Waterline

Lady Wreck raises her glass
and drinks to the stiffness
in her neck, lostness of the day.
She veers into the sofa, her helm
of anxiety crashes into waves
of ambient light and laugh tracks.

Lady Wreck is so grateful to be here,
hello, hello, it’s lovely to be back
where no one can see her
billowed under blankets,
the words of her friend in a loop:

there are refrigerated trucks
outside on the streets
full of dead bodies

Lady Wreck sets her head down,
sweats, shivers, breathes in all
the hull of her body (a dinghy)
wouldn’t allow before,
takes the full weight
of the ocean on board.

As Easy as Herding a Duck

"How do you herd a duck?" is a Google search string I've typed recently, and of course, I found a helpful video on YouTube. What we've learned in the past two weeks as we take the ducks to and from their tractor, is that when frightened, ducks will play-doh themselves through small spaces, get stuck in concrete blocks, huddle in brambles, and veer off under stairwells then shoot out the bottom openings like "Vend-O-Duck."

We've also learned that they have personal kinespheres, just like people do, and once you learn their comfortable space bubble, you can use their flock instincts, and some cooked corn, to get them to go where you want them to (mostly). This morning we had our first real success, getting them out of the brooder in the greenhouse, and outside to the pyramid without any real snags. This is the first morning they are out there early, rather than later, and with any luck, we'll get them into their coop tonight.

A couple of weeks before lockdowns and social distancing began, eight ducklings arrived at our local post office and I got a call from the postmaster, Fran, to come "pick up your box full of chirps." We've been fortunate for the past two months to be preoccupied with ducklings. We were not prepared for the constant stream of care required, or the endless questioning over brooder light wattage, how to build a secure coop, or what kind of grit is needed for their digestion. But I am glad we've had the vast opportunities for creative problem solving while we've been sheltering in place. It's kept our minds and bodies busy.

I've annoyed countless friends with texts of duck pics (for the record, you really need to proofread your text messages when mentioning ducks). I've hounded my friend Howard, the Animal Whisperer, for advice and guidance.

Ducks grow fast. They are messy. They outgrew everything within a few weeks, and we lost two of them (Moonlight and The Undertoad). They've spent the past few weeks growing in a brooder made out of a livestock waterer, in a corner of the warm greenhouse.

We began to build a coop with supplies picked up, and later had delivered, the chicken wire and two by fours piling up outside our house. We researched, and planned, and neither of us has carpentry skills or any particular spatial genius. We ended up with what I call "Patchy Milatchy," or "The Duck Bunker," or "The Quack Shack."

The whole build was a "it's a learning experience!" of problems overcome with ah-ha solutions. One I applied yesterday. A couple of screws were poking out of the walk-up side of the ramp, so at Dan's suggestion, I grabbed a couple of wine corks and screwed them on. Ingenious.

The coop has to be weasel proof, and it is, we hope. It is so tightly built, that when the wood swells during rainy weather, the door is difficult to shut. It's do-able, and then locked down with two sliding hasps.

We also built a "duck tractor," a moveable safe haven for them to be in while we're not out on the property with them. It's a pyramid, because that was the easiest to build with the materials we had, and also Dan's idea.

I'm not sure what would be out there for them if I was left to my own devices to build something. I found myself outside this week on a sunny day, snagged in a curl of poultry netting, with a handful of those jabby fenceposts at my feet, trying to envision a duck run with the materials we had left over. I gave up. So for now, the ducks will move from their coop to the tractor, or out onto the pond.

My next search string for Google is, "How do you get ducks to come in from swimming on the pond?"

Sunday Funnies (or not so)

A Short List of Things I No Longer Lick

Envelopes, to seal
A finger, to coax a page turn
The nib of a drying pen (rare, but still)
Any frayed end of yarn or string
A finger, to pick up a small piece of paper
A finger, to twiddle a plastic bag open

Throwing Confetti Into a Vacuum Cleaner

Lists are just a way to feel in control of your life, and to put a sense of order to your day. I go through phases of making them and abandoning them. Not making a list means "anything can happen," but making a list sort of means the same thing. You are not in control.

The daybook I put together for 2020/21 is dormant right now, sitting on the edge of my desk. I'm not sure when I opened it last. If we were not in the midst of a pandemic, and all was well in the world, I'd be in full swing with a residency at an elementary school where I'd be teaching writing for the stage. Last night would have been the April edition of the Only an Hour Variety Hour, and today there would be a workshop in the Wunderbarn. We'd have overnight guests here, too. The coffee would be percolating, and breakfast plans would be underway.

Instead, I'm here with my cold cup of coffee, considering making a list so I don't lose my mind, or be the cause of my husband losing his, or spend too much time texting friends terrible YouTube videos or duck photos.

There's a lot of "would have been," that wants to be "is," and with a series of present moments that shift from doom to dim, I'm finding it difficult to make any plans. Everything feels like throwing confetti into a vacuum cleaner.

A Wise Woman

By our pond the river birch resists a borer,
grows without applause for shows,
releases catkins, curls her bark, gets older —
knows when it's time to let things go.

•

There are so many beautiful and unique trees on our property, but I think my favorite so far is the river birch. It has a quality of quiet the other trees don't. This quiet is much needed right now, and was last year as well when we moved here and my mother was dying. Last spring when I was panic researching the types of trees I was seeing with the Audubon Guide to Trees, I gave up on the wych elm, which beguiled me with its strange, early leaves that looked like alien hairdos. Even a visiting arborist shrugged over it. I identified it later by downloading an app, and felt like I'd cheated. But that day, in my disappointment, the river birch beckoned for me to sit and and just be. It had let go of a lot of the little branches in a recent windstorm, and I got a sense of calm from being under it, looking up at the clouds and a twinkle of glossy leaves. It is somehow both shaggy and stately, like a wise woman. I find her branches after storms, little reminders that it is good to let go, to allow for new growth.

Have You Sanitized the Cat Yet?

Our daily rituals are now opportunities for infection. I find myself in a constant internal dialogue about cleanliness. Have you sanitized the doorknobs since receiving that package? You left it outside for 24 hours in the sunshine, then brought it into the kitchen where you took out the contents. You wiped the contents down, broke down the box, put the box in the recycling outside, and then you washed your hands, but did you sanitize the doorknob? The light switch? What else did you touch? Should you sanitize the cat? And what about your shoes? Have you cleaned your shoes? On the news last night they were saying that steps you take could be steps toward infection. The virus might be on your soles now.

Yesterday morning we discussed what dinner ingredients we had and I darkly joked that we wouldn't have anything to talk about at 3 p.m. since we now had a plan. We are fortunate to be food secure here, for the moment. Plenty of tuna and chickpeas, leafy greens growing, and Dan bakes bread. I look forward to the day when what we are growing we are able to share.

Our lives are so routine I can tell you where I'll be in an hour and a half, or in three hours, or at 6 p.m. In a normal world, routine is comforting, but this kind of routine is different. It's an attempt to control time, similar to how life in a nursing home operates. I'm hyper-aware of the hour. I have about another 30 minutes before I'll be sitting at the kitchen table with my husband, discussing our plans for the day.

I took a break from Facebook to avoid the endless scrolling, and everyone else's anxieties, tips and advice, and the constant stream of videos, free entertainment, and good ideas.

Am I being more productive? Not really. I feel frozen, unable to fire up the engines of energy required to pursue any purposeful project, be it paying work, or non-paying pursuits that I have begun and have stalled, collaborations, writing groups, attempts at juggling, and piano practice.

Laundry gets done. I clean the floors on my hands and knees. Animal care predicates a lot of my daily schedule, as does meal planning. I am capable of daily movement (circus training, yoga, walking) and writing, and that is about all. It feels useless at this time, but it is what I can do, and what makes me feel normal and sane.

Yesterday, after propping up a sagging maple branch, treating the goats to some pear scraps from breakfast, and collecting kindling for a fire, I walked out and looked into the surface of the pond. What I saw was a slice of the world upside down, and I knew I could stand and stare at it for as long as I wanted without having to wash my hands.

