Burned Over District,

when so many gave in to their longings for release

and labeled the feeling “God.”

Don’t you know, in God we read the opaques?

Oh! I’m burned over!

Lord, I am weary let me rest.

There’s nothing that can save me now because

there’s nothing to be saved from.

There never was, apparently.

So why now do I long for something better when I know better?

I have no illusions about changing the world,

I just don’t want to be another Emily Dickinson-

a weird lesbian who stuffed her drawers with poetry.

Then again, I know there are worse ways to be.

Creation and destruction,

the inner is outer and back again

and everything is Mind

and my mind is free.

Send smoke signals,

Morse code, semaphore,

telegram and telephone,

everyone needs to know

we are free.

Oh my god we are free.

Intermission

A muddle of words on the tongue-

tai chi instead of Chai tea.

Something that simple can remind me of the vastness of difference.

A muddle of thoughts,

and I believe that everything I’ve thought, seen, believed

about my life is wrong,

and in a moment,

the potential makes me want to crawl out of my skin,

in a moment,

I will see myself in my life as I really was.

I begin to free fall.

Then, thought shifts again and everything is exactly as it’s always been.

Would it be so bad to lose this last bit of myself when so much has fallen away?

And so I continue to remember.

Fifteen years as a hausfrau without a haus of my own;

the years now lined up like empty Mason jars on a cellar shelf.

The cupboards were always full,

the beds were made,

the only place dust gathered was in my womb.

I was a widowed wife of nothing,

always with the undercurrent of not wanting to be tied down to anything.

I learned that a sense of duty is a prison;

that you can’t help anyone who won’t help themselves

and love is wasted on those who don’t understand what love is.

It’s no wonder the only thing that makes me happy now

is potential.

Like echoes heard in the marble hall of a museum,

telling me what I want is “over there, you’re so close.”

Further back,

I remember all the summer evenings

alone at my bedroom window where the smell of cut grass and old wood mingled,

sometimes with rain.

The strange habit of giving people too much power over me

began at this window, or thereabouts.

Outside, the neighborhood a lazy swirl of activity in the dying light of the day

while downstairs,

the clinking of dishes, canned laughter from the TV

and voices muffled by heavy walls and floors-

I was not allowed to be a part of any of it.

All of this – nothing but a way to be made separate

without ever asked permission to do so,

and so I lacked an understanding of my relation to the world around me

and I observed everything through the lens of fear.

And how could I not fear, when the shocks of violence

burst out like scattershot through those early years?

Moving inward, deeper still, to places of my own devising.

In closets, under stairs and beds,

tiny places ruled by my imagination called “My Own.”

Is there fear here, too?

My feet must firmly touch the ground eventually,

to a place where I’m no longer betrayed by even my own mind,

or the cruelties of others.

Why did it take so long to land here?

Am I only deceiving myself in thinking the ground beneath me will hold firm?

I sometimes think I am ruined for life.

A more recent time;

it’s dark on the edges of morning

and I wake, cold.

Maybe my body has confused sleep with death

and I long to return

rather than put my feet to the floor and move forward

through inevitability.

Some of us are addicted to wanting to die and don’t realize this is living, too.

I haven’t yet learned I have to run,

hurtling through space straight towards the truth,

right on into it,

until I feel it dissipate around me.

So what remains to grasp onto?

To grasp at anything

is to misunderstand everything.

And now I remember

the two Indian brothers who shared a hospital room across from mine

after my first suicide attempt.

They couldn't speak English

and when the nurse took their blood
it ran down their stick arms
bright red and thin as water.

Oh, how they cried,
so small and so afraid,
the pain of the world in their contorted faces.

I went home the next morning and nothing changed,
just one cold, rainy March day after another.
It’s only now, all these years later

that I can allow my heart to break wide open.

But this must be about joy-

suffering we know.

We must find joy

which languishes in the corners

while misery grows exponentially.

We must accept life as it really is,

and sit in all this muck

this fear this anxiety this despair

this meaninglessness this craziness

and still feel so joyful that we wish our hearts

would burst.

Is it possible?

There must be a naming, a possessing of this joy,

we must stake our claim and not let go.

This is our true destiny made manifest.

Now,

I want to tell you about my kind.

The women separated

from themselves and the world around them

by the violence of men-

they are my kind.

The ones who are working

their way back to themselves

and the ones who made it back,

they are my kind.

Those, whose love is never returned,

who go for months without the touch of another.

The light catcher,

the artist,

the awakened

are all my kind.

The ones who struggle inside for something better,

the self aware

the clairvoyant

the diviners.

The bulimic but not the anorexic,

the prostitute but not the whore.

The talkers

Scheherazade

the ones in silence

the deaf, blind, dumb.

