Category Archives: Poems

Rachmaninoff and Me

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I haven’t written because I have too much to say, but question the validity of saying any of it. Recently on Facebook I have been adding “friends” who are poets and authors, and I don’t know who they are – well, some names are slightly familiar – and they all have books, and write beautifully, which adds to my writer’s block; but I just came from seeing the play “Preludes” at Lincoln Center about the composer’s block of Sergei Rachmaninoff after a disastrous – and I do mean disastrous – debut of a new symphony. The conductor was drunk and the orchestra not prepared, and Sergei got skewered by the critics. If seeing that play doesn’t unblock my backlog, I think nothing could except drunkenness, which isn’t my style. It didn’t work for the conductor, it wouldn’t work for me.

Afterwards I sat under the trees in front of the theater in this blessed balmy air that is the same temperature as your skin surface, which is, of course, heaven, and the guy who played Rachmaninoff walked by. He was talking to an obvious friend who left and then as he walked back, I said “Thank you,” and he came over and I told him about the Rachmaninoff wars between my 7-year-old grandson who adores Rachmaninoff, though at first he thought it was Mozart he adores but it is Rachmaninoff, and my 5-year-old granddaughter who thinks music isn’t music unless it has words and a singable melody, while Ben doesn’t like music with words. He is gifted in math so it makes sense. Rachmaninoff was mathematical also.

So the writer’s block has been both about that I cannot keep up with the magnificent writers who are suddenly all over my FB thread even though they don’t know me, but probably did a quick check, saw I looked harmless, and were willing to accept me as a “friend.” And it is also because I have lost my sense of having a profile, any i.d. Nothing makes sense anymore regarding who I am. And if you don’t know who you are, your literary impulses, which depends on what you think and feel, can get pretty confused.

Wendell Berry – one of my new literati friends posted this magnificent poem by him – described this well. Well, my dislocation takes it a bit further than he does, but he really described not knowing. See?

It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

Now, it seems the impeded stream may not be singing – more like gurgling eddies – but he sums up the bafflement and makes it all good somehow, as having the purpose of no purpose might actually get you somewhere.

I haven’t been fighting losing my identify. I invited it and have yielded to it even as I now question it. Several years ago I decided to strip myself of definition and it has been working. I mean, people think I am serenity, except for my closest friends who still think I am serenity and rely upon my being serenity for their own serenity even when some get occasional glimpses of churning waters underneath.

Joan Didion wrote that as she got older she couldn’t write as she once did, words eager to rush onto the page, internal rhythms known even before the words arrived. Now she just tries to use the right words, the accurate ones, the authentic ones. Each word done with such care. I tell myself to do the same but I am not Joan Didion, and to include a reference to myself in a paragraph about her is narcissistic blasphemy, but . . . yikes.

Plus, there is a residue inside me that is rococo. I would love to be able to use words like verisimilitude, laconic, obfuscation, lexicography, and lassitude as nimbly as I use words like harvest, fever, raspy, and earth.

It is imperative to use the right words, but it is work. It is a meditation, it is knowing what is. And knowing what is is, generally, beyond words. See the problem?

Other problems include that I’m just plain lonely in this transition to non-description. This is, by the way, an essential struggle of most elderly. Have you any idea how many people who were my friends or acquaintances a couple months ago are no longer here?

My second ex-husband sent the word out, through a convoluted route that found me across the U.S. and after 35 years, that he has dementia and Parkinson’s Disease. It wasn’t his lungs, after all, that got him. It was Lewy’s body disease, the second most common form of dementia, the top of the list of all those kinds of dementia that are not Alzheimer’s. Do you think I’m losing use of my vocabulary not because of seeking rockbottom truth but because words are disappearing? I am afraid of that. In any case, no-frill words tend to be truer. Something may be “transcending” but it is more accurately “rising, delicate and vaporous.”

Rachmaninoff really suffered. Brilliance hiding is not a pleasant thing, especially when you need to bring in rent money. Brilliance molding? What is a sorry state for others is a horror for a genius. I am not a genius. My suffering has been real but it is not a case of having a gift that could blow the minds of others into the stratosphere and that the world will forever ache over from its loss. Mine is more closely aligned to the loneliness felt in the gap of not hearing one’s self express one’s own understandings, of not taking something to the next level, of stupefied energy.