Freestones

There were plenty of peaches last August —
a hundred thousand suns drowsed on branches,
some fallen already, bites out of them.
The rule was no eating as you filled the basket,
but there were bites out of the ones on the ground,
people were cheating. How could you not
in the face of all that plumpness, sweetness
that buzzed with luscious fruit magnetism?
Everyone darted through the trees like insects,
drunk on the togetherness of strangers devoted
to a common cause,  and the children
of the family who tended the trees
gave everyone a little cart to wheel
through the rows, to make the hoarding
easier, a lighter load.

You went for another basket and then we had way
too many peaches for our household of six,
so I peeled and froze a bunch after we gorged
on all we could, and now, months later, with
all of us a safe distance apart, I bake a pie:

Defrost
and drain
the extra juices
so the crust
isn’t soggy,
use a binder
like cornstarch
and surprise,
it turns out
to be artificial,
like holding
a conversation
with a peach
through a bad
phone line,
its voice
cracking
through the crust
and crumble,
a squeak,
peep,
pop,
pip,
pit.

The Other: A Prayer for Comfort

The comfort I need now
is in the sawblade of anger
bearing down
instead of saddling up
my merry-go-round
of horses again.
With some relaxation,
the teeth of the saw
will do the work, break
a clean line,
a boundary.

The comfort I need now
is to let the long story
of apathy and depression
inside my home, and fire up
the kettle of complaint
to feel its hiss and piss
and oh, what is that,
more anger, rising?
How it changes the air,
clings to walls, tears up
on the windows,
slides down
every surface,
pools to reflect
my grubby face.

The comfort I need now
is the needle of sadness
its eye threaded with flame,
the point darting tiny holes
in the perfect linen
of my childhood.

The comfort I need now
is the agility of fear
and its whisper of secrets
I already heard but ignored,
the ones I learned from dreams.

The comfort I need now
is a spotlight, a flashlight,
a candle will do,
so I can stand in the light
of my shame
for this instant of forever.
You have come to understand
that I don’t know anything
and I look jowly
with a light on me like this,
saggy with age, tired.

The comfort I need now
is for you to see
who I really am,
my shadow,
oddly shaped
from the happiness
of the sun, twin
goofs, spoofs
of each other.
See how when one exits
the other
isn’t far
behind.

It's Not Easy Being Green

When you can say, "I made this over 30 years ago," you are no longer young. You might not be ancient old yet, but if you were capable of making something out of material other than play-doh in the late 80's or early 90s, you're not young anymore. You were young then. You were ready for everything, and full of the world.

The one thing I did yesterday that was satisfying and met with some success (I burnt our dinner, and had quite a flap of a time getting ducks back inside, and I'm generally itchy and miserable right now but I'm alive), was repainting and refreshing a garden sign I made for my parents over 30 years ago.

The sign reads "It's not easy being green - Kermit the Frog." I can hear the enthusiasm in my mother's voice as she tells me she and dad discussed possible garden quotes and this one was the winner. I remember my choice of Celtic letterform, and the embellishment with a thistle.

I was smitten with the meaning of thistles, which is bravery, courage, and loyalty in the face of treachery. I had to add something symbolic and high falutin' because I was 20 and reading Wuthering Heights and the poetry of William Blake. I wore a lot of black then, and had a bad heart rhythm, and was anemic with poetry. I never thought about how a thistle is a garden weed. If my parents eye rolled at the thistle, I never saw it. They loved the sign, and placed it on the gate that led into their little kitchen garden patch where it remained for several years. This was the garden where Mom grew tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, and oregano, and the contents inspired her perfection of eggplant parmesan, which she made often.

When they took down the fence, the sign disappeared, until a couple of years ago when I found it in the basement of their house, just as it was about to be sold. There it was, screwed into the bottom of one of dad's stained glass work tables where he'd used it to create a side for a glass filing system. It was still in service. When I saw it, the question that governed that time in our lives loomed: Did I want it? My sister and I had spent almost a year clearing out our parent's house -- selling, giving away, or sheepishly acquiring the objects of mom's life. I decided I wanted the sign, found a screwdriver, and worked out the screws. I took the sign home where I put it on the back porch of our rental, where it didn't make much sense.

When we moved to our new home, the garden sign ended up out by the kitchen garden, where it sat on a green plastic chair. It caught my eye recently. It was stained with mold, and looking faded. I had plenty of time to refresh it in the middle of an isolating afternoon, so yesterday I sat out on the grass by the duck tractor and spent an hour or so painting. I traced over my old letterforms, the ascenders and descenders of my youth, letters robust with feeling and intent. I replaced only one thing. The thistle. In its place is a cotyledon -- the first leaves of a plant. A simple sprout that can be anything. Ready for the world.

Assignment for Self-Isolation

Turn on the oven for no reason at all.
Regard every object in your room with a hello, including the nail file.
Listen to that noise you can’t identify without trying to name it.
Describe your shoe, in detail. Now you’ve said something about death.
Forget a relative’s name, then sort through old photos as if you’ll remember.
Try to describe the sky without using the words blue, cloud, or paperweight.
Tell us what you’re really feeling right now.
Sing a song about three lies you’ve told.
Pick at that scab. Poke at the wound.
Write about how lists are just attempts at control.
Wonder why you are writing at all.
Be enthusiastic and smiley for no reason, and live with how rotten it feels.
Cheat on the personality quiz.
Make a list of ten things that are impossible.
Make a list of six things that bring you joy.
Make a list of three things that are wrong with the world.
Now title your list poem: “The Narrator Is Not Me”
Build a relationship with someone in your mind, cheat on them,
and write about it in one sentence.
What was the aftermath?
What was the why?
Now write about all of it using only one word.
Tell about your life without using any pronouns or the letter s.
Use a semicolon, then apologize for it.
Use a lot of exclamation marks, and don’t apologize.
Make a list of three lies you have told.
What was the best lie you ever told?

What do you wish you had done differently?
Walk around the bottom of a lake and tell us what you see.
Get angry, lava level angrysad, and then bake a loaf of bread.
Everyone is baking, it's better than thinking too much.
Your oven is warm enough now.

Turncoat of Hope

We’ll get through this
perhaps, it’s feasible,
do-able,
within our reach,
there’s a likelihood,
eventually, some
potentiality,
it’s within the realm,
Deo volente,
well, it's contingent upon,
achievable, actionable,
workable,
probably, sure,
it is likely,
mayhap,
it’s a tossup
of imaginable
chance.

This Poem Can't Live Up To The Epigraph

“The Sun is thousands of times bigger than Earth; I block it out with my hand.”
            - William Stafford

Well now I’ve done it,
started a poem with an epigraph
by none other than William Stafford
and now every syllable of this piece
better live up to the giant, the Sun.
And that means, if you follow the logic
of the metaphor? analogy? aphorism?
(she’s unsure, ha, ha!), I block his words
out with my hand, like that redactive
poetry scheme to reveal a fresher
universe of language:
newer,
younger,
better.

Nope, that’s not me,
not my hand, anymore,
anyway.

I won’t try to sell you this poem.

My pen across the page
makes a sound that tells
me nothing about where it is headed,
(also a thought of Stafford’s,
a beam directly into my brain).

I never know what to expect,
or when everything is finished,
what I've said or omitted,
if anything has taken root
at all, or even if it matters.

The ideal life for words:
under the Earth (not a star!)
instead of above it.

Imbroglio

Wow. Just wow.
It’s time to clean up your mess.
Do a number on this ghost room,
clear out the salmagundi.

The piles are irreverent —
jumbles of photographs,
gum wrappers, spent matches.
Lift the fragile heft of reminders,
that half a fence post, bent pewter steins,
your father’s commemorative lighter,
and the closet filled with your scribbles.

If you can’t let go, just catalogue
the imbroglios of your life
in ten year increments, write out
the tabs, file all those olla podridas
of humiliations.

What are you going to do about this:

the coffee can full of keys
to unlock doors that no longer
exist, from all your family addresses
that are now outlines
in the air.

Self Portrait As Bitten By Mosquitoes

Nightfall, sundown,
dusk, the gloaming,
(as my husband calls it),
twilight, the time you most
want to be outside, perhaps
waiting for the song
of the ice cream truck,
playing a hijinx of hopscotch,
or enjoying a drink on the patio,
you hear their high whine.