The ones who know it’s all meaningless but try anyway.

Marsyas

Artemis

Cassandra.

The fighter but not the soldier

the truthful and the trickster.

The birds

trees

rocks

ocean,

my kind.

Intermission

Long ago, gods and goddesses were buried alive at Delphi

when the irrepressible wave

of piety and repression loomed on the horizon.

Their stories past usefulness,

they were shunted, if not out of memory then out of sight.

It’s a generational leitmotif,

these cruel attempts to wipe out what we see in others

and refuse to accept in ourselves

because we never understand we can all be holy.

Yet every day, I hear church bells play this song,

“‘Tis a gift to be simple

‘tis a gift to be free,

‘tis a gift to come down where we ought to be.

And when we find ourselves in the place just right

‘twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gained

to bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed

to turn, turn will be our delight

‘til by turning, turning we come out right.”

So I know I’m not alone

in this universe that began as a tiny point of purity

with no conceptions or assumptions.

This is where we must return,

but we are here in our present time

called the Quaternary Age,

and we’re divided into

earth

water

fire

air-

inner harmony is now more imperative than ever

and harmony is another word for understanding.

Some say it’s the Fourth Turning, a time of chaos.

Yet as long as we have existed, there has never been a time

when there wasn’t chaos;

to believe otherwise is to believe more myths.

Maybe we don’t remember the other times,

we’ve repressed our Devonian DNA in the interest of progress,

traded in our instinctual memories for air conditioning and processed meats.

Or maybe this really is our first time around

and maybe we don’t pay attention to history.

Hold on tight anyway,

we’re in for a very bumpy ride

and you need to keep your third eye open at all times.

Presence.

Practice.

Love.

You will always find the infinite within the finite.

In Process, No Title

Black boot on snow crunches
and the beaver, just a few feet away,
so slick and narrow of body,
dives into the water and disappears.
His brown fur gleamed in the sunlight.

Not like the two deer that one time years ago,
whose coats were a dull, soft brown and covered in ticks.
The male was skittish and moved further away
but the female, she stayed still, watching
as I inched closer until I could touch her flank
while our eyes locked and we created a moment
of acknowledgement. A moment of accord.

“But did you touch it?” My friend asked.
She still mourned her nephew, dead in the first days
of Afghanistan, 2001,
and who once touched a deer in the wild.
“No, I didn’t touch it.”
Her face relaxed, then smiled with satisfaction.

Her last words to him, “Don’t go.”

The Good Times

As everything is so fresh, my mind keeps returning to the upsetting and sad events of the past few days, especially yesterday. But, when that happens I remind myself to think of a good memory of Kenyon, in order to diminish the bad memories.

I'm remembering his love of vanilla ice cream. I would take him to an outdoor ice cream shop every summer. He was so adorable, with the ice cream around his mouth.
Our walks in Hueston Woods, and how he followed me in the nearly dry creek, hopping from one rock to another, exactly as I did. He would stop and look at me a bit uncertainly and with my encouragement make it to the next rock.
His love of children.
His need to be the center of attention at ALL times.
How warm and soft he felt.
Our daily walks around the neighborhood.
When I'd put him in the car, he'd immediately scramble over to the driver's side and sit up so proud, with his chest puffed out, like he thought he could drive!
How, despite his small size, he could still nearly push me out of bed.
The way he'd be right at the door to greet me.
So many good memories.

A Different Way

The logistics are tough.
Navigating in a world made new by loss so white hot and deep. How? But so much in life just happens, with no planning or foresight of my own.
But how, anyway?
I am sensitive to the energies around us and feel suffering deeply. Before, when feeling overwhelmed by the cruelties of others, I could think to myself, "At least I have Kenyon." A simple idea with profound meaning for me, and great comfort. I believed that my love and care of him helped create balance in some way. Helped reaffirm the good in this plane of existence.
I no longer have that.
I no longer have Kenyon.
I am sent reeling out, unmoored, hysterical, bereft.
My stalwart companion gone.

For Kenyon, and Others

The world becomes a cold stranger

when you lose someone you love.

Why always at the beginning of Spring?

Good Friday, March, April,

rain, wind, dark skies.

No matter how profound

and inconsolable

there will never be, never,

another time you will

feel them in your arms.

Kenyon

Two months after my father passed away, I went to a rescue shelter that cared only for Shelties. A little dog walked up to me and stood next to me and stared at me for a long time. He wouldn't play catch, he ignored the other dogs. The next day I returned, ready to adopt a different dog. I found out that dog had bitten a little girl. And there was that little dog again, right at my feet, staring up at me. He remembered me. He came home with me that day, nearly seven years ago.
Kenyon was for most of those years my only friend and my only family. He was and is loved so deeply and so profoundly by me that I can't begin to put it into words. He has been a steady source of unconditional love and comfort to me.

