Story Book

Undue optimism

2006-06-06T05:21:19Z

A friend of mine says
life is an inconvenience at best
Kurt Vonnegut
– one of my favorite writers –
takes it even further and calls life
a crock pot full of shit
my lover calls me every night
on his way home from work
and every call starts with a big sigh
that tells me exactly
what he thinks of life

What does one do with a crock pot full of shit?
I keep the lid on
and dance around it
plant flowers
make love
pray to the trees
play music
and once in a while
another human being is beautiful

I am too often inconvenienced by a certain odor
it makes me sigh and weep
or else cantankerous
I know full well
the crock pot full of shit
is there at the center
of all the environment
I have created and secretly delight in

I have moments of undue optimism
and think so lush is life
I could just bite
on all the green and blue
taste the sweetness of rain
drink in the fragrant night
wriggle my small ass
hey you!
am I not pretty in my high heels
that I can hardly walk in?

And there it is again
the smell
the awful truth and
proverb of my life

I’ve been beaten at the game so often
that now I’ve hit on a remedy
worthy of Mozart’s music

I will upend the stinking bowl
and turn the gripe of men upon its head
shit – so I belatedly remember –
is biodegradable
then let it fertilize my garden
wash out the crock pot
and keep the ugly thing
for a curious decoration

Arguments

2006-06-06T05:19:56Z

We go for a walk in the park, my love and I. (I should call him my partner, but doesn’t it sound dull?) A little argument ensues because I don’t want to walk on the paved path having to jump out of the way of ruthless bike riders with their startling cries of, On your left! On your left, damn it! every five minutes. I want to walk on the trodden foot path right down by the river. A high embankment covered with shrubs and trees gives the illusion of privacy.

Some way down the path, in a small pebble strewn clearing, stand two men in what looks like a close embrace. Let’s not go there, my love whispers. And why not, say I, just two gay guys smooching, I don’t mind, and I’m not going back. But something’s funny here, my love says and follows me as I walk ahead.

The two men are short and dark, Latinos. One holds the other tight in his arms, they are supernaturally still. The one who is being held has a faraway dreamy look in his eyes. The other one, the holder, flicks me an almost imperceptible glance as I pass and say hello. They don’t answer.

I do not know then that the one who is being held has knife stuck in his body and the one who is holding is doing the sticking. We are walking by the scene of a murder, and my love, who does not know that either, keeps yet insisting that something strange was going on back there, we should not be on this path. He has an instinct for the wrong.
~
In the rose garden we sit down on a bench and talk and kiss, and passers-by smile, how nice, or look away. One thing leads to another, as things go in conversation and somehow we land on the topic of Einstein’s relativity theories and get into another argument.

My love says that Einstein’s theories have been proven wrong, and moreover, Einstein knew that he had been wrong. But no, I say, if a scientific theories are superceded by other, more advanced theories, they aren’t necessarily proven wrong, they still hold within a limited context, like Newton’s theories still hold within certain conditions…

No, no, Newton was proven all wrong, and so was Einstein, my love keeps insisting on throwing both these men’s life’s work on the trash heap so stubbornly, it makes me angry. Poor Einstein, poor Newton! I am stubborn myself, when I’m right.

We get rather loud over our relativity theory and quantum mechanics theory and Einstein and Heisenberg, who was a Nazi, no he wasn’t, and people are not smiling at us anymore or looking away. Heads are turning, looks are disapproving.
~
And suddenly all hell breaks loose, sirens wail, whistles blow, a whole squadron of cops comes stampeding towards us.

For a moment I sit frozen in disbelief. I think somebody has called the police on us. Look, there are these lovers on a bench, arguing loudly about Einstein instead of talking nicely and kissing, go take them out of our park!

The cops are running past us, veering north. Something’s up, my love says. Those two guys on the path. Well, perhaps they did look a bit strange, I admit.

We walk back, on the official paved bike path this time, jumping out of the way of bike riders, On you left! And at the height where we had seen the two men the cops are knotted in a bunch, jabbering into their walkie-talkies, running down to and back up from the river, the place is cordoned off with tape. Oh, my love is so excited, he has been right, hasn’t he! Yes, my love, but about what exactly?
~
We read about it in the paper the next morning, over breakfast. Mexicans, they got into an argument. Over drugs. The one stabbed the other seventeen times. Miraculously, he survived. And I walked by, saying hello. I have an eerie feeling, a sick hollow under my ribs. Belated shock.

My love says I shouldn’t be walking on that path any more, and we get into another argument. I have a right to walk there. No homeless, drug dealers, murderers, what-nots shall keep me from my river path. I never listen to reason, he says. Perhaps I don’t. But at least I don’t take to knives.

Making plum wine from somebody else's plums

2006-05-30T06:46:09Z

Sue Goldish had plums last year and I had none. A cold snap prevailed while my plum tree was in bloom, and there were no bees to pollinate the flowers. I had no pears either last year, same reason.

I know how to make wine from fruit, and Sue Goldish doesn’t. So she brought her plums and I made the wine. Not only do I know how, I also have all the equipment: carboys, siphoning rod, hydrometer, buckets, big pots, gauze cloth, bungs and air locks, different sized funnels, even a tiny one to fit into the siphoning rod, a bottle washer, and bottles.

I provided all the necessary ingredients bar the plums: sodium metabisulfate (for sterilizing all the equipment before every use to avoid contamination with the vinegar bacterium, whose slightest touch will turn all the wine to vinegar), sugar (12 ½ pounds), lemon juice, wine yeast, yeast energizer, acid blend, pectic enzyme, water, heat, and of course my labor.