Oh the grey clouds that hover
over the pond, or malinger
in damp grasses, or damnedest of all
they slip into the house through
torn screens. Blood bandits.
I’ve fought them all my life.
They love my 98.6 degrees
of Type A positive.

“All mosquitoes that bite you
have your name,” said
my grandfather one summer
when I was poxed with bites
so badly I got a fever.

Last night I caught one
poised by my face, eye-to-eye,
taking my temperature
as I brewed tea,
and I brought my hands
together in a smack so loud
and sharp my palms rang
out like church bells,
a holy palmers' kiss.

When I opened
the book of my hands
there was this text
you read now
written sanguine,
the poem of me.

A Grocery Story

Pretty soon, you’ll hear the drums
that make up the stark accompaniment
for this fragile bulk of emotion
at our grocery stores,
a theatre of masks
under the thrummy-chummy
fluorescent lights.

A man with a plaid scarf
wrapped around the lower half
of his head sets the stage
for a snowstorm drama.

The young woman with tranquil calico
spread across her mouth and nose
is a prairie romance.

A skulk of bandits in the bakery
aisle eye donuts from under
triangles of bandanas:
a western.

The most vulnerable
character is the elder
in an N-95, a turtle
with a walker pocket
full of cat treats
and a cart piled
with TV dinners.
A bewitching
shapeshifter
who has something
important to show
us all if we aren’t
too fearful to see it:

That blue gaff tape
reminds us players
where we must stand
to find our light
at the check-out.

Not a Poem/Letting Go

While everyone else is making masks, or delivering groceries, I've been writing poems. I'm not proud of this. I feel frozen. I'm terrible in a crisis. Introspective, or worse, panicky. When there was a fire here on Thanksgiving, I ran out to the pond, screaming and crying. Very useful. At least I know myself?

I've been outside a lot, as weather will allow it, to help dig an extension to our kitchen garden. Images of this work have come up in a couple of recent poems -- roots, digging, worms. I shared a few photos on Facebook of my gleeful ride on the broadfork. There's circus showmanship in it, but overall, it's work with a capital W. Rocks haven't made it into my recent poems yet, but they have been plentiful.

Yesterday the blades of the broadfork tinged off several rocks as I made attempts to gain ground. I had a hard time gaining any kind of ground. I fought with a long root, got rained on, windblown, heard my shoulder pop, and finally moved the stake that marks the end of the garden because I was too tired to finish the last little wedge.

Yeah, that's right, I cheated. I gave up. My whole body yelped. The space might have held  another cabbage or two. The garden is huge. We'll have plenty of cabbages to share, was my justification.

I have my husband's practicality to thank for this garden. For all the greening here. It was his vision to grow our own food, and his ingenuity and determination have gotten us to a point where we can. We had a shared vision to live in a place like this (years ago we wrote letters to each other describing the details of this house), and the nature is nurturing, especially now, but it was his good sense that brought us to growing lots of vegetables. The greenhouses are filled with growth. The gardens are chilly, but starting to show promise.

My husband is practical. I am not.

While he's been doing the research and work necessary to bring food to tables, I've been perfecting my eight hoop split, writing poetry, and dreaming of being followed by a parade of ducks.

Dig
deeper.

Oh, here's a rock.


A memory of my mother on the floor, with a broken shoulder, the moment that led to her losing everything in her life that brought her joy and purpose -- theatre work, keeping a house, writing letters, snuggling her cat. All of that, gone. Now she's gone.

Dig
deeper.
Root.

I feel a little more of what she might have felt. I'm glad she's not here for this pandemic, and I miss her presence in my life. I hear her message of "You have to let go of what you once were," while I'm outside, digging. Even though there's the hope that I may return to the work that gives me purpose and a lift in my step, right now there's no point in pursuing it. No, I do not want to do Zoom classes, or put on a costume to perform to an audience of screens.

I have no sense of purpose now, other than to disturb worms, and I need to be ok with that. I need to be quiet, and listen.

It might be ok to feel frozen right now. To not know what to do. It might be what's best for me.

But today I need to pull out my mother's sewing machine and make masks, because we have to go out and get groceries.

Dig
deeper.
Worm.

Oh look who it is! Miss Whatever-Her-Name-Was, our home economics teacher in the 8th grade. There she is admonishing me for not paying attention while she showed us how to wind the bobbin. I was daydreaming, of course. Look at that cloud.

For You

Here’s a potato.
That’s it, yes, a potato,
something for you to eat
dug out of the ground
with my hands
which I washed
before digging
and washed again
after (I like dirt under nails)
and then I scrubbed
both the potato and my hands
and now it’s been
out on our porch
for 24 hours
in the sunlight,
so when you’re out
for your walk
you can come
pick it up —
the one potato
that somehow
survived
this winter.

Root

I wish I could say what I am
or am not going to write about
with some air of authority,
but the days offer up what they will —

Canyons of resistance,
the open beak of a dying bird,
a root taken hold in the garden
like an umbilical cord.

I don’t know what any of it means,
the terrible burble of images
I reach down into my throat for
past ribcage,
lungs,
and stomach,
into the glistening dark
of sweet, warm blood
that is the me, you, me, you tide
to pull up a handful of what
rich men fear and mock —

Common shells of silence
or moaning weeds of the real,
all the sudden,
spontaneous operas
sung after we hear
the swarming,
wounded pulses
in our own ears.

Prank

Time has stripped the letters
from all the tabs in my dictionary,
gagged the alphabetical order.
Your guess is as good as mine
where the word “prank” hides.
What a gambol definition is now.
Olly olly oxen free!
Ah, there you are, you hotfooter,
just thirteen entries fooling
over “pray.”

Why Can’t You Just Be Nice

We all need the sun today,
yesterday, tomorrow —
all summer in the now,
and I resent being told
to provide it.

Put on your makeup,
you’ll feel better.

Wear a bra.

Be creative.

Move.

Be nice,
can’t you just
be nice for once?

For my birthday
this year, I woke
up in tears, fired
up the percolator,
and wrote some
obscure metaphor
that only (maybe)
archers understand.
I’m not sure
I even get it.

Target missed.

The cupcakes
I baked for myself
and my husband
were rocks.

Jack called and we sang
Happy Birthday
to each other
in the key of hysteria.

Outside in the rain,
worms celebrated.

I read something tidy
about how what you write
can never be finished until
you’re embarrassed by it.

What a relief.

Everything I’ve written
can be put to bed,
tucked under the covers,
each word nodding off
on greasy pillows of shame.

Nitey-nite.

My mother
wanted to see
what I’d be like
as an old woman,
and well,
this is it:

I am not nice.

The other night
when I let my hair down,
a stink bug droned out,
pinged its body against
the mirror where I caught
my folded face.

My middle finger
is swollen.

This poem is
finished.

Bathos

You’ll forgive the expression, I hope
for my various nostalgias of early March:
Children on swing sets and slides,
two people sitting on a park bench
sharing a lunch, park lovers
held together by an invisible parenthesis.
I considered attending church
when I saw the first crocus,
then didn’t, and a great song
rose without me anyway,
like wind on waves,
one voice from many.

Breathing the same air,
you took a sip to taste
my coffee, that sweet
ignorance of living
which now leads to
doubt, and deadly,
and doom, your lips
two surfaced sharks.

Here we are today,
souvenirs stapled to a wall,
benign but mad pennants
facing the mirror of history.

Yes my heart slaps,
urges, flashes, spreads,
plies a blistered speech
without anyone else
listening or hearing.

I am held together by a parenthesis,
that absurd embrace of whispered words.

Here is where I drop in
the anticlimactic lapse
of a question mark.

?

You’ll forgive the expression:
I hope.

Happy Mirthday from Lady Paramount

You’re trying too hard
to laugh, so you can’t.
Target panic.

You must cry first
in order to laugh.
Quiver.
So let us, as a group,
in our separate
but safe spaces,
lay down and laugh
together.

Turn up your volume.
We want it to be contagious.
This is the kind of virus
we need right now,
to hear the primitive,
unconscious mechanism
at play. Uncontrollable.