I knew for a while he wasn't in the best of health, but he was happy, content, eager to go on walks even if it meant he moved slower. Tonight, he collapsed. I rushed him to the vet's which is where he is now, hooked up to an IV because he is severely dehydrated. The outlook is grim. There's a small chance the fluids will improve his situation, maybe enough so he can come home for a little while longer. Maybe I am writing that to fool myself into thinking it will be ok, delaying the inevitable because it's too difficult to let go. It's painful enough knowing he is alone in a cage, sick and in pain.

I truly do not know how I will go through my day to day without him.

Renewal

Had a few quiet moments to myself to walk in the woods at Q's aunt's house. There is an old stone wall, the kind I saw all the time when I lived in Massachusetts, and large pine trees, like the one in the backyard at the home where I grew up. I just don't see these things where I live now and I've missed them so much that a part of me has dried up due to this lack. A disconnection there. Seeing those things again, and to be in the woods, to hear the crunching of snow and the rushing of the creek water, all felt like renewal.
I feel it inside of me, this dry, empty longing that nothing around here will fill or repair. There's a comfort and familiarity when I am back there that I don't feel here where I live. Now, thanks to my love, I will have more opportunities to return to New England and New York and fill that space up and hopefully feel some peace and fulfillment because of it.

Bad News

There really is a time
when bad news is heard
(in such a way that it is meant not to upset)
and one falls to one’s knees
and calls out
futilely,
“Jesus.”

Just Like Always

The steady grace of an empty chair,

unwavering in its loyalty

to all you hope for unto death,

may creak and sigh under your expectations

but never complain of remaining empty

lo, all these years.

Just like in a van Gogh,

longing for company and anxious for Jerusalem,

its negative space mute witness

to all that never was.

Asleep or Awake

What is it that we're really saying when we wish for other things?

Vignette IV-Unfinished

Another cold and dreary day

to set along the other cold and dreary days.

A steady drizzle covers my eyeglasses despite the large hood covering my head.

People appear as islands even more so on rainy days.

A young boy runs in circles in front of the Federal Reserve,

ignored by his mother but not by the homeless man who watches him.

A baby in a stroller sits under a blanket several feet away

from the same mother, ignored, too.

Water from a puddle soaks through my cheap shoes, chilling my toes.

Inevitably, someone will say, “At least it’s not snow.”

The rain does nothing for this ugly city.

Inside, the woman sitting at the front lobby desk never has anything to do.

She stares dreamily out the glass walls,

she can’t really be seeing the city with that look on her face.

She poses quietly, like a woman in a 19^th century painting, a Degas counter girl

or a dance rat; a woman bathing or brushing her hair.

She, too has no privacy.

Even on the elevators we are watched.

And we watch ourselves in our reflections in the doors.

We watch each other but time still seems to fly by us

like a silver streamer in the wind.

What is it that we gain from watching?

Hospice

This Saturday I am scheduled to attend an all day training class at a hospice. I have volunteered for the so-called "11th Hour" program, which if not obvious from the name means being with the dying in their last moments if they so request.
I'm nervous. Clearly this isn't something I want to mess up. But, I've wanted to do this for quite some time. My father died in the same hospice organization nearly seven years ago and I was so impressed and grateful with their care, and would like to be a part of that.
I don't fear death. I fear lots of things, but not death. I fear growing old, being laid-off from my job, never doing what I am meant to do, being ordinary and/or bourgeois, marriage, babies, menopause, heights. But death is just the way we move from one mode of existence to another. If I am able to assist someone in that transition then I would feel like I've done valuable work in my life. I also hope I can bring comfort to those who remain after their loved one has died; what a tough place to be in life. In a poem I'm working on I wrote,

Grief doesn’t lie.

It is sharp, penetrating,

a deliverer of the inconsolable and undeniable facts

that once given will eventually leave,

though slowly,

easing its way out the door.

This should be quite a learning experience, I look forward to it.

When I Was Happy

Happiness is not a memory.

Remembering is as Vast as Forgetting

I remember every sky

and how the light shone

or how it did not shine.

I remember every ocean

long after it has become an unfamiliar touch

and all that remains is a moon-like energy that lacks intuition.

The burden of light.

The resistance of water.

Every breath a new beginning

yet every day people die, and some of them I love.

And they die.

And they die.

Doesn’t the universe ever grow tired of me?

Stupid, damaged, holy fool that I am.

Vignettes I-III Unfinished

I.