This is not outwardly visible. I look pretty good, and my health is good. I had it checked out of fear that the gloom eyeing me along the edges of my campfire was partially physical. My health is fine, my loneliness isn’t really.

Did I tell you my past is littered with bad husbands? Men who failed me on the simplest of terms. Fidelity, safety, things like that. It is a cluttered landscape behind me. Debris beside the road, but it is okay. I am blessed, and I saw this play today “Preludes” on the composer’s block of Rachmaninoff. He was 28, I’m 72. He got over it. I will too . . . or not.

It is not important to be able to use words such as pulchritude, dipsomaniac, vermiculite, or phrases such as “it hit him the way formaldehyde hits a lizard, “ or “she circumambulated the offering, an oracle tied to the thread of a vision” No, it is enough to be able to say, “She loves with her entire body. She loves so much she does not know her body from her mind. She loves more than fits conventional wisdom. She loves beyond calling. She loves with the clarity of a baby’s drool. She loves. She loves mindlessly. She loves so much she trusts losing herself even though she has no choice in the matter.”

Rachmaninoff went on to write his “Prelude in C# Minor.” I wrote this.

 

Finding the Words for Eternity

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Words become more precious as you age. Each one is required to be right, exact, capturing and cradling a clear intent. It is my belief there are several reasons for this.

First is that life itself becomes more precious. A limited supply of anything good becomes more precious, and as you come to grasp what remains of your life, to deal with it daily as people around you die, you want to have what remains to be superb. That includes the words you use. They must not degrade the preciousness of life.

Second, but related, is a desire to understand what life is in its pure form. In the living of your life when you are younger, you seldom need to understand what being alive is. You just are. You do what your species does. You don’t obsess over what is real and what is not real, or try to enter the DMZ area between consciousness and unconsciousness. You don’t focus so intently on your reactions to events and people that you have seen your reactions as passing sensations, vapors, mists, sandstorms, waves, occasionally particles. You don’t yet know that you are forming a matrix of these sensations and labeling them as “now” and “here” and “memory” and “reality.”

But, there is a need as you realize that your life is by all definitions at least 75% over to re-examine what life is – what it actually is instead of what happens within it. In this re-examining you can discover that being alive is more than living a life.

You feel the universe expand as your physical life shortens. To explain this intangible reality through tangible words is a delicate art. It has stymied me, though without anxiety. It is, actually, why I have not written in more than a month.

During that time I also spent two weeks in London, loathed a winter that overstayed its welcome, and for not altogether bad reasons have felt a lessening of closeness with two men who matter to me dearly. Yet I wrote of none of this because something larger is happening and it avoids words.

In any case, I don’t have the right words yet. I don’t believe there are any. Even so, I am trying.

I feel on the outer edge of the reality within which we classify and categorize sensations, memories, responses, and beliefs, and we call them reality and we try to hang on to them, when they are only imprints on our consciousness. I’m trying to say there are two worlds and they are both real, but in different ways.

I feel I am gently against the inside of the skin of a large bubble and on the other side is all time as timelessness and all space as beyond space. I think I may have stumbled on why so many older people become gentle. We have become more aware of what is on the other side of the bubble skin, and it gives hope, love, and patience. It also reorganizes our priorities. It tells us to live in ways that add beauty. Just that one rule.

I don’t pretend to know what is beyond individual consciousness, but I trust this awakening relationship with timelessness and unending space. I ask It questions occasionally.

Two nights ago I said: You will have to spell this out for me. I don’t quite get what is real and I don’t know what I am do to.

I asked It to spell it out and that night I had a dream in which I sing a song that flowed through me. I woke to listen to the song. It is the letters W, A, I, and T.

Only the letters W A I T, over and over. I will wait. There is time. There is eternity.

 

Ode to a Man Who Loves Me

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There is a man who has loved me since I was a sophomore in college, or maybe a junior. I’m not sure now. He was the campus poet. Also a wrestler and football player, but for me mainly a poet and friend. Four or five years ago he found me through Facebook. When I responded with “Is that you?” he was unable to reply for weeks.