I’ll guide you through
your epiphanies of shame,
your wah-wah moments
of defeat and lacking,
the failure of being you
in front of an audience
until you’re disoriented
and stumbling, and then
and only then will you
receive my invisible seal
of approval, the holy
gold star for rising
to the paradox,
releasing to minnow
the hollow air.

If I Polyester: A Birthday Anagram

This day is cracked
open like the eggs
I cannot buy or borrow.

I am sorry to report
that your cake
will be a bird fighting
the wind,
crossed scissors,
or a joker.

So instead you get
an anagram.
A star, or rats?
Live or evil?
Mood or doom?

Sovereign of grump
coiled in my brain,
take a nap.

Whorl, whirl
for better words.

Life is poetry
gives us gazelles
of possibility.

Your birth 
life is poetry
charcoal eyes 
feister ploy
all past, present,
and future verse 
eerily if stop

Today you are 28,
a hawthorn wreath.
Plant each black pansy
seed we sent
free soil pity
and imagine us
laughing together
at yeti profiles,
I frostily pee,
riot if sleepy,
refile it posy,
feel spirit, yo.

Journal of American Poetry

For beautiful pressed flowers
gather those free of spots or blemishes.
Sunny days are best for gathering.
Pluck off damaged petals,
Cull wilted leaves,
pull seeds that look as if
they might damage the pages.

You’ll need a telephone book
or some weighty tome —
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable,
the Dictionary of Symbolism,
the Oxford English Dictionary volume A-O,
The Holy Bible.

Some prefer the Dictionary of Miracles:
Imitative, Realistic, and Dogmatic.

Whatever you have
that is heavy will do.

Pull a length of parchment paper
and lay down your
Enchanter’s nightshade,
fern,
daisy,
bilberry,
apple blossom
marigold,
flax,
spiderwort —

Fold the paper over it,
and squash
somewhere in the middle
of your book.

Forget every detail
of its life
and let it wilt
between the pages.

It will eventually dry,
crumble.

In a few decades
someone looking up
the origin of the word
nonsense
will find your poem,
now a brown stain
across the word
normalize.

Silent

I think it’s the silent e
in the word humane
that gets under the skin
of my eyelid the most.

Sometime during the 17th century
we decided that human
was different from humane.

You can be “of or related to
the family of human beings,”
or you can be “compassionate,
civil, gentle, inflicting
the minimum of pain.”

Shake any hand now
and receive a dollop
of hand sanitizer
and a lecture
from a total stranger.

Get within six feet of me
and you can hear the muscles
in my neck and shoulders stiffen.

Right now, being human is an error.
There’s a bad bit of code
in the loop, a glitch.

Humane. We don’t know
what that is, other than
the silent e as a wall,
a border that helps us
console ourselves.

It’s a foil blanket
covering the words
that always follow:
“treatment,”
“slaughter,”
“killing.”

Say it. Humane.
Feel how the silent e contorts
your face into a terrible grin
with the elongated a.

Say human and you feel
the tip of your tongue
touch the roof of your mouth
and your lips close
to a place of being
silent.

Distance Greetings

Sunday, and I overturn dirt,
disrupt the wormy darkness
of this spring isolation,
when a stranger bicycles past
carrying a candelabra
of hello, how are you,
I’m just fine,
thank you.

Broadcasting

Here’s the news for today:
Some seeds stick to your gloves.

The clouds, clods of dirt, that stream
that cuts through the woods —
they are not just within our grasp,
they are our hands, eyes,
and mouths.

Clouds as hands, you say?
Tut tut.
Eyes of dirt?
Snort.
Mouth of stream water?
Must be fake news.

We think of that as “someday,”
you know, six feet under.
A few hundred worms, some time,
grab of roots at the ribcage.

The Big Takeover.

It took falling in love,
having a child,
and almost losing my life
to know my heart as
a mountain, feet as the tides,
my hair, each strand
connected to a river birch
that is rotted on the inside.

I still forget what I am made of
if I spend too much time
in the car, or find myself
inside a grocery store,
or staring at the screen
of my screw-this-thing phone
looking for anything
more interesting than
my own mind, which,
I realize I am reporting,
is mostly moss on a rock.

Right now I look out this window
(sand and fire)
with my glasses on
(sand and fire)
my eyes
(sand and fire)
at the field
where we broadcast
wildflower seeds yesterday,
the littlest ones
holding onto my hands
like kindergarteners.
They wouldn’t let go.

They whispered this news:
Sand and fire,
water and wind.

What I Miss About Being Near You

Sight

We are near each other, sitting side by side on the somewhat punishing cushion of our kitchen banquette. You notice the little hair coming out of my chin that catches the sunlight. I see the fleck of amber in your left iris. You notice how the skin around my eyes fans out when I smile.

Taste

Here, have you tried this cinnamon turmeric tea? It's supposed to cure being human. I think it makes you immortal or something. Let me pour you a cup. Bitter? A little. We can cut it with these oatmeal cookies I just made, and the cranberries, sour. Bitter, sour, and lumpy. Welcome to teatime at Jenny's!

Touch

When I spill the tea all over the table, we both reach for the nearest napkins, and press them into the spreading pool. What a klutz I have always been. Forgive me. Our hands touch, and we play that pile up game where the hand on the bottom slides out and goes to the top, until we're a mess of hands and napkins. We laugh.

Sound

Oh, your laugh! God, I love laughing. It's all I want to do. When I am near you, I hear your breath. That's the poetry of the body, the inhale, exhale, langorous sigh, bubbling laughter. Your voice is a syncopation that reminds me of watching the insides of a piano when it is being played.

Smell

When you stand up to get another splash of milk for the tea, I smell the laundry detergent you used this week coming off your clothing from the heat of your body. You detect the hint of my unwashed hair, and we both catch, through the open window, the scent of spring air. You say, "It's a long time coming." I agree. That lift of life scent is a long time coming, every single year we get to experience it.

Movement

Hip hitch when you stand (aging), the slightest lean forward from the chest (your heart leads you), and then a glide that is somewhere between sailboat and assuring door latch. Your hands puppet the words you speak, bring them to life. And when something strikes you as really funny, you put your hand over your heart and your head tilts back so I can see right up your nostrils, almost right into your brain. An invitation into what you're thinking.

Intuition

Our bodies are not a boundary between us and the rest of the world.

Your Friday Briefing

During this time of constant change
we understand that this is a difficult
and complex time.

Surreal time.
Crazy time.

Through this time of great challenge,
in these unprecedented times,
with this uncertain time.

During this challenging
and unpredictable time,
this critical time,
we are taking some time
with this bizarre
and ever-changing time.

These are serious times
in this time of crisis.
What an atypical time,
a supremely challenging time.

In these strange times
for certain
we are aware
of time.

In times like these
for the time being —
what a time
to be alive.

Face Times

Everything is closed now.
We can’t touch each other.

Yesterday I saw my daughter’s face
in the rectangular room of my phone.
She told me how she spent
the morning at work making meals
for a woman and her daughter
who are living out of a car
in a local park.

I wanted to hug
everyone in the story.
My daughter, her boss,
the woman, her daughter,
whoever delivered the meals.

Everything is closed now.
We can’t touch each other.

This is as close as we can get.
You are reading  these words
made up of letters
I just typed, each letter
a pattern of pixels.

Everything is pixels now.
Keep your molecules to yourself.

A Brooklyn friend, using
Facebook Live, gives daily tours
of Greenwood Cemetery.
He showed us the statue of Minerva,
a Roman goddess with her upraised hand
forever waving at the Statue of Liberty
a few miles to the west.

What a strange friendship
between the goddess of wisdom
and the symbol of freedom,
they never really touch,
just wave politely,
with too much distance
between them
for any real conversation.

Everything is closed now.
But waving is acceptable.

I’ll bet both of them
are hungry, poor, and tired
of the living talking of freedom
on one side of the river
and all the dead
on the other, so silent.

Didn’t Achilles’ mother
dip him in the river Styx
while holding him by the ankle
and so his heel became
his most assailable place?

We try so hard to protect.
Everything is closed.