Sue Goldish helped to wash and pit the plums, grind them in the food processor and transfer the sauce to the two buckets in which I started the must with five gallons of boiled water and the sugar. The next day, when the liquid had cooled down, I added the yeast and all the other ingredients. The must is the first stage of wine making, when the yeast is allowed to ferment on the fruit. Five days later I filtered the must through a gauze cloth and transferred the liquid to a five gallon carboy.

I closed the carboy off with a bung, a stopper made of rubber that fits the mouth of the carboy. On top of the bung sits an air lock, a small valve mounted on a piece of plastic tube which passes through a hole in the bung. The air lock is then filled with sodium metabisulfate. This whole maneuver has the purpose of allowing the gases which develop during fermentation to escape, but no free floating vinegar bacterium or fruit flies which carry the bacterium to enter the carboy and turn all our wine to vinegar.

I coddled the wine through the winter. I racked it three times. Racking is the process of siphoning the liquid from one carboy into another to take it off the lees, the dead yeast cells and other sediment that would spoil the wine, until all fermentation has stopped and the wine is crystal clear. Finished plum wine has a lovely light crimson color.
~
Sue Goldish called two days ago and asked, how is my wine, I had forgotten all about it through this busy winter… Well, I hadn’t.

I said, funny you call just now, I was planning to bottle the wine tomorrow, it’s my free day from work…

Sue Goldish said she would come over tomorrow after her Native American basket weaving class to watch me bottle the wine and see how it was done.
~
When Sue Goldish came I had already rinsed, sterilized and rinsed the bottles again. I always rinse everything after sterilizing it with sodium metabisulfate to remove as much of the sulfur as possible. Sulfur is harmful in greater quantities. I had soaked and sterilized the corks and prepared everything else, like carrying the five gallon carboy from the kitchen counter to the kitchen table, lining up the bottles on a tray below the carboy, and so on.

I sterilized and rinsed and then filled the siphoning rod with water and worked out all the air bubbles. I use my tiny funnel to do this, it saves much time. I siphoned the wine into the bottles. Sue Goldish helped to even out the fill so there would be a half inch to one inch space between the wine and the cork.

Then I corked the bottles with my rather antiquated corker that needs a little strength in the arm for the final push home. I chipped the mouth of two bottles. Aligning the bottle, the cork and the rod that pushes the cork down perfectly through the center is a bit of a guessing game with my old corker. I always chip a bottle or two or three.

Sue Goldish wiped the corked bottles with a damp cloth while I cleaned up the tray and other stuff. We had twenty-three bottles of wine made from Sue Goldish’s plums. There was a three quarter full bottle of wine left over, uncorked. We drank some of that wine. It had come out really nice, full bodied yet dry, with a fragrant plummy bouquet.
~
I gave Sue Goldish one of Charles’ sturdy boxes to put on the back seat of her car and helped her carry the bottles out to the car and stow them in the box. I told her she had to bring the box back because Charles is very particular about his boxes. He collects them and keeps them in his storage unit.

I had asked Sue Goldish to leave me the two chipped bottles. She left the one which was more badly chipped and took the other. I advised her to decant the wine from that bottle through a paper coffee filter to catch any possible tiny shard of glass. If she were to ingest a tiny shard of glass it could kill her.

Sue Goldish thanked me profusely and offered to pay for the corks and other ingredients I had used in making the wine, but I declined payment in money. Then Sue Goldish drove off with twenty-two bottles of wine I had made from her plums. I had an almost half full open bottle and the chipped bottle at home.

I took a glass of the delicious plum wine out into the back yard and drank it. I had a dry chuckle in my throat because I had known it would go exactly so.
~
I had met Sue Goldish at a friend’s house for a small dinner and recorder playing party. I brought a bottle of home made pear wine and a bottle of home made plum wine to the party, and that’s how Sue Goldish and I got to talking about wine making. I said I had no plums this year, and she said she had lots. A few weeks later she called me and asked if I would help her to make wine from her plums. Sure, why not.

Sue Goldish is not unattractive, short, a bit broad in the hips, but with a nice contrast between her large porcelain blue eyes and very fine dark eyebrows and curly dark hair. She is also something else, not easily definable. Under the bubble wrap of new age soft speak the self center of the person somehow sits right close.

I had a growing feeling within the first half hour of her walking into my house with those plums that she would not offer to share any of the wine with me. Maybe there was too much referring to the plums as hers, maybe I just had a general hunch. I made the wine anyway, I’m an enthusiast who can’t resist the lure of the plum. Otherwise those plums would go to waste. And besides, I enjoy the work.
~
Of course I could have asked her for my share, but I foresaw an undignified little argument about the correct division of the spoils.

I must confess that I’m amused at having been correct in my assessment. And I have the added advantage of using Sue Goldish for writing material. If this is unkind of me, so what. I can do that at least, and what can she do?

Except sit at home and drink my plum wine.

