Anniversary

January 30, 2011 at 11:55 am (Scribbles)
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Grandpa greeted me as always: a hearty kiss to the cheek, bristled with the stubble he’d missed, and a hug that put bears to shame. His smile crinkled and creased around his eyes, his joy such that he couldn’t quite keep still, quick shakes of his arms and then anchoring them behind him to lean forward and listen from behind his glasses, mild and jowly. Every so often, a hearty laugh leaned him all the way back and we all laughed with him. Everyone said how wonderful it was – sixty years.

I went to greet my grandmother, sitting like a bird in a wheelchair, hands and shoulders folded in. A cousin sat next to her, talking in the other direction.

“Hi, Grandma.”

Her eyes turned to me, pink-rimmed and at once both too small and too large for their settings, but still beautiful blue. Mumbles helped get her voice going; turning slightly to the cousin but keeping her eyes on me, she asked

“Who’s that?”

Her hair was fluffy and longer than she kept it when I was young, and like every time in the past few years, it was whiter than when I saw her last. I sat next to her, among cousins and other relatives, and try as I might I found myself talking in the other direction.

Everyone said how wonderful it was – sixty years.

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In Or Out?

December 27, 2010 at 12:56 am (Scribbles)
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I have always heard about words trying to get out, about people holding things in, about being ready to burst with the words wanting to escape – but why don’t I ever hear about the words that people are trying to keep from getting in?

These words, they creep and they cringe and they hide until they see an opening, and then they scamper and swarm like mad things trying to get in and turn over the tables and keep the neighbors awake.

I do what I can, but it’s hard to shore up the defenses and seal every chink in the wall when these words are so good at poking and prodding and getting that foot in the door before it can be slammed in their sanctimonious faces.

It’s hard, as well, because they’re so hard to distinguish from all the others, coming as they do in the same voice, with the same manner, and suddenly I realize that they’ve taken the floor when I thought I was thinking of something else.

Insidious is the word – and yet I never hear of people trying to keep words out.

They’re always trying to keep words in, as if holding on to something true can somehow keep it from being so – as if these mad renegade words were going to rush out into the street and start stealing cars and committing acts of vandalism.

It isn’t the true things that are said that hurt, it’s the things that I can’t tell if they’re true or not because they haven’t been said, they’ve simply wormed their way into my head and are refusing to leave – those are the words that hurt.

But I never hear about that – what with all this holding in of words – leaving far too many quiet places where I can’t keep words out.

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Ghost Train

September 26, 2010 at 12:28 am (Lyrics)
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Ghost train, wailing down the track,

Ghost train, I know you’re coming back,

They say that you stopped running

So many years ago, but

Ghost train, I think that I would know,

Know better.

I’ve seen you, ridden in my dreams,

I’ve been carried over streams,

You took my mind to places

My body couldn’t go, oh

Ghost train, and they all think they know,

Know better.

They told me you don’t ride that track,

They told me that you’re not coming back,

But I just heard your whistle

Not half an hour ago, oh

Ghost train, you’d think that they would know,

Know better.

The video I made to accompany my recording of this song is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0xsytIRY7c

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A Kitten

July 22, 2010 at 10:59 am (Scribbles)
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You could have been a piece of newspaper, or a paper towel that had escaped some neighbor cleaning their windows. But you weren’t. I rumbled up, draped with a sash of orange extension cord and dragging the mower behind, to find a small, crumpled shape covered in dirty white fur, flat in the way that only a pitifully dead animal is, like life was what had kept you three-dimensional. I had seen birds before, but you – you were the first kitten, and I didn’t know what should be done. You’d have to be moved – the grass had to be cut, and you were laid like an offering in the dead-center of the driveway strip – but parental warnings of germs, disease, disaster tumbled through my head, and I couldn’t touch you.

Not that I would have touched you. Even the body of a vagabond kitten deserves the respect we pay the dead, and already, moving you was taking things too far – didn’t you have a right to lie where you fell? But there was the grass to cut, and where you were was an unsheltered place that would not leave you peaceful long.

The backyard hosta bed provided the best shroud I could think of, and a twig was your goad to leave the soft grass for the broad, spear-shaped leaf. A few steps served as funeral procession, and I laid you to rest between the front porch column and the air conditioner, a pitifully small creature half-curled within a leaf. Thinking was hard after that. The grass was cut, your original resting place disturbed and mowed down, and chasing each other through my head were thoughts of not having seen you, of what could have hurt you, of why you were so carefully placed – the things that only young death dredge up from the darker places. Every so often, I would check back, that day and in days after, to keep the vigil that no one else knew was needed.

Then there was the day you were gone. The leaf was there, slightly wilted but pressed in the center where you’d been, and I was suddenly sure you were all right. That you had been merely hurt, unconscious, that in the intervening days you had recovered and gone back to your family. I ignored the probability that my father had seen you and tossed you away. You were all right, somewhere; you were no longer a huddled, flattened bundle of fur and sinew. Somewhere, you were happy, and maybe I had managed to help.