Oh, we are all so vulnerable,
and we don’t like to be reminded.

I owe a huge debt in this world,
and this is some of what I have now
to pay anything back before I go:
these words
in this space
between us.
Take them
as you would
my hand.

Strong Measures

It’s five in the morning
and the moon is public property,
so enjoy its impression
of a child’s construction paper cutout.
Subscribe to its channel.

We are all relieved the sun
hasn’t been cancelled today.
We need the light to fill
our stunned-to-darkness places.

Please remember the sun
is for others, too. Pick up
after yourself when you’ve
spent time in the clouds.
There are no restrictions
on contemplation,
no shuttering
of deep thought.

The daisies in the park
will not be punished
for raising their faces
to yours. Planting seeds
is permitted, encouraged.

We realize these are
strong measures to take,
so, please, please, obey
the flourish of dandelions
and grow where you can.

Isolation

How is this even a thing,
quiet?

Up to our twilight knees.
Up to the loaf of our bellies.
Up to our solar plexuses.

Green, how I love you.
Nature.

Birds, how you sing anyway,
not knowing our shadow headlines.

Daffodils send their blades
up through the earth.

It’s quiet inside
ourselves.

The hellebore
bows, facing a sunset
filled with shade.

We have a hard time
living here, in this
empty speech bubble.

Up to our armpits.
Up to the penumbra of our hearts.
Up to our necks.

The south wind
(pay attention to direction)
is swelling.

I dreamed the song
I’ll never lift,
a cloud lullaby,
lyrical haunt.

Up to our twitching noses.
Up to our half-closed eyes.
Up to the disorganized rain in our minds.

Stash of silence.
Hoard of solitude.
Quiet.
Listen.

Panic Corner in the Language Center

There’s a part of the language center in my brain that I imagine as a large filing cabinet — one of the metal ones with drawers that stick. Tucked inside dog-eared folders are the words I never use, but which pop up like song lyrics. I spent an entire day wondering where spanghew came from and why I was thinking of it, and it never got used in anything I wrote or said. It was just my mantra for the day. Ah, but here it is now, sparkling in its obscurity, begging for you to look up its definition.

My sister and I share a general abhorrence for any food that is slimy in texture. At a restaurant together, with a set meal, we were served a dish that is similar to potato, which gets blended into a viscous soup. It is served over rice. The entire time I was in Japan I was careful not to offend anyone, but I was pretty sure I was not going to like this dish, and didn’t want to leave any untouched. As Naomi served it up for everyone, I said, “sukoshi,” and made a little gesture with my thumb and index finger to indicate “small.” She understood and spooned out a tiny bit.

Sukoshi is the word for “a little bit” in Japanese that I learned 20 years ago when I studied some “get around words” for my first trip to Japan.  Like most of what I used that trip, which included "Otearai wa doko desu ka?”, the word was relegated to that filing cabinet. When I needed it most, in that critical moment of being served a food I might not finish, there it was, like a superhero in a bright red cape.

I probably could have finished the dish. The entire meal was delicious. Oishii. That’s a word I’ll use often.

Yesterday I decided I’d like to have prints made of the photos I took on our trip. I uploaded them all to Google Drive, thinking that would connect to the drugstore’s photo center kiosk. It did not. Google Photos was available, that celestial super-cloud of data I never think about, or I could use Facebook, Instagram, or connect my phone directly to the kiosk with my power cord. Who takes their power cord with them everywhere? I went to another drug store, which had no photo center. Then I ended up at the store of the Living Dead: Wal-Mart.

I thought I’d just breeze through the aisles of zoned-out shoppers by taking the superhighway lane in the middle of the store, straight to the back. My goal was electronics, where the photo kiosks were. A young man at a booth chirped, “Ma’am, may I ask you a quick question?” and I replied, “Nope, I’m on the run.”

“On the run?” From what, exactly? I have never used that phrase before, but the panic center, the part that hates dealing with nonsense, called it up and without thinking, spanghewed it out of my mouth. It worked. The guy backed off whatever his sales pitch was. I didn’t have to talk with anyone who called me “Ma’am.” I wouldn’t feel obligated to buy The Thing I Didn’t Need or Want.

When you’re in a pinch, facing an awkward social situation, the words may just come to you,  unbidden. These are the words you didn’t know you knew, the ones waiting inside untouched folders, the ones whose definitions might need to be researched, but oh, they’ll do the trick as you make your great escape.

Watching Me Watch Myself: A Meditation on Meditation

A quiet mind has never been my hallmark. It reels with proclamations, self-judgements, to-do list items, conversation reviews, philosophical meanderings about time, diatribes on appliance repair, scraps of poetry and song, floating dream images, and survival thoughts — like what might be for dinner. I should go to the grocery store.

When my sister suggested a “Movement Meditation” class at the Satoyama Design Factory during our visit in Kamogawa, I said “Yes! I can do that if there’s movement!” She said she thought it might be about a half hour of dance followed by a half hour of quiet. I wasn’t sure about the quiet, but thought I’d try.

I’ve never done any kind of long meditation before, but I once attended a yoga class that had a guided visualization the end. “Imagine a boat at the shoreline,” the soft-voiced instructor intoned. Lavender misted out of a diffuser in the corner of the room. The set-up was lovely. Instead of relaxing into the image, I argued with myself over which color the boat should be. Blue? No, too on the nose. Red? Too alarming, this is supposed to de-stress. Wait, what is that over there by the cattails? A dead fish? I never got out on the boat. I ended up poking at all the fish that were belly up in my mind.

The idea of combining movement and meditation, where flinching might be allowed, perhaps even flailing, appealed to me.

Our instructor explained in Japanese that there were five stages to this type of meditation, all of which were to be performed with our eyes closed. Kristen translated for those of us who didn’t understand. This class was actually Dynamic Meditation, a registered trademark meditation in a series of offerings from Osho, who was an Indian godman and founder of the Rajneesh movement. During his lifetime he was viewed as a controversial new religious movement leader and mystic. There was a little color photo of him in a frame on the shelf facing the open space where we’d practice.

The first stage of the meditation consisted of ten minutes of breathing through the nose while keeping your knees slightly bent and movement natural. I made short, staccato like breaths, with a focus on the exhalation. Osho’s website describes it as “chaotic.” We were instructed to blow our noses beforehand, but my experience with this stage got messy anyway. I had to wipe my nose on my sleeve a couple of times.

Stage two was “blasting off like a rocket” or “exploding like a volcano.” Ten minutes of vocalizing from the depths, holding nothing back. Wail, scream, cry, sing ... anything goes. Your mind isn’t supposed to get in the way, but I found myself on the floor at one point, recalling a movement theatre class where we were all monsters.

Stage three was jumping with arms up in the air for ten minutes with a mantra of ”hoo” on each landing. You are supposed to let your flat-footed landing “Hammer deep into your sex center.” I think that was lost in translation for me, or I was zoned out when it was mentioned. I just got exhausted here. You’re supposed to “be total.” I felt about half, maybe two thirds, worrying about the blood flow to my arms, and wondering if my ankles would swell up from all the jumping.

Stage four was standing still for 15 minutes in whatever posture you found yourself in when the bell rang at the end of stage three. My arms were up in the air. You are not supposed to move. No coughing, fidgeting, anything. My arms began to sag at about the five minute mark, and were left halfway up my torso, palms facing out, like I was being held up in a robbery. However, this is the stage where I saw color, and felt a really strong energy flow, and my brain finally shut off for a moment. I cried. Then my brain was back on.

The fifth stage was 15 minutes of dance. A celebration. An ecstatic end to exit with.

It turned out flailing was encouraged in this meditation. The stage where I saw color left an impression on me, although I’m not sure what to do with it. Let it flow through me. Observe.

Osho said of this meditation, “… bring your total energy to it, but still remain a witness. Observe what is happening as if you are just a spectator, as if the whole thing is happening to somebody else, as if the whole thing is happening in the body and the consciousness is just centered and looking. This witnessing has to be carried in all the three steps. And when everything stops, and in the fourth step you have become completely inactive, frozen, then this alertness will come to its peak.”