Un-titled

2006-05-30T06:44:24Z

All distractions fail me
there is nothing left but the trees
blooming into my face
as if spring were a natural occurrence
that rattles round without my volition
everything starts needing

Waiting for time to do something
grow love or leave a check in the mail box
I let the wind take my hair
and birds build nests over my eybrows
spit out my tongue to drift like a blossom
dumbstruck by sunlight

The traffic is reliable
it drones on without a pause
snuggled up in a linear lack of season
with the neighbors’ collected TV programs
and the things I don’t buy
like some semblance of life

If things were so

2006-04-29T02:55:47Z

I would be looking at your face
and get lost in its lines
without a moment’s doubt
your hands a trance before the touch
your lips the question to all answers

you are at every turn
in crowds and offices
and check-out lines in super markets
waving to me from afar
I have but one smile eternal

I do not think of you
why should I? don’t I know by heart
the length and curl of your hair
the gleaming of your bones
the light under your feet

the churning skies
find stillness in your body
as old explosions ferment into new stars
and carry their blue flames
to orbits of cool tranquility

I may always leave you
and at my end you have come back
unerring like the space between my eyes
the air in my stride
a rest in motion that sings

Utterly predictable

2006-04-29T02:52:25Z

I have a sleepless night once in a while
it’s no big deal
dark rooms and unkind thoughts
are good company at four a.m.
or I could switch on the kitchen light
and read the newspaper
freshly delivered by a person unknown

The paper is full of stuff
I already know
much like the page turning bestseller
I’m reading off and on
sensational discoveries and developments
plot turns and twists that are utterly predictable
I read them both to see if I’ve been right
I have

It is more difficult to face
the next day and you
when nothing we could say
will change us or reveal that our miscalculations
magically add up to understanding after all
alas! we have affection
and what else is new

Perhaps the next time I have a sleepless night
I shall go out and greet
the newspaper deliverer
and ask him or her
how is your life?
and he or she might answer
not much of anything to brag about
I do the usual and somehow I get by

So do I

Beautiful women

2006-04-23T07:33:51Z

My accountant is a woman with the face and body of a bulldog.

She does my and my now separated husband’s complicated tax return every year, and though impeccably honest and working by the book, she has managed a nice pay back for us each time.

In consideration of my separated husband’s difficult financial situation I’ve been filing a joint tax return these past two years. Otherwise I’d get all the payback while he would pay taxes on every scant dollar he earns. We’re still friends, aren’t we?

My accountant does not like men very much. She expresses her disapproval of the human male and all relationships with it in short terse barks.

– Let him pay, it’s none of your business. –
– If you want to take care of three children instead of two, that’s your decision. –
And clenches her teeth and makes a little growling sound in her throat.

Yet she is most tender-hearted when it comes to payment. She allows me time when I don’t have the money on the spot. And I can call her any time for advise, for free.

She lives with a woman, in what exact relationship I do not know, goes to church, and has two tiny yapping male dogs.
~
My new vet is a woman with the face and figure and gait of a camel.

The other day I got into an argument with her over spaying my cat.

I think that allowing a female mammal at least one pregnancy, birth and suckling of the young activates hormones which will work beneficial on her physical and emotional health.

My vet expounded on all the dangers of this process (for cats, that is). In unsparingly vivid language she described the painful diseases and consequent miserable deaths tom cats bring to female cats by mating with them.

Oh, those dirty, disease-ridden, horny, inconsiderate street toms who will travel for miles to impart their death seed to a female feline whose owner failed to spay her and so prevent her from going into heat. They can smell out a cat in heat from half the world away!

She went on quite a passionate little rant there, and I could not help but think she was not only talking about male cats, she was on a rampage against the males of any species, including the human. If I had been a man I would have looked for a place to hide.

I don’t know any of my vet’s personal circumstances, but I have a feeling that she is unmarried, childless, and she does not like men, poor beasts.
~
I like men, for various reasons.

One of them being that they’re different from me, and this creates a pleasant erotic tension. I also have children, who are, as a rule, obtained by having sexual intercourse with men. I like having children. I like sexual intercourse with men.
~
I also like both these women. They are among the most radical non-conformists I know.

In the face of their, perhaps neurotic, perhaps heroic oppinionatedness my slightly bohemian and artistic life seems pale compared to the realism they exude.

Neither of them pretty or by choice or circumstance inclined to conventional womanhood, they must have wrestled with a hostile environment to assert their place in life.

I find this kind of courage utterly feminine.

I’m drawn to it as to an extreme of sameness that is quite as heady as the erotic tension between my female self and the male other.

Ultimately, my response to them is emotional, not intellectual. I experience these women as beautiful in the wholeness of their being. In their company I feel free and easy and refreshed.

Maybe I am the child they never had. Maybe they are the extremist woman I never dared to be. Maybe I feel with them as with someone whom I could quarrel with and don’t do any damage.

We would get so angry in our argument, and then, at a certain point, just start laughing, and laughing and laughing our heads off.

The physics of halves and holes

2006-04-23T07:32:18Z

Two halves at full contact make a black hole.

In theory a black hole is some sort of super gravity event that tears atoms and particles apart until everything is one big mash stuck into an infinitesimal point, or singularity, forever.

Gravity and speed inside a black hole blow all other physical laws to smithereens. No space, no time, eternal now.

So great is the gravitational attraction of a black hole that not even light particles can escape it, much less two halves.

Two halves with any sense avoid full contact so as not to collapse together into a black hole. They hover safely at what I would call the event horizon of the relationship.

Only fools fall in love. Don’t they know it’s going to be a cosmic catastrophe, all mashed together inside that singularity, not knowing who’s who and what’s what, oh that is my arm, no it’s mine, and so on.
~
Maybe the fools believe in another theory, or rather a fool’s speculation. Namely that a black hole is somehow a shortcut to another shore of the universe.