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Wind-tossed

April 3, 2010 at 12:42 pm (Poetry)
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The stinging sand

pricks and sweeps and purges

in a wind that surges up and out

and back and takes

the leaves that last November left

and tosses them to the sky,

as if to throw them into the trees again.

A dromedary’s lashes give a veil

to eyes that water faintly,

close,

and open again to see

the power that the body feels

in this wind that wheels about

and pushes, pulls,

demands not sober walking

or timid scuttles out of reach,

but a tumult of a dance.

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A Pale Shadow…

February 7, 2010 at 8:24 pm (Scribbles)
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Something was in the air this evening. Walking west, I wasn’t paying attention when I looked up and saw the plume of steam, rising above the building, stark and fantastic against a sky intense with blue. Everything remotely connected with the ground, that cloudy phantom included, was bathed in the flat orange glow of campus streetlights, setting off a sky that was a perfectly shaded wash, turquoise on the horizon and deepening into a midnight cerulean as the sun’s last few rays dwindled in the eastern half of the sky. But it wasn’t just the play of opposing colors that struck me – that wasn’t enough to summon the sensation of having been hit with something, of having some part of myself pulled out and up every time my eyes encountered that blue-shaded sky. For the first time, I was seeing the intense depth of what lies above our heads. Usually, I look at the sky when it is a beautiful clear day or night and it is a velvety blanket of one color, or when there is a sunrise or sunset and the sky is like a multicolored painting thrown up into the sky – either way, I look up and I see a kind of inverted bowl above the earth, some flat surface, exquisite but finite. This evening, though, there was real depth in the sky, the sense that the shades of blue were as much a product of looking through countless atmospheric layers as of simply gazing at “the sky”. This was what sucked my soul up and out, making me catch my breath – this was what made my world suddenly seem intensely two-dimensional – and yet, this was what suddenly made me feel much bigger in my particular universe. I can’t explain why, but this sudden epiphany of the intense, unending depth of the sky, a depth that I had never grasped before, gave me a sense of the depth that might conceivably lie inside of me as well, untapped but present, just waiting to take someone’s breath away.

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Walking Home

January 22, 2010 at 11:55 pm (Scribbles)
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There is nothing really wrong with a world where the sun, having danced across the top of a cloud mattress all day instead of keeping the trees company, suddenly but slowly begins to leap off the edge of the mattress and in the process throws a rich pink-gold glow against the tops of the buildings. There is nothing really wrong with a world where, on a bitterly cold and shadowless day in mid-January, someone can look up and see the shadows of the trees standing tangible and comforting against the sunlight on an orange-brick dormitory, see the searing gold of the same sun in the window glass, and suddenly realize that even though the wind is cold, it’s fresh, and even though the sun has been hiding all day, it was never really gone. There never will be something really wrong with a world where someone can glance over their shoulder and enjoy, for a minute, the sun framed by a tree, a wall, the clouds, and a roof, knowing all the while that frames don’t mean much to the sun. Just like the clouds, this frame won’t keep the sun from going down in splendor and coming back up some fine morning to turn cartwheels across the sky. There is nothing really wrong with a world where these things happen, and someone can come across them without looking, and know that though they weren’t looking, this was exactly what they were looking for.

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Ripple Poem

December 3, 2009 at 12:21 am (Poetry)
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I like to think that we operate

like ripples in the water.

We start out as the effect

(intended or not)

of someone else’s actions, and then we grow –

we spread our boundaries in circles of self-ordained perfection,

 leave what little passing marks we can, and then

we meet another ripple.

Suddenly, the symmetry is gone, but there

where it used to be

is a swathe of ourself, tangled up in some part of that other ripple,

coming back towards our center.

And in the other ripple, there is a little piece of us

that has tangled with them

and is moving swiftly towards their core.

And so we re-claim ourselves,

re-know ourselves,

and know another for the first time

over and over again

as the ripples keep coming,

and reverberating,

again

and again.

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On The Platform, Looking East

September 9, 2009 at 11:27 pm (Poetry)
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Of all the things that changed

Why couldn’t one thing stay the same

And why, oh – why

Couldn’t it have been the one thing holding me up

Letting me pretend to be strong

Because that was how it made me feel.

Now, it doesn’t make much difference

Whether I’m strong or not –

I don’t feel it, and worse,

I don’t believe it.

I’m not even strong enough to pretend

That I’m changing with the changes –

I’m staying just the way I was

And I don’t know which train I’m supposed to catch

To get me to where everything else seems to be going,

Where my one unchanging thing

Has already gone and changed.

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Moonshadow

June 8, 2009 at 11:00 pm (Poetry)
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The light’s too pure

and the angle’s wrong –

no streetlight threw that beam,

silver spotlight,

through my window.

A sky too clear for stars

holds it steady,

steady through the panes

to dapple music with its own notation:

twigs and leafy grace notes

without pitch

sing silent music for the night-eyed

and sheath themselves in silver.

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