Tod and Dan arrived at the door at the end of our meditation, dressed and ready to go to the onsen. I was glad the next thing on our agenda was a trip to the public bath, where the water would be steamy and melt my muscles. I was ready to relax after all that meditation. Maybe I’d even imagine an invisible boat on some unnamed shoreline.

Oh Noh

There is no cure for a case of the giggles. You try to stifle, and the “funny thing” just becomes funnier. Your sides hurt from the quaking. Your eyes water. Maybe they’ll think you’re crying, maybe no one will notice, maybe they won’t send the usher over to politely whisk you out of the theatre.

Browsing shop stalls at the Temple of Asakusa, I saw some Kyōgen masks, the characters for the comedic interludes during Noh theatrical pieces. The two that caught my eye were Oji, the old man, and Usobuki, a face with surprised eyes and a pinched mouth, a character who can only whistle. I was reminded of my wish to see some theatre while we were in Japan, and turned to my sister. “Do you think there are any Noh productions happening while we’re in Tokyo?” She did some research. The National Noh Theatre had a Fukyu-Koen (Dissemination Performance (Introduction to Noh) on the 11th. Perfect. She got us tickets.

The National Noh Theatre entrance is an open space, with sculpted trees in front of a low building that has a center courtyard. While we waited for the doors to open to the performance, we explored an exhibit of scrolls that depicted scenes from Noh plays from the Edo period, on loan from the Kobe Women’s University Library. There was also a small series of chant books that the actors used for rehearsing.

The theatre seats 200 people, and each seat back is outfitted with a screen for translation. A relief. I’d need that. The National Noh stage looks like a small temple, with some trees painted against the upstage wall, and a long stage right entrance that leads onto the main stage. Actors glided in from behind a curtain and made their way to the mainstage like they were floating on clouds.

Before the production began a professor from Kobe University stood in the center of the stage in his white socks and dark suit and discussed the historical context of the plays. This wasn’t translated. Kristen leaned in occasionally to whisper — “He’s talking about the sea, and the geography of a battle. Now he’s explaining some kind of helmet collar that gets pulled.”

The first play, a Kyōgen titled, “Suhajikami,” was about two farmers going to market. One is a seller of ginger, and the other a seller of vinegar. The entire play is a series of puns, various plays on the words “su” for vinegar, and “hajikami,” which means ginger, as the two sellers vie for space at the market. The twenty minutes of wordplay ends on a boisterous laugh between the two. There were chuckles from audience members throughout, but if you are not a proficient in Japanese, some of the puns are lost, even with translations. My sister seemed to understand most of it. I enjoyed the slow movements of the actors, and the spirited tonality of their voices, which was song-like and made the chant books in the exhibit make more sense to me.

The actors didn’t wear masks. Their action was a slow float, glide, and turn. In many ways, it resembled martial arts, loaded with intention and meaning. The costumes were elaborate, and I felt I was missing something here as well, not understanding what the patterns and textile choices might mean. It felt a bit like reading Chekov — I got the gist, but I wasn’t experiencing the richness for an ignorance of cultural and historical background.

The main Noh play, which came after the Kyōgen, was “Akogi,” a story in which a monk encounters an old fisherman on the beach and discusses an old poem describing Akogi-ga-ura beach. The monk asks why the beach is called Akogi-ga-ura,and the old man tells the story of a fisherman named Akogi who was discovered poaching fish in the sanctuary, and was executed by drowning off the shore of the beach. He encourages the monk to console the spirit of Akogi, who is still suffering in hell.

In the first half, we hear the old fisherman tell the story of Akogi to the monk. It is nearly sung, with little movement, with the addition of some drumming and chanting. Reciters add to the text in a way that felt echoic. After intermission, when the fisherman (who we now suspect is the spirit of Akogi) disappears, we are introduced to a traveler returning home who sees the monk resting in his hut. The monk explains that he was just regaled with a story by an old fisherman, and he thought the hut belonged to him.

This is getting long, isn’t it?

I peeped down the row of audience to my left.  All asleep. The man who was seated late in the middle aisle was sleeping. Four people in our row were nodding off.

The owner of the hut begins to tell the tale of the fisherman … again. Another long, poetic retelling of poaching on the high seas, with drums, echoing words, and slow movement. I wasn’t prepared for the retelling. Kristen leaned in as we read the translation of the traveler’s monologue together. “Maybe he doesn’t know the whole story.” And then he began, “In the year …” and she whispered, “Nope, looks like he knows it.”

That set me off in giggles. It was a release from intense storytelling, but I was in the National Noh Theatre. I should have reverence for a craft that has been around since the 14th century. My laughter felt worse than poaching fish. I was in a state of helplessness, like Akogi, unable to find my way back to the shores of propriety. When I couldn’t stop, Kristen and I slipped out of our seats (luckily they were in the back on the aisle) like two schoolgirls skipping class.

The drama ends with us disappearing into the ocean of Tokyo’s winding streets to meet everyone at the Akita Festival —a festival devoted to dogs so devoted they wait for their masters who have been dead for years to return from work. I wonder if Akogi had an Akita still waiting for him to return from his damnation. I wonder if there will be one waiting for me — hee hee hee.

Loud and Wrong

Sometimes you have to wait in line — a long line, without really knowing what is going to be said to you at the end of it when you finally get to talk with the person in charge at the counter.  It’s part of life, and at the airport, it is a chance to observe human behavior.

Our flight out of Japan was delayed by a day. We were deplaned after two attempts by the mechanics to fix a “part that is needed to fly over water,” according to the pilot. Since this was an 11 hour flight, most of which is over the Pacific Ocean, I was really fine with the decision to not fly. Some passengers grumbled. As we left the plane, there was already trash everywhere. Discarded candy bar wrappers, plastic wrap from the  complimentary headphones, and on each screen, a still of whatever movie was being watched. It was like walking through the last vestiges of a preteen sleepover.

We returned to our original gate seating, and waited for word on the delay. When the announcement was made that the flight was canceled, and wouldn’t be rescheduled until the following morning, we were told to “follow the woman with the yellow vest” through the airport. All 300 or so of us followed one tiny woman. We lost her at a couple of points, and had to rely on the herd of faces we’d already memorized as our fellow plane mates — the young Texan with the loose blonde ponytail, a Japanese man with his grandmother, a guy wearing white-rimmed glasses. A few airport employees held up handwritten signs with arrows along the way. What our pilgrimage amounted to was a very long line at the airline check-in desk, where we’d all started our day.

We stood with a young woman from Laos who asked us if we’d been through anything like this in our travels. Dan explained that we’d either be offered a hotel and meal voucher, or we’d get rescheduled flights. She seemed relieved. The line snailed along. Dan noticed that attendants at the counter had to share a stapler. Then we realized they had no printers, and had to walk away from their posts to print out hotel vouchers and boarding passes. Some of them rode the luggage belt to get to their desks faster.

I watched a woman at the desk pull out her hair from the same spot just in front of her ear, strand by strand. Another woman, at the counter the entire time we waited in line (about two hours), must have had a complex travel itinerary which was disrupted by the flight change. She took out her laptop to consult a world map. Her flights were rescheduled.

Americans are not good at waiting. It’s like they’d never spent time in a line before. There was a group of impatient, entitled ticket holders who decided to start their own line by complaining. One man oozed his way to the front of another counter and demanded to know why he and his wife had to wait. He was given a hotel voucher. I overheard him tell his wife, “It’s ok, we got meal vouchers too, and I have plenty of snacks.” No one was going to starve (I sat near this man on the plane the following day, and he ate during the entire flight). Then he felt empowered to let others know his success, and made an official announcement that “this line is the line to get into if you want a hotel voucher.” Some went into that line, which took away one or more attendants who could manage all the people in the first line.

The rube and his wife, the guy in the white rimmed glasses, and several others who befriended them, were the boisterous Americans who had all the answers before anyone else did. At the bus queue, one of them decided that one bus was designated for each hotel, and actually moved someone’s luggage. Each bus dropped people off at either hotel since the hotels were near each other. They were wrong. So they had the wrong answers first.

I have never liked the adage “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Sometimes the squeaky wheel is just a total embarrassment to the rest of the vehicle, and needs to be removed and replaced.