Or that it is actually a new universe in the making. So much matter mashed into energy in one infinitesimally small spot, it eventually bores its way into another dimension where, bang! a new big bang occurs.

And voila, as the French say, word, light, creation.

All that mash spewing out and separating into tiniest units and seeking other units to attach to and forming units of ever greater complexity, until we have again a half of this and a half of that.

Dressing up (or down, or un-), buying new bangles to allure, meeting in real or virtual space, on the way to work or on a trip to the moon. Looking for the other half.

Timidly, boldly, carefully, anxiously, passionately, secretly, recklessly, spiritually, ravenously, verbally, telepathically.

Some try it enlightenmentally, where everything and everybody, under the collective name of god(dess), becomes the other half.

I’m sure that whatever we are, in whichever form, some kind of meeting and mating is going on. Isn’t it fun?
~
Now, if you want to escape all of these halves and holes or even circling event horizons without much mash happening, make money.

It’s easy, no advanced physics involved, just simple arithmetic.

For example, you could follow the principle of the Fibonacci series, a little mathematical trick by which the number after 1 is always the sum of the two preceding numbers:

1 – 1+1=2 – 1+2=3 – 2+3=5 – 3+5=8 and so on.

This teaches you the method of getting always more.

If nothing else, you can use the idea as a premise or as a mystery clue in an action-packed bestseller and make millions.

While you’re making all this money you can be perfectly satisfied that you’re not superceding the laws of physics in any way, creating no eternal here and now or spewing out new universes.

You’re respectfully engaged in helping to blow only this little Earth to smithereens.

The pieces will be here in appropriately big chunks, wobbling around in our solar system, for future visitors to see:

Look, these folks were rich and clever enough to acquire the means for blowing themselves up. Smart-asses.
~
While at a distant shore of this or another galaxy some idiot half is eyeing another idiot half’s tentacles,or antennae, or blobs, or energy field, or what not, considering full contact and the whole shebang, or maybe they should be careful and only hover at the event horizon.

The idiots who got away.

Treehugging in the genetic environment

2006-04-23T07:22:30Z

I have a son
he is so beautiful
and lonely like a tree
that grows in a far corner
of cosmic serendipity

he wears a crown
of branches in a twist
bejeweled stormy green
at times a wind will house there
to vent his weird and gripe and keen

a dappled light
a fragmentatious shade
draws alien tales to swing –
at his roots the angels gnaw
and in his boughs the devils sing

I go there oft’
and put my ear against
his trunk and listen close
my fingers fathom writing
in grooves of bark – whose words are those?

his hieroglyphs
spell whispering a script
that yearns discovery
yet I am not the reader
his meaning safe in secrecy

I just hug him and hug him
future at his whim
freedom his –
I kiss

Trillium sign

2006-04-04T04:58:09Z

Driving to the river park to go hiking I imagine that all the people I see are my projections, unacknowledged, repressed or discarded fragments of myself.

The fat woman sitting at the bus station, her belly ballooning over her thighs, is my greed – the bull-necked man in the little car jerking around the corner too fast, my fear – the little guy scuttling along the sidewalk, my cowardice – the bratty child pulling at her mother’s arm, my loneliness – the woman with the frozen smile on her lips, my anger. And so on.

Everything I think I am not someone else has to be, everything I’m not doing someone else does in my stead.
~
A girl is playing the bag pipes in the park. She plays badly, the music has no flow, no bounce to slip under one’s feet with the irresistible urge to dance. The notes ring out false, the rhythm ambulates. An older man is video taping her.

She stops playing, drops her bag pipes on the lawn and walks quickly up the path, towards my car. She is a dark, stormy beauty in her late teens, tall, with smoldering eyes and an abundance of wavy black hair falling down her back. A petulant sneer sits on the perfect face like a subtly freak Halloween mask. The man, her father, runs after her, calls, she walks on.

What splinter in my eye is she?

Oh, she is my envy, my abandoned efforts, my thwarted ambitions, and he, not to forget the man with the placating voice, my resignation.
~
I go on my walk up Skinner’s Butte. The trilliums are blooming on the slope, luminous pure white starlets in their own universe, complete in their own meaning, they are no part of me.

And yet just now, for the first time, do I clearly see and understand their shape, like a greeting.

The tri-cornered blossom points one petal straight up, the other two sit sideways at an angle, like legs, and from the joint the stalk continues the vertical line down the middle. I draw my imaginary circle around the figure and say: Peace.

We are all, One.

(More or less)

2006-04-04T04:55:44Z

Why less
is more of what for whom
less food devours more lust
less lust slurps more on love
more love sleeps in the innocence
of tenderness
a feathering to dust
a lighter heart
and please
not so much sex

Less is more
for you and less for me
I want a little something
exceeding rationing
Tai-up my Chi
and even out the score
by sparing not
the palm and fingers of your hand
a fiery half moon lures the lore
of much where less
runs to digress
and looks for ice cream
in the vortex

(A river Styx
runs somehow through
your matrix bag
of cosmic trix
now here is something rum:
is lessest most then
and the answer to all quantities
runs at the banks
of none at all?
go solve me that conundrum)

Less is less in love
(I think)
and more is more
in substitute
don’t tie me down
to squiggles of yin-yang
my boisterous mood
will blink
into your undreamt depths
a new big-bang:

A lusting greaterness
exhales the breath
of an expanding universe
a mass of sex
boils matter into stars
the milky way’s a bar
that serves
an effervescent drink
a dragon plays the drum
his lady winds the river Styx
into a silver rope
love is your kink
(more or less)

Love sickness

2006-04-02T09:00:07Z

It’s an old wisdom that people who fall in fall in love where and when they don’t want to become ill, perhaps instead.