The homeless man is shaving this morning. He stands out on the sidewalk, no water, the cream on his face a shock of white against his brown skin and layers of clothing all the same dark gray-green color. He uses a cathedral window covered in a black iron grill as a mirror. There is nothing in the air but the smell of shave cream, held in place by cold, gray clouds.

II.

The tropical plants are now mixed with poinsettias and oversize Christmas decorations and a pattern of golden light shimmers on the low ceiling above the fountain. The reverberations of voices mix with water that here gushes up, there falls down over blue tiles.

Sometimes small birds fly into the lobby and for a while live in the Ficus trees and find crumbs of food on the restaurant floor. Often they fly up, up high above to the windows that look out over Fourth Street, maybe to their old home, and they sit on the ledge and watch. Then one day they have disappeared.

The walls of the lobby are covered in a thin veneer of travertine, as any Louis Kahn influenced building would be. Behind that a harsh, rough gray concrete, behind that the offices that surround this lobby of restrained tropics and giant Christmas tree ornaments. The water and glass and stone are all carefully orchestrated to create a place, a mood, maybe a feeling of self satisfaction that not even a tiny bird lost on the inside looking out should disturb.

III.

It seems in an effort to fashion a decorative theme to create a calm environment, the opposite happens. So it is with hospitals and so it is with this office. Tan may be considered a neutral color but once it is the repository of so much dissatisfaction it becomes anything but neutral.

To see the same color on walls, on partitions, on desks feels claustrophobic; the only reprieve for the eye is the carpet which is a couple of shades darker than everything else and scattered with flecks of red and purple.

The windows, if one is lucky enough to be near them, are almost always filthy, a quality that is enhanced on dark and dreary days of which lately there have been plenty.

The windows are like many other features, meant only for certain people. So are real walls and doors, and furniture made with solid wood.

Those that reside in these special places are primarily men, overwhelmingly white, with wives and children, of which they often complain about, and are so deep in debt that they will never escape.

Between Hell and Reason

"Politics and the fate of mankind are shaped by men without greatness. Those who possess greatness are not in politics." Albert Camus

"Patriotism is a way of loving one's country that consists in never wanting that country to be unjust, and in telling it so. But patriotism itself has never been enough to make men rise to the strange struggle that is theirs. There must also be the delicacy of heart that feels repugnance at each compromise; the dignity the bourgeoisie lacks; and in a word, the capacity to say no." Albert Camus

Late December

In the woods, today even the birds are quiet.

The sun is bright and blinding, defying its December temperament.

It’s good to see much is still alive in the winter.

The water in the creek will be long gone by summer

and delicate branches,

like so many Chinese brushstrokes,

will be hidden by April.

What is it this world wants from us?

There are times when the loneliness is so intense

it becomes a sharp anxiety

and there is nothing to do about any of it but wait it out

until it subsides

and reverts back to its regular ache.

At least here, surrounded by the ageless,

being alone becomes a minor tragedy.

Even this wanting to die

means nothing when placed against it.

Passage

There was a time when I knew everything.

Bodhisattva,

creator of new worlds,

no longer earth bound.

The light was consumed by my heart

and it dispersed throughout, down to the marrow of my consciousness,

my dreams altered.

Now I stand on the edge to nothing,

of being unknown.

What a relief.

The things that mean the most can’t be explained

and I’m unable to name what has been possessed,

it lives only in the silences now.

As when I was a little girl, I pass my fingers across my lips,

closing, then locking

and toss away the key.

Today I watch as birds drop from the trees like little brown leaves,

momentarily staining the light through the branches

Let it go, let it go,

let all of it go.

"Certain Slant of Light"

Stopped at a red light I looked in my rear view mirror and was laid low by the evening sky a dark blue with no pinks or golds just deepening blue before darkness. I felt an urge to drive off into that blue light and then run and run and keep on going into that sky and not stop for anything (there has to be something better than this now life). And then I remembered being young and seeing that same sky in a different place and a different time and a feeling of comfort came over me so sweet. Wistful for youth.

Stormy Night

I dreamed I was laying in bed in the bedroom of the house I grew up in. Was my father still alive? I heard the wind blowing from the snow storm and dreamed it was the wind making the tree branches scrape against the bedroom window. I remember the tree that stood so close to the house. I thought to myself I would rearrange the furniture the next day so that it was as it used to be. Why is the bed here instead of where it's always been? Who was in the house? I sensed my father. There was a light on somewhere outside my room, a golden, warm glow. In the dream, I was aware of my boyfriend lying next to me as he lay next to me in my sleep.
Eerie how real it all felt.

I woke up with a gasp, a bit afraid, and struggled for a while trying to locate myself. So disoriented. Here I am, in my home, far away from what has not been my home for 25 years. Hours later and I still can't shake this dream.