You know, like Trump.

When our plane took off, people applauded. My takeoff anxiety was in full-swing. We had 11 hours to go. Let’s make it over the ocean first. The pilots have a job to do.

Style

Everyone in Tokyo today has a coat that is nicer than yours. Herringbone, grey, beige, long, short, collared or not, adorned with a small faux-fur scarf. I saw very few black coats. Nails on women were manicured. Hair was conservatively cut and styled.

In the year 2000, the fashion in Tokyo was intergalactic. Fifth Element short skirts, white eyeshadow, the highest of platform shoes (women died from falling on subway stairwells), bleached hair, bright colors. The white eyeshadow was a startling Liquid Paper for the eyelid. I forget what I wore. Probably stretchy pants and wordless tops. Everywhere we went I felt like a big loaf of bread.

In 2020, calm is the new wild. Everyone is wearing earth tones. The highlight color is mustard, if you are brave enough to wear a highlight color. Dan saw a guy dressed all in green, but I missed him. It’s easy to miss people in Tokyo, which is a mill and seethe of humans.

I packed layers, planning on cold days and evenings in the countryside with my sister and her husband, and didn’t pack anything I’d call fashionable. In Tokyo, I felt like a rock with legs. A monolith in my oversized grey sweater coat, like an avatar in a video game whose goal is to not bump into anyone or anything. I failed at that, I’m sorry to say.

I thought about the coats I could have brought with me and if they’d stand up to what I was seeing on people. Nope. The 10 year old black coat I bought in Germany? The other black dress coat I got at Target 12 years ago?

By our second day, I felt offensive. My hair, in piles on top of my head, got snickers from shoppers while we were in a paper store. I love the red, cashmere hand warmers my daughter got me for Christmas, up-cycled from someone’s sweater, and wore them everywhere, with the big grey monolith sweater. They stood out. The boots I purchased to be comfortable (which bore a tag on them that said “fashion” — knockoffs of some brand I don’t know), made my size 10 feet look like concrete blocks. They were comfortable for all the walking we did though.

I wondered out loud with my sister if I should style my hair differently for the next day. Was I offending people? “Wear it how you want,” she said, and she shared that in her early days of living in Tokyo she gave up on trying to blend in. You never will. Just be you.

What a relief.

In the countryside of Kamogawa, I felt more at home. Everyone wore relaxed, comfortable clothing. Layers. They smiled more, and even if I was ridiculous and loafy, they didn’t make me feel so. There were goats, dogs, chickens, and cats. None of them wore fancy coats.

But I still feel the pull of desire for a nicer coat, which is impractical for where I live. When I’m around people who have manicured nails, I want manicured nails, which is not wise for a woman who tends to goats on a daily basis and has to sweep out a barn. Yesterday I found myself on my knees in the mud, in my thrift store “goat coat,” holding onto the collars of Littleface and Brick, who decided that a visit with the neighbors down the road was a good idea.

My biggest concern these days is how to trim goat hooves. Goat manicures are on my mind. I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube tutorials. My days of fashion, if I ever had them, are over. If you see me wearing a nice coat, it’s a loaner.

Page Match

Last Friday (right before I lost my voice), I participated in Page Match as Volta, my alter ego. She's all about delivering turns, gut punches of meaning ... you know, you think you might laugh, but then you cry, that sort of thing. She has to wear many sweatbands and a fanny pack full of melting chocolates to do this important work.

Everyone who took the stage that night and rose to the challenge of writing on-the-spot in ten minutes was fierce fire, and I was humbled and energized by sharing the writing table and stage with each one of them, and then relieved to take my wig off at the end of the night and eat a pancake at a local diner.

What can you write under pressure in ten minutes with a random prompt? I urge you to give it a try. It generates some wonderfully wild writing if you are willing to let go.

Congratulations to Monica Prince who took first place, to Carla Christopher for her second place win, and to all for their character, charisma, and diamonds-from-pressure writing.
Photography by the poetic lens of Michelle Johnsen. Modern Art space for creative encouragement provided by Libby Modern (Go! Go and find your creative self there!). Event from the fearless literary minds of Tyler Gof Barton and Erin Dorney of Fear No Lit. 

For the full album of Michelle's photos, go here.

And here are the two pieces I wrote that night. The prompt we were given for the first round was "Astroturf," and the second round prompt was "About a mountain." After my Prepositional Yawp, I was out of the game, left to enjoy the rest of the match with my husband and daughter.

Astroturf

The summer there was too much Astroturf, was the summer of tube socks. Tennis, lobbing balls over fences past the pool -- chasing the damned tiny moons everywhere. Ten, Love, whatever.  I couldn’t feel my hands. I was beyond frayed to falling until I leaned against the fence of my own body, my boundary, myself. Nothing but sky around me, I fell into it, forgot all I was but my outline, a cutout of summer at ten years old, in tube socks and shorts. I waited for anything other than the false ground, fakery, forgery of grass beneath my feet. Green, green youth, not mine, but a volley in a valley of forever. We all go through this madness of finding ourselves in the grass, looking up after a fall. The body suddenly awake, aware, a starfish.

Prepositional Yawp

About a mountain, above a garage, across the year, after the drink, against my life, below, below, below the ground, between the months when we were apart by, bye, goodbye, for all of the incantatory bell ringing of my body against the world, from the other side of the night, from the other side of your spleen, in the distant between of cemetery headstone where you left a tiny rock pressed into the dirt, into the ever after god-awful belief of the everafter, of, of, of, what is all fo this for, from one body to another, stuff and nonsense -- to you this is all to you, I miss you, you up there where no one can say or see or reach -- with that look in your face, with the way that you laughed, oh, oh, oh there are no more ways to say how or what direction other than GONE.

Since Your Death

A found poem from signage read on the PA Turnpike between the Quakertown and Wilkes-Barre exits

Fallen rocks
Falling rocks
Fallen
Fallen
Fallen rocks
Fallen
Fallen
Falling rocks
Fallen
Falling
Fallen
Fallen
Fallen
Fallen
Fallen

How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything.

If that's the truth, then I am a total wreck, and apologies are in order. Maybe. No. Take it or leave it, baby!

I'm not a list maker like everyone else in my family. My nose doesn't match. But every single time I catch myself in the mirror these days, I see my mother, and I miss her. Why didn't I see her in how I look when she was alive? It is just about breaking me. I avoid the mirror as much as possible.

Everything I do is pleached with grief. I'm not myself. I do not know what to do with my time, now that I have time. I can travel, and I've gone nowhere. I can audition, and I'm not showing up. I can sit and write sheafs of poems, and all I have are torn out pages from a steno notebook scattered all over my desk. I practice, and don't care about it, really. I started a crochet project just to stay up later at night.

Introspection is needed, rather than putting everything I do out there all the time, although as an Aries I'm not really good at being quiet.

I'm having interesting, symbolic dreams. I'm doing my best to just be. To be slow and be alright with that.

Yesterday I identified 73 different varieties of trees and plants on our property. I ate a yoghurt, and smeared some of that miracle serum on the "wrinkle of concern" between my eyes. I crocheted at a good clip. I didn't smile much. That is my way of "just being."

Wych Elm

Today I picked up five bales of hay for the goats, whacked my head on a beam in the barn (I'm fine), and spent a long time sweeping the seeds and hay out of the back of the car. I always feel like an amateur homesteader when buying hay or straw from a real farmer. Why, oh why did I get a manicure? What is the point? Purple fingernails? 

Five bale limit for our car!

I made a large mask in the art stall, testing out an idea.

One eye is a clock.

The other a sere heart.

It felt good to create. I have some ideas for it that I may or may not follow through with, given my current state. I made a mess of the space, I cried and yelled and wished I had a friend to play with, I was happy I was alone, I got covered in oil pastels and paint, and there were little bits of corrugated cardboard stuck to the bottoms of my feet. How I do anything is how I do everything.

My nose.

Enso

You can lose your life here
or let go of it.

Take off the costume
of your over-amplified voice
squeezed through a funhouse mirror
for so many years even you
can't translate it anymore.