The illness acquires the function of denial, afflicting soma where psyche turns her head in shame. To hope, to ask for reciprocation and dread the blank stare, the embarrassed pause before, I like you, appreciate you, have affection for you, struggles from the unwilling tongue would be a blow to pride which in anticipation is warded off to land on tougher stuff of the material body.
~
My friend’s lady friend (of recent standing) has been deathly ill, he says, and uncharacteristically needy.

This “deathly” is a measure of her projected independence, and more else, a precise gauge of her instinct that has plumbed shallow depth and found it wanting for safe passage.

A conversation has his word for it. When I asked him, do you love her, he said, yes! Then paused and thought and said, no. I like her (company), I appreciate her (mind), I have affection for her…
~
Illness can legitimately expect attention and involvement where unrequited love can not. Illness can be dependent where passion would be a beggar crawling on her knees. Oh no, wretch my body but let me keep my soul untouched!

My friend’s lady friend has lost a husband to love’s age-old enemy, death. I can imagine she would not want to lose another lover even worse, to life. She’d rather fight the battle within herself.
~
People who fall in love boldly, taking all the risks, are healthy as the proverbial horse.

They feel the blow no less, and let themselves be blown, they hear the sickening crunch when earth opens and there is nothing underneath, the belly opens black, the heart goes into tailspin. They live on the illusion that they can survive.

(Love, I have a sudden whimsy, must be an invention of the Germans, according to their proverb, what does not kill you makes you strong.)
~
There is no guarantee in either case. Burn out the sickness with another, homeopathic style, fall free and back to touch the atmosphere and burn out like a meteor.

So rare is the fall of two together that creates an equilibrium in which to float in mutual suspension, at least for a while.
~
A favorite way out of such predicaments is lust. It has no need to fall nor to get sick for fear of falling. It relies on a healthy body in the first place like all good appetites, leaves heart and soul out of the sickening loop, and plies its business as a renewable energy, with whomsoever as the wind blows, heat rises, and the solar rays are almost everywhere.
~
Unless, of course, the sun itself burns out, gone heat, gone wind, in which case none of this matters a damn thing any more. And so on and so on. This theme has a way of thinking (sinking?) me into a corner.

As always.

The right mistake

2006-03-25T08:25:01Z

I called my old friend Jo Caluori today, a long ways away in Munich, Germany. I let the phone ring and ring, he has no answering machine. And no e-mail, and no computer, and no TV. But he knows everything about the world. He is a wonderful writer who does all his research for his books in city libraries and carries thousands of little esoteric facts around in his small head.

I thought I had misdialed, so I dialed again. He picked up at the first ring.

I hardly ever answer the phone, he told me. I have a code with my friends to ring, hang up, and ring again, so I know it’s somebody I really want to talk to.

Oh, I said, and I just thought I had made a mistake, that’s why I called again.

Well, unwittingly, by instinct, so to say, you did the right thing, he said.

I guess I’ve made the right mistake then, I said.

He laughed and said, yes, exactly! Then we talked for an hour, about books and people.
~
the right mistake is a phrase I picked up from my ex-husband. He is a musician, and in music, particularly in jazz, and in other arts the right mistake is that extra beautiful thing. It happens a lot in acting too. The right mistake can make an actor or actress famous.

There is such a thing as the wrong right, though it doesn’t sound so good, perhaps for that very reason.

My ex-husband, for example, almost always did the right thing, like insisting there should be no discussion at the dinner table that might lead to unpleasant disagreements, or not responding to my expressions of anger or depression, or telling me not to worry about things I had no control over. And he was almost always wrong to do that right thing. I think our marriage shattered on the rocks of his flawless behavior.
~
Once on a hot summer afternoon I was driving through downtown, on my way home from work. On a street corner stood two young women. One was completely naked, the other one was clothed and held the naked one in her arms. All the drivers did the right thing, they drove on without causing a traffic jam or even worse, a pile-up. I almost stopped, wanting to see more of this extra-ordinary sight, wanting to know how it would develop, what it might lead to. One look from the driver beside me told me to move on, told me not to be curious and cause a greater incident than the two young women.

It was the wrong right, of course, not to stop. We all should have gawked and talked and found out, and to hell with traffic, something real is happening here!
~
My new relationship might be considered a mistake. He is a man with nothing to recommend him, not even an undying passion for me, in fact hardly any passion at all. Some might think I’ve missed my turn. Yet I know here is my erring path, for worse because I’ll know my depth in this adventure, and for better because I love him.

He on the other hand has chosen me for all the good and right reasons. But love has no reasons, it is unreasonable, and choosing someone not for love but for reasons however right, is that not wrong?
~
Perhaps here is a basic difference between men and women. Women are creatures of the right mistake, following instinct, intuition, reacting spontaneously, if need be regardless for right or wrong. Men consider their options, chances of success, arrive by blameless calculations at their wit’s end: the right and its thing.