But since then he has written, mainly through private FB messages or emails, an average of two or three times a week. Each note is poetic, most have photographs, and they revolve around me, not him. He seldom volunteers information about himself or his life.

Occasionally he forwards an announcement from NASA or elsewhere on new discoveries in the cosmos or inside atoms. He is very smart and understands that we cannot comprehend where we live – and that the best we can do is to keep chipping away at ignorance until the gems of truth are seen and known. Well, I attribute that to him. He never carries on or pontificates. Maybe he just loves being awestruck.

Stars, mountains, lakes, and vistas figure large in his life. He spent years working in our national parks. A couple years ago he sent messages that I needed to call him right away. He had gone out to his car at night to see if that was where he left his keys. Standing under the stars and thinking about the end of his life, he had to talk to me, he had to make sure I knew how much he loved me before he went gaga and forgot to tell me.

Well, I don’t think either of us is near to being gaga, but he wrote last night that he is ill with one of those degenerative diseases that is not kind. I’m not sure any of them are. I am sad.

It took little nudges from me over months to find out that he is ill. He has had many medical tests done and the verdict seems to be in. His energy was devoted to supporting me, to being a champion, to declaring love, to being amusing with words that have multiple meanings and surprise pathways. It was not in sharing his troubles. You might find this strange. It is certainly unique. He chose to bless my life, and has.

Beyond his being there, beyond his infusion of beauty into my life, he has shown me the courage of expressing love, of saying it. We in the Midwest were taught not to do that.

Neither of my parents said they loved me until I was in my mid-twenties and I forced the issue by ending annual visits to Iowa by telling them I loved them. After a few years of this, they expected it and managed first an awkward “me, too” and then finally “I love you, too” at the airport. It was like chewing cardboard for them, but they got there.

There are so many absurdities around saying “I love you” and my friend blew them all away. The hesitancies didn’t apply. I’m not saying I deserve his love. I recognize he credits me with being more or better or whatever than I am. But that is not the point. He loves and he says so – not only to me. Sometimes he copies me on poems, photos, and notes to his family.

He was in Vietnam, one of only two in his unit to return alive and with all his body parts. A poet in the midst of slaughter. How does one deal with that? Well, at least partially with medicines and by saying what needs to be said before you go gaga or die.

He says he will love me always. It is that simple, that courageous, that “without any strings.” He has received scarcely anything from me compared with what he has given, though I hope he knows how grateful I am.

I love you, my friend. You have helped me to tell everyone I love that I love them. You have given my heart freedom, muscle, and joy.

And, dear friend, please forgive my being so public in the face of your tendency towards privacy. I want to pass on what you have helped me to learn.

. . .

Readers, below is a teeny sampling of photographs, and I start with a random – yet very clear – excerpt from a longer quote:

Q: So what did the OTHER photon say to the one photon … etc… 
A: I have NO clue as to what this matter is all about… so please, enlighten me, I truly wish to know if there is a tunnel at the end of the light…

tunnel at the end of the light..

reflections of warmth, love and light.. too much love..

veil of clouds..

Peace.. 2

Na Pali Coast, Kauai..

Love, one world..

heart with no pockets..

Waiting in the garden for lightning

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garden at night

I sit in my garden at 1:30 am waiting for an epiphany,
longing, Saul on the road to Damascus, to be relieved.

Even though I don’t believe salvation comes through lightning,
I long for quick and fast.

I believe salvation comes through knowing and accepting,
though I do not know of what or how.

Not tonight but the night before I met a man
who has lived twenty-five years under a large tree in India
where there is snow and a trail to Tibet
where Chinese soldiers have orders to shoot you on sight.

The trail, narrow as a snake, winds along the side of mountains.

The Chinese soldier who saw him, wearing no shoes,
asked his blessing and gave him his combat boots.

He lives off wild strawberries that look like raspberries –
I saw a photo on his friend’s cell phone – and a kind of wild spinach.

And mushrooms that grow only after lightning strikes the ground.

I wait for an epiphany.

In a US city he wear shoes, soft sportive clothes, and a white newsboy hat.
He smiles without end, and seldom speaks.