How is this yammer-hammer
of anxiety's bungee cord
holding your skeleton together?
Those winds of unknowing--
that blue grey paradise
in your fingertips,
surf of sorrow
like a slouched sock,
a lazed flamboyance you allow.

This is the scrumhum of sand
as it passes through the body,
your physical world.

Your whole life
you never heard
the sound of pages
turning in the background.

How impatient you always were
to just fill a page with words.
How exasperated your partial
circle of a heartbeat was.

No one is surprised
when you take off one mask
to put a different one on.
No one is surprised
by the sound of their two syllable
footsteps that say:
alone
alone
I am.

Just the Contents

There’s really nothing to report, just the contents
of these little boxes, objects almost absent,
lost in a landscape of pure bric-a-brac.
They were once filled by me, who has a knack
for forgetting where things really belong, their intent.

So lift the treasure chest lid with confidence
and find paperclips in a room without documents.
Who needs closure? Office supplies just show us
there’s really nothing to report.

A wooden box with a smooth top and a bent
latch holds a few Euros, money meant
for sunnier purses and glasses of cognac.
And this one, hand-painted with the blackest
of flowers holds a few matches, their fires spent.
There’s really nothing here that’s just content.

--
Poet's Note: Kind of a rondeau, but not really at all. A bit more of an unraveled doily.

Grenade

All the angels in me are tired
of the chain reactions
and plutonium triggers
of my wishbones.

They pant like dogs
in their bullet-proof vests.
Go out in the world, I say,
but they’ve read the headlines.

Better to sandbag my ribcage,
count my teeth and name them
like stars, chain-smoke and laugh
about their ghost stories.

They pull on the long rope
of my brain, uncoil, re-twist,
search for the films of
births-marriages-deaths
so ordinary and solo.

They’ve traded in their harps
for the skirl of harmonica,
light tin can fires at night
as the General stokes
the indigo bulb
between my eyes.

At daybreak, they startle, 
Why is she up so early?
They aim for my mouth
but shoot at my feet instead.

Go out in the world, they say.

I dance with this bomb
that is my body.

Sweet Beast

The half-formed idea is the thirteen legged beast I wrestle with everywhere these days. On trips to the supermarket I see a flash of its tail curl into aisle D, in the shower it hogs all the soap, and when I'm just drifting off to sleep it scratches me with a scaly toenail to say, "Hey, still here," as if I needed the reminder. I'm thinking of you, half-formed idea, all of the time.

It has no face. It has no name. Naming it would make it real, and it is not ready to be real yet. As un-whole (and unholy) as it is, it can be anything. All thirteen of its legs are full of potential. It may walk! It may run! It may fly! Maybe the legs are set to transform into wings. Or eggplants. Who knows? Who knows? Who knows?

I am building a one woman show with no words. I have just my body, and some props, which start to take on the feel of "visual aids" sometimes as I work, like I'm just handing these object ideas to the half-formed idea beast and it is holding them up for the class to see and wonder over. Here's an onion. It represents layers. Here's a ball of twine. It represents, I don't know, something. Ugh.

This is my creative process, and on good days I cheer myself on with the notion that having this restriction is a catalyst, not a conundrum.

I think my mother may feel the same way about her aphasia. It's kind of just right, building this show this way, a this time in my life. My mother's words are eroding, but we've developed a personal sign language for communicating. When vocabulary is evasive, movement speaks. Our pantomimes almost always end in some good laughs. Aphasia has moments of serendipity, and plenty of opportunities for creative problem solving. Sometimes she's up for that, and others, not. I get it.

Today I spent two hours rolling around on the floor of the garage, exploring Barteneiff's Fundamentals of Movement -- breath support, initiation, sequencing, alignment and connections, body organization, ground, weight shifts, spatial intent. It's great to know the terms, but I don't think of them as I move, I just move. I become more aware of how my body moves, how it changes in feeling as I walk or stand after experimenting. Today I felt a little like DaVinci's Vetruvian Man.

Then I got thirsty, distracted by heat, and my head pounded. The beast returned to drag me back to the hellscape of doubt, which I'm pretty sure is made up entirely of positive internet memes.

All functional movement is expressive. Think about that the next time you bend your neck to look at your phone, or pick up a chair and walk across a room with it. Your body is always telling a story, is always revealing your inner life, whether you like it or not. What a tattletale. What a sweet beast, the idea of the body as storyteller.

Cleave

This is version three of the original poem, "To Be Eligible,"which I wrote and shared the other day. I've been following my instinct to take the poem apart in different ways. This version uses press on lettraset lettering in the center rift, the gap, the river of no that separates the body of the second version of the poem, "Don't Cry." The process of making this version was physical and angry -- pressing down the letters to see them adhere the paper, blacking out all the space around the other words, creating a void.

Cleaving

To be eligible

for the tarpaper dream,
the rubble of glassy mouths,
our silent, violent, majestic home:

Keep your eye
on the eye
that watches you.
Don’t cry.

To be eligible
for once upon a time
and a sky not on fire:

Here is a stone
for your throat.
Don’t cry.

To be eligible
for happily ever after,
a path free of bombs:

Here is a feather
to replace your heart.
Watch it drift.

To be eligible
for the Mother of Exiles,
the glow of welcome,
open arms:

Set forth in section 101a
we have a history
of turning away.

We’ve collected your sun,
your son, your daughters,
for those who tinker
with status best,
revel in the forlorn
perfection of files.

To be eligible
we number your guilt
for wanting better:

You get one call
to your child.
He answers
but sounds
broken.
Or the phone
on this land is your land,
this land is my land
just rings
and rings
and rings.

A friend who works in a nursing home told me how she’s noticed that with each new resident’s arrival, the environment changes. Their personalities affect the spirit of the place. It was such a great relief to hear this because I have lately not felt myself changing much of anything beyond gym clothes to daywear to costume to ratty pajamas.

We moved here three years ago. It doesn’t look like we’ll be moving anywhere else right away, so what we thought was a transition has turned into more of a holding pattern. I keep thinking about the phrase “bloom where you are planted” and feel most days like a dandelion in winter.

Our somewhat affordable rental allows for our cat, Steve. There is little that appeals to us about the house — the doors are so close together the doorknobs clack together and pinch a finger or hand (the worst geometry is that of greed), windows stick, everything is beige. There is a mysterious stain on the carpeting in the living room that disappears when I tend to it, and reappears after a month or so.

I fell in love with the tree in the backyard though, and the kids in the neighborhood play inventive and imaginative games outside a lot. We've made friends of the neighbors. It is much quieter than our city apartment was.

Over the course of the past three years, my husband’s trees are filling up the backyard with their green and sudden fruiting, the front garden waves a slow hello in daisies, cosmos, and perennials, and the children ring our doorbell to ask if I can play too, or at least loan them a hula hoop. I’ve nicknamed the pony across the street “Lone Pone.” Last fall I turned our garage into a black box theatre so I’d have a space to create in, and also to share.

Last night we held the inaugural event in the garage space we call “The Little Theatre of the House of the Car.” Steve anticipated the arrival of guests by sitting himself arrowed toward the front door. Friends, neighbors, and family arrived in ones and twos. We ate in the living room, scrunched onto the sofa and what seating was left after I plundered all the chairs for the garage theatre. A few of us stretched out onto the floor.

During performances, which included comedy, dance, poetry, music, and personal narrative, Steve changed the environment with his sassy stride, sliding into the theatre to drink from unmonitored glasses, and rub against legs. Witnessing everyone’s sharing, whether it was movement or song, or spoken word, hearing the space filled with laughter and the exhaled ahs after some poems, I felt wealthy.

I realized that what has felt like inaction has really just been very slow progress, just doing things “one step at a time,” rather than taking gigantic, bold leaps. To make the garage a theatre I sewed curtains (there was first some experimentation with rope and binder clips), organized props and hoops and found space for tools and the lawnmower, and found area rugs to delineate seating and stage areas. It took time. It was worth it.

Setting: A mild summer night in a cul-de-sac dropped into a patchwork of farmland. An audience sits on a driveway and lawn facing a garage. Music begins, and the garage door rises to reveal an empty theatre, a place where anything can happen. A work in progress. Two characters enter. The change is quiet, but obvious.