Mechanized virtue at home, at work, at war. And do not give the homeless money, they might use it for drugs and alcohol, give them a sandwich that they might eat. And what it they don’t want to eat, if drugs and alcohol are more necessary things for their survival on the streets, the only real comfort?
~
If men make a mistake they regret it to the end of their lives. Women tend to embrace their mistakes. Like the one with the clothes on who embraced the one who was naked.
~
People in a creative state bridge the gender gap, transcend the opposition of right and wrong. As does my ex-husband in making music, as does my relationship in arbitrary moments of unreasonable lust, as does a child in the sheer exhilaration of feeling its body move.

As did my friend Jo Caluori. When I said, I guess I made the right mistake, it took him only a second or two to understand, and laugh and say, yes, exactly!

A ringing in your ears

2006-03-23T04:58:36Z

Blow out the candle, dim this useless light that flickers over nothing. A blankness creeps into my eyes, no shadows are to dance this night.

With every sleepless minute I gain weight, it is your fault. You’ve slowed down my metabolism. You are not mad in love enough to keep me thin, my legs stay closed, my cells lie open to assault.

You say that people do gain weight from stress. How strange, as stress is an effect of overload, while I am feeling heavy not from more but from a drought of less.

I slept on down, breathed gold, found ground in mystic seas. My arms were song, my legs bestrode the moon, a dance of finest pain. A hormone package of delusions I alone cannot sustain. The heart succumbs to love’s realities.

I try to settle into our company of well behaved good-neighborhood. It goes according to your wish, the quiet life. Oh careful what you wish for! A fatted silence grows in place where once a raging poet stood.

Perhaps there is another sound, that constant ringing in your ears. A stimulation of the brain, misrouted through the Vegas nerve, the doctor says. But I know better, dear:

You hear the hum of my rebellion, the echo of my tears.

merlinden @ 2006-03-13T21:45:00

2006-03-14T05:53:44Z

Five minutes of snow

It is always winter and never snow, I complain, and he says, it has snowed before in March.

Low and behold, a sudden drop in temperature one night, plus the required precipitation, needle-sharp, the sky is pale with clouds and the air has that particular snow-smell.

Just off the one or two degrees to crystallize the rain into those big fat snow flakes, another near miss, I sleep and dream of Germany.

I wake at six am, perhaps it is the glare.

It is, it is! Framed in my bedroom window stand the trees powder-dusted, such a sight! Oh look! He breaks from feathered sleep, I told you so.

Each branch and twig and whithered leaf traced most tenderly in white, resting on black, the magic of old black and white movies.

A thrill of childhood afternoons, a walk as lovers across a snowy field, a ride with a friend in his buxom fifties volvo through a village and a woman walking towards us on the white street, her face starkly beautiful and clean under a black shawl. Snow flakes settle slowly on her and on us.

I have five minutes before I fall asleep again. When I wake up once more the snow will be gone.

It is all my winter, as cold and quiet as my heart.

Radar screen of desire

2006-03-14T05:49:10Z

Desire is a vulnerable state.

Much contrary to conventional definition desire does not seek mere satisfaction of sensational needs. It seeks an equal response from the other.

All examples are bad because limited and subject to different interpretations, but the best bad one I know is in certain kinds of music. Voices that make no sense on their own together create the miracle of sound we call music. Almost all forms of music move towards a moment of cadence, be it rhythmic, melodic or harmonic, that brings the individual strands to a culmination of unity, then to part again and seek each other again in their ongoing call and response.

In such music the different voices desire each other, they could not create the overall particular sound without each other. Music in which one or more voices work in mere subservience to another is usually boring music, lacking the richness of dynamic exchange. It is the kind of music that gives star power to one and a minor role of support to the other.

Desire desires mutual desire, a process of tension in separation and release in unity based on mutual attraction. Desire meeting with unequal response makes hardly more than an ugly noise. It becomes either a user or a servant of the other, depending on circumstance, star or drudge.

Desire is a vulnerable state. It requires the other. In a first authentic impulse the person offers complete visibility of him or her self, hoping for a similar revelation from the other. Not just an answer of acceptance, not just a mirror, an echo, but the other voice that makes sensible its own.

Desire meeting with unequal response creates need. There is much talk about needs and meeting them, usually in a setting of inequality. As in biological terms a mother responding to the helpless, powerless infant in suckling it to give the nourishment it needs to survive. A lot less is said about the desire of the mother to give suck to her infant, and her helplessness and powerlessness if this desire is frustrated. If mother and infant can freely follow their instinctual urge towards for each other, actions will be complimentary towards mutual fulfillment. There is a vast difference between “I’m feeding you because you need it,” and, “I’m feeding you because I have the desire to do so.” In the first instance a bottle will do, in the second the mother’s nipple responds to the beauty of the baby’s mouth. Mutual, equal desire.

Desire is a vulnerable state. It acts in good faith, or what we call hope, the hope for equal response, or equal revelation. Both together create freedom, complete visibility. Once we meet with unequal response and are in need the split from freedom has occurred. Need, of course, creates dependency: upon the ministration or service of an other, even if the position is reversed and need is met by servicing the other.
Need is dashed hopes, a state of past and ongoing loss. A complexity of interaction in the freedom of equal response is streamlined into the sameness of service to need. Need seeks to shelter itself from visibility and invents convention based on an arithmetic of units of energy invested and received. Ritual is superimposed over rite, formality over rhythm, negotiation over communication, expectation over spontaneity, image over revelation, isolation over love. Some might call this list of firsts the road to personal freedom, I call it a list of alienations. Some might call this list of seconds the road to dangerous attachments, I call it a list leading to cadence.