He glows as someone might who eats mushrooms that grow after lightning strikes.

I wait in my garden with my dog, discomforted.

Three days ago I had lunch with a rare beauty in her early 70s,
enthralled by a rocker, singer-songwriter – enthralled!

They whirl and dance, enchantress and enchanter.
He has wings tattooed on his back.

She calls him panther, he calls her slow burn.
She is famous, on the cover of a magazine right now,
wearing a hat made of a nest with golden eggs.

She writes of their sex life, real and imagined –
she will create a perfume for them and the book.

The perfume will be named “text.” He is 37.

She removed her large black straw hat and blue sunglasses
under the mottling trees. Our lunch was salmon with avocado
and chia seed pudding with raspberries.

I had not seen her in over a year.

“You have ‘Z’ on your forehead.”

“Yes,” she said, “it is a tattoo.”

“You have been struck by lightning.”

Two night ago, I saw my own young lover after months of parting.
He told me he missed me, us, talking, being.

That was not an epiphany, except in being stated.
It was getting things good and right.

He will help “Z” find a perfumery.
Perhaps we will create our own perfume,
something for what we cannot have.

I wait, in the garden, discomforted, for lightning – and rain.

I look to a man who lives under a tree
and a woman who loves madly
and a librettist who may make an opera of a play I wrote
and a once lover who will be a friend forever
and a widower who flees grief, likes bullfights, and touches my heart
and a phalanx of delicate and mighty women who fight demons with me –
and a singer-songwriter (not hers, but mine) who breaks through reasonable living
by the ruckus of his untamed genius.

These people and more sit with me as I sit in the dark,
knowing there is no lightning of reprieve,
understanding, or accepting of what has happened
to the others now with us –

children beheaded in Iraq,
people turned into body parts in Gaza,
the dead from plague in West Africa.

Numbers beyond immensity dead in Syria.

And this is the crux:

How do we dance on the head of the pin during slaughter?
How do we create perfume?
How do we eat chia seeds with raspberry topping?

I cannot put their suffering in a drawer
for after my vacation or rendezvous or lunch.

Symphony of friends and lovers – simplest of lives,
most stylish of lives – lift me lift me lift me.

I am split between ecstasy and pain.

Did lightning already strike? Was I torn apart silently?

A rabbit, a first, just hopped across the end of my garden
– not poetic license. It is a city garden, it is 2:00 am.

Two of us awake in this strange land,
searching for a kind of wild spinach or berry,
or mushroom that grows only after lightning strikes.

Pockets

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Some people place you in their side pocket among their keys and billfold to take out only when you are useful to them, without care if you have been scratched, rumpled, or torn.

Others in their breast pocket, more tenderly, to be taken out like a small shiny object, perhaps of use as a secret talisman, or to be shown as borrowed i.d. to gain them entry into someone else’s esteem.

Still others place you in a purse, back pack, or computer bag jostled among their history of ticket stubs, old lipsticks, used tissues, and aging agendas to be rediscovered by happenstance when they search for someone else’s business card.

There are no pockets in someone’s heart. To be there your host had to have been willing to feel your essence and let it pervade their own. When that happens, your perfume will linger forever. If they let you know depends on who they are, what they understand of beauty and rarity, and how they tend love.

Passion, a steed

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You can lead passion to rationality
but you can’t make it drink.

It may bow its head or rear up, meow or whinny,
but it will not drink.

The size of its obstinance does not matter.
Passion, any size, does not drink rationality.

We brush our teeth and tie our shoes, it does not.
We read our mail and change our beds, it does not.
We pay our bills and make coffee, it does not.

Passion drives us mad banging against the bars
and searching for the key to escape.

Passion rode us on its back long ago, or only yesterday.

It remembers, and will not let us forget.

A Valentine to all my lovers, ever

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There was the lover who wrapped me in grape vines, another who sent me poems written in his blood, another ran with me in large intertwining circles in the cold of winter in a Tennessee valley under a full moon, another made me dinners and cleaned up afterwards. Even swept the floor.