Desire is a vulnerable state. Akin to wholeness and holiness and divine madness and the precarious life of endangered species. Subject to environmental influences. Forced to adjust to realities. Morphed into achievable realms of needs. Sadly left on the scrap heap of romantic idealism.

Unequal response can be conflicted response, which leaves a glimmer of hope to be chased, an all too common trap in many love affairs.

And sometimes there can be a complete lack of response that by one-sided or mutual need later evolves into rational notions of apprecitiation, affection, even love. And yet it is headed by the erstwhile words: “You’re not on the radar screen of my desire.”

A lost signal.

Dark poet

2006-01-16T05:08:31Z

Dark poet goes hunting
a sea gull on the beach
an arrow in one hand to pierce
a feathered breast
pen in the other
to write a word so fierce
it curdles heart and mind –
alas! the blasted bird
won’t come to his behest
and stubbornly stays out of reach

A drop of blood! he cries
the sea gull rents a screech
and flies a lofty arabesque
above his head
untouched by burning
eyes and needs poe-esque
for spelling death correct
the lyric sorcerer
must understand the color red –
the gull prefers its native bleach

I beg you bird stay still
a while – I thee beseech
to grant me the authentic touch
my pen is dull
with metaphor
I don’t want much
a little bird blood now
to turn an Edgar Allen –
in answer quoth the gull:
draw your own blood – go find a leech!

Mouse in the news and in the house

2006-01-12T05:07:55Z

I was told a story that had made the news,
of a man who found a mouse in his house.
He caught the mouse, and because he had a little bonfire going in his yard
he threw the living mouse into the fire.

The terrified creature managed to get out of the flames,
itself now burning, a living torch,
and ran blindly back into the house,
where it apparently let the furniture partake of its fire.
The house burned down to the ground
with the proud homeowner weeping over smoldering ashes.
Serves him right.
The mouse, sadly to say,
died in that fire too.

There are almost too many morals in this story.
As for example: be kind to small critters
lest they’ll burn your house down.
Or: how small things can have big consequences.
It is also the story of most wars
as wars usually come home to the agressor in one way or another,
destroying him along with the percieved enemy.
~
A second story declares itself the mirror image of the first,
this one an exercise in animal to animal behavior.

It concerns a woman whose daughter told her
that there was a mouse in the house,
and the mouse was eating the cat food.
The woman didn’t quite believe her
– children tell such tiny tales –
until she came home one day and saw the mouse.
It was sitting in the cat dish, nibbling the cat food.
The two cats, Siamese at that,
were sitting earnestly in front of the dish,
watching the mouse eat.
And, according to the daughters evidence,
now admitted as such,
this had been going on for some time.

Watching the mouse eat.
Not eating the mouse.
Not throwing it into a (metaphorical) fire.

What are we to make of that?

Do I hear some comment about the degeneration of
domesticated animals who’ve lost their hunting instinct?

Then amongst us humans must be living certain creatures of the wild
who will always hunt.
Not to feed, not to have enough,
but to have more than others,
to hoard the overflow against a future time
when they can sell it dearly,
or invest their kibbles in the stock market,
and use their more for the open or secret wielding of power.

Certainly not share anything with the proverbial mouse,
not even a little space behind the walls.
Throw the vermin into the fire!

While cats with their reputation as cruel predators
seem able to get over instinct and age old racial differences
once their bellies are full and they’ve had time
to contemplate the goodness of life
that serves them a full bowl every day.
~
Yet mice can be very dangerous to people.
They carry the Hanta virus, causing an infection
from which not everybody will recover.
American Natives knew this and dealt with any mouse sightings
in the following manner:
everything a mouse had touched was burned,
including the house if that’s where the animal was seen.

They would not burn the mouse, of course,
because they would never touch it.
So the mouse had plenty of time to get away
before the fire started.

Re: The state of Texas

2006-01-10T09:27:05Z

Dear Mr. George W. Bush:

My partner and I have the following proposal for you. We think you will like it. We propose that the state of Texas secede from what is now called the United States of America and become its own country as the United State of Texas.

The rest of what was the United States of America will then become the Federation of Everybody Who Wants To, a loose affiliation of, you guessed it, disorderly and squabbling entities engaged in a never-ending Pow-Wow over how things should be done, and nothing will be done until everybody agrees to it. And we mean it.

Of course, everybody who wants live in Texas can either stay there or move there with you. Everybody Who Wants To can move into the Federation. It’s a free country, right?

If you manage this feat, Mr. George W. Bush, you can then be the President of Texas, and Mr. Cheney can be your Vice President, or vice versa, or you can take turns, or you can fight it out at a rodeo.

You can take the American Flag with you, all the stars wiped out except that one bright shiny one which is Texas.

You can also take all the things you like best with you: homeland security, the FBI and CIA, the INS, the IRA, the Pentagon, the stock market, the health insurance companies, the churches of your (and their) choice, and the women who agree to submit gracefully.

You can take all the gas-guzzling cars and trucks and SUVs. You can have in addition the atomic power stations and the atomic waste. There should be plenty of room in Texas to bury all that atomic waste you like to generate.

We’ll have wind and solar and geothermal power and electric cars and other energy saving technologies that you won’t support.

You can take global warming as a hoax, we’ll take it seriously.

You can leave with us Social Security, Medicare, Financial Aid, public schools, and any social services that are considered a danger to our economy. We’ll also take the spotted owl and other endangered species. You can leave women’s lib with us, the freedom of religion, and the pursuit of happiness. That should be a load off your mind. We’ll also take care of the arts, music, poetry, literature and all creative expression that might worry you.

We'll also keep those pesky labor unions. We'll put them in a museum as a reminder of the times when people had to fight for living wages, safety at the work place, benefits, and other common decencies.

If you ask how we’re going to finance all these things without an IRS and stock market, etc., well, we’ll muddle through, and you can have a good laugh at us and our Pow-Wow.

You can have all the commercial media and Country-Western and soap operas and Fox News. I would say you can have TV in general for your own, but my partner might not agree to that. So we’ll keep PBS.

And now, Mr. George W. Bush, comes the best of all.

If you have your own United State of Texas, then you can make Iraq a part of your country and you can have all the Iraqi oil. Iraq can become East-Texas. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

Of course, you’ll have to deal with those Iraqis who don’t want to be a part of Texas but a part of their own Federation Of Those Who Want To. It’s a free country, right? We guess there will be a bit of packing and moving in days to come, and some traffic jams, but don’t worry, it will all sort itself out somehow.

We have to tell you one thing, though. We’ll have NASA, or what’s left of it after we get rid of the military ballast. You can have that. We’ll make it a research facility that will concentrate on and succeed in manned spaceflight within and beyond our solar system.

And, Mr. George W. Bush, if you and the United State of Texas don’t behave and start threatening us with your weapons, we’ll transport you and yours and Texas to Mars. Then you can have Mars, all of it, and live there after your own fashion. You’ll have a whole planet and Texas will be a world power. You can play war games. Blow each other to smithereens, if you want to.

Think about it and the glory that awaits you.

With all our best wishes for you and Texas, and maybe Mars,

Sincerely,

Violetta Tarpinian
and Charles Carmichael
Shacked up unmarried in the People's Republic of Eugene, Oregon, capital of radicals and hippies, future member of the Federation Of Those Who Want To.

Walking down the worry

2006-01-06T08:50:51Z

In pacing slowly up and down
the short patio at my back door
in measured steps
each one the sound of anticipated sorrow
in my mouth the pain I share with the future
I am reminded of Emily Dickinson’s line
“…A wooden way, regardless grown…”

I have puzzled over that line for many years

Perhaps now I hear its message
in the grain of my own footfall
though with her the formal feeling comes
after the great pain
while with me it comes before
and finds its form in the mute ritual of pacing

Walking myself into the bad news
in retrospect reversion of Emily Dickinson’s sentiment
I have a fleeting glimpse of the picture
as it hits the retina of the eye
before the brain switches it right side up

and the call comes that all is yet well

Daisy three times

2006-01-04T07:36:46Z

Once I met a girl named Daisy. True to her name she was white and gold and sturdy, and the clear blue sky was in her eyes.

I met her at my friends Lisa and Helmut’s wedding party many years ago. She cried all night because her boyfriend had broken up with her.

Her tears were like shimmering raindrops falling from the cloudless blue of her eyes.

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true…
~
Once I drove out into the country to look at a house for sale. After a long search I found the house at the end of a dirt road in the middle of the woods. In stood in about an acre of clearing.

The house was an old prefab, derelict, painted an ugly, peeling green. But the land around it was a huge field of blooming daisies, waist high.

My dog ran into the daisies and disappeared, I only saw a an undulating line of parting and closing flower heads, as if the invisible hand of god were trailing a finger through the meadow.

I had a vision of strange people living in this strange, neglected house.

It was a warm summer day, and the round of sky over the bowl of daisies was clear and bright blue. Yet it suddenly started to rain, drops like polished glass fell on the daisies, collected in their golden centers and ran down their long green stalks.

I wanted to lie down among the daisies and hug their roots and let the rain wash my memories away.

I’m half crazy…
~
I did not buy the house. I did not want to live in the middle of nowhere in a shack that gave me visions.

All for the love of you…
~
The sky cleared yesterday afternoon. Winter skies can be so relentlessly blue.

Out in my yard I found a little lonely daisy, the English lawn kind, blooming low to the ground.

I would have liked to pick it and cradle it in my hand. I would have liked to count her petals, carefully ripping them out one by one. He loves me he loves me not…
~
In the middle of happiness there is grief.
In the middle of sunshine there is rain.
In the middle of winter there is spring.

Holiday close

2006-01-03T05:44:19Z

Emotional upheavals are a dys-function of the holidays. It happens to the best of us. And here I was, leveling words at one I love and think I know his ways. Words I would have chosen much more carefully at any other time.

In coming closer we come dangerously nearer to the point of injury. And if I am the speaker, am I also then the hearer, and point my words at you that they may stab at me?

Closeness and the traditional christmas cheer together form a narrow needle's ear, and we are stretched so tight that only the intimate insult will pass through.

I did not mean to say those things to you. Christmas was the devil made me do it. Every year I swear I will not be a victim of my christmas nerves, those little beasties who draw the coil of closeness tight until it must be sprung.

I say, I'll go away and celebrate somebody else's holiday. I'll be a good guest who does not know the custom of the land and smiles and nods at all the high-strung tempers and lends a friendly hand when others flip through overloads of intimate exchange.

So, that's my tip. A stranger does fare best in what goes for tradition. Admiring root and keeping distance, while others move through the range of close encounters of an earthly kind. Leave closeness home to mind it's cozy dreams. And in this space the thought of wideness might come to my assistance.