Then, there was the husband who after 18 years of more or less ignoring Valentine’s Day changed his pattern and reserved the best table at a French restaurant and had roses waiting. I found out six months later he was living a separate life with another woman and apartments in Beijing and San Francisco.

And, there was the husband who was violent, and the one who brought a custody suit against me. These are three different men. Each injured me, and each has been overcome, and each taught me that love is too precious to be thrown out because some people aren’t good at it.

As a woman of a certain age, romance still matters, more precious than ever. Catastrophes still bruise but less than before – and my women friends are pros at care and tending.

I have had a pendulum swing towards where I forgive flaws knowing that otherwise there would be no one in my life, and “forgive” is not the right word because it implies I hold a balance to determine good and evil, and I do not. Life is an unfolding story, not a legal case. No one doesn’t mess up, even as some mistakes are inexcusable. And the people who did inexcusable things maybe shouldn’t be in your life or mine but we can get on with our lives because we are terrific.

I have had a pendulum swing towards where being loved is a gift that thrills me as an aurora would thrill me, as chocolate truffles thrill me, as Maria Calos thrills me. Love is our natural condition, but it is still a gift. We could have all been reptiles and missed out on love.

Love is the light. Love is when someone touches your lips and you are suddenly no longer in the nitty-gritty of life, death, and taxes. Love is when your grandchild says almost anything and your heart dances. Love is tending your parents when they forget your name. Love is why we keep going.

To all my lovers, ever, and I’m sorry if I don’t remember your name – being in my twenties during the sexual revolution means I can never run for public office – to all my lovers, ever, some of you were good and some of you were not so good, some of you I think about and some I don’t, some of you were older and some of you were younger, some of you were poetic and some of you were not, some of you were rich and some of you were poor. To all my lovers, ever, I wish you to be loved well, even superbly, this Valentine’s, with or without grape vines, but surely with a sharing of household chores and a cleaning up after meals.

SISTERS

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A cool scalpel, slice-thin, and so clean,
Hands sanitized, gloves two seconds away,
Mask in place, breath dew already forming on my upper lip.

Separating past from now from future,
No place for dreams, or wishes,
A basin ready to receive them, cut away, refuse.

Why are we not allowed ornamentation?
Why this minimalist line?
What harm fantasy, a moment’s dream?

Don’t tell me I don’t know reality.
I know reality, it is the dreams,
Real as vapor, hard as crystal,
Or sometimes onyx. I hold onto my illusions,
And flee naked, gown flapping, from the OR,
Down the hall, screaming.

As my surgeon smiles, kindly even, sure surgery
Is necessary, and that I will return worse for the wear.
Best not delayed is how she sees it.

… while I curl into a cluster of small damp flowers,
Smelling the earth as dirt from which all life grows, beautiful, oblivious,
before reasoning sets in with its sister: dreaming.

cerastium-arvense-577x433

On a Saturday that feels like Sunday

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On this Saturday that feels like Sunday,
somewhat cooler than I’d wish
as I practice not having obligations,
as least not immediately,

when spring rises in the coolness
and the tree blossoms turn green
with traces still of pink,

on this Saturday that feels like Sunday
I wonder what Sunday will bring.

Will I wake from liquid into an incandescent thing
with wings, wet, vulnerable, poised for flight?

On this Saturday that feels like Sunday
the pregnancy is nearly obscene,
the tumescence liquid crystal.

Only missing is the sound of spirit
whishing from body. It won’t happen.

I will be here tomorrow on a Sunday like others –
grounded with what we have of mystery,
love and explosion.

Those Things

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Those things one is supposed to know,
how to tie your shoes
and tie up your life and dreams
into reasonable patterns

that can be discerned when needed
to assure you that your fiber
will cover the stream of unattached
things that glide like translucent platelets

on the sclera of your eyes,
and are all around you,

time, people, places, memories,
what was thought to be,
what is imagined to be,

what your heart thinks is real
but your mind rejects,

what your mind thinks is real
but your heart rejects.

Those things, bundled,
neatly, or not so neatly,
casually, vibrantly, bursting
out of the bag, calliope of chaos

beyond time,
outside of beliefs,
not collectible into Something.

Those things one is supposed to know,
where have they gone off to now?